“I have never harmed anyone simply for the sake of harming them.”
And what do Barnabas and Julia have to do with all this warlock malarkey? Practically nothing, I’m sorry to say. Barnabas might be vaguely aware that Quentin has something on his mind, but it’s certainly not keeping him up all day. The simmering tensions between Quentin, Gerard, Daphne and Desmond, which we might call Plot A, have entirely escaped our gentleman vampire, who’s been focusing his attention on Plot B, a cul-de-sac sidequest involving Roxanne, Julia and Angelique.
I’ve had to speak sharply to the main characters in the past about this unfortunate tendency of theirs to drift off into side issues. Two months ago, Barnabas and Julia traveled to the 19th century hoping to avert the Collinwood-closing catastrophe of summer 1970, and practically the only thing that they understand about those future events is that they involve shady gun-runner Gerard Stiles in a prominent role. But Gerard has been permitted to run roughshod over the entire show for weeks and weeks, getting possessed by warlocks and working his wiles on Daphne, entirely unchallenged by the two characters that the audience has presumably tuned in to see.
We last saw Barnabas on Thursday, when he brought a day player named Randall to a nearby crypt, handed him a hammer and stake, and gave him instructions on how to kill the lady vampire heading in that direction. Then Barnabas sprinted off towards his own coffin, leaving this pop-eyed nonentity to handle the protagonist duties. And where is Barnabas now?
Well, that’s what local undertaker and part-time detective Lamar Trask wants to know, observing to Julia that Barnabas is still missing. “No, he is not missing,” Julia sniffs. “He was grief-stricken about Roxanne, and he is in seclusion for several days.”
“I hardly think the circumstances warrant going into seclusion,” Trask scowls, and I agree. What we need right now is for Barnabas to shake that B-plot off his shoes, and get himself involved in the main story.
But seclusion is where he’s going to stay, I’m afraid, because Jonathan Frid is taking a two-week vacation. Barnabas won’t be back until episode 1159, when he’ll walk into Collinwood and act like he just stepped out for a breath of air. You’d never accept that kind of behavior from a main character in any other medium, but this is daytime soap opera, a genre composed of 15% creative storytelling and 85% logistics.
Which leaves us with well-meaning wastrel Desmond Collins, currently drowning on dry land in the drawing room of Rose Cottage. Desmond made the understandable mistake yesterday of taking something away from Gerard Stiles before Gerard was finished with it, which is a career-limiting move on a show more or less dominated by whatever Gerard happens to be interested in.
So Gerard, mad in every sense of the word, decided to say it with voodoo. Lighting a nearby candle, he took one of Desmond’s ascots, wound it around the neck of a little wooden fetish object, and pulled.
Now, I don’t have to tell you the effect this had on young Desmond. I haven’t been keeping exact count, but this is at least the 10th voodoo doll sequence that Dark Shadows has perpetrated in the last several years, the most recent being only three weeks ago. If this show has taught us anything, it’s that choking someone with voodoo is fast, reliable and inexpensive.
So Dr. Julia Hoffman, faced with yet another case of idiopathic occlusion of the esophagus, makes the obvious diagnosis, namely: black magic. Unfortunately, this is the only medical condition that Julia has ever treated that can’t be resolved with a bracing round of sedatives.
Julia doesn’t realize that Gerard is capable of this kind of tomfoolery, because she’s a main character and nobody tells her anything, so she runs home to confront Angelique, which isn’t correct but it’s a very good guess. They proceed to have a high-stakes high-camp showdown, which I have no choice but to present here in full.
Julia: Have you decided to kill off the entire Collins family, because you failed with me?
Angelique: What are you talking about?
Julia: You know what I’m talking about, I’m talking about witchcraft!
Angelique: Suppose you explain this curious accusation of yours.
Julia: Is it necessary to explain? Desmond Collins is dying, and not of any natural causes. It’s because of witchcraft!
Angelique: Oh? So naturally, you suspected me.
Julia: Well, I didn’t expect you to admit it.
Angelique: I have never harmed anyone simply for the sake of harming them, and I’ve never met this Desmond Collins.
Julia: If you’re not responsible, then who is?
Angelique: I don’t know. And what’s more, I don’t care. But what I do care about is Roxanne. How did you destroy her?
Julia: I didn’t. I suddenly was free. I learned later that her brother Randall had kept her out of the coffin at sunrise. She is at peace, Angelique!
Angelique: Valerie! I’m known as Valerie now!
Julia: Only until your true identity is discovered.
Angelique: You dare to threaten me?
