The Dark Shadows Daybook: April 23

By PATRICK McCRAY

Taped on this day in 1969: Episode 743

When Laura programs Jenny to become the ultimate assassin, will Barnabas and Quentin put their differences aside to combine forces? Barnabas: Jonathan Frid. (Repeat; 30 minutes.)

Barnabas tricks his way into obtaining Quentin‘s Book of the Dead. It’s a successful gambit, perfectly timed to reveal that Laura Collins is actually Laura Stockbridge Collins, a returning fire demon from his youth. Quentin must trust Barnabas when considering his mysterious cousin against the obviously more destructive forces around him.

It should have been a matter of one world ending and another world beginning. Simple, right? There was a point when it happened before. The show shifted focus… officially. A story about Victoria changed to one where Barnabas was no longer this really interesting side character. He was the character. Where? Perhaps right before 1795 or during. During is a good choice because it starts out as Vicki’s story, but she has to be forced into a witch trial just to give her something to do. No, it’s officially Barnabas’ story. It introduces Angelique as the catalyst for his change. If she got the story moving, it’s no wonder that the show should finally resolve itself when she resolves herself. 

Batons pass hands in marathons… and sometimes they come back. Dark Shadows specializes in cycles that vary based on what’s happened in between. Even the structure of the show is a cyclical ritual. Recap. Title and theme. Narration. Resolve the recap. Add less information than it feels at the time. Unresolved crisis. Credits. 

In between all of that is where lives change, and 743 is what could and should have been the fulcrum from Barnabas to Quentin because it contains the moment any self-respecting fan is waiting for from the moment they hear that heroes on Dark Shadows didn’t stop with Barnabas. There was this other guy, Quentin. And for a time, they are both the heroes of the show and yet are constantly pitted against each other. Terrified mistrust is the one beloved and shared virtue tying all Collinses together across the centuries. It’s no wonder that Barnabas doesn’t save time by simply being honest with Quentin. Honesty bruises the gin, and the writers are going to need it if they have to unite these guys. 

Seeing them unite to deal with Laura is uniquely satisfying, and Jonathan Frid and David Selby maintain the tension with admirable gamesmanship. Bringing back Laura Collins was one of the show’s truest masterstrokes. She becomes a thread taking us from long before the appearance of Barnabas to a point even more distant in the past than his origin, and then into the fantastic future of 1897. I’m not sure what this does more of to critics of the program… prove its delightfully substantive complexity or give them ammo to cry, “Codswallop!” (By the way, that’s not asking for opinions. It’s a test with a right answer and a wrong one.) 

Laura is kind of the linchpin of this. The thing that stops Quentin‘s story from becoming the dominant one for the rest of the series is that it pretty much resolves itself in 1897. It’s extremely satisfying, but it’s brief. The story of Barnabas runs through the entire series. However, it’s fun to look at how the cycle changes itself, however briefly, and if only to comment on the Barnabas story.  Both stories involve men who cheat. Both stories involve women who are cheated on, Josette and Jenny, respectively. Both stories involve a magic user who inspires the cheating.  But Quentin’s story is far more cynical. Even though the man in it is more of a cad at the beginning, he also has much more destructive women surrounding him. Chicken or ovum?  Angelique legitimately loves Barnabas. I think it’s pretty clear that Laura has very little interest in Quentin except as an excuse to get her to Alexandria. Josette is a victim in all of this, but she is only used against Barnabas to induce guilt, anxiety, and two, at first, drive him to choosing Angelique. Laura, however, is an engine of pure destruction, which is, of course, the job of fire. Angelique is more of an elemental figure of nature, and thus, is more driven by natural urges in and around procreation and the emotional attachments associated with it. she uses Jossette, with a lot of cruelty, but it is to either get Barnabas or punish him for not attending that particular Sadie Hawkins dance. On the other hand, Laura positively weaponizes Jenny as an assassin, pure and simple. 

