Tag Archives: wuthering

Episode 1233: You Make Me Sick

Gordon Russell, March 1971, ,

“That may be true, but I have an odd feeling it isn’t.”

Previously, on Dark Shadows:

“Every minute you live is mine,” Bramwell urges, “just as every breath I take is yours! There is no Morgan. There never was! Other people are only shadows that we use to hurt each other with, to frighten each other with! That’s true, isn’t it?”

“Morgan did it for me!” Catherine cries. “He went into that room for me!”

“You and I are the only real ones,” he insists. “You and I!”

It turned out Bramwell’s wife Daphne was hiding in the bushes during this exchange, drinking in every word, and as she lies now on her deathbed, irreparably poisoned by his toxic disregard for other people’s feelings, Bramwell has to wonder, Is there anything that I could have done differently?

Continue reading Episode 1233: You Make Me Sick →

Episode 1229: Catherine the Not-So-Great

Gordon Russell, March 1971, , ,

“Sleeping is not one of the safest things you can do in this house.”

When you think about it, isn’t there a fine line between passion and obsession? Isn’t true love a kind of madness, in which nothing else really matters beyond your shared feelings?

“Morgan went into that room to save me!” Catherine cries. “That’s why I must stay here and help him, even if it takes the rest of my life!”

Bramwell glowers at her. “You’re remarkably generous with the rest of your life, considering it belongs to me!”

She turns away, her mind a whirl.

“Every minute you live is mine,” Bramwell urges, “just as every breath I take is yours! There is no Morgan. There never was! Other people are only shadows that we use to hurt each other with, to frighten each other with! That’s true, isn’t it?”

“Morgan did it for me!” Catherine cries. “He went into that room for me!”

“You and I are the only real ones,” he insists. “You and I!”

So the answer is no, there isn’t a fine line between passion and obsession, true love is not a kind of madness, and these people are psychopaths.

Continue reading Episode 1229: Catherine the Not-So-Great →

Episode 1207/1208: A Duel’s House

February 1971, Gordon Russell, , , , ,

“Are you aware that you’re looking in the direction of the Old House?”

You know, I hate to be that guy, but if you can’t even do a duel properly, then I don’t know why you’re on television.

I mean, I remember the days when a Dark Shadows character could walk ten paces, turn and choose not to fire because they were being noble and heroic, and in return they would be shot in the face and die, like a man. And then they would come back as a revenant with an eyeball hanging out of their face and a different voice and they would say I WANT IN DEATH WHAT YOU WOULD NOT GIVE ME IN LIFE and people would be afraid of them and run away, and it would be crazy-looking and fun to watch. That’s what I expect out of a duel, some spectacle and excitement, and most importantly, an actual plot point that facilitates story progression.

But this? Bramwell stands there and lets Morgan shoot him in, I don’t know, the shoulder or something, and now he’s just saying sullen Bramwell stuff while he’s horizontal instead of vertical.

This is not romantic and noble. It’s not even story progression. This is just lying down and moping.

Continue reading Episode 1207/1208: A Duel’s House →

Episode 1205: The Bad Behavior of Bramwell, or Romance and Rape and Why Nobody Seems to Do Anything About It

February 1971, Sam Hall,

“You are a demon — and the demons in me are in league with you!”

There is something about him that stirs you.

All it took was one look, and he knew. He can see that you’re lonely and unhappy, and he knows what you really want. He knows who you really are. He understands you better than you know yourself.

That moment you had together… it meant something. You can’t deny it, and wish it away. He felt it, too. And he remembers.

You try to fight it, but you can’t. You are drawn to him. It doesn’t matter what you say; you don’t have a choice. In the end, he will have you.

And then you have him arrested, I guess, or he gets shot in a duel. That’s usually how those stories end up.

Continue reading Episode 1205: The Bad Behavior of Bramwell, or Romance and Rape and Why Nobody Seems to Do Anything About It →

Episode 1199: The Wuthering

January 1971, Sam Hall, , , , , ,

“Sometimes I regret all these things we’ve had to do because of that room.”

Yesterday, Dark Shadows as we know it came to a close, as eccentric millionaire Barnabas Collins and his boon companions Julia Hoffman and T. Eliot Stokes completed their journey to there and back again, returning home in debatable triumph. They’d traveled to the year 1840 with the goal of changing history, hopefully in a localized area and not one of those Nazis won the war type deals. All they wanted to do is stop Gerard and the unhallowed dead from tromping through Collinwood in 1970, leaving the house in ruins and killing a whole bunch of people that they liked.

Whether it actually worked or not is very much up for debate, because they never really had a clear idea of exactly what they were trying to stop. When they pulled this kind of maneuver the first time, in the 1897 storyline, Julia was told the chain of events that specifically needed averting, so it was child’s play to consult the chronometer and find out whether they’d done it or not. In 1840, they didn’t have a map, so the reckless wreakers of time crime just went around stomping on butterflies and hoping for the best.

Well, somebody must have done something clever while they were gone, because they climbed the magic stairs back to a world where everyone is alive, including them. Apparently, someone’s been living at Collinwood for the last four months in their place, doing things that the travelers don’t remember doing, which is yet another surprising choice on the part of the Dark Shadows writers. It would have been easy to have Elizabeth asking where they’d gone, we’ve been so worried, and so on, but Dark Shadows took the road less traveled, as they so often do, and personally I’m grateful to have one last impossible mystery to remember them by.

That’s the end of the show, really, with Barnabas, Julia and Stokes merrily skipping off to the historical center, where they’ll learn how the Nazis won the war. But everyone who watches Dark Shadows knows that just because you die, it doesn’t mean you have to lie down and stop bothering people. Death is just a change of address, and Dark Shadows still has one last story to tell. So off we go, into the unknown.

Continue reading Episode 1199: The Wuthering →

Episode 1187: I Presume You’ve Never Heard About Something Called Parallel Time

Gordon Russell, January 1971, , , , , ,

“I refuse to allow my fears to be decided by the fears that exist in this house.”

Out on the wiley, windy moors of the East wing of Collinwood, Daphne Harridge follows the sound of a piano. It gets dark and it gets lonely up here, where the Collinses never tread. This wing of the house was closed off decades ago, and was probably never really occupied at all, because it turns out that the Collins family has a heartbreaking bloodbath every fifty years or so, which cuts down on the descendants something fierce.

But Daphne has bad dreams in the night, so she’s gone exploring, looking for the tinkling, impossible piano being played in an empty part of the world. Finally, she reaches the double doors to the room where the music must be coming from — but when she opens the doors, she finds that the room is deserted, just a blank studio space with an abandoned chandelier that even the spiders don’t pay attention to.

“I’m sure the music came from this room!” Daphne thinks, baffled. She leaves, shutting the doors behind her — but then she hears knocking, so she turns around and opens them again.

And there’s a fully furnished room, just sitting there, with chairs and lamps and all the trimmings. This is the real occasional furniture, which only appears occasionally. I don’t actually see a piano, so that’s still a mystery; it’s possible that there’s a piano bar that appears here on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, and she just missed the changeover.

So here she is, a woman on the verge of a universal breakdown, catching sight of another world that was never meant to be. This may portend a splintering of the barriers between one universe and another, filling rooms unexpectedly with strange furniture of an unknown manufacture, rupturing causality and destroying interior design as we know it.

Daphne tries to catch her breath. “What’s happening to me?” she says, because obviously this is all about you.

Continue reading Episode 1187: I Presume You’ve Never Heard About Something Called Parallel Time →