[Dark Shadows] Episode 807: Dickens Without Poor People

[Ubiquitous]

“Well, you know how he gets when he possesses someone.”

Behold the educated viewer, watching an episode of Dark Shadows.
Charity Trask is looking at the unfinished portrait of Quentin Collins,
on the night of the full moon. To her surprise, she sees the portrait
change before her eyes, the painted face transforming into the image of
a werewolf.

“Ah,” one nods appreciatively, “an allusion to The Picture of Dorian
Gray.” One says this to oneself, because nobody else can stand to be
around one while the television is on.

But in reality, this storyline is based on The Picture of Dorian Gray
in the same way that Star Wars: The Force Awakens is based on an Ewok
lunchbox. There’s a family resemblance in there somewhere, but anything
more than that is a stretch.

I’ve written a lot about narrative collisions, the mash-up moments when
the Dark Shadows writers throw in characters and plot points from other
stories, just to see what happens. It’s one of the defining features of
the show, fueling all kinds of crazy storyline twists and surprising
shifts in tone, and creating a mad Frankenstein patchwork of Universal
Monsters films, avant-garde black box theater and pretty much
everything you remember from English Lit.

The first and most important narrative collision on the show is Jane
Eyre vs. Dracula, in spring 1967. At the time, the Collins family was
drifting gently in the direction of exposing their final terrible
secret — not a mad wife in the attic, but a dead husband buried in the
basement, which is practically the same thing. The orphan governess was
well on her way to falling in love with her dark and mysterious
Rochester, at which point you either introduce a triangle with a creepy
missionary dude, or you finish the book and everybody writes their term
paper.

And then Renfield opens the chained coffin in the family mausoleum, and
all of a sudden Count Dracula moves in next door, and he tells
everybody that he’s a long-lost cousin from England. He gets started on
Mina Harker while everybody else is still messing around in the
basement, and — in a stunning upset — Dracula actually wins. He faces
off against two different Van Helsings and a few wannabe Jonathan
Harkers, and in the end, he demolishes them all, and then he just keeps
on snacking his way through a four-year menu of Minas.

That works out great, so the writers start raiding the bookshelves for
more story ideas. To everyone’s surprise, they follow up with a
science-fiction version of The Crucible, seasoned with The Monkey’s
Paw, The Cask of Amontillado, The Tell-Tale Heart, Pride and Prejudice,
Jack the Ripper and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

No, seriously. They intentionally reference all of those things during
the show’s four months in 1795. Millicent starts out as Lydia Bennett,
and ends up as the Rosencrantz version of Ophelia. It is an age of
wonders.

Now, the standard way that people talk about Dark Shadows’ narrative
collisions is that they were a pragmatic shortcut for the writers,
which helped them to come up with new story ideas. If you’re stuck for
a storyline idea and you’re allowed to go to the library and borrow
one, then obviously that’s very appealing.

But it also becomes an inside joke between the writers and whoever’s
well-read enough in the audience to notice it. This was 1960s daytime
TV, watched mostly by housewives and teenagers, and if the kids haven’t
read Pride and Prejudice all the way through, then that story point
sails over their heads. But some of the housewives went to Barnard, and
the reference is a shout-out to anyone who cares.

And besides, Sam Hall had a weird sense of humor, and some of the
obscure references are clearly just Sam amusing himself. He thinks it’s
funny to do a scene from Waiting for Godot in the middle of a vampire
soap opera on ABC’s dime, and he’s right — it is funny, even if nobody
else gets it.

He really did that, by the way, in episode 537. He was a madman. I bet
there are more literary references hidden in Sam’s scripts, which
nobody’s figured out yet. I leave this challenge for the lit-crit
archeologists of the future.

So by late 1968, the outside influences start piling up in surprising
new patterns. The lead-up to the 1897 trip was a direct reference to
The Turn of the Screw, but with a less frantic governess and real
ghosts.

Then Count Dracula travels through time by meditating over an ancient
Chinese divination technique — attention people of the future, please
figure out where the hell _that_ came from — and the storyline goes
into narrative collision overdrive, borrowing from Jane Eyre (again),
Nicholas Nickleby, Nancy Drew, Mummy movies, The Pit and the Pendulum,
The Wolf Man (again), The Telltale Heart (again), The Monkey’s Paw
(again), The Cask of Amontillado (again) and The Maltese Falcon (for,
like, the fourth time). Narrative collision is now the thing that Dark
Shadows does.

But the interesting thing about 1897 is that they’re not stealing from
the classics in the same way that they used to.

Two years ago, they borrowed plots and themes that would inform the
character development and long-term storylines. In 1795, they did a
long-form adaptation of The Crucible, because it let them do dramatic
riffs on jealousy and cruelty and fanaticism and injustice. They turned
Abigail Williams into Angelique, and Reverend Hale into Reverend Trask,
and those themes and characters were so strong that they’re still with
us, a year and a half later. We’re still getting Jack the Ripper
sequences every time Barnabas goes to the docks, because the theme of a
cruel, selfish man preying on socially powerless women resonates with
our ongoing focus on Count Dracula’s relationship problems.

