“Will you feel the pain when this enters his body?”
Well, once again it looks like London Bridge is falling down; that’s today’s headline. We’ve got Maggie all locked up in a basement, so if anybody’s looking for her, then that’s where she’ll be. You can’t let these governess types run around loose for too long, or they get into mischief.
So it’s another setback for women’s lib, I’m afraid; I thought the 1970s were supposed to be more evolved than this. But here’s Maggie Evans Collins, whisked away to her new home in the basement of an abandoned farmhouse, which is one of those pretty-girl-in-peril reeducation centers where you’re supposed to sit and think things over until you recognize that your captor is the man of your dreams. And somewhere in the world, a fish finally gets that bicycle it’s always wanted.
Her new landlord is John Yaeger, a vicious brute who’s visiting this fictional universe from The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: Special Victims Unit. He’s the Hyde. The Jekyll is Dr. Cyrus Longworth, Maggie’s close friend, who goes around rubbing his face on her underwear when she’s not looking. That’s Dark Shadows for you; even the Jekylls are a mess.
But everyone can see that Maggie’s not being treated well by her new husband Quentin, who shouts at her and blames her and suspects her of being a vengeance-minded voodoo priestess, which she isn’t. He doesn’t actually hit her, which is nice, but he ignores her a lot, and when she says something that he doesn’t want to hear, he tells her to go to her room. Well, she’s done that, I suppose; it just happens to be a different room than he expected.
Yaeger, who’s getting more delusional by the day, thinks that Maggie’s going to settle into her new environment and start playing house. He’s stolen some of her possessions — clothes, a hairbrush, whatever accessories he felt like rubbing on his face — and he expects her to thank him for being so thoughtful.
“You know, I thought I would take the trouble of making your change here less traumatic,” he chirps. “Some of your own things always adds a bit of security.” And look how pleased he is with himself; he thinks he’s nailing this.
He says that he’ll let her go at the proper time, ie: when they walk out together, as a united couple. “You know, Maggie, I seem to be more confident in my charms than you are,” he smirks. “You’re going to love me! I promise you that!”
So this is another example of that rape culture concept of women falling in love with the strong, powerful man who shoves his way into her heart. It’s one of those cartoons where the caveman bashes the woman over the head with a club and drags her by the hair to his cave, which used to be hilarious for some reason.
The charm offensive doesn’t last, of course. Within minutes, she’s defying him, and he screams, “You will do as you’re told!” He can’t tell her to go to her room, of course, because she’s already in it.
So she’s been reassigned from one abusive man to another, given clothes and food and a room to sleep in. It’s kind of a rape crisis center, except it’s pro- and not anti-.
And the worst part, in a scenario made up entirely of worst parts, is that this guy is actually Cyrus, who she thinks is a close friend. He knows what she likes to eat, he knows that she’s been fighting with her husband, and he even knows her deepest fears, because she confided in him and asked for his help. This is even more of a betrayal than she can imagine.
There are three men in Maggie’s life — the emotionally trigger-happy husband, the friend who kidnaps her and steals her clothes, and the other friend who periodically decides he needs to sneak into her bedroom and drink her blood. Maggie has not been not super fortunate in her choices about male companionship.
And the interesting thing is that this is what Barnabas did to Maggie, three years ago. It’s exactly the same plan — abduct her, keep her locked up in a room, train her on the finer points of pleasing her man, and then wait for Stockholm syndrome to kick in.
In both cases, the men see the relocation as both a sleepaway camp and a punishment, depending on their mood. When Yaeger’s feeling optimistic, he expects her to think of this as her new home. When he gets angry and storms out of the room, it’s a prison cell.
Now, when Barnabas did all this three years ago, Maggie didn’t fall in love with him, but America did. He’s the hero of the show now, a teen-dream star with his own board games and Halloween costumes. I suppose by 1973 we’ll have forgotten all about this first encounter, and the world will be filled with John Yaeger model kits.
This version of Maggie is especially susceptible to treatment like this, because she doesn’t actually have a life outside her marriage and the one-sided supernatural war that she doesn’t realize she’s engaged in.
In Rebecca, the novel that inspired some of this storyline, we see the narrator in the days before she marries the charming millionaire and moves into his flammable mansion. She’s the paid companion to a rich woman visiting Monte Carlo, which isn’t a great job, but at least she gets to travel. But Maggie Collins shows up on the screen already married to Quentin, with no past to speak of, and nothing to ground her character. Maggie is a wife, and a victim; that’s her entire identity.
