The Dark Shadows Daybook: DECEMBER 5

By PATRICK McCRAY

Taped on this date in 1969: Episode 912

Who’s blonde, diminutive, power hungry, and may be looking at a spanking from Barnabas? For once, it’s not Carolyn. But who? Chris Jennings: Don Briscoe. (Repeat; 30 min.)

Barnabas must exert increasing control on Alexander as Amy is pulled into the fold of the Leviathans. Julia tracks down Harrison Monroe, who tries to scare her off like an Oz potentate. An assertion that she has news from Charles Delaware-Tate grants her entry into Monroe’s house.

1897 rubs off on a guy. Well, guys like Sam and Gordon, those irrepressible upstarts in the writer’s room. That storyline had been the show’s most creatively dense endeavor, built around the core mystery of a ghost assassin and his motives. Surrounding that was a parade of other weird tales and eccentric wackos, making the sequence as elaborate and ornate as the era housing it. The program’s next core story -- Julia opposing a demonic messiah bent on world domination -- was even more ambitious. Even if their reach exceeded their grasp with the execution of that sequence, the writers told the myriad associated and coincidental stories with inventive brio. Paul Stoddard lives! Josette finally goes to haunt someone else for a change. There’s the last we see of Chris Jennings. An avenging Angelique. The return of Nicholas Blair. Heck, the return of Quentin and the mystery of Grant Douglas. They even find time to bring back Amanda Harris, square off with a personified version of death, and dramatize the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. I’m pretty certain that a giant spider is involved, and somewhere, the lost castaways of the Minnow feel safer. There’s even a flashback to the 1940’s. This is only in the space of about 3-4 months. Sounds like a long time, right? You’ve been spoiled.

In the first year or two of the program, it would have taken nine weeks just to show Liz buttering a piece of toast. But after 1897, this storyline density is the standard for the audience and maybe the writers, themselves. And they still have not exhausted themselves. So, while we’re at it, let’s briefly turn the show into The Wild Wild West. When it comes to the final days of Charles Delaware-Tate, not only do the writers turn it into yet another plot thread, they memorably resolve a character who didn’t really need a resolution. I suspect it answers the demands of no one, and it answers them with a generous panache that overcomes the most steadfast apathy. It’s an era of mini-mysteries -- little adventures and diversions whose only real problem is being more interesting than the Leviathan A plot they decorate. Notice that the B plots evaporate around the time that Jeb enters. They pad out just enough time for the Leviathan baby to grow up into a soap opera heartthrob. And Christopher Pennock certainly deserves the singular attention of the show. Unfortunately, the A plot doesn’t match nor enhance his talent. It’s a tall challenge to compete with the recent memory of the android duplicate of a 100 year-old Roger Davis. Trust me, I've tried.

The show has really entered a fascinating point in its transformation. Almost all of the mini-plots  resolve loose ends that tied the show to the past, earliest days. Who would have thought that, in so short a time, we would get the death of Paul Stoddard, emotionally wound Carolyn so severely that her man chasing days end, watch Josette tell Barnabas to get over it, already, say goodbye to Chris and Amy, deal with Amanda Harris -- for whatever that is worth, see Angelique get married and overcome, for her longest stretch, her obsession with Barnabas... and enjoy the security that Quentin, a little less than a year after meeting him, is now a threat to no one?

In the most macroscopic sense, the Leviathans are the least important thing going on. This segment of the show is like a KonMari exercise in clutter busting. Unless it gives joy to the audiences and writers, out it goes. Many of these plot elements have gone beyond motivating the characters. Instead of driving them to a destination, they are just, like Josette with Barnabas, driving them in circles.

This has an interesting effect on the next storyline. (And it almost makes me wonder if they were intending to stay in Parallel Time had the ratings been high enough.) Parallel Time is certainly enticing because our major concerns and questions have just been answered or eliminated in Primary Time. The other edge to that sword cuts out a lot of suspense and urgency to get back from Parallel Time. Once things get to that point in that dimension, the main reason to come home is to escape from, rather than escape to.

