i'm doing 1840...finally

I have to agree with mscbryk: The characters were so much more fun when they were tortured souls than out and out nice guys (though they never really were that either). Once they became the "good guys" there wasn't much for them to do but fight the "bad guys" or in Quentin's case, get buried alive (am I imaging it or did that happen more than once?)

And to Magnus, nice signature, definitely got a sarcastic chuckle out of me. 

was this due to fear that the show's pre-teen audience might get "mad" like they did during the leviathan storyline when barnabas turned nasty again?

Perhaps. But it wasn't just the teen audience who disliked evil Barn during Leviathans. The daytime magazines were flooded with letters from adult viewers complaining.

by making previously "bad" characters like barnabas and quentin "nice"(or at least nuetral)it actually does them a tremendous disservice and nullifies alot about what made them compelling in the first place.

True. Though in the case of Barn it might be less of an issue because they never truly reformed him. Even while trying to save the family or solve some other crisis, he still managed to do many (some might even say far too many) decidedly unheroic things. But with Quentin it was, sadly, a different story because after 1897 he basically lost much of what was most appealing about him in 1897. After 1897 Selby didn't get much good material to work with unless he was playing some alternate Quentin. 

I couldn't disagree with Willie Loomis more about Jonathan (he's my favorite actor on the show).

Jonathan was the reason I started watching Dark Shadows in the first place....I found the show a bit on the boring side (aside from the Laura story) before Barnabas came.  Once Jonathan came onto the show I was hooked. Of course I watched the Barnabas episodes long before the episodes before he came so that may have made a difference.

I think Jonathan should be cut some slack on his stumbling over his lines. He had been a theatrical actor before he came onto DS, and he himself admitted he had been a slow study. Working on a soap opera is quite different from working on the stage too, I would imagine.

Jonathan was better in some scenes than others, but he was not an absolute washout by any means. There are several dramatic scenes he played to perfection, his weeping at Sarah's disappearance after she finally appeared to him, for example. He was so great in that. And if he did trip up other actors on occasion, it's not like he did it on purpose.

I do think the other actors, Joan and Louis for example, got shortchanged as far as having their own storylines when Jonathan came on, but that's hardly Jonathan's fault.  DS actors were known to do other projects and leave for long periods of time while still on the show.


As far as 1840 goes, it's one of my favorites. In fact all of the time-travelling sagas are my favorites.

In fact all of the time-travelling sagas are my favorites.

It's interesting that you say that because back in '98 when AOL's now defunct Dark Shadows Online asked all online fans (not just AOL members) to nominate their favorite DS storylines, hundreds of fans responded, and the three highest voter getters were all time-travelling sagas: 1795, 1897 and 1840. Not one of the present day storylines came close to the amount of votes those three storylines received.

a few comments and many questions...

of all the time stravel storylines 1840 is the "prettiest".it reminds me of 1970 parallel-time in that collinwood itself looks bright and cheery despite the sinister doings beneath the surface.blue seems to be a signifigant color here that contrasts nicely with all the dark woods.there is a particularly lovely cornflower shade that colors everything from draperies to gowns.the set for rose cottage is especially nice.

questions and this will involve major spoilers...

how are flora and desmond related to the family?they are refered to as "cousins" but wasn't daniel the last surviving member of the collins family?since flora had to have married into the family was there some other hitherto unmentioned male relation or is this simply one of those things that goes unexplained?

why does nancy barrett as leiticia faye act just like charity trask possessed by pansey faye in 1897?is there a particular reason or was that just a popular character the writers thought they could milk a bit more?

one can assume that the child of gabriel and edith ends up being the father of the 1897 characters(judith,edward,quentin and carl)but those numbers don't really add up.again does this major continuity issue go unaddressed?are the 1840 quentin and the 1897 quentin supposed to be the same character for some reason?and for major spoiler points i peaked ahead in the episode summaries and see that at some point towards the end of this storyline gabriel kills edith...how is that possible if she's the head of the family in 1897???is this just another major continuity snaffoo or does some sort of parallel-time mumbo-jumbo undo this at some point?

i know this is cheating but i'm already confused by this storyline.

p.s.i'm probably one of those rare fans that prefers the "present day" storylines to the time travel stuff.

Hi, mscbyk,

I'll address two of the issues you bring up:

one can assume that the child of gabriel and edith ends up being the father of the 1897 characters(judith,edward,quentin and carl)but those numbers don't really add up.again does this major continuity issue go unaddressed?

Unless I'm forgetting something, I don't believe we're ever told the ages of Gabriel and Edith's children. I believe all we know is that they're away at school. So, it might be possible that in 1840 they had a son who was younger than Tad but still old enough to start a family within the next 5 or so years. And also, even though Joan Bennett was 59 in 1969 that doesn't necessarily mean that Judith was 59 in 1897 - Judith might have been a bit younger. 

are the 1840 quentin and the 1897 quentin supposed to be the same character for some reason?