I’m sure the program examines Laura‘s motives, but I’m not sure they really matter. Just as Quentin is a passion driven mirror for Barnabas, allowing us to appreciate the latter‘s contemplative nuance, Laura‘s destructive nature is the perfect foil for Angelique. Angelique‘s evolving heroism is perhaps the most truly interesting part of the 1897 storyline, and by seeing her in relief to Laura, it’s easy to begin viewing her as the more sympathetic figure.  Quentin‘s storyline is ultimately less tragic in the Greek sense, but it somehow feels sadder. he is surrounded by no one who seems to really love him. Jenny is crazy, so whatever she feels is going to change in about five seconds, disqualifying it from serious consideration. And Laura is a nightmare who never really loved him. However, both Josette and Angelique genuinely love Barnabas, and this makes us continue to care about him as a vulnerable figure, because he is presented as intrinsically lovable. Why? He is ultimately a good man, and his seeming flaws, which are his conscience-based indecision and the rash action he takes to compensate, finally show themselves as virtues. No, they are not necessarily part of the masculine archetype, but that’s the point. Barnabas is an extremely feminine thinker in a world surrounded by women. Quentin shows what you get with an excess of masculine thinking. He is lust and he is action. You know, everything that a man is supposed to be. So unlike Barnabas. But it only makes Quentin a magnet for women to exercise their wrath for wrath’s sake. And it also manifested self in the nature of his curse: he is revealed as the savage, lone wolf who never finds a pack.

If the largely feminine audience always liked Barnabas, but could never quite identify why, the presence of Quentin defines it by implication.  It’s the show saying, “OK, now here is a traditional man with the traditional psychological traits of a man. Yeah, he’s a lot of fun, but he also winds up sad and alone. look at Barnabas. Not really the traditional masculine figure at all. And he ends up being all the better for it.”

Television at this time was beginning to explore these redefined models of manhood in characters like Spock. but Spock’s decisions seem to originate somewhere between the cultural requirements of being a Vulcan and actual biological pre-determinism, also associated with being a Vulcan. Barnabas comes about it simply by thinking a little differently. In many ways, he exhibits the sort of masculine representation that we would see in someone like Hawkeye Pierce, so someone get him a martini.

Seeing Barnabas and Quentin working together on magical workings in this episode, we begin to enjoy the synergy possible when the two men combine to take power back from a strictly vengeful figure like Laura. Audiences, desiring both men, briefly had their beefcake and got it to bite their necks, too. This was on the mind of the zeitgeist, echoing the most psychologically insightful episode of Star Trek, “The Enemy Within.”  With that, author Richard Matheson concluded that the balanced masculine psyche required both the Barnabas side and the Quentin side. Dark Shadows has a slower burn, and eventually, and subtly, champions the feminine thinker over the masculine one. I would imagine that this is certainly a more appealing conclusion for a largely feminine audience, many of whom were dreading the daily return of their mid century modern nightmares of husbands who would be coming home every day shortly after the show’s closing credits would roll. But it’s also excellent modeling for boys watching the show, and somewhere, deep in the minds of mothers, there had to be more than one who quietly valued that positive modeling.  

You know, sort of. If you ignore countless moral feelings and the potential for supernatural violence. But those are aspects of Barnabas‘s personality that he doesn’t want. it’s telling that he should return to women again and again to eliminate those abilities.

Because they probably aren’t worth it.  Not really. 

This episode hit the airwaves on April 30, 1969.

The Dark Shadows Daybook: April 13

By PATRICK McCRAY

Taped on this day in 1970: Episode 996

What has black hair, a bushy mustache, and swings a mean sword cane? Parallel Time, meet your new best friend. John Yaeger: Chris Pennock. (Repeat; 30 min.)

Cyrus transforms into the giddy, roughhousing swinger, John Yaeger, who immediately goes to the Eagle to romance Buffie. In the process, he deals with his romantic rival, Steve, with extreme prejudice. When he offers to pay for the damage with one of Longworth’s checks, Buffie drops a dime on him to Quentin. Yaeger is well aware of the betrayal, however.

April 13 is a significant day for me because it’s not only the day they taped episode 210, where the iconic hand of Barnabas Collins shot up to grab the 20th century by the throat, it was also one year before I was born. But by that time, 1971, Dark Shadows had been off the air for eleven days.

I was eleven when I saw Dark Shadows for the first time. That was in January of 1982. It was very much of a different world from 1967 or 1970, betrayed by hairstyles and hemlines, and yet, as adults are cursed to do, I will tell you what you may know better than I; eleven years is nothing.  The show had only been off the air for eleven years. Eleven years ago from tonight, Barack Obama was president. We had iPhones. Marvel movies were coming out… one, anyway. Daniel Craig was still James Bond. It doesn’t seem that long ago. And 996 features a performance and an interpretation of a classic character that are both shockingly modern. Ahead of 1970. Of 1982. And maybe of 2020.

April 13. I can think of few better ways to spend this day than with Chris Pennock. With episode 996, we do. And how.

It’s the first time we see John Yaeger flex his muscles in the fullest sense. From the get-go, although the makeup is more Goulet than ghoul, this is no ordinary performance. How much was Joe Caldwell? How much was Chris Pennock? Inseparable?

