The Dark Shadows Daybook: Oct. 6

Taped on this date in 1970: Episode 1124

By PATRICK McCRAY

Can Barnabas evade the son of the man he murdered before Judah Zachery claims another life? Lamar Trask: Jerry Lacy. (Repeat; 30 min.)

Armed with a letter disclosing the potential true identity of Barnabas Collins, Lamar visits Collinwood to force the brash Englishman’s hand. Meanwhile, at Rose Cottage, a man once possessed by the head of Judah Zachery confronts a haunted Desmond, dying in the process.

Maybe today isn’t the Dark Shadows Daybook. It might be the Trask House Daybook. Because I think we’ve stumbled into another series. 

What a marvelous episode that charges out of the gate, giving us, just in the opening narration, an absolute banquet of intrigue, occult weirdness, and reasons to keep watching. The episode absolutely delivers, with actors like John Karlen and Nancy Barrett still finding new colors in their performances and a script that has genuine intrigue and dread. If you've seen the rest of the series, parts of it may feel familiar. And? Bolero quickly familiarizes us with itself, and that’s the point. It’s a burgeoning experience that intentionally maintains a simplicity that reveals a mounting complexity and grandeur, each go-round surprising us with what it contained all along. Yes, Bolero. But with Donna Wandrey instead of Bo Derek, and that's a pretty good trade. After all, Donna Wandrey never said, “They’re washing me like a horse,” while expecting to be taken seriously in subsequent features. Only Thayer David could pull that off.  

Even though it’s at the start of the much maligned 1840 storyline, this is a solidly rambunctious way to introduce someone to the series. When it begins, Desmond is possessed by a haunted head, Quentin has drawn the Death card in a tarot deck, we find out that Kate Jackson is there to murder Quentin, and Barnabas is doing everything he can to win the current woman of his dreams away from, well, himself. He's always had to live down his nocturnal activities, but this is the most extreme case yet, as he tries to make up for the cad he was just a few days and yet hundreds of years ago. Kind of. Compounded. That's really before any dialogue starts. What a welcome to Collinwood! Considering what people have to wade through in the first episodes of the show just to get to the whole vampire part, this is like pressing the accelerator on a MacLaren. And then you kill off Abe Vigoda. Nothing against Abe, but if it worked for Coppola, it can work for Curtis. Abe, it’s just business. 

However, wedged in between that terrific opening and a climax where supernatural forces victimize Vigoda (and feel free to go back and read that phrase as many times as you want), we are actually stepping into a parallel universe. Well, kind of, and more interestingly than we ever did with parallel time. Because for just a moment, we step into the sister series of Dark Shadows. It’s the series that never got made, but the series that makes all the sense in the world. Its star? Jerry Lacy. 

Is he the villain? Yeah, if you’re a Collins. But that’s a particularly pretzeled moral bar. Take a step back. Get an objective view of the ethical landscape that mercifully vanishes at Widow’s Hill.  We take a degree of heroism for granted on the show because vampires are cool and we like Jonathan Frid. It’s easy to forget that these are pretty reprehensible people. Is there an alternative? Maybe for a blip in 1840: The House of Trask. For a period, they are the other white meat of prominent Collinsport families. Yes, they are working class, and yes they haven't been there as long, and no, they don't stay as long, but they nevertheless have a place. And you could very easily make a multi-generational supernatural tv series just based on that dynasty. 

One of the things that brings this into focus on this is the stunning performance of Jerry Lacy, an actor so good that we take him for granted. It can be a curse of good actors because they make it look so effortless. In 1124, Lacy could easily win a bet on who the dashing and dark romantic lead really is. He is just as intense, unpredictable, and determined as any vampire. And perhaps as commandingly seductive. When he is alone with the women in the episode, he summons up a surprisingly deep well of passionate intensity. Yes, judgmental, but not without a powerful sense of desire. As he draws Letitia Faye into using her psychic abilities for his own ends, he shows a new and powerful side to the Trask archetype. For once, nothing is forbidden to him by the cloth. Poor Barnabas only comes back into the drawing room to save his own keister, seconds from being outed. With Lacy in brief control of the drama, Jonathan Frid plays the weasel pedal to an extent that even outshines the best of John Karlen. As hard as he possibly can. It's a delight, and he continues when he gets back home. Like a cartoon character, Trask has let himself in there, also, and is so calm and collected, I am surprised he’s not smoking Barnabas’ pipe and correcting his crossword puzzle. 

