Seagoing con man Jason McGuire finds his old henchman, the sorely bedraggled Willie Loomis, in a bar and drags him back to the great house of Collinwood. He orders Willie to apologize to reclusive matriarch Liz and her daughter Carolyn for, among other things, trying to rape Carolyn. The ladies distrust Willie at first, and Carolyn has occasion to remind Willie that she had to fend him off by pointing a loaded pistol at him and promising to blow his brains out. After a few minutes, though, Carolyn realizes that Willie is strangely changed and seriously ill.
Carolyn leaves, and Liz and Jason have a scene together in the drawing room while Willie and the portrait of Barnabas Collins have a scene in the foyer. Willie and the portrait have some fresh material to explore; Willie tries to evade the portrait’s gaze. When he cannot, he screams and faints. A closeup of the portrait emphasizes its grim look of command. It was Willie’s obsession with the portrait that drew him to his doom, and now a sinister force calls to him through it.
The scene in the drawing room is anything but fresh. Jason makes a demand of Liz, in this case that she let Willie stay in the house; Liz resists the demand; Jason threatens to expose her terrible secret; Liz capitulates. This is the eleventh time we have seen this particular ritual, and it is no more interesting than were the previous ten.
Writing from the perspective of someone who started watching Dark Shadows with #210, Danny Horn praises the acting of Joan Bennett and Dennis Patrick and declares this the first good scene on the show. Bennett and Patrick were outstanding performers to be sure, but those of us who have seen this same scene so many times before will be less enthusiastic. Besides, there have been some other good scenes in the last few days, even if most of them involved actors triumphing over weak scripts. And in the first months of the series, there were whole episodes that were good, one of them as recently as eight weeks ago.
It is by no means clear why Jason wants Willie in the house. Jason’s whole plan seems to be to blackmail Liz and squeeze her for whatever he can get, and Willie plays no part in that. On the contrary, the danger he represents to Carolyn and to well-meaning governess Vicki very nearly prompts Liz to call the police and put an end to the whole situation.
In #204 and #205, Willie threatened to expose Jason’s guilty secrets if he didn’t deliver a large sum of money right away, suggesting that Jason is keeping his own blackmailer close at hand. But yesterday, Willie said he didn’t want any money, and today he says that he wants to go far away and never see Collinwood again. So it would seem Jason is off whatever hook Willie may have been keeping him on.
Liz breaks it to Carolyn that Willie is going to be back in the house while he recovers from his illness. Carolyn at once agrees that this is as it should be. She is deeply concerned about Willie’s sorry state and believes that his apology is sincere. She asks Liz if she also believes this. Joan Bennett plays her response for a laugh- Liz is so surprised that Carolyn is actually convinced by Willie that she momentarily forgets to pretend to be convinced herself.
Viewers who saw all of Willie’s depredations will appreciate Carolyn’s response. If someone as thoroughly loathsome as he was can inspire this much sympathy after falling under the malign influence he has released, how much more poignant will it be when the same influence starts to work on a character we actually like?
The episode ends with a scene between Willie and Jason. Willie is in bed, moaning that he wants to get away from Collinwood, while Jason bullies him to stay and tries to find out what’s wrong with him. When Willie snarls at him to stay away from the bite on his wrist, all those scenes with Liz become retroactively easier to tolerate. Willie was hard to watch when he was trying to rape the female characters, but now that he has been brought low by the fell powers of darkness he’s likable enough. Jason’s insistence on probing into Willie’s doings suggests he too will get his comeuppance sooner or later.
The contrast between Carolyn’s final speech to Liz, with its reference to Willie’s apparently “spiritual” disorder and her remark that she isn’t sure she wants to know what is going on with him, and Jason’s final interrogation of Willie, with its assumptions that Willie has committed a specific crime and sustained a specific injury in the course of it, shows the difference between Carolyn and Jason as characters. Carolyn has been on Dark Shadows from the beginning and knows that the ghosts have been getting more and more intrusive. She remembers that her Aunt Laura visited recently and turned out to be a murderous fire witch from beyond the grave, and that by the end of Laura’s time no one could be sure if anything that has happened in Collinsport has been entirely of this earth. She knows that she is part of a supernatural thriller/ horror story, and has an eye out for the uncanny.
Jason showed up only a few weeks ago, immediately after Laura vanished. He is an in-betweener, meant to sweep away some leftover story elements, get the vampire onto the show, and fill time before the deadline for departure the actor gave the producers when he took the part. But as far as Jason knows, he is the leading character in a show about blackmail plots, whodunits, and missing fountain pens. He is a throwback to a phase of the show that ended in November of 1966, and he is speeding towards his doom.
Acilius on Dark Shadows 