“Twins usually do resemble each other, or haven’t you heard?”
Except it’s not Angelique, obviously. How could it be? She’s dead, probably.
Although Angeliques do have a habit of making post-mortem comebacks; they’re a tenacious people. It doesn’t matter how often you strangle them, exorcise them, shoot them in the shoulder, set them on fire, burn their portraits, or dump buckets of water over them and dissolve them into a well-dressed puddle. They always return, with fresh schemes. What a world, what a world!
But life is made up of meetings and partings; that is the way of it. Today, we gain a witch, and lose a writer.
Violet Welles joined the Dark Shadows writing team in March 1969, and her first credited episode was 711. Angelique made a surprise return in that episode too — emerging from the fireplace, to flirt with Quentin and swank around in gorgeous outfits.
Over the last year, Violet’s penned some of the most memorable character dialogue we’ve seen on the show. Some Dark Shadows writers are content to move the pieces around the board — like Ron Sproat, who’s not on the show anymore, and Gordon Russell, who is — with everyone sounding pretty much like everyone else. But Violet makes everyone sound like an individual, with a real personality.
Let’s run through a few highlights.
Angelique: We’re all on the same side, aren’t we? My side.
Jenny: If we’re sisters, why do I have to stay here? You can go anywhere in this house! You go walking in the gardens! I watch you! I watch you all the time! And sometimes you wear MY GREEN DRESS!
Mrs. Johnson: I’d like to meet the man that invented supermarkets, and wring his neck.
Count Petofi: Do you think I care how many people die along the way? Do you think I care how many leaves are on this tree?
Liz: Mirrors! Will they show me all the people I could have been?
David: No! They’ll show you all the people you really are!
Quentin: Do you hear me? I am Quentin! Edward, you can forget about the brandy.
Edward: I assure you, if you were Quentin, you wouldn’t forget about the brandy.
Magda: Look at you, lying there! You think I have destroyed you, you fool! Don’t you realize you are destroying yourself?
And then there’s today, another slice of heaven which we call Parallel Time. This week, we’ve washed up on a foreign shore, where people look familiar, except they’re wearing different colors and they have new things to talk about.
Quentin’s the master of Collinwood in this reality, and his wife, Angelique, passed away six months ago under mysterious circumstances, which is just typical. I don’t know if the police suspect foul play or not. Actually, I’m not sure there even are police in this band of time. The police force might be staffed with monkeys, for all I know. Oh my god, wouldn’t that be amazing? Monkey cops! From now on, I’m going to assume that Parallel Time has monkey cops, and every store in Collinsport is owned and operated by children. I haven’t seen any evidence so far that would disprove that assertion.
Anyway, Angelique is an ex-wife, and Quentin’s just brought wife #2 home to her new enormous mansion. Maggie’s not taking to it, really. Everybody keeps talking about Angelique all the time, as if she’s going to just get up from her grave and walk back into Collinwood. That’s a ridiculous notion, obviously, except now it’s happened, and here she is.
So Maggie runs upstairs to her room, because there’s only so much a girl can take. In the following exchange, Quentin tries to calm her down, and keep an eye on how Violet Welles constructs the scene.
Quentin: Maggie, that woman… Her name is Alexis.
Maggie: Alexis?
Quentin: Yes, she’s Angelique’s twin sister. She just arrived from Florence. She just found out about… about what happened to Angelique.
Maggie: Quentin! Her twin sister?
Quentin: Yes, and she’s very upset. It would be very thoughtful of you, if you were to go down and greet her properly.
Maggie: No, I don’t want to see her! I don’t even want to meet her!
Quentin: Now, that’s ridiculous!
Maggie: Quentin, no! Let me explain!
Quentin: Maggie, there’s no time for that! Now, we have a guest waiting downstairs! One of us should be down there with her.
Exit Quentin, end of scene.
Now, there’s nothing brilliant about this particular scene; the dialogue isn’t decorative. It’s just a decent writer doing her job. But it’s a nice bit of economical screenwriting, and it illustrates something important about the relationship between Quentin and Maggie.
In the space of three lines — “it would be very thoughtful of you”, “now, that’s ridiculous”, and “we have a guest waiting downstairs” — Quentin goes from reassuring to impatient to furious, and all Maggie does is say no. The interesting thing is that each line is delivered as if Quentin were Maggie’s father, rather than her husband. He’s cajoling her, scolding her and then giving her a lesson in manners. Quentin is clearly terrible at being somebody’s husband; it’s no wonder he keeps losing wives.