Because the Leviathan storyline kind of just ends, and then ends again with Jeb's subsequent death, it feels a little bit like a non sequitur for the Dark Shadows universe. I really strain to try and come up with things outside of Carolyn that are permanently changed, subtracted from, or added to by the Leviathan storyline. As far as the overall story of the series goes, these little subplots were not diversions, fillers, and misdirections as the Leviathan story developed. It's the other way around. The arguably disposable Leviathan storyline now feels like the MacGuffin while the real action of resolving many of the show’s mysteries is executed with surprising efficiency.

After Parallel Time, what's left? Literally, the apocalypse. From episode 1, the program was telling us that we were welcomed at both the beginning and the end of the world. The road is finally clear to deliver it.

This episode was broadcast Dec. 24, 1969.

The Dark Shadows Daybook: NOVEMBER 27

By PATRICK McCRAY

Taped on this date in 1968: Episode 639

What deadly secrets will be revealed on a simple phone when David and Amy explore the hidden recesses of Collinwood?

Amy begins her first day as a permanent guest at Collinwood, and in the process ends of exploring a sealed off wing with David. There, they begin speaking on the telephone to a mystery is presence calling himself Quentin.

For better or worse, Amy is in da house, and the change implies everything we suspected about young Roger and Elizabeth and the Collins Way (before Victoria, anyway). It gives us a great vision of what it was like to grow up at Collinwood, too. May I unpack?

Down the rabbit hole! Who’s with me?

Really? That’s all? Well, um, fine. Wait here. Have a sandwich.

It’s vital to remember that in 1968, the year of 1897 was only 71 years prior to filming. Not that long before, cosmically speaking. For us, that’s like being haunted from 1947, a year my father remembers well. This episode was shot an astounding 50 years prior to now. (That’s right, this is the 50th anniversary of the first utterance of Quentin’s name.) It’s weird to look at what 50 years can mean. Since I have your attention and just to think out loud…  50 years prior to its taping, the year was 1918. From the other direction, that’s only 21 years after 1897, making it one year after Elizabeth Collins was born. (In real life, it’s also the birth year of Dennis Patrick, making him 8 years younger than Joan Bennett, who was born in 1910, just 13 years after 1897.) For the hell of it, Jamison Collins was only 33 years old when he became a father in 1918. Dark Shadows actors who were around the age of 33 when the series was shot were Jerry Lacy, John Karlen, and Diana Millay. At the age of 33, Jamison Collins is only 6 years older than was Quentin when we met him in 1897. For a reference point, Quentin, had he been “alive,” would have been only 48 in 1918, which is just one year older than Wallace and me. David Selby was born in 1941. He wouldn’t be at Quentin’s 1918 age of 48 until 1989. Here’s what actor David Selby looked like in 1989, when he appeared in the Falcon Crest episode, “Doctor Dollars.”



Because Dark Shadows and its cast have been with us for 52 years, and because the show itself (like American Bandstand) deals with time travel, arrested aging, and a mappable dynasty, I find these finer points of chronology to be inordinately fascinating. It’s especially arresting here because the essence of the program is knit up in dealing with the past, even if that past is in recent memory. When we meet Liz, she’s torturing herself for decisions she made 18 years prior. Unlike the 171 years Barnabas was in stasis, 18 years is a span of time that’s easy to manage… more so with every passing year. I can remember 18 years prior with disturbing ease. This makes 1897 just long enough in the past to be exotic and just close enough to actually be relevant to the characters. With the elaborate clothing, unusual props, and ornate hairdos, it’s easy to forget that we’re basically dealing with Roger and Liz’s dad when he was David’s age. If you’re an adult who can remember his grandfather, you’re Roger remembering Edward.

This all begins to give Dark Shadows an immediately dynastic continuity, and with that, a sense that we are seeing slices of one, epic story rather than zipping around from the distant 1790’s to the present. Working backwards, we now have a thread from David to Roger, Roger and Liz to Jamison, Jamison to Edward, Edward to Gabriel’s son, that son to Gabriel, and from Gabriel to Daniel. At this point, it gets weird, because we don’t really know the relationship that Daniel’s father had to Joshua’s father.