Dark Shadows has a rich history of improving the classics, thank you very much, as they reinterpreted venerable texts for a postmodern era. The original authors -- Shelley, Stoker, Wilde, James, Stevenson, etc -- certainly had the edges and luxuries of poetic language and originality. But with the edge of originality also comes the myopia of having to do this now-now-now, with no time to let decades and culture mull over the ideas in context. Essentially, those original authors were beta testing their ideas. The James Whales, Jimmy Sangsters, and Dan Curtises (Curti?) were perfecting them for wide release to the public.

Good. Evil. So clear for Victorians and Edwardians whose sun never sat, whose racial superiority was axiomatic, and who didn’t have the troubled teendom that was the 20th century yet under their belts. The Jekyll and Hyde concept is now, post-Freud & Company, just… weird. Richard Matheson fired the first shot with The Enemy Within, wherein both the “good” and “evil” sides had as much to recommend them as to condemn. Pennock and Caldwell take this even further, giving Dark Shadows its most philosophical (and dramatically ebullient) moment, sadly stuck in a storyline that is, you know, babysitting the audience because we got a movie to make, people. Look alive!

Maybe that was a good thing. Maybe they couldn’t have gotten away with this if Uncle Dan were at home. (Or if Drug Culture had not yet been totally villainized, and someone tell Cary Grant to give us his source.) When we meet John Yaeger, he might not be what we think of as conventionally attractive, but he’s also not the semi-simian grotesque that March, Cagney, and the other guys became. The early Hydes were childlike. Yaeger is a cocky young man in full. You know when women tell you (well, tell me) not to be too nice, what they’re really saying is not to be too reliant on their validation. John Yaeger is an army of self-validation. No self-doubt. It’s not that the opinions of others don’t matter, but they don’t seem to matter more to him than his own.

Okay, yes, he beats Steve mercilessly, but Steve is no prize and his grabby way with the biscuit hooks, re: Elizabeth Eis, would not exactly fly in under the flag of #MeToo Uber Alles. This is redneck-on-redneck action, and I say let the boys duke it out, which is actually my way of saying that Yaeger was not unprovoked. When he comes to life, it is with as much joy as malice. He is the continuum of human reaction, and say what you will, he’s honest. As I’ve noted before, it’s hard to tell what Yaeger would be like if things went his way. I imagine a pretty fun guy. Similarly, if he sensed true loyalty, he’d probably be the kind of dogged advocate everyone wants in a friend.

The problem with Yaeger is not that he’s too much of anything. The problem is that everyone else is too little. If everyone took a dose of Longworth No.5, he’d be on a level playing field. I’m not so sure he’d go nuts at that point because, well, as Robert Heinlein imagined, (in some cases) an armed society is a polite society. Until then, while there are few actions of his that we can reasonably commend, we can still get a giggle or more from the spirit. As for the execution? Again, perhaps this is only a performance that you can get away with when the boss is in Tarrytown. If there’s anyone whose emphatic sense of conflict relations might meet its match with John Yaeger, it’s Dan Curtis. Am I the only one who sees this?

This episode hit the airwaves on April 20, 1970.

The Dark Shadows Daybook: April 13

By PATRICK McCRAY

Taped on this date in 1967: Episode 210

Willie’s scheme to rob the Collins family of its wealth may cost him far more than riches when the dead rise to take vengeance. Timothy Gordon: Barnabas Collins. (Repeat; 30 min.)

As Liz pays off Jason to leave Collinwood, Willie escapes the house to plunder the Collins mausoleum. As he cracks open a sarcophagus behind a hidden door, a hand from within the tomb grasps him by his throat. 

This is the first episode that most of us in the pre-streaming generation ever saw. It may not have been the first Dark Shadows episode, but in every way that matters, it's the first episode of Dark Shadows.

We generally avoid thinking of it as the pilot of the series, because, let's face it, it isn't. To the delight of literalists and pedants everywhere, the first episode is cleverly entitled, “Episode 1.” (And my favorite part is where Burke Devlin has to talk David into the pod race so that he can get a sample of his blood.) But 210 is the first that matters. Yeah, I said it. And I’m not just being a weisenheimer. If you start with today’s episode, are you really missing much? Clearly not. We didn’t see those early episodes for decades, and it didn’t slow us down at all. More than most other shows, Dark Shadows is true theater. It deals with consequences rather than causes. That means that there is always some kind of past we didn’t see. There are always, even for completists, “unaired episodes” being referred to. Victoria’s Sanka is barely in the cup before she finds herself over a decade behind, if dealing with Burke and Roger, or twice that time if dealing with Liz, Carolyn, and the case of the slightly bent fireplace poker. We’ve always missed something on the show. Isn’t that the very core of the haunted house mythos? Protagonists in stories like that only exist because of what they don't know. Because of the threats they're trying to solve…  threats that came from someplace else. Usually wrapping them up in problems they weren't even alive to help create.

