“How could I dream something that actually happened?”
“Maggie, I hate to see you this upset,” Cyrus says, which is a shame, because being upset is pretty much Maggie’s job.
And why shouldn’t she be upset? She’s just had a terrifying dream in which she saw her new husband murdering his first wife, and wives, as a class, are pretty sensitive on the subject of wife-murdering. So she rushed over to Dr. Cyrus Longworth’s place, for a consultation.
Cyrus holds Maggie’s hands tenderly, to reassure her. “I just wish there were more that I could do,” he murmurs.
She smiles. “I wonder if you know how kind you really are,” she observes.
He looks into her eyes. “Don’t hesitate to come back here and visit me, if there’s anything more that I can do.”
“I won’t forget,” she says, and then asks, “Is something wrong?”
“Wrong?” he asks. “Why?”
“The way you keep looking at me.”
“Oh, no!” the doctor stammers, remembering himself. “I’m sorry, that’s just me! Absent-minded Cyrus Longworth, staring at something, without knowing what he’s staring at.”
She chuckles, and says good night.
And he watches her, the dear wife of a dear friend, as she walks upstairs and leaves the house. Then his glance falls on a pair of white gloves, left behind on a table. Grabbing them, he hurries to the door, but she’s already gone.
Cyrus Longworth looks down at the gloves, and then he takes them and rubs them against the side of his face.
I swear to God, that is the actual thing that he actually does. He rubs his cheek on the gloves, and makes like this is the most sensual experience he’s ever had.
Seriously. Look at this. It’s eerie. I might never get over this.
So I hate to bring this up, but I need to say one word, and that word is: Sabrina.
That’s the name of Cyrus’ fiancee, who — as far as we know — works in this room, where we’re standing now. We haven’t seen a lot of Sabrina lately, but since we haven’t heard about a breakup, a layoff or a fatal accident, she’s presumably standing just past the edge of the screen, tapping on test tubes, and jotting down equations on her science pad.
So whence all this hand-holding and stammering and blushing? We knew that Cyrus was getting himself entangled with a barmaid named Buffie, and Sabrina hasn’t really been a factor in that little subplot, so maybe they’ve decided that Sabrina doesn’t matter.
Now, I’m not saying that I like Sabrina or that I believe in the Cyrus/Sabrina relationship, because I absolutely do not. She hasn’t been on the show for a while, which suits me, and as far as I’m concerned, she can stay wherever she is for as long as she likes. I’m just saying that we spent a month looking directly at Sabrina’s face while she whined and pouted and cooed at Cyrus, and that is not even being acknowledged, which is just so utterly odd.
Plus, as far as I can figure, Maggie and Cyrus have literally never had a single scene together. Yes, Cyrus is friends with her husband Quentin, and Quentin and Cyrus have talked about Maggie — they recently had a conversation where they speculated that maybe she secretly practices voodoo — but he’s never expressed any interest in her. And now the gloves.
The theme of this week is that Dark Shadows starts getting better all of a sudden, probably because executive producer Dan Curtis came back to New York after shooting House of Dark Shadows, took a look at what was going on, and is now in the process of making some much-needed adjustments. While it’s hard to look at Cyrus’ new glove fetish as an advance in storytelling, that’s actually what it is.
One of the big projects of this week is to tie the important characters together more tightly. For the last couple months, there have been three separate story tracks — the Angelique/Quentin/Maggie conundrum, the Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde story, and Barnabas, the main character of the show, trapped in an alternate dimension with no idea how to get home.
They took an important step in this direction last week, when Barnabas declared, out of the blue, that he felt the lust — the lust! — for Maggie’s blood. Yesterday, they established a dramatic connection between Barnabas and Cyrus’ alter ago John Yaeger. And today, they complete the circle by connecting Cyrus with Maggie, which is communicated to the audience through this surprise outbreak of glove frottage.
