In #70, the deserted Old House on the great estate of Collinwood was introduced as the favorite hangout of strange and troubled boy David Collins (David Henesy.) Several adult characters tried to keep him away from the house, notably crazed handyman Matthew Morgan (Thayer David,) and Willie Loomis, servant to David’s distant cousin, vampire Barnabas Collins. David’s visits to the house precipitated a number of crises, including one that began when he found that Barnabas and Willie kept the cellar door locked and became intensely curious as to why. We knew that they did this to conceal Barnabas’ coffin at the foot of the stairs. That was when the show was set in 1967.
Today, young Daniel Collins (David Henesy) is introduced as a boy whose favorite hangout is the deserted Old House on the great estate of Collinwood. He finds much put-upon servant Ben Stokes locking the cellar door. Ben is the friend and accomplice of Daniel’s second cousin, vampire Barnabas Collins. Daniel is intensely curious as to why Ben is locking the door. We know that it is to conceal Barnabas’ coffin at the foot of the stairs. Now the show is set in 1796.
Ben initially responds to Daniel’s curiosity with the same angry bluster Willie had used in his efforts to keep David away from the house. By the end of their scene together, he has engaged Daniel in conversation, as Matthew often did with David. Daniel confides in Ben that he is planning to run away. Ben points out that Daniel is in no way prepared to strike out on his own, and persuades him to go back to the great house and to make a list of the things he will need. Combining Willie’s responsibility for protecting Barnabas with Matthew’s ability to persuade a boy that he is his friend, Ben seems well-positioned to keep Daniel from coming into conflict with the vampire in the family.
Back in the great house, repressed spinster Abigail Collins, Barnabas’ aunt, finds Daniel’s list and asks him what it is. He evades that question. As it happens, it is not the one she most urgently wants answered. She sits him down in the drawing room and asks him about a charm bracelet she had found somewhere around the house.
Daniel confirms that the bracelet belonged to Victoria Winters, the governess who used to teach him and Barnabas’ little sister Sarah. Vicki is now standing trial on charges of witchcraft. Sarah is dead, and Abigail is convinced that Vicki’s evil spells caused her death, among many other recent tragedies. The bracelet seems to Abigail to be evidence against Vicki. Abigail points to a charm in the shape of a devil and asks Daniel what Vicki told him about it. He says blandly that Vicki told him and Sarah that it was a devil. She asks him if Vicki instructed him and Sarah to fall to their knees and worship the Devil, and he reacts scornfully, asking who ever heard of worshiping a devil.
Abigail presses Daniel for more information about Vicki. He keeps talking about how much he and Sarah liked her, and tries to paint her in a favorable light. He tells Abigail that Vicki used to say that the day would come when people could fly through the air, covering hundreds of miles in a single hour, that there would be machines that would pick up voices traveling through the air and make them audible with the turn of a dial, and that other machines would be able to solve arithmetic problems. We know that Vicki is a time-traveler displaced from the 1960s and that she is describing airplanes, radio, and electronic calculators, and we further know that her time-travel was not the result of a spell she cast, but that Sarah’s ghost yanked her back in time. But Abigail interprets her stories as promises of rewards from the Devil, and most of those whom Vicki has told of her chronological dislocation have taken it to be a confession that she is a witch.
It dawns on Daniel that everything he is saying in his attempt to defend Vicki is making matters worse for her. David Henesy does a marvelous job showing us how miserable this makes Daniel. Abigail tells him he must go with her to Vicki’s trial tomorrow and repeat to the judges what he has told her. He resists the idea. She breaks off their conversation to announce she will go to the Old House. Daniel has told her that he saw Ben locking the cellar door, and she has jumped to the conclusion that he was hiding evidence against Vicki behind it. Daniel pleads with her not to go, but she insists.
We cut to the front door of the Old House, where Abigail encounters Ben. He begs her not to go in. She accuses him of being in league with Vicki and declares that his own trial will begin before long. Ben may have been able to soft-soap Daniel, but Abigail responds with hostility no matter what he says. Finally, he watches her go in. She has said that whatever happens to her inside will be her own responsibility; after she is gone, Ben echoes this statement, a savage note of satisfaction in his voice.
Abigail unlocks the cellar door, goes down the stairs, and sees the coffin. Of course, it is sunset; of course, she is just in time to see the coffin open and Barnabas rise. She watches in terror. Clarice Blackburn does an extraordinary job of acting in the closeup of Abigail’s reaction; she gives the purest possible look of fear, and her scream is perfectly open and smooth.
Barnabas looks at her and asks “Abigail, what are you doing here?” The audience can’t be in much doubt how their reunion will end, though we will have to wait until tomorrow to see just what happens between them.
Dark Shadows was made with very little advance planning, though we do know that they had settled on the name “Daniel Collins” for David Henesy’s character well before the 1795 segment began. In #350, three full weeks before Vicki starts her uncertain and frightening journey to the past, heiress Carolyn slips and calls David “Daniel.” So it is inexplicable that they’ve waited until the segment has been going for more than thirteen weeks before bringing Daniel in. Vicki and David’s relationship was the only thing on the show that consistently worked in 1966, and David’s scenes with Sarah were among the highlights of 1967. So when in #372 haughty overlord Joshua tells Vicki that she will be tutoring both his daughter Sarah and his young cousin Daniel, the audience would have been excited to see the three of them together.
Presumably the makers of the show were unsure how long they would be able to stay in the eighteenth century before the ratings started to suffer and they came under pressure to get back to a contemporary setting. That might explain why they wanted to keep the number of characters to a minimum, so that they would be able to show the four necessary events- Sarah’s death, Barnabas’ transformation into a vampire, Josette’s leap from Widows’ Hill, and the chaining of Barnabas in his coffin- without starting a lot of threads they would have to hasten away and leave dangling. Even so, there were plenty of longueurs in the first weeks when they could have fitted in a few scenes of Daniel and Sarah together, if they had had the time to plan them.
As it happened, the ratings were great for the eighteenth century segment, so they were under no pressure at all to go back to the 1960s. But the breakneck pace of the early weeks and the lack of detailed planning has come back to haunt them. Three of the four big points have all been covered. All that is left is to chain Barnabas in his coffin and to send Vicki home, and they can do both of those things in any one episode. They are going to have their work cut out for them to fill the remaining time with stories that are anything like as interesting as some of those they passed up because they didn’t realize they would have time to tell them. The result will be that, while the last few weeks of the eighteenth century segment feature some great moments and several Genuinely Good Episodes, they also involve a lot of disappointment for the audience.
Acilius on Dark Shadows 