The Dark Shadows Daybook: OCTOBER 18

By PATRICK McCRAY

Taped on this date in 1968: Episode 610

Eve visits Jeff in the garden and is surprised when he fails to acknowledge his past love for her... when he was known as Peter Bradford. Perhaps because she looks different from when she was Danielle Roget? Inside, Vicki tells a melancholy Liz that she and Jeff will marry. Liz’s funk lifts briefly when Vicki invites her to help plan the wedding. Jeff descends into anxiety in the garden, giving Vicki her doubts about the wedding. Liz, too, returns to her thanatomania, and when she sees a spying Eve, she declares her to be the Angel of Death. Eve goes to Nicholas, demanding to know of her past identity -- a forbidden topic. They discuss the fact that she was seen by Carolyn, and now by Jeff.  He is livid. All she can offer him is the information that Jeff Clark and Peter Bradford are the same. Curious, Nicholas places Eve in a trance and learns that Peter came to loathe the deeds of Danilelle, who murdered Phillipe Cordier. Peter had, however, enough love to give her a head start before he alerted the authorities that she was a killer. Eve awakens, confirmed in her suspicions of the past. Nicholas is disturbed that other forces are at work in the midst of his own efforts.

What wasn’t going on in 1795? The authors loaded it up like a clown car of expanding cast members and storylines. It would be great fun to retcon the telling of 1795 to include hints of Danielle Roget. And let’s not forget the other, eleventh hour storyline lurking under the 1795 surface: Jeb Hawkes. He had existed in the 1790’s, too, and lured Vicki to leap from Widow’s Hill after her return to that time. Peter later came to the future as a ghost to punish Jeb. This is a storyline that could use a more memorable establishment of causality. On one hand, I give it a hearty WTF and go on to say that it makes the curly-q Ragnarok/1840 storyline look like the Maggie Kidnapping. But it is text. Seen that way, it’s one of Collinsport’s more cosmic mysteries, perhaps not meant to be lashed down with colored paper and a bow.

On this day in 1968, Aristotle Onassis announced his wedding plans with Jackie Kennedy. We also saw Apollo 7 return three bitter and sick astronauts to Earth. Finally, in the-more-things-stay-the-same department, athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos were suspended from the Olympics for giving a black power salute.

What year is it? Really? Forty-eight years later?

You’d never know.