“This is the only family I’ll ever need, this knife!”
All I know is you talk too much! All you Collinses are always talking! You think it’s so precious! All those words!
Gabriel! Stop calling me that! I hate that name! I hate myself! Oh, and I hate you!
Well, it’s not going to stop me, mother, all those lies, because I’m going to kill you! And I’m going to kill everyone else! This is the only family I’ll ever need, this knife!
Get out of here! I’ll take care of him! You seem very concerned, considering he was about to kill you!
Gabriel! You killed him! You killed him!
Melanie! Now listen, you’ve got to come out of there! Melanie! Now, look, just because Kendrick Young knows about your attacks, that’s no reason to lock yourself in the room!
I killed his sister! Dear god, I killed that innocent girl!
You can’t talk like that! Now, you’ve got to come out! They’re not going to lock you anywhere!
No! Leave him alone! Leave us all alone! What’s over is over!
If Gabriel is innocent, then someone else is guilty! Who killed my sister? Tell me! Who killed Stella?
Melanie, please, let me in! Melanie, I am going to see you, now, open this door, please! Melanie! Melanie!
Kendrick, no! You want a happy ending! And for a Collins, there’s no such thing as a happy ending!
All right, think! Think about some young, poor, beautiful girl, lying in a grave in the woods! She has no more chance! But you still do, if you take it!
All right, all right, what is it? All right, now look, now look, just take it easy, calm down, try to get ahold of yourself, but tell me what it is! Now, come on!
Let go of me! I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you! I know who you are! I know I hate you! I hate all of you! Because you hate me! And it’s all out in the open!
I can’t rest, I’ve got too much to do! I’ve got too much killing to do!
Tomorrow: The Unlovables.
Dark Shadows bloopers to watch out for:
Quentin shouts through the door, “Now, look, just because Kendrick Young knows about your attacks, that’s no reason to lock yourself in the room!” He means your room.
At the start of act 3, when Melanie says “well,” someone in the studio clears his throat.
There’s another throat-clearing when Quentin tells Gabriel, “You can help to save all of us.”
Yet another throat-clearing after Flora says, “What am I going to tell him, that Melanie killed his sister?” Dude needs a lozenge.
Quentin trips over the line, “Did he say where he is?”
When Quentin tells Flora what he’s going to say to Kendrick, there’s studio noise and shuffling feet.
Quentin has a whole scene with Flora about what he’s going to say to Kendrick when he finds him, but in the next scene, Kendrick arrives and talks to Flora, with no payoff for the Quentin scene.
After Flora tells Kendrick, “I have nothing to tell you,” the person clears his throat three times in a row. Seriously, dude.
Tomorrow: The Unlovables.
— Danny Horn
Dark Shadows Every Day 
The Collinsport Throat-Clearer strikes again!!
It’s a cow trying to attract Barnabas’s attention, not realizing that ship has sailed, been lost, and then found off the island of St. Whatits.
Throughout this storyline, Kendrick shouts at nearly everyone. It was almost like the second coming of Jeff Clark/Peter Bradford. I liked Kendrick and Melanie having a relationship, but in this episode he starts yelling at her too, when she’s locked in her room. I know he’s supposed to be angry, because his sister was murdered. However one can still have a serious conversation without resorting to yelling every time.
I didn’t like when Gabriel exclaims he remembers everything right before a commercial break. The moment the scene resumes, he immediately forgets again. That was such a cheap stunt to keep viewers from changing the channel. I suspect many changed the channel right afterward in disgust.
I understand the part of Desmond was originally written for Roger Davis- maybe when John Karlen playing that role he decided he would spend the last weeks of the show imitating Davis.
On the other hand, Kendrick’s shoutiness in this episode does show the importance of casting. If it really had been Roger Davis in the part, his scenes would have been absolutely impossible to watch. But John Karlen not only sells the character, but he and Nancy Barrett provide the one consistently entertaining strand in this whole segment of the show.
Agreed! At least with Karlen you get that it’s an acting choice that makes some sense–he’s an angry man whose sister was killed and the woman he loves is acting nuttier than a squirrel buffet. With Davis he could have been acting opposite a kitten and a lamb and he would still bellow every line.
The main problem is that they paired Kendrick and Gabriel up and both of them are very yell-y because of various emotional distractions, so in general it’s a LOUD episode.
An acting choice, yes. As opposed to Roger Davis, who at that point in his career doesn’t seem to have had a choice, that was the only way he could talk.
Anyway, the pairing of shouty Kendrick and shouty Gabriel in the same episode is a huge failure on the part of hack director Henry Kaplan. Karlen and Pennock weren’t responsible for each other’s performances- the director had to look at the episode as a whole and provide the actors with guidance so they could build an emotionally coherent experience for the audience.
Just saw that Geoffrey Scott died today at age 79.
R.I.P.
Diana Millay in January, Christopher Pennock in February, Geoffrey Scott in March. I suppose 50 years out, the cast is in the age group where we should brace ourselves for “Dark Shadows News” to consist largely of obituaries…
Oh wait, I see Geoffrey Scott actually died in February as well. That’s even grimmer! We don’t have a month between them any longer!
Geoffrey Scott died in February AND March? Was one of the deaths in Parallel Time?
I never noticed before that all of Quentin’s lines begin with “now”.
I did. And his vernacular is strictly 1960s as well, for every Quentin that Selby played – “Now, now just wait a minute here…”, and other expressions.
Also consistently saying “gonna.”
David Selby and his “Now”s. Dennis Patrick starting every speech with “Well”. Kathryn Leigh Scott starting every speech with a laugh when her character was in a good mood. The frequency of the episodes and the resulting pressure were enough to expose these small flaws.
I’m in the early 900’s now and the more I read about these godawful late episodes the more I think I’m going to stop at 1198.
That was my plan, originally. But I’m gonna stick around for Danny’s comments about Stoke’s eulogy of the series, in 1245.
You should stop at 1244. Then you can imagine the best ending ever. It’s bound to be better than what was broadcast.
“Mama! You had better tell him. I tried, but I couldn’t. So you tell him. Please?”
Best line in the episode.
The.
Best.
Random memory…
I read the ‘1840 Concordance’ and listened to the Media Sound Records DS albums before I ever got to watch the 1841 parallel time storyline on the MPI tapes. Since the tinkly version of ‘Ode to Angelique’ kind of felt like the theme song to parallel time in 1970 (which I had watched in syndication, until they ran out of the shows), I totally assumed that Cobert’s harpsichord version on the volume 3 DS album was going to be featured in 1841 parallel time.
Unless I’m mistaken, it was ever actually used in the show, which is too bad, It might’ve been a fun way to indicate “hey, it’s parallel time… but in the past.” So much for “he sound of the spinet”
I queued it up to the spot in the Youtube video (1:49:04): https://youtu.be/N5CoJ6QUxIw?t=6544
I love it when the blog moves so quickly I can’t keep up. It’s been awhile. I love the plan to keep the clip to end on the shows end-iversary.
Weirdly enough, despite the show’s dwindling days and the fact that I hated the “Wuthering Heights” storyline with a passion (give me “The Lottery” any day), this was the episode that hooked me on Dark Shadows back in the Sci-Fi Channel days. I had watched the show on and off with my mother when I had a day off from school, but something about the scene with Gabriel threatening Flora with a knife stuck. Starting the next day, I recorded each episode and watched it when I got home.