But that’s just the beginning of today’s Longworth turnaround. After Maggie leaves, Buffie comes over for her usual sparring session. Buffie has been experiencing eruptions of affection for both Jekyll and Hyde, at irregular intervals. So now she’s come over to hassle Cyrus for a while, and he responds by ignoring her and pretending to look into a prop microscope, like he’s super busy with mad science and she is an irritant.
And it was just yesterday that Cyrus stopped by Buffie’s place three times over the course of an episode, stammering and blinking. In fact, she yelled at him and practically pushed him out the door, and then when she called to invite him over again, he was there like a shot, thrilled to get another chance. Now, the silent treatment.
Both yesterday’s episode and today’s were written by the same writer, Joe Caldwell, and these episodes were shot in order. There’s no break in production that might explain why Cyrus would be panting for Buffie’s attention yesterday, and despising her today. It’s not a mistake, or an accident. It’s just an abrupt change in policy, which I interpret as Dan making a new decision.
To Caldwell’s credit, he writes a nice long exit scene for Buffie, who by the way is about to exit. This is her last full episode; she’ll appear in the first scene of tomorrow’s, and then leave the show for good.
Usually, these sudden character exits don’t get any real attention. Adam ran into the back room at Stokes’ place, and never came back out again. Harry Johnson agreed to help Carolyn keep a secret, and then vanished. Tony Peterson walked out of Collinwood, and resolved into a dew. They just weren’t invited back the next day. But Buffie has a little character moment, where she gets to reflect on her imminent ouster.
She’s throwing herself at Cyrus, which is a thing that she does periodically, and he says no thanks. “Miss Harrington again,” she snaps, “and no thanks!” Spotting the gloves on his desk, she sneers, “You wouldn’t have said that to the person who owns these, would you?”
Cyrus jumps to the gloves’ defense, telling her to back off. She asks who they belong to, and then spins off into a little one-woman show.
“Funny,” she begins, “I knew her when she was growing up here, before they moved. She comes back, marries Quentin Collins… and I meet John Yaeger.” She frowns. “I always knew she’d be someone special. So bright, so pretty, so ladylike!” Pacing, she ends up in front of the mirror. “I bet when she looks in the mirror before she goes to bed, she doesn’t hate herself. And there, Dr. Longworth, you have a vital clue to Miss Buffie Harrington… who is no lady at all.” He doesn’t care.
There’s more. She shows off a little string of pearls that Yaeger gave her, and laughs bitterly. “I’ll never be a lady,” she says. “You reminded me of that. I’ll stay in my league, and let Maggie Collins stay in hers.”
And then she hands the pearls to Cyrus, and walks out. He doesn’t rub the pearls on his face. I guess there are guidelines about what goes to the face and what doesn’t.
So the other day, under the episode 1020 post, regular commenter Jason B. said, “I’ve been spreading the gospel of D Horn in the DS groups I frequent. There was no plan, there was no plan, there was no plan.”
And Buffie’s little swan song is the latest example of this principle. Seriously, for real, there was no plan.
Buffie was a critical part of this storyline just yesterday, providing a link between Barnabas and John Yaeger. They obviously had something in mind. And then a day later, with no warning, she hands back the pearls, and she’s out of our lives.
And they’re selling this Cyrus/Maggie thing hard, too. In the next scene, Cyrus goes to Collinwood to return the gloves to Maggie, so she can have another opportunity to smile, and touch his arm, and say that it was very dear of him.
Then Cyrus dashes home to his secret basement murder lab, and makes for the safe with the Mr Hyde juice.
He’s hit with a pang of doubt. “I mustn’t!” he cries. “She’s Quentin’s wife! Quentin’s my best friend!”
But then he turns again. “Buffie’s right,” he muses. “So soft… so quiet… so special… What did Yaeger achieve with Buffie? Nothing! But with Maggie…”
And then he makes a conscious decision to drink the magic potion, and turn into a hairy rage machine, specifically so that he’ll be able to rape Maggie without fear.
