In Dark Shadows #3, man of mystery Burke Devlin mentioned that he started on the path to riches when he was in a bar in South America. Since then, he has mentioned his business interests on that continent several times, and the old standard “Brazil” has emerged as his informal theme song. Yesterday’s episode, one of the finest in the series, called back to the early days of the show several times, and today they close the loop on Burke’s connection to Brazil. His plane crashes in that country, and he dies there.
We learn of Burke’s fatal accident when housekeeper Mrs Johnson tells her employer, Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, that she has heard a radio report of an aviation disaster in Brazil. Mrs Johnson first came to work in Liz’ home, the great house of Collinwood, in #81. At that time Burke had sworn to wreak a terrible vengeance on the Collinses and Mrs Johnson was his secret agent. Burke renounced his quest for vengeance in #201, which was just as well, since it was never very interesting anyway. But they never told us that he had stopped paying Mrs Johnson or that she had stopped funneling information to him. So viewers who have been watching all along may wonder if she really did just happen to be listening when the radio announced that a Varig flight had gone down outside Belém. Maybe she was in touch with some associate of Burke’s who told her more than she could repeat to Liz. Or maybe not, but in any case it is satisfying to be reminded of the connection.
Burke was engaged to marry one of Collinwood’s residents, well-meaning governess Vicki. When she is told that Burke is missing and presumed dead, Vicki declares that she is certain he will come back. Vicki was originally the audience’s point of view character, an outsider to whom everything we did not know had to be explained. We now know many things she does not, but in this declaration she once more seems to be closer to us than to the other characters in her knowledge. She knows, as we do, that she lives in a soap opera and no major character is likely to stay dead permanently, especially not when his death is supposed to be the result of a plane crash in a faraway jungle.
On the other hand, Burke has been fading in importance for a long time. After his revenge story fizzled, he never really found a new reason to be on the show. His relationship with Vicki might have made things happen when he was still in conflict with the Collinses. She would then have found herself torn between her lover and the family that had all but adopted her. But once Burke and the Collinses patched things up, there was no obstacle between him and Vicki. In the last few days, it has seemed that she might even be able to stay in the house and keep her job after marrying him. There has been a theme where Burke tried to gaslight Vicki out of believing in supernatural phenomena that he himself had plenty of evidence to suppose were real, but that was less a storyline than a speed bump. Burke’s part was recast after the charismatic Mitch Ryan showed up for #252 too drunk to work; since then he has been played by the woefully miscast Anthony George, and it has been obvious that the character needed to be written out of the show before he did permanent damage to George’s career. So maybe Burke won’t come back after all.
Meanwhile, in the Old House on the same estate, vampire Barnabas Collins is moping around while mad scientist Julia Hoffman works on her notes about her attempt to turn him into a real boy. When she asks if there is anything she can do to lighten his mood, he sarcastically suggests that they play a game of cards or of cribbage. She’s up for either one, but he says that he won’t be happy until Vicki comes to him. He doesn’t know about Burke’s accident, but has somehow convinced himself that Vicki’s personality will eventually disappear and be replaced with that of his long-lost love Josette, and that as Josette she will be his bride. Barnabas goes on so long about how wonderful it will be when the Josettified Vicki is in the house that we start to wonder just how the two of them will pass the time. The day may come when Barnabas is glad of a cribbage board.
Julia only recently committed her first murder. She and Barnabas killed her old medical school classmate Dave Woodard a week ago, and she is still reeling from the shock of it. One thing she has settled on is the fact that she is going to be linked to Barnabas for the rest of her life. It doesn’t seem likely that she will ever be able to tell anyone else about Woodard, and being a murderer is, like it or not, an important part of her identity. So no one other than Barnabas can ever really know her. She’s making the best of this by trying to fall in love with him, but his sick obsession with reenacting the plot of the 1932 film The Mummy with himself in the Boris Karloff role and a woman in her early twenties in Zita Johanns’ double role as the dead princess and her reincarnation would seem to leave her at an impasse.
Julia presses Barnabas about his relationship with Josette. When he keeps insisting that the Josettified Vicki will come to him of her own free will, she asks if the original Josette ever did that. Barnabas’ silent grimace answers her question. She goes on to ask why Josette is so important to him if he was never very important to her. He says he will explain it all to her, but that they must have the proper setting. He leads her to the place of Josette’s death, the cliff at Widows’ Hill.
