Episode 364: Barnabas, Barnabas

Vampire Barnabas Collins has been part of Dark Shadows at least since we first saw his portrait on the wall of the great house of Collinwood in #204, more properly since they went to great lengths to make it look like there was a portrait on that spot in #195. He is now the main force driving the action of the show, and pretty much the only reason people are tuning in to watch it. The ghost of Barnabas’ ten year old sister, Sarah, first appeared in #255; ever since, we’ve been waiting for the two of them to meet. At the end of yesterday’s installment, they finally did.

Barnabas was in his living room, trying to choke the life out of his only friend and would-be lover, mad scientist Julia Hoffman. Sarah materialized, and he let Julia go.

This echoes a scene in #341. Barnabas and Julia were in the act of murdering her medical school classmate and onetime friend, Dave Woodard, when Woodard claimed to see Sarah. At that, Barnabas almost let Woodard escape. Only when Julia called out “Stop him!” did Barnabas take hold of Woodard and kill him. Not only is he murdering a good-guy character, he has coerced Julia into taking part in the crime and will gloat over her new status as a murderer. But in the middle of all that loathsome cruelty, we see a flash of his longing for his baby sister. It is a tribute to actor Jonathan Frid that we can feel Barnabas’ loneliness and want to like him even in the middle of one of the character’s very darkest moments.

This time, Sarah really is there, and she really does stop a murder. There is a puzzle as to why. In #360 and #361, Julia knew that Barnabas wanted to destroy her, and appealed to Sarah for help. Sarah refused, saying that she liked Dr Woodard and knew what Julia did to him. We heard Sarah’s “London Bridge” theme on the soundtrack during the murder of Woodard, so it is clear that she witnessed that crime. But if she can stop Barnabas killing Julia, why couldn’t she stop him killing Woodard?

Today is only the second time Sarah has appeared to more than one person at a time. When Barnabas’ ex-victim Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, wanted to escape from the hospital where Julia was keeping her locked up in #294, both she and her nurse could see and hear Sarah. Maybe it is difficult for Sarah to manifest herself to two people, and impossible for her to show herself to three. In that case, Julia’s presence would have stopped Sarah from saving Woodard.

It’s also possible that Sarah can’t do anything that will lead to Barnabas’ capture. She has appeared to many people and given all of them clues about the strange goings-on, but she has referred directly to Barnabas only when speaking to his partners in crime Willie and Julia. Time and again she has stopped short of giving information that would expose her big brother. When Barnabas and Julia moved against Woodard, he was calling the sheriff. Woodard might have placed himself beyond Sarah’s protection when he picked up the telephone.

Indeed, if Barnabas does kill Julia now, he will probably be caught. Julia has given a notebook full of incriminating evidence about Barnabas to a local attorney to be handed over to the authorities in case anything happens to her. Besides, everyone knows she spends a great deal of time at Barnabas’ house, so if she suddenly goes missing he will be investigated. By preventing Barnabas from killing Julia, Sarah is protecting him from exposure.

Sarah tells Barnabas that he taught her the first lessons she ever received in morality, and that he has now forgotten them himself. He begs her to stay, showing at length the vulnerability and need that have been so effective at recruiting our sympathy when we have glimpsed them before. She says she will never appear to him again, not until he learns to be good. We’ve known him long enough to know that this will be an extremely long wait.

Sarah vanishes. Julia sees her friend shattered. She approaches him. She addresses him, for the first time, as “Barnabas, Barnabas.” He recoils from her. He does not renew his attempt to strangle her, but he does tell her in the coldest imaginable voice that he could kill her as easily as he could crush a moth. It hasn’t been two minutes since his little sister reduced him to tears, and he has snapped back into his place as death itself.

Some say that Barnabas’ frequent references to his longing for Sarah during these weeks are meant to make him easier for the audience to sympathize with. I think this scene shows that the opposite is more nearly the case. They’ve undercut every other ground for liking Barnabas, leaving us only his love for Sarah. When we see that not even a visit from Sarah can thaw him out for any length of time, not only do we have to give up any hope that there is a nice guy hidden inside him, but we also hear the door slamming shut on any possibility that his character will develop in a way that will surprise us. Since he is the show, the closing of that door means that Dark Shadows 2.0 is all but over.

In the great house, matriarch Liz breaks the news to well-meaning governess Vicki learns that the authorities in Brazil have identified one of the corpses found in the wreckage of an airplane that crashed outside Belem as that of Vicki’s depressing fiancé, Burke Devlin. It has been clear for some time that Burke probably died in that crash, so Liz is worried that Vicki’s refusal to accept their verdict is a sign that she is in an unhealthy denial about the facts of the situation.

In the first 25 weeks of Dark Shadows, Burke was a major figure, the arch-nemesis of the Collins family. His storyline never really took off, though, and when undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins was on the show from #126-191 his issues were all absorbed into her arc. He formally renounced his grudge against the Collinses in #201, and has been surplus to requirements ever since.

There is just one thing I wish they had done differently about Burke’s death. During the early period of the show, there was a story about high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins trying desperately to hide a custom-made filigreed fountain pen of Burke’s. That dragged on for months, and dominated 21 whole episodes. It would have been a nice Easter egg for those of us who sat through those not-very-interesting installments if Liz had said the authorities were able to identify Burke’s body in part because that pen was on it.

There is a bit of intentional comedy this time that works very well. Telling Barnabas of Vicki’s refusal to accept Burke’s death, Liz exclaims “She can’t go on loving a dead man all her life!” Barnabas is clearly offended by this remark, quite understandably since he is deceased himself. He responds that “It has been known to happen.” But he manages to keep cool enough that Liz doesn’t notice.

Closing Miscellany

This episode marks the last appearance of Sharon Smyth as the ghost of Sarah Collins.

Episode 1-274 of Dark Shadows each began with the words “My name is Victoria Winters,” delivered in voiceover by Alexandra Moltke Isles and leading into a few sentences vaguely related to the plot of the show. Beginning with #275, these voiceovers might be delivered by any actress with a speaking parts in that episode, and do not involve their character’s names. Many are written in the first person, however, as is today’s:

There has been a homecoming in the great house of Collinwood, and those who have returned have found that very little has changed. We still live within a ring of fear, a fear that is generated by the one who lives in the Old House, where on this night a kind of madness prevails, a madness that will lead to the threat of murder.

Every time this happens, the Dark Shadows wiki complains that “by this time in the series, the narrations are no longer spoken in character.” That complaint might have made sense if only a few of the episodes since #275 included first person pronouns, but dozens of them do. So we would have to say that they often are spoken in character, but that it isn’t always clear who the character is. The wiki editors will be glad from now on, because this is the last time a narrator says “we.”