Julia: No, there’s no point in threatening you, I couldn’t risk exposing Barnabas. But someone is using witchcraft against Desmond Collins, and I think it would be to your advantage to help us find out who it is!
Angelique: Why do you say that?
Julia: Because if anything happens to Desmond Collins, there will be an investigation by the family, and by the authorities. Everyone will be questioned, including you. Now, suppose in this investigation, the truth of you — all about you, becomes known. Then you will become the one accused. Think about it, Angelique!
So Angelique finally has something worth thinking about. This is the best move that the show has made in a while, kaiju-wise. As we all know, the four giant monsters of Dark Shadows are Barnabas, Julia, Angelique and Quentin — the characters that are so powerful they have to appear in every storyline. When things are going well on the show, these four are making the big decisions and driving the main story; when they’re not, it usually bodes ill.
Unfortunately, the Quentin of 1840 isn’t much like the Kaiju Big Battel Quentin that we know and love, so Gerard has been pinch-hitting as the handsome, manipulative rogue over the last couple months. Between them, Quentin and Gerard have been handling the A material, but the other three have been stuck in their own little tide pool.
What we need right now is a diva alliance between Angelique and Julia, set on the trail of the real heavy of the piece. If we could interest these two in world affairs, they could do a little Sherlock and Watson routine, which would tide us over until Barnabas comes back circa a week from Thursday. Plus, these two are fun to watch, when they’re not murdering each other.
So they turn down the lights, and Angelique seats herself next to the fire, with Julia standing by the door as a lookout, in case anybody sane wanted to come into the drawing room while they have it reserved. Looking into the flames, Angelique calls upon whoever it is that she calls upon on these occasions, and requests:
Let the flames carry my thoughts to the one who is like me — to the one who understands my way of life! Whoever you are, wherever you may be, let my words enter your thoughts! Reveal yourself to me! Send me an image by which I may know you!
In other words: Angelique would like to know the truth of you. You know what I’m talking about, I’m talking about witchcraft!
As usual in these days of modern telecommunications, the call is picked up right away, as Angelique’s words enter someone else’s thoughts. They’re not feeling talkative at the moment, but they’ve got an outgoing message in the shape of the legendary head of Judah Zachery.
This connects to another good idea they had lately, which is to link Angelique with the Big Bad of 1840, by way of a retconned backstory that I personally do not find particularly compelling. But I’m willing to be flexible on this — if a purported brand new year-zero incarnation of Angelique gets Lara Parker showing up at work to participate in the main storyline, then sure, go ahead and purport whatever you like; I will adjust my expectations on this end.
Except then they do this:
Julia: What is it? What did you see?
Angelique: Nothing, I saw nothing at all.
Julia: I don’t believe you, not from your reaction.
Angelique: I was reacting to a vibration. Whoever your witch is, he is hostile to me as well.
Julia: I don’t believe you’re telling the truth.
Angelique: I’ve told you everything I know. There’s nothing more that I can do!
And that’s it. Angelique has one more nasty crack to hurl, and then Julia walks away without a word, story option over.
This reminds me of that sad day in June 1968 when Professor Stokes could have joined Murder Club along with Barnabas and Julia, but Julia refused to tell him that Barnabas was a vampire, and he in turn refused to tell her that he knew where Adam was. Stokes never reached his potential as a main character, because the writers kept him at a distance.
Smart characters run the show in serialized narrative, because they make wild guesses and arrive at story-productive conclusions. But if you keep secrets from the smart characters and don’t allow them to figure things out, then the story sags and there’s nowhere to go. Julia knows that there’s no such thing as “reacting to a vibration,” but they leave the scene where it is, and if Desmond wants to sit there and choke for no reason, then that’s his problem, as far as Dr. J. Hoffman is concerned.
Because Grayson Hall is going AWOL for the next three weeks, which takes Julia out of the realm of practical politics. To explain, here’s an excerpt from the 2006 biography Grayson Hall: A Hard Act to Follow:
“Another episode indicative of Curtis’ favor of Grayson was when she was written out for three weeks in November – December 1970. This might be the one time when husband and wife colluded without fully informing management. When Grayson began to see the bags from her father’s eyes staring back at her in the mirror, she was not happy and decided upon a quiet eyelift. When Curtis realized Grayson was not in the scripts, he confronted Sam Hall. “Where the fuck is Grayson? What have you done with her?” Sam informed Curtis of Grayson’s whereabouts. Curtis retorted, ‘Tell her not to touch her face ever again without talking to me first!'”