Briefly, Trask the hero of a different show who has somehow wandered into a program where the victors of history have written him and his family as the bad guys. His father was a badass witch hunter, reportedly tortured and starved to death when he dared to pursue the servants, lovers, and associates of a vengeful and aristocratic vampire. He never knew the old man, but he certainly knows of his legend and suffered his absence. Fascinated with the strange dance of life and death, unable to afford medical school, Lamar Trask has clearly studied voraciously.  He’s well-versed in the law, of course. An historic trial cost his father his future. Even in 1840, the only way to learn about bodies and anatomy, short of becoming a music hall entertainer, was to become a mortician. Makes you think. Maybe he didn’t get into that line because he's creepy. He might have followed that pursuit for entirely logical reasons. The Collins family is a menace! Look at the Collinses that he has to deal with. There's Gabriel, who is not exactly the life of the party. Then you have Quentin and Desmond, who have the incredibly poor judgment to do things like build unguarded, unstable time portals, become best friends with Gerard Stiles, and consider the severed head of a nefarious occultist to be a great gift for mom. 

The whole town loses either way, there. If you think it’s the perfect gift, you’re a danger to the entire town. If Flora is so nutty that it IS the perfect gift, you’re a danger to the entire Western Hemisphere. As a warmup. Yeah, these are the normative characters. These are the people we are supposed to trust. Topping it, Trask has a letter from his father absolutely outing what went on shortly before his mysterious death, doing so with eerie specificity. And who shows up? The “identical son" of his father 's killer, wielding ungodly social power and wealth. A man who potentially. has the powers of hell at his fingertips. And he’s suddenly on a first-name basis with your former Lois Lane. 

Bolero again. But not just ascending. By this point, it’s inverting and twisting like trapeze artist determined to see how far their bravery and recklessness can take their art. In 1840, the show is still in midair, and maybe that’s where it remained. Of course, the eventual fact that Lamar is a ruthless and unethical bigot has to crash the party, taking Dark Shadows back to reality, which is not only where it belongs, but what it defines. 

This episode was broadcast Oct. 15, 1970.

The Dark Shadows Daybook: October 15

By PATRICK McCRAY

Taped on this day in 1969: Episode 874

Petofi must go on the run from gypsies as the power of the hand returns to Quentin, who uses it to restore minds. Meanwhile, Kitty begins to realize that she is Josette.

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly." — Ernest Hemingway, THE SUN ALSO RISES

Endings in DARK SHADOWS frequently feel like they happen in the same fashion: quickly. It’s jarring for a show where everything else is, to be polite, in no particular hurry. In the case of Jason McGuire, characters like Carolyn and Barnabas have simply had enough and they end his shenanigans unceremoniously. (Literally, since the wedding doesn’t take place.) Adam wanders away. In the case of Petofi, it’s a controlled implosion with a variety of calamities all happening around the same time. A disturbed jolt back from 1969. A rebounding Barnabas. Garth Blackwood. King Johnny’s widow. Beth’s cooking. Whatever Aristede brought back from Cabo. (Okay, I’m conjecturing the last part.) Still, for a character who’s been around for months, it’s a shock to see him undermined and petard-hoisted so quickly.

Putting almost all of the end in David Selby’s hands (or hand, in this case) is a master stroke. Petofi’s wit and strange gentility always seemed like a function of his ungainly physique. It was a source of humility beyond the deniable. In Quentin’s body, he becomes understandably and insufferably smug. And then far crueler with far less nuance to his approach. As far as games go, he’s moved from an elegant and Puckish game of go to football, with a brutal playbook, at that. By the same token, Quentin has yet another lesson in humility to learn, and he’s graduating with honors. I’m not surprised that the character is so boring when we meet him again. If I were Quentin, I’d be too terrified of life to do anything but wash my hands, walk old ladies to the grocery, and turn the pages for the chorus pianist. I don’t think Gerard drives him crazy; whatever happens to him on the Night of the Green Flag is the final chunk in the mosaic of All of the Things in Life that Can Go Horribly Wrong.

Not that it’s a miserable ride for the rest of us. Not here. Watching Petofi lose the power of his hand is like seeing Khan getting caught with his shields down. Although it would be fun to see Thayer David find a new way to chew the scenery, Selby’s eyes register shocked umbridge with olympian powers. It’s a bit of full circle. We met him as a petulant ghost, eyes blazing with disapproval and reproach. As human and humane as Quentin becomes, this is a nice reminder of why the man and actor were so captivating when we were first introduced.

As Petofi falls and Quentin learns his last lessons in responsibility, Barnabas is also on the ascendant, and it’s our warmest time with him. Watching him actually, really, I-swear-to-God get Josette back has a sweetness that even the show can’t yet believe. It metes it out as if we’re a deserving dog, they’re out of treats, and all that’s left is the fois gras. On our end, we’ll take what we can get, and yes, it’s fois gras. In the same fashion, it won’t last. It can’t. Happy characters don’t belong on soap operas, and it still feels like Barnabas has lessons to learn. Who knew they’d be so ugly? And it’s not like the fois gras is being served up by the shovelful. Kathryn Leigh Scott is charged with serving it in tiny bites at frustrating intervals. I have no idea if she ever got to play Nina in THE SEAGULL, but she gives the audition of her life, here. Seagull/Actress/Kitty/Josette, it becomes a blur that she navigates nimbly, and it’s her best acting on the show since the depths of her first of many kidnappings. Kitty’s transformation into Josette could have easily degenerated into a Carol Burnett skit, and if you’ve seen KLS on the inaugural POLICE SQUAD!, you know she’s an astoundingly underrated comedienne. The fact that she keeps it on just this side of credible (without degenerating into the dull) is a tribute to her sense of taste and discipline.

