We’ve spent over 42 weeks with the ancient and esteemed Collins family of Collinsport, Maine- reclusive matriarch Liz, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger, flighty heiress Carolyn, strange and troubled boy David, and David’s well-meaning governess Vicki. Liz owns all the biggest things in and around the town, but the family is isolated and embattled. Someone bought up Liz’ debts and tried strip her of all her assets, her only servant went on a killing spree and was stopped only by the intervention of ghosts, Roger’s ex-wife showed up and turned out to be a murderous fire witch from beyond the grave, and now Liz herself is being blackmailed by seagoing con man Jason McGuire. Jason even forced Liz to share her home with his rapey henchman, dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis.
Today, an unexpected visitor comes to call on Liz at the great house of Collinwood. He identifies himself as her distant cousin, Barnabas Collins, the last survivor of the English branch of the family. This is the first Liz has heard of the existence of such a branch, but Barnabas’ resemblance to an eighteenth century portrait that hangs in the foyer is strong enough to make his claim plausible. He charms her with his old world manners. Regular viewers, knowing how lonely Liz must be, are not surprised that she is delighted with him.
Many commentators think it strange that this cousin from England does not have an English accent. I don’t see why. The last character on Dark Shadows to speak with an accent that had anything to do with the show’s setting in central Maine was killed off in #186, and Barnabas has the same mid-Atlantic accent Liz and Roger use. Since he goes on at length about himself as a typical member of the Collins family, we might assume they’ve all been talking like that for hundreds of years.
David plays in the long-abandoned Old House on the grounds of the estate. He sees Barnabas silhouetted in the doorway and greets him. Barnabas enters only after David has spoken to him.
David thinks that Barnabas is the ghost of the man in the portrait. When David tells him that he is on intimate terms with several ghosts, Barnabas gives him a hard look and takes a step towards him.
Barnabas reacts to David’s remarks with such a stiffly attentive face and such a deliberate movement of the body that we might sense menace. A man preparing a deadly attack might look like this. But David does not pick up on any danger. He chatters happily away about his ghost friends. As he does, Barnabas relaxes.
Returning viewers know that Barnabas is not in fact from England, but that Willie released him from a coffin where he had been confined for many years. He resembles the portrait painted in the eighteenth century because he sat for it. He embodies a malign supernatural force that we heard calling to Willie through the portrait and that the caretaker of the old cemetery has said creates a palpable aura of evil that emanates from the tomb where, unknown to him or anyone else, Barnabas’ coffin lay hidden.
None of the characters in today’s episode knows these things, but when David goes back to the great house he shows that he is onto something. He tells Liz and Vicki that he thinks “there’s something funny” about Barnabas. After Liz leaves, David explains to Vicki that Barnabas does not seem angry, as does the man in the portrait, but sad, terribly sad, as if he were “haunting the rooms” of the Old House. Evidently David is rehearsing the part of Captain Shotover in Shaw’s Heartbreak House, with his famous speech about how “We don’t live in this house, we haunt it.”
Vicki functions as an internal audience in her scenes today. She is the recipient of some flowery gibberish from Barnabas about the loveliness of the syllables in her name, and afterward agrees with Liz that Barnabas is very charming. She has a conversation with Liz about whatever is happening in the Jason/ Willie story, and reacts with alarm when Liz says things we are supposed to find alarming. Finally, she is someone in front of whom David can speak freely enough to tell the audience that we’re going to wind up feeling sorry for Barnabas.
Passive as Vicki is in her time on screen today, her opening voiceover is a bit more intriguing. The first 270 episodes of Dark Shadows open with brief monologues by Alexandra Moltke Isles in character as Vicki. Usually, these monologues allude to events in the story. The implication would seem to be that Vicki either knows what is going on or will eventually find out, and that she is speaking to us from the future, where she is looking back on the events we are about to see. This has very much included the advent of Barnabas. In the opening of #202, Vicki told us that Willie was destined “to awaken and unleash a force that will affect the lives of everyone”; in #209, she said that he had “stumbled onto the darkest and strangest secret of all”; and in #210 and #211, she again referred to his grave-robbing expedition and its fell consequences.
