DARK SHADOWS 627

Grayson. ALEXANDRA MOLTKE’S LAST EPISODE. Narration tells us that Jeff’s rooming house is on the outskirts of Collinsport. Slightly different reprise.

NOTE: the photo showing Collinwood is looking worn and has scratches on it or threads or pot marks and maybe a hair (EWL!). Time to replace that!

Jeff checks Eve’s body. She is dead. “My God!” Vicki says.

Eve told Jeff the proof that he was Peter this afternoon… So it is the same day as the almost wedding.

Vicki asks if Jeff did it and he says no. He also says, later on, “I don’t know” to some of her questions. “I don’t know anything more about this than you do.”

Vicki is going to see Jeff through this and convinces him to call the police.

NOTE: the room is suddenly well lit and the small lamp looks like a different one, maybe?

Adam voice over: he wonders who he can turn to: not Nicholas Blair. Angelique, also in the woods, comes to Adam, who’s scared of her (Barnabas’s reactions to her in him?). She knows that Eve is dead and that he did it. She tells him she is glad: Eve was evil and he had a right do to it.

Angelique uses the truth to get her way, telling Adam that Nicholas knew Eve did not love Adam. He used Adam like he uses everyone. She tells him Nicholas knew Eve was seeing Jeff and wanted her evil, she was Danielle Roget, her real name, her name was not Leona.

She wants them to work together to dispose of Nicholas Blair. She also wants them to frame Jeff for Eve’s murder.

Adam says, “I don’t know” twice. She asks if he believes her (IDK) and if he will do as she asks (IDK). She asked him to go back to the house and act as if he were surprised Eve was dead when Nicholas tells him that news.

An out of focus Joe Haskell in hospital. Someone is watching him from the window briefly. A nurse comes in to Joe and puts the lights out (Greta Markson) for him to rest.

On a side note, a nurse, I don’t know which one, was played by Miss Polish America in one episode. When the nurse leaves, it seems that Tom Jennings has come into Joe’s room but the fast talking deep voiced bad actor explains he is Chris Jennings, Tom’s brother.

Chris’s hair is wet and dripping from the rain. Joe could not find Chris for Tom’s funeral; Chris moves around a lot. Chris asks if Joe was with Tom when he died and Joe was. Chris asks about the animal and the wound that was on Tom’s neck. He knows that no animal is around here that attacks humans.

He finds it mysterious and wants to talk to people Tom worked for or knew and doctors at the hospital---a list Chris already got from the sheriff (it’s odd the sheriff would let him do his own investigating like this: Jeff Clark, John Moody, Seth Parker, Nicholas Blair.

Joe asks Chris if he went to see his sister. Joe calls her MOLLY. MOLLY fell to pieces when her brother Tom died. Dr. Hoffman sent her to Windcliff since she was in shock.

“I didn’t know. I just didn’t know,” Chris says.

Julia comes in to check on Joe and when she sees Tom she screams, puts her hands up and yells. Joe tells her Chris is Tom’s brother. She calms down and he doesn’t ask her about her screaming twice. Chris tells Julia he has a car here and can drive her back to Collinwood.

SO THIS HAPPENS MORE THAN ONCE: JUST HOW DID JULIA GET THERE IN THE FIRST PLACE? Doesn’t she drive her car to the place? Is she leaving it there? Is she walking everywhere?

When Chris leaves the room, asked to do so by Julia, Joe and she discuss Chris. Julia asks, “WHY?” in two wrong places.

Joe tells Julia that Chris and he went to High School together, he was bright, and then went on to college for architecture. Then something happened that changed his whole personality. He dropped out, alienated all his friends, and spent time in the mountains for weeks at a time, then disappeared completely.

When his parents died, he didn’t even come back then, saying in a letter to Tom he got he didn’t get the news of the funeral in time, he said.

Joe tells her Chris is investigating Tom’s death. Joe wants her to get him to leave town. Chris is outside the window listening.

NOTE: this seems to more than imply that Joe knows about the supernatural goings on now and especially that Tom was a lot like Angelique: a vampire.