“There are no limits for John Yaeger!” he says. “He would never keep saying over and over, no, no, no! His word is YES! Nothing stands in his way!” And then he makes with the chemistry.
So here’s my conspiracy theory. This is the second character in a week to acquire a sudden obsessive interest in Maggie Collins — the third, if you count Yaeger separately — and there’s already Quentin, Angelique and Hoffman, who basically talk about Maggie nonstop. We’ll see a couple more characters later in the week who also seem to spend a lot of their time focusing on Maggie. Dark Shadows seems to be slipping into full-on Maggie worship, and taking us all along for the ride. It’s almost as if they want to interest us in an upcoming feature film that stars Maggie as the female lead. I’m just saying.
Tomorrow: Rage Against the Machine.
Dark Shadows bloopers to watch out for:
When Angelique picks up the witchcraft book, you can hear someone in the studio — it sounds like they’re saying “Watch yourself!” A few moments later, just before Maggie walks in, someone coughs.
Angelique garbles the word “Besides” in the sentence “Besides, she thought it was the perfect time for Maggie to meet all your friends.”
The title on the spine of The Seventh Level of Witchcraft should be going in the opposite direction.
There’s some confusion about what time it is. In act 2, Maggie tells Cyrus “Good night” while it’s still the afternoon. In act 3, Yaeger tells Maggie to meet him at 6pm on the docks. In the next scene, before Maggie arrives, Yaeger asks Buffie, “Do you always walk the streets this time of night, alone?”
Yaeger tells Maggie, “I hope you know that you’re doing me — that I’m doing you a very big favor.”
Tomorrow: Rage Against the Machine.
— Danny Horn
Dark Shadows Every Day 
This doesn’t really belong here–really the DS issue of the moment is setting up the Vampire vs. Mr. Hyde climax, which I remember with great fondness and saved this sorry arc–but given that DS was a pioneer in Chromakey technology, join me in admiring just how far we’ve come with Chromakey Grandma:
http://nofilmschool.com/2017/05/grandma-teaches-herself-and-you-chroma-key-greenscreen
Time-Life Publications presents…
An exciting new library series –
Witchcraft By Levels!
Are you interested in becoming a witch?
Are you a witch already, but are looking for a complete reference library?
The Witchcraft By Levels series is what you’ve been waiting for! Written in easy to understand language, and laid out step by step. In no time at all, you’ll be able to cast spells that get RESULTS! Whether it’s love potions, enslavements, or calling forth demons from the bowels of Hades, you’ll find it here in the Witchcraft By Levels books. Trying to find “fillet of a fenny snake”? The answer is in Level Two, along with information about substitutions you can make if you can’t find fenny snake. Don’t know what size cauldron is right for your needs? Level Three has a handy chart, along with a chapter on new alloys and alternatives to the classic iron cauldrons. And in Level Four, you’ll find all sorts of handy shortcuts to speed up your sorcery! Still using a mortar and pestle? Did you know you can get faster results with a Cuisinart food processor? Just one of the hundreds of tips you’ll find in these indispensable books! Trouble getting the man you desire? Level Five will show you dozens of ways to have him on his knees, panting, worshipping the ground you walk on! And if you decide he’s not what you want, Level Six will show you ways to get rid of him, from turning him into a frog, a newt, or a cat, to mythological tricks, like the Medusa spell that will make him into a marble statue!
Yes, it’s all here, level by level. In no time at all, you’ll have the whole world in your power.
Order today!
I’m sold! But John, what’s the 1-800 number?
Sorry, that’s Parallel Time-Life. Not available in this reality… 🙂
I only remember the early 1980s follow-up, Microwave Witchcraft.
(Parallel Time-Life, hehe)
Well, this explains some things. Since Angelique was about to read this book, we can surmise that she is only a sixth level witch. That’s why she can’t get her spells to work the way she wants. I submit that the Angelique in the original timeline must have been at epic levels (20+)!
