The Dark Shadows Daybook: March 6

By PATRICK MCCRAY

Taped on this date in 1970: Episode 982

Maggie receives a note from the dead Angelique, disinviting her to Collinwood. A prank? Meanwhile, Will meets Barnabas at Loomis House, but has suspicions. Quentin returns home and immediately starts arguing. Maggie finds out that Hoffman kept much nicer quarters for Angelique. Quentin’s son, Daniel, is in a foul mood about the marriage. In all, it’s a rotten welcome home. Will contends that Angelique’s ghost controls the house and that the note Maggie received shows signs of Angelique’s penmanship. Great. Back at Loomis House, Barnabas begins to feed off Carolyn. After discovering the bite marks, Will confronts Barnabas, chaining him in his coffin and forcing him to narrate his life for a new book.

Anne Rice, have you no shame? (I can’t believe I just asked that.) This is worse than that weird, highly commercialized flirtation with Jesus you had during the zenith of the Bush administration. You’d better be glad that Dan Curtis is eclipsed in pugnaciousness by only one person: Harlan Ellison. If you’d “quoted” Ellison the way you ripped off this storyline for INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE, the streets of New Orleans would flow orange with your fiscal remoulade. 

 I feel like we get into deep dish Parallel Time here, for better or worse. Goodbye, Barnabas. Hello, slow roast of Maggie Collins. Poor Kathryn Leigh Scott. To be given such ample screen time only to have nothing to do in it but suffer. Yes, she suffers well, but this is just like seeing a kitten put in a sack and hit with a t-square. The highlight of the episode, reliably, is John Karlen, who finds entirely new reasons to mug with delicious abandon. 


On this day in 1970, the American "revolutionary" group, Weather Underground, blew some of themselves up while trying to make a bomb. This is what happens when the radical left tries to do something violent involving the sorts of things they are usually attempting to ban.