“David, they’re nowhere in the room! They’re dead people! They’re ghosts! And we look exactly like them!”
There is no such thing as time. There’s only space, physical space, and it is space that measures the distance between those points which we, in our ignorance and folly, insist are points in time. All time is one point, one moment, it is ever existent and it is ever accessible, and it is physical space that can be used to make all time easily accessible. Well, physical space and LSD, obviously.
Dr. Julia Hoffman is currently engaged in a literature search for a weeks-long research project on stuff that’s happening upstairs in her own house. She’s been reading her way through the Collins family’s enormous collection of books about themselves, looking for references to Rose Cottage, Gerard Stiles, the Java Queen, and any other phrase that might come up in conversation. She was looking at tax records the other day; I have no idea what that was supposed to achieve.
But Julia knows that there’s a category 5 horological hurricane headed this way, which will destroy the house, scatter the family and set up a supernatural storm surge that will still be felt twenty-five years from now. She will have recently been there herself, touring the wreckage in the far-off space year of 1995. Now that she’s back at home, she’s tearing through the library, desperate to find a clue that could help her un-impend the impending disaster.
Quentin swaggers in and asks what’s cooking, and Julia explains that she’s trying to find a staircase.
“Oh? In a book?” he smiles, and she grins.
“Well,” she explains, “I’m trying to find a mention of it, or something. Something that says something about the staircase that Barnabas and I returned from 1995 on.”
So there you have the current storyline, in a nutshell: the show’s best character is sitting on the couch, flipping pages and hoping to find something that says something.
But at least the second-best character is on the scene, passing the time. Quentin makes an assortment of flippant remarks, ending with, “You and Barnabas do not give up easily, do you?”
“Well, we don’t dare,” she says, “for the children’s sake, and yours, and everyone’s.”
“I don’t mean to joke about it,” he says, giving her a warm smile. “Here, let me help you.”
It’s adorable; these two are so cute together — not as romantic partners, but as best friends who tease each other. They do several of these Quentin/Julia bonding scenes over the next week, for irony-accentuation purposes.
And then Julia finds something special — a sheet of paper, with an architectural plan for “Proposed Stairway Into Time”. Seriously. That’s going to be a thing now.
They didn’t make a big deal about it at the time, but apparently Barnabas and Julia returned from 1995 to 1970 on a special staircase, which magically appeared and led them to safety. And here’s the plan for it, showing the West Wing corridor, and a little drawing of a staircase with a helpful arrow pointing in the direction of up. That’s all there is to it, apparently.
This is obviously ridiculous, but the paper has some magic words written on it: “Quentin Collins, 1840”. This is Quentin’s great-grand-uncle, an addition to the increasing population of characters named Quentin Collins, which will ultimately span two time periods, two Parallel Times and into the next movie. That’s the nice thing about Quentins; if you lose him, there’ll probably be another one along in a minute.
But if there’s a Quentin involved, there must be something to it; that’s the signal that we’re supposed to pay attention. An Oscar or an Abner can be easily forgotten; they name-dropped “Abner Collins” a couple weeks ago, and nobody even noticed. You can’t do that with a Quentin; they demand our attention.
So then we get into the double-agent scenario, which I’m feeling mixed about. Quentin — original flavor Quentin, not the 1840 one — is currently under the spell of ghost governess Daphne Harridge, who’s been meeting with him in her old room in the abandoned wing of the house, to no avail. She’s one of the things that Julia’s investigating, so Quentin’s actually being obstructive and speed bumpy.
Take the looking-for-the-staircase sequence, for example. Armed with this impossible architectural plan, Julia charges off to the West Wing to find the purported staircase. This leads her to Daphne’s room, which makes Quentin itchy.
“Another bedroom, Julia,” he says, “like so many others.”
She asks, “I wonder whose room it was?”
“Look, I’m sure that there are some more plans downstairs that we haven’t gone through. Why don’t we go back downstairs?”
