“No, she is not! But her spirit is.”
“But we can get to Angelique through her!” he says, and she says, how? which seems like a fair question.
“If we control some of her condition — slightly! — Angelique will collapse,” he says. “Then — well, we can control her then, and she can do nothing! That will give us time!”
So that’s the plan, I guess; all we have to do is control some of her condition, slightly. We finally got that all figured out.
“Do you really think that I indulge in witchcraft?”
“Good evening,” says Inspector Hamilton, “I’m Inspector Hamilton.” And then it goes downhill from there.
“I’ve just been thinking about the things that have been happening around here — not just to me, but to everyone!”
The audience applauds, as Kermit the Frog takes the stage. “Tonight, we’ve got a real treat for you,” he promises, “because our very special guest stars are that world-famous knife-throwing act, Lesley and Warren!”
Then a woman walks onstage to correct him, and the penny drops.
“Wait a minute,” says the frog, “you’re not Lesley and Warren, you’re Lesley Ann Warren — the actor, the dancer, the singer!”
She smiles. “Yes, thank you.”
“So, how come you’re doing a dumb knife-throwing act?”
Lesley shakes her head. “You know, Kermit, I thought you were the one person on this show who wasn’t crazy.”
“Me, not crazy?” asks Kermit. “I hired the others!”
Continue reading Episode 1037: The Things That Have Been Happening
“No, it wasn’t in this room, it was in another room, but it was behind the same door!”
Young Daniel is drawn to the drawing room of Loomis House, aka the Old House to anyone who matters. He’s here on an art school field trip, on the advice of a spooky oil painting of a Collins ancestor who speaks to him through the pounding of an off-screen kettle-drum heartbeat. Once he enters the house, Daniel isn’t sure what he’s supposed to do, because it turns out kettle-drum heartbeat is not as precise a communications medium as people sometimes think.
Looking around, his eye lights upon a manuscript sitting on the sideboard. He picks up the top page and begins to read, because Daniel is nosy and he has no respect for other people’s intellectual property.
“For long enough,” he reads, “the world has lived in ignorance of this terrible truth.” Realizing that this must be a page of Will’s new book, Daniel sits down and helps himself to some literature.
So, yeah, me too. This is a thing that young Daniels do, apparently, when we find ourselves just south of episode 1006, wondering what happens next. We read a book.
“I can’t understand why I have the feeling that something frightening is going to happen.”
It always starts with a box.
You’ve finally figured out what you’re going to do with your life. You’ve got an unstable girlfriend hidden in your house, who’s provisionally agreed not to massacre herself until you get back. You’ve arranged with a friend to destroy the coffins that he was saving up for you. And now you’re going back home, so that you and your girlfriend can use a magical oil painting to travel one hundred years into the future, turn into different people, and live happily ever after. Everything is going according to plan.
And then somebody hands you a mystery box, and the world slips sideways.
“There may be only one way of preventing tonight from happening.”
Last cliffhanger, Charity had a vision of Quentin’s death (stabbed or something — lots of blood on his chest). At beginning of this episode, she is wandering in the woods. Magda finds her and Charity says Quentin will die in 12 days — September 10. Reverend Trask comes home and finds that while Edward + Jameson have been cured, Charity is still possessed. She says she’ll kill anyone who comes between her and Quentin. Trask asks Magda to watch Charity. Quentin realizes there’s a full moon that night and he tells Magda he’s going to stop the change.
Or, at least, that’s what happens in today’s episode according to the original version of Dark Shadows Every Day, which I started in a school notebook when I was fifteen. I might have chosen my words more carefully if I’d known that I was going to show it to people thirty years later. Also, I apparently didn’t know how to spell Jamison.
“Hot tentacles stretch upwards.”
We’ve reached a milestone in our uncertain and frightening journey into the past — June 6th, 1968, the day that Senator Robert F. Kennedy died. Kennedy was in the middle of a Presidential campaign, and he was gunned down by an assassin on June 5th, just after winning the Democratic primaries in California and South Dakota.
So Dark Shadows was pre-empted on June 6th, along with the other network daytime shows, to present news coverage of the assassination.
On this blog, a pre-emption day means I fill in with an episode of NBC’s 1991 Dark Shadows revival series. We watched episode 1 of the new series for Thanksgiving 1967, and episode 2 a month later for Christmas. Marking a more somber occasion, I’m going to draw a respectful curtain over the tragic circumstances of this particular pre-emption, and move on to my discussion of this mediocre vampire show.
“Don’t start imagining a lot of things just because someone we barely know is acting peculiar.”
All week, I’ve been talking about Sam Hall, the new writer who just joined the show. He wrote the last three episodes, and now he passes the baton back to Ron Sproat, who tends to be lackluster and frustrating. And today, just to prove the point, Sproat turns in a script that appears to be made mostly of reconstituted episode parts. Damn it, Sproat! Get it together.
“Why do you think you’re the only one who hears dogs?”
Let’s start, once again, with the notebook. I’m going to assume you’ve been following the story, and you already know everything you need to know about the vampire, the doctor, the experiments, the murder, the notebook, the niece and the crystal chandelier. If you’re new to the group, feel free to read up on the old episodes, because frankly I’ve had it with trying to explain this weird little knot of a storyline.
Fortunately, the show is less than two weeks away from coming to the exact same conclusion.
“You feel that you have no more use for me, and you’re planning to dispose of me. Is that correct?”
Dr. Julia Hoffman is standing in the foyer of Collinwood, clutching a red notebook and emoting. And when Dr. Hoffman expresses emotion, it stays expressed. She has an internal monologue that can be heard up to three miles away, if the wind is right.
This notebook contains the notes on her experiments in curing Barnabas’ vampirism. Barnabas has decided that Julia has betrayed him, and he’s planning to kill her once he’s sure that the notes have been destroyed.
Now, thinking about this situation rationally, there are several options here. For example: Tear some relevant pages out of the notebook, put them in an envelope, and mail them to a friend. Or copy the notes into another notebook, and use this notebook as a decoy. At a pinch, she could even write BARNABAS IS A VAMPIRE on her driver’s license, or in black magic marker down her arm, Memento style.
Julia does not consider any of those options. As far as she’s concerned, the smallest indivisible unit of measure is the notebook.
Dark Shadows Every Day 