She doesn’t have a job. She doesn’t even have a hobby. The evil undead creature who lives in Maggie’s house likes gardening and flower arranging, she has a piano and a diary and an active social life. Maggie literally has no interests in anything outside of her marriage, her relationship with her stepson and her own feelings.
And honestly, even her sister in New York — the only healthy relationship that Maggie has — is basically just another place to stash her when she’s not wanted. When Maggie runs away from Quentin, she goes to stay with Jennifer, who acts as doorman and prison guard. During that period, Quentin accused Maggie of acting like a child, and she kind of was, running home to hide behind her big sister.
So the concept of “Maggie on her own” is unthinkable. If she wanted to leave Quentin and live on her own, what would that even look like? She has no source of income, and no way to live independently. I’m not saying that she’d be helpless like this if she were a real person, but that’s the way this character has been constructed. She’s a victim, she’s an object of love and subject of gossip, and she’s a target for witchcraft and vampire blood-feeding.
Maggie is entirely alone. Yaeger and Angelique want to convince her that she has no connections, no hope — that without Quentin, she’s nothing, she might as well fall out a window, or attach herself to another abusive man.
And then, just when you thought you understood the psychosexual rape-culture politics of this episode, the ice witch comes along to give the rapist a pep talk.
Angelique — Maggie’s only female friend — is actively conspiring against her, encouraging her abductor to buck up and keep trying. Yaeger comes over to whine about the way Maggie looks at him, and Angelique basically rolls her eyes, unable to believe how lame and childish this caveman actually is.
“She has more spirit than I thought she had,” he crabs, and she snaps, “And you have less than I thought you had!” So that’s 0-2 for Yaeger’s stand-up-to-women plans for the evening.
But Angelique knows the way to get to Maggie. “Every tie she has with Collinwood must be broken,” she insists. “She must be made to feel completely alone — that she has no life to go back to at all, because that life doesn’t exist for her anymore! You must rob her of every defense that she has — and when she’s completely vulnerable, then she’ll turn to you, because you’ll be all that she has. Don’t you see?”
So that’s the real question of this storyline — what would Maggie be, if her ties to Quentin and Collinwood were broken? A couple weeks ago, Angelique used that idea to talk her all the way out an upper-story window, and it almost worked.
But that applies to pretty much all the women in Parallel Time. What would Sabrina be, without Cyrus? This week, she found out that her fiancee is a murderer, and she’s still sticking by him. And how about Buffie, who literally got beaten and raped during a commercial break, and still wanted to go out with Yaeger? Carolyn doesn’t show a lot of interest in quitting her miserable marriage, and Hoffman and Hannah are both under the sway of Angelique. Most of the female characters in Parallel Time are not in control of their own lives and destinies, except for Angelique, who’s trying to spoil it for everyone else.
Parallel Time is an alternate Earth where things are different, because people have made different choices. Except the women, of course, who hardly make any choices at all.
Monday: The Last Day of Parallel Time.
Dark Shadows bloopers to watch out for:
Yaeger drops some silverware on the floor when he brings in the champagne. He picks it up, but then another piece falls to the floor.
Maggie tells Yaeger, “You’re not going to get away from this!” She means away with this.
When Angelique sees Yaeger at the window, she turns to Liz and calls her “Mrs. Collins.”
There’s a little audio fault when Angelique tells Liz that she wants to find Maggie.
The scene at the gazebo isn’t lit properly; Angelique is entirely in shadow. There’s a long close-up shot of her, where you can hardly see her expression.
Yaeger says, “There’s something I want you to do!” and then there’s a long pause before Maggie replies, “I won’t do anything!”
When Liz talks on the phone to Jennifer, you can hear Yaeger putting the sword back into his cane.
As Liz and Roger talk about Maggie in the drawing room, Angelique can be seen crossing the foyer, heading upstairs for her cue.
Monday: The Last Day of Parallel Time.
— Danny Horn
Dark Shadows Every Day 
Which brings to mind some lines from another big Helen Reddy hit;
Angie baby, you’re a
special lady
livin’ in a world of
make believe…
well, maybe.
Reading this It just occurred to me that PT could have been saved if Selby/Quentin was the Jekyll Hyde character. Pennock turned out to be too goofy to have any sexual magnetism and he seemed to know it, which is why he did all that clothes fondling while sighing like Mr. Whipple. Meanwhile they emasculated Selby. I still love the final Barnabus Yeager face off though.
Good point, David. I never thought of that before, mainly because I just thought of PT as something that had to be gotten through, like certain classes in high school and college. But this could have been a tour de force for Selby.
