Vampire Barnabas Collins is in a chirpy mood. He and his associate, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, have just committed the premeditated murder of Julia’s medical school classmate Dave Woodard. As we saw when Barnabas made his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie to help him hide the corpse of seagoing con man Jason McGuire, nothing makes him happier than forcing someone to help with the killing of a former friend.
Today, Julia wants to stop her attempt to cure Barnabas of vampirism, but he won’t hear of it. When she tells him she might try to kill him instead of curing him, Barnabas relishes telling her that he trusts her completely. She does knock him out of his blissful state when she suggests that if she manages to turn him into a real boy, he might have a conscience. He gives a little speech in which he says some brave things about being willing to accept the punishment fitting a man who had done the things he has done if he also gains the ability to love as a man can love. Jonathan Frid puts enough into this speech that it is possible to sympathize with Barnabas in the moment that he is delivering it.
That moment doesn’t last very long. By the end of the episode, we are back on this set, where Julia says that “someone” might love Barnabas as he is, and he takes delight in her humiliation as he makes it obvious that he knows she is referring to herself.
Some say that Barnabas’ speech about wanting to love is meant to make the character more likable, but it has the opposite effect when he so smoothly transitions back into this gleeful cruelty. The other day, Julia told Barnabas that she had wondered whether he was capable of feeling any emotions at all, but we see in this scene what we’ve seen all along, that he is nothing but emotion. Except when he is acting, trying to convince the living members of the Collins family that he is their long-lost cousin from England, his feelings are right on the surface. For a minute or two, he has some feelings about love and justice, and we see those very clearly. But that is a brief interlude in the middle of his entirely gratuitous torture of Julia. We are left in no doubt that he takes an utterly unmixed pleasure in causing her pain. We’ve already seen very cold villains on Dark Shadows and before the series ends we will see more, but by the end of this scene Barnabas claims the crown of most detestable character ever to appear on the show. It’s so hard to imagine how he could possibly sustain such a level of malignity that it’s no wonder viewers still keep tuning in to see what he will do next.
The main theme of the episode is the contrast between Barnabas’ relationship with Julia and his relationship with well-meaning governess Vicki. For the first 39 weeks of Dark Shadows, Vicki was the audience’s main point-of-view character; now Julia is the one who knows what we know, and who makes things happen when she learns new information. Seeing Barnabas first with one woman, then with the other, we see how the show has been changing since he joined the cast.
Barnabas eavesdrops on Vicki’s conversation with her depressing fiancé Burke on the terrace at the great house of Collinwood, then slides in and claims to have inadvertently overheard the last few words of their conversation. Burke gives Barnabas a dirty look, then excuses himself to do some telephoning while Vicki and Barnabas stay on the terrace and talk for a little while.
Barnabas has some vague idea of seducing Vicki, an idea he has been remarkably desultory about pursuing. In this scene, he does the only thing he has ever really got round to doing about it, which is to listen sympathetically while Vicki tells him her troubles. This time, she’s trying to convince herself that she wants what Burke wants, which is to get away from Collinwood and start a new life somewhere else. It isn’t an exciting situation, but Alexandra Moltke Isles delivers her lines with so much urgency that it holds our attention.
Julia eavesdrops on this conversation. She looks miserable. Whatever she may have had in mind when she first came to Collinwood, Julia is stuck with Barnabas for the foreseeable future. Not only has Julia murdered one of her oldest friends for Barnabas’ sake, she has involved herself so deeply in so many of his activities that it is unclear how she would go back to the successful professional life she had before she met him even if he were destroyed. If he is going to spend his time hanging around other women, she faces a drab prospect.
In the drawing room, Burke, Vicki, and Julia talk about the death of Dr Woodard. Julia can’t bear the topic, and excuses herself to go out to the terrace. There, she catches a glimpse of Woodard’s ghost. Julia screams, Burke and Vicki come, and all she can do when they ask what’s wrong is to keep jabbering that “he wasn’t there.”
There are some rough patches in the script today. For example, in the opening, Julia is touching the equipment when Barnabas exclaims “Don’t stop!” This is puzzling- she doesn’t appear to be stopping anything. And when Julia says “He wasn’t there,” Vicki has to ask “Who wasn’t there?” A person might reflexively say such a thing, and Mrs Isles’ rapid delivery of the line and simultaneous movement of the neck and the shoulders suggest such a reflex. That’s probably the best choice any actor could have made, but the line still gets a bad laugh. Barnabas and Julia’s successive eavesdropping expeditions also come off as some kind of joke, and all the scenes take too long. The whole thing could have used another trip through the typewriter. Still, writer Joe Caldwell was at his best with miniature character studies, and while he may not have had the time he needed to give this one his usual polish, the actors still have more than enough to show what they can do. It’s a fairly good outing, all things considered.
Acilius on Dark Shadows 