“Trying to transcend that other time level can be very dangerous!”
Eccentric mass murderer and explorer of the outer realms Barnabas Collins is pacing the Collinwood drawing room, frowning heroically and making excuses. He’s been having one of his spells again.
His friend Julia takes a lap around the track. “Barnabas, why did you do it?” she wails. Barnabas drank Megan dry a few weeks ago, and now he’s about three-quarters of the way through Sabrina.
“I stayed at the Old House, and fought the urge to leave,” he says, striking an apologetic pose. “And then she came to me.”
“You couldn’t help yourself,” Julia observes.
Barnabas swivels, and snaps, “Do you think I do this by choice?”
“No, Barnabas,” she reassures him. “I know what you’re going through.” Yeah, he’s going through the entire female supporting cast, is what he’s going through.
And then they have the kind of conversation that justifies why we keep pointing the camera at Barnabas and Julia.
“Julia,” he considers, “for the past hour, I’ve been thinking of that room in the east wing.”
She furrows. “What does that have to do with it?” she asks, because she’d forgotten all about the east wing, where they’ve recently discovered a door that offers sporadic glimpses into a parallel universe. That’s how outré these people’s lives have become, where they can lose track of major discoveries in quantum mechanics taking place in their own house.
“Julia, if I could only transcend that time warp that exists in that other room!” he sighs, because everything is always about Barnabas. “If I could only get to that other world of time!”
“Do you think that going back to that other world, that other level of time would change things?” she asks, one-upping on the terminology again.
They keep coming up with new monikers for the miracle in the east wing, including that time warp, that other world of time, that other level of time, that other band of time, and that other agglomeration of time. The phenomenon doesn’t actually have anything to do with time, per se, but that’s what they’ve decided to focus on.
“It might be a way of saving Sabrina’s life,” Barnabas says. “And it’s possible, Julia, just possible, that –” And then he runs out of words. Barnabas Collins has memorized his lines up to this point, and no farther. “I might be…” he struggles, “well, not the same as I am here, but quite normal, and able to live in the daylight.” It’s close enough.
“Barnabas,” Julia says, “trying to transcend that other time level can be very dangerous! You could get trapped there forever!”
But Barnabas doesn’t care. He’s out of time, out of ideas and out of dialogue. Any time level that he can force his way into would be better than the time level he currently lives in.
But it’s more complicated than that, obviously. It usually is. These people have been dashing back and forth between time levels for what we might as well refer to as years; that’s how they let this Schrödinger’s cat out of the bag in the first place.
So if we’re going to run the good ship Collinwood into a sandbar, and leave it there while the cast shuffles off to Tarrytown to shoot some goddamn Warner Brothers epic, then we might as well take inventory, and figure out which universes we’ve already visited.
Because you can’t keep puncturing haphazard time tunnels through the fabric of everything without doing some kind of damage to the time band you’re standing in. Rupturing the localized dimensional fabric creates time eddies that skitter up and down the timeline, spawning feedforward loops and generating spurious meanwhiles.
It’s like I keep telling Vicki: there are consequences to time travel. In fact, you usually get the consequences first; that’s the whole idea. But Vicki never listens.
So we’re back to the seance again, which was the show’s first use of time travel — or, looked at from another angle, the ninth.
Chronologically, I think the first time travel departure was Barnabas traveling from 1796 to 1970 via Leviathan cairn on the night of Josette’s death, followed by Vicki and then Eve, both en route to 1968, and then there’s the 1840 and the 1897 trips, and then, at last, the first use of time travel.
So here we are, in 1967, sitting around a table and touching each other’s fingers for four months, while Vicki slips away between two artificially-extended ticks of the clock. Pictured above is the world that Vicki left, with poor old Phyllis Wick taking a seat in Vicki’s place.
