“I will be your ghost tonight. I will be your ghost twice.”
“Oh, Julia, if you could have seen his face yesterday,” Angelique breathes.
“I did.”
Angelique whirls around. “And his eyes?”
Julia doesn’t respond, so I assume she’s thinking, You know what? I saw his face, but I totally forgot to look at his eyes. Oh, well, maybe next time.
Continue reading Episode 1173: The One Where Everybody Finds Out
“Whatever they know, I’m afraid it’s a great deal more than we care to imagine.”
You know, people say that Dark Shadows storytelling is slow, but just look at Gerard and Lamar; it was only yesterday that they even thought of looking for secrets in Ben Stokes’ diary, and now here they are, all the way downstairs in someone else’s house, tearing into the architecture.
“It was during the witchcraft trial,” Ben wrote improbably, “that the Reverend Trask made his last trip to the Old House. He made the mistake of finding the secret in the basement.” Upon reading this, Lamar Trask remembered hearing something bumping behind a brick wall a few weeks ago, and less than one minute later, he and Gerard have broken and entered the Old House, stormed to the cellar, and banged on a brick wall with a hammer and chisel, and now — ta-dah! — they’ve uncorked it, the co-star of The Cask of Amontillado.
And here he is, the Reverend Trask in skeleton form, hanging on a hook behind a pile of bricks, just like he was when they unveiled him last time, in spring 1968. I don’t know how many times they’re planning to unimmure the same guy; at a certain point, you ought to just leave him upstairs in a glass case and charge admission.
“For mother, the cards are blank. For me, they throb with life!”
Number one: The playroom. Right?
“He said God is dead — long live Lucifer!”
“You were once named Miranda!” he says, and suddenly she was.
“A whole tangle and labyrinth — I’m convinced that she’s somewhere there!”
It’s the same old story. You start out with another Earth on the opposite side of the sun, where all the good people are evil, and everyone’s got a mustache except the people who are supposed to have mustaches. But you can’t leave well enough alone.
Pretty soon, you’ve got people from the other universe popping up to cause trouble. They move into your house and call themselves Cassandra, and refuse to admit that they’re the spinoff. They demand crossovers and reboots and flash-forwards, rewriting time to suit their own purposes. Before you know it, you’ve got Skaro Daleks fighting Necros Daleks, and 616-Thor taking a spare hammer from Ultimate Thor, and two completely different ways for Edith Collins to die, and anything that you do to try to fix the problem only makes everything worse.
They say that those who don’t remember the past are doomed to repeat it, but it turns out the people who do remember the past repeat it even more. It’s gonna get repeated either way.
“My eyes have the power to restore you to me!”
It’s been four months since the terrible flashlight man came into our lives — a dark stranger, appearing with no warning just outside Angelique’s room, gazing in a perplexed manner at a scene that he could see but not participate in. “Elizabeth!” he cried, but she couldn’t hear him, and neither could Hoffman. “It is hers, it will always be hers,” Hoffman said, and it was, and it will, and the goggle-eyed man from another place just stood there on the threshold, saying, “Quentin! Husband?” and generally making an ass of himself.
His name is known to us now: he is Barnabas Collins, the Destroyer of Worlds.
Trespassing on our favorite show from an alternate world where I hope they appreciate him more than we do, this monster has brought a wave of supernatural violence to our sleepy little soap town, killing two thirds of the cast and driving the ratings into the earth.
Hoffman is dead. Carolyn is dead. Will is dead. Bruno is dead. Cyrus and Sabrina and Larry and Dameon are dead, plus Chris is missing, and Liz isn’t looking too well. Barnabas Collins has swept through our show like a buzzsaw. Everybody said that bringing a vampire onto a soap opera was a terrible idea, and they were right, especially this vampire.
“Why do you keep insisting, despite the fact that there’s no evidence, that Maggie was kidnapped or something?”
New Stokes says he’s stolen some life force, but who hasn’t, right? Barnabas drinks other people’s blood, Yaeger gets off on other people’s fear, and television exists to take your time and attention, and turn it into commercials. Now we find out that Angelique’s got a psychic hook-up that drains some rando in the back room. What’s the difference?
Continue reading Episode 1031: The Last Day of Parallel Time
“Not anything’s going to keep me from destroying you!”
More than once upon a time, there was a little lost princess…
Continue reading Episode 967: Vicki Ruins Everything, part 3: The Way It Happened
“It wasn’t an ordinary dream, it took place at the antique shop.”
You can always tell when a new actor feels comfortable on Dark Shadows, because all of a sudden there’s a lot more noise coming from that direction. Chris Pennock has been on the show for a few weeks now, and he’s getting one of those full-court-press episode streaks that they sometimes do for new villains when they’re just getting started. Overgrown teen tyrant Jeb Hawkes appears in 18 out of 20 episodes in his first four weeks, and in the ones where he doesn’t appear, they spend the whole time talking about him anyway.
And it’s here, in his thirteenth episode, that they’ve managed to convince him to stop worrying about his sense memory and animal work. You’re a villain on Dark Shadows. Just start shouting.
“As I was going through the portrait, I thought I knew what it meant.”
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.
Dark Shadows Every Day 