Sarcastic dandy Roger, possessed by the spirit of wicked witch Angelique, visits mad scientist Dr Lang. The village of Collinsport was once a whaling center, and Lang is mindful enough of that long-ago history that he collects harpoons. Roger appears to be fascinated by Lang’s collection. He holds one of the finer pieces, admires it, fondles it, and tries to kill Lang with it. At the last moment, the murder is prevented by recovering vampire Barnabas and Julia, who is a scientist as mad as Lang but infinitely more interesting. As is typical of supernatural beings on Dark Shadows, Angelique projects her power through a portrait of herself; the portrait also has some adventures today.
There is a lot of great stuff in this one, as other bloggers have well explained. The 1960s were the heyday of Freudianism in the USA, and in the first year of the show the influence of that school of thought could often be traced in the scripts of Art Wallace and Francis Swann. Patrick McCray documents in his post on The Dark Shadows Daybook that this was an episode where writer Gordon Russell allowed himself to cut loose and have fun with the sillier side of the Freudian approach.
On his Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn focuses on the scene where Barnabas and Julia decide to go and stop Roger. He points out that it is the first conversation they have had about something other than themselves, the first time Barnabas shares with Julia the secret of how he became a vampire, the first time they take heroic action, and the first time they are recognizably friends. It is that friendship that will drive the action of the show from now on.
In their meticulously detailed summary of the action of the episode on their Dark Shadows Before I Die, John and Christine Scoleri capture the effect on the audience of the steady accumulation of one absurdity upon another as the episode goes on. Reading their unfailingly matter-of-fact description of the ever-mounting lunacies we witness in this half-hour is almost as exhilarating as it was watching them in the first place.
Barnabas calls Julia’s attention to the closing cliffhanger. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
The opening teaser is a reprise of the last scene of Friday’s episode. Dr Eric Lang is trying to convince his patient, recovering vampire Barnabas Collins, to participate in an experiment he wants to start. He addresses him as “Barnabas Barnabas.”
It had been a quirk of Barnabas’ previous physician, Julia Hoffman, to repeat Barnabas’ first name, and as Julia, Grayson Hall manages to put a fresh inflection on “Barnabas, Barnabas” every time she says it. But as Lang, Addison Powell simply says “Barnabas Barnabas” without a pause, as if he were saying a compound name like “Jean-Claude” or “Jim Bob.” He even calls him “Mr Barnabas” at his exit, as if he thinks his full name was “Barnabas Collins Barnabas.” This is by no means the worst thing about Powell’s performance, but it is such an obvious contrast with Hall that it is as if the makers of Dark Shadows are sticking a thumb in our eye and taunting us with his inferiority to her.
As if that weren’t bad enough, Powell has competition for the title of worst actor in this episode. Craig Slocum washes up in the role of ex-con Harry Johnson. Well-meaning governess Vicki is the first to see Harry; she immediately screams in horror and starts to sob, the correct reaction to the sight of Slocum in any role.
At least there is a silver lining to Harry. He is the son of housekeeper Mrs Johnson, played by the estimable Clarice Blackburn. From November 1967 to March 1968, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the late eighteenth century, and Blackburn played repressed spinster Abigail Collins. Abigail was a triumph, an irresistible comic villain who was the highlight of every episode she was in. Mrs Johnson’s scenes today are the first we’ve seen of Blackburn since the show returned to contemporary dress, and she is razor-sharp. She is intriguingly sheepish when she asks matriarch Liz if her son Harry can stay with her for a little while, and alarmingly quick to assure Liz that Harry won’t make trouble. When she hears Vicki scream, Mrs Johnson comes hurrying in, is unsurprised to see that Harry is the source of Vicki’s panic, and cuts Harry off before he can offer a defense. She takes Harry into the drawing room while Liz calms Vicki upstairs, and tells him that he is one false move away from going back to prison forever.
Blackburn is so much fun as the unillusioned mother that it is a terrible shame Slocum never manages to read a line or move a muscle in a way that a living person might in the given situation. She gets laughs in spite of him, but with a competent actor in his part the scene where Harry faces his mother would be some of the best intentional comedy in the whole series.
There is one other thing about Harry that makes me smile. On the blog of the Terror at Collinwood podcast, Danielle Gelehrter posted an article some time ago about some concept artwork Eric Marshall did for a hypothetical Dark Shadows animated show in the style of early 1970s TV cartoons such as Scooby Doo or Filmation’s adaptations of Star Trek or My Favorite Martian or Gilligan’s Island. The show Marshall imagines features Harry. Personally, I would have chosen motorcycle enthusiast Buzz, who dated heiress Carolyn for a couple of hilarious weeks in 1967, since his outlandish appearance makes him so much more obvious a choice for animation, but at least Harry’s presence suggests that had such a show been made Clarice Blackburn might have been in the cast and had the chance to do some comedic voice acting.
Eric Marshall’s proposed cast for an animated Dark Shadows that might have been made in the 1970- everyone but Harry. Posted at Terror at Collinwood. Eric Marshall reminds us that Mrs Johnson’s first name is supposed to be “Sarah.” Posted at Terror at Collinwood.
There is some nice stuff in the drawing room between Barnabas and his sometime victim/ fiancée Vicki. Vicki has figured out that the spirit of wicked witch Angelique is once more at work in the great house of Collinwood and that it will take a great effort to stop Angelique from finishing the destruction of the Collins family that she began in the 1790s. If Vicki ever knew that Barnabas was a vampire, she has forgotten it, and Barnabas cannot confess it to her now. He certainly cannot tell Vicki that it was Angelique who made him one. So he listens to her report, but cannot accept her help in the battle against Angelique.
Quite the contrary. Barnabas looks at the spot on Vicki’s neck where he used to take his meals and feels the old hunger coming on. He says he must go to see Lang. Vicki protests that he should stay and let her tend him while they wait for Lang to come to them, but Barnabas insists.
