In a moment of anger, wicked witch Angelique cursed her husband Barnabas Collins. In the first stage of the curse, a bat bit Barnabas on the neck. Barnabas lost a great deal of blood, and now has a high fever. If he dies, he will rise as a vampire. Angelique regrets placing the curse and is trying to undo it.
At the top of today’s episode, Angelique is fussing over a large bloodstain on the floor of the front parlor. With a word, she can turn Barnabas into a vampire. Earlier, she turned his father Joshua into a cat one day and back into a human another day. She made Barnabas’ true love, the gracious Josette, conceive a mad passion for his uncle, Jeremiah, made Jeremiah reciprocate it, and drove the two of them to elope. She enthralled Barnabas’ devoted friend, much put-upon servant Ben Stokes, and forced him to assist her in her evil plans. She could sicken Barnabas’ little sister Sarah and kill her or heal her as she chose. She made bewildered time traveler Vicki suffer hallucinations that led her to incriminate herself as the witch. Yet for all her powers over humans, she is utterly stumped by the stain on the floor. She stares at it and talks to herself for a minute or two, helplessly rubs it with a dry cloth, then stands up, defeated. Considering that she was a lady’s maid until she married Barnabas, you might think that the first thing she would have learned when she took up black magic would be spells to help with the house-cleaning, but evidently not.
Unlike the blood on Lady MacBeth’s hands, the stain on the floor is visible to everyone. Barnabas’ mother Naomi sees it when she has come to the house and asked to see her son. Angelique denies that he is there. We cut back and forth between the women in the front parlor and Barnabas in his sick room. When Naomi notices the bloodstain on the floor, Angelique claims that it is a wine stain. Naomi is a serious alcoholic, so she probably knows the difference between a wine stain and a bloodstain. The ailing Barnabas makes noises that Naomi hears, and Angelique claims that they are just the sounds of the house. Naomi lived in the house until she gave it to Barnabas a couple of weeks before, so she probably knows the house’s noises well enough that this won’t fool her either. Even after Angelique has resorted to these two very ill-chosen lies, Naomi gives up and goes away. It is fun to watch Angelique struggle to find a way out of an awkward situation with her mother-in-law, and touching to see that Naomi is so determined to believe the best about Barnabas and his new wife that she decides to accept Angelique’s explanations.
Angelique goes upstairs and gives Barnabas a potion meant to cure him of her curse. She is terribly upset when it doesn’t work. We’ve seen Angelique regret her spells before, and in #377 we heard her thinking about the fact that she can’t control their effects once she has cast them. But this is the first time we have seen her go so far in an effort to undo her evil deeds. When she offers to bring Josette to Barnabas, there is enough desperation on her face that it seems plausible that she sincerely intends to let her rival try to help him.
In the great house, Naomi and Joshua quarrel about Barnabas and Angelique. Joshua claims that he has not the slightest concern about Barnabas; as soon as Naomi leaves the room to answer the door, we see a haunted look on his face that shows this to be a lie. It’s a wonderful touch, and sets up an expectation that Joshua will soon relent in his hostility to Barnabas.
Naomi opens the door to find Josette and her aunt, the Countess DuPrés. When the bat attacked Barnabas, Josette and the countess were many miles away from Collinwood, yet Josette not only sensed that something terrible was happening, streams of blood appeared on her neck at the same spots where they appeared on Barnabas’ neck. After this experience, they hastened back to Collinwood.
While Josette and the countess were in the inn far away, a bat appeared outside their window. Though Angelique has been dispatching bats to do her bidding, she did not then know and still does not know where Josette and the countess were at that time. Regular viewers of Dark Shadows should be ready for this. The show’s first supernatural menace, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, was introduced in December 1966 as an assortment of related but autonomous phenomena, and we saw in 1967 that the ghost of Sarah was also made up of several parts, not all of which were aware of each other or working towards the same goals. So the bat that spies on Barnabas, the bat that bites Barnabas, and the bat that hangs around Josette and the countess may all be parts of the complex known as “Angelique,” but that need not mean that they are all under the control of the woman we know by that name or that she is even aware of them.
Josette is determined to help Barnabas and says that she and her aunt will be going to the Old House to ask Angelique where he is. Naomi is sure Angelique does not know, but Josette and the countess insist on going to the Old House anyway.
When Naomi came to visit, Angelique had to be pleasant. Naomi is Barnabas’ mother, and she is the only ally Angelique can hope to have in the family. But she doesn’t have any need to be nice to Josette or the countess. She keeps telling them to get out of her house, and they keep refusing. Finally they are on their way to the door when they hear Barnabas’ voice crying out “Josette!” At that, there’s no stopping Josette from rushing up the staircase to his room. The countess holds Angelique back, and Josette finds Barnabas bleeding and delirious. He keeps calling her name, unable to recognize that she is with him. He staggers past her. His back to her, he leans out into the hallway and calls “Josette! Josette!” It’s a poignant image of a man who has never fully appreciated anything he had, and who has now lost everything.
Acilius on Dark Shadows 