You remember Phyllis Wick, of course — everyone does, except the Dark Shadows writers circa December 1968. She was the girl on the train that Dan Curtis dreamed about, a young governess heading to Collins House, hoping to link her past with her future, or the other way around. And then along comes Victoria Winters, kicked through time by some cosmic travel agent disguised as the ghost of a little girl. And it’s Phyllis’ first day on the job, too. How are you supposed to fill out a timecard for something like that?
And then here we are, four months and one tick later: the parallel world that Vicki returned to. Nobody’s moved, but they’re all sitting in different chairs, and Roger and Barnabas are in different positions. It’s a subtle change, I’ll admit, but that’s how parallel works sometimes.
And there’s Barnabas Collins, suspicious and unhappy, trapped in a world he never made. He’s from Vicki’s original level of time, where Phyllis Wick lived and loved and hanged and died, and that’s what Barnabas remembers. But now he exists in this new parallel place, where Phyllis fell and Vicki landed.
Barnabas has shifted existences, placed in this world to catch Vicki when she falls, as she travels by noose back to 1968. He has two choices — the Vickiverse versus the Wickiverse — and Barnabas can’t remember which side he’s on. It turns out this Parallel Time thing isn’t new, after all.
So here, in this tricky moment of time, we should play a few rounds of Parallel or Not Parallel, just to keep everything straight.
We’ll start with an easy one, the commercial for the Barnabas Collins Dark Shadows Game from summer 1969. Parallel or Not Parallel?
The answer is Parallel, of course. This could never happen in our universe; the kids are having a social event in the Collinwood drawing room, and nobody’s drinking sherry.
Let’s try another. The night when Barnabas didn’t kill Nathan Forbes after the crossbow incident: Parallel or Not Parallel?
The correct answer is Not Parallel, because this didn’t unhappen in the second place. This was an alternate time thread that Barnabas snipped off with scissors when he brought Kitty back to 1796, so she could turn into Josette and drink a Drano cocktail. This one’s hovering in the obverse, stuck in that stopping-off place where Mr. Best stores his spare parts.
And the altered-state Carolyn, who appeared for one episode in September ’68: Parallel or Not Parallel?
Obviously, this one is Parallel, it’s staring us right in the face. Another Carolyn Stoddard, falling out of an overturned carriage and into Tony Peterson’s arms. That’s why she had her mouth open for most of the episode; she’s from a world where Collinwood is a bungalow, and she can’t figure out where all these rooms came from.
At the end of the episode, Parallel Carolyn was returned to her home universe, taking Tony with her. They were young and foolish and so desperately in love; once he got over the shock of descending the stairway into time, he proposed to her, and they were married the next day. It was a beautiful wedding, up till the part where she cracked his carapace with her raptorial forelegs, and bit his head off.
But how about all those reprises at the beginning of each episode, where people are wearing different clothes, or saying different things, or entering the room through a different door? Parallel or Not Parallel?
The answer is that these are both Parallel and Not Parallel at the same time, a platoon of secret Schrödinger’s cats, waiting for their moment to strike. Just around the corner, armed with poison and Geiger counters and mad science apparatuses, they’ve heard about Angelique making Joshua trade places with a cat, and then back again. When that cat disappeared, they say, these artificial felines, where did it go? What other world of time, what stopping-off place, what hellish never-realm of Carolyn Stoddard’s other selves?
Where is Phyllis Wick? they yowl into the night, at nobody in particular. What is the Great Unwinding? And whatever happened to Dr. Julian Hoffman?
And finally, fatally, that zero-hour of time crime: the ghost of Peter Bradford, hanged and angry, postulating pasts that couldn’t be and never were. Parallel or Not Parallel?
The answer is that yes, this is Parallel Peter, leaking through the crack in a glass that hasn’t broken yet. The Jeb from our universe never set foot in the seventeen-nineties, but Peter knew a Jeb who died at Widow’s Hill — and just for a moment, Jeb remembers him, the parallel man who tricked Vicki, and kicked off a whole new chain of consequences.