If they had gone that route with casting, who would have played the master of Collinwood? I can’t see Louis Emonds playing the romantic lead.
Bring back Roger Davis? (Kidding, kidding! KLS would have quit much sooner.)
Jerry Lacy! Or John Karlen…(speaking of, his birthday was May 28th.)
Chris Pennock might have carried it off, he was pretty obnoxious and shouty in the last storyline. Or Michael Stroka?
But Selby was the teen idol and way up there on “the wall”, so he had to be the romantic lead. Besides, he was already a Collins.
I’ll guess that Don Briscoe was out of consideration while they were planning PT.
Dark horse outsider – Michael Hadge as ‘Buzz’ Collins.
The mere possibility of an undiscovered parallel time Buzz amuses me, although chances are he might have become a bookish establishment square, or else leading wild dance bacchanals on the wharf which even Angelique cannot stop. (And then it threatens to become an early version of FOOTLOOSE).
How aboutThayer David in the Maxim de Winter role? He could be so handsome and sophisticated. He could also be imperious as well as vulnerable – he could have nailed it.
I, for one, could absolutely see Louis Edmonds playing the Max de Winter role to a T. How different is de Winter from a younger Joshua? And the Roger of the pre Barnabas episodes was much more of a dark and brooding, yet suave and charming, bastard. The age difference between him and Maggie would play up the image of her as the innocent child bride to his jaded sophisticate, and would be consistent with the characters in Rebecca.
However, I also don’t think it would have been impossible for Quentin to have been both de Winter and Jekyll/Hyde. If it wasn’t plausible for him to have discovered the formula himself, he could have somehow been Cyrus’s test subject.
Oh, I can so see Sabrina (like Vera on Alice, or Esmeralda on Bewitched) knocking over the Do Not Touch juice into the magic drinks table – say, at the big anniversary costume party – and before long EVERYONE is turning into Hydes all over Collinsport. Sales of sword canes, hair grease, mustache wax and plaid suits skyrocket! Unspeakable things start happening in Brewsters’ lingerie department! And Max Factor Tan #2 pancake makeup, along with nose putty, become almost unobtainable!
You’re right – Selby should have played de Winter and Jeckyll & Hyde. No way would 1970’s teenagers have wanted to see Maggie married to Louis or Thayer. I speak from experience – I was 13 in 1970 and I’d have thought it was really icky!
In DS91, they had Roger and Maggie boffing; so, maybe if they’d put a wig on Big Lou they could have had him play Lord of the Manor? Could have started him as a teen heartthrob…
A longish curly brown wig and one of those romantic frilly, open neck Lord Byron poet shirts – Big Lou would have been on the cover of Tiger Beat for weeks!
Oh, I can see the cover stories now –
SPECIAL ALL-LOU EDITION!
“DS bombshell! Lou tells all, tattles on David and Jonathan!”
“Louis Edmonds – what does he WANT from a girl?”
“Alone with Lou – From someone who KNOWS!”
“Can YOU make Lou CHANGE HIS MIND?”
“Is Louis Edmonds LOOKING for trouble?”
“Win LOU’S autographed boxers!”
“Lou – too much man for YOU?”
“Will YOUR love HURT Louis?”
PLUS+PLUS+PLUS
FULL SIZE WALL POSTER!
(A collectors item for sure. But just TRY and find one on eBay…)
Now, now. They didn’t need a teen heartthrob to play the part of a cold, unfeeling, shouty older husband. That’s one of the reasons David Selby’s version fell so flat.
Cold? Unfeeling? Shouty? OLD?
Gosh, you make him sound so unpleasant. 🙂
Well, then they would have been rooting for Barnabas to steal her away!
It’s just too damn bad Joel Crothers left the show. He would have been a beautiful Mr. Hyde.
Interesting idea!Perhaps Cyrus’s potion makes Quentin become some sort of werewolf?
This is a good idea! Quentin has already shown great alacrity at being a werewolf, and the Jekyll/Hyde story is just that, only the hero actually wants to wolf out and concocts a chemical, scientific version of being cursed by an old Gypsy woman.
Pennock, I think, is very good at differentiating between the two characters, and acknowledging that he wants to be Yaeger, not free himself from the impulses he characterizes. And he is playing Yaeger the way he’s portrayed in the original story–someone of “lower” evolution who seems apelike–you can’t point out any specific thing, but he comes across as bestial. Even when he tries to be charming it lasts for about ten seconds and then he’s shrieking and waving his sword cane.
