Category Archives: Gordon Russell

Episode 670: Small World

Gordon Russell, January 1969,

“What do you have against other people?”

Attention all bachelors: Carolyn Stoddard — the young and beautiful heiress of the Collins family fortune — is back on the market, looking for another dangerous serial killer to sweep her off her feet.

I don’t know what it is about Carolyn, but practically everyone that she’s ever dated is responsible for at least an attempted murder or two. Her first boyfriend, Joe, tried to strangle Barnabas, Burke went to prison for manslaughter, Tony poisoned Professor Stokes’ sherry, and Adam threatened to assassinate Carolyn’s entire family, up to and including Carolyn.

Seriously, the only good guy that she’s ever been out with is Buzz Hackett, the motorcycle beatnik. I wonder what Buzz is up to, these days.

Today, Carolyn is passing the time in the Collinwood drawing room with her latest butchering boyfriend, Christopher Jennings. Chris is one of those quiet loners that you hear about on the news, who everyone agrees is a fine young man, if you don’t count the monthly murder sprees.

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Episode 669: My Boyfriend’s Back

Gordon Russell, January 1969, Violet Welles, , ,

“I’d like to meet the man that invented supermarkets, and wring his neck.”

We’ve talked a lot lately about the failure of the 1968 storylines, and I think it’s high time we move on, and talk about the failure of the 1969 storylines. You can’t live in the past forever, except for Angelique, apparently, and I don’t think I’ll ever figure out how she manages it.

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Episode 663: Being This Way Again

Gordon Russell, January 1969, , , , ,

“I had forgotten how overwhelming this urge for blood could be, and how helpless I would be to resist it.”

Last year, Dark Shadows took a bold leap, spending four months in a detailed flashback to the 18th century. This risky endeavor turned out to be a huge win, a creative high point for the series.

When the time travel story ended in April, the question was: after an ambitious and successful storyline like that, what do you do for an encore? And then they spent the rest of the year not really coming up with a coherent answer to that question.

Instead, they stumbled their way into a set of tangled story threads involving a mad doctor, a Frankenstein monster, a time-traveling witch with dream powers, a demonic crime boss, an occult expert, a root cellar, two new vampires, multiple kidnappings, a brick wall, an anagram, the French Revolution, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Jim Morrison and a View-Master reel.

It’s not easy to tie that all up and have it make sense, so they didn’t bother. They just threw a werewolf at us, which kept us entertained while they quietly directed the surplus characters to the exit.

But now the production team is doing a bit of soul-searching, trying to figure out where it all went wrong. And since there are clearly no rules about what qualifies as acceptable afternoon programming anymore, they might as well take us along on their annual review.

This week, they’re doing it all over again. Dark Shadows is going back to going back in time.

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Episode 662: This Is the Night

Gordon Russell, January 1969, , , , ,

“I am not dead, as you can plainly see.”

Aunt Em had just come out of the house to water the cabbages when she looked up and saw Dorothy running toward her.

“My darling child!” she cried, folding the little girl in her arms and covering her face with kisses. “Where in the world did you come from?”

“From the Land of Oz,” said Dorothy gravely. “And here is Toto, too. And oh, Aunt Em! I’m so glad to be at home again!”

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Episode 661: Greatest Hits

Gordon Russell, January 1969, Sam Hall,

“Then you’ll be dead, and he will have changed the course of history.”

Barnabas looks grave. But he’s in a graveyard, so that’s appropriate.

“What did happen on that night?” Julia asks.

Barnabas says, “It was the most tragic night I have ever experienced,” and coming from him, that means a lot. This is a guy with a lot of candidates for most tragic night.

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Episode 659: Gone Girl

Gordon Russell, January 1969, , , , , , , , ,

“But last night, she sent me a message… from the past.”

The morning of a new day at Collinwood. Plans have been made to take two children away on an extended trip. But there are unseen and evil forces at work within the great house — forces that have possessed both children, and decreed that — oh my god, Vicki, WHAT IS IT NOW?

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Episode 658: Did He Fall, or Was He Pushed?

Gordon Russell, January 1969, , , , ,

“I don’t want to sleep! The dreams! The dreams are awful!”

It all started with Nicholas Blair, that scheming mastermind who wanted to steal Maggie away. Nicholas arranged for his pet vampire to keep Maggie’s fiancee occupied, and then Joe Haskell just stood there and watched, as his whole life slipped out of his grasp.

He lost his job, he lost Maggie, and somewhere along the way, he lost his soul. It’s hard to say exactly where, but the night that he helped Angelique kill his cousin probably had a lot to do with it.