That facelift vacation starts today — we next see Julia in episode 1168, by which point there’s already a witchcraft trial, and there’s only about a month left before the 1840 storyline is over. Like I said, it comes down to logistics a lot of the time, and major story decisions are often based on which actors are available. This is an unseasonable time for the kaiju to be mostly AWOL, but that is the truth of them.
Tomorrow: How to Explain the Doll.
Dark Shadows bloopers to watch out for:
When Julia approaches Desmond to examine him, the camera stays on Flora and Leticia, looking on anxiously. Then it stays there for about ten seconds, with the two of them just standing there watching, while the interesting thing happens off-camera. They should have cut to a shot of Julia and Desmond, but either the camera was having trouble picking up that shot, or the director just forgot to switch to the next shot.
Julia examines an unconscious Desmond, who’s not moving or making any sounds. She observes, “He seems to be trying to choke again, now.”
Trask asks Flora, “Did you know that Quentin and Desmond had a quarrel, earlier this evening?” This is an odd bit of plot tinkering — Trask did walk in on them briefly snapping at each other about Gerard in yesterday’s episode, but the focus of the scene was the conflict between Trask and Quentin. In tomorrow’s episode, Trask describes it to Randall as a “violent quarrel”.
Trask tells Flora, “I was told that Dr. Julia… uh, Collins came to examine Desmond.” He’s clearly catching himself before saying “Hoffman”.
Julia tells Angelique, “If anything happens to Desmond Collins, there will be an investigation by the family and by the authorities. Everyone will be questioned, including you. Now, suppose in this investigation, the truth of you — all about you, becomes known.”
As Angelique prepares her ritual, the lamp turns off before Julia touches it.
There’s an edit in the final act between the Julia/Angelique scene and Trask in the basement. As usual with these edits, there’s a jump from one music cue to another.
Tomorrow: How to Explain the Doll.
— Danny Horn
Dark Shadows Every Day 
I think you’ve put your finger — again — on the reason that I’m able to accept the Miranda DuVal malarky (and thank you for the Zero Hour reference): if Angelique Prime is back on screen, I’m invested. Invent any lunatic plot contrivance you can, just make sure that Angelique Bouchard Collins Collins DuVal DuBois Rumson Collins is on the screen. (And I’ll take Barnabas, Julia, and Quentin as well, I suppose.)
“No, he is not missing,” Julia sniffs. “He was grief-stricken about Roxanne, and he is in seclusion for several days.”
Julia Hoffman, the woman who has stood by Barnabas for all these episodes, the one who has stuck by him through thick and thin, must be choking herself as she says this.
I know, right? Couldn’t she make up a better lie than that – called away to Bangor on business, or needed an eye lift, guest spot on Mike Douglas?
And Lamar (granted he hasn’t any sympathy for Barnie anyhow) is going to act like he’s never seen anyone grieve over someone’s passing? Undertaker Trask doesn’t seem very broke up about Roxanne…the girl he wanted to marry. Guess Lamar, like all Trasks (except Charity) is kind of a jerk.
Maybe Barnabas was so upset about Roxanne that he bolted to Boston for a blood binge. Julia could have said he went to Boston to find some comfort.
Trasks never get real broken up; they just start baying for witch blood and sometimes remember their missing fathers.
I’m looking forward to when Lamar forgets Barn exists and focuses entirely on Quentin.
Benji at this stage if the game I think Julia is just watching out for Barnabas now. I don’t think she any longer wishes for more from him. While he apologized to Julia about missing Roxanne, Julia is resigned to just be his dear friend which is not gonna lose or ruin for anything. If anybody messes with Julia, tries to harm her or treat her wrong, he will whip their butts big time.
It occurred to me the other night, that while Barnabas refused to let Roxanne be killed in 1970 in order to free Maggie, he didn’t hesitate to have Roxanne dispatched in 1840 in order to free Julia. I’m inclined to think that by this stage his “dear friend” means more to him than any of Josette substitutes!
Why not? Barnabas never will.
I need to share this with people who will understand, I copied Angelique’s brown dress from 1796 for an American Girl type doll. I’ve made lots of dresses for these dolls the last two years and they normally fit, this one was much too small. I have a smaller blonde doll. Took it in to fit her. trying to put her hair up, her head fell off. trying to put it back on, I broke the elastic to her legs. my doll went to pieces. I truly had no plans to voodoo with it, I like Angelique, when I was a little girl I thought being a witch was going to be a career choice!