The same storm is going on…is this still the same night as Vicki’s wedding? Julia is questioned by Tom at Collinwood’s doors and inside. Her hair is not wet but his is dripping from the rain. Julia has her standard story/lie to tell him and when he asks what kind of animal attacked Tom, she says, “I don’t know.”

Julia then questions him. It has been over two months since Tom died, why did he take so long to come here? Then they discuss his sister MOLLY who is in Julia’s hospital (“it’s my hospital.”).

Chris says, “The kind of life I lead is all WRONG for her.” The actor emphasizes the word WRONG, an annoying habit of Chris. He is always on the go. Julia thinks he does not want the responsibility. He leaves, upset. Julia goes up the steps, smacking her gloves into her hand. The thunderstorm is still going on.

Vicki comes in as Julia goes up to the landing. She tells her that Roger must have turned off his CELL PHONE! WTF? Did they even have cell phones back then? Which makes me wonder when Roger got one. (Or did she say telephone?).

It certainly would have helped in past crises before such as when Roger and Vicki were stranded at that shack in the storm in year one. And any number of other times, I think. I thought I was hearing things.

Although details are sketchy, mobile phones were not available to the public until 1972 or so although the army and military used somethings similar. The inventor of cell phones and network phones started work on his vision in 1966!

Vicki tells Julia about Eve (but of Jeff she says, “He didn’t know her last name.”) and Julia reacts but lies as usual, telling Vicki she didn’t know the woman. Vicki needs Roger’s help to clear Peter. Vicki goes to get him while Julia goes back down the steps, puts one glove on and goes out the door.

Angelique voice over: she asks her master to lift the curse of the night off her. She wants Blair relegated to the darkness. She starts a lengthy incantation to summon her master.

As she starts to talk out loud, the large mike appears over her head.

She evokes and invokes several things: calling on the prince of fire and the flames, the dark creatures of the nature, she summons him in the name of the seven flames, in the name of the charred and blackened stars that reigned at her beginnings, calling him/it forth from the mouth of the dragon, and of the beast and the false prophet (she seems very good at it but she is reading some of this from the teleprompter), she calls him forth from the subterranean rivers of blood, from the smoke of torment that rises and in the name of every evil spirit that is obedient to him.

This includes calling him the prince of fire and mentioning the seven plagues and the blackened dead stars that reigned from her beginnings (which makes me think she is older than Nicholas!). She evokes the mouth of the dragon, the beast, the false prophet, and everything evil. He in turn starts to destroy her with some kind of glowing fire…or so she thinks and asks him not to destroy her. She screams and seems to half vanish in flames of green.

There are NINE people in this episode, which makes me think maybe they could have shown the near wedding. Something that never happened before is that AFTER the credit of Alexandra Moltke as Victoria Winters, another credit appears…the Nurse played by Greta Markson. Also the credits move to the left or right or the camera does… slightly.

Phew. A long episode and a fantastic one. Lots happening. I must admit to being a bit uncomfortable when Angelique summons up the dev…Diablos, so not yet named. Something about it seems TOO evil and too much like real Satanists that it makes me uneasy. I no longer think this.

It is also very clear that she is calling THE DEVIL but the show cannot call him that.

I am very, very hard on the actor, Don Briscoe, who plays Chris in my first round of reviews. That was before I found out what happened to him and so I will completely lay off him and what I think about his acting. Seeing him act again, makes me wonder if I really should lay off him…or if I can.

I think he is ---and I’ll say this positively now---the hottest guy in Dark Shadows with the possible exception of the guy who played Jeremy for four episodes.

And…Alexandra’s last ep. ! Sigh!

Episode 627: Bad Moon Rising | Dark Shadows Every Day

Dark Shadows bloopers to watch out for:

In the reprise teaser, the furniture, books and clothes that were scattered around Jeff’s room have magically been packed away. The rocking chair is gone, and so is the sport coat, which was hanging on the light fixture next to the closet.

In the hospital, when Chris takes a note out of his pocket, a camera peeks into shot on the right.

