The Dark Shadows Daybook: March 18

By PATRICK McCRAY

Taped on this day in 1970: Episode 985

Maggie thinks she’s seeing double when Angelique’s twin sister arrives… but is she? Maggie Collins: Kathryn Leigh Scott. (Repeat; 30 min.)

Maggie is stunned to find someone she assumes to be Angelique in her home. She is told that it’s Angelique’s sister, Alexis, but no one at Collinwood seems to shake the feeling that the former mistress has returned. Maggie and Quentin row over the new guest, and Maggie leaves.

Best moment of acting on the show, apologies to everyone else. And by the show, I mean all 1225 episodes. Kathryn Leigh Scott and David Selby end the episode with a fiery argument about whether or not Angelique has returned or if it's really just her twin sister, Alexis.

There are moments in acting where everything but the actual moment of total communication completely vanishes. There's no planning. Seemingly no script. The actor is as completely absorbed in the given circumstances and connection with their scene partner as is the most transfixed audience member. You might have heard of the concept of "in the moment." Sounds pretentious? It isn't. It is a moment like this.

Scott is a highly intelligent person. Vastly culturally literate and perceptive about the nuances of human behavior. In her choices, she is also a hell of a chess player. She owns every moment when she is on screen. She is not one for accidents. The final scene in this episode combines that kind of creative ownership with total creative freedom that the rigors of the show’s precision usually deny the performers. It's normally about saying lines and hitting marks with an accuracy demanded by being live on tape with minimal preparation. It doesn't allow for that almost supernatural spontaneity. This moment does. It's not just about raised voices and Selby's bombast. This is about actually BEING.

It's often a mystery... how these moments come about. Olivier wept after certain performances because he had no idea how he achieved them. When Scott departs Collinwood, you hear a voice never before experienced on the series. There is an edge that is totally fresh, totally new, and totally about communicating with Selby at that moment. And she means it.

It goes by in a flash, but it's worth really appreciating.

Overall, Parallel Time is one of the show's least effective storylines because of its failure to live up to the concept. Where do the universes deviate? Where don't they? The writers hide behind, "This isn't science fiction," too much with this. Nowhere is this truer than the moment when Cyrus quotes Shakespeare. Why not attribute it to Marlowe, guys? Have a little fun with the PT concept. It's possible to have those Easter Eggs as flavoring without being a slave to science fiction. It's a general rule that if you play to the dumbest guy in the room, you'll have the dumbest show in town. Given that, if you play to the most average guy in the room, well, you get my point.

This episode focuses on the abstracts of good and evil more dedicatedly than most on the show. Of course, any Jekyll & Hyde story is apt to. I'm getting ahead of myself, but I'm not sure that Yaeger is as much evil as liberated from the yoke of consequences. Why need he be? He's a tourist in Longworth's body. He exhibits too much joy... Longworth, too little. I can see scenarios where he has a great weekend in New York, as long as no one gets in his way.

If there's a monster in the episode, and in all of PT, it's not Angelique. Nor Stokes. Nor Yaeger. Nor any of the ostensible suspects. On a primal level, it's Quentin, that most violent of good guy husbands. The only thing that strains my credulity in the episode is that he doesn't slap Maggie into next week.

Not that he should.

But with a temper that volcanic and self-assured, in an age where That's The Way Things Were, I feel like PT Quentin is cutting short of where he really seems to want to go. He's an unreasoning, privileged, overly confident bully with an anger management problem that is more readily found in kaiju. And THAT, my friends, is a monster. Because that monster is real. The most astonishing OTHER element in the episode is that Maggie actually leaves him.

That is the fantasy element of the series because too few victims of domestic abuse find Maggie's strength. Dark Shadows wasn't an engine of social change. But in this one instance, I can only hope that someone out there was inspired by her example. And what am I saying? Day ain't over yet. Perhaps someone is being inspired right now.

No Quentin is worth it.

This episode hit the airwaves April 3, 1970.

The Dark Shadows Daybook: March 10

By PATRICK McCRAY

Taped on this day in 1969: Episode 711

What’s beautiful, brilliant, blonde, and set on Satanic revenge? Quentin Collins, meet your new girlfriend. Angelique: Lara Parker. (Repeat; 30 min.)