Peter is a PT cruiser, on a joyless joy-ride from one time band to the next, passing through the past where Phyllis Wick died on the gallows, the world where Danielle Roget pined for Peter, and that other level of time where the life and death of Barnabas Collins happened just like William Hollingshead Loomis said that it did.
Barnabas wasn’t a vampire there, in that Life and Death situation, so he couldn’t transport the Leviathans’ burden to 1969. Stuck in a century where absolutely everything is an antique, the Leviathans had no shop to take shelter in. So they hid as best they could, with their box and their book and their ancient grudge, and they grew a different Jebez Hawkes.
She’s not Carolyn, the big bad grumbled, because deep down in his DNA, he knew he had a bride somewhere. But she smells like Carolyn. She’s the next best thing, this Winters chick, and she can lead me to the world she came from, where my wife is waiting. But it all went wrong, as it always does, and always will, because Vicki ruins everything.
And the vibratory shields between Collinwood and Keystone City, weakened by trip after trap across the timelines, finally cracked open in the east wing, and PT-Peter, strange visitor from another world, tried and failed to take his revenge on a man who never heard of him, until just now.
It can’t be you, said Jeb, and it couldn’t, but it was.
And somewhere, in the darkness, the thrice-killed man raises a toast to another life tangled in time. He has everything he wants now — a new world, several new wives, and a job at The Somerset Register.
But Phyllis Wick and the missing cat, whatever became of them? Somewhere, in some other band of time, there’s a nice normal soap opera about love and power and money and extramarital affairs, a show where a different William Loomis opens the mystery box, and the only thing that comes out is Jingles the clown. Phyllis and her time-shifted pet could finally settle down in Somerset with Parallel Megan, and open an antiques store. They just need to find the right door.
Monday: The Clone Wars.
Dark Shadows bloopers to watch out for:
Sky tells Carolyn, “I’m afraid, Mrs. Hawkes, that there is no excape!”
When Julia asks, “Barnabas, why? Why did you do it?” the camera tries to follow her as she crosses the room, but there’s a wall in the way; they have to cut to a Barnabas close-up instead.
Julia tells Barnabas, “Quentin told me that you’d given him your word!” Barnabas replies, “I gave him my word!” He means “I kept my word”.
Julia says to Barnabas, “People in the town are being worried about the attacks now.”
When Barnabas appears, it takes Sky a long time to come up with the line “I gotta get out of here.”
Sky tells Barnabas, “Nicholas made me do it!” Barnabas asks, “What has he made — what has he promised you in return?”
When Barnabas opens his eyes and finds the PT room has changed, the camera pulls back quickly, revealing a boom mic above Barnabas.
There’s a closeup on The Life and Death of Barnabas Collins today, and it’s really clear that it says “William Hollingsford Loomis,” but everybody says “Hollingshead”.
In the last moment, when PT Carolyn asks Barnabas, “Who are you?” there’s a camera and teleprompter visible behind her.
On his last episode, they still misspell Geoffrey Scott’s credit as Geoffery Scott. I guess sometimes you just have trouble with names.
Behind the Scenes:
Christopher Pennock described filming Jeb’s death in The Dark Shadows Almanac: Millennium Edition: “I did have talent for shameless, over-the-top, quasi-Shakespearean-chewing-the-scenery acting. No problem there. When I finally got a handle on Jeb Hawkes’ outrageous villainy, ‘zap!’ they tried to make him remorseful, sympathetic, loving and depressed about it all. Well, all those elements were simply too much for my limited scope as a 24-year-old actor. (But James Dean was 24, I’d think to myself.) I mean I barely knew my lines! By the time I was flung off Widows’ Hill, screaming to my death, I wanted to say, ‘But, I’ve got him! I’ve got the handle! I can do Jeb!’ Splat! I went onto the jagged rocks.”
Monday: The Clone Wars.