But 1897’s collisions are mostly hit-and-run, just grabbing a bit of
visual spectacle that lasts for an episode or two.

The second coming of Jane Eyre was the exception — keeping Jenny locked
up in the attic was a symbol for the ruling class hiding their unhappy
truths from the world, and the writers followed through on that theme
for several months.

Besides that, the literary references just skip across the surface. The
Tell-Tale Heart lasted for half an episode, and the guilty party wasn’t
being haunted by his own conscience; it was an outside influence
specifically trying to screw with him. The Pit and the Pendulum became
a Batman-style action-adventure countdown. They started to do a riff on
The Monkey’s Paw, with a “careful what you wish for” theme as seen in
the actual story, but then the magical hand grew a body, and all of a
sudden it’s a Bond villain.

There’s a story that I’ve heard about Armistead Maupin, the author of
Tales of the City, a long-running love letter to San Francisco. The
series was optioned by Warner Bros for a feature film adaptation, but
the studio told him that they’d have to drop most of the gay characters
to make the movie successful. He told them that taking the gay people
out of Tales of the City would be like taking the poor people out of
Dickens.

And here we are, watching a television show that actually takes the
poor people out of Dickens. Reverend Trask’s punishment school,
Worthington Hall, is a direct lift from Nicholas Nickelby’s Dotheboys
Hall, but instead of being filled with the orphaned and forgotten, its
student body consists of two immensely wealthy children whose family
owns the grounds that the school is standing on.

And then there’s Oscar Wilde’s 1890 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray,
which is stripped of all meaning and turned into another action-
adventure cliffhanger. Count Petofi’s fiendish plan to get Quentin
under his control involves commissioning a magical portrait that will
change into a werewolf on full moons, so Quentin doesn’t have to. It’s
a clever idea, and a funny allusion for you and me and the Barnard
grads to chuckle over. It’s also a good example of the show’s new
approach to narrative collisions, because this storyline is the
opposite of The Picture of Dorian Gray in every respect.

Here’s a quick summary, for everyone who missed English class that day:

Basil Hallward is an artist in London in the late 19th century, who
falls desperately in love with a beautiful young man that he meets at a
society party. The moment that Basil claps eyes on Dorian Gray, he’s
lost forever — Dorian is all that he thinks about, and all that he
talks about, and capturing his unique beauty on canvas becomes the
single focus of Basil’s life.

Basil is gay, by the way, although he never actually says so out loud,
so maybe he’s one of those Jonathan Frid-style lifelong bachelors who
are shy and collect antiques and have a great respect for women, and
just happen to be born without the capacity to experience romantic
love. It’s not a likely scenario, for Basil or anyone else, but his
family says that he’s not gay, and he’s dead now, so nobody can ask him
and that means we should change the subject. Also, he’s fictional.
Basil is, I mean, not Jonathan. Well, they both are, I guess.

Anyway, Basil is super inspired by Dorian in several lifelong
bachelor-type ways, and the book opens with him painting the portrait
that will be his crowning achievement as an artist: Dorian’s beautiful
and unspoiled soul, captured on canvas.

During a sitting, Basil’s friend Lord Harry Wotton drops by. Harry is a
cultured, witty, utterly cynical agent of Discordia, and one of the
most shameless Mary Sues in literary history. Harry is clearly Wilde’s
self-portrait, a man who can drop six eye-opening epigrams during the
course of a two-minute conversation. He’s full of theories about art
and life and society, and every character in the book trips over
themselves, they’re so eager to hear what’s going to come out of his
mouth next.

By the way, Harry isn’t gay either, honestly, where do people get these
crazy ideas? He’s married to a woman, hel-LO, and there’s women all
over the movie poster, so what are you even talking about.

But Harry spouts all these quotable paradoxes about morality, which he
doesn’t have a lot of respect for, and the rules of cultured society,
which ditto. He encourages Dorian to take advantage of his youth and
beauty while he has it — to make mistakes, and follow his passions
while they still burn this brightly.

His mind awhirl, Dorian looks at the finished picture, and laments that
the portrait will stay young and beautiful forever, while he will
wither and grow old. Instead of a tribute, he suddenly sees the picture
as a cruel mockery of what he’ll someday become. He wishes — with a
fervor that cracks reality — that it could be the other way around,
that the portrait could grow older while he stays young.

So guess what: it works! Dorian meets a young actress, and falls head
over heels in love with the idea of being in love — but then he drops
the girl, as soon as she exhibits a flaw. He tells her that she’s
worthless and will never experience love again, and she takes the hint
and commits suicide. That evening, he looks at the portrait, and finds
that the picture’s face has a cruel line around the mouth, while he’s
unstained. This goes on for quite a while, with an eternally-youthful
Dorian enjoying all kinds of forbidden passions, while the portrait in
the attic bears all the visible effects of his corruption.