Quentin and Evan accidentally summon Angelique. After determining that she is in Collinsport, she finds that Barnabas is back in the arms of an avatar of Josette. She rolls up her sleeves and gets to work on brutal revenge for both of them.

We are ten episodes into 1897, and if you were not familiar with the series, you would swear I was making it up. Nothing that has come before can really prepare us for what just happened. It represents more than an arc of television. It represents a philosophy.

And it may be fan service, objections to which I do not understand, nor have I ever. From where I am standing, which is narrow and damp and smells like Wilford Brimley, fan service is just stuff someone doesn’t like in a thing they usually do. In ample supply, usually, and daring to please someone, thus triggering the following thought, “Somewhere, someone is having a good time, and I’ll put a stop to THAT!”

Dark Shadows has just run through ten days of the best fan service in horror. Which is saying something. Okay, what’s on the scoreboard? Barnabas: vampire. Time travel. Gypsies. A dead matriarch and her ghost. A child induced to rob a coffin. A Satanist attorney with a pointy beard. A tall blonde. John Karlen, shrieking with laughter and blasting away good taste with a “fib” flag. Swords wielded. Quentin speaks. Kids induced into devil ceremonies. Oh yeah, Josette is back, as is the music box, with Barnabas picking up like the past hundred years and 1960’s fever dream never happened. Louis Edmonds, a little more Louis Edmonds. Joan Bennett, even more imperious because she lacks the means to be. It’s more of everything you like and a healthy dollop of stuff you’re horrified you were being denied. I’m certain that someone out there can’t stand it, but let us revel at the philosophy that gave us this.

Specifically, that art can exist to delight us, even as it challenges. This is Dark Shadows gone mad with generosity, not always pushing the envelope, but stuffing it full of the things we love. If it is about mystery, that’s secondary. The main mission is to thank audiences for tuning in. And today, the mosaic became complete. Because Dark Shadows was missing only one thing to become the ultimate echo chamber of itself. Today, it got it.

There is a perfection to Angelique wandering into the frame that assures us that the writers are rock confident of what they have, and they disguise no qualms about sharing it. Quentin is as immediately smitten with her as is the audience. They are not wasting any time with her jumping through hoops of pretense in a black wig. She’s here. She’s choking Evan Hanley like a Sith badass, and she sizes Quentin up with more potential energy than Pavarotti on the high dive. Her mission is to Get Barnabas, and all it takes is once glance, like an erotically charged Gladys Kravitz, through a window to find that she’s arrived just in time to straighten out the unheavenly hash of that no good, two-timing, hemopathic husband of hers, running around with the reincarnated spirit of his dead fiance again, mere hours after he’s out of the coffin. She cannot let him out of her sight for a mere century, and he’s back at it again. The louse.

She really holds a grudge, but do you blame her? You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, and at the rate she went in 1795, she broke enough eggs to run an IHOP. She didn’t just pop out of her hammock one day in Martinique and decide that she was tired of kicking around the Islands, so she might as well disguise herself as a domestic, do back-breaking labor for a year or two, then kill almost everyone in a small, Maine coastal village. You know, if she could have accomplished her ends without all that bloodshed, I suspect she would have done so.

The poor demoness is not back for fifteen minutes before she sees that all of that work was for naught. Barnabas is back in the arms of that woman, but it hasn’t gone far enough that a good doll-stranglin’ won’t help. It’s kind of hard not to cheer her on... quietly.

There’s a payoff, too. I’m not sure that we can sense it’s coming, but it would be gratuitous, well, fan service,  to bring her back without a justification.

1897 is about transformation. A European society becoming an American one. One century becoming anothert. Quentin, not just becoming a werewolf, but becoming a man of the saddest maturity. Barnabas, finally mastering the game he was dealt into a century earlier. And Angelique?

This is her great maturing as well, going from declaring Barnabas a mutual enemy with Quentin to saving his life, turning him human, and aiding his fight with Laura. Not cleanly. Not without ambiguity. But with a firmness that will carry her well into 1970 and backwards to 1840. Unless it’s the other way around.