We’ve had two major breaks so far from the pattern that establishes Vicki the speaker of the opening voiceover as the person who already knows what we are in the process of finding out. Vicki opened #15 by saying that she had at that point in the story befriended David, something she was in fact months from doing. She opened #102 telling us that Roger was the only person she had to fear, when in fact Roger was the least of her problems. Now, we break from it a third time.
Today’s opening voiceover runs thus:
My name is Victoria Winters. Night is drawing nearer and nearer to Collinwood, and the man who disappeared into another night has not been found. But out of the falling dusk, another man has come, a stranger who is not a stranger, a man with a face long familiar to those who live at Collinwood, a man who has come a great distance but who still bears deep within him a soul shaped by the far country from which he came.
Some may argue (as the Dark Shadows wiki does) that “the far country” might be a reference to death, and so this monologue might be delivered by someone who knows that Barnabas has risen from the grave. But if you know that, you aren’t likely to say that he “bears deep within him a soul,” since we usually hear that vampires don’t have souls.
Vicki has been, not only the narrator, but the point of view character and the chief protagonist of Dark Shadows up to this point. So when we ask whether her voiceover suggests that she might remain unaware of Barnabas’ nature, we are asking if she will continue in that role.
The blackmail storyline was the only one going on Dark Shadows between #201 and the arrival of Barnabas. It has an expiration date, not only because Liz will eventually run out of stuff to surrender to Jason, but also because actor Dennis Patrick agreed to play Jason on condition that he be allowed to leave whenever he wanted, but in no case later than the end of June. The show has been trending heavily toward the supernatural thriller/ horror story genre since December. Indeed, Jason’s first entry into Collinwood in #195 comes with a hint of the portrait of Barnabas, suggesting that his purpose was to introduce Barnabas to the show.
So, while they could not possibly have foreseen that Barnabas would be the hit he actually became or how they would go about rebuilding the show around him, it was likely that if ABC renewed Dark Shadows and it continued beyond #260, Barnabas would have to be a presence in one way or another.
This might offer Vicki a way back in. The previous deadly threats, crazed handyman Matthew Morgan and blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, were both thwarted by Vicki’s relationship with the ghost of Josette Collins. Josette’s portrait hangs at the Old House, and her spirit is strongest there. Since Barnabas is already at the Old House, perhaps we should expect Josette to help Vicki defeat him as she helped her defeat Laura.
The first question that expectation brings to mind is whether Barnabas is also connected to Josette, and if so how. Today, he identifies Josette to David as “our ancestor.” It has been established that Barnabas is the son of Joshua and Naomi Collins, that Joshua and Naomi continued to live in the Old House after David’s ancestor Jeremiah Collins built the great house, that Jeremiah was not the son of Joshua and Naomi, and that Josette was married to Jeremiah. In the closing scene today, Barnabas makes a speech to the portrait of Josette, telling her that he claims the Old House for himself and that she and Joshua no longer have power there.
Barnabas’ bracketing of his father and Josette as the two relatives who thwarted him would suggest that those two were closely related. I think the likeliest explanation at this point is that Jeremiah and Josette were the parents of Joshua and Naomi, and that Barnabas’ grandmother took his father’s side against him in their climactic battle. All of that is subject to change, of course- Jeremiah, Joshua, and Naomi are only names, and for all the heavy lifting Josette’s ghost has done in the story since December of 1966 she has spoken only a few words and barely shown her face. So even a drastic retcon wouldn’t require explaining any memorable images away.
If Josette is Barnabas’ grandmother, it would seem that he would know a lot more about her than even her friends Vicki and David do. So Vicki is going to have to be on her toes to recruit Josette and deploy her in a battle against Barnabas as effectively as she did in her showdown with Laura. If, as the opening voiceover suggests, Vicki is going to remain oblivious to what Barnabas is all about, Barnabas’ declaration that Josette’s power is ended will prove correct. In that case, Vicki’s future on the show would appear to be sharply limited.
Acilius on Dark Shadows 