Over the years, nine writers were credited with scripts for Dark Shadows. This is the final episode attributed to Malcolm Marmorstein, who is not among the eight best of those writers.*
Well-meaning governess Vicki has told her depressing fiancé Burke that she will break off their engagement unless he ends his investigation of her friend, courtly gentleman Barnabas Collins. Burke comes to see her at home today, and she demonstrates her resolve. When Burke says something about how Barnabas can take care of himself, she replies “And I can’t?” Burke tells her that she can be unaware of the evil around her. She holds still, looking very much like the daughter of matriarch Liz. Burke eventually gives in, agreeing to apologize to Barnabas.
Barnabas comes by to give Vicki a book about the history of Collinsport. Burke asks to see him privately in the drawing room. When Burke apologizes to him, Barnabas offers to answer all of his questions. With obvious difficulty, Burke says that he doesn’t want any answers. Burke offers his hand, and Barnabas reluctantly shakes it.
Burke offers his hand while the portrait of Jeremiah Collins looks on. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Burke says he will leave Vicki and Barnabas alone to discuss the book. Barnabas asks Burke to join them, but he declines. They are all smiles.
Once he is alone with Vicki, Barnabas repeats his offer to answer any and all questions about himself. With no apparent difficulty, she says that the only questions she has are about chapter two.
So an investigation which might have uncovered Barnabas’ many secrets and triggered a crisis is over, and in its place we have two people sitting on a couch where they plan to talk about chapter two of an imaginary book. That’s an anticlimax, but Vicki is so appealing when she is in control of the situation that the scenes are pleasant to watch.
Meanwhile, mad scientist Julia Hoffman is hanging around Barnabas’ house catching up on her own reading. She senses the presence of a ghost. She believes it is the ghost of Barnabas’ nine year old sister Sarah. The strains of Sarah’s theme song “London Bridge” play on the soundtrack, telling the audience she is right. Julia goes out into the woods to look for Sarah, then comes back into the house and looks around there, but doesn’t find her.
Barnabas comes home. Julia tells him she thinks Sarah was around. Barnabas is jealous his darling little sister will visit other people but not him. Barnabas claims that Sarah has been visiting his enemies and speculates that she has come back to destroy him. This is unwarranted- no one Sarah has visited has any plans to harm Barnabas, and she has shown enough power that she could have done him in long since if that were her goal.
Artist Sam Evans is at home with his daughter Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town. Sam is wearing a coat and tie while painting. I suppose that could be called “professional attire,” and Sam is a professional painter.
Professional attire.
Maggie’s main occupation these days is an important one on a soap opera. She is the resident amnesia sufferer. She can’t remember anything about the weeks she was missing and in the custody of a person or persons unknown to the non-villain characters on Dark Shadows. The only clue Sam, Maggie, and Maggie’s fiancé Joe have as to who abducted Maggie is that a mysterious little girl named Sarah has turned up and shared important information at key moments in Maggie’s travails. So they are desperate to find Sarah.
As the three of them talk about how elusive Sarah is, Maggie says that she seems to be able to disappear at will. Joe dismisses this idea out of hand. Regular viewers might find that a bit odd. During the storyline centered on undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, both Joe and Sam had definite encounters with supernatural beings, Joe with the ghost of Josette Collins in #179 and Sam with the same spirit on the several occasions she compelled him to paint pictures explaining the danger Laura represented. Sam has also seen Sarah appear in and disappear from a locked room. So we would expect at least one of the two men to hesitate for a moment before rejecting the idea that Sarah might be a ghost.
Sam and Joe decide that because strange and troubled boy David Collins has seen Sarah more often than anyone else, they should go visit him at the great house of Collinwood and ask him to lead them to Sarah. David is happy to talk about Sarah, but he tells them that he has no idea how to contact her. He also warns them that if they do get in touch with her, they will likely find that nothing she says makes much sense. David and his cousin Carolyn continue with their plans to take a bus trip to the nearby town of Bangor, Maine, while Sam and Joe search the grounds of the estate hoping to find Sarah in one of the spots David mentioned that he had run into her.
They see a swing moving in the breeze and jump to the conclusion that Sarah had been in it moments before. If they could hear the background music, they would know they were right- Sarah’s “London Bridge” cue is playing. Lacking this ability, they conclude that they have found nothing. They decide to go ahead and visit the Old House on the estate, home to courtly gentleman Barnabas Collins and Barnabas’ servant Willie. They hope that one of them will be able to tell them something about Sarah.
They find that neither Barnabas nor Willie is at home, but someone they know is there. Dr Julia Hoffman answers the door. When Sam followed Sarah’s directions and found Maggie at the end of her ordeal, she was in a terrible state, drained of blood and in a state of total mental collapse. Maggie was treated at a hospital overseen by Julia, who is qualified as a specialist in both hematology and psychiatry. Now Julia is settled in at Collinwood, masquerading as an historian writing a book about the old families of New England.
Sam wants to know why Julia is keeping up this imposture. He delivers a speech full of courteous words thanking her for spending so much time on Maggie’s case without remuneration, but his tone and body language prepare us for his angry response when Julia refuses to give him any specifics. He tells Julia that he has decided he doesn’t believe her. He gives her a piece of his mind, then storms off.
Joe stays behind and apologizes for Sam. Julia assures Joe she isn’t upset, and asks him to tell Sam that she is doing everything she can. After the two men are both out of earshot, Julia smiles and repeats “I am doing everything I can!” Without that mustache-twirling line, first time viewers might not have caught on that Julia is a Villain.
Sam and Joe go back to the Evans cottage. It is night time, Maggie isn’t in the parlor, and her bedroom door is closed. Sam goes up to the door and shouts her name repeatedly. When she answers in a groggy voice, he apologizes, saying he didn’t mean to wake her.