The Dark Shadows that begins with this episode was a success to the extent that, 55 years later, you're reading about it and I'm writing about it.  So it stands to reason that this episode contributed to that success in a unique way because it started it. Most people might look at episode 210 and conclude that it works because of its last five seconds. While you would think it's appropriate to give the hand a hand, it works as a pilot in other regards. In more important regards. Barnabas is hardly the first vampire we see in the episode. In fact, all of the men in the episode are vampires to one extent or another. Jason is exploiting Liz. Willie is exploiting Jason and attempting to exploit the Collins Legacy. And while the women are largely victimized by this, I'm not sure that you can call them victims. They certainly don't act like it. Liz legitimately thinks that she is ending the situation, and she comes off as a matriarch who seems very good at ending situations she wants to see buried in a sea chest in the cellar. Which is probably why Roger had gas logs installed in the fireplace. Still, Liz clearly has secrets, and Jason knows them to the extent that he’s calling way too many shots for a man with a hat like that. 

Villains and heroes are immediately evident. Liz is dancing for Jason like his name’s Bob Fosse, and that immediately roots us in a world where aristocracy is a ramshackle lie. But Jason also seems under the thumb of his own underling’s unpredictability. He’s the one pleading to Willie to come clean about his secret plans, and Willie taunts Jason with his ignorance of them. Jason’s sole power, we quickly see, is in Knowing Things, so this stymies our would-be heavy to a point where he seems downright human. Perhaps more so than the austere Liz. Certainly more so than the vaguely sanctimonious Victoria. These may be the forces of good, but evil seems more compelling and strangely identifiable. Because evil is just as powerless as we are in the face of a raw stupidity that is too dim to see the limits of its own great ideas. Hence, we see Willie’s ability to keep everyone subordinate… even more than the show’s blackmailing mastermind or the bedrock of Old Money American Power. 

Even before the long pantomime of Solving the Puzzle of the Mausoleum, we are treated to a compelling story about the collapse of American power and the strange charm of moral corruption via Jason’s Irish lilt. But it’s more than that. All of these people in the power chain have fooled themselves into thinking they are the top dogs while being knowingly undermined by the guys right underneath. That’s the paranoia that defines the American identity. Live by the redneck, die by the redneck. The only one who didn’t get the memo is Willie, whose clues to the family jewels are the ultimate wardrobe of Emperor’s New Clothes. They will only lead him to death, which is all that’s below him on the ladder down from the Olympus of Collinwood. 

Sure, Willie. You go exploit the rich. Spend it fast, baby. What you don’t know is that death has a lot of plans for you. And we love the ending because we all know what it’s like to be taken advantage of. Maybe this episode of Dark Shadows is strongest as a standalone, ending in a profoundly Rod Serling-esque place. Seeing it end like this is to see that at least one person isn’t playing the game. Barnabas has no moral inversion because a dead man has no need for moral order at all. It’s a relief that the cold and misanthropic universe -- the one that gives cancer to infants -- will also turn the relentless cruelty of its inevitability toward even the worst. The Willies of the world may think they have it by the ass, but death truly does come for us all.

It’s just that in 210, we can finally shake death’s hand. You know, after it chokes the life out of He Who Thought He Could Get Away With It. The painting of Barnabas serves as a warning of this, but no one is paying attention.

People in the house see the regalia on Barnabas and talk about how he liked to wear jewelry. But that’s not jewelry. He’s bedecked in the honors of war. These are the medals of a soldier. A decorated one. Barnabas Collins represents the strength that built Collinwood. A strength whose apparent absence allows a grubby second-hander like Jason to victimize Liz, and for Willie to keep Jason equally off-balance. 

Only, it’s a strength that is not absent. Just patient. It is a strength so undeniably resilient that even death is powerless to stop it. 

Through it, in a fashion, Liz has her revenge. Willie is trapped by the literally unthinkable, and we know that it’s only a matter of time until Jason is, as well. 

Perhaps we didn’t tune in to episode 211 to see if Willie survived. Perhaps we tuned in to make sure that he didn’t. 

And then everything changed. 

This episode was broadcast April 17, 1967.