“We can stop the cause of what’s made all this happen if we go back!”
There’s a moment in this episode when it looks like Julia might give Quentin a lethal injection, as the Sheriff of Collinsport just stands there and watches.
It doesn’t happen, but that’s how bleak the current storyline is, that you sit there and think, wait, is Julia casually murdering one of her friends? Last year, we spent six weeks with the main character of the show mind-controlled by lurking horrors from the depths of space who wanted to cleanse the earth of humankind, and it wasn’t anywhere near as scary as this.
Escaping from an adventure in a parallel dimension, Barnabas and Julia have washed up on the shore of 1995, a post-apocalyptic dystopia where their house was destroyed by ghosts. Convinced somehow that they’ll be able to travel back to 1970 whenever they want to, they’ve spent the last two weeks trying to find out what happened twenty-five years ago, so they can hop back in time and put a stop to it. This is how your brain works when you’re pretty sure that you’re the protagonist, and the story is actually about you.
Unfortunately, that means everybody else is an add-on, and life has gotten progressively more difficult for Dark Shadows characters who aren’t named Barnabas or Julia. They just went through a harrowing storyline where almost everyone was either murdered or died in a fire, and now we’re watching Carolyn die, again, for the second time this month.
Carolyn was one of the oldest living survivors of whatever it was that killed everybody else, spending decades lost in guilt and grief and incipient cat-ladyness. Barnabas reassured her that she was strong enough to fight the ghost, and she believed him, except she wasn’t, and now she’s dead.
Carolyn Stoddard is survived by a scribbled list of bullet points, which she jotted down for a PowerPoint presentation she was planning to give in the ruins of her childhood home. But the evil ghost got there first, and cancelled the lecture. Once again, the villain wins, as they tend to do on Dark Shadows. Stay tuned for local programming.
And the ghost has his hooks into Julia, twisting her loyalties out of shape. He keeps appearing on the landing with vengeance on his mind and a spotlight on his face, silently filling her with destructive instructions. She promised she’d love the bat-man forever, but 1995 is a bad year for the franchise. Now that I think of it, Batman had sidekick troubles too, that year.
Barnabas and Julia thought they could just skip across the surface of this bloodstained field, picking up some helpful intel and then zipping back to headquarters to mull it over. Every single person they’ve talked to for the last two weeks has told them, don’t go into that house. And they keep going in and out, at least once per episode, because it’s a gorgeous set and you want to show it off. But it turns out they’re not untouchable after all. Hubris has a way of catching up with you; that’s pretty much what hubris is for.
So Barnabas is trying to interest Julia in a round of Junior Detectives, which is usually their favorite party game, but Julia is suddenly the party of no. “Julia! Carolyn’s dead!” he cries, but she just stands there in the foyer, looking up at a ghost who isn’t there.
“Come, you must examine the body!” he croaks. Barnabas is actually getting hoarse, because he’s been expressing surprise so much these days that it’s wearing out his voice. This is only going to get worse.
By the time he gets Julia into the drawing room, Carolyn’s body has vanished, spirited away by a spirit who probably should have taken the note instead.
“Well, she was here!” says Barnabas, his voice straining. “She was sitting at that table, with a pen in her hand!” Then he picks up a piece of paper, still yelling. “Julia — this is her writing! That note that she gave me! She remembered! She was trying to write down what she was trying to tell us!”
And this is just the beginning of the episode; Barnabas is going to need to find a way to stop being so emphatic all the time, or he isn’t going to make it to act three. But Julia keeps on contradicting everything he says.
Barnabas: The night of the sun and the moon…
Julia: That doesn’t make any sense, Barnabas!
Barnabas: The night Rose Cottage was destroyed…
Julia: Rose Cottage? There’s no house here by that name! Carolyn was mad, Barnabas!
Barnabas: The unfinished horoscope… the night I sang my song… the picnic… the murder! All of these are clues!
Julia: Really, Barnabas — that other note that she sent to you fooled me, it sounded coherent! But obviously —
Barnabas: Regardless of what you say, these are obviously im– very significant things, that she wanted to tell us!
It’s fantastic, one of the great moments in anti-infodumping. They’ve got a list of six phrases that the audience is supposed to absorb and remember, because they’re clues to the mystery that we’ve spent the last two weeks puzzling over. But he goes so fast, and his voice is failing, and he’s chewing up some of the lines, it’s impossible to really take any of it in. And meanwhile, Julia is being nothing but distracting; it’s like she’s at war with the audience.
He tells her to go call the Sheriff, and she’s got every possible reason to say no — I don’t know what to say, we’re not supposed to be in this house, he’ll think I’m mad, he’ll ask too many questions. And finally, Barnabas turns to face his friend.
