Episode 517: Tell me your dream

Wiggèd witch Cassandra shakes off an attempt to burn her and finds out that Sam Evans, an artist whom she blinded a little while ago, is in the hospital with a severe head injury. Sam is on the critical list.

Cassandra has cast an elaborate spell that takes the form of a series of nightmares one person after another has. Sage Timothy Eliot Stokes managed to stop the dream curse a while ago, but Cassandra is determined to restart it. Sam must be the next person to have the dream, so she goes to his hospital room and puts a powder in his drinking water that does the trick.

We see Sam’s dream, as we saw the dream when each of the previous nine people had it. The dream is an opportunity for the actors to emote as fiercely as they want, and most of them seem at least a little bit silly as they go through the exercise. Today, David Ford is the most ridiculous yet. He has to scream several times, and we find that screaming was not one of his strengths as an actor. In fact, every time he did it Mrs Acilius and I laughed out loud. The other person in his dream, the well-meaning Vicki, is played by Alexandra Moltke Isles. Mrs Isles has a ghostly quality that makes her very effective as a mysterious figure in a nightmare. Next to her, Ford seems to be some random guy in a bathrobe who just wandered onto the set.

Sam wakes up from his dream and begs his daughter Maggie to get her friend Vicki to come over. Only by telling her about it can he be relieved of the agony that comes to those who have had the dream. Regular viewers know that if he does this, Vicki will have the dream. In a soliloquy, Cassandra tells us that Vicki will pass the dream to recovering vampire Barnabas. Her purpose in setting the curse was to turn Barnabas back into an active vampire; this will therefore be the last step to her success.

Stokes knows how the curse works and knows that Barnabas will die if the dream gets back to him. He does not know that Barnabas was a vampire, much less that Cassandra wants him to revert to vampirism. Maggie was the first to have the dream and knows that Stokes is an expert on it. She does not know that it is designed to kill someone at its culmination. So she sends for both Vicki and Stokes. At the end of the episode, Vicki is at Sam’s bedside, inviting him to tell her the dream; Stokes is still on his way.

Cassandra chose Maggie to be the first to have the dream because she resembles Barnabas’ lost love, gracious lady Josette. They look so much alike that they are the same actress. She does not tell us why she chose Vicki to be the last, but Vicki had extensive contact with Josette’s ghost in the first 39 weeks of the show, and from November 1967 to March 1968 traveled back in time and got to know Josette as a living being. When Josette was alive, Cassandra was known as Angelique. She was a lady’s maid in Josette’s family’s home, and secretly hated the young mistress. Barnabas had an affair with Angelique until he realized he could marry Josette, when he discarded the servant and pursued the mistress. Eventually, Barnabas’ attachment to Josette led the enraged Angelique to turn him into a vampire. So it is logical that Angelique/ Cassandra uses the two women closest to Josette as the first and last instruments in her campaign to revamp Barnabas. It does make it all the more ironic that Stokes lumped strange and troubled boy David, who for the first months of the show was more involved with Josette’s ghost than anyone else, among the “comparative strangers” who have the dream when Barnabas is in relatively little danger.