“I’m merely wondering if there’s something in you that reaches out towards unnatural creatures.”
HAMLET
The time is out of joint — O cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!
Monthly Archives: December 2015
Episode 789: My Wife and My Dead Wife
“In effect, we are going to create — a thing!”
Reverend Trask has only been married to his new wife Judith for three days, and already she’s defective. She seems to have picked up the idea that she’s actually Trask’s first wife, Minerva, and she’s determined to punish the people responsible for her murder, namely: Trask and his associate, Evan Hanley. This is not the kind of reliability that Reverend Trask expected; I hope he remembers where he put the warranty.
Episode 788: Mrs-taken Identity
“Our lives are one long continuous crisis!”
Oh, man. I know that look. It’s July, and somebody needs a vacation.
Episode 787: The Dog Pound
“I don’t think that two supernatural creatures appearing simultaneously at Collinwood could be just a coincidence.”
A metaphor for masculine hunger and violence is loose in the dark forest, a bottomless appetite for carnal destruction preying on the weak. Faced with this upsetting symbolic rejection of civilized cultural norms, Collinsport Animal Control sets up a traffic stop and hopes for the best.
And now we’ve got a new kind of juvenile in detention, a crossbreed nightmare on two legs dressed in grown-up clothes, snarling and clawing at anyone foolish enough to approach its cage. So here’s my question: How do you think they got him out of the bear trap and into a jail cell?
Episode 786: The Blog Post About The Original Music From Dark Shadows with The Robert Cobert Orchestra & Featuring Jonathan (Barnabas) Frid and David (Quentin) Selby
“Listen carefully, and you’ll hear my dream.”
Charity Trask dreams of sexy scoundrel Quentin Collins, just like everybody else in the summer of ’69. “I’ve been waiting for you,” he says. She replies, “I feel so lonely when you’re not here.” This isn’t the part of the dream where he closes his eyes while she gets murdered by a werewolf. This is the other part.
Charity’s father has suddenly decided that she should marry Quentin, for reasons that are mostly product placement-related. The Dark Shadows soundtrack album dropped on Friday, and today’s episode serves up a full-length music video of the feature single, “Shadows of the Night (Quentin’s Theme)”. By music video, I mean that they play the whole song while Quentin and Charity pose and make thoughtful facial expressions. It’s 1969; they haven’t figured out how music videos work yet.
Episode 785: We Interrupt This Program
“This hand, it is not my servant. I tell it what to do, yes, but it has powers that I do not possess.”
If you think about it, it’s almost like this is a real soap opera. For months, the odious Reverend Gregory Trask has been slowly building a relationship with Judith Collins, the current mistress of Collinwood. He admires her virtue, her generosity of spirit, her strength of character, and (most of all) her enormous family fortune. If you admire somebody at close range like that for long enough, it’s going to make an impression.
Then a couple weeks ago, he arranged for his wife Minerva to be killed, and after a barely suitable mourning period, he laid his heart, such as it is, at Judith’s feet.
Now, looking at the structure of the other current storylines, it’s obvious that they’re just being made up from day to day — all this King Johnny Romano nonsense, and everybody suddenly knowing about the legendary hand of Count Petofi. Last week, Magda said that Julianka was dead, but she’s going to show up two weeks from now, alive and temporarily healthy. Barnabas’ fake “engagement” to Angelique, Edward becoming a vampire hunter, Jamison’s dream that had clues about Quentin’s death — remember that one?
All of those supernatural stories are just drifting onscreen and then off again, bumping into each other with no rational plan. But underneath, the writers have been carefully crafting this Trask/Judith seduction story, one story beat after another. There’s been an actual soap opera storyline just sitting there all this time, hiding in plain sight.
Episode 784: Things People Say When They’ve Run Out of Sensible Things to Say
“How mad the world has become.”
Well, your psychic abilities seem to have failed you!
Continue reading Episode 784: Things People Say When They’ve Run Out of Sensible Things to Say
Episode 783: A Helping Hand
“We know nothing about this hand, what it can do or what it cannot do.”
Okay, stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A gypsy and a vampire walk into a cave, carrying a box. The bartender says, do you need a hand? And the gypsy says, no thanks, we’ve already got one.
Episode 782: Don’t Leave Home
“When you were putting Miss Balfour’s room to rights, did you find a dead snake on her dresser?”
Shadows of the night, falling silently. “Quentin’s Theme” is steadily climbing the Billboard Hot 100 charts, and pretty soon everyone’s going to be humming that tune, whether they want to or not. In this world that we know now, Quentin Collins is a bona fide Dark Shadows phenomenon, with a hit record and everything.
And this phantom melody is even starting to intrude on the hazy parallel world of the Paperback Library gothic romance novels. This peculiar line of spinoff books has been spinning its own cracked version of Dark Shadows for several years now, first chronicling the adventures of an ersatz Victoria Winters, and then tumbling head over heels for Barnabas Collins.
We last checked in with the Paperback Library four months ago to read Barnabas Collins vs the Warlock — the 11th novel in the series, and the sixth to feature Barnabas. By that point, the PBL was following clear editorial guidelines that the greatest human being who ever lived is named Barnabas Collins, and everybody else can go to hell. His only flaw is that his hands are cold, and hands are not everything.
But even the Paperback Library can’t ignore Quentin forever. They can ignore consistency and common sense and the limits of human patience, but Quentin Collins requires a response.
Episode 781: The Hunt
“I will tell you an old gypsy saying. Walk fast, and misfortune will overtake you. Walk slow, and misfortune will catch you!”
How to Not Catch a Vampire, lesson one: In order to not catch a vampire, you have to not think like a vampire.
Dark Shadows Every Day 