Visiting parapsychologist Dr Guthrie and well-meaning governess Vicki have persuaded flighty heiress Carolyn and high-born ne’er-do-well Roger to join them in the drawing room of the great house on the estate of Collinwood for a séance. Their goal is to contact the ghost of Josette Collins. The table is photographed by a camera pointing straight down, a first for Dark Shadows.
As Vicki starts moaning, the doors to the room fly open and a shrouded figure appears. After a commercial break, the figure is revealed to be Roger’s estranged wife, blonde fire witch Laura. Laura says that she has changed her mind, and decided to accept Guthrie’s earlier invitation to join the séance.
The five gather, and after a moment Vicki resumes moaning. She utters a series of words in French, most of them disconnected. Laura glares at Vicki, and it seems to be a great struggle for Vicki.
Carolyn says that Vicki doesn’t speak French. Since Josette was originally French, they conclude she is the one speaking to them. Regular viewers know that Laura and Josette are enemies, and that Laura forced Josette to retreat the other day. So when we see Laura making this odd face at Vicki, we know that Laura is using black magic to frustrate Josette’s attempt to speak through Vicki. Through Vicki, Josette manages to force out the French for the words reclusive matriarch Liz repeated after she fell ill a few weeks ago- bird, fire, stone. She says that a stranger is present, that a small boy is in extreme danger, that the stranger is both dead and not dead, mentions an empty tomb, and describes flames rising to the sky. She twice struggles to say “The name of this person is” before Vicki screams and collapses face first onto the table.
Alexandra Moltke Isles strains every muscle to depict the intensity of Josette’s battle with Laura. She is convincing enough that her final scream and collapse don’t seem at all exaggerated. Unlike Vicki, Mrs Isles is a fluent French speaker, and her superb accent enables her to craft a distinct character for Josette in these few gasping words.
Laura’s arrival will raise a question for those who have been keeping track of the show from its beginning. The first time we saw the drawing room doors fly open was in #30. That was also the first time we saw the room lit by candlelight during a thunderstorm, as we again see it today. On that occasion, Vicki saw a silhouetted figure there.
It is never made clear who this figure is. The only living person in the house with Vicki is Roger, and unless he was wearing a wig it can’t have been him.
Compare that silhouette with what we see when the doors fly open this time:
Are those of us who have been watching from the beginning supposed to make the connection and wonder if the figure Vicki saw in #30 was Laura? That was an episode at the climax of the story that began when Laura and Roger’s son, strange and troubled boy David, tried to murder his father. When he made that attempt in #15, we saw David saying “He’s going to die, mother, he’s going to die!” There was a suggestion then that David was in psychic contact with his mother, and since then we have learned that Laura is able to materialize across distances. Perhaps she already had this ability last summer.
Vicki saw the ghost of Josette in #126. At that time, the ghost spoke to her in English, in a clear, calm voice, and used complete sentences. They’ve spent a lot of time in recent weeks explaining that it is difficult for Josette to appear to more than one living person at a time, but I think we are to assume that her struggles communicating today are less a consequence of that limitation than they are the result of Laura’s interference.
Two actresses share the part of Josette in this episode. Mrs Isles is her voice at the séance. We also cut away from the séance to the long-abandoned Old House on the grounds of the estate. There, we see footage that originally appeared in #70, where Josette (played by Kathryn Leigh Scott) takes shape in front of her portrait above the mantelpiece and walks down to the floor. This effect introduces a more intense phase in the séance. One of the major themes of supernaturalism is that there is a geography of mysterious connections among particular places, and seeing an instantaneous reaction in the drawing room of the great house to an apparition in the parlor of the Old House directs our attention to arcane geography.
One of the moments that does not work so well comes in between the two attempts at séance. Before the first, Roger had been harshly skeptical, deriding Guthrie as a quack and taking every opportunity to show his exasperation with Vicki and Carolyn for playing along with him. When Guthrie invites Laura to join their second attempt, Roger says, with evident sincerity, that he is no longer skeptical. What has changed his mind?
During the first attempt, even before Vicki started to make sounds, Carolyn and Guthrie said that they felt a ghostly presence approaching. When the doors fly open and a figure is seen in silhouette, they react as if that figure might be a ghost. When they see that it is Laura, the audience suspects they may have been right, but they behave as if she were a living human being. Roger certainly does not regard Laura as anything other than the wife whom he is so eagerly trying to divorce. If Roger did feel an eerie presence, as Carolyn and Guthrie did, it must have been a remarkably strong feeling for his skepticism not to return when he sees that the figure was Laura.
This leaves Roger looking like a cardboard character with no real motivation of his own. That could easily have been avoided. The séance doesn’t begin until the episode is half over. Everything up to then is a total waste. Add a few moments to the séance, and you’d have plenty of time to show that Roger is experiencing something he won’t be able to shake. As it stands, we can assume that something of that sort happened, but we shouldn’t have to make that assumption. Something should have been shown to us that would explain the point and advance Roger’s characterization.
Considering that the only sign of the séance’s success we saw before Roger’s change of mind were the first few seconds of Vicki’s channeling Josette, we might imagine Laura going into disdainful ex-wife mode and making a salty wisecrack. Something to the effect that all a woman has to do is moan a couple of times and Roger thinks he’s done something great. It’s just as well she doesn’t say this, but it is too bad the episode sets itself up to be deflated so readily.
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