Barnabas goes to Lang’s house. Lang tells Barnabas that if he participates in his experiment, he will not only be entirely free of the vampire curse, but that he might also have the physical appearance of Peter Bradford, alias Jeff Clark, an unpleasant young man who is more or less Vicki’s new boyfriend. This intrigues Barnabas, but Lang will not explain what he means. Since we know that Lang is a mad scientist who is forcing Peter/ Jeff to steal parts from newly interred bodies, we can assume that he will eventually be constructing a Frankenstein’s monster. Presumably he means that the finished product will look like Peter/ Jeff, and Barnabas will somehow live inside it. Since the creature is being built from parts, to look like Peter/Jeff it would have to be finished with salvage from Peter/ Jeff’s corpse. How Peter/ Jeff will be converted from his present state of living and obnoxious to dead and recyclable is what awaits explanation.
Much to her surprise, well-meaning governess Vicki Winters came unstuck in time in #365 and found herself in the year 1795. She spent the first few weeks of her sojourn in the past telling all the characters she met about the other roles that their actors played in the first 73 weeks of Dark Shadows, thereby puzzling them and irritating the audience. After a few months, the people of Collinsport had decided to try Vicki on a capital charge of witchcraft. There were no laws against witchcraft in Massachusetts or anywhere else in the English speaking world in the 1790s, but Vicki had got on so many people’s nerves by that point that they were willing to overlook that technicality and sentence her to hang. She was whisked back to 1968 in #461, with so little time to spare before she died on the gallows that she came back with rope burns on her neck.
Throughout the first year of Dark Shadows, the writers used Vicki more than any other character to move the action. Unfortunately, they sometimes moved it by having her do things that served the plot, but that the character had no reason to do. That gave rise to “Dumb Vicki,” and Dumb Vicki was very much on display throughout the whole segment set in 1795-1796.
Now, emigrés from the late eighteenth century are starting to join Vicki in her time. We open today as the clock chimes midnight. Vicki, wearing her nightgown, is coming down the grand staircase in the foyer of the great house of Collinwood, roused by the sound of an unexpected voice in the drawing room. It is the voice of haughty overlord Joshua Collins, master of Collinwood in 1795. Vicki enters the room to find sarcastic dandy Roger Collins carrying on a lively, albeit one-sided, conversation with a portrait. Roger is convinced that he is Joshua, and deals with Vicki in just the lofty way Joshua dealt with her during the costume drama segment. He even brings up Vicki’s frequent confusion with names, something Roger could not possibly have known about. This, therefore, is no mere delusion of Roger’s- Joshua’s ghost really is taking possession of him, manipulated by a force with its own malign intentions.
It is no secret from the audience what that force is. Roger has become obsessed with a portrait depicting wicked witch Angelique, who in the 1795 segment wrought terrible harm to the Collins family. Angelique was responsible, in one way or another, for the deaths of both of Joshua’s siblings, both of his children, his wife, and many other people. Too late, Vicki learned that Angelique was the witch for whose crimes she was being condemned to hang. As we have seen other supernatural beings do on Dark Shadows before, Angelique is using her portrait as a means of projecting her powers into the world of the living.
Roger/ Joshua’s remark about the name trouble reminds us of Dumb Vicki, but that is not the version of the character we see today. Instead, we have a visit from Smart Vicki. When Roger keeps insisting that he is Joshua Collins, Vicki picks up a telephone and shows it to him, declaring that it is something that did not exist in Joshua’s time. Roger looks at the receiver in silence for a moment, then groggily asks “Is it for me?”
Vicki says that she will take the portrait back to the antique store where she bought it so that it can be sold to Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes. This is a bit jarring for returning viewers- in #464, Stokes offered Vicki $200 for the painting, and Roger countered with a bid of $50o. Evidently Roger didn’t actually pay Vicki the money, because he doesn’t say that it is his when he urges her to leave it in the house.
Vicki and Roger leave the drawing room. Roger slips back in, takes the painting, and marches out of the house with it. While he does so, a nice little bit of music featuring the harp plays on the soundtrack. I don’t know that it is new, but I didn’t recognize it.
Part Two. Peter/ Jeff
Angelique not only killed Joshua’s son Barnabas, but cursed him to rise at night as a vampire. Barnabas returned to the great estate of Collinwood in 1967. He has been passing himself off to the living Collinses as their distant cousin from England. When Barnabas found that Vicki had visited his native period of history, he bit her in an attempt to keep her from revealing his secret.
Vicki and Barnabas were on their way to spend eternity together when she crashed her car to avoid hitting a pedestrian. In the hospital, the physician on duty when Vicki and Barnabas were brought in, Dr Eric Lang, turned out to be exactly the right sort of mad scientist. He has apparently cured Barnabas of vampirism. It is unclear whether Vicki remembers that Barnabas bit her and sucked her blood, and quite clear that she doesn’t think of him as a monster.
In the 1790s, Vicki met and somehow fell in love with an unpleasant man named Peter. Peter has returned to the present with her; in fact, he was the pedestrian Vicki had to crash her car to avoid hitting. They have seen each other several times since, and for no worthwhile reason Peter keeps insisting he is named Jeff. Peter/ Jeff shows up at Collinwood today. Vicki ushers him into what she alone calls “the living room,” and everyone else calls “the drawing room.” Peter/ Jeff asks Vicki if she loves Barnabas and plans to marry him. She tells him she does not. She says that she doesn’t want to hurt Barnabas’ feelings, but that she will have to break the news to him as soon as possible.
Part Three. Barnabas, Barnabas
Barnabas is still in the hospital. We see him in his room, in the daylight, looking at himself in the mirror. He can’t resist touching his reflection. It is a genuinely beautiful little moment, and an eloquent image. In the contrast between the solidity and familiarity of Barnabas’ standard right profile shot and the fragile little image slightly distorted in the mirror, we see a point of decision. The ghoul has not been destroyed, but a new and very vulnerable human life now co-exists with him in the same body. Wallace McBride says that “On Dark Shadows, your reflection always tells the truth“; this reflection tells a deep enough truth to keep the show going for years.
