“Feel the light flashing into your mind!”
Angelique: But the man who murdered Angelique deserves a very special punishment!
Barnabas: But what if I’m too successful?
Angelique: Somehow, he will find his way through the police!
Barnabas: Nothing’s happened to you. And nothing, I’m sure, has happened to Angelique.
Angelique: And yet, you murdered me!
Angelique: You introduced me to the cold of the tomb!
Claude: Feel the light flashing into your mind! It means I’ve come!
Barnabas: Is she dead? Have you murdered her, too?
Angelique: Perhaps I have.
Angelique: She must not be allowed to speak!
Barnabas: For once, we agree!
Claude: Ah, yes, my grandfather’s grave — an old trysting place, of Roxanne and me.
Barnabas: But you don’t understand! The life of Quentin Collins depends on her silence!
Claude: What a shame, then, that the life of Quentin Collins means nothing to me.
Claude: Find Angelique, and tell her that, unfortunately, her final destruction is only a matter of minutes.
Angelique: Can you hear me, Maggie? Can you feel my power?
Angelique: He will come to you — and when he does, you will raise the gun and point it at his heart.
Angelique: I returned to destroy Quentin, not to save him!
Barnabas: But it will give you peace!
Angelique: Peace? I don’t want peace! I want his destruction — and I will have it!
Monday: The Parallel Sky.
Dark Shadows bloopers to watch out for:
There’s some audio talkback from the studio when Angelique and Maggie are looking out the window, and in the next scene.
We can clearly see Angelique standing in the corner as she’s waiting for Roger to enter the room.
When Angelique tells Maggie to find the gun in the desk drawer, there’s a camera at the top right.
Monday: The Parallel Sky.
— Danny Horn
Dark Shadows Every Day 
I love Roger’s death scene. It’s not as long-winded as Margaret Hamilton but it does have the same intonation of “I’m melting”. I also appreciate the triple cliffhanger and the wacko aftermath next episode
“There’s some audio talkback from the studio when Angelique and Maggie are looking out the window, and in the next scene.”
I just pretended that it was all of those state troopers that Maggie claimed she saw out the window.
Yeah, there’s nothin’ like trystin’ the night away on Grandfather’s grave.
So the grave marker with Claude North’s name on it was a big nothingburger? Didn’t Stokes say he feared Claude b/c he had powers or something?
Well – he has the power to get romantical in a cemetery, guess that’s something. (Okay, it’s not all that frightening as powers go, but the writers said they were running out of ideas. Personally, I was expecting something a little more terrifying, given Stokes’ dire warnings.)
Yeah, it’s a shame it didn’t pan out, but I guess by this time, the writers were as sick of PT as we were and just wanted to wrap things up.
“Peace? I don’t want peace!”
Lara Parker just crushes that moment, and I respect Parangelique for going out on her own terms. it’s her rage and she’ll take it with her, thank you.
I guess she came down firmly on the side of “DESTROY QUENTIN” right after she found out and punished who really killed her…?
Whatever, it’s Angie. She makes her own sense.
Oh, Lordyloo! More hypnotism. Now we know how Paralangelique got all those men dangling from her skirts.
And Angie knows now that Quentin didn’t kill her (only on DS would that idea come up!) – so why is she sending hypno-robot Maggie off to shoot him? There’s no need for revenge. I thought she had wanted Quentin back at the start of this story line anyway, because of her undying love of him. Another plot tossed away. It would make more sense to have Maggie kill herself, so Quentin would be free; maybe Angie has had time to take a good look at him, and say ‘is this what I really want?’
While I mention hypno-robots, is Roxanne ever going to contribute to the plot? I’m not going to expect “Ragtime Gal” and high kicking dance steps at this point, but maybe she could hum a couple of bars of “Wait ‘Till The Sun Shines Nellie”?
Do you suppose the original plan for Brian Sturdivant was to have him be the “new Barnabas”? I mean he’s dark, and intense, has that great tousle, good profile, nice build, dark flashing deep-set eyes, he moves like a tawny young…
I’m sorry, where was I?
Oh, yes. Don’t guess there’s anything in the DS behind-the-scenes about him, or it would have been mentioned by now.
Yeah, I think Brian Sturdivant is really cute too. He’s not that good of an actor here, but they’re giving him a terrible, nonsensical part to play. I wish they’d kept him around, to see what he could have done with better material.
I wrote all I know about him in the Behind the Scenes footnote under 1051 — small parts in a Roger Corman movie and a TV-movie in 1971, and a few months as an understudy on a Broadway play in 1972. I don’t know what happened to him after that. If anybody knows anything, please post it, I’d love to know.