— Danny Horn
Dark Shadows Every Day 
Thank you for addressing the Parallel/Not Parallel nature of those oh-so-different reprises. I know we both agree and disagree on the nature of those, which fits in with the whole “It is both…and neither” way the damn things operate. I’m still certain there’s a Collinwood out there where a young governess named Deanna Troi is married to the darkly handsome but secret werewolf Mr. Worf, though.
Really want to be able to like that one. LOL
Better that Deanna is married to the ashen-faced Data who is secretly human.
How else can he be functional in every way?
In multiple methods of pleasuring. In every way.
He gets around.
He’s a damn Quentin. Who knew?
There is another Universe in which Phyllis Wick had an affair with Tony DiNozzo.
Happy birthday, Danny!
yeah, happy birthday!
I’m remembering Barnabas’ justification for murdering Sky as something like: “You caused Carolyn pain by killing Jeb, so you deserve to die.”
Well, by that rationale, Jeb deserved to die, too, because he caused Carolyn pain by killing her father.
I wonder if Barnabas himself could pass that litmus test?
You make a good point about Jeb deserving to die for causing Carolyn pain, and everything, but it was only just recently that he scored the all-important salvation/redemption points on the board game that is Dark Shadows, by turning on the Leviathans, risking ‘everything’ for love, and for starting to think about anyone other than himself. He actually would have preferred that Phillip not take that deadly lethal plunge off Widow’s Hill, but what’s a Cthulhu to do do?
Jeb has made that magical leap, through hoops of fire, from the super-evil squares, to the pretty-good-I-guess squares, landing smack-dab on Carolyn’s Love, scoring immunity from Barnabas for the whole messy vampirism shenanigan, but not immunity to karma in general, which is where you draw the card that says “Go straight to Widow’s Hill, and don’t come back!”
As Bill Paxton would say: “Game over, man.”
And then Carolyn has a pretty dream where Jeb promises to come back. At the time, it was probably very possible, but they never got around to it.
Oh well, Chris Pennock really does go on to better things, all the fun and frolic with John Yaeger, and the really quite touching & sad story of Cyrus Longworth. Longworth is probably Pennock’s best work.
My first impression of Parallel Time:
“Where we’re from, the birds sing a pretty song, and there’s always music in the air”.
No, wait, that’s Twin Peaks. That’s a different story of inter-dimensional travel to places both wonderful, and strange.
Well, I haven’t seen any birds, but there is music in the air, every time Angelique’s room “appears”.
As Danny has mentioned, the room has a definite color scheme, that’s sort of pink and orange, or apricot, unlike anything we have seen before on Dark Shadows. Very feminine colors, not the deep reds and greens that I love, but perfect for Angelique’s room, and for color television. In the early days of color, a set like this was pretty stunning, that’s one thing I remember from “first run”, how rich that room looked.
Barnabas probably thought he was entering a more beautiful world. Unfortunately, inter-dimensional travel does not cure vampirism. And I was so sure it would.
Richard — re: “the really quite touching & sad story of Cyrus Longworth. Longworth is probably Pennock’s best work …” Don’t know if you’re a Big Finish fan but the Brits revived Cyrus in our time band as a lonely handyman living in Bangor, Maine, circa 1972, who has an altogether different but terrible problem with a “friend” named John and a new neighbor named Sabrina Jennings. Chris was born for audiodramas and he delivers a bravura performance. Cy’s story begins in “Fall of the House of Trask,” and continues in “The Enemy WIthin” (my favorite of the arc) and “Deliver Us From Evil.” Definitely worth checking out if you’re a Pennock fan!
Barnabas deserved to die for killing Dave Woodard.
He might deserve it for killing Carl Collins, but it would be much funnier to have him haunted by practical jokes…
Yeah! Like having Barnabas trapped in the secret room in the Collins family mausoleum with Carl’s ghost – having to endure Carl’s jokes and gags for centuries. Carl literally does have a million of ’em.
I loved Carl, but I’m afraid that, according to “horror movie logic”, he invited death, not just by being conspicuously ridiculous, but by also being fairly useless. If he had been ridiculous AND useful, then he could live…..