Barnabas has given us at least two versions of his relationship with Josette. In #212, he gave a speech to her portrait which implied that she was his grandmother, and that she sided with his father her son when he and Barnabas had a fateful clash. Soon after, Josette was retconned into Barnabas’ lost love. In #236, Barnabas was trying to brainwash Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, into thinking that she was Josette. He told her then that he had sailed with Josette from her home in the French West Indies to Collinwood, where she was to marry his uncle Jeremiah Collins. It was his task to teach her English on the voyage. Aboard ship, they fell in love. This reenactment of the tale of Tristan and Isolde ended as sadly as did the original, though the particulars of the story were not the same.
Now, Barnabas tells Julia that he met Josette for the first time when she arrived at Collinwood. He had taken no interest in his uncle’s betrothed until he saw her, but was stunned by her beauty and quickly fell in love with her. He found himself compelled to be “her good and faithful friend Barnabas,” a position he found humiliating. As a vampire, Barnabas is a metaphor for selfishness and cruelty, and so it is hardly surprising that he confines Julia to the same position with regard to himself and that he openly delights in her humiliation. It is a bit dizzying that she expresses so much sympathy for him, telling him in this scene that he never seems more human than when he talks about Josette.
In telling this latest version of the story, Barnabas says that as Josette came to feel that her youth was wasted on the elderly Jeremiah, it dawned on him that there was a way he could offer her eternal youth. This harks back to #233, when Barnabas told Vicki and Liz’ daughter Carolyn the story of Josette’s death, that she leapt off the cliff because she was being pursued by her lover. So we are to assume that Josette killed herself rather than let Barnabas turn her into a vampire. But it might suggest more than that. Whenever Barnabas met Josette, and whether it was aboard ship or on her arrival, he was not yet a vampire. We have not heard how he turned into one. Perhaps he involved himself in some kind of black magic in an attempt to keep himself and Josette young forever, and as a result he became a vampire and she fled from him to her death.
Vicki shows up and tells Barnabas and Julia about Burke. They are stunned. Julia’s reflex is to lean in and touch Vicki’s arm, Barnabas’ is to stagger back.
Barnabas quickly senses opportunity, and he shoos Julia away. He says that she was complaining of the cold and that for the sake of her health she ought not to stay. She is so obviously humiliated that only Vicki’s absorption in her own distress keeps her from noticing.
Barnabas plays the “good and faithful friend,” and Vicki looks over the edge of the cliff. She talks about the widows who have thrown themselves to their deaths from it over the years. She says that she had at first assumed that they were just “make-believe creatures,” but that if she thought Burke were really gone she would throw herself after them. Barnabas grabs her and urges her to stop such talk.
As this goes on, we hear the “Widows’ Wail,” a sound effect prominent in the early months of the show that the uninitiated mistake for wind, but that indicates something terrible is about to happen. When Vicki and Burke had their final conversation yesterday, they heard it, and he refused to admit its meaning. Vicki and Barnabas hear it now. The Widows bewail upcoming disasters, and Burke is already dead. Barnabas tells Vicki that she will be a bride very soon, and she nods and repeats, “A bride… very soon.” As she does, the Wail sounds louder than before.
Closing Miscellany
This episode includes one of the most famous bloopers in the entire series. When Liz is on the telephone getting the news about Burke’s plane crash, she refers to “That place in Brazil… (long pause)… (separate, equally long pause)… (fidget)… (different kind of pause)… Belém!” It is a wonder to behold.
This episode was taped on 16 October 1967. On the 28th of that month, Alexandra Moltke married Philip Isles. So, whether or not Vicki was going to become “a bride very soon,” her player was. The wedding announcement in The New York Times doesn’t mention Dark Shadows; it does mention that “Mrs David Ford” was part of the bridal party. That Mrs David Ford was Nancy Barrett, who played Carolyn, and her Mr Ford played Maggie’s father Sam.
Neither Mrs Isles’ marriage to Philip nor Miss Barrett’s to David Ford lasted very long. Mrs Isles is still known as Mrs Isles, even though she was married to a doctor named Alfred Jaretzki for 33 years, ending with his death in 2014. By the time she met Jaretzki, she was a nationally known documentary filmmaker, and there is her son Adam Isles, the father of her three grandchildren and a former high official of the US government. So I suppose it made sense to stick with that name. In any case, I doubt very much that the widows were wailing for her.
My wife, Mrs Acilius, mentioned that even though we have seen the whole series before, she fully expected Barnabas to push Julia off the cliff. The episode pulled her in so completely that she didn’t stop to tell herself that she would have remembered if he’d done that.
Acilius on Dark Shadows 