She just stands there, lost in thought. “We’re looking for a stairway through time,” she mutters.
Quentin raises his voice. “Julia, now listen to me, if you’re going to go rummaging around through every room in this house, we might as well forget about the staircase!” This must be one of those definitions of “rummaging” that involves standing entirely still. And then he grabs her by the upper arm, and pulls.
He’s clearly speedbumping — blocking a story point that might make things more interesting, like Julia finding out about Daphne — and normally that’s against my religion, but that’s why they’re doing the cute Julia/Quentin scenes.
When it’s David and Hallie purposely standing in the way of natural story progression then it’s intolerable, because they’re basically generic children with nothing to offer in the way of entertainment value. But Quentin and Julia are the stars of the show, a title they forcibly wrestled out of the hands of the boring family who used to live on this set.
They have a weird and interesting history, and they’re practically the only people who know all of the absurd and contradictory secrets that they share. This isn’t a relationship based on random proximity; these two really trust each other. So he’s not lying when he says that he wants to help her. He’s actually torn here, between loyalty to his friends versus the hotness of his new hypnocrush.
And they really play that angle, when Daphne summons him for some lilac-scented love. She gets ready for a silent ghost hug, but he refuses.
“What’s happened to my freedom?” he demands. “I know, all you have to do is summon me, and I’ll come. You won’t let me tell Julia and Barnabas about you. Why? Is it because you have something to do with what’s supposed to happen?” These are all good questions.
“I can no longer lie to my friends!” he continues, keeping up his end of this one-way conversation. “One minute I help them, the next I betray them!” And then he tells her to go to hell, and makes for the door.
This is all very exciting, but then, argh, after the commercial break, he walks right back in and kisses her on the mouth. “I should have known I would never get away from you,” he coos. “I’ll never be free. It’s too late for that.”
So like I said, mixed feelings. I kind of dig the double-agent vibe, and the angry ghost lecture was fun, but he was actually just about to do something that would make the story more interesting. If he told Julia about Daphne, that would finally give her something to do besides sit in the drawing room reading books.
But we do get a plot token for sitting through all that, which is nice. After the kiss, Daphne hands him a journal: “The Thoughts, Words and Deeds of Quentin Collins, Esquire, As Set Down By His Own Hand, 1840.” I guess this is our dimension’s equivalent of The Life and Times of Barnabas Collins.
He hands it over to Julia, who’s impressed. “What a strange man he must have been,” she muses. “Wildly fascinated with the occult, raging against the stars and the universe because he knew they were capable of changing, and that his relationship to them could be quite different.” And yeah, that’s pretty strange, all right. If anyone can squeeze some sense out of that line, I’d appreciate it if you’d let me know.
“Apparently he believed that time was quite fluid, and accessible,” she reads. “He must have been very advanced for his time.” Right, because these days fluid time is commonplace. Look, I don’t know where this is going exactly, but Q40 does sound like an interesting dude. Maybe we could go and look at him for a while?
Monday: A Sense of Something.
Dark Shadows bloopers to watch out for:
Julia is reading a book on the drawing room sofa. She flips a few pages, and then looks up at the camera for a long take, to get her cue. Then she starts flipping again. The camera cuts to Quentin, standing motionless in the foyer, waiting for his cue to start walking into the drawing room. After Quentin drops some books on the table, Julia looks up at the camera twice.
Quentin and Julia walk into Daphne’s room, where the burning notebook is smoldering on the desk, and they don’t smell smoke or anything.
Julia asks Quentin if there were no other books or papers, and he says, “No, I don’t think.”
After Daphne gives Quentin the book, you can see the top of the set.
Monday: A Sense of Something.
— Danny Horn
Dark Shadows Every Day 
“What a strange man he must have been,” she muses. “Wildly fascinated with the occult, raging against the stars and the universe because he knew they were capable of changing, and that his relationship to them could be quite different.” And yeah, that’s pretty strange, all right. If anyone can squeeze some sense out of that line, I’d appreciate it if you’d let me know.
