“I have to go back and try to change history, so that this terrible night couldn’t have happened!”
She calls herself a Collins; they usually do. She says that she’s from England, by way of Pennsylvania, which is just as good of a cover story as anything else. She’s Barnabas Collins’ daughter, apparently, and she’s also Barnabas Collins’ sister, and frankly, given the chance, she’d be his wife as well. It’s complicated.
“Will tomorrow tell us any more than today?”
Every once in a while, I have to take an unplanned break from writing this blog — usually for a conference, or a seance, or I have other things on my mind — and when I come back, it’s always the same. The blog is a shambles, all caved-in and overgrown with vines and creepers. Everything’s dusty, the commenters are ravenous and desperate, and you don’t even want to know what happens to the Twitter feed.
Suddenly, it’s the distant future — or at least, a lot more distant than I wanted it to be — and if I could figure out what happened, maybe I could go back in time to make it right. I mean, I probably can’t, but you never know.
Continue reading Episode 1062: Don’t Take It Personal (Just One of Dem Days)
“I’ll first give you the pleasure of viewing the dead, disintegrating body of Barnabas Collins!”
So, I don’t know. What do you feel like talking about?
“I never thought it would end this way,” Maggie says, taking a last look at the house she helped to destroy. She came to this moldering manse thinking it would be all cocktails and crabmeat, a dream house where she could live with her dream husband Quentin, who’s currently in custody. I don’t know how she thought it would end. It’s not even clear how it’s ending now.
“I must go back to that time!”
For the last two and a half months, eccentric millionaire Actual Barnabas Collins has been time-tossed and unbound, falling backwards downstairs into a non-canonical dimension ruled by parallel people who don’t really count.
This is nothing new for Dark Shadows, of course; like all licensed properties, it’s spawned a sprawling network of untidy un-verses, just piling up on the store shelves. There’s Gold Key Collinwood, where Barnabas’ greatest foe is the Collinsport fire marshal; there’s Comic Strip Collinwood, where Barnabas is the reincarnation of the Egyptian god Osiris; there’s Paperback Library Collinwood, where Barnabas lights mummies on fire; and there’s View-Master Collinwood, which is pretty much the same as the regular kind, except shorter and in 3-D.
But all of those alternate dimensions have their own Barnabas, one apiece, as it should be. And then there’s Parallel Time, which was too lazy to create their own Barnabas, so they stole ours.
“Relax, and enjoy the spectacle of Barnabas Collins trying to prove anything.”
Imagine there’s a man who’s seen the truth.
Have you ever woken from a dream, and felt like you were losing touch with the world where you belonged? Like the world in your dream was the real world — where you were happy, where things made sense — and when you were there, it was so easy to see how everything fits together?
Don’t you get that weird itch sometimes, in the back of your head, like there’s someplace else that you’re supposed to be?
Imagine there’s a man who’s stepped through a crack between the world you know, and the world as it should be. Imagine that he understands how to trace back through your life, to find that awful choice that you made, the moment when you made the wrong turn. He knows your deepest regret, and he’s seen the world where you didn’t do it. He knows the person you might have been.
And he knows it instinctively, without even trying. You walk into the room, and he knows your name. You’ve never seen this man before, but at a glance, he recognizes who you are, who you should be, and where it all went wrong. He knows everything about you. He knows things about you that aren’t even true.
Has he come to save you? To take you by the hand, and bring you to that other place, where you can live the life that you were always meant to live? Or is he here to destroy this false world, while you’re still in it?
Imagine there’s a man. For the sake of argument, let’s call him Barnabas Collins.
Continue reading Episode 1026: The Seventh Level of Witchcraft
“Just come, and bring all your amulets and herbs!”
Today’s episode of Dark Shadows begins with some people in Parallel Time talking about the Parallel Time room, where they’ve just seen some people from Parallel Parallel Time, i.e. whatever the opposite of Parallel Time is. Mainstream Time? The Curtisverse? Is there any kind of fan consensus on what to call whatever time it is we’re usually looking at?
Anyway, this is Parallel Quentin talking to Non-Parallel Barnabas, the dimension-hopping vampire crossover artist who came to this uncharted Collinwood accidentally on purpose and can’t figure out how to leave. Quentin and Barnabas have been in the east wing, taking a peek through the veil, and they saw some Regular Time people discussing their Regular Time concerns, like where do you think Barnabas went.
