Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, has been a prisoner of vampire Barnabas Collins for a long time now. Barnabas is planning to kill her tonight. We spend the opening scene with Barnabas’ sorely bedraggled blood thrall, Willie Loomis. We hear Willie’s thoughts as he does the housekeeping. Willie wishes he could save Maggie, but Barnabas has too much power over him. The most he can do is bring her a poisoned glass of milk and invite her to drink it if she wants to die an easy death.
Willie is not Maggie’s only friend. The ghost of Barnabas’ nine year old sister, Sarah, materializes in Maggie’s cell. Sarah asks Maggie why she is crying. Maggie tells her that if she doesn’t get out of the cell very soon, she will die. Sarah is distressed to hear this- “You mustn’t die- I don’t want you to die.”
Maggie hasn’t figured out that Sarah is a ghost, and keeps asking her how she manages to get in and out of the cell. Sarah usually evades this question, but now she says that there is a way. She came upon it accidentally, long ago, and her father ordered her not to tell anyone, not even her brother. She will be punished if she tells. If her father put her in the prison cell in their basement intentionally, Sarah’s fear of punishment is quite understandable.
Sarah overcomes her fear sufficiently to share a riddle with Maggie which she says will give her the answer:
One, two, away they flew.
Three, four, by the door.
Five, six, count the bricks.
Seven, eight, the clue is “grate.”
Nine, ten, home again.
Maggie asks Sarah to repeat the riddle, and she says she can only say it once. Maggie tells her where to find her own father, Sam Evans, and asks her to tell Sam that she has seen her. Sarah disappears.
Sarah’s fear of punishment will ring a bell for regular viewers. Strange and troubled boy David Collins is so intensely afraid that his father, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger, will punish him by sending him away to a boarding school or a jail that he tried to murder Roger. Later, David left his favorite person, well-meaning governess Vicki, to be decapitated by crazed handyman Matthew Morgan because he was afraid that if he helped Vicki his father would find out he had earlier defied him and would punish him. Now, Maggie is in mortal danger because another Collins child, one who lived in a previous century, has a similar fear of punishment. The cell in the basement of the Old House was there before slavery was abolished in the area in 1783; perhaps Sarah’s fear and David’s are a bequest from the slaves and indentured servants whom their forebears locked up in it.
We cut to the Evans cottage. Sam is an artist, and is working. Sarah materializes in the living room. Sam had locked the door and Sarah won’t explain how she got in, but he seems to be delighted with her anyway. She is impressed with his paintings and asks him to paint a picture of her. He offers a drawing instead. When she agrees, he picks her up and sets her on a stool. She flashes a grin at being picked up. She asks if she can keep the drawing when he is done with it.
Sam tells Sarah that her dress is very pretty. He then mentions that you don’t see many dresses in its style. She asks if that means he doesn’t like it. When Sam says that all he means is that it isn’t the sort of thing other little girls wear, she says she doesn’t play with other little girls so she doesn’t care what they wear. She seems to be getting worked up about this, so Sam calms her down with, “All right, all right, I see.” This little exchange gave my wife, Mrs Acilius, a laugh. Sarah may have been born in the same year as Jacob Grimm, but she is very much a nine year old girl.
While Sam draws Sarah, she steers the conversation to Maggie. She asks Sam if he looked for Maggie on the beach under Widow’s Hill. He says he’s looked everywhere he could. She repeats her suggestion that he look for her on the beach. He says he is sure he won’t find her there. She responds “You might, if you go there tonight.” Disturbed by this, Sam looks up, and finds that Sarah has vanished.
This surprises us almost as much as it surprises Sam. Sarah had made it clear that she very much wanted to keep the drawing, yet she disappears before Sam is finished. Evidently, it wasn’t within her power to stay.
Back in the cell, we see Maggie and hear her thoughts as she tries to remember Sarah’s riddle. Like Willie’s voiceover internal monologue in the opening scenes, Maggie’s goes on too long. We can see that Maggie is in an upsetting situation and understand why Sarah’s presence confuses and distracts her. That makes it clear she would have difficulty remembering the exact wording of the riddle, but we really don’t need to hear her go over every part of it.
By the time Maggie finds the loose brick that triggers the opening of the secret panel, Barnabas is already rising from his coffin. We cut between Barnabas walking through the basement and Maggie struggling to open the panel. It may sound like we’re describing filler when we say that we see Barnabas traversing three distinct corridors between his coffin and Maggie’s cell, but it doesn’t feel that way. Not only do these shots build suspense as we wonder if Maggie will get out before he reaches her, but in Barnabas shown as a hunched, solitary figure in narrow spaces sketched in shades of gray we see the representative of a world bleak beyond endurance. We can see why the first serious feature film about a vampire, F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), devoted so much screen time to showing Count Orlok skulking about the corridors of his castle.