Barnabas: Julia… what is wrong with you?
Julia: Nothing.
Barnabas: Something is!
Julia: Why?
Barnabas: Well, you disagree with everything I say! Whatever suggestion I make, you don’t want to do it!
Julia: Well, I’m just putting myself in the sheriff’s place, getting a seemingly mad telephone call from somebody.
Barnabas: Julia! Carolyn is dead!
And then Gerard is there, in his own little unearthly spotlight on the landing, pulling Julia’s strings. The formerly unbeatable Junior Detectives are turning against each other. Barnabas knows that something’s wrong, but he can’t imagine what it could be. All he knows is that his world has been destroyed, and he is completely and utterly alone.
This goes on all day; that was just act one. Barnabas finally gets Julia to go call the Sheriff, while he searches the house for the corpse. He knows that Carolyn’s dead and there’s nothing he can do to save her, but this is a person that he loved, and she shouldn’t be defiled by phantoms.
And they find her, laid out in the playroom among the stuffed animals and Raggedy Anns, just another toy that the poltergeist is playing with.
“Who put those flowers there?” Barnabas croaks. “What a grotesque sense of humor.”
Gerard is unstoppable, and his cruelty isn’t limited to killing them. He wants them to suffer, to betray each other, to lose hope. There’s no point to this weird display. He just does it because he can.
And then we get a sequence from the Satanic road company of Of Mice and Men, also known as George and Lennie at the Gates of Hell.
Over at the Old House, the deranged Quentin gets the news that Carolyn is dead, and he knows, with the simple clarity of the fictionally insane, that he’s next on the hit list. He cycles through a selection of manic attitudes.
“He killed her!” Quentin shouts. Everybody’s shouting today. “Barnabas Collins made him do it! He wasn’t satisfied! He had to try and find out for himself!”
And then: “No, no, he’ll kill me! He’ll kill me, too!”
And then: “Ohhh — don’t you mention that name! Don’t you ever mention that name, do you hear me? I don’t know any Gerard!”
And then: “I know! The woods! That’s where they found me, they found me in the woods! Where’s Elizabeth? Elizabeth!”
And then: “They did, they made me go there, just like they made Carolyn go there. Oh, I wonder what I was doing in the woods.”
And so on.
So by the time Julia comes in, Quentin is already all of the way wound up.
“You!” he shouts. “Yes! You were with him there, weren’t you? Weren’t you? No no no, don’t come near me, don’t you come near me!”
She goes into professional mode. “Sheriff, I am a doctor,” she explains. “Can you hold him, please?”
Quentin tries to struggle. “No, you keep her away from me, she’s not gonna touch me!”
“I’ve got to give him a sedative,” Julia says. “He’s been ill.”
So they hold him, and they make him sit down, and this might actually be the moment that Quentin Collins dies.
So Quentin sits there, in the chair, waiting for his execution.
“It really doesn’t matter, you know?” he says, dreamily. “Cause he always wins. He always wins…” This really is the bleakest thing they’ve ever done.
He turns to Julia. “I want to go back there. Will you take me back there?”
“Back where?” she says, readying the injection.
“Just away from here. Oh, I just want to go far away from here.”
“That might be a very good idea.”
And George raised the gun and steadied it, and he brought the muzzle of it close to the back of Lennie’s head. The hand shook violently, but his face set and his hand steadied. He pulled the trigger. The crash of the shot rolled up the hills and rolled down again. Lennie jarred, and then settled slowly forward to the sand, and he lay without quivering.
George shivered and looked at the gun, and then he threw it from him, back up on the bank, near the pile of old ashes.
Tomorrow: Gangsta’s Paradise.
Dark Shadows bloopers to watch out for:
Barnabas holds onto Carolyn’s note through all of act 1, and he’s still holding it when we come back from commercial. In act 2, when he’s thinking outside the drawing room, he slowly crumples the note in his hand, and he’s still playing with it when he goes to check the secret panel, and when he sees Gerard. When Gerard disappears and Barnabas argues with Julia, he’s still fussing with the paper; you can hear it crunching in his hand every couple seconds. He goes upstairs to the playroom, and when we see him up there, he doesn’t have the paper anymore; it may have been reduced to its component molecules by that point.
When Barnabas touches the secret panel, Gerard steps into frame a little sooner than he should have.
Barnabas tells Julia, “We can stop the cause of what’s hap– made all this happen if we go back!”
When Barnabas shouts “You will not go unpunished, Gerard!”, the camera drifts a little too high and shows one of the studio lights.
