Thanks for the good word, Dawn!  I'll be setting my VCR...

Let me tell you, these next couple weeks are going to be rough for this Dark Shadows junkie!  Just when I was getting into the 1840 storyline, and looking forward to the return of Angelique, SciFi decides to pre-empt the show.  Oh well.

Guess I just didn't realize how addicted to our show I had become until I started freaking out Wednesday night when I came home to find The Outer Limits recorded on what I thought held that day's Dark Shadows episodes.

Thank goodness I have the tapes I started making at the beginning of the current run.  They provide some solace when I need my DS fix.  Decided to start watching the beginning of the 1897 storyline, and let me tell you I am enjoying it!  Magda and Sandor are too much fun, and I just love the interplay between all the Collins siblings early on in that story.

Was wondering how the rest of you are coping.  With DS off the air for the time being, are you just going 'cold turkey,' or are you watching DVDs or video tapes of old episodes?  (I know some of you don't follow the SciFi run).  Anyway, just wanted to know if anyone besides me was going through withdrawal.

Yeah, from what I've heard, Grayson was a pretty hip broad.  Maybe she was trying to inject a little of herself into the good doctor. 

Shouts out to those who remember "The Thing that Couldn't Die!"  It's SO funny to watch now, but it scared the bejesus out of me as a little kid.

In an attempt to respond to Vlad's comments, I too was amazed that the head showed up so early in the 1840 storyline.  This is my second viewing of 1840, and it's hard to believe all this madness with Judah Zachery has already started.

As to how much of this the writers had planned, it's so hard to tell.  Part of me agrees - maybe they had this whole thing intricately plotted out months in advance.  The events of 1840 are pretty convoluted, and it's hard to believe there wasn't an overall vision.  Perhaps DC or other persons in authority asked for a story that lent some insight into why the Collins family kept having these supernatural problems every generation.

Even PT1841 goes in this direction.  Without going heavily into spoilers, much of the story centers on an ancient curse against the family.  Later in the current storyline, we will discover that such a curse also drives most of the action in 1840.  To me, this hints at an overarching plan by the ptb.

That being said, there are several inconsistencies (i.e. family history) that I don't think can be readily explained.  So much happens, and it's happening so fast that it seems like someone was telling the writers to speed up the action and they simply lost track of what had come before in effort to keep up the breakneck pacing of 1840.

The disembodied head itself taps into a primal place of fear.  It's the kind of thing that haunts our nightmares as children.  That's why "The Thing that Couldn't Die" ruined me so much as a kid.  I definitely see the macabre fascination though, as back then I was also quite taken with the story of Anne Boleyn's sad fate and her headless ghost.

The idea of of a living/dead severed head (that rhymes!) is horrifying.  You've done your research, Vlad.  There's obviously some tradition of severed heads in the horror/fantasy genre, as well as in mythology.

Although I'm not familiar with the Norse or other myths you referenced, I do remember that in one of the old Oz books (and the 1985 movie "Return to Oz") there was a similar motif, involving an evil witch who had a whole cabinet full of severed heads that she kept in jars.  She would change her own head with the ones in the jars, in the way other women change their hats.  I read the Oz books when I was 10 or 11 and this is the image that stayed with me most.

An aside - doesn't Judah's head eventually have to go with a body other than his own?  Do I sense the shade of the Oz story here?

And haven't some of us heard stories about victims of the Reign of Terror in revolution-era France who, once guillotined, had lips or eyes that kept moving for some time after death?  Also I remember reading that when they executed Mary, Queen of Scots, her lips moved in prayer for maybe ten minutes after her head was stricken from her body.  Can her conciousness have survived that long too?  A chilling image.  One would never want to be that living/dead disembodied head, but to be left alone in the dark with it?

Anyway, there are just some mental pictures so frightening and macabre that they become objects of fascination to us -  archetypes of horror, if you will.  Add to this disturbing symbol the idea that a living dead severed head could force people to do it's bidding, and well...you pretty much have as chilling a story as ever there was.

Considering that "The Thing that Couldn't Die" (1958) and another cult fave "The Head that Wouldn't Die" (1962) had been fairly recently released, the writers may have had this idea about a menacing severed head reinforced many times.  Who knows, perhaps one of the writers heard about the Norse or Celtic myths, read the Oz books in childhood, learned about the Reign of Terror in history class, and then saw one or both of the aforementioned mentioned movies and just couldn't shake the scare that a mean old animated severed head can put into you.  And voila, Judah Zachery!

Kudos to Dark Shadows that they tried this, and that they ultimately pulled it all off pretty well!  Yeah, things got a little muddled along the way, but the actors (for the most part) rose to the occasion, investing this story with fever-pitched performances that really put the grand back into Grand Guignol.  For my money, it's one of the best pure horror storylines of the whole series.

And oh yeah, that wax head is excellent!  Sometimes the only way I can tell the difference is that the glass on the box fogs up when it's the real deal.

Congratulations, Mark!!!

Yeah, KLS's departure would have had to make the whole Josette angle much harder to deal with.  They couldn't work the lookalike concept in 1840.  They would have been left with making someone her reincarnation who DIDN'T look like her, which really wouldn't have worked with any of the existing 1840 characters.

I think the article posted by MB (thanks!) shows that the audience was tired of the Barnabas/Josette romance, and didn't want that repeated.  Why the PTB chose to pursue the May/September thing with Roxanne instead of building something between the vampire and our fave doctor is beyond me, though.  They could have gotten a lot of mileage out of a "will they or won't they" storyline between Barnabas and Julia.

And just where is Josette's ghost in all of this?  True, she did appear during the Leviathan storyline to give Barnabas the brush-off, but in 1840 shouldn't she still have been actively haunting the Old House?

Maybe her ghost would have been pissed that Barnabas gave her the brush off so easily after waking from his relatively short dirt nap.  :-

I too was bothered by the farewell Barnabas so hastily bid Josette.

May contain spoilers -

I agree Vlad, the 1840 storyline is wonderful.  It's like a dark flower that just keeps closing in on itself.

Many of the characters are wonderfully realized, and showcase the DS actors at their best.  Nancy Barrett as Pansy Faye comes to mind, and you have to sort of love Lara Parker's Angelique, who redeems herself in this storyline (well, kinda).

Desmond and Flora DO showcase Karlen and Bennett at their best, and I think that James Storm is really strong as Gerard.  Of course Chris Pennock is wicked good as Gabriel, and although Virginia Vestoff's Samantha Collins is a nasty piece of work, you have to admit she was amazing in the role.

1840 is scarier and more bleak than many of the previous storylines, and I love how it hints that the darkness always goes deeper at Collinwood than you first think it does.  Maybe the very ground on which the house was built was cursed even before the first Collins ever set foot in Maine.

That being said, the nonsense about the head of Judah Zachary just sends me ROTFLMAO, but in a good way.  And I'm always wondering if they really did adequately wrap up all loose ends, like that thing with the kids.  Does anyone remember Judah/Gerard going after Tad and Carrie?  What about Edith?  And did there end up being Collinses at Rose Cottage after Barnabas and Julia changed the past?

Would have loved to see more of the return to 1970.  Can you imagine?  What if that trip to 1840 royally screwed up present day Collinwood?