Vicki visits Barnabas in his hospital room to tell him that she cannot marry him. She thinks that she and Peter might be meant for each other. She also tells Barnabas that there are signs Angelique is making her influence felt at Collinwood again.
Vicki knows that her news about Peter will hurt Barnabas, but she understands that if they are to fight against Angelique, there can be no secrets between them. Barnabas understands this as well. Therefore, he decides to surrender immediately. Right after his scene with Vicki, we see him telling Lang he has decided to revert to vampirism.
That reaction is absurd, but it goes to the heart of the character as we came to understand him in the part of Dark Shadows set in the years 1795 and 1796. He did not believe that gracious lady Josette could love him, so he had a casual fling with her maid, Angelique. He did not believe Angelique cared very deeply about him, so he cast her aside once it became clear Josette was willing to marry him. He did not believe Josette could forgive him for having come to her from a dalliance with Angelique, so he did not tell Josette when Angelique vowed vengeance on them both. At each point, Barnabas’ underestimation of his own lovableness led to disaster. If only Barnabas could have read Jonathan Frid’s fan mail, he and Josette would have had a happy, quiet life and died in obscurity in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Part Four. Vicki
For her part, Vicki spent the first 38 weeks of Dark Shadows growing close to strange and troubled boy David Collins, who tried to kill her more than once, tried to kill his father Roger and frame her for it, who talks to ghosts, and whose mother is an undead fire witch. In the same time, she fell in love with a man named Burke, who spent years in prison for a killing in which Roger had a part but for which he was also very much responsible. While in the 1790s she fell in love with Peter, who committed many crimes and would doubtless have become a killer had Vicki not killed his man before he got to him. So Barnabas’ weird nature and career of homicide hardly guarantee that Vicki will spurn him.
I often wonder what might have been had the show decided to initiate Vicki into Barnabas’ secret. Alexandra Moltke Isles and David Henesy triumphed over some stunningly bad writing to make the story of Vicki’s bonding with David the one consistently interesting thread of the first year of Dark Shadows. Now that there are good writers and other stories that are working, I can only suppose she and Jonathan Frid would have given us something for the ages if they had been allowed to show Vicki coming to accept the true Barnabas.
There are several ways they could have done that. Maybe she gradually learns the horrible truth, can’t go to the authorities right away because she needs Barnabas as an ally against a more immediate threat, and by the time that threat passes decides he’s a good risk. Or maybe she becomes a vampire herself and finds out about his past in the process of being cured.
Or, most daring of all, maybe it turns out Vicki knew that Barnabas was a vampire all along. Sure, she was upset when she thought he’d killed her friend Maggie- why do you think she invited herself to spend the night at his house during that period? She had the guilts because she had failed to save Maggie and wanted him to bite her as punishment. Sure, there were some sleepless nights when it looked like he might be planning to kill David in order to silence him- why do you think she kept making herself available to Barnabas in that period as well, if she wasn’t offering herself as a tool he could use to keep the boy quiet without hurting him?
Well-meaning governess Vicki and mad scientist Julia have gone to the Collins family mausoleum in the old cemetery north of town. Vicki wants to see whether her memory is correct and there is a chamber hidden behind a secret panel in the mausoleum, and Julia is trying to limit what Vicki can find. As they enter the mausoleum, Vicki shines a flashlight directly into the camera, then sees a man lurking in a dark corner of the mausoleum.
Vicki assures us that, no matter how much the show might have changed since last summer, it’s still Dark Shadows.
The man is Peter, an unpleasant fellow with whom Vicki unaccountably fell in love when she met him on an unscheduled journey through time to the 1790s. For no reason that will ever be of interest to the audience, Peter keeps insisting that his name is Jeff and that he is not a time traveler. Yet he is the one who finds the mechanism to open the secret panel and expose the hidden chamber where Vicki and Peter once found refuge. Even after that he keeps wasting our time with his pointless denials of the obvious facts.
While they inspect the chamber, Vicki realizes that Julia knew it was there. She confronts her about it, and Julia feigns ignorance. Vicki points out that Julia tried everything she could to keep her from going to the mausoleum and that when those efforts failed she insisted on accompanying her there. Vicki is taking a breath, apparently about to list further evidence supporting the same conclusion, when she glances at Peter and changes the subject.
Vicki remarks that the only way the room has changed since she was there in the late eighteenth century is that there is now a coffin in the middle of it. Julia knows that it is the coffin in which vampire Barnabas Collins was confined from the 1790s until 1967. Barnabas bit Vicki several days ago, but it didn’t really take, and he has since been cured of vampirism. So Vicki probably doesn’t know that Barnabas ever was a vampire, and certainly doesn’t know that it is his coffin. Peter opens the coffin. The empty interior of the coffin dissolves to Barnabas in his hospital bed.
Mid-dissolve.
Barnabas sits up by bending from the waist, showing that old habits die hard. He cries out for the doctor who rehumanized him, Eric Lang. A look of panic spreads across his face.
Terrified Barnabas
He is alarmed to hear hounds baying outside his window. He goes out on the terrace of his hospital room and touches its stone balustrade.
What, your hospital room doesn’t have a terrace with a stone balustrade?
Barnabas goes back inside and continues crying for Lang. When Lang shows up, he explains that the cure isn’t quite complete. There will be occasional relapses of varying intensity, and further treatments are necessary. Barnabas throws a tantrum in response to this news, pouting that if he has to keep taking medicine he may as well go back to being an undead abomination who preys upon the living. Lang talks him down, telling him that he is confident he will be able to effect permanent remission.