But it’s downstairs where the actor and the script really need to be on point. Obviously, “Alexis” is a sham; this is no twin sister. Angelique is one of the four major kaiju of Dark Shadows. We would know her anywhere. And we’ve seen this woman pretending to be other people, lots of times. Like Barnabas, Quentin, and the grandfather clock in the foyer, Angelique is a fact.
Two years ago, the sinister sorceress wormed her wicked way into the house by calling herself Cassandra Collins, a perky, innocent young woman who just happened to meet Roger and conduct a whirlwind romance, ending in matrimony in about eighteen hours.
Barnabas recognized her, of course. He was supposed to, that was the whole point of the masquerade — to distract him, and drive him out of his mind. And we recognized her, because we’re televisually literate. We know that Angelique showing up in 1968 Collinwood is an exciting plot twist, while a random lookalike named Cassandra is not. She kept up the outward pretense for quite a while, but she let the audience know that she was Angelique by the end of the first episode, because of course she was.
They played it differently in late 1969, when Quentin was struck by a car and caught a bad case of amnesia. Everyone called him Grant Douglas for a while, and the show tried to pretend that maybe he wasn’t actually Quentin, and it was a terrible failure of a storyline.
Looking back on it now, the entire Grant/Olivia storyline might actually be the most abject failure in Dark Shadows history; I can’t think of anything that even comes close. The audience wanted nothing more than to have Quentin back, drunk and funny and ready for trouble, and instead we got an aimless amnesiac who moped around and called himself the wrong thing. It wasn’t romantic, it wasn’t fun, it didn’t have anything to do with anything, and I don’t think there was a single good scene in the entire affair. At the end, they just shrugged and said, hey look, everyone, it’s Quentin.
And now, they’re doing it again: bringing in an incredible twin, and generating three whole weeks of front-burner story based on whether the woman who is obviously Angelique is actually Angelique. But Alexis isn’t going to walk up to Barnabas’ portrait in the foyer at the end of the episode and twirl her mustache, like she did when she was Cassandra. This is Parallel Time; Barnabas doesn’t even have a portrait in the foyer.
So Lara Parker and Violet Welles have an important mission today, which is to convince the audience that this might actually be Alexis Stokes, while leaving enough wiggle room to keep us on the hook for weeks. And they just go ahead and do exactly that.
It starts in Angelique’s room, the parlor of Parallel Time, where Hoffman welcomes her much-missed mistress.
Alexis: Oh, the room is beautiful!
Hoffman: It’s exactly as you left it. Nothing has changed!
Alexis: Why, what are you talking about? I’ve never been in this room before.
Hoffman: I understand you’re telling everyone about being a “twin sister”…
Alexis: But I am Angelique’s sister!
Hoffman: But you don’t have to lie to me! I’ve always known you would come back, that’s why I’ve kept the room exactly the same as it always was!
Alexis: You thought Angelique would come back? But that’s impossible, she’s dead!
Hoffman: She is not like others.
Alexis: She certainly wasn’t like anyone else. Nevertheless, she is dead. Do you hear me? She’s dead. And I’m her sister.
And oh, the marvelous ambiguity of the words: “Do you hear me?”
Lara Parker invests that phrase with just the slightest hint of steel, which could so easily fall in either direction. She’s the innocent Alexis, trying to cope at short notice with the barking mad domestic who’s calling her the wrong name. She’s the devious Angelique, warning her devoted servant not to break character before she’s ready. She is either, and she is both, and as of this moment, I am willing to accept three more weeks of winter.
Obviously, Julia Hoffman — never to be outdone by anyone, as far as madwoman acting choices are concerned — pulls her weight in this moment as well, fixing the trickster with a penetrating glare.
And then she breaks, puzzled and stubborn. Alexis asks her for a nightgown to wear, and Hoffman stumbles toward the wardrobe.
“Which one would you like?” Hoffman asks, and Alexis flashes her a patient smile.
“Well, I really can’t answer that question, can I?” explains the mystery woman. “I’ve never seen any of them. Why don’t you just pick one out for me?” And then she maintains eye contact, for as long as it takes to make her point.
“I’m sorry, Miss Stokes,” Hoffman stammers, “I’m sorry if I’ve said anything that…”
“It’s perfectly all right,” Alexis says. “I can understand how much you must miss her. But I wouldn’t intimate such a thing to anyone else, if I were you.”
“They might be very distressed by it…”
“… and so might you.”
It’s fantastic. Quentin is stunned by it, of course; we all are. It’s the best thing they’ve done in months.