Danny wrote, “So here’s my conspiracy theory. This is the second character in a week to acquire a sudden obsessive interest in Maggie Collins — the third, if you count Yaeger separately — and there’s already Quentin, Angelique and Hoffman, who basically talk about Maggie nonstop.”
Yes, I suppose it could be some helpful pre-release marketing for HODS, if I interpret your hint correctly.
Could a larger role be the fulfillment of a promise by Dan Curtis to KLS to persuade her stay on the show? That is, Dan Curtis saying to KLS, please don’t leave our DS troupe. If she stays, the writers will give her character Maggie a bigger part. Eventually KLS did leave the show before the end of its run, but I don’t recall her reasons for leaving, if she ever said why. Was it a move to France? I’m not sure …
But If she knew what a large following DS would still have nearly 50 years later, perhaps she never would have left! But in 1970 who knew? …
Count, she said in her books that she left because her then-boyfriend, Ben Martin, was being transferred to Paris and she wanted to go with him.
I seem to remember Hoffman was recently in Maggie’s bedroom, watching her as she slept…which might be interpreted as a bit…obsessive. Just sayin’.
Elizabeth Eis turns out to be a really good actress. Who knew? And I wonder if Dan and the writers rationalized this sudden lurch toward Maggie-lust on Cyrus’s part as the Yaeger personality seeping into his brain, which is what eventually happens. Not that I care for the Cyrus storyline at all, but you’re definitely right, Danny, that suddenly it all feels more cohesive.
Have you seen her in Dear Dead Delilah (1972)? Also starring Agnes Moorehead and Dennis Patrick.
Omg! I vowed never to watch DDD again as I believe it’s the WORST movie of all time but now I want to see Elizabeth and Dennis now that I’ve been introduced to them via DS.
I had a great affection for Elizabeth Eis from even the Leviathan debut.
It’s like when you have that visceral feeling, for someone great… Angelique, Samantha Collins, Julia Hoffman, even Julianka….
You just get that feeling from the first scene.
She wasn’t really given much to work with as Buffie, but yet did a nice job with the role. I loved the scene where she compared herself to Maggie.
I’m glad she leaves the show now. There wasn’t much more her character could do except die horribly. At least we can imagine after meeting Yeager for the last time she has a moment of clarity and grabs herself a Greyhound and gets the heck out of Dodge!
Has it been determined if Cyrus has any memory his being Yeager? I know Yeager has Cyrus’ memories. By this time Cyrus indeed knows that Yeager is just plain bad. He surely had to know if he turned into Yeager, he’d cause harm to Maggie. This isn’t Jekyll & Hyde it’s The Nutty Professor.
Here’s also the difference between PT Angelique and Angelique-Prime. “Our” Angelique wouldn’t need to read a “Witchcraft For Dummies” book. She really is a rank amateur.
Well, she hasn’t tried any Level 7 stuff yet. She wants to make sure – and her recent sorcery hasn’t been all that successful. Evidently witchcraft is more difficult than we think.
“Hey, this thing reads like stereo instructions!” – from Beetlejuice
And Cyrus apparently doesn’t care if Maggie’s hurt; as long as he can get into her (pant, pant) GLOVE DRAWER!
You’re so right, it’s totally the Nutty Professor (the Jerry Lewis version!). Complete with the crazy faces in the transformation…but of course on this budget there was no room for multiple teeth-changes or spilling multicoloured paint everywhere. Yaeger is his way of living out his fantasies, mainly about getting girls it seems, just like Buddy Love. He even comes with a signature wardrobe.
Sometimes it seems like Cyrus has no recollection of certain things he did as Yaeger, but it could just be pretense because so far these apparent memory lapses seem to only occur within the context of conversations with others, like when he acted surprised that Will Loomis had met Yaeger. But after the initial transformation during which he had no memory whatsoever of what Yaeger did, he had had the chemist remove certain “impurities” from the compound which were causing the amnesia, so theoretically now he should remember everything he did while he was Yaeger. The great thing about that explanation though is that any minor memory loss of Cyrus’s could conceivably be explained by fans as being due to lingering impurities resulting from a lack of diligence on the part of the late chemist.