We see Julia standing in the rain beside a sign for the Collinsport Hospital, looking up at Barnabas’ silhouette in the window behind his balustrade. She walks away. We then see Lang at a desk in a large wood-paneled room. There is a knock. Lang gives a self-satisfied smirk as he looks at his watch, then opens the door to let Julia in. We see that the wood paneling continues in the corridor behind her. In later episodes we will learn this is in Lang’s house. In that case, the paneling in the corridor behind Julia makes it clear someone has already let her in. At this point, a viewer would naturally assume that it is Lang’s office in the hospital. Wood paneling may not be standard for doctors’ offices in hospitals, but neither are terraces with stone balustrades standard for patient rooms.
Julia looking innocent.
Julia had been treating Barnabas’ vampirism in 1967, and wants to reclaim the case. She and Lang sit across from each other and engage in a verbal fencing match. Lang uses many of the ploys we have seen Julia use to keep control of the situation. On his great blog Dark Shadows Every Day,Danny Horn speculates that the audience’s revulsion at the prospect of Lang replacing Julia was the intended reaction. It cements our sympathy for Julia as a trickster figure and as the de facto protagonist of the chief storylines.
I agree with Danny’s assessment of the scene’s effect, but I doubt it was fully intentional. When I imagine the scene played with Howard da Silva instead of Addison Powell as Lang, I see the audience conflicted and in suspense. We are invested in Julia and her relationship with Barnabas, and so we don’t want Lang to push her aside. But an actor like da Silva would be so intriguing that we couldn’t help but be curious how it would play out if he did. It is only the severity of Powell’s professional deficiencies that causes us to see Lang as nothing but a threat. Compared with the more complex reaction a da Silva could have generated, this scene falls flat.
As Julia is leaving Lang’s office, Peter barges in. Julia’s eyes widen when she sees that the two are connected. Lang realizes that she is likely to make good use of this information, and is furious with Peter for exposing it to her.
It becomes clear that Peter has been implicated in a homicide, that he is suffering from amnesia, and that Lang is blackmailing him into stealing body parts from a nearby cemetery. When Peter says he will no longer help Lang, Lang threatens to send him back to the institution for the criminally insane where he found him. He also forbids Peter to see Vicki again, telling him that Barnabas Collins wants to marry Vicki and that Barnabas’ happiness is important to his plans.
In yesterday’s episode, Peter talked to Lang about his hope that he might be able to learn something about himself from Vicki. This reminds longtime viewers of the first year of Dark Shadows, when Vicki’s motivation for staying in the great house of Collinwood was her hope that she would learn who her biological parents were and why she was left as a newborn at the Hammond Foundling Home. Peter even uses the same phrases Vicki had used in expressing the desire to learn more about himself. Moreover, Vicki, like Peter, has an important gap in her memory, having forgotten key details of her time in the eighteenth century.
That Lang has plans for Vicki was strongly suggested last time, when he told her that he expected her to have an extremely significant future. When we see what future he has decreed for a character who is in a position so similar to Vicki’s, and that the future he has in mind for her includes marriage to Barnabas, we can have little doubt that his plans for her are most evil.
The scene between Lang and Peter is a very efficient piece of exposition, but it is poorly executed as drama. Addison Powell keeps pulling funny faces for no apparent reason, does not appear to have any control over the volume of his voice, and alternately drifts off his mark and stands unnaturally still. Roger Davis is a highly trained professional actor, but he must have skipped the day when his acting teachers covered means of shouting without sounding constipated. The two of them together are not very easy to watch. I get through their scenes with a further bit of imaginary recasting, picturing a onetime Dark Shadows extra like Harvey Keitel as Peter opposite da Silva’s Lang.
Vampire Barnabas Collins, desperate to save his own life after he aged extremely rapidly as the result of an attempt mad scientist Julia Hoffman had made to turn him into a real boy, bit his distant cousin Carolyn Collins Stoddard and enslaved her in #351. In #462, Barnabas was afraid that well-meaning governess Vicki Winters had learned his secret, so he bit her as well. As it happens, Vicki had not figured out that Barnabas was a vampire, so the bite was unnecessary. That was lucky for Barnabas. After he bit her, Vicki was noticeably less interested in Barnabas and less deferential to him than she had been at any point in the year or so she had known him.
Now, Barnabas has happened upon another mad scientist, Eric Lang. Lang has apparently succeeded where Julia had failed. Barnabas can go around in the daytime and do other things humans do. What’s more, Lang takes a look at Vicki’s neck and sees that the marks of Barnabas’ bite have vanished. Vicki remembers having the bites. Even after Lang has told her that they vanished because the reason for them no longer exists, she has an enigmatic look on her face when she stares into the mirror and studies the spot where they used to be. It was never clear what she made of Barnabas’ biting her and sucking her blood- maybe she just thought he favored an aggressive make out technique. She looks deeply puzzled now, but what exactly she is trying to understand is a mystery. She looks away from the mirror, then looks down, defeated in her attempt to find sense in her memories. Finally, she turns her back on the mirror and goes resolutely about her business.
For her part, Julia is in the great house of Collinwood with Carolyn. Julia is surprised that Carolyn is talking to her in a friendly manner, as she did before she and Barnabas “became so close.” Carolyn removes her scarf, glances in the mirror, and is delighted to see that the marks on her neck are gone. Carolyn asks what that means. Julia says that it means that she is free, as free as Barnabas, and that it must continue to be so.
Unlike Vicki, Carolyn had a full briefing from Barnabas about his condition and its requirements, and she was deeply involved in his criminal enterprises for some weeks. Her joyous reaction to the disappearance of the marks leaves no doubt that she remembers something about this experience. There is nothing in any script after this to tell us what, but we will often notice actress Nancy Barrett giving a line reading or showing an unquiet reaction that suggests she remembers everything. I suppose you could say she was padding her part with these little signs, but the directors obviously didn’t object and it will be quite a while before the writers give her dialogue which forces her to stop doing it.
