“Where would you go, with all that power in your suitcase?”
Once upon a time, there was a television show called Dark Shadows, and I swear to God it is getting crazier every day. We have now entered the phase of the show where absolutely anything is on the table.
For example: a man who collects magical artifacts is visiting a wolf man and a gypsy witch in their haunted house, when suddenly they rip off his hand and discover that he’s actually a mad god from a fairy tale kingdom that nobody knows how to spell. And then the conversation starts to get a little weird.
“Your hand, sir,” a dazed Quentin says, politely proffering the twist-off hand he just pulled out of the guy’s empty socket.
“No, don’t give it to him!” cries Magda the gypsy. “He is Count Petofi, demon from hell! One hundred years ago, he was a werewolf! One hundred years ago, they cut off his hand as payment for the cure!”
The man chuckles. “I do admit to knowing something of the strange, sad story of Count Petofi. Do you know, Mr. Collins, that the Count was the last recorded man to own a unicorn?”
Yeah, of course he was, thinks Quentin. That news bulletin from Narnia fits right in with the rest of my day.
“The saddest morning in the late Count’s life,” says the mad god from the forest kingdom of Ozhden, “was when he awoke after a night of a full moon, to find his unicorn had been killed by a wolf.”
And he means it, too. We are now watching a television show that includes unicorns.
You know, it was only six months ago that the writing staff was furiously arm-wrestling over whether the show was getting too silly. Sam Hall wanted a show where the Devil created the Bride of Frankenstein, animated by the spirit of a French Revolution psychopath, and Ron Sproat wanted a show where occasionally a character would see a ghost. Hall won, Sproat left the show, and now we have unicorns.
When Dark Shadows started, it was a show about canneries, governesses and manslaughter charges. Now it’s about magic beanstalks, chupacabras and phantom kangaroos.
This is a moment where the narrative collisions pile up in amazing new patterns. Magda is a gypsy from the Universal Monsters films, which take place somewhere on the Franco-Hungarian border, in a hazy twilight netherworld that basically shakes out as “somewhere more European than here” and “some time earlier than now”.
Transplanting Dracula and The Wolf Man to New England, as Dark Shadows does, means that there’s an 18th-century gypsy caravan parked outside Boston, four years before the Red Sox started playing at Fenway Park.
Now, they say that Count Petofi is from the Forest of Ozhden, or something like that — I don’t know how you spell it, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was different in every script, so good luck finding it on a map. It sounds like Ozhden to me, which is vaguely Central European. They might be talking about Ogden, Utah, for all I know.
But apparently those Beantown gypsies — the ones that Magda grew up with, in Civil War-era Massachusetts — they’re the ones who cured Count Petofi’s werewolf curse, and took his Legendary Hand as payment. And according to Magda, that happened one hundred years ago.
Therefore: There were unicorns in New England during the Revolutionary War.
Obviously.
Quentin grabs a knife and tries to threaten the Count, demanding to know the secret recipe for wolf-be-gone, but Petofi slaps the weapon out of his hand and gives him a badass lecture.
Quentin: Why won’t you help me? You know what it’s like. Why won’t you?
Petofi: To get something, you must pay the price. A little bargaining, perhaps.
Quentin: I’m willing to bargain.
Petofi: No, Mr. Collins, you are only willing to cringe, to make inept excuses. You must learn, Mr. Collins. I paid my price. You must pay yours.
And then he just turns, and walks out of the house.
So the television show that recently offered us a Jane Eyre/Nicholas Nickleby crossover special has become a dark fairy tale, where the curses are even more metaphorical than usual. Now that he’s been unmasked, Count Petofi has to leave Collinwood for a while — like Rumplestiltskin, having other people discover his true name weakens him, at least for a while. They don’t actually explain why Petofi has to go away, or where he’s going, because we’re playing by magical elf rules that don’t have to be logical.
But Petofi is leaving a gift behind, for the residents of the great estate. He’s struck up an unlikely friendship with young Jamison while we weren’t looking, entertaining him with fabricated stories of adventures with Lord Kitchener in the Sudan.