Maggie comes out of her bedroom holding a wooden doll in eighteenth century garb. The doll wasn’t there when she went to sleep, and is the sort of thing Sarah would have, so she concludes that Sarah must have been in her room while she slept. Returning viewers will recall that when Sarah visited Maggie in #297 and found that she couldn’t remember her, she became upset and took away the doll she had previously given Maggie. This is a different doll, but it does confirm that Sarah is still watching over Maggie.
Closing Miscellany
This is one of only two episodes in which Nancy Barrett and David Ford share a scene. In #85, Miss Barrett’s Carolyn and Ford’s Sam were in the Blue Whale tavern at the same time; today, Carolyn, Sam, Joe, and David stand in the foyer of the great house talking about Sarah. It’s interesting that the two actors worked together so seldom, because from 1967 to 1969, Miss Barrett was known socially as Mrs David Ford.
At the climax of his scene with Julia, Sam tells her that she “should have been a member of the diplomatic corps…because you’re a master of the evasive answer!” So far as I’m concerned, the Foreign Service is one of the most honorable professions there is, and this is a shameful swipe at one of the most selfless, patriotic, and often heroic groups of people our country is blessed to produce. Writer Malcolm Marmorstein often cranks out mediocre scripts, but this smear marks a new low even for him.
Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, can’t stand being cooped up in her house all the time waiting for the person who abducted her and held her prisoner to be identified. Since she has amnesia covering the entire period of her captivity, her father Sam and her boyfriend Joe have to recap the whole storyline to her before they agree to go with her to the local tavern, The Blue Whale, where they can meet with other people who will help them recap the storyline that followed.
At the Blue Whale, a couple stands at the jukebox and play the theme from “A Man and a Woman.” We see that Bob the Bartender is back on duty. The other day, someone else was in his place, so it’s a relief to know that he’s still around.
At The Blue Whale.
Joe enters, and finds well-meaning governess Vicki alone at a table. He joins her, and she explains that she is waiting for her depressing fiancé Burke. Joe explains that he is waiting for Maggie and Sam. They start recapping while Bob brings them drinks and the couple dances. The couple must be out-of-towners- they aren’t good dancers, exactly, but neither are they doing the Collinsport Convulsion.
Unusually competent dancing.
Maggie and Sam arrive. “A Man and a Woman” continues to play while everyone compares notes about a mysterious little girl named Sarah who seems to have had some connection with Maggie during the time she was missing. Everyone tells everything they know, except Vicki. This is odd- Vicki is the one who brought up the topic of the little girl and who keeps pressing it forward, but she does not mention that she saw Sarah at the top of the stairs in the house occupied by courtly gentleman Barnabas Collins.
Burke enters. Maggie, Sam, and Joe excuse themselves. Burke has been so dreary in recent weeks that it’s hardly surprising Maggie would rather resume hiding in her house than be around him.
Vicki is upset with Burke. Barnabas complained to her yesterday that Burke was having him investigated. She demands that he shut the investigation down at once, issuing an ultimatum that she will end their engagement if he does not. Burke sounds smarter than he has in months as he explains his reasons for thinking there is something sinister about Barnabas. Unlike all the scenes where Burke was angrily asserting that Vicki was crazy for saying that she had seen and heard things we had also seen and heard, Vicki stands her ground. She won’t give an inch, and she immediately comes up with plausible explanations for all of Burke’s observations.
When Burke starts talking, the background music shifts from “A Man and a Woman” to “Brazil.” We have heard this tune behind Burke at the Blue Whale many times; it really is his theme song. When it plays, we know that we’re supposed to focus on him. When he starts talking about Maggie, it shifts again, to one of the “Blue Whale” dance tunes Robert Cobert wrote for the show. That tells us that Burke is no longer the subject- instead, we are paying attention to the overall story of Dark Shadows.
As it happens, returning viewers know that Burke is right about Barnabas and Vicki is wrong. We also know why Vicki didn’t volunteer that she saw Sarah at Barnabas’ house- she does not want to cast any suspicion on her friend. But we also know that the Dark Shadows has been fun since Barnabas joined the cast, and that no stories are going on that do not center on him. If Barnabas is caught, there won’t be a show for us to watch. Besides, it’s great to see Vicki finally standing up to Burke, even if it isn’t on one of the many occasions when he is wrong. Nor is Anthony George even struggling to play him. He is a cold actor who is at a loss when Burke is supposed to be reacting ferociously to provocations or exuding passion in love scenes, but this scene is right up his alley, with Burke cool, forceful, and intelligent. Alexandra Moltke Isles gets a real workout having to dominate the scene when George is in his wheelhouse, and she pulls it off admirably.
Sarah Collins has taken her friend and distant cousin, strange and troubled boy David Collins, home with her. Since Sarah is a ghost, her home is in a mausoleum. She has decided to show David one of the most interesting features of the place.
As we open, David is following Sarah’s instructions. He is standing on the sarcophagus of her mother and pulling a metal ring in the mouth of a stone lion’s head. The ring comes forward and a panel opens, revealing a room that was hidden for more than a century and a half.
The lion’s head.Pulling the ringThe panel opens
The first time we saw the panel open was in #210, when dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis happened upon the ring and ended up releasing vampire Barnabas Collins from his coffin in the hidden room. Now that we see this gimmick again and see it in color, it’s starting to seem odd that all you have to do to open the panel is pull the ring. The ring stands out as the only piece of metal in the tomb. Anyone entering the space would be tempted to tug on it, if only to polish it. If you’re wanting to make sure your vampire doesn’t get loose, I’d think you’d install a more secure system. Maybe you could add two or three additional decorative doodads to the wall, one of which you turn, say, three quarters of the way to the left, the other of which you turn some other way, and between them they release the ring.