Maybe all the books are like that.
And Spock has a goat.
Well described and well analyzed, Professor Horn.
Part of watching all soaps is always intuiting the writers’ ongoing choices–no one just coughs on a soap without plot consequences, and the joy of speculating where they’re going with this or that is a big part of the fun. And while Dark Shadows–we’re all agreed now, yes?–held to no overarching plan, there are these times when you feel Daddy grab the wheel and forcibly turn the car in a new direction. We might call them Cyrus Glove Moments.
What distinguishes a Cyrus Glove Moment is that the new sharp turn has the retrospective effect (if you’re willing to play along) of realigning and recasting what’s come before, implicitly reclaiming a wandering plot to new meaning: here, stammering titmouse Cyrus Longworth comes clean–he invented brutish and brazenly fashion-impaired John Yeager, not out of moral purpose or scientific curiosity, but to give himself the experiences of a fearless egoist, lusting for Yeager’s shameless life of abusing styling gel and women. And now that he feels secure in the chance to expand his life this way, he can drop the Buffie Harringtons and go for the Collinsport dream girl, who is –who knew?–Maggie Collins. Buffie was a practice round. This was the goal. Now we know.
I had the same feeling–more weakly–when 20th-century Angelique reflected back on her unexplained desire to marry 1895 Quentin as a sad move to make Barnabas jealous, and–more powerfully–when 1841’s Samantha Collins suddenly realized that all of Gerard Stiles’s seemingly aimless machinations expressed his desire to become Quentin.
And when you’ve been rolling your eyes as the car careens in random directions and effectively coasts to a stop, these moments of forcibly taking the wheel can be thrilling. More Cyrus Gloves! Open-ended narrative will always need them.
The whole Cyrus and Maggie’s Gloves thing is that much creepier when you realize that she’s supposed to be the catalyst for his inability to control Yaeger at all, because he’s just admitted that what he wants is to rape women in general and her in particular.
He’s not in love with Maggie–he doesn’t even know her. He doesn’t even have Barnabas’s excuse that this poor beleaguered woman happens to look like an equally beleaguered woman who luckily got to die and escape all this nuttery. He simply likes the idea of forcing a woman who normally wouldn’t consider him a romantic prospect into a sexual liason.
Cyrus clearly doesn’t love Sabrina–not only is he full on ignoring her and clearly proposed because, well, she was there and liked him–but the very first thing he did as Yaeger was assault her and steal back the engagement ring, which he has never returned. When Buffy started flirting with him as Cyrus, he brutally raped her, than lost interest in her.
So of course, Maggie, being the wife of the best friend he didn’t have until last week Quentin, who is being very sweet to him but clearly not on him, is who he directs his rage at. He’s every incel neckbeard who sat in any basement muttering about how someday those bitches are going to learn.
Sabrina went through the wrong door and has been locked in the broom closet all this time. Her foot is caught in the mop bucket and she’s got a wastebasket stuck over her head, and she can’t get out because the doorknob came off in her hand.
Maybe before Don Briscoe became unreliable they were planning on bring PT Chris & Sabrina together
Yes. Melissa’s version is the correct answer.
But he lured her through the door, where he hid the mop bucket, stuffed her with the trash can, pulled off the doorknob, then mumbled and walked off of the set.
Casting idea – which of the young ladies on the show might have played young Liz Collins, finding she’s in a terrible marriage and pregnant?
And young Paul Stoddard (the cad, the swine!)
I bet David Henesy could have done a pretty good “teenage Roger”…
KLS as Maggie’s mother(?) Also pregnant(?)
Who would young Sam Evans have been?
Who would have played the Haskells? The Jennings’? The Devlinses?
