The opening voiceover is delivered by Vala Clifton, who makes her debut today as Maude Browning, a young lady whose profession it is to make herself agreeable to the gentlemen she meets. This marks the first time since episode #1 that the first voice we have heard was that of someone we had not seen previously. The rule lately has been that the introduction is always delivered by a woman who appears in the episode. Today, that leaves Ms Clifton as the only candidate.
At the top of the episode, vampire Barnabas Collins tells his friend, much put-upon servant Ben Stokes, of his plans for revenge on the Rev’d Mr Trask, a visiting witchfinder responsible for much misery and injustice. When he makes it clear that he plans to murder Trask and to do it in an especially atrocious manner, Ben puts his foot down and says that he will no longer help Barnabas in any way. Barnabas threatens to kill Ben if he doesn’t come back with the implements he has ordered. Ben says that he may as well kill him right away. He stands still and squeezes his eyes shut, evidently expecting Barnabas to accept the invitation. Barnabas does put on his strangling face and move towards Ben, but at the last second he relents.
We then see Ben at The Eagle tavern, demanding “More rum!” Maude is at his table, trying to engage him in conversation. He warns her against going out at night, bringing up Ruby Tate, a woman who died on the docks some nights before. Maude has already said that she arrived in town the day of Ruby’s death, but when she is explaining why she isn’t afraid to go out alone at night she suddenly becomes the expert on Ruby’s ways. “She talked to anyone. I don’t.” This is a delicious little moment, reminding us of all the people we’ve known who make up little stories to persuade themselves that they are immune from the misfortunes that have befallen others.
Untrustworthy naval officer Nathan Forbes enters the tavern accompanied by a man in sailor’s togs. Maude gives up on Ben and leaves his table; she chats with Nathan for a moment, her eyes on the bulge in his pants most of the time. That’s understandable, it’s rather a conspicuous bulge.
Maude leaves the tavern, and Nathan directs his companion to sit with Ben and to get information from him about Barnabas Collins. The man introduces himself to Ben, giving his name as Noah Gifford. Noah claims to be looking for work on the great estate of Collinwood. Ben tells Noah to stay away from there and to go back to the sea. He is drunk enough to mention Barnabas’ name, but doesn’t say much about him. He says that he wishes he could go to sea himself. He says that he likes tea, and wants to go to China to get a nice strong cup of it.
In #363, the ghost of Barnabas’ little sister Sarah mentioned that her father and his friends were always going to China on their ships. When Ben brings up China, regular viewers might remember that, and take it as confirmation that the Collinses were involved in trade with China in the 1790s.
Right before we watched this episode, I was reading an article by Amitav Ghosh in the 23 January 2024 issue of The Nation magazine about trade between the USA and China. Mr Ghosh says that between 1784 and 1804, the USA shipped a wide variety of products to China, but that from 1805 on Americans sold nothing to China but opium. He likens the label “China trade” for that commerce to calling Pablo Escobar’s business “the Andean trade.” Right up to the beginning of the flashback in #365 the show was equivocating on whether Barnabas, Sarah, and the rest of them lived in the eighteenth century or in the 1830s. Choosing 1795-1796 as the setting for this segment turns out to be a way of lightening one of the darker shadows the history we know from our time-band might otherwise have cast over the world of the show.
Nathan’s connection with Noah will sound another echo in the minds of longtime viewers. The first unsavory mariner on the show was seagoing con man Jason McGuire, who spent several months in 1967 blackmailing reclusive matriarch Liz. Jason was accompanied by a henchman, dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis. Nathan at first seemed to be a good-natured and likable fellow, if a bit free with the servant girls and regrettably mercenary in his engagement to marry heiress Millicent Collins. But ever since it turned out that he already had a wife and that she was blackmailing him into splitting Millicent’s inheritance with her, Nathan has been reminding us more and more of the sinister Jason. When he turns up with Noah in tow, the resemblance is complete. We can only wonder if Noah will follow Willie’s lead and get into some kind of terrible trouble at the Collins family mausoleum in the cemetery north of town.
On the docks, Barnabas meets Maude. He goes through the same struggle to keep himself from biting her that he had gone through with Ruby in #414. He is so slow to move in for the kill that she has time to scream and attract Nathan’s attention. Barnabas hears someone running towards them, drops his cane, and runs off.
Nathan sends Maude back to the tavern. He finds the cane and recognizes his old friend Barnabas’ signature wolf’s head handle. In the tavern, he asks Maude to describe her assailant. She mentions that the man wore a gold ring with a large black stone. Knowing that Barnabas always wore such a ring, Nathan is convinced that he did not go to England as his family has been telling everyone, but that he is in Collinsport and is the strangler who has been terrorizing the community.
Nathan seemed most virtuous when Barnabas was alive and he was his more or less loyal friend. So it is a jolt that his reaction to the idea that Barnabas might be a serial killer is to tell Ruby that, lucky as she was to escape the Collinsport Strangler, she “may not be the only lucky one tonight.” Since he has not made any move to contact the authorities, there can be little doubt that his luck is not an opportunity to stop the killings, but the discovery of information he can use to blackmail the Collins family out of every penny they have. He has completed his transformation from a good guy with a rakish side into a deep-dyed villain.
Closing Miscellany
As Nathan enters the waterfront scene, we see a sign behind him labeled “Greenfield Inn.” We saw weeks ago that the Collinsport Inn, familiar from the first year of the show, already exists in the 1790s, so evidently this is a different hostelry. In #214, when Barnabas had returned to Collinsport in 1967, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins did mention that any place in town other than the Collinsport Inn where there were rooms for rent would hardly “qualify as a flophouse”; perhaps the Greenfield Inn is the ancestor of one of these frightful places.
Originally broadcast on 29 February 1968, this was the only episode of Dark Shadows to air on a Leap Day. One of the reasons I started the episode summaries this blog when I did is that the calendars for the years 2022-2027 match those for 1966-1971, so that I can post on the 56th anniversary of each original broadcast, matching not only the date but also the day of the week.
Acilius on Dark Shadows 