And Carl’s ghost is a great idea:
Hiding little bits of garlic in Barnabas’s coffin.
Using his whoopee cushion to turn Barnabas’s coffin into a “whoopee coffin”. Making surprisingly loud, deeply embarrassing random noises throughout Collinwood, especially when guests are present.
Continually trying to recruit the living for an insightful game of “Who Is The Vampire?”
“MINCED” GARLIC-TEE HEE HAW I LOVED!!!!! THE PARA-TIME EPs IN THE DAY…..ALSO QUENTIN’S STAIRCASE INTO TIME…….MGK
So, what about the Dockside Debs that he drained? And a certain lieutenant named Forbes, not to mention promising newcomer Suki? Trask? Aunt Abby? And that’s just in 1795-ish! There’s kind of a lengthy “debit column” for Barnabas Collins, despite his honorable motives. And I doubt Sky’s death made Carolyn feel any better.
“Vengeance is mine, saith…”
The ‘hit’ that Nicholas’ ghost puts on Jeb has a similar flaw for me. It does nothing, aside from pointless revenge; what’s in it for Sky? He won’t get back his Leviathan-sponsored lifestyle, or his fabulous trophy wife, won’t even bring back Nicky. So why bother?
But however they did it, it’s DONE! And Barnabas has a whole ‘new’ set of relatives to exsanguinate – in fact, a whole new world of victims.
Oh definitely – the Reverend(s) Trask could come by the secret room on Sundays and barrage Barnabas with 24 hours of Hell Fire sermons – as only the Trasks can deliver.
Jeremiah’s bloody apparition could pop in from time to time, too. Barnabas will be wishing for the days when he was chained in his coffin, alone.
And Jason McGuire could come sing off-key his favorite Irish melodies. The doxies could come and do their best Pansy Faye imitation. Woodard could come and regale him with the most disgusting things he saw in his medical practice, with visual aids (and smell aids).
Let’s annoy Barney 24/7! So when he says that he regrets killing them, he will say it with real feeling.
Woodard can just give his “…if both live…” speech, again and again and again. 😀
that’s Dr Lang, but yeah
Dang! Lang! Of course. Woodard (well, one of them) had a different all-time favourite of mine, with
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Stoddard, but I’ve got to go somewhere and do something immediately.”
I bet Carl Collins & Jason McGuire TOGETHER could really drive Barnabas ‘batty’. Irish ditty duets, off-key! And I really think Carl & Jason would get on well.
“Have you heard this one, Mr. McGuire?”
“Which one, Mr. Collins?”
“A vampire walks into an all-night coffee shop…”
Not to be picky, but I think Jason was Scottish…?
Well…
Wikipedia gives the surname McGuire (as well as Maguire) as being of Irish origin. (But there are plenty o’ Scottish ditties too.)
And Sky Rumson would reveal that he likes to play the vuvuzela…
Well, how about tinkering with Julia’s formula, so that the next time she gives Barnabas his shots he turns into a purple dinosaur?
All the incarnations of Woodard and Dr. Lang could form a barbershop quartet. I bet Eric Lang has a perfectly lovely and beautifully modulated tenor.
Wait! John E. – your Aunt Abigail suggestion – RIGHT! The party can’t get started without her sour puss. I missed that one the first time I read through!
The Trasks need a back up dancer.
Hallelujah! Can I get an Amen?
Or the Three Woodards could go and do a permanent Three Stooges routine
A new fantastic point of view, even.
I find it impossible to judge a vampire, because I have not walked in those shoes. I always felt that Barnabas found redemption (more or less) when Dr Lang made him human again, and he turned down using Jeff Clark as a face donor.
I haven’t really kept track of what Barnabas did as a vampire, as opposed to what he did as a human, but it would be interesting to know.
To me, the “real” Barnabas Collins is the one who was kind, helpful and considerate to a lost and helpless Victoria Winters, when she first landed back in 1795. Any, and every, bad thing he ever did can be traced directly to, and blamed, on Angelique. That’s something I never forget.
