At the end of yesterday’s installment, artist Sam Evans looked out the window of his house and saw his daughter, missing local girl Maggie. Today, the sheriff shows up and reports that he and his men couldn’t find anything to substantiate Sam’s report. The sheriff then tries to convince Sam that he didn’t really see Maggie at all. When last we see Sam, he is telling himself that it was only his imagination.
Maggie had escaped from the custody of vampire Barnabas Collins and Barnabas’ sorely bedraggled blood thrall, Willie Loomis. Today, Barnabas meets Maggie in the graveyard, chokes her, and takes her into the tomb where he spent a century or two. He declares that he will punish her for trying to leave him.
As Barnabas talks, Maggie seems inclined to go along with his plan to annihilate her personality and replace it with that of his long-dead love, Josette. He wonders aloud if the punishment he was planning is necessary after all. But then she remembers that she is holding her father’s pipe, and she calls out “Pop!” Barnabas then takes her to the hidden room in the back of the tomb and shuts her up in his old coffin.
Director Lela Swift was uncharacteristically sloppy with the framing yesterday, but today she makes up for it with one of the most remembered shots of the entire series. When Barnabas shuts Maggie up in the coffin, we see him from her point of view. Claustrophobic viewers beware!
The next morning, Willie releases Maggie from the coffin, takes her back to Barnabas’ house, and urges her to convince herself that she is Josette. For a while, she tries it. We start to wonder if Willie will have as much success with Maggie as the sheriff had with her father. But then she looks in the mirror and shouts “I’m Maggie Evans!”
That may not sound like much story for 22 minutes, but it never feels slow. Swift and the actors are all in fine form today.
On the other hand, there are a couple of script problems. The sheriff is written as such a fool that we can’t help but be distracted, and the scene between Maggie and Barnabas in the outer section of the tomb goes on too long. But even at its lowest points the actors just about save it. Dana Elcar always makes it seem that Sheriff Patterson knows more than he’s letting on, so it isn’t until he starts trying to talk Sam into believing he didn’t really see Maggie that we get the sinking feeling that he is absolutely useless. And Jonathan Frid and Kathryn Leigh Scott are electric as Barnabas and Maggie, so much so that we could forgive the scene between them even if it had been twice as repetitious as it fact is. With two consecutive episodes including as much good stuff as was in yesterday’s and today’s, it’s starting to seem like they are due to land one in the ranks of the Genuinely Good Episodes any day now.
Acilius on Dark Shadows 