Last night, Jeff and I finished watching Dark Shadows:1245 episodes and 20 storylines (according to the Dark Shadows wiki.) We didn't watch every episode--I skipped around in the early storylines, and Jeff watched fewer episodes than I did. But we did watch all episodes of the last several storylines.
The last storyline was Parallel Time 1841.The start of this storyline is kind of jarring: a wounded Lamar Trask stumbles into the mysterious room that is a portal to Parallel Time, is trapped there, and apparently dies. In all the other time travel storylines on Dark Shadows, one of the original time line characters make the trip with us.
This time, we are suddenly following new characters in a new timeline including Bramwell Collins, played by Jonathan Frid, the portrayer of Barnabas Collins. The backstory is that Frid was sick of playing a vampire and wanted to play multiple characters as the other actors did.
Parallel Time 1841 concentrated on a family curse and a lottery where a member of the family had to spend a night in a terrifying room. A subplot was a Wuthering Heights-type romance.
The last scene of the storyline was discovering that Melanie Collins had been bitten by a vampire. It felt like a return to the basics. But no. The show ended with a voiceover from Thayer David that it wasn't a vampire bite after all. Everyone lived happily ever after and there were no more dark shadows. A disappointing end in a whimper.
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