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.
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.
Dark Shadows Commentary 