In yesterday’s episode, Barnabas Collins extracted a promise from his friend, much put-upon servant Ben Stokes. Barnabas had decided that the curse that has made him a vampire and condemned whoever loves him to death must end. Ben reluctantly agreed to come back after dawn to the secret chamber in the Collins mausoleum where Barnabas’ coffin is hidden and drive a stake through his heart.
The curse was the work of wicked witch Angelique. Eight minutes after Barnabas discovered he was a vampire, he killed Angelique. But when Ben was about to keep his promise and end Barnabas’ curse, her disembodied head appeared before Ben’s eyes, her voice resounded in his ears, and the mallet and stake vanished from his hands. Angelique declared that the curse would be fulfilled in its entirety, and ordered Ben to take that word to Barnabas after dusk.
Every viewer who has seen even one episode of Dark Shadows knows that Barnabas will react to this news by choking Ben. If we’ve been watching the 11 weeks so far that the show has been set in the years 1795 and 1796, we know that he won’t kill Ben or seriously injure him, since that would leave the main character without anyone to talk to. So there is no need for today’s opening scene, in which Ben gives Barnabas the news, he chokes him for a little bit, then lets him go.
After Barnabas leaves Ben alone in the secret chamber of the Collins mausoleum, Angelique’s disembodied head floats into view again. The floating head gag was reasonably effective when it was used for undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins in late 1966 and early 1967, because there were so few special effects of any kind on Dark Shadows at that time that associating one with Laura set her apart from the other characters and showed that she was an invader in the world in which they operated. But double-exposures and Chromakey and puppetry and other gimmicks have become routine these last several months, so it isn’t very impressive now. It certainly isn’t powerful enough to justify its use in three scenes today.
While still with Ben in the secret chamber, Angelique says that she will cause the gracious Josette to go to Barnabas so that Barnabas may be the death of her. She starts calling Josette’s name, and her voice morphs into Barnabas’. They do an impressive job syncing her lips with his voice. We dissolve to Josette’s bedroom, where the voice of Barnabas continues to call her name. Then all of a sudden we hear Angelique’s laugh. Does Josette hear that part too? It messes up the only really effective part of the episode.
Angelique’s floating head appears again and gives an intricate explanation of a dream Josette is about to have. This echoes the sequences we saw in 1967 in which mad scientist Julia Hoffman hypnotized imperiled heroines and made them forget information that might have led to the exposure of the many crimes she and Barnabas have committed. After Angelique’s long preface, Josette finally has the dream. It is shown to us in a luridly colored sequence, and in it Angelique shows Josette the mausoleum where Barnabas’ coffin is hidden.
As we might have predicted, Josette goes to the mausoleum when she wakes up. Just as predictably, she meets Ben on the way, and he tries to talk her out of going there. Of course Angelique’s floating head appears yet again and forces Ben to scurry off.
We’ve known since #5 that Josette will die by jumping off the precipice known as Widow’s Hill. In #185, we learned that in the 1960s she was still famous in the village of Collinsport as “the lady who went over the cliff.” In #233, Barnabas revealed that she jumped because he frightened her while she was up there. So when Barnabas finds Josette in the outer room of the mausoleum and tells her that she is in grave danger, there is no real suspense- we know that she is not going to die this way. Like everything else we see today, it is filler.
Frustrated by the failure of the episode to advance the plot, Danny Horn devotes his post about it to a discussion of the 1845-1847 serialized novel Varney the Vampire. I sympathize; I toyed with the idea of posting a two-sentence summary of the action followed by an essay about the greatest of all moving pictures about a floating head, John Boorman’s 1974 masterpiece Zardoz. But I don’t want to work that hard. Danny may have called his blog Dark Shadows Every Day, but he lavished so much effort on each post that they were often separated by weeks or months. I want the episode commentaries here to appear on the 56th anniversary of their original broadcast, and so I’m not going to do the kind of extra work Danny used to do.
Acilius on Dark Shadows 