Quentin’s been mulling it over all the way downstairs, and by the time they hit the drawing room, he’s ready to deliver his verdict: Barnabas is the Barnabas they’re talking about in that room. Obviously this is the case, because the multiverse is big enough to hold several Brunos and anywhere up to five Sabrinas, but the good Lord only made one Barnabas.
But Barnabas decides to bluff it out, because they still haven’t developed the technology to determine whether somebody’s Parallel or not. He says that he’s not the Barnabas from the room, and Quentin’s just going to have to take his word on that. So Quentin shrugs and says okay, but it’s a weird coincidence, and Barnabas says that it certainly is. And there you have it, a pleasant and perplexing slice of afternoon television that accomplishes nothing of consequence.
“She said Collinwood was like a perfect clock.”
And they’re off, out the door and down the path and away to Tarrytown, New York, to film House of Dark Shadows, an unwise reprise which revisits the past and destroys the future.
“You don’t know what it’s like, suddenly seeing yourself walk into a room.”
Everyone’s talking about it! Here’s what people are saying about Parallel Time, opening Friday:
“I can’t help but be fascinated by that room, and everything I’ve seen there!” — Barnabas Collins
“Somehow, we must discover the secret of this room!” — Roger Collins
“You must take me to that room immediately, I want to see this for myself!” — Professor T. Eliot Stokes
“There must be something very special in the east wing, because suddenly everyone’s so interested in it!” — Elizabeth Collins Stoddard
I will regret this, I’m sure. I will regret all of this. The upcoming Parallel Time storyline will fail in some spectacular way — like Adam did, like Nicholas Blair and Count Petofi, and all the other disappointing men in our lives — and I’ll end this period of the show trying to figure out how it all went wrong, as I always do.
But this feeling, right now, this tickle of heightened expectations? Give me this. Even if it’s only for a little while. Just give me this.
Continue reading Episode 977: Things That I Already Like About Parallel Time
“I feel a presence of someone!”
Previously, on Dark Shadows:
The Doctor came to a halt, his arms folded. “I won’t do it,” he said obstinately. “Whatever you want — I won’t do it!”
The Time Lord spoke one word. “Daleks.”
The Doctor spun around. “Daleks? Well, what about them?”
The Time Lord paused, as if collecting his arguments, then said, “Our latest temporal projections foresee a Time-stream in which the Daleks will have destroyed all other life forms. They could become the dominant creatures in the Universe.”
“That has always been their aim,” agreed the Doctor grimly. “Go on.”
“We’d like you to return to Skaro at a point in time just before the Daleks evolved.”
Immediately the Doctor guessed the Time Lord’s plan. “And prevent their creation?”
“That, or alter their genetic development, so they evolve into less aggressive creatures. At the very least, you might discover some weakness which could serve as a weapon against them.”
The Doctor tried to look as if he was thinking it over. But it was no more than a pretence. He couldn’t resist the idea of a chance to defeat his oldest enemies once and for all. “Oh all right. All right. I suppose I’ll have to help you — just one more time. Return me to the TARDIS.”
“No need for that, Doctor. This is Collinwood.”
“All my instincts tell me… it wasn’t a wolf! No… It was another kind of creature!”
So here’s the question: Is Dark Shadows cursed?
Over the last couple years on this blog, I’ve watched and read and listened to a growing number of Dark Shadows spinoff products — the 1991 revival series, the Gold Key comics, the Paperback Library novels, the trading cards, and the Big Finish audio dramas — and they all have one thing in common, namely: They don’t make any goddamn sense. And we haven’t even gotten to Night of Dark Shadows yet, one of the outstanding leaders in the field.
It seems like people are unable to write Dark Shadows stories that hang together in a coherent way, up to and including the writers of Dark Shadows. So what kind of chance does the Dark Shadows comic strip have? For these two weeks, while I’m out traveling, we’ve been reading this 1971 strip, and so far, it looks like the curse of not making sense is in full effect. So as we go along today, I’m going to periodically check in with the ABC7 AccuWeather Sense Tracker, to see if we can figure out what’s wrong with the structure of Dark Shadows stories.
Continue reading Dark Shadows Comic Strip, part 5: Try to Forget
Dark Shadows Every Day 