Be that as it may, Barnabas’ old coffin is still in the hidden room. Sarah announces they will be opening it, and David resists the idea. He debates with Sarah for a while before curiosity gets the better of him.
Sarah the psychopomp. David wants to let the dead rest.David’s resistance crumbles.
He is shocked to see that it is empty. David asks Sarah why an empty coffin would be put in such a place, and she happily tells him that it wasn’t always empty. There was someone in it once, but he got up and left. David protests that the dead don’t walk away, to which Sarah replies that “Sometimes they do.”
David is shocked.Nobody’s home.
When David first met Sarah in #256, she was outside Barnabas’ house, puzzled that she couldn’t find her parents or anyone else she knew. Now it is starting to seem that she knows that she is a ghost haunting a time long after her own, but Sarah’s lines here are the first clear indication that she knows what is going on with her brother Barnabas.
David’s bafflement that the coffin is empty echoes #273. In that episode, matriarch Liz was shocked to find that the chest seagoing con man Jason McGuire buried in her basement did not contain the murdered remains of her husband. Liz kept asking “Why is there nothing there?” David seems almost as appalled as his aunt had been at the sight of some clean fabric unadorned with a rotting corpse. A few days after Liz found out Jason hadn’t really buried her husband in her basement, Barnabas killed Jason. Regular viewers will already have this story in mind, because in #276 Barnabas and his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie buried Jason in the floor of the very room David and Sarah are visiting at this moment. Clearly Barnabas would not be happy were he to find out that David knows about the room.
That wasn’t the first vacant grave in Dark Shadows. From #126 to #191, the show was mainly about David’s mother, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. As the Laura arc progressed, graves of various women named Laura Murdoch were revealed to be empty. Now Laura’s son is coming face to face with an unoccupied coffin, suggesting to loyal fans that he may yet learn something about his own origins.
To Sarah’s consternation, David says he has to go home. He tells her that if he does not, his governess, the well-meaning Vicki, will be upset with him. He simply refers to Vicki by name, as if Sarah already knows who she is. Regular viewers have reason to believe she does know who Vicki is, but it is not clear why David assumes that he can just say “Vicki” without explaining to Sarah who he means. Sarah swears David to secrecy about the existence of the room.
By the time David gets back to the great house of Collinwood, it is 9:30 PM and Vicki is indeed worried about him. Apparently no one else is at home; certainly, no one else has missed David. Vicki sits David down on a seat that’s been in the foyer from the beginning of the series, but which has only been used once or twice before. They have an earnest little talk that recalls the scenes they shared in the first 39 weeks of Dark Shadows, when their complicated relationship was the one storyline that consistently worked.
Rarely used seat.
David describes Sarah to Vicki. It finally dawns on her that Sarah is the little girl she saw on top of the stairs at Barnabas’ house in #280. When the light flashed in Vicki’s eyes, my wife, Mrs Acilius, shouted at the screen “Tell him!” Vicki and David again look like the fast friends they had become by #140, so we would indeed expect her to tell David that she thinks she has seen Sarah, and to tell him where and when she saw him. If she and David join their lines of inquiry and work together to find out about Sarah, the plot will move more quickly and on a much bigger scale than it can so long as everyone pursues their own questions in isolation.
Vicki catches on.
But, Vicki is also very fond of Barnabas, and reluctant to believe anything bad about him. Sarah has been seen in several places connected to the abduction of Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. Vicki doesn’t want anyone to add Barnabas’ house to that list, so perhaps it is not a “Dumb Vicki” moment when she decides to keep the information to herself.
Meanwhile, Barnabas is at home. He is irritated with mad scientist Julia Hoffman. Julia is attempting to cure Barnabas of vampirism, and he is dissatisfied with the progress of the treatment. He is also irked that Sarah broke Maggie out of the mental hospital where Julia was keeping her locked up, and blames Julia for failing to ghost-proof the place. He declares that Julia is “a meddlesome and domineering woman,” and that he, as a native of a different century, has no intention of tolerating such a person.
Barnabas and Julia discuss Vicki’s depressing boyfriend Burke. Burke has been investigating Barnabas, and his operatives have come upon some information that would raise questions Barnabas would have a hard time answering. Julia agrees that Burke must be stopped, and urges Barnabas to let her handle the matter. He says that he will take care of it, and that he will do so with “finesse” of a sort unfamiliar to the loutish inhabitants of the twentieth century.
Barnabas’ masterful finesse consists of telling Vicki what Burke is doing and asking her to make him stop. Those eighteenth century guys must have been amazing, to come up with something so complex and subtle in just a couple of days.
Julia comes into the great house as Barnabas is leaving. She asks Vicki if David is back yet. Vicki tells her that he had been out playing with Sarah in some location he refuses to disclose. Barnabas tries to conceal his alarm with a laughing remark about leaving Vicki and Julia to investigate the mystery of David’s playmate.
David comes out of his room to ask for food. While Vicki goes to fetch the housekeeper for him, Julia meets him at the top of the stairs and they talk about Sarah. David points out that she is repeating questions she has asked in previous episodes. He tells her that he doesn’t mind questions and neither does Sarah, but cautions her that the answers Sarah gives don’t make much sense.
The stained glass windows at the top of the stairs look great in color, and it is a relief when David shares the audience’s awareness that we’ve heard Julia’s lines before. Even so, the scene is a disappointment. David and Julia were fun to watch in their previous scenes because they were so relaxed together. Perhaps that was because David Henesy and Grayson Hall understood each other right away. Not only did they have similar ways of working as actors, but her son Matthew is about his age, so she might already have been familiar with a lot of things in his life that the other adults on set wouldn’t have known about.