Now, it’s important to note that this is not a science-fiction story.
Wilde gives Dorian a brief lampshade moment where he wonders whether
there’s a scientific explanation for what’s happening, so that he can
shut down that line of thought and forget about it.

Might there not be some curious scientific reason for it all?
If thought could exercise its influence upon a living organism,
might not thought exercise an influence upon dead and inorganic
things? Nay, without thought or conscious desire, might not
things external to ourselves vibrate in unison with our moods
and passions, atom calling to atom in secret love or strange
affinity? But the reason was of no importance. He would never
again tempt by a prayer any terrible power. If the picture was
to alter, it was to alter. That was all. Why inquire too
closely into it?

With that, Wilde closes the door on all things literal. You’re not
supposed to figure out how Basil acquired his magical power, or
anything horrid like that. This story is about the purpose of art, and
the mechanisms of polite society, and most of all it’s about how clever
and insightful Oscar Wilde is.

So as you can imagine, that story, that character and those themes have
approximately zero percent to do with Quentin’s portrait needs a shave.
Saying that this storyline is “based on The Picture of Dorian Gray”
does a disservice to the main theme of Dark Shadows, namely how clever
and insightful Sam Hall is.

Quentin isn’t being worshipped for his beauty and innocence. He’s not a
fallen angel, who changes before our eyes into a degraded brute. In
fact, if anything, Quentin’s character arc is going in the opposite
direction, as we’ll see later this week when he spontaneously invents a
whole suite of feelings about his lost daughter. Oscar Wilde is rolling
his eyes so hard that his head might come loose.

Around here, if a character mutters something cryptic like “If thought
could exercise its influence upon a living organism, might not thought
exercise an influence upon dead and inorganic things?” then that’s a
cue for Julia to shake her head, and try to get them back on script. On
Dark Shadows, thought does actually exercise an influence upon dead and
inorganic things. That’s kind of the show’s core competency.

So here we are in a brave new world, where the rumors of borrowing from
the classics are greatly exaggerated. Dark Shadows is no longer in the
business of copying storylines. Now they dash into the library just
long enough to rip a couple pages out of a book, and then they run
away, giggling and shouting, "You’ll never catch me alive!" As the man
said, all art is quite useless, so you might as well enjoy yourself.

Tomorrow: Twisting.


Dark Shadows bloopers to watch out for:

In the teaser, as the painting transforms, Charity moves too close to
the painting, and you can see a transparent image of her face over the
portrait on the right side of the screen.

As Tate walks down the steps into Petofi’s lair, the camera zooms out
and then in very suddenly.

Aristede tells Tate, “You learned that a long time ago, what are you so
upset about it now?”

There’s a lot of studio noise while Aristede and Tate are talking,
including a chair scraping on the floor several times.

Tate tells Aristede, “I have paid the price of things that you can’t
even imagine.”

As Barnabas gives Magda the gun, he loses his line and checks the
teleprompter. Then he says, “Now… when he comes, there’ll be no
problem.” (Checks the teleprompter again.) “But if it becomes
necessary, you must kill him.”

We can see Barnabas in the mirror as he’s leaving the Old House. Just
last week, Barnabas told Evan that he can’t see himself in a mirror.

Tomorrow: Twisting.


--
Hillary's staff admitted cutting and pasting classified emails, then
explained cutting & pasting to Hillary. Three times.

[Bill Steele]