The worst thing Barnabas ever really did was not marry Angelique, when she demanded it. I knew a girl like that, in high school. We hung out a little, and before I knew it, she had taken over, and was in charge of, me. A poorly conceived, self defeating strategy on her part. If college had not provided the necessary escape just in the nick of time I…..let’s just say I avoided becoming a vampire. But it was close.
I agree, pre-vampire Barnabas was a kind and gentle soul. But I remember something Dr. Woodard said to him about how if Barnabas turned him into a vampire, he would have enough free will left to destroy himself instead of destroying others. That’s an interesting concept – could and should vampire Barnabas have destroyed himself? It sure would have lowered the body count.
Woodard didn’t know any other vampires at the time to really test that moral hypothesis. The ones we did see would demonstrate that vampirism alters the personality greatly, as well as instilling a hard-wired instinct for self-preservation: Tom Jennings, Dirk, Megan, Roxanne. The only one whose personality and moral compass remained the same was Angelique (and we actually don’t know what she was like before being “infected” by the black arts).
Carolyn and Daphne in HODS and the 1991 DS respectively were also dramatically different as vampires.
I grant you Tom Jennings, but Dirk was still in thrall to Laura as a vampire, and showed his resentment at Judith for the way he was treated as a servant. Megan had already had her morals scrambled by the Leviathan, so it is hard to tell. Also she did not go around leaving drained corpses. Both Sky and Roger survived the experience, unlike Barnabas’ victims.. Roxanne, I recall Angelique saying that she controlled Roxanne. When we meet Roxanne in the present, she has gone through several years of experience which may have molded her personality.
And I am curious about Tom Jennings, too. Remember, he had the werewolf inheritance, which even if it was not overt, could have influenced his behavior as a vampire.
Dr. Woodard is not speaking from experience, at best, it’s wishful thinking. I was very sorry to see him go, it was a terrible thing.
I think a human can sort of judge another human, but a human judging a vampire is more like a human judging a shark. For one thing, it’s dead, and the rules of the living go out the window. And different authors have different takes on the degree of humanity still to be found in a particular vampire, which pretty much ends it for me.
Besides, one thing that is very soap-opera-like about Dark Shadows, is that most things that happened a while ago, no longer matter. Wasn’t Woodard killed before the characters of Barnabas and Hoffman were really fully sorted out?
I distinctly remember when Julia was reborn, and all her sins were washed clean, because she got a smart new haircut, which on TV, really can mean someone is a new person, and you’re supposed to forget all about all the bad things they did, before the fan mail started, or the ratings went up.
All true. Also,the Barnabas that killed Dr. Woodard was his evilest incarnation. It might have been interesting to see how the later, reluctant, often remorseful vampire BarnabasCollins would have dealt with Dr. Woodard.
I guess Barnabas would have strangled him to death after terrorizing him from the shadows in his own home — like he did to Carl Collins at the peak of the series and his popularity.
Yeah, you’re right Stephen – apparently you CAN’T teach an old vampire new tricks.
It would have depended if the actor had another gig lined up and had to leave – as John Karlen did when he was playing Carl.
I say that if there is a reboot, Barnabas should not be made into a disposal system for characters that have to leave. There should be an island with the mate and the skipper, a millionaire and his wife, a movie star, the professor, and Mary Ann for them to go to.
“You couldn’t help yourself,” observes Julia.
Barnabas could help himself. So he did. Help himself.
Hard to say who takes the blame here; as Barnabas wasn’t there at the “starin’ window” doing his thinks call, “Come to me, Sabrina! Hear me! You cannot resist!”
She comes on over to the Old House…
But then, Barnabas was commenting on how strong the ‘need’ had become, maybe he was emitting the call without realising?
And vampire lore DOES have the ‘victim’ as addicted, needing the bite like a fix, the need growing as death nears – so I guess the whole vampire thing must be something in the blood.
