“Perhaps I have an innate fondness for gypsies who’ve fallen by hard times.”
Frankly, it’s dawn; it was dawn four scenes ago. But Barnabas saunters downstairs to the basement, where Magda is tapping her foot and shooting meaningful glances at her wristwatch. Then he takes the time to give her a full briefing before he gets into his coffin, because apparently today is casual day in the crypt.
“Tell me what you meant by what you said to me.”
Hey, guess who’s out on parole? It’s Angelique, freshly sprung from the flames of the netherworld, conducting an impromptu lecture tour in other people’s houses.
Barnabas and the gypsies are out at the moment, doing god knows what, so Angelique just lets herself in via Chromakey so she can stand there in the drawing room and express herself.
“It’s been a long time, Barnabas,” she says to Barnabas, who isn’t there. “Long enough to have put me out of your mind. Oh, but you’re still in my thoughts.”
“And so are you,” she spits, turning to address the portrait of Josette, which is hanging placidly over the fireplace, minding its own business. “You, with your innocent eyes, that were always so startled when they looked on evil. Well, here it is again! Look at me again!”
Holding herself erect, she declares, “I am Angelique — and I HATE you!”
So it’s a good thing Barnabas isn’t around, because honestly, imagine coming home and finding this in your front parlor. Seriously, you came all the way over to my house to yell at the decor?
“We’re all on the same side, aren’t we? My side.”
I address myself and those here with me to the powers of darkness, he said.
I call upon the flame to summon you, he said.
I call upon the raven and the viper and all the dark creatures of nature to draw you like a rising mist from out of the darkness of the earth, he said.
And he said it over an active hellmouth that spews out vengeance-vowing fire demons on the regular. What could possibly go wrong?
“Now you’re dead, and you’re going to stay dead.”
Pursued relentlessly by the muffled-tympani sound of a beating heart, black sheep and future poltergeist Quentin Collins races downstairs to the study, to check on his dead grandmother.
This is the first running of the Telltale Heart Grand Prix, and as Quentin applies the brakes and shudders to a stop, he finds Edith sitting up in her casket at the finish line, grinning at him like being dead is the most fun she’s had in years.
So there we are; it’s happened. The haunter has become the haunted.
“What would her spirit be doing wearing a glove?”
At the end of yesterday’s episode, Barnabas finally drew a line in the sand.
“YOU have the will, Quentin!” he said to Quentin, who did.
“I will leave you now,” he continued, raising several eyebrows. “There’s only one thing that you have to decide in the next hour — how to give it back. Because if you don’t — I will have to do something about it. Something drastic!” And then he walked out the door.
So David can suck it, I guess, is the current attitude of the program.
“It’s been my experience that death causes as much ill-feeling as life.”
Time-tossed vampire Barnabas Collins is stuck in the year 1897, lost behind enemy lines on a ghost-hunting recon mission. For all he knows, he’s here to stay, so he’s trying to make friends with the locals.
At the moment, he’s in the Collinwood study with Edward, the putative head of the household, in front of an open casket containing Edward’s grandmother. The old lady spent the last several decades telling everyone that she had a family secret that she would pass on just before her death, but it turns out that’s a tricky deadline to plan around. Now Barnabas is the only one who knows the secret, which was: Don’t let Barnabas get out of his coffin and hang around Collinwood. So that worked out great.
Grasping at straws, Edward harangues Barnabas for a while, begging him to tell the secret, but Barnabas just stonewalls and that’s pretty much all they can do.
Frustrated, Edward grouses that Edith even kept the location of her will a secret. She left instructions with Judith in a sealed envelope, and now they have to find it.
And that’s the last time anybody mentions the secret. From this moment on, the story is all about finding the will. It’s the most blatant MacGuffin relay race handoff you’ll ever see.
“I know Collinwood more intimately than anyone else in the family.”
Her name is Rachel Drummond. Her journey is beginning, a journey that she hopes will open the doors of life to her, and link her past with her future. A journey that will bring her to a strange and dark place, to the edge of the sea, high atop Widows’ Hill, a house called Collinwood — a world she’s never known, with people she’s never met, people who tonight are still only shadows in her mind, but who will soon fill the days and nights of her tomorrows.
And, man, talk about linking the past with the future. Here we are three years later, and we’re still doing Jane Eyre.
“I found out what it was to be a Collins!”
And then, fortunately, she went insane and died. Hooray!
“I don’t know how you came back, and I don’t care!”
As we’re settling into this 1897 time travel story, the thing that’s really remarkable is how much the writers have learned about setting up dramatic conflicts within the core Collins family.
It’s early 1969, and by this point in the show, the present-day family has been entirely nerfed. All of their secrets have been exposed, explained and apologized for, and any future story-driving difficulties have to be imported from the outside.
Last year, we spent some time with the 1795 family, and they were actually pretty well grounded too. Naomi was a drunk, Joshua was a grouch and Abigail was a fanatic spinster, but they were a functional family who would have carried on pretty well, as long as they could avoid having sex with pretty French vengeance demons.
But the Collins family of 1897 is absolutely out of their goddamn minds. At the start of today’s episode, Judith walks into her dying grandmother’s bedroom, and finds her brother Quentin strangling the old lady, and demanding to know the family secret.
This is the second time in two straight episodes that Judith enters a room and interrupts Quentin in the process of murdering a family member. She doesn’t even have that big of a reaction, she just shoos him out the door and gets on with her day. That’s how insane this family is; a murder attempt means nothing to these people.
“Being startled is the most interesting thing that’s happened to me all evening.”
Eccentric millionaire Barnabas Collins has used the ancient Chinese secret of I Ching to jump the turnstiles of time and transport himself back to the late 19th century, which he slept through the first time.
Here in 1897, Barnabas is pretending to be his own great-grandson, who’s the grandfather of the guy that he’s pretending to be in 1969. According to his cover story, the original Barnabas Collins sailed to England in the late 1790s, where he settled down and had tons of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, all of them identical. There are apparently hundreds of Barnabi of every age and gender littering the English countryside, all looking moody and forgetting their lines.
It’s a thin story, especially because he doesn’t have an English accent, but luckily there’s a portrait of the original Barnabas on the wall in the foyer, which he uses like it’s a driver’s license.
Barnabas was desperate to find Quentin, the evil spirit who’s tormenting the family in 1969, but now that he’s met the guy, he can’t think of anything to say. You’d think he’d be better prepared than this; he’s had negative seventy-two years to think about it.
Dark Shadows Every Day 