“Well, you know how he gets when he possesses someone.”
Behold the educated viewer, watching an episode of Dark Shadows.
Charity Trask is looking at the unfinished portrait of Quentin Collins,
on the night of the full moon. To her surprise, she sees the portrait
change before her eyes, the painted face transforming into the image of
a werewolf.
“Ah,” one nods appreciatively, “an allusion to The Picture of Dorian
Gray.” One says this to oneself, because nobody else can stand to be
around one while the television is on.
But in reality, this storyline is based on The Picture of Dorian Gray
in the same way that Star Wars: The Force Awakens is based on an Ewok
lunchbox. There’s a family resemblance in there somewhere, but anything
more than that is a stretch.
I’ve written a lot about narrative collisions, the mash-up moments when
the Dark Shadows writers throw in characters and plot points from other
stories, just to see what happens. It’s one of the defining features of
the show, fueling all kinds of crazy storyline twists and surprising
shifts in tone, and creating a mad Frankenstein patchwork of Universal
Monsters films, avant-garde black box theater and pretty much
everything you remember from English Lit.
The first and most important narrative collision on the show is Jane
Eyre vs. Dracula, in spring 1967. At the time, the Collins family was
drifting gently in the direction of exposing their final terrible
secret — not a mad wife in the attic, but a dead husband buried in the
basement, which is practically the same thing. The orphan governess was
well on her way to falling in love with her dark and mysterious
Rochester, at which point you either introduce a triangle with a creepy
missionary dude, or you finish the book and everybody writes their term
paper.
And then Renfield opens the chained coffin in the family mausoleum, and
all of a sudden Count Dracula moves in next door, and he tells
everybody that he’s a long-lost cousin from England. He gets started on
Mina Harker while everybody else is still messing around in the
basement, and — in a stunning upset — Dracula actually wins. He faces
off against two different Van Helsings and a few wannabe Jonathan
Harkers, and in the end, he demolishes them all, and then he just keeps
on snacking his way through a four-year menu of Minas.
That works out great, so the writers start raiding the bookshelves for
more story ideas. To everyone’s surprise, they follow up with a
science-fiction version of The Crucible, seasoned with The Monkey’s
Paw, The Cask of Amontillado, The Tell-Tale Heart, Pride and Prejudice,
Jack the Ripper and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
No, seriously. They intentionally reference all of those things during
the show’s four months in 1795. Millicent starts out as Lydia Bennett,
and ends up as the Rosencrantz version of Ophelia. It is an age of
wonders.
Now, the standard way that people talk about Dark Shadows’ narrative
collisions is that they were a pragmatic shortcut for the writers,
which helped them to come up with new story ideas. If you’re stuck for
a storyline idea and you’re allowed to go to the library and borrow
one, then obviously that’s very appealing.
But it also becomes an inside joke between the writers and whoever’s
well-read enough in the audience to notice it. This was 1960s daytime
TV, watched mostly by housewives and teenagers, and if the kids haven’t
read Pride and Prejudice all the way through, then that story point
sails over their heads. But some of the housewives went to Barnard, and
the reference is a shout-out to anyone who cares.
And besides, Sam Hall had a weird sense of humor, and some of the
obscure references are clearly just Sam amusing himself. He thinks it’s
funny to do a scene from Waiting for Godot in the middle of a vampire
soap opera on ABC’s dime, and he’s right — it is funny, even if nobody
else gets it.
He really did that, by the way, in episode 537. He was a madman. I bet
there are more literary references hidden in Sam’s scripts, which
nobody’s figured out yet. I leave this challenge for the lit-crit
archeologists of the future.
So by late 1968, the outside influences start piling up in surprising
new patterns. The lead-up to the 1897 trip was a direct reference to
The Turn of the Screw, but with a less frantic governess and real
ghosts.
Then Count Dracula travels through time by meditating over an ancient
Chinese divination technique — attention people of the future, please
figure out where the hell _that_ came from — and the storyline goes
into narrative collision overdrive, borrowing from Jane Eyre (again),
Nicholas Nickleby, Nancy Drew, Mummy movies, The Pit and the Pendulum,
The Wolf Man (again), The Telltale Heart (again), The Monkey’s Paw
(again), The Cask of Amontillado (again) and The Maltese Falcon (for,
like, the fourth time). Narrative collision is now the thing that Dark
Shadows does.
But the interesting thing about 1897 is that they’re not stealing from
the classics in the same way that they used to.
Two years ago, they borrowed plots and themes that would inform the
character development and long-term storylines. In 1795, they did a
long-form adaptation of The Crucible, because it let them do dramatic
riffs on jealousy and cruelty and fanaticism and injustice. They turned
Abigail Williams into Angelique, and Reverend Hale into Reverend Trask,
and those themes and characters were so strong that they’re still with
us, a year and a half later. We’re still getting Jack the Ripper
sequences every time Barnabas goes to the docks, because the theme of a
cruel, selfish man preying on socially powerless women resonates with
our ongoing focus on Count Dracula’s relationship problems.
But 1897’s collisions are mostly hit-and-run, just grabbing a bit of
visual spectacle that lasts for an episode or two.
The second coming of Jane Eyre was the exception — keeping Jenny locked
up in the attic was a symbol for the ruling class hiding their unhappy
truths from the world, and the writers followed through on that theme
for several months.
Besides that, the literary references just skip across the surface. The
Tell-Tale Heart lasted for half an episode, and the guilty party wasn’t
being haunted by his own conscience; it was an outside influence
specifically trying to screw with him. The Pit and the Pendulum became
a Batman-style action-adventure countdown. They started to do a riff on
The Monkey’s Paw, with a “careful what you wish for” theme as seen in
the actual story, but then the magical hand grew a body, and all of a
sudden it’s a Bond villain.
There’s a story that I’ve heard about Armistead Maupin, the author of
Tales of the City, a long-running love letter to San Francisco. The
series was optioned by Warner Bros for a feature film adaptation, but
the studio told him that they’d have to drop most of the gay characters
to make the movie successful. He told them that taking the gay people
out of Tales of the City would be like taking the poor people out of
Dickens.
And here we are, watching a television show that actually takes the
poor people out of Dickens. Reverend Trask’s punishment school,
Worthington Hall, is a direct lift from Nicholas Nickelby’s Dotheboys
Hall, but instead of being filled with the orphaned and forgotten, its
student body consists of two immensely wealthy children whose family
owns the grounds that the school is standing on.