Today, though, they are both having trouble with their lines. That keeps them from making enough eye contact with each other to sell the scene. David Henesy keeps looking at the teleprompter, which he could evidently read from the top of the stairs with only a little squint; Grayson Hall couldn’t read from that distance, but she does tilt her head back and look up when she’s searching her memory for her next line. Since the characters aren’t looking at each other, we don’t feel an emotional connection between them.
Hall has to thread a particularly small needle in this scene. Julia is trying to make her interest in Sarah seem casual in the same way Barnabas affected a lack of interest in her, by delivering lines about her with a jokey inflection. We know that she is urgently concerned with finding Sarah, and her efforts have to leave David unsure whether she really is the easygoing adult he has so far taken her to be or whether she is trying to pull a fast one.
In the course of a friendly chat between two people who obviously like each other, onetime Academy Award nominee and frequent Broadway luminary Hall could certainly have accomplished all of this. But in the course of this awkward encounter, it all falls flat. Especially so with Julia’s last line to David. After he has told her how difficult it is to get a straight answer from Sarah, she puts on a goofy voice and says that she’ll keep that in mind if she ever meets her. Since she isn’t looking at him when says this, it comes off not as an affectionate gesture acknowledging that they’ve run out of things to say, but as a high-handed dismissal. Even though she pats him on the shoulder and he smiles after that line, it still doesn’t seem that David would come away from the interaction with as complex an emotional response as he is supposed to have. Most likely he would just be irritated with Julia, as indeed the audience is likely to be.
“I’lll kee-e-ep that in mind.” Departure.
We end back at Sarah’s place. Barnabas is in the cemetery looking pathetic. He hears the strains of “London Bridge” coming from the mausoleum. We see Sarah sitting on her mother’s sarcophagus moving her fingers on her recorder far more rapidly than the music we hear would call for. She looks more like she’s playing a rock ‘n’ roll number.
Jammin’ with the Junior Funky Phantom of 1967.
Barnabas calls out to Sarah. He identifies himself as her brother and says that he has come to take her home. He goes into the mausoleum only to find that she has vanished. Wracked with sorrow, he pleads with her to come back, saying that he loves her and needs her. He touches the plate marking her grave. This underscores the futility of his desire to take her home. Leading him here, it is she who has brought him to what is in fact her home, and what ought also to be his.
Sad Barney.The impassable barrier.
This shows us a Barnabas we can sympathize with, but it also sets him on a collision course with David. Barnabas has been so harmless lately that we might wonder if his part is going to be recast with a purple felt puppet counting “Vun peanut butter saand-veech!” If he sets out to kill a child, he’ll be back on track as a horrifying menace.
Besides, David is not just any child- as the last bearer of the Collins name, David’s survival has a great symbolic importance to the show. He was central to everything that happened on Dark Shadows in its first 39 weeks. So if Barnabas becomes a threat to David, it will be a case of conflict between the current main character and the previous main character. Since Vicki originally represented the audience’s point of view and is still a major character, the divided loyalties between Barnabas and David that we first see influencing her behavior today could create a high level of dramatic tension. Especially so if Barnabas turns her into a vampire, and she winds up like Lucy in Dracula, the “Bloofer Lady” who herself preys on children.
In a clearing in the woods, strange and troubled boy David Collins runs into his friend, the ghost of his distant cousin Sarah Collins. Sarah wants him to spend time with her, but he explains that he has to go and have dinner. Sarah persuades him to come with her to Eagle Hill cemetery, where she will show him a secret.
The secret turns out to be the hidden chamber inside the Tomb of the Collinses. David objects when Sarah tells him they will be opening the coffin there. His curiosity finally overcomes his scruples. He is shocked by what is inside, Sarah is pleased.
The whole interaction between Sarah and David is charming beyond words. At first she is lonely, and her simple rendition of this one emotion is sad enough to explain why David cannot stick with his resolution to get home in time for dinner. Once they are in the cemetery, she is brisk and commanding, insisting David open the door to the tomb, instructing him to release the secret panel inside, assuring him that it will be all right for him to stand on the sarcophagus of Naomi Collins* to reach the lever that controls the panel, directing him to open the coffin, and smiling when he does so.
Sarah shows such raw emotion in the scene in the woods and such verve in the cemetery sequence that I wonder if this may be the episode taped on the day of one of the more infamous moments in Dark Shadows history. Nine year old Sharon Smyth and eleven year old David Henesy would play on the set while the crew was preparing for taping. Mrs Sharon Smyth Lentz now tells the story that one day, they were playing hide-and-seek and she decided it would be a good idea to hide inside a coffin. She heard David Henesy approach the coffin, and just as she expected him to open it and find her inside, he jumped on top and sat there. She could hear the director calling out “We’re ready for Sharon! Where is Sharon?” but couldn’t open the lid of the coffin or make herself heard from within. Behind the scenes between Sarah and David C. may be a bit of unfinished business between Sharon and David H.**
There’s also some stuff in the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood. Vampire Barnabas Collins is feeling sick, and thinks it may be due to the efforts mad scientist Julia Hoffman is making to cure him of vampirism. He tells his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie to kill Julia if he suspects Julia is doing anything to harm him.