Alexis: Oh — is it the gown? Is that it? Hoffman gave it to me, because I left my luggage in town. I do hope you don’t mind.
Quentin: No, it’s all right. You look so very much like her… so very much.
Alexis: Yes, I know.
Quentin: Particularly in this room. It’s almost as if two people had blended together, and then became one.
Alexis: Or as if the past and the present have blended together, and become one.
Alexis: You miss her very much, don’t you? So do I.
Alexis: Perhaps we can… comfort one another.
Of course, Maggie is there to witness this villainous instance of pre-meditated witchery, which confirms beyond doubt that this is the demon Angelique, unless it isn’t, in which case it’s probably Alexis.
And Maggie runs, down the hall and down the stairs and out the door, picking up speed as Violet Welles hits escape velocity, emerging from ABC Studio 16 and sprinting down the street, out into the fresh air and sunshine of a Manhattan afternoon, where only the streets are parallel and everything else is exactly the way you left it. She’s gone now, but she’s left us with a final kiss — a perfect scene, to remember her by.
Monday: Down in the Science Dungeon.
Footnotes:
Here’s the episode numbers for the Violet Welles quotes above:
- Angelique, my side: ep 711
- Jenny, green dress: ep 717
- Maggie and Mrs. Johnson, supermarkets: ep 669
- Petofi, trees: ep 858
- Liz and David, mirrors: ep 904
- Quentin and Edward, brandy: ep 857
- Magda, destroyed: ep 757
- Roger, enormous horror: ep 958
Dark Shadows bloopers to watch out for:
Maggie tells Quentin, “No, I don’t want to see her! I don’t even want to meet her!” I’m pretty sure that’s supposed to be the other way around: “I don’t want to meet her, I don’t even want to see her.”
It’s very quick, but when Cyrus says, “if the proper compound was distilled,” the boom mic drops into the frame for a moment.
Chris tells Cyrus, “You’ve become obsessed by a purely private, impractical idea!” The word “private” comes from a couple lines later, when Cyrus says that Angelique’s address book isn’t private. Cyrus trips over the word when he realizes that Chris already said it.
Cyrus misquotes Shakespeare slightly: “There are more things in heaven and earth, than can be dreamt of in your philosophy.” The quote is more things “than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
When Alexis and Hoffman talk in Angelique’s room, you can see somebody through the doors, standing around on another set. You first catch a glimpse of it when Hoffman says, “It’s exactly as you left it!” and then you really get a good look when Alexis asks Hoffman for a nightgown, and sits down.
When Alexis apologizes for disturbing Quentin with her piano playing, somebody coughs in the studio.
Monday: Down in the Science Dungeon.
— Danny Horn
Dark Shadows Every Day 
Danny, you erroneously refer to Angelique as Quentin’s ex-wife. She is Quentin’s late wife. An ex-wife is one who is divorced, which Quentin and Angelique haven’t been. A late wife is the deceased wife of a widower, and Angelique is Quentin’s dead wife. Sort of. Maybe. In a way, I guess, so maybe she isn’t… Heck, there IS no word for what Angelique is to Quentin in PT. But since this is Angelique, and she is one of a kind, maybe it’s fitting that there are no words for her.
I meant ex-wife as in “this is an ex-parrot”.
SPOILER ALERT
In addition to the above-mentioned methods for unsuccessfully exterminating Angeliques, you can soon add ‘poking them with a pointed stick’.
I always loved “joined the choir invisible.” Most epic python sketch ever
I was hoping that was a Mean Girls reference. 😋
Good lord. Sorry. Clicking on this, I’m thinking it’s probably not posting because it’s so damn big.
Am I the only one who gets the vibe that Quentin would rather have Alexis stay than Maggie?
Poor Maggie. Where is Parallel Joe when she needs him?
I’m wondering a bit about why Quentin married Maggie at all, and vice versa. Except that marriages on soap operas almost NEVER work.
And if the writers are borrowing from Rebecca, shouldn’t Quentin loathe Angelique for her dalliances? Or didn’t they use that bit?
It’s because they’re starting to graft Poe’s Ligeia onto Rebecca, substituting Alexis for Rowena, so they could have skipped the Rebecca setup entirely (it seems like more of a red herring than anything) and had Quentin as a morose widower until Alexis shows up. What does PT Maggie do, anyway? Am I forgetting something that comes later? The DS Wiki entry for Maggie Collins ends after she leaves Collinwood, but she’s in about 70% of the rest of the PT episodes after she returns from the HoDS shoot.