There’s also a lot of business in this episode with Vicki and an unpleasant man named Peter. Lately, Peter has been pretending to be someone else, even though the audience and Vicki know perfectly well who he is. Today the show suggests that this irritating little storyline is the consequence of Peter having amnesia. The episode ends with him, Vicki, and Julia opening the secret panel that reveals the hidden chamber in the Collins family mausoleum where Barnabas was trapped from the 1790s until 1967. That proves that Vicki traveled back in time to the 1790s and that Peter knew her in that era. Since the audience already knows both of those facts and none of the characters directly involved in the action has any reason to doubt either of them, it’s an anticlimactic conclusion.
When Vicki and Julia are entering the mausoleum, Vicki shines a flashlight directly into the camera. In at least eleven of the episodes made when the show was in black and white, characters entering darkened spaces did this with flashlights, often creating elaborate halo effects. Sometimes this appeared to be a blooper, several times it was obviously intentional. We’ve only seen it once or twice, briefly, since the show went to color in the summer of 1967. It’s nice to see it again.
In a room at the Collinsport Hospital, very loud physician Eric Lang (Addison Powell) opens the curtains to show his patient, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, that it is a sunny afternoon. It takes Barnabas a moment to realize that this is Lang’s way of showing him that he has cured him of his longstanding affliction, vampirism. Once he figures it out, Barnabas is very happy to be human again.
Barnabas talks with Lang about the origins of his vampirism. At one point Lang says “Ah, so a curse was responsible.” You know how doctors are, always coming out with the same cliches. Lang does say something novel when he remarks on Barnabas’ “pulsebeat.” That specimen of Collinsport English will be back.
In the great house of Collinwood, Barnabas’ distant cousins Roger and Liz are at odds. Roger keeps having conversations with a portrait, in the course of which he loses track of the time. The correct time is 1968, and he keeps thinking it is 1795. When he does that, he mistakes himself for his collateral ancestor Joshua Collins and his sister Liz for Joshua’s wife Naomi. Today, Liz has to slap Roger to get him back to himself. Louis Edmonds’ alternation between Joshua and Roger is masterful, one of the outstanding moments of acting in the whole series.
The portrait is of Angelique, the wicked witch who made Barnabas into a vampire in the first place. At the hospital, it becomes clear that Angelique’s spirit is controlling Roger through it. He is cold and distant, staring out the window when Barnabas tells Liz he wants to take up gardening, refusing to say a word when Lang enters the room. When he takes his leave, Roger looks at Barnabas and declares “It’s not this easy.” We realize that he is a puppet for Angelique. Roger steals Lang’s cartoonish mirror-bearing headpiece.
We cut back and forth between Barnabas’ hospital room and the drawing room at Collinwood. At Collinwood, Roger shows the headpiece to the portrait and explains that it was Lang’s. He starts to twist it. In the hospital, Lang suddenly leaps up with a splitting headache. Roger stops twisting, and Lang says he’s better. He resumes twisting, and Lang resumes suffering. Roger tells the portrait he cannot obey its command to put the headpiece in the fire, and throws it across the room. In the hospital, Lang suddenly recovers from his headache. Barnabas tells him it was Angelique’s doing, and says that he will have to become a vampire again to spare Lang her attentions.
On his blog Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn identified Addison Powell as “THE WORST ACTOR EVER TO APPEAR ON DARK SHADOWS.” I don’t agree with that. In yesterday’s episode, for example, Powell attained a level that could fairly be described as “competent,” a label that forever eluded figures like Mark Allen (Sam Evans #1,) Michael Currie (Constable/ Sheriff Carter,) and Craig Slocum (Noah Gifford and, later, Harry Johnson.) And there will be times when his ludicrous overacting lends just the note of camp that turns a scene from a tedious misfire to an occasion for chuckling. But he is pretty bad today. When an actor gets to be depressing to watch, I sometimes make his scenes bearable by trying to imagine what it might have been like if, instead of casting him, they had chosen someone else who might have been available.
So many members of the original Broadway cast of the musical 1776 appeared on Dark Shadows at one time or another that I tend to assume that any of them would have accepted any part on the show. Howard da Silva played Benjamin Franklin in 1776, and he is my imaginary Dr Lang.
You can see da Silva’s Franklin in the 1972 movie version of 1776, where he plays the Sage of Philadelphia with frequent chortles that suggest a mad scientist gleefully working to release a murderous nightmare on the world, which is more or less the show’s vision of the founding of the USA. That isn’t Franklin’s only note- he has occasion to speak earnestly about the British Empire’s mismanagement of its North American possessions, and sorrowfully about the need to leave slavery alone while concentrating on the fight for independence. Those who have seen da Silva play subtle and powerfully compassionate men in his other work, for example as the psychiatrist in the 1962 film David and Lisa and as the defense attorney in the 1964 Outer Limits episode adapting Isaac Asimov’s story “I, Robot,” will hardly be surprised that he could be effective in those moments.
So when Powell overdoes the shouting, I imagine da Silva in his place, going through his bag of tricks to show us a man who might be taking a maniacal satisfaction in his blasphemous labors, who might be profoundly devoted to the relief of suffering, and who might be both at once. Sometimes I get a pretty clear image of what that would have been like, and when that happens the show in my head is hard to beat.
At the end of Friday’s episode, the well-meaning Vicki Winters was driving her car and bickering irritably with her passenger, Barnabas Collins the vampire. Barnabas wants to elope with her, which she doesn’t object to doing. But first she insists on running an errand in his old neighborhood, the deserted cemetery north of town, and he hates that idea.
A pedestrian wandered into the middle of the road. To keep from hitting him, Vicki had to slam the brakes so hard she lost control of the car and crashed. At least she learned the lesson of the cowardly Roger, who ran over a pedestrian years before the show even started and as punishment was condemned to spend months looking for some guy’s fountain pen.
Today, Vicki and Barnabas are in the hospital. We see Barnabas in bed, moaning alternately for Vicki and his long-lost love, the late Josette. It doesn’t bode well for the planned elopement that in his delirium Barnabas gives Vicki only equal time to Josette. We then see Vicki in her bed, moaning for Peter, an unpleasant young man she got to know recently while visiting the late eighteenth century. She doesn’t mention Barnabas’ name at all.