Barnabas also tells Willie that he is deeply worried about Sarah’s presence. He has no idea why she has come back or what she wants. Indeed, no one seems to know what Sarah is up to. David keeps complaining to her today of her mysteriousness, and everyone else who has mentioned her is full of unanswered questions. The audience hasn’t seen anything that would explain what she intends to do; it isn’t even clear that she has a plan. Whether she does or not, the writers are definitely making her story up as they go along. Which, oddly enough, turns out to be enormously compelling. The very wackiness of their improvisations gives us a feeling that Sarah really is a visitor from another plane of existence, one that does not follow any of the rules we expect to see in our daylight world.
Julia then comes in, and Barnabas tells her that he will kill her if the treatments do not work. She is irritated, and asks why he must continually pester her with death threats. Julia’s refusal to be frightened by Barnabas is so funny that the comedy must be intentional on the part of the actors and directors, if not of the writers.
*Her mother, as David doesn’t quite know. In the first year of the show, David had been on friendly terms with a number of the ghosts; as recently as #288, he wondered aloud if Sarah were a ghost. But now he seems to have forgotten all about the supernatural back-world of the action. In his post about this episode, Danny Horn writes that stripping David of his ghost-awareness just as Dark Shadows is going all-in on paranormal stories amounts to “grinding up his character for the sake of plot mechanics.” Considering that they are in the process of grinding several other characters up in the same way for the same short-sighted reason, it’s a worrying development.
Yesterday, fake Shemp Burke Devlin tested his hypothesis that old world gentleman Barnabas Collins abducted Maggie Evens, The Nicest Girl in Town, and held her prisoner during the period covered by her current amnesia. On the one hand, he found that Maggie was perfectly relaxed when Barnabas visited her recently, and that she regards him only as a mildly pleasant acquaintance. There would seem to be no way she could have this reaction to someone who had subjected her to such an ordeal. On the other hand, he found that a melody she seems to remember hearing during her captivity might have come from a music box that was in Barnabas’ possession at the time. Since he has also found that the only person Barnabas will admit to having known before his arrival in the town of Collinsport lived over 130 years ago, he seems to be willing to consider that the resolution to this paradox might require a supernatural element.
Since we know that Barnabas is a vampire and have been frustrated with Burke’s recent angry denials of the existence of supernatural phenomena he previously knew all about, that episode felt like a breakthrough. Lately Barnabas has been harmless and all the non-villain characters have been clueless, leaving the show adrift. Maybe Burke will restart the vampire story. Maybe he will again become the dashing action hero he was when the charismatic Mitch Ryan played him in the first year of Dark Shadows, and maybe his investigation will precipitate a crisis that will bring the Barnabas arc to an exciting climax.
That hope shrivels to nothing in the first minutes of today’s outing. We begin with Burke knocking on the door of Barnabas’ house. When sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie Loomis tells Burke that Barnabas isn’t in, Burke says that he knows he is. Willie asks why he thinks he knows this, and Burke says that he’s been hiding behind a tree for hours staring at the front door. Burke is supposed to be a rich guy- it would be one thing if he’d hired private detectives to hide behind trees, but that he chose to spend his time doing that himself makes him look ridiculous. He pushes past Willie and declares that he won’t let Willie keep him out of the house. So before the opening titles roll, we’ve seen Burke as an unstable man who alternately cowers in the dark and perpetrates home invasions.
After Burke shouts Barnabas’ name a couple of times, he tells Willie he knows Barnabas is there because he never saw him come out of the front door. Willie says he might have gone out the back door. Burke’s response to that is “Maybe.” With that, Burke blows his last shred of credibility as an action hero. He presses Willie with some questions about Barnabas’ business interests; usually when characters ask about that, I think a suitable send-off for Burke would be a story where Barnabas bites him, enslaves him, and uses his money and connections to put some substance behind his pretense to be an independently wealthy cousin from the Collins family’s long-lost English branch. But when we see Burke being such a total schmuck as he is in this sequence, it’s hard to imagine he could be of any use to anyone, or to care very much how they go about writing him off the show.
That “Maybe” is such a preposterous anticlimax that I wonder if it is a sign of some politics behind the scenes. Long after the show was made, writer Malcolm Marmorstein remembered executive producer Dan Curtis wanting to end the vampire storyline around this time and to give the show over to an arc about Burke and well-meaning governess Vicki getting married and moving into a long-vacant “house by the sea.” There have been a few vague stabs at getting such a story off the ground- Burke and Vicki are engaged now, and he is in the process of buying such a house. But the vampire story was so much the biggest ratings draw the show has had that it is hard to imagine Curtis really wanted to scrap it- more likely he wanted to have more than one story going at a time, as soap operas usually do. In any case, the “house by the sea” bits have been so dull that it feels like the writers are simply refusing to develop the theme, and Ron Sproat’s script today could hardly fail to do lasting damage to Burke. So perhaps there is a sneaky kind of revolt in progress.
Meanwhile, visiting mad scientist Julia Hoffman and strange and troubled boy David Collins have left the great house of Collinwood to take a walk in the woods. They are looking for David’s friend, the ghost of nine year old Sarah Collins. Sarah leaves belongings of hers as tokens of her presence; these objects linger in physical existence until she reclaims them, after which they vanish when she vanishes. Some Dark Shadows fans put a lot of energy into saying that this aspect of Sarah “doesn’t make any sense!” To which I reply, she’s a ghost. All you can expect is that the story will tell you what the rules are and will follow them consistently. Not only does Sarah follow this rule consistently, but the ghosts of Bill Malloy and of Josette Collins had both previously left things lying around the house for people to find. Most recently, Sarah left her bonnet in the house, and now David and Julia are on a quest to return it to her.
David takes Julia to a clearing in the woods where he has encountered Sarah before. We hear “London Bridge” on the soundtrack, the musical cue telling us that Sarah is present, but she does not appear. David and Julia look around and don’t see her. David thinks he hears someone nearby to their left. They look that way, but don’t see anyone. They turn back, and find that the bonnet is gone.