In Ep #1077, while researching the events of 1840 during the summer of 1970, Quentin mentions that he had a great-grand uncle with the same name as his, and he remarks how very strange it is to think that someone had his name and lived at Collinwood 130 years earlier. 

hey msbryk,

1840 is one of my favorite storylines, but there are definitely some inconsistencies that have left me scratching my head too.  hope you enjoy your first viewing of it - i think it's really fun!  and you're right - it is pretty to look at.

piggybacking onto what mb was saying above, it isn't ever stated what the ages of gabriel and edith's kids are - in fact, being "away at school", they could even be older than tad, imo.  maybe the father of edith, quentin et al was almost university age?

edith getting killed in the 1840 storyline creates a paradox that many dark shadows fans have debated for years.  i can't explain it either, except to say (somewhat cynically) that i'm sure the writers likely didn't care if anyone remembered edith from 1897, and certainly never dreamed we'd be sitting around, virtually, talking about why they did what they did forty years later.  inconsistent, sloppy writing/continuity like this certainly isn't uncommon on television.

as for the leticia/pansy similarity - i'm pretty sure everyone just liked nancy barrett as that character, so they brought her back, albeit with a different name.  perhaps leticia's meant to be an ancestor of pansy?

as to daniel supposedly having been the last of the collinses in 1795/6, i don't remember ever hearing that, but perhaps someone else here does.  since we were later informed that the collins family came to maine in the 1690's, there were certainly enough generations between the 17th and 19th centuries for an offshoot line from which desmond's unnamed father sprang.  plus, with the collins family being so...peculiar, i'm sure that even if they had said daniel was the last collins, there would've been some black sheep of the family in the 17th or 18th centuries that didn't make it into the official family history, who nobody acknowledged.  yeah, that's fanwanking, but it could be used to explain any "cousin" showing up later on the show.

Alright, I thought I knew what "fanwank" meant, but now I guess I don't.

The only thing that really makes 1840 impossible is B, J, and Stokes returning to 1971 and finding things normal, with Liz knowing them.    I think they never intended to return to the "present" except for a moment... then they fled from 1971 as fast as they could, because they'd screwed it up so badly that no story in 1971 RT could possibly be viable.    As long as they were staying forever in the past, contradictions and loose threads wouldn't matter (they thought).     They weren't even staying in the same "universe". 

Don't know what to say about Edith being killed in 1840 and then having old Edith in 1897 just bursting to tell the family secret. Which would mean that Gabriel would've known it because Daniel would've told it to him in 1840, which obviously didn't happen because A) we didn't see it and B) Daniel HATED Gabriel a whole spankin' lot, and probably would've told it to Quentin instead.

I can't remember if Gabriel bites the bullet or not in 1840, but if he didn't, maybe he married another Edith?

I agree with what others have said about the ages of Gabriel's children. We were never given any hint as to how old or young they were, so they could've been anywhere from probably 6-25.

And in regards to Daniel being the last surviving member of the family in the late 18th or early 19th century, that's heavily debateable. Especially since the Collins family tree, found in the DS Almanac, shows that Isaac Collins, the first ancestor, had three unknown children. And then one of those unknown children had Joshua and Abigail, from which the rest of the tree branches out. So it's possibly that one of Joshua's uncles had children, thus resulting in Flora and Desmond appearing as cousins of the 1840 family.

In the Summer 1970 episodes, there is a painting of an ancestor right outside the playroom named "Abner Collins".  He may have been Flora's husband.

I always figured that Edith wasn't killed in 1840 but unconscious and revived sometime later.  They should have had Edith & her family out of the country at the time the 1840 events happened, tp make it easier.  Its funny they actually remembered about Edith in 1840 at the beginning of the story only to forget at the end she was supposed to be alive.

Yeah, the unconscious theory worked for me too. LOL!

Hey, o'm sure that's not the first Gabriel strangling she survived.

 

i was pleasantly surprised at what i thought was a remarkable bit of continuity with the inclusion of edith in this storyline.what's more she was at an age in 1840 that would have jived with her being in her eighties/nineties in 1897...

but i was disappointed when i learned that they tossed this out the window by having edith die later on.

yes i've heard a million times that the writers only thought the audience would only see these episodes once but still did they think that their audience suffered from a collective case of amnesia and would forget about a very important character from only about a year before?

the show itself ran for less than five years so it's quite likely the audience vividly remembered most of the characters from it's entire run even only having seen each episode once.do you forget what happened three years ago?the writers should have given their viewers a bit more credit.

Based on the ways in which they wrote the show, I've surmised through the years that the DS writers didn't look at the concept of time in the same way that, say, science fiction writers do or a majority of writers might have. They pretty much viewed the storylines in terms of the points in time when they took place on the show, as opposed to their actual chronological time. Even though in real time 1840 obviously took place before 1897, the 1840 storyline took place after the 1897 storyline on the show, and the 1840 events took place after Barnabas' trip to 1897. So, to the witers' minds, anything that happened in the 1840 storyline didn't invalidate anything that we had seen in 1897 because Barnabas had travelled to 1897 before he'd travelled to 1840 - 1897 took place before 1840 in the show's and Barnabas' own timeline - and thus any changes that Barnabas & Co. made to 1840 hadn't yet taken place when Barnabas had been in 1897. Yes, that creates all sorts of paradoxes, not to mention it conflicts with a logical view of time - but there you have it. But then, that's hardly the only unique take on the concept of time in the DS universe as it's endlessly fascinating how changed events in the past had been able to change outcomes in the future like David's death due to Quentin's haunting, but they never actually changed the fact that events like the haunting had taken place because several characters still remembered. It's not so much the writers didn't expect the audience to remember - it's that they expected the audience to accept and to go with the concept of time in the same ways that they did. DS is quite simply a show with many of its own unique rules. 

Just thought I'd poke my head in the door to say that I'm more or less equally fond of the present day storylines and the time-travelling ones.  I have a special fondness for the pre-Barnabas 1966-67 shows, and for the Cassandra Collins/Nicholas Blair 1968 storyline--as regards the latter, mainly because I started watching DS during that period so it was my introduction to the series.

I haven't watched the episode in quite some time, but as I recall it, when David and Amy are exploring the West Wing in December of '68, they pass a portrait of a mutton-chopped gent of the 1860s and David solemnly informs his new friend that this is Thaddeus Collins, an ancestor who fought in the Civil War.  I realize I'm imputing WAY too much power of recall to the writers but I like to think of Thaddeus as the child Tad grown up and doing his bit during the War Between the States.

G.