I’d like to say it’s all so simple, but it isn’t. This is Dark Shadows and one has to look for the most convoluted explanation possible. Feeling impotent and used, 1840 Quentin had this thing about heavenly beings. Our beloved Dr. Hoffman has deduced that he could change the direction of his life…that he could get a life…by building a magical stairway to the stars. Using future theories of time and space, he would go beyond the speed of light and wind up any-where else than Collinwood and a intergenerationally dysfunctional family. Of course, LSD would be quicker than building a staircase, but this is Dark Shadows, after all.
There was nearly 11 minutes of new stuff in this episode – but they destroyed the book they spent ten minutes writing yesterday. So technically we are going backwards in time…without even using the staircase!
I am going to start counting the number of times Hallie uses David’s name – and taking a drink every time she says “…we CAN’T!” (I would take a shot whenever she says “David”, but I don’t know if it’s possible.)
On an ordinary soap opera, there’d be a scene where we saw Roger in Europe – I do hope he’s having a good time. He hasn’t even sent a postcard!
Tad and Carrie seem to think that Daphne knows everything – apparently speaking is NOT one of her talents? And exactly how old are the children meant to be, they seem to be about eight, judging by the dialogue. And will SOMEONE please give that picture over the fireplace a nudge back into position?! (I know I have mentioned it before; it just bugs me that set dressers feel that unused rooms all have paintings hung askew.)
Okay, so burn the notebook. Put it on the wooden table and set it ablaze (plainly David soaks his composition books in lighter fluid, and puts squibs inside each cover – I must try that), but by no means should you put the book INTO THE FIREPLACE BEHIND YOU to burn it. And apparently the scent of lilacs overpowered the odor of burning paper. Or they cancelled each other. Or something.
Now we have a draft of the Staircase Into Time – anybody for a quick run to Menards for some lumber? Seems like something we could slap together on the weekend!
Okay, and I’ll take a drink every time Hallie asks David why, who and when – and we’ll both be snockered in no time.
Or dead of cirrhosis. At any rate, we should be well-preserved (ie, pickled). Stay well away from open flames!
Obviously the notebook was playing a similar game, which is why it went up like a torch1
Can somebody put a muzzle on Hallie?
Oh, that made me so mad! The damn book was still smoldering and neither Quentin or Julia noticed at all!
Heyo Danny and fellow DS-Every-Day enthusiasts!
I first popped in here about a year ago, and I’m still watching/interacting with/cherishing this show for the first time (well, the Julia episodes, at any rate). And I’m finally nearly caught up to you all, now, having just reached episode 1071, myself, with Julia and Barnabas newly returned from their scary but awesome excursion to 1995.
I’ve added about a dozen comments and questions to various older posts from Danny and comments from others here. 🙂
Mostly keen to know some of your collective opinions on the best DS episodes and your fave DS characters or character pairings. My original query on this appeared on Danny’s post for my own top-rated episode: 1061. In fact that entire 1995 storyline, and J&B’s return to 1970, and their efforts to find out what led to the catastrophe, is by far my favorite, so far.
Anyway, just wanted to check in again and thank Danny and all here for the ongoing DS party (the best backdrop ever for a newbie like me to watch the show) … oh! And I meant to mention:
Since I was a kid and we used VHS to tape movies off the TV, I have watched this film, The Lady in White (1988), kinda obsessively every year in October.
It somehow has, to me, the exact same “feel” to it as Dark Shadows (certainly way the hell more than the Burton remake)! There are no vampires, notwithstanding Frankie’s Halloween costume, but … Well, it just shares that DS campy, spooky, fun, and sometimes disturbing “spirit.”