However, that doesn’t translate well into “suddenly I love Maggie.” Suddenly I want to dominate Maggie, sure–most movie versions of Hyde do that with their versions of the Buffie character–but Hyde doesn’t love or become obsessed with anyone. He’s just an Id-jerk stomping over everything he comes across, and Pennock’s been too good at that to buy this whole LURVE thing.
Basically they’re trying to make him PT Barnabas, when 1) we HAVE Barnabas right here, he’s faced off with Angie and is all set to go, and 2) we have Quentin, who is in dire need of refurbishment personality wise. The whole storyline is superfluous to requirements.
“Today, the part of Sam Hall will be played by Ron Sproat…”
I absolutely love that people are dropping silverware on this show. However unintentional, it adds a layer of reality you just don’t see anywhere else on TV.
(Seriously, if I went a day without dropping silverware, I would think I was dreaming.)
I wondered if that was a flub, actually, since Maggie bolted for the door when he was busy picking up the silverware. She clearly was supposed to do that.
Maggie is simultaneously being (metaphorically) date raped and stranger raped by the same man.
And I know, I just know, that Yeager is going to smash that seashell that Daniel gave Maggie, isn’t he? Just to be EEEE-VIL and make her feel more alone. He’s already making her eat with flatware he dropped on the mucky floor. (That’s just good kidnapping etiquette.)
But the big question is, how long before that sword cane falls apart again?
“So it’s another setback for women’s lib, I’m afraid; I thought the 1970s were supposed to be more evolved than this.” Having grown up in the 1960s, I would say that 1970 is not really “the 70s” yet, though I know you’ve argued, Danny, that the 60s ended in 1969. Women’s lib is pretty nascent at this point, barely registering, if at all, on a lot of mainstream folks’ radar. We’ve got to give it at least another year or two before “women’s lib” becomes a “thing” that most people are aware of.
I seem to remember Nicholas Blair goading Adam into a similar ‘force her to love you’ scenario. With the expected results. No wonder there are so few cavemen around anymore.
I haven’t looked ahead to the next episode. But when Stokes says his secret partner is in his back room, I so want it to be PT Adam!
Or maybe Stokes’ back room is another conduit between regular and parallel time and this is where our Adam disappeared to all those storylines ago?
Danny, note this: that summation was, quite simply, sublime.
I think I have to disagree with Danny on this one- PT Maggie has significantly more of an existence outside her marriage than the second Mrs de Winter has outside hers. We may never see Jennifer Evans, but we do see Maggie sitting in her sister’s apartment writing a letter in which she tells her husband that she’s decided it’s time to call in the lawyers and move on from their failed marriage. The second Mrs de W never got that far. Nor did she make a connection with a member of the de Winter family the way Maggie does with Amy and Liz from the first, and with Daniel in his last episode. She didn’t stand up to Mrs Danvers as Maggie does to Miss Hoffman; she didn’t stand up to her at all until her very last day at Manderley, when it is already too late.
Moreover, everything in the early section where we see the second Mrs de Winter as a lady’s companion sets her up as a dependent, anxiety-ridden person; compare that to various incarnations of Maggie and Kathryn Leigh Scott’s other characters we’ve seen on the show up to this point, from the tough-talking hash-slinger who was everybody’s pal and nobody’s friend through the girl who escaped from the vampire’s dungeon to quick-witted Kitty Soames. Unless you’ve started watching in the couple of months before this one, you’ll need a lot more evidence than we get of PT Maggie’s psychological weakness for her to make sense as the victim of a Rebecca-style war of nerves.
Coming into this after not seeing it again since I watched when it was originally broadcast, I was rather looking forward to it. I didn’t remember it well and I thought it might feel like watching it for the first time. That’s mostly been true. Very little is familiar. But I understand why the ratings went down! I know they’re doing Rebecca but how many teens had read Rebecca or seen the movie? They dodn’t know Maxim. They knew Quentin. They wanted to see Quentin, not some grumpy authority figure. He’s so mishandled in this! The Cyrus/Yaeger story isn’t helping, either.
Another blooper: When Angelique sees Yaeger at the window and walks towards Elizabeth, Joan appears to trip and grabs onto the arm of the sofa.
And what is the point of the braid sticking out from Angelique’s hairdo? It looks very odd.
That braid is driving me crazy! Why does Angelique suddenly have a handle?
Damn. At this point, I’ve lost count of how many times Kathryn Leigh Scott has been abducted and held against her will.
Another blooper – when Elizabeth and Roger are talking in the drawing room, you can see Angeliques scurry across the entrance hall to get in place at the top of the stairs so she can saunter down leisurely a minute later.