This little scene captures some of the feeling of live theater that gave the early episodes of Dark Shadows such a special quality. I particularly like the low camera angle on David and Julia, as if we are looking up at a stage.
Later, Julia goes to Barnabas’ house. She and Willie talk about Burke’s visit. Julia muses about the need to provide Barnabas a more complete cover story to keep Burke at bay. This is the first staff meeting we see between Julia and Willie. Until this scene, the only conversations we’ve seen between two people who knew that Barnabas was a vampire were between Willie and Maggie during her captivity, and only a sharply limited number of things could happen during those conversations. Willie would tell Maggie to submit to Barnabas, either sorrowfully or angrily. Maggie would either express defiance openly, pretend to be cooperative, or give nonresponsive answers that suggested she was losing her mind. Combine those attitudes, and you have six possible interactions. Sometimes the characters would change attitudes in mid-scene, multiplying the number of possible interactions, but no matter how you mix and match you still end with Maggie in the same fix she was in at the beginning. But when both characters have some measure of personal autonomy and both are invested in helping Barnabas keep his secret, the number of possible interactions is very large and the number of possible outcomes is infinite. So this is an exciting scene.
We end in The Blue Whale tavern, where Burke asks Vicki to stay away from Barnabas for reasons he refuses to explain. The only interesting thing about this scene is that Bob O’Connell does not appear in the background as Bob the Bartender. Some other uncredited extra is pouring today.
Fake Shemp Burke Devlin is starting to suspect that there is something odd about old world gentleman Barnabas Collins. He suspects that Barnabas is not from England as he claims to be. More darkly, he is considering the possibility that Barnabas might be the one who abducted Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, and held her prisoner. As it happens, the audience knows that he is correct in both of these suspicions. We also know more- that Barnabas is a vampire.
Burke has hired investigators to probe into Barnabas’ past. Barnabas told him he lived near London with a cousin named Niall Bradford. Burke’s investigators have found that the last time a man of that name lived in London was 130 years previously. Dark Shadows has been going back and forth for months on whether Barnabas lived in the 1830s or in the eighteenth century. Yesterday they seemed to commit themselves to the earlier date, but now we’re back with the 1830s.
Burke asks Maggie’s doctor, addled quack Dave Woodard, to show him all of her medical records. Woodard protests that medical records are confidential. He then tells Burke everything he knows about Maggie’s case.
Burke calls on Maggie. She is back home, apparently well, but suffering from amnesia covering the entire period of her captivity. Unknown to any of the characters we see today, Maggie’s psychiatrist Julia Hoffman is a mad scientist in league with Barnabas, and she has wiped Maggie’s memory clean of any information that might threaten to expose him. Burke talks with Maggie and her boyfriend, hardworking young fisherman Joe, repeating everything Woodard told him a few minutes before.
Maggie and Joe tell Burke that she has had a few visitors since she came home. Maggie blithely mentions that Barnabas was one of those visitors. Burke is startled to hear this, and Maggie repeats that Barnabas dropped in to pay his respects.
During the fourteen weeks when Dark Shadows was driven by undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, Burke saw extensive evidence of supernatural doings. But he lately he has decided that he lives in the kind of world where the show took place in its first few months, where there might be hints of ghosts in the background, but all the action came from flesh and blood humans subject to the usual laws of nature. Since it doesn’t occur to him that a person might have powers like Julia’s, Maggie’s calmness when talking about a visit from Barnabas seems to prove that Barnabas is innocent.
Burke learns that Barnabas has been to see Maggie.
Maggie does say that there is just one memory she has that seems to be connected with her time in captivity. It is a bit of music- “a light, playful tune. A soft, tinkling sound.” She freely admits that it seems unlikely that this would have any connection with such an experience, and speculates that it may have been something she remembered from childhood.
In the great house of Collinwood, well-meaning governess Vicki is listening to the enchanted music box Barnabas gave her. Burke and Vicki are now engaged to be married. He comes to see her, and remarks on the music box. She accuses him of being jealous of Barnabas, and he keeps coming back to the music box. When she opens it for him, he remarks that it makes “a light, playful tune… a soft, tinkling sound.”
The episode ends with Burke listening to the music box and staring off into space. Barnabas gave the music box first to Maggie, then to Vicki, in each case hoping that she would listen to it until its magical quality caused her to believe that she was his lost love Josette. Seeing the look on Burke’s face as he listened, my wife, Mrs Acilius, said “Maybe Burke will start to think that he’s Josette.” Who knows, maybe he and Barnabas could be very happy together.
When new writers start working on Dark Shadows, they do some inventorying of ongoing and disused storylines. When Ron Sproat came aboard in November of 1966, he contrived a lot of scenes that served to mark storylines as “To be developed” or “To be discarded.” Now Gordon Russell has begun to be credited with scripts. He addresses continuity questions with brief lines of dialogue.
For example, for the last forty weeks the show has been equivocating about when it was that Barnabas Collins lived as a human being. Sometimes they say that he died and became a vampire in the 1830s. That fits with the original idea that Jeremiah Collins built the great house of Collinwood for his bride Josette in that decade, because Barnabas is supposed to have loved Josette and hated Jeremiah. At other times, they have pushed Barnabas, Josette, and Jeremiah back into the eighteenth century.
Now Barnabas has risen from the grave. Mad scientist Julia Hoffman has developed a series of injections to cure him of vampirism and turn him into a real boy. When Julia finds that Barnabas has heard the ghostly voice of his sister, nine year old Sarah, she declares that “The injection can wait!” and wants to talk all about Sarah. When Barnabas tries to avoid the subject, saying that Sarah has been dead for nearly 200 years, Julia replies “So have you.” That would seem to nail down that continuity question.