Sheila,
Being a witch is still an option but I don’t think it’s easy to earn a living as one unless you want to be a scammer too. …and darn it, but it doesn’t seem to be as much fun as Dark Shadows and Harry Potter make it out to be.
Although, in my opinion, you are already kind of witchy for liking dolls. They have always made me uncomfortable. 🙂
I did once try to help an ailing cat by drawing on the energy of the plants outside. Two trees along the driveway died within weeks and the cat lived into her 20’s. (Dutch elm disease caused the first and it took some pampering and eventually trips to the vet every three weeks to keep the old girl going as long as she did, but it’s a better story to leave that bit of reality out of it.)
When I was a kid I thought working in space would be a career option. Being a vampire would have been my first choice but I knew they weren’t real. Reality is so disappointing!
BTW, we share a first name!
I don’t know if it’s directly connected to the eyelift caper, but it’s clear something happened between Frid and Grayson Hall around that time. They have a few scenes together when she comes back in 1168 and 1169, then none at all until the final episode of 1840! Then they only have a few scattered scenes together as Bramwell and Julia in Parallel Time, and then Frid’s not in NODS. I can’t imagine that anyone working on the show simply forgot how good Barnabas/Julia scenes are, so I can only assume that someone put his foot down and announced “I can’t work with this person any longer!” (And with that, there was truly no hope left of saving the show).
It’s so sad summed up like that.
So was this around the time Grayson was supposedly encouraging Selby to have the affair?
A number of my various parental units were born in the 1920’s. They would have disassociated themselves from a person who did something so inappropriate. Even my “morally flexible” father would have condemned that sort of manipulative, marriage damaging involvement. (It’s just extra icky and perplexing to have a 3rd person partially instigating and then cheering on someone else’s workace affair.)
Frid was already burned out and doing things to sabotage his job. Curtis wasn’t paying as much attention. Sam could get away with manipulating his wife’s screen time via the script. Maybe Grayson didn’t especially want to be working with Frid either.
😝 Too much reality ruining the fiction.
And the show and the viewers suffer.
Frid definitely had negative things to say about Grayson later on in his life. Perhaps it was his decision that he didn’t want to play Barnabas anymore that caused the problem. What place would there be for Dr. Julia Hoffman without Barnabas? Of course they make her a Collins in 1841PT but their relationship was not the same.
I was just re-reading our beloved blog and Angelique’s line…
“I have never harmed anyone simply for the sake of harming them.”
That may be the first expression of a moral code on the program (such as it is). lol
She has only harmed people for the sake of harming someone else…
Which is a bit of a hairsplitter. But at least Angelique has SOME standards!
Should we believe her or our own lying eyes and ears? Absolutely no self awareness or conscience in that one. I thought of doing an Elvis and shooting at her through the tv but I don’t have a gun.
Guess I’m the lone member of the Trask fan club. No matter what the incarnation, when those crazy Trask eyes start rolling, I cheer!
The Trasks were horrible but certainly entertaining.
There was one scene in 1968 after Vicki had returned from 1795 where the ghost of Trask #1 appeared and warned her to beware of the witch (Cassandra) at Collinwood. Nothing was made of it, but I looked at that as Trask’s admission that he was wrong about Victoria in the past and perhaps was trying to make amends to her.
It really was good of Ghost Trask to take time out from his Barnabas vendetta to appear to Vicky with that warning. Like you say Robert, he was trying to make amends. Got to hand it to him and Abigail – there truly was a witch in the house! Unfortunately, she was always one step ahead of them.
It wasn’t so much an admission, but a realization. It was Julia who managed to convince the spirit of Trask, down in the Old House basement, that there was indeed a witch at Collinwood, but that it had been Angelique, who was now living at Collinwood under the name of Cassandra. This was after Trask had managed to wall up Barnabas, and was trying to prevent Willie and Julia from opening the wall to get him free.
As Julia reveals the true identity of the witch Trask had originally been seeking, just as his image is disappearing you see on his face a look of illumination, after which he resumes his task of witch hunting. He must have also realized in that instant that Barnabas was not responsible for what he became.
The first Reverend Trask was more of a sympathetic character, because he genuinely believed in what he was doing, and that what he was doing was right and good. His posthumous activities in punishing Angelique/Cassandra put him on the right side with viewers, because he was aligning himself with the side that was out to defeat the powers intent on destroying Barnabas.
He was no match for Nicholas Blair, but nonetheless manages in the end to evade the warlock after being summoned from the grave, and even has a “happy ending” after subduing his adversary with a cross and then disappearing from Blair’s reach in a reverbed burst of laughter.