Barnabas tells Julia and the Sheriff, “I’m going to get Eliot Stokes. He’ll tell me who’s the best person to have this exorcise conducted!”
Quentin tells the Sheriff, “I’ll kill him! He made her go to that room!” Then he corrects himself: “He made her go to that house!”
And a little later in that scene: “You see, he made me go there. They did, they made me go there, just like they made Carolyn go there.”
When the Sheriff is asking Julia where Barnabas is, the camera takes a while to focus on Gerard at the window, and manages to get as far as his hands when the dramatic sting chimes.
Tomorrow: Gangsta’s Paradise.
— Danny Horn
Dark Shadows Every Day 
Standing by the table pointing downward, Barnabas makes me think of The Magician in the tarot, which is a card I’ve often identified with him.
That would would be really cool, but requires some symbolic thinking on the part of the writers. Not that that they couldn’t…i’m just sayin’…
I didn’t mean to insinuate it was anything more than a neat coincidence! I did a whole DS version of the major arcana once, but it’s all on a lost hard drive.
how cool is that, Melissa. what an interesting presence you are.
I have to check the “rule book,” but i think it would have to be a really powerful ghost to make a human body disappear and move somewhere else. And, according to the “rule book,” wouldn’t a vampire be able to locate that body at least as easily as a powerful ghost?
Wait…i’m losing the threads here…is Barnabas still a vampire? Has he checked in to his coffin recently? Man, this is so confusing.
Rule book should have something about Quentin not being affected by poison (or, indeed, any other kind of ) injection – they just mentioned that magic portrait the other day.
And wasn’t the sheriff pushing J&B to the city limits just a day ago? Now he’s gonna hold Quentin while “I’m a doctor” Hoffman shoots him up? At least he’s the best looking sheriff Collinsport has had. Fills out that uniform well, just look at the line of those shoulders!
They’re going to have to leave 1995 soon, they’ve almost run out of characters to bump off. But that shot of our Carolyn, lying dead in the ruin of the drawing room, that’s wonderful drama. And then having her disappear is good creepy! (Now we know what happened to Dr. Lang when he died.)
Oh yeah, I forgot he was immortal. That’s the kind of thing that you probably shouldn’t be able to forget about someone.
I though the portrait would be channelling off the insanity curse from Quentin, too, but since he’s had amnesia in the past, I guess the portrait doesn’t have an effect on his brain. I wonder if it also takes care of his haircuts and manicure, and he never has to shave? Would alcohol also have no effect on Quentin?
Questions like that keep me up nights…
This has been an ongoing debate about the portrait’s effects and for me, it seems simple enough that the portrait only keeps him from aging and turning into a werewolf. He’s ageless not immortal.
And being cut in the face with broken glass.
The portrait preserves the physical form, just as a portrait would, and transfers that to Quentin, giving the painting the image of what he’d actually look like. So, if he for instance fell into a wood chipper, the painting might take the form of a pile of hamburger, but Quentin’s going to look okay but will likely be dead. But he’s still a lot more impervious than anyone. If the portrait is destroyed, he turns into Hurd Hatfield.
Every ghost seemed to live by his or her own “rules.”
Josette / Sarah / Jeremiah / Quentin / Beth / Peter — all seemed to have a different set of abilities regarding communication, materialization, etc.
At this point I think Julia’s the vampire: she hasn’t eaten or slept since Angelique held her prisoner in PT, and hasn’t changed clothes since they got to 1995.
Those ambitious shots from behind the (Old House) stairs to nowhere lately…it had to happen sooner or later…I saw the end of the stairs in the front of the shot.
Not that the set layout of the Collinwood set lined up perfectly to the actual Seaview Terrace but the Old House set REALLY was wrong.At the very least there should have been another door at the bottom of the stairs
Happy Days was the worst comparing the exterior to the interior of the house!
The Sheriff of 1995 is a particularly over-the-top actor who emotes by shouting a lot. Even when he’s exhibiting some pathos memorializing Carolyn from his memories as a teenager(?) I don’t feel it.
A lawman on DS was apparently the most difficult role. Not a single one truly made an indelible mark. I guess Dana Elcar, by sheer number of appearances and a memorably large rear end, came closest.
Only in the movie did the Collinsport law enforcement have any real effect.
I’ve never seen the movie. I guess I should watch it sometime.
HODS will be on TCM on October 28. Also NODS.
You mean Sherrif Dennis Patrick in House of Dark Shadows? Yeah, he seemed to have a decent operating budget, too, with cars and multiple deputies and stuff.
I really liked Dana Elcar. He simply commanded authority. Later when he was the chief of detectives on Baretta he kept that authority demeanor.