And then there’s Oscar Wilde’s 1890 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray,
which is stripped of all meaning and turned into another action-
adventure cliffhanger. Count Petofi’s fiendish plan to get Quentin
under his control involves commissioning a magical portrait that will
change into a werewolf on full moons, so Quentin doesn’t have to. It’s
a clever idea, and a funny allusion for you and me and the Barnard
grads to chuckle over. It’s also a good example of the show’s new
approach to narrative collisions, because this storyline is the
opposite of The Picture of Dorian Gray in every respect.
Basil Hallward is an artist in London in the late 19th century, who
falls desperately in love with a beautiful young man that he meets at a
society party. The moment that Basil claps eyes on Dorian Gray, he’s
lost forever — Dorian is all that he thinks about, and all that he
talks about, and capturing his unique beauty on canvas becomes the
single focus of Basil’s life.
Basil is gay, by the way, although he never actually says so out loud,
so maybe he’s one of those Jonathan Frid-style lifelong bachelors who
are shy and collect antiques and have a great respect for women, and
just happen to be born without the capacity to experience romantic
love. It’s not a likely scenario, for Basil or anyone else, but his
family says that he’s not gay, and he’s dead now, so nobody can ask him
and that means we should change the subject. Also, he’s fictional.
Basil is, I mean, not Jonathan. Well, they both are, I guess.
Anyway, Basil is super inspired by Dorian in several lifelong
bachelor-type ways, and the book opens with him painting the portrait
that will be his crowning achievement as an artist: Dorian’s beautiful
and unspoiled soul, captured on canvas.
During a sitting, Basil’s friend Lord Harry Wotton drops by. Harry is a
cultured, witty, utterly cynical agent of Discordia, and one of the
most shameless Mary Sues in literary history. Harry is clearly Wilde’s
self-portrait, a man who can drop six eye-opening epigrams during the
course of a two-minute conversation. He’s full of theories about art
and life and society, and every character in the book trips over
themselves, they’re so eager to hear what’s going to come out of his
mouth next.
By the way, Harry isn’t gay either, honestly, where do people get these
crazy ideas? He’s married to a woman, hel-LO, and there’s women all
over the movie poster, so what are you even talking about.
But Harry spouts all these quotable paradoxes about morality, which he
doesn’t have a lot of respect for, and the rules of cultured society,
which ditto. He encourages Dorian to take advantage of his youth and
beauty while he has it — to make mistakes, and follow his passions
while they still burn this brightly.
His mind awhirl, Dorian looks at the finished picture, and laments that
the portrait will stay young and beautiful forever, while he will
wither and grow old. Instead of a tribute, he suddenly sees the picture
as a cruel mockery of what he’ll someday become. He wishes — with a
fervor that cracks reality — that it could be the other way around,
that the portrait could grow older while he stays young.
So guess what: it works! Dorian meets a young actress, and falls head
over heels in love with the idea of being in love — but then he drops
the girl, as soon as she exhibits a flaw. He tells her that she’s
worthless and will never experience love again, and she takes the hint
and commits suicide. That evening, he looks at the portrait, and finds
that the picture’s face has a cruel line around the mouth, while he’s
unstained. This goes on for quite a while, with an eternally-youthful
Dorian enjoying all kinds of forbidden passions, while the portrait in
the attic bears all the visible effects of his corruption.
Now, it’s important to note that this is not a science-fiction story.
Wilde gives Dorian a brief lampshade moment where he wonders whether
there’s a scientific explanation for what’s happening, so that he can
shut down that line of thought and forget about it.
Might there not be some curious scientific reason for it all?
If thought could exercise its influence upon a living organism,
might not thought exercise an influence upon dead and inorganic
things? Nay, without thought or conscious desire, might not
things external to ourselves vibrate in unison with our moods
and passions, atom calling to atom in secret love or strange
affinity? But the reason was of no importance. He would never
again tempt by a prayer any terrible power. If the picture was
to alter, it was to alter. That was all. Why inquire too
closely into it?
With that, Wilde closes the door on all things literal. You’re not
supposed to figure out how Basil acquired his magical power, or
anything horrid like that. This story is about the purpose of art, and
the mechanisms of polite society, and most of all it’s about how clever
and insightful Oscar Wilde is.
So as you can imagine, that story, that character and those themes have
approximately zero percent to do with Quentin’s portrait needs a shave.
Saying that this storyline is “based on The Picture of Dorian Gray”
does a disservice to the main theme of Dark Shadows, namely how clever
and insightful Sam Hall is.
Quentin isn’t being worshipped for his beauty and innocence. He’s not a
fallen angel, who changes before our eyes into a degraded brute. In
fact, if anything, Quentin’s character arc is going in the opposite
direction, as we’ll see later this week when he spontaneously invents a
whole suite of feelings about his lost daughter. Oscar Wilde is rolling
his eyes so hard that his head might come loose.
Around here, if a character mutters something cryptic like “If thought
could exercise its influence upon a living organism, might not thought
exercise an influence upon dead and inorganic things?” then that’s a
cue for Julia to shake her head, and try to get them back on script. On
Dark Shadows, thought does actually exercise an influence upon dead and
inorganic things. That’s kind of the show’s core competency.
So here we are in a brave new world, where the rumors of borrowing from
the classics are greatly exaggerated. Dark Shadows is no longer in the
business of copying storylines. Now they dash into the library just
long enough to rip a couple pages out of a book, and then they run
away, giggling and shouting, "You’ll never catch me alive!" As the man
said, all art is quite useless, so you might as well enjoy yourself.
Tomorrow: Twisting.
In the teaser, as the painting transforms, Charity moves too close to
the painting, and you can see a transparent image of her face over the
portrait on the right side of the screen.
As Tate walks down the steps into Petofi’s lair, the camera zooms out
and then in very suddenly.
Aristede tells Tate, “You learned that a long time ago, what are you so
upset about it now?”
There’s a lot of studio noise while Aristede and Tate are talking,
including a chair scraping on the floor several times.
Tate tells Aristede, “I have paid the price of things that you can’t
even imagine.”
As Barnabas gives Magda the gun, he loses his line and checks the
teleprompter. Then he says, “Now… when he comes, there’ll be no
problem.” (Checks the teleprompter again.) “But if it becomes
necessary, you must kill him.”
We can see Barnabas in the mirror as he’s leaving the Old House. Just
last week, Barnabas told Evan that he can’t see himself in a mirror.
Tomorrow: Twisting.