This is what makes sense, and it’s kinda cool. In episode 1169, when Barnabas is cured for the last and most important time, it’s mentioned that his great uncle, Amadeus, was the prosecutor in the Judah Zachary trial. Amadeus was the brother of Collinsport founder, Isaac Collins. That works out to Isaac being Joshua’s… grandfather? Isaac got to the colonies in 1690, and he was at least twenty. Joshua wouldn’t be born until 1730, 40 years later. Unless Isaac was a very old father, that makes him Joshua’s grandfather. So, it’s from his brother, Amadeus, that we get the line that takes over Collinsport when Barnabas “dies” without an heir. It also explains why Judah Zachary largely bugs this other line and leaves Joshua and Barnabas alone; they had nothing to do with the trial. Daniel, Gabriel, Son of Gabriel, Edward, Jamison, Roger/Liz, and David are the direct descendants of that beatnik lawyer who made a hash of things for Judah at his trial. Nice going, Angelique. By ending Isaac’s line, you inadvertently led to Collinwood being in the direct line of fire rather than some row of townhouses in upstate New York.

What this means is that there’s a lot of old stuff on the show.

Exploring the closed wings is a mighty payoff for the character of Collinwood, itself, finally confessing the extent of its neglect and emotional damage. Amy seems amazed that no one has explored the house, and I am both thankful and amazed that someone is bringing it up. It just underlines a truth that we often ignore on the show, and that is… well, they’re living in a haunted house. What do you expect? And it seems to get more haunted all the time, like a perpetual motion machine of the occult. The situation with the Widows is bad enough. Now, with Quentin finally working up the ecotoplasm to reach out, Diabolos only knows what’s going to happen.

It makes me appreciate what a strange household surrounded Roger and Liz as children. Look at their dad. What is life like if you grow up with what went on in the 1897 storyline? When you’ve been possessed by Count Petofi… when not meddling with the will hidden in your great grandmother’s room-temperature coffin, days ripe? And when you have seen entirely wings of your house shut down, isolated, boarded up, and cut off, along with a good share of the domestics in the process?

The story of Collinwood isolating itself is a story that reached its conclusion with Liz’s reaction to the murder of Paul Stoddard. But again, look at her father. He knew what it meant to see a house compartmentalized after a marriage was dissolved with extreme prejudice. Jamison was around for the ugly beginning of the end of the house that was inaugurated by its matriarch’s suicide. And he was even around when the house was briefly a home, lively, with Jenny and Laura and Quentin and Carl filling it with laughter and mischief and revels not yet ended. But they would end, and we witnessed that. Over and over. How can one house be perpetually falling over the cliffs on which it’s built, but never quite go over?  That’s the most supernatural occurrence of all. The toll for Collinwood is not on the structure. Nor the actual lives of the inhabitants. As English social critic, George Alan O'Dowd, might put it were he to address those visitors, “You come and go. You come and go.” No, Collinwood’s decay is one of its strange, wooden heart. More than anything else, Collinwood is haunted by the perpetual death of joy, and the funeral has been going on for nearly 200 years. At the heart of it? A sinner with a sideburn shaped halo.

In a house haunted by Quentin, once joy incarnate, it will be Quentin’s own descendant, Amy, who will be responsible for his rescue from death and time. She is simply looking to play. In his own way, so was Quentin. It was the quest to end boredom that was the source of his curse. It is a marvelous statement about the power of the human imagination and mischief that the quest to end boredom would also be his release.

This episode was broadcast Dec. 5, 1968.

The Dark Shadows Daybook: DECEMBER 5

By PATRICK McCRAY

Taped on this date in 1968: Episode 644

Amy and David continue their quest through the east wing, finding antique clothes exactly their size while led by an old tune emerging from an unseen gramophone. Is Quentin summoning them? Perhaps he can’t leave. Meanwhile, Roger, Liz, and Carolyn, propelled by a dream from Magda and Jamison’s phantom signature on a mirror, begin searching for the children. In the east wing, David finds a hollow wall. Pushing beyond it, he is stunned at what he sees.