The Trask/Barnabas vendetta is always fun to revisit in each time band that Barnabas travels to, but with each successive Trask appearing more unprincipled as they go along. Here in 1840, the makeup department is applying the same sinister black shading around Lamar’s eyes that made Barnabas seem so dark and distant upon his arrival in 1967. In a sense, over the course of the series the roles between the two characters become reversed.
Oh, it isn’t that I dislike Traskiness; and they are entertaining. I just question Lamar’s butting into the Collins family like he does.
Oh definitely, mainly because Lamar’s butting in always generates a barrage of extra shouting from Quentin.
Right? It’s like, dude, YOU DON’T LIVE HERE. You just keep trying to buy Quentin’s wife’s sister for your own and she’s not down for it. Maybe go dust the caskets and order some more lilies or something.
I am surprised to find myself liking the Trasks and loving Jerry Lacy’s performances.
As a kid I mentally labeled the first Trask as an evil crazy man who was always trying to hurt the good guys … by good guys I mean the self-centered, melodramatic, lying vampire who beat his servants and stole people’s blood with his teeth and his friend the lady doctor who broke her medical oath, conducted unauthorized medical experiments, and who routinely drugged or hypnotized almost as many people as she lied to.
Most of the Trasks are refreshingly honest in their actions and delightfully oblivious to how nuts they sound. I like the intensity and the Trask version of crazy eyes. In real life, I’d cross the street to avoid having to interact with a Trask. He scary in a way real people can be scary.
I just found it amazing that Tony Peterson could become the over-the-top Reverend; like so many others on DS, a wonderfully versatile performer. But it does seem that with each succeeding foray into the supernatural, the ‘edges’ were worn off the characters, or the actors were playing basically the same thing again. Abigail and Minerva were almost interchangeable, as were all the Trasks. Not just because the same actor was doing them – look at the variety that Thayer David brought to his roles! Grayson Hall had some good stuff, too, as did Louis Edmonds and Joan Bennett; Nancy Barrett, John Karlen, even Kathryn Leigh Scott gave good, varied performances with their characters at the outset, but the 1840s don’t really seem to be giving much that’s radically different anymore – though in truth, what could they do to make their parts stand out? Barrett is just reprising Pansy Faye, Karlen’s Desmond is pretty much PT William. Joan Bennett is giving more lightness to Flora than any of her previous characters had, and Big Lou gave some distinct differences to Daniel (though with a definite flavour of PT Roger – better keep the hatpins away from HIM).
I think it might have been a reluctance of the writers and Curtis to venture too far away from what had worked before, which tended to make the characters redundant; plus, there were some characters that basically never ‘changed’, like Barnabas, Julia, Quentin, and Angelique.
I love the 1840 story, and it’s partially because Barn and Julia have taken a backseat after being absolute workhorses for the majority of the show’s run, essentially going through the same motions over and over.
Miranda-as-Angelique-as-Valerie is firing on all cylinders, undergoes real character growth instead of being Barn’s primary antagonist, and will, as we know, finally get what she wants, although probably not the way she thought she’d get it; Quentin’s romance with Daphne is angsty and believable, and my personal favorite sweetiepie John Karlen finally gets to be a romantic hero with Nancy (who do a great job, incidentally, as Desmond and Leticia. Their sad jailhouse recitation of marriage vows is great soap and cements them as my favorite DS couple of all time, laugh all you want!) and makes you wonder why the show never noticed the chemistry between them at an earlier date. It’s kind of depressing when you think about it. John Karlen had chemistry with Delphine Seyrig, they should have capitalized on the dude.
Meanwhile you’ve got Gerard running around, causing trouble, stealing heads and households, bewitching and macking on every female within a fifty mile radius of Collinwood as long as she’s not nailed down.
I love 1840, I love all of the players in it, and I love that there’s so much freaking romance in it. Romance of the traditionally soapy sort rarely appeared on DS, so to have a whole timeline devoted to it is absolute perfection for me. Contrast with 1841PT which tries something new but loses steam almost from the drop, certainly as soon as David Selby is out of the picture and the frankly horrible Wuthering Heights redux which has none of the romantic charge that was taking place only a few episodes earlier. I wanted to love Bramwell and Catherine, especially after what happened in 1840, but at that point it felt like the writers had given up. I’ve got no history or understanding of the backstory during that time, so…
Also, hi, and also, I miss the hell out of TWoP.
Terry Craword as Edith Collins is now wearing the same armadillo wiglet she wore as Beth Chavez. Some styles are eternal.