David Collins, brought from 1969 by Count Petofi to inhabit the body of his grandfather-as-a-young-boy Jameson, has been lying in a feverish state at Collinwood for several days. He doesn’t realize that he’s traveled back in time and that the Quentin Collins who’s being so attentive to him is a living man and not a ghost.
It’s Quentin who gets Angelique to help the sick boy. David recognizes her too, as Cassandra, even though she’s got long blonde hair and is wearing Victorian clothes. Angelique doesn’t explain to Quentin that she once was/will be David’s stepmother, since that’s far too complicated. She’s never told him that she used to be married to Barnabas about 100 years ago either.
After some argument with Count Petofi over which one of them is more evil, Angelique removes the Count’s spells. David is returned to 1969 and Jameson awakes; the last thing he remembers is saying goodbye to Victor Fenn-Gibbon (aka Count Petofi), which is the point at which he became possessed.
The funny thing is that Angelique does have the power to travel through time, without all that I Ching business that Barnabas used. We’ve seen her do it, jumping from 1795 to the 1960s once she learned that Barnabas was there, and appearing in 1897 of her own will. She also sent Eve back to the 1790s, so she’s in a much better position to do what the Count wants, if only he weren’t so snotty to her.
Jameson’s father Edward has also recovered his wits and no longer thinks he’s the butler. Their recovery gives all the male Collinses a chance to bond, not just father and son, but the two brothers. They’d even hug if they weren’t so rigidly Victorian.
The other outcome of this is that Angelique and Quentin are engaged again; she insists on it as repayment for her services. In addition, Angelique says that she’ll give curing Quentin of his werewolf curse another try–but ultimately, she isn’t the one who manages it.
When the next full moon occurs, Quentin winds up locked up in a cell in the basement of the old house so that he can’t kill Beth or anyone else. This isn’t the little room with a small barred window on a solid door, where Maggie Evans was kept prisoner, but what looks like a jail cell with floor-to-ceiling iron bars making up one wall. I can’t imagine when or for what purpose this room was originally built.
But when the moon rises, Quentin doesn’t change.
The next evening while the full moon is up again, he sees his own portrait: the figure has become a werewolf while he remains normal.
On one of the recent DVDs, producer Dan Curtis spoke frankly of how he borrowed plots from various horror and gothic classics for the show. After the success of Dark Shadows, he went on to produce a number of made-for-TV adaptations of these same stories, including Turn of the Screw (although he had nothing to do with one my favorites, Frankenstein: The True Story; I thought he did). He acknowledges that the character of Quentin was indeed named after Peter Quint, the ghost in Henry James’s story.
As this plot with the portrait develops, it becomes obvious that Quentin might just as easily have been named Dorian.
It turns out that Count Petofi is responsible. He tells Quentin that he has plans, and he expects to repaid by Quentin for his part in them.
Charity Trask, meanwhile, is still under the Count’s spell. Tarted up with too much makeup and an unconvincing Cockney accent, she continues to have occasional bouts of clairvoyance. On this occasion, she foresees the death of Quentin in 12 days time.
In her vision, she sees the portrait of Quentin in the Collinwood drawing-room, covered in blood. A trail of blood leads up the stairs to the tower room, where Quentin himself lies with a bloody wound in his chest.
When Barnabas hears about this prediction, he’s naturally interested. He is, after all, here to find out how Quentin died and how that connects with his ghost’s possession of David. Barnabas also wonders how Quentin’s skeleton wound up sealed up in his bedroom when he died in the tower room.
He goes back to the I Ching wands, which he discovered at the old house in 1969; he believes they originally belonged to Quentin and wants to locate them in 1897 so he can reverse the process he used to get to this time period and return to the 1960s to do some historical research. Now that he knows the exact date of Quentin’s death–September 10–but not who killed him, Barnabas thinks he can find more information about what happened/is going to happen.
Searching Quentin’s room, he does find them in the closet, He also sees the werewolf portrait. Even though Barnabas has never read The Picture of Dorian Gray, he understands precisely what this means.
In the basement of the old house, Barnabas sits down at a table and lays out the I Ching sticks in a pattern. He begins to go into a trance and his spirit floats away into time… but before it can go anywhere, Edward Collins comes down the stairs and dashes the sticks off the table onto the floor.