Vicki comes to and finds Peter at her bedside. He denies that he is Peter, claiming merely to be a strange man who let himself into her room to watch her sleep. She recognizes him not only as her boyfriend from the 1790s, but also as the wayward pedestrian involved in the crash. He admits to this, but will not answer any of her questions.
A nurse enters and finally gets Peter to leave Vicki’s room. Perhaps he will let himself into other girls’ rooms and stare at them while they sleep. The doctor, a man named Lang, comes in.
Dr Lang asks Vicki if she knows Barnabas well. This is an interesting question. Before he bit her on Tuesday, Vicki definitely did not know that Barnabas was a vampire. Her behavior towards him since has been so blasé, not only by contrast with the behavior of his other victims but also by contrast with the eager friendliness and habitual deference she had always shown him in the many months they have known each other, that we can’t tell if she has learned that he is one even now. Indeed, we have no idea what Vicki thinks is going on between her and Barnabas, and as a result their scenes together have been pure comedy.
Vicki nibbles on her index finger and thinks for a moment about Lang’s question. Since they were going off to spend the rest of eternity together, it would be pretty embarrassing for her to admit that she doesn’t really have much understanding of Barnabas, so she says that she does know him well. As she does so, she glances away for a moment, and the light flashes off her eye, emphasizing her unease.
Vicki talking through her hand
Lang asks about Barnabas’ health before the crash. Vicki puts her hands down and stutters slightly as she says “He was in excellent health.” A note of uncertainty gives her voice a childlike quality. When Lang replies with “Really?,” her voice sounds even more childlike when she answers “Y-yes, have you discovered something Mr Collins didn’t know about?” Lang says that he thinks Barnabas knew about it.
Lang looks at Vicki’s neck and finds the marks of Barnabas’ bite. They are just two dark dots, not conspicuously different from the last stages of an ordinary hickey.
The bite marks.
When Lang asks about the marks, Vicki’s grogginess suddenly vanishes and she becomes hyper-alert. Since Vicki has been so bland about her experience with Barnabas, returning viewers might well expect her to answer Lang’s questions about the bite marks by saying that Barnabas gave them to her when they were making out. Instead, she gets defensive, at first denying that she remembers how she got the marks and then asking “What’s wrong with them? Why are they so bad, please tell me?” Alexandra Moltke Isles reads that line brilliantly. There is a touch of defiance in her voice, but also a sincere question- she genuinely does not see any reason she should have to hide the marks or explain them to anyone.
Early in the episode, the telephone rang at the great house of Collinwood, and long-term houseguest Julia Hoffman answered. It was the nurse, reporting that Vicki and Barnabas had been brought in after a traffic accident and that “Mr Collins is on the critical list.” Now Julia is in Barnabas’ room trying to arrange transport to his house. Lang comes in and is astounded at the thought of taking an unconscious patient, who is in critical condition, out of the hospital.
Lang and Julia have a showdown. Lang makes it clear that he knows that Barnabas is a vampire, and has deduced that Julia, who is a doctor doubly qualified to practice as a psychiatrist and a blood specialist, has been trying to cure him. Lang marvels that Julia has been treating “a legendary condition.” He asks to examine her neck; she never removes her scarf, surprising returning viewers who know that Barnabas has not bitten her. He continues to pose direct, well-informed questions, which she continues to parry with lies and evasions. She grits her teeth when he refers to Barnabas as “our patient.” At the last, she agrees to go, and he agrees to keep the room dark.
Barnabas awakens and sees Lang. He becomes agitated and demands to be released. Lang refuses. Lang tells him the time is nearly four o’clock. Dawn broke in central Maine at 4:33 on the morning of 8 April 1968, so Barnabas has little more than a half hour to get back home to his coffin. It is no wonder that Barnabas puts on his murdering face when Lang will not let him go. Lang backs away and says he must explain something Barnabas does not understand. Lang reaches the window. As he opens the heavy curtains, he intones, “Yes, it is four o’clock! But it is FOUR O’CLOCK- IN THE AFTERNOON!!” The sunlight floods the room. Barnabas screams and covers his eyes with his hands. But he does not turn to dust- he is no longer a vampire.
This marks the end of the epilogue to the 1795 segment, and with that the end of Dark Shadows 3.0. Unlike version 1.0, which ended with no unresolved story threads of any interest, and version 2.0, which ended at a moment when the only way forward was the annihilation of all the characters, they have cued up at least three major storylines. Eventually Peter will stop pretending to be someone else and something will happen between him and Vicki; Roger will bring wicked witch Angelique home with him; Lang and Julia will work together to manage Barnabas’ aftercare. There are several other characters available for story-building. We have met kindly eccentric Professor Stokes and expect him to contribute to some or all of these storylines. We do not know how Barnabas’ cure will affect his blood thralls Vicki and Carolyn. Carolyn’s relationship with Humphrey Bogart-esque lawyer Tony is in an awkward spot, and Tony is in a position to trigger a major storyline if he starts telling people what he thinks he knows about Carolyn and Barnabas.
On his blog Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn often identified Addison Powell, who plays Lang, as “THE WORST ACTOR EVER TO APPEAR ON DARK SHADOWS.” I don’t think he deserves that title. In fact, he isn’t even the worst actor in this episode. I’m sure the Nurse was written to be pretentious and silly, but Katharine Balfour’s stiffness and relentlessly exaggerated vocal mannerisms are simply excruciating. Powell isn’t great, and will get much, much worse, but he is basically competent today. Mrs Isles, Jonathan Frid, and Grayson Hall all do excellent work in their scenes with him, and he never once gets in their way. But when Balfour is on stage, the others can do nothing but stop and wait for her to leave. She had an extensive stage career, so I suppose she must have played many parts well, but she is stupefyingly bad today.
