Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, is giving up hope. Vampire Barnabas Collins locked her up in the jail cell in the basement of his house some time ago, and everyone she knows is coming to believe that she is dead.
The other day, a little girl in eighteenth century clothing appeared outside Maggie’s cell. The girl did not respond when Maggie tried to get her attention, nor did Barnabas’ sorely bedraggled blood thrall, Willie, see her when she walked past him. Only on her second or third visit to Maggie did the girl interact with her, and then only to warn her not to tell her big brother that she had seen her. Maggie suspects that the girl was a hallucination of hers.
We know that the girl is real, because we saw her interacting with someone else. Outside Barnabas’ house, the girl talked with strange and troubled boy David Collins and played catch with him. If we’ve been watching the show from the beginning, we also know that there are many ghosts in and around Barnabas’ house, and that they have a special rapport with David. Further, this girl gives her name as Sarah and says that everyone she knows went away a long time ago. We’ve been told that Barnabas had a sister named Sarah who died in childhood, so we know that Sarah is the ghost of that sister.
Today, the girl appears to Maggie again. This time she shows up in the cell itself. At first, she tosses her ball in the air, sings “London Bridge,” and ignores Maggie’s repeated questions. Eighteenth century kids didn’t have mobile phones, apparently they had to resort to a ball and “London Bridge” when they wanted to tune out the grownups. Sarah finally comes around when Maggie puts her hand on her shoulder.
Sarah explains that she came because Maggie was crying. She asks what Maggie is sad about, which Maggie doesn’t try to explain.
Sarah won’t answer many of Maggie’s questions. Sarah says that she has been looking for her parents, and she is puzzled as to where they and everyone else have gone. She says she does have one friend. If that is a reference to David, it would show that Sarah can learn information during one apparition and retain it during subsequent apparitions. It is unclear whether she knows that she is a ghost, and her understanding of Maggie’s situation is remarkably slight.
Maggie and Sarah play catch and sing “London Bridge” together. Sarah vanishes a moment before Barnabas arrives. Maggie reacts to him with terror, but when it becomes clear that he isn’t planning to kill her right away her excitement at Sarah’s visit comes bursting out. She tells him that she has a secret friend who visits her in her cell and plays with her. When he asks what she’s talking about, she tells him it’s a secret. She babbles in a gleeful, childlike way.
Barnabas reacts to this with discomfort. He keeps his eyes on Maggie and edges away from her, speaking to her in a pitying tone. Bleak as Maggie’s situation is, this is a laugh-out-loud moment- she’s become too weird for Barnabas.
Upstairs, Barnabas tells Willie that Maggie isn’t working out. In a moment of wild hope, Willie asks if that means he’ll let her go. Barnabas sourly replies that of course it does not mean that- they will have to kill her. His plan is to kill her in such a way that no trace of her will ever be found, “because there will be no trace.”
Willie takes a meal to Maggie and demands she stop pretending to be crazy. It isn’t helping her, he says. She denies that she is doing any such thing, and babbles cheerfully that “I do whatever anyone tells me to do.” Willie leans in, putting his face close to hers, and screams and shouts that she has to be her usual self if she is to have any chance of survival.
After Willie leaves, Maggie starts crying again and telling herself that there is no little girl. But then she looks at the floor and finds a doll Sarah left behind. Maggie smiles, knowing that her secret friend does exist.
Maggie’s mad scenes are fascinating. Even though she believes that Sarah is real and we know she is right, seeing Sarah has the same effect on Maggie a psychotic break might have. It takes her out of the reality that she shares with Barnabas and Willie, and gives her an affect that is neither continuous with her usual personality nor intelligible to them.
The three adult actors are all on the top of their form today, just superb. Nowadays, when Sharon Smyth Lentz describes her performance as Sarah, she says that “The first word that comes to mind is ‘clueless.’” But that works out surprisingly well. We know so little about what, if anything, is going on in Sarah’s mind that the keynotes of the performance would have to be “lost,” “confused,” and “vague,” and she had those three things down pat. Things sometimes get rocky when Sarah has a long stretch of dialogue or when multiple actors are moving at the same time, but neither of those is a problem today.
Joe Caldwell started making uncredited contributions to the writing of Dark Shadows early in 1967, and I am tempted to attribute every good thing in a script by Malcolm Marmorstein to him. But Caldwell’s name is showing up in the credits now, and this episode is excellent. So maybe Marmorstein could rise to an occasion every now and then.
My wife, Mrs Acilius, points out that this is the first episode set entirely in the Old House.
Acilius on Dark Shadows 