You neglected to mention that toward the end they got into H.P. Lovecraft.

One thing to keep in mind in following the story iosthat Barnabas was
supposed,to be a villain, but so many women in the audience fell in love
with him that they decided to "redeem the character" -- a common
practice in soaps-- which involved going back in time to show that it
was all Angelique's fault.

[Ubiquitous]

Post by Bill Steele

Post by Ubiquitous
“Well, you know how he gets when he possesses someone.”
Behold the educated viewer, watching an episode of Dark Shadows.
Charity Trask is looking at the unfinished portrait of Quentin Collins,
on the night of the full moon. To her surprise, she sees the portrait
change before her eyes, the painted face transforming into the image of
a werewolf.
“Ah,” one nods appreciatively, “an allusion to The Picture of Dorian
Gray.” One says this to oneself, because nobody else can stand to be
around one while the television is on.
But in reality, this storyline is based on The Picture of Dorian Gray
in the same way that Star Wars: The Force Awakens is based on an Ewok
lunchbox. There’s a family resemblance in there somewhere, but anything
more than that is a stretch.
I’ve written a lot about narrative collisions, the mash-up moments when
the Dark Shadows writers throw in characters and plot points from other
stories, just to see what happens. It’s one of the defining features of
the show, fueling all kinds of crazy storyline twists and surprising
shifts in tone, and creating a mad Frankenstein patchwork of Universal
Monsters films, avant-garde black box theater and pretty much
everything you remember from English Lit.
The first and most important narrative collision on the show is Jane
Eyre vs. Dracula, in spring 1967. At the time, the Collins family was
drifting gently in the direction of exposing their final terrible
secret — not a mad wife in the attic, but a dead husband buried in the
basement, which is practically the same thing. The orphan governess was
well on her way to falling in love with her dark and mysterious
Rochester, at which point you either introduce a triangle with a creepy
missionary dude, or you finish the book and everybody writes their term
paper.
And then Renfield opens the chained coffin in the family mausoleum, and
all of a sudden Count Dracula moves in next door, and he tells
everybody that he’s a long-lost cousin from England. He gets started on
Mina Harker while everybody else is still messing around in the
basement, and — in a stunning upset — Dracula actually wins. He faces
off against two different Van Helsings and a few wannabe Jonathan
Harkers, and in the end, he demolishes them all, and then he just keeps
on snacking his way through a four-year menu of Minas.
That works out great, so the writers start raiding the bookshelves for
more story ideas. To everyone’s surprise, they follow up with a
science-fiction version of The Crucible, seasoned with The Monkey’s
Paw, The Cask of Amontillado, The Tell-Tale Heart, Pride and Prejudice,
Jack the Ripper and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
No, seriously. They intentionally reference all of those things during
the show’s four months in 1795. Millicent starts out as Lydia Bennett,
and ends up as the Rosencrantz version of Ophelia. It is an age of
wonders.
Now, the standard way that people talk about Dark Shadows’ narrative
collisions is that they were a pragmatic shortcut for the writers,
which helped them to come up with new story ideas. If you’re stuck for
a storyline idea and you’re allowed to go to the library and borrow
one, then obviously that’s very appealing.
But it also becomes an inside joke between the writers and whoever’s
well-read enough in the audience to notice it. This was 1960s daytime
TV, watched mostly by housewives and teenagers, and if the kids haven’t
read Pride and Prejudice all the way through, then that story point
sails over their heads. But some of the housewives went to Barnard, and
the reference is a shout-out to anyone who cares.
And besides, Sam Hall had a weird sense of humor, and some of the
obscure references are clearly just Sam amusing himself. He thinks it’s
funny to do a scene from Waiting for Godot in the middle of a vampire
soap opera on ABC’s dime, and he’s right — it is funny, even if nobody
else gets it.
He really did that, by the way, in episode 537. He was a madman. I bet
there are more literary references hidden in Sam’s scripts, which
nobody’s figured out yet. I leave this challenge for the lit-crit
archeologists of the future.
So by late 1968, the outside influences start piling up in surprising
new patterns. The lead-up to the 1897 trip was a direct reference to
The Turn of the Screw, but with a less frantic governess and real
ghosts.
Then Count Dracula travels through time by meditating over an ancient
Chinese divination technique — attention people of the future, please
figure out where the hell _that_ came from — and the storyline goes
into narrative collision overdrive, borrowing from Jane Eyre (again),
Nicholas Nickleby, Nancy Drew, Mummy movies, The Pit and the Pendulum,
The Wolf Man (again), The Telltale Heart (again), The Monkey’s Paw
(again), The Cask of Amontillado (again) and The Maltese Falcon (for,
like, the fourth time). Narrative collision is now the thing that Dark