…definitely forgetting something…but I’m not telling!…
Oh, I’d never heard of Ligeia before. Well spotted!
ah….! Wait and see! All in good time John E Comelately…
Toto, too? 😀
The dalliances thing is the inspiration for Bruno’s relationship with Angelique; Bruno is the “Jack” from Rebecca.
I think in Parallel Time Joe and Tom Jennings got together and opened a bed and breakfast in Bangor
Oh! Oh! Oh!
Just picturing them fixing up an old Victorian ‘painted lady’;
goodness, just love a man with a tool in his hands.
Have to sit down for a moment….I may need some sal-volatile!
I’m used to thinking of Alexis as the “good twin” and Angelique as the “evil twin,” but we see Alexis here putting a move on a man she knows is married. Maybe she’s only the “slightly-less-evil twin.”
Hey, Alexis needn’t be a sorceress to be a vixen. This IS a soaper, after all. I have a guess as to why Quentin’s being so warm toward her, but (as Coda says) I’ll wait and see whether I can think like a DS writer.
I decided not to read ahead in the DS Wiki or watch episodes (well, not FAR ahead 🙂 ), and see the show for the first time along with the weblog. It’s really fun going into ‘the unknown’ like this!
I’m not even sure Angelique was a sorceress in parallel time. She’s sort of a combination black arts voodoo queen, female Adam, and Laura Phoenix
I can’t blame Alexis for trying to get her claws into a rich man but after a few days of listening to Quentin bellow, you’d think she’d run out the door right behind Maggie.
Where is that PT Sky rumson – he rarely if ever bellowed at Angelique although he did attack her with a torch once.
Going to guess that PT Sky married PT Olivia Corey and they lived happily ever after off-camera. Or maybe he grew a mustache and married Krystle Grant, I’m not sure.
Along with “Ligeia,” it’s easy to see a little bit of a connection with the Richard Matheson story “Therese.” Which most people know from the TV movie “Trilogy of Terror” (made by Dan Curtis, of course), where Karen Black plays both the “good sister” and “bad sister.” And as with this story, that story has a twist when it comes to putting those two labels on them.
Yes. He is indifferent to Maggie, treating her like shit and she is driving herself nuts about it. I would leave. He would not treat me that way. Seems like these guys like to treat their current wives like shit because their past people come back.
There’s a reason Maggie tore him a new one and took off.
Didn’t she ever hear of an annulment? That relationship is a totally lost cause.
Spoiler (stop reading if you haven’t seen the full series twenty times as I have)….
it just occurred to me that we never again see “our” Angelique. RT Angelique in the story’s main continuity. What she did after Sky Rumson and the Leviathans is unknown. Pity — we could have used her in Summer 1970.
I once had a theory about that. I think “our” Angelique does return…only she doesn’t know it. When she becomes a #NeverLeviathan and uses her powers she’s basically gone rogue against her own Underworld Party. And she probably is struck from being the keynote speaker at their next convention. When Barnabas goes to PT 1970 he’s unaware that she’s been summoned back to the underworld to answer for her part in Jebgate. After she remains there for some time until the Devil’s grand jury decides on whether to induct her. To avoid spoilers I won’t mention what she finds when she goes back but she returns to the underworld to plead her case to allow her to follow Barnabas on his next time trip. She is granted that request with one caveat: she will have no memory of her time spent in the 20th century,
Well that would at least explain why 1840 Angelique acts the way she does… Because it was clear when she was Cassandra that she hadn’t stuck around 1796 but instead hightailed it to 1968. So her visiting the mausoleum on a regular basis all those years between 1796 and 1840 never made sense. Then again, all those timeslips seem to have created all sorts of alternate-parallel realities. Maybe in one of them Angelique never went to 1968….
I like this explanation a lot. It’s the only way 1840 Angelique makes sense- and we don’t have to scratch our heads wondering whether 1890s and 1960s Angelique’s never happened!
Thanks for the great farewell to Violet Welles, my favorite DS writer. She was magical.
I meant ex-wife as in “this is an ex-parrot”. Danny, Danny, ya’ does my heart good.
Very good acting by Kathryn Leigh Scott and David Selby in the climactic scene of this episode.
Quite a shift in target audience in these weeks of the show. DARK SHADOWS was never more obviously a kids’ show than during the Leviathan segment; it was never more uncompromisingly aimed at grownups than at the opening of the Parallel Time segment. It’s hard to think that there could have been many viewers who would have been young enough to be spooked by the shadow on Jeb, but mature enough to care about the quarreling couples living in the houses at Collinwood-2.