It’s set a bit before the DS series and in a small town outside NY. I am sure many of you are familiar with the film (in fact, it may well have been mentioned here elsewhere), but I wanted to post it, just in case. 🙂 And now I am going to watch it again while sipping my 🍎 cider and munching on my cinnamon -n-butter popcorn. Afterwards …back to DS #1071!! ❤❤❤
Hey Cole – The Lady in White haunts me, too. Of all the many scary movies I’ve seen, that one…well, you just have to experience it for yourself, right?
My favorite Dark Shadows episodes are all the ones from Barnabas’ first appearance through 1795 right on til the end of the Adam Story line.
Barnabas is my favorite character, followed pretty closely by Julia (although I had a hard time forgiving them for murdering Dr. Woodard). My favorite secondary characters are Nicholas Blair (he was so funny!) and of course, that fantastic scene stealer, Reverend Trask – in all his incarnations, including bubba Trask.
Samantha and BenJ: so glad you love Lady in White, as well! 🙂
I had the hugest crush on the older brother when I used to watch it as a kid! (He’s such a cute, funny boy; plus, he really is the hero of the whole story). 😉
Cole wrote about the movie “Lady in White” (1988).
Cole, I just watched the whole movie a night ago, and we both enjoyed it immensely. I want to say a big “THANK YOU” to you for the recommendation.
I know the movie “Lady in White” was not a Dan Curtis production, but it does have so many things a DS fan could really appreciate.
R.O.F. – I heard about another movie here on this blog titled “The Love Letter” (1998) by Dan Curtis, and starring George C. Scott’s son Campbell Scott and Jennifer Jason Leigh, which you may wish to check out, if it is still on YouTube. It was well done and is about time travel. In my opinion, “The Love Letter” is a glimpse at what “Dark Shadows” might have been like if Dan Curtis & the whole DS staff had (1) had a better budget to work with, and (2) had the luxury of time to revise the scripts again & again, and (3) had not always been so very rushed to churn out episode upon episode on an extremely tight production schedule.
Either of 2 links below, to “The Love Letter”:
or
Thanks!
-Count Catofi
Hey Cole, I am extremely behind, but I wanted to share my area of expertese (What DS people /connections are to be found in other things). Lady in White has a DS connection: Cliff Cudney. Cliff played John Hart Zombie in eps 963-965, and more recently appeared as Victor Flagler in ep 1062. Cliff is a stunt man in Lady in White.
Hello Cole:
I’ve just finished up the last episode a few days ago, so this is all pretty fresh in my mind. To answer some of your questions:
FAVORITE STORYLINE: Barnabas kidnaps Maggie
FAVORITE TIME TRAVEL: 1795
FAVORITE ACTORS: Thayer David and Nancy Barrett
FAVORITE CHARACTER PAIRINGS: Elizabeth and Carolyn / Julia and Barnabas (of course) / Roger and Elizabeth / David and Victoria / Ben Stokes and Barnabas / Nathan and Sukie (saw way too little of them) / Eliot Stokes and Julia / Amy and Chris / Sandor and Magda / Quentin and Judith and Edward / PT Willie and Carolyn
“What a strange man he must have been,” she muses. “Wildly fascinated with the occult, raging against the stars and the universe because he knew they were capable of changing, and that his relationship to them could be quite different.”
His staircase through time had taken him to 2017, where A Man Called Horn was redefining his relationship to the stars and the universe, first for the better, then, alas, the worse. He could see in advance the trajectory from virile black sheep to whipped ghost-love-slave and raged against the heavens–to no avail. Because Dan Curtis’s ego blocked created a black hole.
To think that it only took Julia a day or two of studying Dr. Lang’s journals to figure out how to create human life, and half that time she was hindered by the Dream Curse.
By far the most frightening thing she had ever been through!
Cole – First…oh, my…we have got to get you a life! How much time did that take to catch up? There have been moments when i’ve wanted to stake Barnabas, shoot the werewolf, and tell the Collins’ to go see a therapist for some intensive family counseling (in all generations). But there’s something that hooked me in and sucked me into their story.