Julia speculates that Barnabas has subconsciously willed Sarah to return to the living, because she symbolizes the kindly side of his nature. There have been a bunch of possible explanations for why Sarah emerged shortly after Barnabas did; evidently this is the one we will be going with, at least for a while.
Barnabas has been looking through an album of family portraits, Sarah’s among them. He tells Julia that he is particularly intrigued by another portrait in the same volume, that of Jeremiah. He says that Burke Devlin, depressing boyfriend of well-meaning governess Vicki, bears a striking resemblance to Jeremiah. This point was first made in #280, when Burke came to a costume party at Barnabas’ in Jeremiah’s clothing and Barnabas was shocked by the resemblance. Barnabas says that he will be a happy man when Burke is as dead as Jeremiah. This tells us, not only that Barnabas is serious about his hostility to Burke, but also that we can expect some connection between Jeremiah and Burke to be developed.
Julia chases Barnabas around his living room until he hangs his head and mutters a promise not to hurt anyone, not even Burke, as long as there is a chance the injections will work. This helps both to explain why Barnabas has been so harmless lately and to reinforce the Bossy Big Sister/ Bratty Little Brother dynamic that is forming between him and Julia.
Julia goes to the great house. Matriarch Liz is under the impression that Julia is an historian writing a book about the old families of New England, and letting her stay in the mansion on the understanding that she is doing research into the Collinses. Liz asks about Julia’s previous books. Julia evades the question, saying that only scholars have ever heard of them. Liz mentions that she was a recluse for eighteen years, during which time she read so widely that she became aware of many scholarly books. Julia seizes on Liz’ reference to her time as a recluse, and asks a series of questions about it. Observing Julia’s facility at deflecting questions she doesn’t want to answer, Liz says that “If you are as nimble with the written word as you are with the spoken, you must be a very interesting writer.” This conversation not only marks Liz’ period of seclusion as an extinct topic, but also shows that Julia’s cover story is not going to be solid enough to cover her operations indefinitely. Moreover, it gives Joan Bennett a chance to show what Liz sounds like when she is smart.
Vicki meets Burke in the courtyard of the great house. She asks him why he’s late. He says he had a meeting with his lawyer, James Blair (a character we last saw in #95 and last heard mentioned in #133.) The reference to Blair tells regular viewers that Burke’s business interests may have something to do with an upcoming storyline.
Vicki asks what the meeting was about. Burke says it was to do with a message from London, then declares he didn’t come to talk about business. At the end of yesterday’s episode, Burke placed a call to London to initiate an investigation of Barnabas, so we know that he has already received some information about him. We also know that he is keeping the investigation secret from Vicki.
Burke brings up the marriage proposal he made to Vicki when last they saw each other. She says that she doesn’t know enough about him to be comfortable making a decision. In particular, she doesn’t know how he made his money or who his business associates are. In response to that, he launches into a speech dismissing those concerns as matters of “the past,” saying that he wants her to think only about “the future.” Considering that Burke won’t even tell Vicki what business he was conducting twenty minutes ago, “the past” that is off limits to her stretches right up to the present. This tells even first time viewers that Burke is a secretive and untrustworthy man likely to drag a wife into some shady enterprises.
It rings even louder warning bells for regular viewers. At this point in Dark Shadows, “the past” is how the characters refer to the vampire arc, which is the only ongoing storyline. Several times, Burke has angrily demanded Vicki renounce interest in “the past,” by which he means her attempts to stay relevant to the plot. As he has made those demands, he has accused her of being crazy when she told him that she saw and heard phenomena that we also saw and heard, in some cases phenomena that Burke himself is in a position to know are real. On Thursday, Burke enlisted Julia’s support in his effort to gaslight Vicki; in that conversation, Julia asked Burke if, when he said Vicki must “live in the present,” he meant that she must live with him, and he confirmed that he did. So Burke’s evasiveness in this scene shows that he is likely to be an abusive husband who will devote himself to controlling Vicki and stifling her contributions to the story.
The show is making something of an effort to launch a storyline in which Vicki and Burke will get married and move into a long-vacant “house by the sea” that has some kind of association with Barnabas and therefore with the supernatural. So the parade of red flags that Burke sends marching in front of his proposal may tell us to expect a story in which Vicki, the long-suffering wife confined to a haunted house, loses contact with the world of the living.
Perhaps that is where we will see Burke’s connection to Jeremiah. Maybe Burke will be possessed by the spirit of Jeremiah, and under that possession his abuse of Vicki will intensify. It is also possible that Burke will be revealed as a descendant of Jeremiah. On Friday, the story of Burke’s childhood was retconned, introducing the idea that his father left the family when Burke was nine. Perhaps it will turn out that he did this after he found out that Burke was the product of an extramarital dalliance with a Collins. That in turn might revive another paternity question concerning a nine year old boy. For months, the show hinted that Burke, not Liz’ brother Roger, was the father of strange and troubled boy David Collins. If Burke is a Collins bar sinister, then David can be his natural son and still retain his symbolic importance as the last in the male line of the family.
Whatever the nature of Burke’s connection to Jeremiah, Vicki’s eventual flight from him might lead her into the vampire story. Since Barnabas thinks he wants Vicki to be his next victim, he has been solicitous towards her, and she regards him warmly. My wife, Mrs Acilius, points out a sort of visual pun implicit in the prospect of Vicki choosing Barnabas over Burke. As played by Anthony George, Burke is an astonishingly poor kisser. As a vampire, Barnabas gives what might be called “the kiss of death.” A woman might prefer a single kiss of death to a lifetime of the impossibly awkward kisses of George.