Joe tried to commit suicide, and then he tried to kill Barnabas, and then he tried to shoot a werewolf that used to be his cousin. Not the dead cousin, another one. It’s been a bad year for cousins.

And now, look at him. He’s wearing a turtleneck.

Oh, Joe. What have they done to you?

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Episode 657: The Unpacking

December 1968, Gordon Russell,

“I still can’t understand it. About the clothes, I mean.”

There’s a long and depressing history of make-believe ghosts in American culture, going back to the late 1840s, when the Fox sisters discovered that they could convince people that ghosts were speaking to them by cracking the joints in their toes. The Fox sisters’ toes, I mean, not the ghosts’ toes. Ghosts don’t have toes. At least, I’ve never heard that they do. Look, it’s not important whether ghosts have toes.

The point is that David and Amy are currently trying to convince the Collinwood domestic staff that there’s a ghost in the house, by committing the most confusing version of spiritualist fraud in haunted house history.

The kids actually have made contact with a real ghost — the spirit of Quentin, a Collins ancestor who wants revenge on the familiy for locking him in a room 70 years ago and letting him starve to death. The angry specter has possessed the children, and he’s using them to further his evil ends, whatever they are.

Meanwhile, Barnabas and Maggie want to take the kids on a trip to Boston, for reasons that I’ll get into later. Quentin is furious, because the children are key to his long-term revenge plan, so David and Amy have to figure out a way to convince everyone to let them stay at Collwinood.

The kids solve this problem by pretending that there’s a different spirit in the house — ghost governess Victoria Winters, who disappeared into the past several weeks ago. So the real ghost in the house is telling the kids to pretend that there’s a make-believe ghost in the house, although it turns out that maybe the make-believe ghost might actually be real too.

Let me see if I can find another way to explain this. Nope, I can’t. That’s what’s happening on the show today. Sorry.

Continue reading Episode 657: The Unpacking →

Episode 652/653: Kill the Moon

December 1968, Gordon Russell, , , , , , ,

“It was the moon! I’m afraid of the moon, Barnabas, and I don’t know why!”

We’re in the dying days of the Great 1968 Wrap-Up, when all of the year’s dangling plot threads are finally resolved, and we can move on with our lives. Today’s episode aired on Christmas Eve 1968, and there’s just a couple more shoes to drop before the clock strikes midnight and we start a new year.

One of the last remaining storylines is the curse that Cassandra put on Elizabeth in a fit of pique, condemning her to do nothing but ruminate obsessively about her own death. This is an incidental story thread that’s been dragging on for more than six months, and for a while it seemed like they might forget all about it. But now Cassandra’s revenge is back with a vengeance, and we’re just going to have to deal with it.

When we left Liz yesterday, she’d wandered out of the house and walked to the graveyard, where she collapsed and pretended that she was dead for a minute. Barnabas went out to retrieve her, and now he’s scooped her up and brought her back home.

The interesting thing, as we close up these remaining story threads, is that Barnabas now appears to be in charge of everything. Liz’s collapse has left Collinwood with a bit of a power vacuum — Roger’s away on business, Vicki’s run off with her husband, and Carolyn has stepped off screen and won’t be back unti Friday. So Barnabas steps in, spending all of his time this week just fussing around and taking care of everybody.

This may be the point in the show when Barnabas the serial killer turns into the redeemed character that people remember — a cross between kindly uncle, butler and babysitter.

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Episode 651: Mother’s Little Helper

December 1968, Gordon Russell, , , ,

“Are there dead people in that building?”

Well, there she goes again. Girl governess Victoria Winters has vacated the premises, dashing off to the 18th century to set a world record for the number of times you can get yourself hanged. She was ashes, she was memory, she was a dream that never came true, and there’s a very good chance that she just created an alternate timeline where Dan Curtis had a dream about Phyllis Wick.

Winner and still protagonist Barnabas Collins and perpetual runner-up Liz Stoddard were live on the scene when Vicki clicked her heels three times and fell backward into the time vortex. Now they’re standing around in the drawing room, trying to process the unprocessable.

“It’s beyond our understanding,” Liz says, “like death.”

Oh, great. Here we go.

“We don’t understand death, do we?” she continues. “Because we can’t. We can only wait for it, knowing it will reach out for us, when it’s ready.”

Yup, that tears it; she’s gone all gloomy again. This is why they never did a blockbuster remake of the Elizabeth Stoddard story.

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