The Dark Shadows Daybook: March 9

By PATRICK MCCRAY

The search for Gabriel intensifies when it becomes known that Quentin has vowed to kill him. This is at the behest of Gabriel, who asked it of Quentin before he went into the room. Meanwhile, Daphne withers away into a coma after telling Bramwell that he and Catherine belong together. Morgan makes a case to Catherine that Bramwell was responsible for Daphne’s fate, adding to her conflict. Melanie visits Julia, insisting that Julia knows the identity of her parents, but won’t reveal it. Can she be trusted? Julia and Morgan attempt to learn the secrets of the locked room, but within, Julia recoils in horror at what she sees.

This… is a soap opera. It’s lots of adults having strained conversations, quietly insinuating mistrust over past transgressions. I know that Lara Parker was getting a chance to play something other than a villain and that Jonathan Frid was anti-Barnabasing, and I hope they enjoyed it. The whole thing just feels stunningly pedestrian. I appreciate the literary function of 1841 PT to the whole of the DARK SHADOWS story, but episodes like this feel leaden compared with the cruelty of the show’s beginning and the zaniness of the 1897 apex. The company is twenty days away from filming NIGHT OF DARK SHADOWS and less than a month away from putting the show to rest. Are they tying up loose ends or cruising it out? Um, yes.

We are just two days away from the death of Philo T. Farnsworth, who would die on the 11th of March, 1971. He invented the television as we know it. And he was only 64 when he died.