After Lang’s big “FOUR O’CLOCK- IN THE AFTERNOON!!,” we cut to the closing credits. Under them is a set where a clock’s hands indicate four. From April 1967 to July 1968, ABC suggested its affiliates run Dark Shadows from 3:30 to 4:00 PM. There were a great many stations which insisted on showing it at 10:30 AM. While it was a hit by this point in the 3:30 slot, its ratings were always rock bottom where it was shown in the mornings, so the great majority of viewers would have seen the correct time as they read the names of the people who worked on the show.
The other day, vampire Barnabas Collins added well-meaning governess Vicki to his diet. Barnabas has bitten several people in the year he has been on Dark Shadows, and his victims have reacted to the experience in a wide variety of ways. Vicki’s post-bite syndrome is unique on the show, and as far as I know unique in vampire stories. Her reaction could most succinctly be summarized as “not feelin’ it.”
Barnabas had hoped to enslave Vicki with his bite, as he had enslaved others, and attributes her blasé response to the unseen presence of wicked witch Angelique. But it may be that Barnabas has himself to blame. Several times in 1967, Vicki went out of her way to make herself available to Barnabas for biting. She invited herself to his house for a sleepover in #285, pressed her neck towards his teeth while embracing him in #311, and has rarely missed a chance to be alone with him. There is a hilarious meta-fictional element to this theme, as Vicki tries to secure a place for herself in the main storyline by becoming the vampire’s thrall.
For his part, Barnabas has time and again looked at Vicki’s neck, shown his fangs to the camera, and then backed off. Even when he finally did bite Vicki in #462, he spent so much time and energy displaying his internal struggle that my wife, Mrs Acilius, commented “Barnabas is about to make himself sick.” Indeed, he took so long making that display that the episode ended before he sank his teeth into Vicki, and we had to wait until the next day to be sure he’d actually gone through with it. You hardly expect Vicki to be excited that such a reluctant suitor has at long last deigned to attach himself to her.
Vicki has recently returned from a long visit to the year 1795,* when the human Barnabas died and the vampire began his career. Barnabas fears she may have discovered his secret while in that period, a fear that deepens as her scattered memories return.
In fact, Vicki never discovered that Barnabas was a vampire. She does have some information that, coupled with what she and others have already found out, could lead to his exposure, but she isn’t thinking about that at all. Instead, her main focus is on an unpleasant man named Peter, whom she met and with whom she fell in love in the 1790s. On Wednesday, she learned that shortly after she left the eighteenth century Peter had been hanged for a killing she committed,** and she is frantic with guilt about it.
At the top of today’s episode, Barnabas sends Vicki a telepathic message that they will be eloping tonight. She accepts this without any visible emotion. Then her friend, hardworking young fisherman Joe (Joel Crothers,) comes to the door. In the 1790s segment, Crothers played naval officer/ sleazy operator Nathan Forbes, a villain who was responsible for many terrible crimes against Vicki and people she cared about. This is the first time we’ve seen Joe since the show returned to contemporary dress, and Vicki takes a while to adjust to the fact that it is her trusty old pal before her, not the detestable schemer who did so much to blight her time in the eighteenth century.
Joe has come to bring Vicki a charm bracelet that his girlfriend Maggie had given her. The charm bracelet turned up in the old courthouse in the village of Collinsport. The courthouse has been disused for years and is about to be torn down. Joe wonders when Vicki was there; she makes many cryptic remarks in reply, but can’t bring herself to tell such a sensible fellow that she was tried there for witchcraft and sentenced to death 172 years before, much less that his counterpart gave the testimony that condemned her to the gallows.
After Joe has gone, Vicki still isn’t motivated to do anything to prepare for her departure with Barnabas. Instead, she takes a nap in the drawing room. She has a dream in which she sees Peter in his gaol cell. She promises him that she will prove his innocence, and marches off. She finds Nathan dozing at a desk. She tells Nathan that he could prevent Peter’s execution if he were to tell the judges that he lied when he told them he saw Peter kill the man whom Vicki actually killed. Nathan cheerfully explains that he cannot tell the judges anything, since he is dead. He tells Vicki that she is dead, too- he was strangled, she was hanged.
Nathan, having a wonderful time in the afterlife, proposes a toast “to Death- the best of all possible worlds!” Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Nathan’s statement is proof that the dream is not simply a product of Vicki’s psychology, but a communication with Nathan’s spirit. Barnabas strangled Nathan, but his father Joshua Collins hid that fact from the world, and neither Vicki nor anyone else alive in 1968 has any way of knowing about it. Vicki wasn’t hanged, but she was about to be when she was whisked back to her own time, and Nathan would have no way of knowing she survived.
Vicki goes back to Peter’s cell and finds it empty. She turns and sees the gallows, on which Peter is hanged before her eyes. She wakes up calling out Peter’s name.
Vicki opens her eyes to see Barnabas standing in front of her. He asks her who Peter was; she says he was someone she knew long ago, and that it will be hard for her to forget him. He asks if she knew he was coming; she affirms that she did. If he knew about the contents of the very elaborate dream she just had, he would have all the more reason to ask such a question. The only action of Barnabas’ mentioned in it was Nathan’s murder, and Nathan doesn’t bother to tell Vicki by whom he was strangled. There are four speaking roles and a background player in the dream, and not only is Barnabas not one of them, no one mentions in it his name, sees his image, or comes into contact with any of his belongings. Barnabas has been dominating the show since he was first named in #205, and Vicki, whom he was under the impression he had enthralled, has lost all interest in him.
Barnabas tells Vicki it’s time to go. She says she has to do something else first. She wants to go to the old Collins mausoleum and see if there is a secret room hidden there. If there is, she will know she really did travel back in time.
Barnabas was trapped in his coffin in that secret room from the 1790s until 1967, and is anxious that no one should discover its existence. He is also eager to get going with whatever plan he has made for Vicki. But he finds himself powerless to oppose her. Not only is he not her dark and irresistible master, as he had been of his other blood thralls, he isn’t getting nearly as much deference from her as she had always shown him before he bit her.