Except that by then he thought that the solution of his problem was to kill someone, that is, Angelique. Instead of going to Trask and telling him the identity of the real witch…
Love your recap of the dizzying array of time travel instances and multiple universes created as a result. As for the Parallel /Not Parallel game where do you put the two Phyllis Wicks? In one tick of the clock she’s Dorrie Kavanaugh one second later she’s Margo Head. And of course they aren’t done yet with alternate reality Collinwoods. There are two comic book versions, a comic strip version, House of DS and Night of DS (I consider these separate realities), the 1991 version, the 2004 pilot, and the Burton 2012 coo-coo fest, the and the multiple novels over the years abvd the Big Finish audio dramas.
The problem with the end of one episode and the beginning of the next is common on all soaps. Here are my examples from Guiding Light. .https://glmanny.wordpress.com/2010/03/27/continuity-error/
True enough – except that GL doesn’t have a potential in-universe explanation for why those discrepancies occur. Unless Roger Thorpe started time traveling after I stopped watching, which is entirely possible… 🙂
Well, there is the fact that Mike and Ed went to high school in both Selby Flats in California and Springfield (IL?) at the same time and both the Spauldings and the Chamberlains and both moved in and always lived there and associated with the same people. And they did do a series of alternate universe story one shots (one of which involved a character becoming a superhero and another involved someone building a time machine based on another character’s novel – sadly I’m serious), but the best AU episode was https://glmanny.wordpress.com/2011/02/17/alternative-universe-episode/ Then there were storylines with time travel (Reva through a painting, Annabelle’s past life visions, etc.) But you’re right in Springfield there isn’t even an attempt to solve these things you just have to accept them. Roger never did time travel although added a life as a CIA agent which is how he came back from the dead. 🙂
I stand corrected – and it looks like I may have to try to find these to watch them! 😀
I’m watching it now. That Jonathan boy is lovely!
He was very popular. 🙂 People even got behind pairing him with his own cousin, or half-cousin as Tammy liked to say.
The camera Zooms in, and, ever in Word comma until we see that the two bands of parallel time are actually parallel strands of molecules in the Twisted dance of the DNA in one drop of the “persistently strong” Collins blood. The base pairs that connect them are Dr. Julia reaching out to Julia the housekeeper, a David to a Daniel, and infinite real Josettes to infinite fake Josettes. Just like in real life, sometimes there’s a random mutation, and that’s where sometimes things get interesting.
And Molly Jennings.
And Oscar Collins.
Oscar moved into an apartment with his friend Felix
Who cares about Dr Julian Hoffman? We ended up with Grayson Hall…who’s complaining?
Oh, I think Grayson Hall could El just as easily have played Julian Hoffman as she did Julia. Would’ve made the romance aspect more interesting, too. 🙂
😀 well if you’re gonna get speculative, anything is possible…she could’ve thrown her hands up and gone all Pepe from Satan in High Heels and started managing the dock girls and selling them off to Barnabas…or she could’ve got really tired of his crap and just run off with Megan Todd…
Coda…lol…Julia should have had her a love interest as well as dealing with Barnabas. That would have been interesting and funny.
Watching Dark Shadows in 1969 and 1970, I pondered whether there were any connection between Judge Julius Hoffman and Dr Julia Hoffman. It would’ve been cool if the Judge had made a guest appearance on Dark Shadows, but he was probably too busy with he Chicago 7 trial.
Or Julia meeting her nepheq Abbie, who brings his friend Jerry….
That’s the “Feelin’ Groovy” Parallel Time version with Julia handing out LSD instead of sedatives, where Collinwood is a commune. Collinwoodstock!
Julia would have made an excellent Cannabis distributor. It would have been less habit forming and addictive. These folks were popping sedatives and drinking daily.
Someone interceded.
you mean intervened, maybe?
