High-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins was the first of Dark Shadows’ icy, calculating villains, and Roger’s son, strange and troubled boy David, was the first of its adorable homicidal maniacs. By the time David’s mother, blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, went up in smoke in #191, well-meaning governess Vicki had converted David from evil to good, and the subsumption of the “Revenge of Burke Devlin” storyline into Laura’s arc had set Roger on the path to becoming occasional comic relief.
Now, bumbling vampire Barnabas Collins combines the roles Roger and David pioneered. Barnabas has been so inept at keeping his secrets that David has learned some of them and is frantically trying to warn the adults about him, but he has shown enough calculation in his damage control that most of the adults receive David’s warnings as signs of mental illness.
The highlights of today’s episode are two sequences in which Roger makes himself remarkably vulnerable to his old nemesis Burke Devlin and family doctor Dave Woodard. Early on, Burke and Woodard are telling him that David is a frightened boy, and Roger answers them with a speech in which he claims that all boys live in constant terror. “I was a child in this house. I was terrified of the darkness in the corners and frightened to walk along the corridors by myself. I used to think that all the people in these Collins portraits… all those dead people… stared at me wherever I went… looked at me with piercing eyes… hated me! Well, I outgrew it, and so will David.” Burke and Woodard simply ignore Roger’s speech- evidently they are true New England men, and cannot imagine talking to each other about their feelings. After Burke and Woodard leave Roger, he looks at the portrait of Jeremiah Collins above the fireplace in the drawing room, and recoils in fear.
After Burke and Woodard have talked with David a while, they come back to ask Roger’s permission to take the boy to look for a secret chamber he says can be found in the Collins family mausoleum. Roger says in reply that they should forget about looking into tombs and get a psychiatrist who can look into David’s mind. He says that David “is like a person on a thin wire, very high off the ground… Any minute he may fall and plunge downward- out of our reach forever.”
Again, Burke and Woodard don’t react to Roger’s speech at all. Viewers who have been with the show from the beginning, though, will see these two scenes as a significant retcon. For the first 38 weeks of Dark Shadows, Roger openly hated David, was eager to get rid of him, and exploited his troubles for his own advantage. Perhaps the single most shocking scene in the entire series came in #83, when Roger coolly manipulated David into making an attempt on Vicki’s life. But now Roger is a caring father whose concern for David drives him to make the most astonishing emotional displays.
In the scene between Roger’s speeches, David told Burke and Woodard about two vacant coffins he has seen. Woodard, who is inclined to believe David is onto something, can’t help but try his hand at psychotherapy, and asks David if he isn’t terribly afraid of coffins. Again, long-time fans will remember that matriarch Liz went eighteen years without once willingly leaving home, because she thought that the murdered body of her husband Paul Stoddard was buried in the basement. In #275, it turned out that Stoddard’s supposed grave held only an empty trunk. Burke was there when that came to light, and Woodard probably knows about it too. So he might well imagine that David would have a lot of unresolved feelings surrounding the image of a vacant coffin. The Liz-is-a-recluse story was a dud from the beginning, so it is understandable it hasn’t been referenced in months, but it’s a shame Woodard doesn’t have the chance to clue new viewers into what may well be on his mind.
Also in that scene, David tells Burke and Woodard he will have to break a promise he made to his friend, the ghost of ten-year-old Sarah Collins. When he says this, the wind blows the window to his room open, and the strains of “London Bridge” play on a wooden flute. When David asks the men if they can hear the music, they make it clear that they can. He tells them that it is Sarah objecting that he ought not to share her secret, but that he has no choice.
He takes them to the Tomb of the Collinses, where Sarah and her parents are buried. He tries to open the panel to the secret chamber, but it has been locked. When Burke and Woodard tell him they don’t believe that there is a secret chamber, he finds Sarah’s flute on her mother’s crypt. This is enough to convince Woodard that there is something to David’s story.
In life, Sarah was Barnabas’ sister. Her current relationship to Barnabas echoes Liz’ relationship to Roger, and the relationship developing between Barnabas and mad scientist Julia Hoffman. She tries to prevent him from committing crimes, but she will not allow him to be caught once he has committed them. At the moment, the crime Barnabas is busiest committing is an attempt to spread the idea that David is insane and to trick the adults into giving him inappropriate psychiatric treatment. So Sarah leaves her flute where it will give David’s doctor evidence that he is not ill at all. On the other hand, Barnabas has reason to fear that if the secret chamber becomes generally known, he will be exposed and destroyed. So she swears David to secrecy about it, and is upset when he is going to violate that secrecy. The usual Dark Shadows dynamic, seen in both the Liz/ Roger and Julia/ Barnabas relationships, is that of Bossy Big Sister and Bratty Little Brother; Sarah is Barnabas’ little sister, and she isn’t exactly bossy, but the end result is similar.
Acilius on Dark Shadows 