Vicki caves in and agrees to marry Burke, even though he won’t answer any of her questions. They go into the drawing room and announce this ominous news to Liz, Barnabas, and Julia. Barnabas responds by looking off into space and exclaiming “Jeremiah!” Again, whatever relationship develops between Burke and Jeremiah, we know that Barnabas is committed to resisting its influence on Vicki.
Barnabas cannot conceal his dismay. He and Julia leave, explaining that they had planned to spend the evening together in town. Liz remarks that Barnabas was happy when he came, and sad when he left. Still, the idea that he and Julia might be going on a date is enough to keep Burke smiling.
In the courtyard, Barnabas tells Julia that he will give her his full cooperation as she tries to cure him of vampirism. He explains he wants to become human again so that he can prevent Vicki from marrying Burke.
This is rather alarming for the viewers. Dark Shadows became a hit when a vampire joined the cast. If the Burke/ Vicki/ Barnabas story is going to be just another daytime soap love triangle among humans, you may as well watch The Guiding Light. The foreboding dun dun DUNN! that ends each episode has rarely seemed more apt than it does coming on the heels of this grim prospect.
Vampire Barnabas Collins has an idea that well-meaning governess Vicki Winters ought to be his next victim. Vicki has given him one opportunity after another to advance this goal, and he has failed to take advantage of any of them. Now Vicki’s depressing boyfriend Burke Devlin has proposed marriage to her, and she is considering it seriously.
As we open today, Barnabas is telling his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie that he plans to kill Burke immediately. Willie talks him out of this plan, explaining the many difficulties of getting away with that particular crime. I was hoping he would bring up one of my favorite fanfic ideas, that Barnabas could bite Burke and enslave him. That would not only allow Barnabas to use Burke’s money and shady connections to establish his identity more securely, but would also give Burke, who after all used to be a very important character, a memorable storyline before he is written out of the show.
Barnabas says that “Devlin is an obstacle” who “must be destroyed.” Burke is indeed an obstacle to narrative development. Even in the first year of Dark Shadows, when Burke was a dashing action hero played by the charismatic Mitch Ryan, none of his storylines really worked. The show gave up on the last of those storylines forty weeks ago, when Burke formally renounced his pursuit of revenge against the Collinses in #201. Since then he’s been altogether surplus to requirements, and when the woefully miscast Anthony George took over the part in #262 he went from dashing action hero to hopeless schlub.
In recent months, Burke has been unpleasantly sullen whenever Vicki tries to connect herself to the vampire story, gaslighting her with angry demands that she deny the existence of supernatural phenomena he himself formerly knew to be real and infantilizing her with assertions that her imagination will run wild if he doesn’t control her. He is a blocking figure in a plot that is already moving too slowly. As an abusive partner to Vicki, who is still our main point of view character, he is quickly earning the audience’s hatred. So Barnabas is mistaken in saying that Burke “must be destroyed”- the character Ryan created has already been destroyed.
Barnabas goes to the Blue Whale tavern, where Burke is buying drinks for two old drunks who are laughing at his jokes. He and Burke sit at a table and have a conversation in which they compare their relationship to a contest. Burke compares it to a card game played for high stakes, Barnabas to a saber duel.
In later years, Jonathan Frid cited this as his favorite scene in all of Dark Shadows. I always like to see The Blue Whale, I like the moment when Barnabas objects that “You make me sound so evil,” and I’m glad Frid had a good time. But George is too bland for the scene to have a real impact. He was a cold actor who could excel when his character was driving the scene and knew more than he was telling. That ability doesn’t help him here. Burke simply reacts to Barnabas with bewilderment, and George had no real flair for reacting to his scene-mates.
The old drunks leave, and Bob the bartender starts setting chairs up on tables. Burke observes that it’s closing time. Barnabas goes, but Burke stays behind. Apparently he lives in the tavern now. He picks up the pay phone and asks for the international operator. He wants to talk to an agent of his in London. He is going to check on Barnabas’ “cousin from England” story.
Sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie Loomis tries to tell his master, vampire Barnabas Collins, that his plans for well-meaning governess Vicki Winters are unlikely to come to fruition. Barnabas wants Vicki to volunteer to become his vampire bride, a goal he has done remarkably little to advance. Even when Vicki invited herself to spend the night in his house, he couldn’t be bothered to bite her. Now she’s getting serious about her depressing boyfriend, Burke Devlin, and Willie thinks Barnabas has missed his chance.
Barnabas responds to Willie’s opinion as we might expect- he grabs him by the throat and threatens to kill him. He sends him away with orders to follow Vicki and Burke on their date and to report on every detail of their conversations.
Mad scientist Julia Hoffman is trying to cure Barnabas of his vampirism, and she brings him substantially the same message, along with a command to leave Vicki alone. Barnabas has enough hope that Julia’s experiments will succeed that he can’t treat her as he does Willie. So he evades her questions, pouts at her orders, and sulks when he finds himself having to go along with her.
The scene looks very much like the interactions we saw in the early months of the show between matriarch Liz and her brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger. Those were sometimes echoed in the interactions Vicki had with her charge, Roger’s son strange and troubled boy David. The bossy big sister/ bratty little brother pattern is on its way to becoming the signature relationship of Dark Shadows.
Meanwhile, Willie has been following his orders. He saw Burke and Vicki make several laughably awkward attempts to kiss each other, then heard Burke propose marriage to Vicki. Vicki asked for time to think it over.
When Willie reports this to Barnabas, he says he is sure she will say yes. Barnabas says that there will be no marriage, and proclaims “Burke Devlin must die!”
Dark Shadows Commentary 