“What happened last night? Did I kill somebody again?”
The earth shakes, the heavens tremble, and the stars no longer shine. Or, to put it another way, Julia Hoffman has a new book to read.
Monthly Archives: June 2015
Episode 676: Murder Club
“Well, it’s obvious you’ve forgotten that you attacked me in this graveyard, the night before last.”
And then, one day, you find yourself walking with a mysterious older man to a secret place where he says he can keep you all night and nobody will ever know, and you ask yourself, how did my life end up this way?
Episode 675: The Unscooby Gang
“There’s something here that doesn’t make any sense.”
The curse is come upon us once again. The dark woods have claimed another.
Last night, a young woman, alone on the grounds of the estate, was disassembled by an unknown assailant, her life extinguished by a malevolent, savage beast that knows only hunger.
So, obviously, we can’t let this go on. I mean, at some point, you run out of day players.
Episode 674: Donna of the Dead
“Would you want to see a sister of yours, if you’d been responsible for everything that had happened here?”
“There is one possible explanation,” Barnabas says, as he paces the drawing room thoughtfully. “The man turned into an animal.”
And you know what? He’s right. That is the only explanation that anyone considers. Nobody else even tries.
Episode 673: The Shambles
“The blast from that gun should’ve killed any living creature. And it should’ve.”
Eccentric millionaire Barnabas Collins is out on the grounds of his family estate in the middle of the night, hunting for werewolves by the light of the full moon.
He hears something moving in the woods — and as the vicious beast advances, Barnabas lets fly with a rifle shot, smacking the animal right in the heart. But this is a supernatural creature with the raw power of whatever demon cursed its malignant soul; it shrugs off the gunshot, and comes back for more.
Thinking quickly, Barnabas tosses the rifle aside, and prepares to beat the snarling beast to death with his cane.
You know, they don’t make eccentric millionaires like this anymore. It’s a lost art.
Episode 672: Werewolf By Night
“There must have been something about this bracelet that kept the animal from killing me.”
Okay, let’s get right into it, because pretty much everything happens today, and I don’t have time to mess around. This is one of those episodes your mother would have warned you about, if she was dead.
Episode 671: The Phone Book of the Dead
“You know how girls are, they’re always having dizzy spells.”
Carolyn’s heading out for a moonlight stroll over to her mother’s private mausoleum. Elizabeth died three weeks ago, but Carolyn insists on paying regular visits to the crypt, just for old times’ sake.
Before she clocked out, Liz was convinced that she would be buried alive — everyone would think she was dead, but she’d really be lying in a comatose state, trapped in a coffin and unable to call for help. So she built herself a state-of-the-art mausoleum, complete with a push-button at her fingertips that she could press if she suddenly got better.
So Carolyn goes to visit every day, wondering if her mother will ever revive. Maggie tells her that it would be better if she could just accept her mother’s death, but Carolyn says that she still keeps hoping.
Maggie finally blurts out, “It’s not possible for someone to come back from the dead,” except on Dark Shadows, of course, where they never do anything else.
Episode 670: Small World
“What do you have against other people?”
Attention all bachelors: Carolyn Stoddard — the young and beautiful heiress of the Collins family fortune — is back on the market, looking for another dangerous serial killer to sweep her off her feet.
I don’t know what it is about Carolyn, but practically everyone that she’s ever dated is responsible for at least an attempted murder or two. Her first boyfriend, Joe, tried to strangle Barnabas, Burke went to prison for manslaughter, Tony poisoned Professor Stokes’ sherry, and Adam threatened to assassinate Carolyn’s entire family, up to and including Carolyn.
Seriously, the only good guy that she’s ever been out with is Buzz Hackett, the motorcycle beatnik. I wonder what Buzz is up to, these days.
Today, Carolyn is passing the time in the Collinwood drawing room with her latest butchering boyfriend, Christopher Jennings. Chris is one of those quiet loners that you hear about on the news, who everyone agrees is a fine young man, if you don’t count the monthly murder sprees.
Episode 669: My Boyfriend’s Back
“I’d like to meet the man that invented supermarkets, and wring his neck.”
We’ve talked a lot lately about the failure of the 1968 storylines, and I think it’s high time we move on, and talk about the failure of the 1969 storylines. You can’t live in the past forever, except for Angelique, apparently, and I don’t think I’ll ever figure out how she manages it.
Episode 668: The Aristocrats
“Sometimes I get scared to like people, because I’m afraid.”
There are five more Ron Sproat episodes, and then, I swear to you, he is out of my life for good.
To catch up the uncaught: Over the last three months on Dark Shadows, there’s been a behind the scenes tug-of-war between two of the writers, Ron Sproat and Sam Hall. Ron’s been on the show since November 1966, and he lkes to slow things down and take his time. He writes a lot of recap scenes, and a whole week can go by without anything really happening. Sam joined the show in November 1967, and he’s the opposite. He’s smart, fearless and easily bored, and he wants to make the show faster, funnier, and more interesting.
Ron and Sam have been out of synch for a long time, and their disagreements are getting worse. That’s why the last few months have been a patchwork of exciting episodes and boring episodes, even more than usual.
By now, Sam has won, and Ron is on his way out. There’s only a handful of Sproat episodes left — and based on today’s episode, it sounds like he’s already cleaned out his desk.
Honestly, he’s not even trying anymore. I mean, he never really tried that hard in the first place, but now he’s not even trying to look like he’s trying.
Dark Shadows Every Day 