Well, as I implied elsewhere, I once read what seemed like a rather knowledgeable insider post that said he was dating Jonathan Frid. (That was not the language he used–I’ve cleaned it up.) The poster seemed to imply that this was why Sturdivant was cast. There was lots of other juicy stuff that sounded plausible, including the specifics of a nearly marriage-ending affair that Sam Hall alluded to an interview to which you linked to in your great appreciation of him.
This is all terribly sordid for this blog but I have I seized my opening to inject some lowdown gossip.
–i.e., one of your absolute DS faves encouraged another of your absolute DS faves to sleep with a co-star who consequently broke the heart of another co-star. This all led to much acrimony but had zero impact on the TV show.
Well we know that Nancy Barrett and David Ford were married during DS but divorced after in ’69 well after his character was killed off.
That was some weird aberration. Nancy Barrett was previously married to her much-older manager so draw your own conclusions. The affair mentioned above came much later and was more along the lines of what often happens on sets between very attractive young people.
David, can’t you give us some initials or something? I’m burning with curiousity now.
JS and KJ broken up by DS (who then goes back to spouse), all encouraged by GH.
That’s it. And when I said it didn’t affect the SHOW, that was a hint
Ahh, that makes sense. It certainly explains the onscreen chemistry between certain characters
It didn’t affect the show because the show was already done. It happened during NODS. Sam Hall revealed it in an interview toward the end of his life:
http://www.tvparty.com/70-dark-shadows.html
One has to wonder what Grayson Hall was thinking, to be so reckless as to try and create a “soap within a soap”. Perhaps, in the end, she had become “Hoffman” after all.
Yeah, what WAS Grayson thinking? That’s…sorta creepy.
This was definitely a Svengali/Trilby Hail Mary thrown into this story at the last minute.
I’d let Claude North Svengali me any time.
I don’t really understand why they had to kill everybody to finish up the story. I guess Dan Curtis was in Dalek mode: Exterminate! It reveals him as a ‘movie guy’. Movies have beginnings, middles, and ends. Soaps don’t need endings. If they kept some of the characters around they might come in handy some parallel rainy day.
Of course, one Parallel Time dimension presupposes an infinite number of such dimensions. Maybe they were planning to go back someday to a different Parallel Time. One which was actually, y’know, INTERESTING.
Yeah, you would think that happily ever after for Parallel Quentaggie would be TPTB’s objective here.
It looks like they might end up the only survivors, which is kind of a happy ending – comparatively –
But…what about Aunt Hannah? Tune in tomorrow…
And her stuffed parrot?
He’s pining for the fjords.
Lovely plumage…
The real happy ending will come when Maggie divorces Mr. Shouty. PT Quentin has been irascible, unfair, disloyal and downright mean to Maggie since they first crossed the Collinwood threshold. All of that can’t be blamed on Angelique, either. PT Q. has a basic character flaw – he’s a jerk.
Sorry – he’s been all that and worse, but she’ll forgive him and keep coming back for more. That’s what you did if you were a woman; men didn’t need to change, women had to take it. Most movies and TV shows said so. Some still do.
You’re right but, I have a deep abiding sympathy for Maggie. She’s been mistreated in every time band and era. I wish we could have seen her get her Joe back in real time. That would have made up for some of it.
Maggie and Joe were one of the only couples I liked!
I mean, I’m willing to spot Angelique on Roger, because–well, he did kill her! And apparently thought saying “I’m sorry, it was because I loved you so much” was going to get him out of it; y’know, after he’d done in Carolyn and Liz and fervently hoped to frame Quentin for both.
Angelique still going after Quentin post-Roger warmth-draining? Well, that’s just her, honestly. She’s like a dog with an old sock once she gets a revenge bug in her ear.
It’s hard to turn away from the closing episodes of a story. The body counts pile up, which make for great dramatic moments. But not long-lasting emotional/story impact.
Yeah, for some reason I cared more about the people who died in 1795, even though we didn’t know them much longer than the Paralellites. Maybe it was because they were connected to the people we knew back in 1966-7.
If they had, say, skipped the whole Leviathan bit, just Julia and Barnabas returning from the past to this alternate future, which they’d actually created by their time-jumping (or Vicki’s, why not…she jumped first); everyone thinks “Hoffman” is acting strangely, nobody knows Barnie, they land a month or so before Angelique gets her ‘acupuncture and massage’ comeuppance. Don’t bother with the ‘six months and she hasn’t decayed’ junk, just bring in Alexis. And have her get possessed instead. Say, at the moment Cyrus torches Angelique’s remains. We have a connection with the characters now, because they’re ‘our’ characters, not Parallel Time people. (I know, it’s a tiny distinction.)