Maggie crawls into the secret passage. She doesn’t close the panel behind her. Not only doesn’t Maggie know that Sarah is a ghost, she doesn’t know that Barnabas is Sarah’s brother. When Sarah says that not even her brother knows about the secret panel, she is telling us, but not Maggie, that Barnabas is unfamiliar with this way. We know that if Maggie had closed the panel, Barnabas wouldn’t have known where to look for her, and so we might yell at the screen urging her to do that. But since it is his house, she has to assume that he does know about the panel, and she knows that he might be at the door any second. So it is rational for her to forget the panel and use all of her time moving forward.
The gap between Maggie’s knowledge and ours again adds to the suspense as we watch her flee from Barnabas through the twisting passages beyond the panel. We only see one path, but the looks on the actors’ faces as they look from side to side tell us that there are several. Maggie is moving cautiously, choosing her way with care, the sensible thing to do if Barnabas is familiar with the passages. Since we know that it is new to him as it is to her, we want her simply to pick a path and run.
Maggie finds two heavy doors, both of them apparently stuck. Barnabas looks around, seems bewildered, and takes a breath. He shouts a speech at Maggie, claiming that she has no chance of escape because he can hear her. He can’t hear much while he’s shouting, so we want her to take advantage of that and bash away at one of the doors during his speech.
This episode ends the 52nd week of Dark Shadows. When ABC* picked the series up in 1966, it gave executive producer Dan Curtis a 26 week commitment, carrying production to #130. After that, the network renewed it for the then-standard 13 week period. The first renewal carried them to #195, the second to this episode. Until just a couple of months ago, the ratings were so low that no one thought it was likely that it would get a third renewal. When the vampire was introduced in April, viewership started to pick up, preventing cancellation and requiring them to come up with a story that they could keep telling.
I do think we can see traces here and there of the original plan. The first part of the plan seems to have been to copy Bram Stoker’s Dracula far more thoroughly than they wound up doing.
The two female characters on the show who had or were about to have boyfriends when Barnabas was introduced were Maggie and Vicki, who are both seeing men who are cut out to be stout-hearted action heroes. The two female characters in Bram Stoker’s Dracula who had boyfriends were Lucy Westenra and Mina Murray, who were both seeing men who emerge as stout-hearted action heroes. Dracula feeds on Lucy, prompting several other people to band together to try to save her. Dr John Seward, MD, contacts his old Professor, the brilliant Abraham Van Helsing, to advise the group. Despite their best efforts, Lucy dies and rises as a vampire, the “Bloofer Lady” who feeds on the children of east London. Lucy’s boyfriend has to destroy her body to free her soul of the vampire curse.
If the show was about to be canceled, it would have been a favor to Kathryn Leigh Scott to have Maggie suffer Lucy’s fate. Going out with a splash like that would certainly have given her something to lead with as she looked for her next job. But once it was decided that the show would continue beyond #260, it was out of the question to lose a character as popular and versatile as Maggie. When the network ordered 65 more episodes, Maggie had to be saved.
The Van Helsing analogue was actually named on screen. In #242, the show’s equivalent of Dr John Seward, addled quack Dr Woodard, said that he was going to call in a specialist to consult on Maggie’s case, a Dr Hoffman, who is “one of the best men in the field.” We haven’t heard about this man since Dan Curtis found out the show was going to be renewed, suggesting that they’ve abandoned the idea to hew quite so closely to Dracula.
In Stoker’s novel, once Van Helsing has corrected the group’s knowledge deficits concerning vampires, Mina emerges as its leader. Attempting to be gallant, the men cut Mina out of their operations, with the result that Dracula escapes them and bites her. Mina is able to resist his influence so far that she can play a pivotal role in the Count’s final destruction.
The first time Dark Shadows modeled a storyline on Dracula, the menace was not a vampire, but undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. In that arc, the men formed a group of stout-hearted heroes advised by Dr Peter Guthrie and led by well-meaning governess Vicki. Guthrie and Vicki were plainly Van Helsing and Mina. Laura killed Guthrie, so he can’t come back to help in the fight against Barnabas, but Vicki is still around, still the chief protagonist, and still the one likeliest to lead the opposition to a villain.
Indeed, Barnabas has expressed interest in Vicki as a replacement for Maggie, and in #233 he blurted out an obvious threat when he realized she was getting uncomfortably close to figuring out the truth about him. So, had Dark Shadows ended with this episode, it is likely that it would have ended with Vicki overcoming Barnabas’ power and driving a stake through his heart.
Of course, the vampire is the source of the ratings, and Vicki and Maggie are needed for future story development. So the makers of the show can’t use any of those plot elements. What in the world they can do is a question that does not, as yet, have a clear answer. So they have been stalling and stalling. Sooner or later, the stalling will have to end.
*The American Broadcasting Company, that is, not the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Acilius on Dark Shadows 