I’ve talked about repetition in soap operas before. Yes, it’s necessary for a number of reasons, but in the same episode? David repeats his reasoning about the hollow wall almost verbatim, two scenes in a row. Meanwhile, the search party discusses searching for David and Amy in the east wing over and over again and then talk themselves out of it. Despite this, 644 is a marvelous study in atmosphere that adores the scenic possibilities of their tiny studio, it feels as if it were written by Sy Tomashoff. I enjoy seeing the core family play Scooby Doo throughout their own home, with Roger coming off as surprisingly alpha in the quest. One of the subtle gems of the series is the evolving relationship between Roger and David. Two years before, Roger would have been burying David’s body in the east wing, personally.  A year later, Roger would have warmed toward David, merely praying that the boy were never found. But now? He’s leading the charge. From Carolyn’s nightmare to the redrummian writing of Jamison’s name in the mirror, the sense of dread extending from the past into the present is electric, and anticipates Quentin’s none-too-soon arrival. Compared with a new, tall, dark Collins, it’s easy to see why Adam/Angelique/Nicholas fell short of grabbing the golden muttonchops of public excitement. It’s easy to see why the ratings were skyrocketing. Today, Quentin’s theme was heard, at last. Portending an oncoming stranger from the past boded well for Barnabas. As with so many things involving Quentin and 1897, this is a both a reboot of Barnabas and 1795… and the opportunity to put the same wine in a new bottle after it’s fermented to a more powerful and confident brew. And by having Liz and Roger acknowledge Jamison as their father, the mythos grows with a relevance that the series has lacked since the days when Jason grew misty-eyed reminiscing about Paul’s love for Carolyn. This feels less like an episode and more like an easter egg, taking us through Collinwood’s hidden rooms on a private tour. And that’s a good thing.

On this date in 1968, holiday audiences “delighted” to Otto Preminger’s unwatchable acid epic, SKIDOO, featuring Groucho Marx as God in his last role. Meaning, Groucho’s last role.

The Dark Shadows Daybook: DECEMBER 5

By PATRICK McCRAY

Taped on this date in 1968: Episode 644

David and Amy search for an escape from the storage room in the west wing as Carolyn awakes from a nightmare about their deaths. Along with Roger and Liz, she sees her grandfather’s name -- Jamison -- written on her mirror. The family is galvanized into a search, but find nothing. Meanwhile, David and Amy find antique clothes that fit them all too well. A gift from Quentin? A sweet, Edwardian tune on a Victrola pulls Amy toward a wall that turns out to be hollow. Although the adults -- seemingly guided by the voice of Magda -- are fruitless in their quest for the kids, David finds a secret panel leading to an unknown chamber. They begin to crawl within.

When I hear ‘Dark Shadows,’ I don’t immediately think ‘vampire.’ Do you? I think haunted house, late at night, with a tempest outside hurling down rain like shards of rock from the hand of an angry god. 644? You deliver, and thus we get a marvelously respectable example to show someone as their first episode of DARK SHADOWS. We’ve known that Collinwood was haunted as hell since our first lectures on its history, and at last, the living residents take the battle to the undead, probing within to uncover their mysteries, armed with nothing but courage, foolishness, and candlelight. This is an episode where the characters don’t just allude to the past; they wrestle with it. Roger and Elizabeth must solve a riddle involving their own father. 1897 might sound like ancient history to use, but to them, it’s only seventy-one years in the past. For us now, that would be the equivalent of 1945, a time when my own my stepfather was a teenager. Doesn’t feel like so long ago, does it? (And, just for the hell of it, Dan Curtis was 25 in 1945.) We also begin the motif of ghosts forcing children into the clothing of their ancestors, a strange parallel to what the show was doing with their actors.

Also, let’s celebrate the first DARK SHADOWS performance of Quentin’s Song, “Shadows of the Past Night.” 1897 is such a gift to viewers, and a sentimental, inviting tune like this draws us further inward toward the mysterious, allusive world of Quentin Collins. It would go on to be a Grammy-nominated, Top Ten single in 1969, notably recorded by Andy Williams and Vic Fontaine.


On this day in 1970, the world lost Fred Stewart, the actor who played Dr. Reeves in the early part of the series. Stewart had an admirable Broadway career, appearing in original production of THE CRUCIBLE and CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF. But not as Maggie.