Artist Sam Evans can think of nothing but his daughter Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town. Maggie disappeared from the hospital weeks ago, and the police haven’t found a clue as to how she got out or where she is. Sam’s friend, dashing action hero Burke Devlin, drops by Sam’s house and offers to take him to dinner. Sam isn’t hungry. Burke urges Sam to work on a painting; he says he can’t concentrate.
Burke brings up the idea of Sam painting a portrait of him. Burke did commission Sam to paint him in #22, and for weeks and weeks afterward Sam vacillated about doing so. That was part of the since-abandoned “Revenge of Burke Devlin” storyline. In the notes about this episode on the Dark Shadows wiki, we read that “the episode’s writer seems unaware of the portrait-painting history between Sam and Burke, the fact that it was a sore subject, and even of the general animosity between the two.” I don’t think that is necessarily so. Burke gave up on his revenge in #201, and everyone was thoroughly bored by the topic well before then. So I suspect this conversation is telling us that Burke and Sam have turned the page on all that.
Before Maggie disappeared, Sam had been painting a portrait of mysterious eccentric Barnabas Collins. Barnabas insisted on working only at night and on doing all the painting at his place, the Old House on the estate of Collinwood, which does not have electricity. Since Maggie vanished, Sam has offered to take the canvas home and work on it there, but Barnabas would not let it leave his house. Tonight, Sam decides to go to Barnabas’ and do some painting by candlelight.
Sam knocks on Barnabas’ door. Barnabas’ servant, Willie Loomis, answers. Before he met Barnabas, Willie was a dangerously unstable ruffian. Willie menaced Sam and Maggie in the local tavern so severely that Burke had to beat him to a pulp, and Sam came away from the experience hating Willie. But in his time working on the portrait, Sam has come to believe that Willie is a changed man.
Willie explains that Barnabas is away, that he doesn’t know when he will be back, and that he isn’t supposed to let anyone in the house in his absence. Sam protests that he is no stranger, and that he is sure Barnabas will want the portrait finished. Willie finally suggests that he take the canvas home and work on it there. That’s what Sam has wanted to do all along, so he is delighted to hear it. He carries the painting to his station wagon while Willie carries the easel. The two are in a jolly mood as they leave the house, seeming very much like good friends.
Sam leaves his pipe on a table in the front parlor of Barnabas’ house. In the first months of the show he went back and forth between smoking this pipe with its white bowl carved into a likeness of George Washington and puffing on cigarettes. We haven’t seen the pipe in a long while, but today we get a number of closeups of it. The first comes before Sam leaves home to go visit Barnabas, and the second when he and Willie are on their way to the station wagon.
As soon as Sam and Willie are outside, a figure draped in white comes down the stairs into the parlor. It is Maggie. It turns out Barnabas is the one who is holding Maggie. He has taken his cue from the 1932 film The Mummy, in which Boris Karloff is an undead creature who tries to convince a woman that she is the reincarnation of his lost love so that he can kill her and bring her back to life as that other person. Barnabas, it turns out, is a vampire. He wants to erase Maggie’s personality, replace it with that of his long-lost Josette, and then turn her into a vampire.
Maggie is sufficiently under Barnabas’ sway that doesn’t know who she is, but she is not fully convinced that she is Josette. When she picks up her father’s pipe she seems to remember something. She doesn’t sniff it, but a pipe is a highly aromatic object, and scents are powerful drivers of memory.
Maggie wanders back upstairs, keeping the pipe with her. Sam and Willie come in, and Sam is mystified that his pipe has vanished. When Willie says he must have left it outside, Sam starts to argue. Seeing that the pipe isn’t in the room and believing there is no one else in the house, Sam laughingly calls himself absent minded and asks Willie to keep an eye out for it.
Maggie wanders back downstairs after her father has gone. She and Willie argue about whether she ought to leave her room and who she is. She doesn’t let on that she knows anything about the pipe. She goes upstairs again, and Willie goes to the basement.
This is the first time we have seen the basement, and we get a long look at it. There is a metal door with a barred window, big cobwebs, a stone staircase, big candelabra, and a coffin. The coffin lid opens, and we see Barnabas inside. This is the first time we’ve seen him there.
Barnabas asks Willie why he has come. When Willie tells him he has news, Barnabas beckons him closer. When Willie obeys, he grabs him by the throat. When Willie has delivered his report, he flings him to the floor, apparently on general principles. He stands over Willie’s crumpled form and gives a lecture about the importance of keeping visitors out of the house during the day. Notably, he does not object to sending the canvas home with Sam.
Maggie wanders downstairs a third time. We see her face and hear her recorded voice on the soundtrack. This is the third instance of interior monologue on Dark Shadows, after we heard Willie thinking at the portrait of Barnabas in #205 and #208. As Willie did not know who Barnabas was or why he was drawn towards him when we heard his thoughts, so today Maggie does not know who she is or what Barnabas is doing to her. She looks at the pipe in her hand, concludes that there is someone she must take it to, and walks out the front door.
In the Evans cottage, Sam is working on the portrait of Barnabas when Burke comes in with a sandwich to share. They chat about the painting. Sam explains that he can’t get the eyes right- they keep looking cold and forbidding, while he and Burke agree that Barnabas doesn’t seem that way at all.
We cut back to the Old House, where Barnabas is sitting in his armchair, giving Willie some orders. He may not seem cold and forbidding to Sam, but he couldn’t be more blatantly malevolent than he is with Willie. When they discover that Maggie is gone, Barnabas and Willie run out the front door.
This is the first episode in which Barnabas is just a total bastard the entire time. When he is with people who don’t know that he is a vampire, he plays the role of the Collins family’s mild-mannered cousin from England; Barnabas is so committed to that performance that we wonder to what extent he is a monster pretending to be a nice guy, and to what extent he is a nice guy forced to function as a monster. When we’ve seen him alone with Maggie, he has obviously been a crazy person, but a twisted sweetness comes peeping out as he talks about his longing for Josette. Even in his previous scenes alone with Willie, scenes that have more than once ended with him beating Willie unmercifully, Barnabas has allowed Willie to go on talking about his feelings much longer than he would have to if he were entirely sincere when he tells Willie that his inner life is of no consequence. But there isn’t the least flicker of warmth in either of Barnabas’ scenes today.
In the Evans cottage, Sam is puzzling over the portrait while Burke is in the kitchen. Maggie comes drifting into view in the window behind Sam. The Evans cottage has been a prominent feature of the show from its early days, and the foliage visible through the window has changed often enough from episode to episode that regular viewers know there is an actual space behind it, but this is the first time we have seen a person there. In her white dress, with her dazed expression and her wafting movements, Maggie looks like a ghost. Sam sees her and is startled. He calls her name. She disappears. Sam and Burke run out of the house to look for her.
There are some significant flaws in the episode. The opening scene between Sam and Burke goes on too long, the repeated closeups on the pipe are embarrassingly heavy-handed, and Maggie’s three trips downstairs are one too many. There are also some badly framed shots, surprisingly so for director Lela Swift. For example, I cropped the fifth image above to zoom in on Sam and Maggie. Here is what actually appears in the show, cluttered with distracting junk on all sides and devoting more screen space to David Ford’s butt than anyone wanted to see:
Still, there is a lot of good stuff in the episode, and the ending is very effective. It is far from a gem by any reasonable standard, but it may be the best script Malcolm Marmorstein ever wrote.
Acilius on Dark Shadows 