My comments on Dark Shadows

At the end of March 1070, Dark Shadows left the universe in which the action had been set up to that point. It spent sixteen weeks in another continuity, which the show insists on calling “Parallel Time.” The Parallel Time segment has so much good stuff in it that I can’t wish it had been different in any way. But if we could have access both to these eighty episodes as they are and to a version…

Sixteen weeks ago, Dark Shadows left the universe in which the action had been set up to that point. This is the final day we will spend in the other continuity, which the show insists on calling “Parallel Time.” The only remaining villain, a wizard known as Tim Stokes, is holding Maggie Collins prisoner in the great house of Collinwood. Stokes telephones Maggie’s husband, foul-tempered sourpuss…

Sixteen weeks ago Dark Shadows crossed over to a different universe than the one where the first 196 weeks of the action took place. The show insists on calling this segment “Parallel Time.” The only villain left standing in this next-to-last installment of “Parallel Time” is the evil Tim Stokes, whom we did not see and barely heard of until the tenth week of the segment, and who did not start…

Julia Hoffman, MD, can do many things no other medical practitioner has ever accomplished. She can build a Frankenstein’s monster and bring it to life; she can erase a person’s memories and overwrite them with whatever she pleases; she can cure vampirism; and, a few weeks ago, she overcame time and space and transferred herself to a parallel universe. Yet, Julia is quite unreliable about…

Wicked witch Angelique has died, again. While she still dwelt among the living, Angelique locked Julia Hoffman up in a dungeon and left her to die of thirst. Julia’s buddy Barnabas Collins and a dimwitted policeman called Inspector Hamilton are looking for her. She is struggling to stay awake. The episode devotes so much time to a go-nowhere story about a non-character named Roxanne that we can…

Wicked witch Angelique Stokes Collins has cast a spell on Maggie Collins, compelling Maggie to shoot her husband Quentin. Angelique herself dwells among the living because of another spell, one cast by her father, a wizard known as Tim. This spell drains the “life force” from a woman named Roxanne into Angelique, revivifying her after Quentin’s brother Roger drove a hatpin into her brain nine…

Angelique Stokes Collins has returned from the grave to take vengeance on her murderer. Unfortunately, she doesn’t know who that is. For the last several weeks, she has been operating on the assumption that she was killed by her widower, foul-tempered sourpuss Quentin Collins. She has managed to get Quentin charged with one murder and suspected of several others; under her influence, he assaulted…

Yesterday, Elizabeth Collins Stoddard overheard her brother Roger Collins having a conversation with the portrait of wicked witch Angelique. When Roger told the portrait that he murdered not only Angelique herself but also Liz’ daughter Carolyn, Liz stormed into the room. Roger then strangled Liz and stuffed her corpse under a window seat. Today, he is in the room fretting about what to do with…

For some time, wicked witch Angelique Stokes Collins has been dissatisfied with her minion Julia Hoffman. What she most wants from Hoffman is information about her new enemy, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins. Yet Hoffman has told her nothing useful about Barnabas. The only time she brings him up is to claim that she was busy following him when Angelique needed her to do something else. Even…

In #969, vampire Barnabas Collins was in the east wing of the great house of Collinwood. He opened a door to a room which, like all other rooms in that long-disused area, was bare and vacant. But he did not see it as it was. Rather, he saw the same space brightly lit, fully furnished, and richly decorated. Women who appeared to be matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard and mad scientist Julia…

Maggie Collins is unnerved because people keep getting murdered in and around the great house of Collinwood. Her husband Quentin was arrested for one of those murders and is the prime suspect in another. He escaped from jail, just in time to be unable to account for his whereabouts during yet another. Maggie goes downstairs and finds old world gentleman Barnabas Collins in the foyer. Maggie…

Late in 1968, the ghost of Quentin Collins began haunting the great house on the estate of Collinwood. The ghost gradually waxed more powerful and more malevolent, killing some people and tormenting others. By March of 1969, the great house had become altogether uninhabitable. Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, trying to contact Quentin, traveled back in time to 1897, when Quentin was a living…

In the first months of Dark Shadows, characters several times shared meals in the kitchen in the great house on the estate of Collinwood. In that intimate setting, they would often exchange information that made it possible for them to advance the story. As time went on, the show developed more ways to get knowledge flowing, and the kitchen lost its importance. We haven’t seen it since…

The police are looking into the murder of Angelique Stokes Collins. Angelique has risen from the grave and is available to assist with the investigation, though Inspector Hamilton, like most of the other people in the village of Collinsport and on the estate of Collinwood, thinks she is her identical twin sister Alexis. Hamilton is impatient with everyone, a bad quality in an investigator. So…

Evil wizard Tim Stokes combined medicine with black magic to connect his late daughter Angelique with a woman named Roxanne. The connection drains most of the “life force” from Roxanne into Angelique. This rendered Roxanne comatose and allowed Angelique to move among the living so long as Roxanne neither dies nor gets even a tiny bit better. Vampire Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia…

Writer Gordon Russell takes bits of old episodes and mixes them as if he were rotating a kaleidoscope. There is a plot involved also, but the screen iconography is the main thing. The show has been operating on the principle of the kaleidoscope for some time. They’ve traveled back in time repeatedly. Now they have traveled sideways in time and taken us to an alternate universe, which they insist…

We open in the room atop the tower of the great house on the estate of Collinwood. Wicked witch Angelique, enemy of the mysterious Barnabas Collins, confronts Will Loomis, Barnabas’ henchman. She demands Will tell her Barnabas’ secret. Returning viewers know that Barnabas is a vampire, and Will is his blood thrall. When Will tells Angelique that he is incapable of betraying Barnabas, we know that…