The Dark Shadows Daybook: JANUARY 11

By PATRICK McCRAY

Taped on this date in 1971: Episode 1192

Samantha learns the terrifying secret of Joanna, but will it be enough to save her from becoming the next ghost of Widow’s Hill? Joanna Mills: Lee Beery. (Repeat. 30 min.)

After a startling imprisonment in Parallel Time, Quentin and Daphne escape to encounter Joanna Mills. After Samantha’s bullets pass through her, Joanna lures her onto Widow’s Hill, where she reveals herself to be a grotesque ghost, bent on revenge.

1840 continues to be the best-kept secret on Dark Shadows. It’s largely known for the surprising denouement of the Barnabas/Angelique storyline, and while the other arcs don’t have that kind of canonical weight, they can be tight, smart, and intriguing. Watching the Joanna Mills mystery conclude, we’re reminded of that. Like the beginning of the Leviathan story, 1840 seems to present both a main arc and an anthology running concurrently. In 1198, it wraps up a section of that anthology. The segment might be a challenge to get into (because of the ensemble of unfamiliar short-timers) but it pays off when you do. It’s one of those brief dimensions of the show like “The Stopping Off Place” story that ran a year before -- easily forgotten despite deserving of a mental dog-ear. I’m bending the page corner now.

If the episode has any message, it’s “don’t tick off a ghost.” Up until Joanna Mills, ghosts on the show reveled in their supernatural powers, and while they were incredibly powerful, there’s always the sense that they are limited to abilities like telekinesis and mind control. Joanna, though, successfully pulls off a hoax on a level that redefines what a ghost on the program can be. If Josette had possessed these powers, Angelique would have been the next unsuccessful cliff diver on Widow’s Hill. She’s intensely corporeal, fooling scads of people into believing she’s real and saving her big reveal for maximum impact. Actress Lee Beery brings a sense of placid control to the part, making her the perfect foil for the tightly wound, humorless Samantha as delivered by Virginia Vestoff. Her postmortem reveal is genuinely horrifying in a luridly Basil Gogos way, and in my book, that’s Louvreable. It’s another moment for parents of the age to have every reason to keep kids from watching, and even more reason for kids to go as Jim Phelps as possible to outwit household Standards & Practices. This kind of entertainment merits Ace bandage slings tied to bedframes, probably-lethally suspending kids upside down from the second floor, hovering like Spider-Man outside the family room where the forbidden images would spill forth. 

1192 even gives a goose to Parallel Time when Quentin and Daphne are briefly trapped there, sucked back to Main Time only because two Kate Jacksons in one place created a Crisis of Infinite Daphnes. For a moment, the story has intrigue and suspense beyond the typical Parallel Time voyeurism. We even learn who discovered Parallel Time -- Ernest Weisman of the University of Vienna. It’s a great nugget of trivia from Quentin I, worthy of Eliot Stokes, and it ties the seemingly random events at Collinwood to a larger mythology that longs to be explored by future writers. It pays to keep watching -- back to the beginning of the show -- after wrapping up the “present” of 1841 PT. Taking the larger context of the Dark Shadows mythos with us, what we lose in mystery and wonder, we gain in intrigue and detail.

As an aside, Joanna Mills was of course, the reason that the song, “Joanna,” was written. It’s one of the lovelier, if “Airport loungey” pieces of music from the show, but because it appears so late in the series and in the less-popular of the MGM films, the piece remains obscure. Even more obscure are the lyrics, which I wrote last spring.

JOANNA
Music by Robert Cobert. Lyrics by Patrick McCray.

I’m wearing pants...
They’re made of Lycra.
And they cling tight to me in oh so many ways.
They’re just pants, you see,
But pants for me,
To wear for all my days.

When I think of all the leather lederhosen
That People wear in far off Germany…
When I think of how they chafe, I guess I am supposing,
They’re proud we see that they are firm of knee.

I’m wearing pants...
They’re made of Lycra
And they cling tight to me in oh so many ways.
They’re just pants, you see,
But pants for me,
To wear for all my days.
To wear for all my days. 

This episode was broadcast Jan. 19, 1971.

The Dark Shadows Daybook: DECEMBER 31

By PATRICK McCRAY

Taped on this date in 1970: Episode 1186

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the east wing, Parallel Time is here to stay. But will Daphne go with it? Morgan Collins: Keith Prentice. (Repeat; 30 min.)

Quentin is sentenced to a beheading and denied an appeal as Barnabas schemes for a new plan of action. Meanwhile, Gabriel overhears Edith and Gerard in the throes of passion and subsequently kills her. Daphne stumbles onto the Parallel Time room where her double confronts a sister, Catherine, who is ambiguous over a marriage proposal from Morgan Collins. She is still in love with a prior flame.