Quentin only meets her once before dubbing her a beautiful, blackhearted child of the angels. A contradictory description more apt than any other. With her landing, the show finally and truly gives itself permission to become Dark Shadows. Whether it’s Liz transforming from murderous to mother or Vicki finally understanding, Dark Shadows is about transformation more than anything else. After all, what is a shadow of the transformation of light to darkness and back again?  At this very moment, the show, itself, transforms.

69 years before the first episode even began.

This episode hit the airwaves March 17, 1969.

The Dark Shadows Daybook: March 17

By PATRICK McCRAY

Taped on this date in 1970: Episode 985

Maggie is stunned to find that Angelique’s twin sister, Alexis, has arrived from Italy. As the house falls under her spell, few believe she’s not Angelique returned. Meanwhile, Cyrus Longworth tells Chris Collins about man’s duality. At Collinwood, Quentin is entranced by Alexis’ rendition of “Ode to Angelique,” and as they are about to kiss, Maggie stumbles in and storms out.

Riddle me this: when is a twin not a twin?

Cyrus Longworth quotes Shakespeare in this episode, and it begs the question of questions: just how parallel is Parallel Time? After all, there’s still Shakespeare, and there’s still a recognizable quote from the Cliff’s Notes to HAMLET. What’s really changed? At times, it feels as if the differences are too slight. When the show could have taken a massive risk in format and tone, instead it shifts just enough to ditch certain actors to go film HOUSE OF DARK SHADOWS while not confusing the viewers… for instance, by having Harry Johnson attempt to take his mother’s job by assassinating her or Liz running around with a beard being told by Barnabas that, “Every revolution begins with just one spinster.”

But it’s not Mirror Time. It’s Parallel Time. Perhaps the differences should be slight. Protecting the brand is important, and they make hay with characters who largely won’t be in HOUSE OF DARK SHADOWS. If they had made this a universe where vampires were the norm and Barnabas joined a human resistance or something, it would have set insane expectations for the movie.

It is a twin of DARK SHADOWS. Not identical. Not too deviant. And like any fictional twin, it gives us a chance to appreciate the counterpart. Most of them are simply more extreme versions of their Main Time equivalents. This episode drives home the importance of twins because it illuminates the fact that this story will focus on the impact of specific twins in a sea of them. With the arrival of Alexis, we have the establishment of one set. With Cyrus Longworth, we have the next, as he strives to give figurative birth to his own twin, John Yaeger -- his other side.

It seems confusing, these twins upon twins. But none of them really are. Alexis is Angelique. Longworth is Yaeger. Smoky is the Bandit. Following that, the larger question is whether or not this parallel universe is a twin or is it simply our own universe with the implications of more extremity (Longworth) or more deception (Alexis)? It’s up to Barnabas to navigate Parallel Time’s maze, and as a man given to outbursts of extremity and a life of deception, this universe may ultimately serve as a very personal mirror.

Today features the last SHADOWS script written by Violet Welles. A press agent for Broadway productions, she was also a ghost writer for Gordon Russell, specializing in characters and the emotional subtext of scripts when assisting him. Vaguely the DC Fontana of DARK SHADOWS, Dan Curtis insisted on hiring her, and she made solid contributions to the show, especially in the 1897 storyline, where she began by helping Evan Hanley and Quentin summon Angelique from Hell. 

Thanks, Violet!

This episode hit the airwaves April 3, 1970.

The Dark Shadows Daybook: March 17

By PATRICK McCRAY

Taped on this day in 1969: Episode 716

Jenny escapes the tower room and locks Rachel Drummond within. Nora complains that her door is mysteriously ajar, but Judith writes it off to gypsies. Meanwhile, she exerts her authority over Dirk, who rescues Rachel. Judith later tells Nora that her mother is not coming to visit, despite the girl’s dreams.

Filler. Entertaining filler, but astoundingly filleresque filler. Lots of atmosphere and a pleasant way to spend twenty-two minutes, but not what you want to use to introduce someone to the show. Every character in the episode is something of a side character, save maybe Judith. So, yes, here’s a fine example of her flexing her muscles as executor. It’s fun to see Jenny on the loose, and this is her first appearance, so there’s that. Marie Wallace has the beginning of her own corner of the bittersweet, hellzapoppin’ blast that is 1897.

On this day in 1969, Golda Meir became the first prime minister of Israel.