Now Petofi gives Jamison a magic touch, which the boy will spread around by giving people a kiss on the cheek — and that touch will reveal who these people really are.
“You played some rather dangerous tricks with my Hand,” Petofi scolds Quentin, “but I should have expected that. You’re all children in this house. Never have I seen a group of people so willing to live lies.”
The mad god picks up his traveling case. “It will be fascinating to see which of you will be able to live and face the truth, and which of you will die. Already, one by one, the lies are falling away.”
He considers Quentin, with a smile. “You, at least, admit what you are. And because you are closer to the truth than the others, I’m leaving you a very surprising and rather interesting present. You won’t like it at first, but — you’ll thank me for it in time.”
“I don’t want anything from you,” Quentin grumbles, but Petofi takes it in stride.
“Oh, no, of course you don’t. But you can’t prevent me from giving it to you. Perhaps I’ll be back in a little while, when you have the Hand. Then I’ll undo some of the mischief I’ll be blamed for.”
And then he’s gone, leaving the survivors to try desperately to spin some of this cursed gold back into straw. For the third time this year, Dark Shadows has renewed itself by embracing an entirely new style.
They can’t keep this up, of course. They’re going to hit a turning point that brings the production back down to earth, and it’s coming sooner than you think. But oh, what a marvelous feeling, to fly this high.
Tomorrow: What Fresh Hell.
Dark Shadows bloopers to watch out for:
At the end of the teaser, Quentin pulls Victor’s hand off — but it gets caught on something, and he has to quickly yank the extra cloth away in time for the camera to pick up the hook at the end of it.
Petofi asks Jamison to kiss him goodbye before he leaves. Jamison hesitates. Petofi asks, “Are you afraid? I thought we were friends.” Jamison says, “Well, we are; it’s just that — well, I don’t know how you’re going to stop me from being afraid — miss you.”
Footnotes:
This episode is double-numbered to make up for the planned pre-emption yesterday for the Apollo 11 moon landing coverage.
When Worldvision offered this year of episodes for syndication, the video master for this episode was missing. Also, the video master for Friday’s episode (805) was damaged, and Worldvision didn’t realize there was an existing kinescope copy, so both episodes were skipped in syndication — making this week a little hard to follow when we were watching it on public television in the 80s. When MPI licensed Dark Shadows for home video release in 1989, they found the video master for 801/802, and patched up 805 with thirty seconds of footage from the kinescope.
Also: I’m pretty sure Quentin has actual muttonchops by now, rather than the paste-on versions he was using for so long. I don’t know exactly when the real hair grew in enough for them to stop using the fake ones, but I just noticed it today, and he looks even better than usual.
PS for baseball fans: I know, the Red Sox didn’t move to Fenway Park until 1912, but it was such a nice sentence that I decided not to let facts get in the way.
And a PS for the world: Count Petofi being sad about his dead unicorn is the gayest thing that has ever happened in human history.
Tomorrow: What Fresh Hell.
— Danny Horn
Dark Shadows Every Day 
Yes, today is the start of the “real” muttonchops. Last week, he had “Muttonchop Helper,” but I think the end of the “Planet of the Apes” facial hair was during the “Pit and the Pendulum” cliffhanger (and yes, I just typed this).
Can we also discuss how Barnabas is no longer the main character of this storyline? Quentin is clearly the protagonist/anti-hero, and he even gains the Julia/Magda sidekick once he learns about his children (and thus the question as to why Magda would help remove the curse she put on him has been answered).
There is an attempt to make Barnabas relevant to the story again (when Petofi learns about Barnabas’s trip from 1969) but soon Barnabas is sidelined for a while before being sidelined again. And those events are designed to create tension for Quentin, the male lead.
When we talk about the decline of the series and the failures of the post-1897 storyline, I think it’s worth mentioning the loss of Quentin as a series lead. Barnabas reassumes his dominance, but there are styles of stories that could only work with Quentin and we’ll soon lose him.
Worse, when Quentin shows up, he does not have much of a story (except that of Amanda and the Orpheus theme, which ends too soon) and he just hangs around. And really, given Quentin’s restlessness and adventurous spirit, would he hang long in a one-horse town, when there is no will involved?