MY FAVORITE STORY LINE… It’s hard to say. I really liked the Haunting of Collinwood by Quentin. Just a thing i have about ghosts, i guess. The destruction of Collinwood was traumatically wonderful. I felt the same way about the destruction of the Enterprise on Star Trek, the Next Generation. “Oh, no…they CAN’T do that!!!”
MY FAVORITE TIME TRAVEL…getting our collective butts out of parallel time and moving into 1995 (okay, still the past for us, but bordered on interesting).
MY FAVORITE ACTORS…David Hennesy. I came into DS on the 1895 episodes and wanted to be friends with him. Later i would come to appreciate Thayer David.
MY FAVORITE CHARACTER PAIRINGS… David and Amy.
Benj: I loved the haunting of Collinwood by Quentin a lot, too. The episode where he drives them out of the house and they pan to all the empty rooms while the Q theme plays may be my favorite episode of all.
I guess for its entire arc, Maggie’s kidnapping edges Quentin’s haunting out for me by a hair. But both story lines are remembered fondly by fans for good reason.
William, one of the things that stands out for me in the episode where Quentin’s ghost drives the family out of the house is the pans of the empty rooms. The DS studio wasn’t large enough to accommodate all those sets in that episode, so the producer (God bless Robert Costello) had to make arrangements for pre-taping a portion of the sequence; I suppose this happened on a weekend.
The other big thing going on in this episode was the interplay between Liz and Roger. Their drawing room scenes were a staple of the show from the beginning, and having them walk out of the house was priceless. True, I’d liked it better if we saw everyone who lived at Collinwood walking out (Carolyn, David, Amy, Maggie, Julia, Mrs. Johnson), but budgets are budgets.
Absolutely on target! I’m sure there were several other camera plays during the series that were good (if not as elaborate), but the “panning sequence” really raised the level of seriousness of Quentin’s ghost.
Danny, since I’m going through the Dream Curse story, which annoyed the hell out of me the first time through…until I got to this part of the show…I’m really curious. Now that you’re here in the Playroom story, which one is worse? In the Dream Curse part of the blog you were saying that you dreaded coming to it and saw it as an endurance test. How does this Playroom storyline match up? Is it worse for you than the Dream Curse? Because I find it worse. It’s the true low point for me, because it just feels like they are throwing random story elements out there with no plans for where they will lead, or even which ones they are going to take up or drop. As a result, things repeat with no purpose, like a random coin toss sequence. At least the Dream Curse had some sort of plan, even if it was irritatingly repetitive and in the end seemed pointless. It was a coherent story, however dull.
Not Danny, but answering anyway ’cause all this is fun. There are two reasons why the Dream Curse is the worst storyline for me:
One: The technical execution is horrible. It looks like a junior high haunted house. Those stupid doors. The fog. The skull on a stick. The endless repetition. The extreme overacting to these things that aren’t scary.
Two: We had a really nice ride up to this point. From Matthew Morgan kidnapping Victoria to the first couple of weeks after 1795, the show pretty well held together as it rolled along and dramatically changed. Liz’s blackmail story was sometimes slow and the show wandered in circles some in the period between Maggie’s return to Collinsport and Dr. Woodard’s murder, but nothing was a stinker.
Then we get to the meandering 1968 period where nothing really truly works (for me), and then there’s this laughable “scary” sequence.
By the time we get to this new haunting, I guess I’ve gotten used to story arcs that don’t stick. And there’s something about seeing yourself in a doll house that somehow seems at tiny bit creepy vs. that cheesy dream.
I did like Angie’s speech to sleepy Babrnabas, the intro to the Dream Curse, it filled me with hope for a great new storyline.
And then, the writers dashed those hopes onto the rocks below Widows Hill.
Made me throw a shoe at my TV.
Not speaking for Danny, but I think the Playroom story is far, far worse than the Dreamer Curse story. At least in the latter there were lots of things happening. It could have been an excellent story with a different type of dream. As presented, it was pretty hokey, but still, there was a plot.