Now, Barnabas is stuck here until they can go back and fix “their” timeline (which can still be the East Wing portal, just introduce that bit around the current point in the story; or maybe they can find some used I-Ching wands, or a cursed mah-jong set, a stairway through time, I dunno.)
I’m just sayin’.
I really like your ideas!
Could have worked!
Well, it ‘ups’ the stakes, with each murder it gets more important to get back and fix the timeline so Willie and Carolyn (and now Liz) can be okay again; Julia & Barnabas have to try to figure out where the problem started, where this timeline diverged. Julia has to go through all the Collins history again (because Barnabas won’t be doing it, being too caught up in everyone else’s stories), and then they’ll need to find some way back to repair things. And (like in City On The Edge Of Forever), to fix it they have to kill Vicki.
Melissa — I cared more for the 1795 people. I think I lot of it is we were given a moment here and there to care about the characters. And since they were working toward a foregone conclusion (Barnabas chained up in a coffin), they had to focus on something else besides a surprise ending.
1795 bloodbath, to me, was the best one, the saddest one and the one that holds together best storywise.
P.S. — I’m about 15 episodes in 1840. So far, I like it pretty well.
Yeah, the conclusion of 1795 is like a Shakespearean tragedy. If Louis Edmonds played Joshua Collins like King Lear.
I’ve always thought that we could have the luxury of carrying a lot less about the parallel versions of these folks. That gives latitude, takes the body count up to incredibly high levels. I have to admit it’s one of the things I love about parallel time. How many characters can we kill off in a little time.
I don’t think there was ever a storyline on Dark Shadows where they didn’t have a issue with logic, consistency or continuity. But PT seemed to have more than its share of problems. All of a sudden Angelique has Endora-level powers without a need for voodoo dolls ..just flames in the fire..to make Maggie do her bidding. We’ll never know exactly what mash-up of science, the paranormal and black magic made the Roxanne-Angelique-Alexis thing possible and how. And in spite of the high body count they will still leave us with loose threads. It also seemed that going forward the writers cared even less about all the continuity issues.
And it gets worse and worse.
Gosh, I sound so negative. There are a few good moments left, but the heydey is over.
There ARE good moments ahead. When I watched the show during its original run On a regular basis) it was during this period through the end. So at the time I wasn’t aware of continuity problems. I’m of the opinion that there are actors and situations that are very strong and if handled better could have kept DS going longer. More on that when we leave PT
The mansion even goes down in this one.
Why is Barnabus even here? He returned to free Maggie from her hostage situation, right?
And then…he fell in LOVE! With a nearly completely unresponsive Roxanne.
Completely gorgeous, no agency of her own and doesn’t say a word. She’s ideal for him.
Ha ha, no need to brainwash this one…
Which only happened because there was, after Maggie’s rescue, absolutely no reason for him to hang around, ever.
I’m pining for the Roxanne who bites.
I finally figured out who Brian Sturdivant reminds me of: Finn Wittrock, who played Judy Garland’s last husband in the biopic that came out a couple of years ago.
I have to say that I’m irritated that Barnabas’s main reason for looking for Julia seems to be so that she can awaken Roxanne!
PT has the usual continuity errors, the dropped plot points, jettisoned characters, and rushed endings that one finds throughout Dark Shadows, only more so! I think its biggest problem is that there’s no really likeable characters in PT. I gave up on the toxic pairing of Maggie and Quentin a long time ago. I’m used to the stories not making sense, but they used to sweep you along anyway. This was determined not to be fun. I had forgotten most of it because very little was memorable. It could have been exciting to view it with almost fresh eyes after 50 years but instead it just felt like an interminable chore.
I thought I saw a glaring plot hole when Barnabas still thought it was necessary to keep Angelique from dying because only she could clear Quentin. But then I realized he doesn’t know that Roger confessed to Maggie and then tried to kill her.
Oh, and I guess we can infer the significance of the dagger now. It was what North always used to hypnotize Roxanne. I can’t believe I’m paying this much attention to this godawful storyline.
Trysting on Grandpa’s grave is the sort of thing Mary and Percy Shelley would’ve done….
Angelique instructs Maggie to “go to my room” and then clarifies it as “Angelique’s room” which I assumed was a mistake, but it’s the same in the next episode prologue (unless its a replay, not the scene done again)?
Props to Louis Edmonds. He was wonderful as demented PT Roger in these episodes.
The big question: When did Barnabas learn how to use a ball point pen? He should have asked Angelique for an inkwell.