It used to be a one unicorn town, but it died.
Quentin — more than Barnabas — requires his family. He needs to spar with Edward and Judith, but he’s just good friends with Roger and Elizabeth. 1840 Quentin is more interesting than 1970 Quentin because of his family tension but as master of the house, he loses his antihero appeal.
Wish the show had stayed in 1897
That’s something the Ross novels did right. Quentin there is a troublemaker who comes back and again with fresh mischief.
Me too. As a kid I started watching the second day of 1897 — so for longest time I assumed that was the main storyline. I was always hoping they’d return. And when the promos in 1970 started saying “next week it’s back to the past for Barnabas” I was so happy — only to be disappointed when I realized it was 1840, which never really clicked for me.
Wow, did I really hit the “real muttonchops” date? That’s funny. It really is a big improvement.
In the mid-1970s, I was on the Boston Common one day when a gypsy woman came up to me and tried to solicit a contribution for the education of Native Americans. She claimed to be an “Indian” herself. She had a couple of children huddled together nearby. I did not contribute anything. I did not believe her because she lacked credibility.
Let me just take a moment, as a “straight” man, to say that Quentin/Selby was ridiculously handsome in this episode. As Jerry Reed once said about Elvis Presley “he was so good looking he made me want to be a girl”.
Also- has anyone ever asked “why” they gave that bit about the unicorn to Petofi? I don’t recall if it comes up later with some kind of relevance. Was it some kind of gag? The show was strange enough, that just blew it through the roof with crazy. If Chekhov’s Gun isn’t played out with someone getting trampled in the later appearance of a unicorn, I’m crying foul.
Count Petofi’s sadness over the unicorn likens him to the King Haggard character in Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn. He, too, wanted to possess beautiful things. Nothing would make him happy. Nothing except to look upon a unicorn.
“Beantown gypsies — the ones that Magda grew up with, in Civil War-era Massachusetts” Magda says several times that she’s traveled all over the world, and presumably she did so as part of a caravan including much of her extended family. And when she first mentions King Johnny Romana, it’s with an exclamation indicating that it is extraordinarily good luck that he and other members of the Romana family are in New England at the moment. So I don’t think we have to believe that Magda was a Bay Stater, or that Count Petofi’s unicorn grazed in North America at all.
Now that the death of Quentin’s son has been established, will they explain how he came to be buried in the woods near Collinwood? Or have the writers already forgotten that point?
I’m looking forward to the Jamison-possessed-by-Count-Petofi storyline. Henesy is very good at that sort of thing. Perhaps we’ll hear another rousing rendition of “Mr. Juggins.”
The “Mr Jughans” song, as performed by David Henesy, is one of the best musical bits on the show. It’s right up there with the two sequences in the first year that open with David Ford as Sam Evans singing in his studio. The only one that’s clearly superior to it is Pansy Faye slapping herself on the rump in the parlor of the Old House.
Oh so this episode was skipped in syndication, that explains why I missed it and ended up thinking that the unicorn reference was a one time thing that came from out of left field. But who knows, maybe it was. I’ve often wondered if certain lines in DS were improvised, and if Thayer David pulled a unicorn out of his arse one day, Sam or Violet might’ve thought it was great and decided to elaborate on it a bit.
Quentin’s real mutton chops are a definite improvement and it somehow makes him even more handsome than before.
I wonder if David Thayer had headaches from wearing those glasses?
It was crazy when Petofi cut his face! Seemed like David Thayer was really doing it!
And even then he didn’t bleed!
Another thrilling blog entry, Danny, and enhanced by all the perspicaciously witty comments.
With all the unhinged story elements being thrown at us in the last few episodes, I’m having trouble keeping up, especially regarding the hot-potato hi-jinks with the Hand. In fact, if a character doesn’t mention who has it, then I haven’t a clue. So now Tim Shaw the Hand holder? Oh boy, talk about being way in over your head. Tim, honey child, if I were you I’d crawl into a hole and pull the hole in after you.
I always wanted The Hand to carry around previous props: the brake valve, the fountain pen, the music box, perhaps even drag the Collinsport Afghan around.