Yeah. See, I really love cheap, dumb horror films so the hokey side of it doesn’t worry me too much – I just find it funny. If something like that has a good story or some redeeming feature, I’m OK. So the annoying thing for me about the Dream Curse is really only the repetitiveness. as in OH MY GOD THEY’RE NOT GOING TO SHOW THE DREAM AGAIN ARE THEY? But at least there is another story going on at the same time that is also OK – the Adam story. It’s true that the idea of being in a doll’s house and having a giant Daphne staring in at you is pretty disturbing, but all in all this part of the show just grates on me – because it is all just one story, one story that isn’t. It’s repetitive but in a sneakier way. I guess I don’t like that. If you’re going to be repetitive, just tell me and I can deal with it. Don’t try to pretend it’s a new thing and then just go over and over the same plot point.
“Tah dah!”
“What?”
“You said you were sick of the playroom story, so I changed it! Tah dah!”
“All you did was knock one of the Raggedy Anns over. That’s all you did.”
“TAH DAH!”
The Leviathans was horrible. Then Bramwell.
Okay, I’ll give it a shot. My “favorite” storylines have changed over the years. Sometimes it’s a portion of a storyline that I love seeing again and again. For example..
Vicki’s return from 1795-96. The audacity of time standing still in the present while Vicki spent months in the past. New Colbert music. Julia’s haircut and her truce with Barnabas. Barnabas’ cure. The portrait of Angelique. The introduction of Professor Stokes. Speaking of which Barnabas meeting Stokes was one of my favorite moments. His stifled smile when meeting Timothy Stokes stirred emotion in me. I felt that Ben had been reincarnated and Barnabas recognized it too, hence being reunited with an old friend.
Other favorite moments include “old” Barnabas biting Carolyn with the “flesh & blood” statement;The shock of Vicki being thrust back in time at the moment of her hanging; The reunion of Nicholas with Angelique Rumson… A great mix of snark and witty repartee; Barnabas meeting Magda and expressing disgust at the condition of the Old House while she talks back to him; Kitty’s realization that she’s Josette at the same time that Petofi realizes the power is back in the hand of the body now occupied by Quentin; the sweeping montage of the various rooms in Collinwood while Quentin’s music wafts through the house. Just a few of my faves
My favorite actors: Thayer David He could evoke hate or affection for his characters. In 1795-96 his performance made me forget all about his deplorable villain from Journey To The Center of the Earth. And in spite of his forgetting his lines and bad recovery Jonathan Frid really gave us a nuanced performance as Barnabas.
My favorite character pairings: Danny has made me appreciate Julia & Quentin but Julia and Barnabas still rule.
Guys, not to change the subject, but my coworker just asked me how he can get ahold of the entire 1991 DS remake that featured Ben Cross. What can I tell him?
It’s available on DVD. The latest version has a different screen ratio, but I don’t think they ever fixed the ‘day for night’ mistake. Barnabas romping through the daylight due to a tech issue with (technical jargon) when it went to DVD.
Thanks, Allison. Forgive the delayed response.
You could probably get on amazon prime or google play.
Well, none of us would be here reading this weblog if we didn’t at least appreciate the whole of the original DS series, though perhaps the different storylines on varying levels; the show wouldn’t still have its mystique, and its devoted fans after fifty years. Just like any cult show (and here I’m thinking of Star Trek – some brilliant episodes, some not so much).
For me, it was 1795. Simply stopping the current story (okay, granted it wasn’t really going anywhere) and dropping us into ‘The Past’, all the familiar actors now in completely different roles, was sheer brilliance (IMHO). We saw the tragedy unfold in quite a different way than the history we’d been given, but to the same end; DS would attempt this again but with varying success. There were wonderful moments of drama (particularly toward the end, like Joshua, Naomi and Barnabas), delightful comic scenes (Nathan and Millicent, “Oh! I am ruined!”) – Trask’s villainy, Abigail’s prudery, Angelique’s…well, Angelique! You could tell how much fun it was for the cast – well, most of them – and I’m sure Miss Winters never thought of ‘The Past’ in quite the same rosy way again!