Shadows does.
But the interesting thing about 1897 is that they’re not stealing from
the classics in the same way that they used to.
Two years ago, they borrowed plots and themes that would inform the
character development and long-term storylines. In 1795, they did a
long-form adaptation of The Crucible, because it let them do dramatic
riffs on jealousy and cruelty and fanaticism and injustice. They turned
Abigail Williams into Angelique, and Reverend Hale into Reverend Trask,
and those themes and characters were so strong that they’re still with
us, a year and a half later. We’re still getting Jack the Ripper
sequences every time Barnabas goes to the docks, because the theme of a
cruel, selfish man preying on socially powerless women resonates with
our ongoing focus on Count Dracula’s relationship problems.
But 1897’s collisions are mostly hit-and-run, just grabbing a bit of
visual spectacle that lasts for an episode or two.
The second coming of Jane Eyre was the exception — keeping Jenny locked
up in the attic was a symbol for the ruling class hiding their unhappy
truths from the world, and the writers followed through on that theme
for several months.
Besides that, the literary references just skip across the surface. The
Tell-Tale Heart lasted for half an episode, and the guilty party wasn’t
being haunted by his own conscience; it was an outside influence
specifically trying to screw with him. The Pit and the Pendulum became
a Batman-style action-adventure countdown. They started to do a riff on
The Monkey’s Paw, with a “careful what you wish for” theme as seen in
the actual story, but then the magical hand grew a body, and all of a
sudden it’s a Bond villain.
There’s a story that I’ve heard about Armistead Maupin, the author of
Tales of the City, a long-running love letter to San Francisco. The
series was optioned by Warner Bros for a feature film adaptation, but
the studio told him that they’d have to drop most of the gay characters
to make the movie successful. He told them that taking the gay people
out of Tales of the City would be like taking the poor people out of
Dickens.
And here we are, watching a television show that actually takes the
poor people out of Dickens. Reverend Trask’s punishment school,
Worthington Hall, is a direct lift from Nicholas Nickelby’s Dotheboys
Hall, but instead of being filled with the orphaned and forgotten, its
student body consists of two immensely wealthy children whose family
owns the grounds that the school is standing on.
And then there’s Oscar Wilde’s 1890 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray,
which is stripped of all meaning and turned into another action-
adventure cliffhanger. Count Petofi’s fiendish plan to get Quentin
under his control involves commissioning a magical portrait that will
change into a werewolf on full moons, so Quentin doesn’t have to. It’s
a clever idea, and a funny allusion for you and me and the Barnard
grads to chuckle over. It’s also a good example of the show’s new
approach to narrative collisions, because this storyline is the
opposite of The Picture of Dorian Gray in every respect.
Basil Hallward is an artist in London in the late 19th century, who
falls desperately in love with a beautiful young man that he meets at a
society party. The moment that Basil claps eyes on Dorian Gray, he’s
lost forever — Dorian is all that he thinks about, and all that he
talks about, and capturing his unique beauty on canvas becomes the
single focus of Basil’s life.
Basil is gay, by the way, although he never actually says so out loud,
so maybe he’s one of those Jonathan Frid-style lifelong bachelors who
are shy and collect antiques and have a great respect for women, and
just happen to be born without the capacity to experience romantic
love. It’s not a likely scenario, for Basil or anyone else, but his
family says that he’s not gay, and he’s dead now, so nobody can ask him
and that means we should change the subject. Also, he’s fictional.
Basil is, I mean, not Jonathan. Well, they both are, I guess.
Anyway, Basil is super inspired by Dorian in several lifelong
bachelor-type ways, and the book opens with him painting the portrait
that will be his crowning achievement as an artist: Dorian’s beautiful
and unspoiled soul, captured on canvas.
During a sitting, Basil’s friend Lord Harry Wotton drops by. Harry is a
cultured, witty, utterly cynical agent of Discordia, and one of the
most shameless Mary Sues in literary history. Harry is clearly Wilde’s
self-portrait, a man who can drop six eye-opening epigrams during the
course of a two-minute conversation. He’s full of theories about art
and life and society, and every character in the book trips over
themselves, they’re so eager to hear what’s going to come out of his
mouth next.
By the way, Harry isn’t gay either, honestly, where do people get these
crazy ideas? He’s married to a woman, hel-LO, and there’s women all
over the movie poster, so what are you even talking about.
But Harry spouts all these quotable paradoxes about morality, which he
doesn’t have a lot of respect for, and the rules of cultured society,
which ditto. He encourages Dorian to take advantage of his youth and
beauty while he has it — to make mistakes, and follow his passions
while they still burn this brightly.