She plays one more character who’s not what she appears. As 1897 ends, almost no one is. Kitty is Josette. Quentin is Petofi. Petofi is Quentin. Barnabas is a human Doppelganger. Amanda’s a painting. Charity is Pansy Faye. And a sketch of Garth Blackwood is about to kill the Count. The deceptiveness of appearances is a bedrock of soap operatic writing, but DARK SHADOWS, epitomized by 1897, will never be content with only the basics. Curtis and the writers top themselves with no concept of ceiling. If appearances are deceptive, then they’ll deceive like they’re doing a daredevil stunt. Is it a stunt? Does it feel like it? No. It’s intrinsic to the story. Like Petofi’s end, it’s been so gradually cultivated, we don’t realize it’s upon us. So much of DARK SHADOWS could feel like a gimmick. From concept to credits, the show seems like it would be television’s greatest engine for gimmicks until you watch it.  The writers are too good for that, though, and so are the performers.

This episode was broadcast Oct. 30, 1969.

The Dark Shadows Daybook: October 5

By PATRICK McCRAY

Taped on this day in 1969: Episode 863

Who dresses like a rake, worships Satan, and is about to dig his own grave? Evan Hanley is about to find out! Humbert Allen Astredo guest stars. (Repeat; 30 min.)

Petofi bluffs his way through surviving Quentin and Evan’s assassination attempt.  As a result, Petofi forces Evan to dig his own grave. At Collinwood, Trask and Judith are reunited, and he is disturbed to find her far more autonomous than before.

863 is bookended by fantastic sequences of supernatural skullduggery and diabolical derring-do. In the middle? You know, a soap opera. What do you expect? Somehow, it’s still candy, and we can thank Jerry Lacy and Louis Edmonds for cooking it up. Edmonds, especially, is taking delight in finding newer and newer depths and dimensions to Edward’s gamesmanship. He reveals fondness for his siblings while never letting them forget where they stand. Of course, it’s easy for an Edwardian prig to grow sentimental about his family when 1/3rd of them have been possessed by a foppish, aristocratic sorcerer. But I don’t need to tell you these things.

1897 is wrapping up, and you can feel it both flagging and heading toward the inevitable semi-climax. It’s impossible to say that they have used every trick in the trunk, but the writers have been here for spring and summer of 1969, made huge choices, completely transformed Quentin into a reformed, if boring, immortal, and gone through two entirely new characters for Kathryn Leigh Scott, Thayer David, and Roger Davis. The show is on its last fumes of really top notch ideas, and the fact that 1897 ends neither with a bang nor whimper is quietly indicative of the mixed bag DARK SHADOWS will become.

As fumes, go, though, pass the bag. These are actually good for you. Humbert Allen Astredo plays a powerless drone with disturbing precision, and David Selby excavates deeper and deeper levels of malicious delight as Petofi revels in Quentin’s body and life. Any article mentioning Selby hovers on the edge of being a fan letter replete with hearts in the margins. But dammit, the man simply owns a set like few others. Ultimately, it’s his mind that makes this so. Active, observant, poetic. Maybe a PhD does make you a better actor. I’m not certain. But it was one of the two best casting choices that Dan Curtis ever made, and although I can read about the hysteria for the show at this point, I can only imagine what it was actually like. I wonder if the writers had planned on Quentin becoming Petofi before this sequence began. If they didn’t, it’s a further testament to Selby’s acting that they made a risky commitment like that.

If this episode exists to do anything, it is to squarely position Gregory Trask to, um, take up permanent residence in Quentin’s room. Trask is an interesting pest in the 1897 sequence, although he ultimately doesn’t seem to do a lot. In the most macroscopic sense, I think his ultimate purpose is to make Edward appear witty, warm, and likable by comparison. If that’s the case, it’s a job well done. And after his ancestor’s turns in 1795 and 1968, it’s satisfying to see the DSU take another chance to knock him around. In ways that have yet to be explored, the Trask dynasty is just as vital as the Collins’ to this story, and perhaps that will eventually be explored. Just bring a mason or a metaphysician. They have a habit of getting stuck behind walls, in bricked up rooms, or parallel dimensions. 

This episode was broadcast Oct. 15, 1969