Then came Adam, the Dream Curse, the Werewolf, the Haunting, and 1897 – lightning struck again with Quentin, and everyone got another change of character, another chance for the repertory to show their talents. Small wonder that the early episodes are dismissed so lightly by some, they seem so tame compared with the “vampire soap opera” we were seeing at this point. I wonder how the cast felt, having to go back to playing the 1960s incarnations after that.
Then, the missteps; Leviathans (which SHOULD have worked, if more care had been taken), Parallel Time (ditto) – the movie venture must have seemed such a step up at the time, onto the big screen, “Hollywood!” And Dan Curtis got impatient to move on to the next project (again, a parallel to Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry did the same thing) – and most damaging of all, the fan base also began to dissipate, heading out to college, to jobs, marriages, families – everything changed, as it inevitably does, and rehashing the same plotlines wouldn’t be good enough to please the Great Arbiter Of Television, THE RATINGS.
Would have been nice to have it happen in another way, but – still, we can be grateful for what we had, and that the show still exists for us and for those future fans – “Hey, have you ever seen Dark Shadows? It’s this crazy TV show from the 1960s with vampires!”
Ohh, thank you much, all: Count C., for the recommendation of the ‘Love Letter’ film–which I’m very excited to check it out this weekend!–and Samantha, William, Tony, and Benj (and all!) for the analysis/listings of the best DS episodes, etc. 🙂
I’ve found it fascinating to only watch the Julia episodes (which means I’ve been able to skip entire huge chunks of the more boring storylines in which she doesn’t feature); but I’m thinking that after I finish watching these Julia episodes, I may just hafta go back and start over again to ensure I watch all the best actors/characters and storylines in full. I fear I’ll experience severe withdrawal symptoms after the last Julia episode, otherwise. Seriously.
BenJ: you’re so right! I am honestly a bit worried about myself with the amount of time/adoration I’ve spent on DS this past year! Heheh.
In fact (this is super pathetic; I can’t believe I’m divulging this detail) … I am so obsessisively in love with the show that while I’m streaming/watching it, I sometimes use my Kindle to take photos of J&B or other fave characters in front of cool backdrops or in the midst of fun scenes (sometimes funny scenes) and then I use one of those free apps (e.g. https://www.amazon.com/Titan-Game-Landscape-Jigsaw-Puzzles/dp/B00GRTPZ3A) by which you can turn a photo in a digital jigsaw puzzle and … yeah, talk about lack of a life. Some Saturday nights actually see me sitting on the couch watching the show amidst playing the DS jigsaw puzzle game. Ahh, so pathetic. But freakin’ fun. 😉
❤ y’all!
Cole my sentiments exactly. I only really like the barnabas/Julia episodes. Hallie and David/Carrie are all irritating. I like looking at quentin but some of his episodes he is on LSD or speed or something and he has to be a functioning alcoholic by now. I have joined all the facebook dark shadows groups as I have no life now either…lol.
Two words: Covid lockdown. Others watched Netflix; I watched Dark Shadows. Very late to answer, Cole, but favorite storyline is the introduction of Barnabas up to 1795. Next is 1897. Best episode is the first episode of 1995. I may feel that way because it was so much better than 1970PT but it was visually arresting and truly exciting. Favorite pairing is Barnabas and Julia, but I always enjoy Roger, Carolyn, Willie and Stokes. I would also add 1897 Quentin, but not any other Quentin. I wish Tony Peterson had stuck around longer. Jerry’s Trasks were great villains.
Also, Playroom and Dream Curse are pretty much running neck-and-neck if you isolate those scenes. Playroom as a whole is probably worse because there are no other stories to distract from the tedium as there was with the Dream Curse.