I’m glad someone mentioned Dana Elcar again. He always knew how to play likable authority figures, on that show, MacGyver, and other things.
Dana Elcar maybe did have some greater air of authority, but he still could never solve a case.
In 1995, Barnabas was in town less than two weeks before the sheriff was at his coffin with a cross and a gun loaded with silver bullets. Good thing none of the Patterson brothers was that effective! We’d have gone straight back to a show about Burke and Vicki going on dates and moaning about Jason McGuire.
He took the Roger Davis Correspondence Course in Acting.
But he hasn’t got to the chapter on grabbiness yet.
To Carolyn’s deep relief!
I’m having meta-flashbacks now of how the large swaths of DS struck me back in the day: Danny’s right, this image of Gerard having driven everyone out, not only to homelessness but to death or madness, trashing the place, and spiritually infecting Julia felt incredibly dire, but it actually felt worse because it came after the endless wandering story fumbles of 1970PT, and I remember genuinely wondering if I wanted to keep watching the show. There was a much-needed return to structured storytelling (Carolyn’s list of cryptic memories was like a lampshade promise to the audience that they were going to start sticking to a plan again), but if the only way to get that was to go through this level of hopelessness, I was genuinely renegotiating my relationship to the show. (And the endlessly dilatory Victorian novel that we landed in in 1840 discouraged me, too.) Danny’s (unquestionably valid) question of whether Gerard is hot is a variation on the question I was asking back then–is there anything to look forward to, not only in this stretch of the plot, but in the show?
Michael, I felt exactly the same way back then – and now. I did get that sense that there was nothing to look forward to, and I began shifting my interest to One Life to Live. By contrast, it had relatable, contemporary, and relevant stories at that time.
Too much time traveling, 1840 should never have happened.
Of course.
It just dies in 1841pt.
I mean of course 1840 was worth seeing…just not 1841pt!
They should have gone back to 1970, brought back Thayer David as Petofi, finally having made it to the future; brought back Alexandra as a hardened, widowed Vicki and resolved her story (giving Joan Bennett something real to do after too long); and brought back Diana Millay as Laura for a final flameout in a storyline that could have involved Roger. Quentin, Angelique and Barnabas, and finally allowed David to grow up. Sometimes going back to one’s roots is the smartest move. Instead we got Sebastian Shaw and clues that went nowhere and Randall Drew and Samantha Collins and Angelique as Barnabas’ true love. Shoulda woulda coulda.
Remember when the time travel concept was a big thing, involving seances, I Ching wands, gypsy intervention and other arcana? Now, they talk about it like they’re catching a bus to Boston. No probs, temporal vortices all over the place, just hop in. 1970? Sure, what day? Drop you off right there!
Yeah, I’m sitting at Blue Whale bar stool,
Talking like a damn fool
Got the twelve o’clock Sam Evans booze blues
And I’ve given up hope for this afternoon soap
Over a bottle of cold brew
Is it any wonder I’m not bat-shit crazy
Is it any wonder I’m sane at all
Is it any wonder I’ve got too much time travel on my hands
It’s ticking away with my sanity
I’ve got too much time travel on my hands
It’s hard to believe such a calamity
I’ve got too much time travel on my hands
And it’s getting away, getting away from me
Great post as usual.
And to raise a totally trivial question – I wonder where Julia got her little black bag of sedatives from? She clearly didn’t bring them with her from parallel time, and her medical license probably wouldn’t be up to date in 1995. Did her medical bag sit gathering dust in the abandoned Old House for 25 years? In which case those drugs are probably way past their use-by date!
I learned from reading about the green pills in The Queen’s Gambit that the tranquilizers Librium and Valium were made by a division of Hoffmann-La Roche, a distant relative perhaps? Maybe she got a family discount. It would explain a lot.
Julia’s like the merchant NPC in any given RPG game.
So Quentin escaped from the asylum at least a couple of days ago, but the sheriff in his hometown hasn’t been notified yet? Par for the course, I suppose.
Barnabas really cuts loose with a howl when he sees the sheriff holding the cross over him. I don’t recall Frid reacting that way to a cross before. Maybe he just got caught up in the spirit of this Very Loud Episode.
I kept saying to the screen “Uh, Sheriff? You don’t wanna maybe nab the escaped lunatic?”
“A silver bullet found at Collinwood?” Where in hell did that come from?
I had to chuckle when Gerard and Julia were having a staring contest, and she lost, because of course, the blinking champion would!
This weird crazy Quentin is not a good fit on him either. Why can’t we have the swarthy confident Quentin again?
How’s this for bleak: Gerard did Carolyn a favor. You know it’s true.