I wonder if that wild swing did permanent damage to the ratings. It’s easy to suppose that a lot of grownups gave up on the show during the Leviathans, and that the young set tuned out in the first weeks of Parallel Time. If that is what happened, we might add it to the list of suspects in the “Who Killed Dark Shadows?” lineup.
I was really proud of Maggie in that scene. When it started I was thinking “oh, God, weeks and weeks of this crap where she keeps getting gaslighted and then telling Quentin she loves him,” but she just tore into him! And stomped out and drove off! Good for her!
The music score in my head is playing “One” by Harry Nilsson. Two relevant lyrics I think: “It’s just no good anymore since you went away” and “Two can be as bad as one”.
We now have the answer to “Is Barnabas essential to the show?” and “Can Lara gain fans as a character who is not Angelique?” Unfortunately they ignore the answers they get and create 1841PT.
It’s back to its soap roots. I expected Daniel to scream, “I hate you!” at Maggie the way David did at Vicki. He certainly had the early David glare back a couple episodes ago.
Thank Christ Maggie finally grows a spine in this episode and gives it right back to Bellowin’ Quentin. “Maggie the Doormat” was getting real tiresome real fast. Of course, now she’s gone for a few weeks so Quentin will have to bellow at someone else.
I’ve always remembered PT as having the best plots, characterization, dialogue, and acting since the Petofi storyline (which I had previously considered the show’s high point), and this episode definitely stood out as one of the best! Now I know who was responsible, although there are a number of good scenes to come, which I won’t spoil now but will most likely comment on when we come to them. This is my third go-around (I don’t count the few times I started re-watching the series but then paused for so long I couldn’t remember where I’d left off and had to start over again), and like many visitors to this blog in the past, present, and undoubtedly the future, I’m reading each of these entries after watching their corresponding eps.
I agree with what others have said about Quentin, although it didn’t really phase me at the time. Now, during my re-watch, my only criticism is that they should have established him and Maggie as the happy couple a bit more, showing him being loving and tender (and dear gods, soft-spoken!) to her before returning to Collinwood, and then show him slowly turning into this taciturn, shouty, and yes, controlling version of himself as he settles back in. I do get the sense that this is what happened, and did even the first time I watched it, I just think it could have been established better.
By the time we got to this point I already knew that DS was borrowing from a lot of different stories and tropes, and it was fun and self-gratifying to recognize them when I saw them. I had seen the movie “Rebecca” so I knew that’s what this was partially based on, and I also recognized “Ligeia” once we came to that. And it was in this episode, during the scene with Cyrus, that I realized they were going to do Jekyll & Hyde next. And now, though I didn’t realize it the other two times I watched this, I see an interesting parallel between Quentin’s transformation from loving, gentle husband to this growling, barking, insufferable cad and it makes me wonder if this was intentional on the part of the writers.
As for Barnabas being trapped in his coffin, sure it sucks, but at the time I just figured he was on vacation and would be back soon. In meantime, I didn’t miss him too much. There were too many wonderful new characters to get to know, the constant “is she or isn’t she” of Alexis/Angelique to worry about, and yes, the Hoffman/Angelique gay subtext was not missed, and greatly appreciated. If only it could’ve come to fruition.
And even if HODS is ultimately responsible for the demise of DS, I’m glad it got made. Interestingly enough, I never thought of it as being another parallel time, but more of a “What If?” story, and it’s fun to see all hell break loose to an extent that never happened on DS (because it couldn’t). In retrospect, maybe it was Dan Curtis’ secret wish fulfillment of “KILL this F—ING show!” lol.
Anyway, I recall enjoying that movie and I can’t wait to watch it again (but I’ll wait until we come to that point in the blog). NODS on the other hand, I remember not liking at all. It will be interesting to see if watching that again will change my mind, though somehow I doubt it.
I didn’t see that coming (“Alexis”). How intriguing! I really do hope she’s Angelique…oh, but then Hoffman will be right…never mind, I really hope she’s Alexis.
Lara Parker is absolutely gorgeous!
I was happy to get a first look at Cyrus Longworth’s mad-scientist laboratory. Since he was experimenting with separating evil from good. I couldn’t help but wonder how many purely evil and purely good rabbits he had managed to create already.
I wasn’t too impressed with Christopher Pennocks acting skills during the Leviathan story, but he really shines as Cyrus Longworth. His whole body language and general deportment are so different as Cyrus. Also glad to see Maggie finally fed up with barky, condescending Quentin, and running from the house. I really wonder if it was the writers intention to make Quentin so thoroughly unlikeable in PT.