Two worlds, where everyone has a double. One of the doubles, Angelique, has her own double, a twin, to hide her evil behind. Cyrus Longworth decides that one personality isn’t enough, so he gets a second one. Barnabas Collins now has two dysfunctional worlds to choose from. Maggie Evans is a “second wife”.
It looks like they put some thought into the whole “twin world” premise.
The “tragic double” was a widely used concept in Victorian fiction, especially the Gothic and Sensation novels. Often the double was a character similar to the hero or heroine, but who has succumbed to the dangers we hope the hero will avoid.
But the novels are full of lookalikes, soundalikes, pictures, mirrors, and other reflections.
You forgot Julia and Hoffman.
I DON’T WANT A SEDATIVE! I JUST WANT JEB!!!
Finally, someone is kicking back against the tyranny of the institution of Julia’s sedatives! Well, she tried…but apparently Julia gave her a sedative anyway. Elizabeth must’ve had to sit on her to hold her down or something.
“I can give you a sedative so strong it’ll be just like being with Jeb.”
Angelique always tries to outdo Barnabas- he spends his time with Julia, who dispenses sedatives, so she took up with Sky Rumson, a two-legged sedative.
Then tucked her under the Evil Afghan so she could have one more terrible, shitty dream and watch Jeb plunge to his death again.
Carolyn subconscious mind absolutely hates her.
Carolyn does not want a sedative.
I wonder what that’s like?
Carolyn just wants Jeb.
I wonder what THAT’S like?
I was thinking…shouldn’t it be “Widow’s Cliff”? I mean, “hill” suggests slopes on all sides but clearly this “hill” has a pretty nasty first step on the way to the beach…
I realize they have to end the scenes, but the constant closing of the doors in PT is just ridiculous – closing them for no reason based on the conversations going on…
And what’s with this complete obsession Barnabas has with the parallel room – isn’t there some Josette he should be busy with???
So Barnabas can see (but not hear) Julia outside the room when he arrives in PT? This is a new development; up until now nobody in PT appeared to notice the strangers looking in on them. I suppose it could be that Barnabas has just arrived, and that he’s actually from the main timeband, so that’s why he sees Julia? Just fanwanking this into the DS-verse. I don’t recall if this situation ever arises again, though it seems only fair that if Mainers can see Parallelers, then the reverse should be true…
John E, you haven’t seen the coming, yes? so the answer will approach, and i don’t want to blow it. but the PT crowd can see the regular crowd, too. but only from outside the PT room, the precise way the regular crowd sees it. for them, the room goes dark.
Yes, but from OUTSIDE the room, looking in – the doorway being the ‘portal’ between dimensions/universes/whatever; nobody except Barnabas sees out of the room into the other time stream.
I think.
The missing cat. Reminds me of the original movie The Fly where David (Al) Hedison attempts to send the family cat through his transporter but the cat fails to rematerialize. But the cat’s atoms, floating in the air, are able to hang together enough to emit a ghostly meow…
Quite funny, Danny.
I wonder how many parallel worlds would be needed to explain all of the continuity errors and cast changes?
Are there no more cows in Collinwood for Barnabas to drain? They couldn’t chain him in his coffin for a few days until the injections wore off? I wonder what’s going on with Adam at the moment? Could the whole Leviathan story actually have taken place in another parallel world rather than the one where Barnabas was cured by Dr. Lang? One where Peter and Jeb did meet? Maybe these aren’t even the same Barnabas and Julia who killed Woodard!
This really is a time travel show at heart.
As glad as I am to see Sky Rumpswab finally disappear for good (and that’s VERY glad), I was surprised that desperate-for-blood Barnabas passed up a free meal and let Rumpswab off himself with a revolver. Then again maybe the blood of bad actors tastes really bad.
I laughed at the idea that forcing a guy to shoot himself in the heart was okay for TV but Barnabas still couldn’t bite another man on the neck.
you mean intervened, maybe?
It appears there’s a problem with the camera in the first act at Collinwood. The colors are bleeding and over saturated. It’s corrected later, perhaps they switched cameras.