The future coughs significantly in the wings as 1840 begins fumbling for its boarding pass, and the transition is a complex, rich delight, and easily the most nuanced storyline transition of any on the show. It has become a huge universe, and a “transish” should not be a tidy thing.

1186 is typical of the 1840 storyline. It packs in all of the thematic and ritualistic good stuff we look for in DS and skips the repetitive running-in-place that so often turns off new viewers. I know, because I watched it with someone who had only passing familiarity with the program, and it kept his attention on more than a polite level. In one episode, we have…

1. The results of a witch trial, where the real world contends with the supernatural, and vice-versa. 
2. The remorse from one friend toward a troubled other, defying expectation and ending with threats over the stewardship of Collinwood.
3. The revelation of romance within.
4. Quentin’s Theme as ghostly bait.
5. A seemingly disabled man stands and kills his wife.
6. Someone ventures near Parallel Time. 

It’s an almost dizzyingly dense combination of show elements. Are the writers getting desperate or are they just tired of ploddingly plotting at the strangely arrested pace demanded by the medium? It’s cosmically irrelevant. By this point, Dark Shadows has become its own medium and it is finding a tempo commensurate with the intelligence of its audience. Hey, you guys… the ones complaining that we suddenly have to tune in for every episode? Yeah, please go watch General Hospital or something. The rest of us like tuning in for every episode, and now we get even more great stuff per installment.

It’s a brisk, witty, suspenseful installment full of satisfying moments and strange wonder. Anything that begins with the threat of a beheading can’t be all bad, and the surrounding treatment of government bureaucracy should please anyone in the jaws of a mindless machine. When Barnabas appeals the impending separation of Quentin and Head, he’s told that, since there’s no precedent for that kind of crime & punishment, there’s no precedent for appeal. It’s reasoning that’s delivered with all of the confidence we expect from a bureaucrat who has no idea what’s going on, and who cares even less if you know it. With a week before the inevitability of death and axes, you’d think that Barnabas might want to, you know, send to Boston for a real lawyer, but he’s too busy working himself up to more harebrained schemes. What? We’ll have to find out.

This is an intensely head-oriented storyline, and as we see Gerard in vague remorse for Quentin, it could be that it’s both genuine and strategic. I never really know how much of what we see at this point is Gerard and how much is Judah Zachery, and I like to believe that it’s far more of the latter. Meanwhile, Christopher Pennock, perennial hero of the Daybook, knows that Gabriel is going into the windup for his exit and is relishing it. Gabriel may be the most dynamic and unpredictable limited-lifespan character on the show, and after brief, saving salvos of help and wit, he’s going for the Gloucester award with gusto. It’s a shame to see Terry Crawford go since Edith is the opposite of the simp that was Beth, but what an exit. 1840 admirably mixes the supernatural monsters with the real. The buildup of Gabriel in the wheelchair is suspenseful enough that a double dip of arise-and-kill is completely welcome, and Pennock’s towering height adds to the menace.

Speaking of double dips, it’s back to Parallel Time. Has Dark Shadows finally admitted that it works best as a period piece? With the exception of about 1710-1760, 1860, and 1920-1940, Dark Shadows has explored its timeline thoroughly, and even the treat of visiting one of those periods would be a challenge given the strictures of the mythos (not that it ever stopped the writers before). At this point, the only way forward is sideways, and the introduction of Morgan Collins and a mysterious “other man” expands the DSU and harkens back to its sudsy origins. Morgan is in the classic mold of the Dan Curtis tall-dark-and-baritone leading man, which sets up a great bait-and-switch when Bramwell enters the picture. I don’t begrudge Jonathan Frid wanting the opportunity to play an earthier leading man. Less fun, ultimately, for Lara Parker. She’s commented that Angelique was too much of a goody-goody, which is true when the character’s not trying to murder children, and if that is the case, Catherine may be the chance to Be Real Pretty, but I’m not sure she’s more interesting as a figure of agency.

The underrated 1840 is entering its climax and denouement. Shifting completely to an entirely new storyline, with no substantive crossover, may be the program’s biggest gamble. Any ongoing crossover character would have been an ill fit, anyway, and the strangely mature 1841PT storyline finishes the show in a manner both familiar and strikingly different. Look beyond the surface, and what seems like “more of the same” is quite the opposite. Dark Shadows is about cycles, and the only thing left after  1841PT is Vicki’s arrival in 1966 Main Time… followed by the rest of the series, chronologically. The eventual and stable union of Bramwell and Catherine is the opposite of the seething mistrust and betrayals experienced by both Roger and Elizabeth in their Main Time marriages. It shows us the arc — not of “the characters,” but of Characters in the story of Dark Shadows. Only at Collinwood is the brightest future in the distant past… and in a parallel universe, at that.

This episode was broadcast Jan. 11, 1971.