Timeframe late 1940s, postwar ‘Baby Boom’ getting underway. The lads all coming back;
Possible story idea steals from The Best Years Of Our Lives, Till The End Of Time, Random Harvest & etc.
I’ve always imagined a 1940s flashback would have cast Alexandra Moltke as the young Elizabeth, David Henesy as the young Roger, Louis Edmonds as Jamison, and Joan Bennett as spinster Aunt Nora. (Jamison’s wife was dead by then.) Nancy Barrett could have played an ancient Charity/Pansy in old-age makeup.
I always see grown up Jamison as David Selby. They would have had to age him like they did when Louis Edmonds played Joshua.
It was sweet when Big Finish introduced Jamison in a 1920s set audio story, they cast Jamison Selby for the role.
Maybe it’s saying the obvious, but the “Buffy vs. Maggie” situation reminds me of the expression “Hollywood Homely,” where a story tries to tell you how plain someone is – at least compared to someone else – but they cast a ridiculously attractive actress (or actor). Appearance-wise, Buffy is this close to a COMEDY SKETCH female lab assistant, if you know what I mean.
I know it’s meant to be more of a “common girl” vs. “lady” situation than that kind, which is why the word lady is used, but it’s still hard not to think of that kind.
Helen Morehouse: What were you thinking?
Casting Director: Well, you said you wanted gritty. In other words…ugly.
Helen Morehouse: I wanted Mary Ann on “Gilligan’s Island” ugly, not Cornelius on “The Planet of the Apes” ugly. TV ugly, not… ugly ugly.
The Simpsons, Pygmoelion (2000)
There really is something special about Kathryn Leigh Scott, though. She has some kind of special glow. She still has it, all these years later. She’s like some kind of fairy princess or something; when I met her I swear I saw cartoon bluebirds swirling around her head.
I hadn’t planned on buying any books that day, but all she had to do was smile and say, “Would you like to buy my book?” And suddenly, there was nothing I wanted to do more than buy her book. (If she’d been selling gloves…)
That’s why the new Cyrus obsession did make sense to me. Just look at how doe-eyed she is when doing the “what are you staring at?” scene.
If she looked at me like that, I would totally melt!
…..or maybe it’s just time for another round of Maggie-abuse. It’s been months now.
Glove fetishism — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glove_fetishism
Lots of non-US books–and some published here, for that matter–have the titles “upside down.” So I’m not sure you could call that a goof.
Wow! A mention! And in the episode that I always forget is Buffie’s (essentially) last!
Boy, what would Cyrus do with Julia Hoffman in her glove days, taking them on and off all the time and whipping the back and forth in her hands?
The more episodes I watch (envy me; I haven’t yet seen them all) the more Chris Pennock becomes one of my favorite actors on the show, right up there with Nancy Barrett and John Karlen. He seems to be that rare beast: the Super Cute Guy who either has no idea how Super Cute he is, or truly does not give a sh*t. Only too eager to slap on a cruddy fake mustache or put a Nerdpart in his hair and get on with doing the character part.
Also love the overheated style he brings to his opening narrations and “thinks”.
Pennock isn’t always good at delivering his lines- as he would write later, he still had a long way to go in developing his craft when he was 24. But one thing he was always very good at was letting his scene-mates shine. No matter how Yaeger is attacking someone, she has her moment in the spotlight.
Also, Pennock looks like he’s having fun, which the viewer picks up on.
Not sure if this is a blooper or not. When Cyrus picks up the gloves and rushes after Maggie, it sounds like he calls, “Miss” instead of Maggie. Maybe he was going to say “Mrs. Collins” but he’s been calling her Maggie all along.
I think you’re right. I actually heard “Miss–Mrs.–” and it seemed odd to me that he didn’t use her first name instead.
Cyrus rubbing those gloves is truly one of the creepiest moments on the show. And it’s horrifying that Cyrus harbors the desire to rape and can justify it by turning into Yeager.
I really like Elizabeth Eis…it’s sad that she’s leaving.