His mind awhirl, Dorian looks at the finished picture, and laments that
the portrait will stay young and beautiful forever, while he will
wither and grow old. Instead of a tribute, he suddenly sees the picture
as a cruel mockery of what he’ll someday become. He wishes — with a
fervor that cracks reality — that it could be the other way around,
that the portrait could grow older while he stays young.
So guess what: it works! Dorian meets a young actress, and falls head
over heels in love with the idea of being in love — but then he drops
the girl, as soon as she exhibits a flaw. He tells her that she’s
worthless and will never experience love again, and she takes the hint
and commits suicide. That evening, he looks at the portrait, and finds
that the picture’s face has a cruel line around the mouth, while he’s
unstained. This goes on for quite a while, with an eternally-youthful
Dorian enjoying all kinds of forbidden passions, while the portrait in
the attic bears all the visible effects of his corruption.
Now, it’s important to note that this is not a science-fiction story.
Wilde gives Dorian a brief lampshade moment where he wonders whether
there’s a scientific explanation for what’s happening, so that he can
shut down that line of thought and forget about it.
Might there not be some curious scientific reason for it all?
If thought could exercise its influence upon a living organism,
might not thought exercise an influence upon dead and inorganic
things? Nay, without thought or conscious desire, might not
things external to ourselves vibrate in unison with our moods
and passions, atom calling to atom in secret love or strange
affinity? But the reason was of no importance. He would never
again tempt by a prayer any terrible power. If the picture was
to alter, it was to alter. That was all. Why inquire too
closely into it?
With that, Wilde closes the door on all things literal. You’re not
supposed to figure out how Basil acquired his magical power, or
anything horrid like that. This story is about the purpose of art, and
the mechanisms of polite society, and most of all it’s about how clever
and insightful Oscar Wilde is.
So as you can imagine, that story, that character and those themes have
approximately zero percent to do with Quentin’s portrait needs a shave.
Saying that this storyline is “based on The Picture of Dorian Gray”
does a disservice to the main theme of Dark Shadows, namely how clever
and insightful Sam Hall is.
Quentin isn’t being worshipped for his beauty and innocence. He’s not a
fallen angel, who changes before our eyes into a degraded brute. In
fact, if anything, Quentin’s character arc is going in the opposite
direction, as we’ll see later this week when he spontaneously invents a
whole suite of feelings about his lost daughter. Oscar Wilde is rolling
his eyes so hard that his head might come loose.
Around here, if a character mutters something cryptic like “If thought
could exercise its influence upon a living organism, might not thought
exercise an influence upon dead and inorganic things?” then that’s a
cue for Julia to shake her head, and try to get them back on script. On
Dark Shadows, thought does actually exercise an influence upon dead and
inorganic things. That’s kind of the show’s core competency.
So here we are in a brave new world, where the rumors of borrowing from
the classics are greatly exaggerated. Dark Shadows is no longer in the
business of copying storylines. Now they dash into the library just
long enough to rip a couple pages out of a book, and then they run
away, giggling and shouting, "You’ll never catch me alive!" As the man
said, all art is quite useless, so you might as well enjoy yourself.
Tomorrow: Twisting.
In the teaser, as the painting transforms, Charity moves too close to
the painting, and you can see a transparent image of her face over the
portrait on the right side of the screen.
As Tate walks down the steps into Petofi’s lair, the camera zooms out
and then in very suddenly.
Aristede tells Tate, “You learned that a long time ago, what are you so
upset about it now?”
There’s a lot of studio noise while Aristede and Tate are talking,
including a chair scraping on the floor several times.
Tate tells Aristede, “I have paid the price of things that you can’t
even imagine.”
As Barnabas gives Magda the gun, he loses his line and checks the
teleprompter. Then he says, “Now… when he comes, there’ll be no
problem.” (Checks the teleprompter again.) “But if it becomes
necessary, you must kill him.”
We can see Barnabas in the mirror as he’s leaving the Old House. Just
last week, Barnabas told Evan that he can’t see himself in a mirror.
Tomorrow: Twisting.

You neglected to mention that toward the end they got into H.P. Lovecraft.

We haven't gotten that far in the viewing yet...

Post by Bill Steele
One thing to keep in mind in following the story iosthat Barnabas was
supposed,to be a villain, but so many women in the audience fell in love
with him that they decided to "redeem the character" -- a common
practice in soaps-- which involved going back in time to show that it
was all Angelique's fault.

I think that was mentioned previously.

--
Hillary's staff admitted cutting and pasting classified emails, then
explained cutting & pasting to Hillary. Three times.