Chris offers Julia a ride back to Collinwood, with no prompting. How did Julia get to the hospital in the first place, and how did Chris know that she didn’t have a car?

When Joe fills Julia in on Chris’ backstory, she tries asking “Why?” during two different pauses, and doesn’t really manage to get the word out either time.

The camera moves slightly during the closing credits.

Behind the Scenes:

Alexandra Moltke gave birth to her son Adam on June 27, 1969 — coincidentally, the third anniversary of Dark Shadows’ premiere. She didn’t do a lot of acting work after this — she was married to Philip Isles, a lawyer who was connected to the New York investment bank Lehman Brothers. She worked behind the scenes in theater for a while, and with the Museum of Broadcasting.

In 1981, she was involved in a huge national scandal — she was reportedly having an affair with Claus von Bülow, a New York socialite who was accused of attempting to kill his wife Sunny. There were various trials and legal proceedings dragging on through 1987. Alexandra’s part in the story was actually pretty minor, but it’s a weird connection for anybody who remembers the trials.

In the 1990s, Alexandra became a documentary filmmaker, thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She made two films about the Holocaust — The Power of Conscience: The Danish Resistance and the Rescue of the Jews (1994), and Porraimos: Europe’s Gypsies in the Holocaust (2002), and one about the McCarthy era — Scandalize My Name: Stories from the Blacklist (1998). Her films were shown at film festivals and at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, and they were broadcast on PBS. So she turned out to be a lot more interesting than you would have guessed, from watching her as an ingenue on a lunatic vampire soap opera.

The nurse in today’s episode is played by Greta Markson, who doesn’t have a lot of credits that I can find in the one minute of Google searches that I feel like spending on her. She appeared in an episode of The Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse in 1954, and she’s got a couple of late-50s Broadway credits. Then she was in an episode of The Defenders in 1965, and Dark Shadows in 1968, and that’s all I know.

A couple other notes: Tom and Chris’ sister is referred to as Molly in this episode. She’ll be renamed Amy Jennings by the time she makes her first appearance next week.

Also, Chris is clearly supposed to be Tom’s identical twin, but they never actually use the word “twin” on the show. They just say that he’s Tom’s brother. And that is just about everything I need to say about this episode. At last.

Well, for one thing, Vicki’s leaving. I should probably make a bigger deal out of this than I am, because one of the themes of the blog so far has been the ongoing war between Victoria Winters and the audience.

She’s the main character, the girl from Dan Curtis’ dream. Every episode of the show used to start with the words, “My name is Victoria Winters,” even if it was an episode that Vicki wasn’t actually in.

But that was several monsters ago, and the world has changed. Barnabas, Julia and Angelique stepped onto the stage, snarling and snapping their jaws, twisting their necks into impossible positions in order to find their light. It was the Age of Kaiju, and all the attention shifted to the big, theatrical characters with tragic storylines and not much in the way of self-awareness.

As it turns out, Vicki wasn’t really able to compete in this new environment. They sent her back in time to the 18th century, and she was the only character in the entire original cast to appear on the show for four months — and she still ended up offstage most of the time, hiding in an attic or locked up in jail.

They’ve tried their best to keep her involved — Dan is incredibly loyal to the people that he likes, and Vicki is the girl from his dream — but Alexandra Moltke knows that this isn’t going anywhere. In the Saturday Evening Post article from a few weeks ago, she complained about being stuck in a five-year contract, playing a dumb character who’s constantly being upstaged by mental patients.

So she did what any smart actress would do: she got pregnant, and told Dan to go to hell. You can’t really tell, but she’s been pregnant for two months, and today’s her last day in Collinsport.

According to the synopses, the original plan for this week had the whole climax of this story thread happening after Alexandra Moltke left. Jeff would be alone when he discovered Eve’s body, and he’d have a long discussion about it with the useless Sheriff.

Part of the decision to speed things up must have come from a desire to have Vicki in the room when this all blows up. It avoids a long, agonized thinks monologue for Jeff, and it allows the wounded almost-newlyweds some dignity, before Vicki ducks offstage and gets recast.