We cut to a car, in which Vicki is driving Barnabas to the cemetery. Apparently it is Vicki’s car. This is the first time we have seen Vicki driving, and it brings up a bit of a riddle for viewers who have been paying close attention to Dark Shadows from the beginning. In the first 46 weeks of Dark Shadows, Vicki was continually asking to borrow heiress Carolyn’s car, getting rides from people, walking longer distances than others thought reasonable, trying to catch the bus, and wishing she had a bicycle. In #232, #233, and #259, it was implied that Vicki had a car of her own. They never explained how or when she came into possession of such a thing, but they stopped all the business of her trying to find a way to get around. As we watch Barnabas squirming in the passenger seat, we can believe he would rather be standing with her at a bus stop.
Barnabas keeps telling Vicki that he doesn’t think they ought to go to the mausoleum. She snaps at him that he was originally enthusiastic about going. The statement is entirely false, and the line is entirely convincing. We saw that Barnabas was appalled at Vicki’s interest in the mausoleum, and we saw that she was too absorbed in her own thoughts to notice his feelings. The two of them bicker about the need to get settled before sunrise, and they sound for all the world like an old married couple. Barnabas exercises exactly zero control over Vicki, and the result is hilarious.
The show so often puts Vicki in the role of Designated Dum-Dum, requiring her to facilitate the mechanics of the plot by doing things she would have no reason to do, that the show’s original protagonist is eventually swallowed up by Dumb Vicki. It’s always refreshing to see Smart Vicki put in an appearance. I don’t know if the woman we see today is a perfect example of Smart Vicki, but she certainly is Smart Alexandra Moltke Isles. Mrs Isles’ performance is so good that even a hater like Danny Horn had to admit in his post about the episode on Dark Shadows Every Daythat she is fun to watch. And the character is Strong Vicki, taking action in pursuit of her own objectives, making use of the information available to her, and bending Barnabas to her will.
The scene in the car will have an amusing echo for longtime viewers. From November 1966 to March 1967, instantly forgettable young lawyer Frank Garner kept telling Vicki how interested he was in her. Vicki went on some dates with him and accepted him as her sidekick in her struggle against undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, but all in all was almost as cool towards him as she has been to Barnabas post-bite. In #153, Vicki was Frank’s passenger in his car. He thought they were going out for a glamorous evening, but she abruptly insisted that they go to the old cemetery north of town and visit an old crypt. Frank was about as pleased then as Barnabas is now. I suppose a fellow ought to know what he’s getting into when he and Vicki get into a car together.
Barnabas sees a figure ahead and asks Vicki what it is. She looks and slows down. A man in contemporary dress who looks like Peter lopes into the road, smiles a big goofy grin, and waves. Even though Vicki’s movements and the sound effects told us she took her foot off the accelerator as soon as Barnabas said he saw something, the man is so close to the car that she slams on the brakes, the tires squeal, and she loses control of the vehicle. He must have wandered right in front of the car. That confirms for returning viewers that the man must be Peter. He always did the least intelligent and most dangerous thing, usually while grabbing at people and shouting in a petulant voice. Poor Vicki. Barnabas is a vampire and a cold fish, but she’s managed to get herself stuck with a guy who makes those shortcomings look minor by comparison.
*It was 1795 in #365, and in #413 they explicitly told us the new year 1796 had come. But after Vicki returns to the 1960s in #461, the only year they talk about is 1795.
**With justification- she shot a man who was trying to strangle a young boy.
High-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins was Dark Shadows‘ first villain. Through the first 40 weeks of the show, dashing action hero Burke Devlin was determined to prove that Roger, not he, had been driving when his car hit and killed a pedestrian ten years before, and Roger would stop at nothing to keep Burke from succeeding. The Revenge of Burke Devlin storyline was never particularly exciting. By the time Burke formally gave up on his quest for vindication in #201, it had been running on fumes for some time. Roger hasn’t been central to a plot since then. The show has capitalized on actor Louis Edmonds’ unrivaled gift for sarcasm by having him deliver the occasional zinger, and otherwise has used him as a symbol of the inability of the Collins family to use its wealth and connections to solve any of its problems.
For nineteen weeks ending this past Monday, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the late eighteenth century and Edmonds played haughty overlord Joshua Collins. That performance was a triumph, and the entire segment turned out to be The Tragedy of Joshua Collins. So returning viewers will have an appetite to see more of what Edmonds can do, and will be excited when we come back from the opening title sequence to a scene focusing on Roger.
Roger spends this scene staring at a portrait and reciting poetry to it while various people enter the room and try to get his attention. That may not sound like a promise of thrills, but it is on this show. For example, Roger’s son, strange and troubled boy David, had a lively if somewhat one-sided conversation with the portrait of Josette Collins that hangs in the Old House on the estate in #102, and that conversation presaged danger for David and an important role for Josette’s ghost. The show’s first supernatural menace was Roger’s estranged wife, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, and several characters had important relationships with portraits of Laura during the four months she was in the cast. And dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis once spent a week staring at the portrait of the late Barnabas Collins that hangs in the foyer of Collinwood. As a result, Willie wound up opening Barnabas’ coffin, finding that he was a vampire, and turning Dark Shadows into an entirely different kind of show.
Roger talks to the portrait of Angelique.
The portrait that has captured Roger’s attention is of Angelique, the wicked witch who turned Barnabas into a vampire in the first place. Well-meaning governess Vicki found this portrait in an antique store and brought it home yesterday. It was Vicki who took us to the 1790s when she became unstuck in time. While there, she met Angelique and the living Barnabas. Shortly after her return to the 1960s, Vicki found that her memory of her time in the past had become spotty. She can’t explain why she wanted the painting, but it does make sense to her that Barnabas reacts to it with violent dislike.
We first saw the portrait in #449, when it was clear that Vicki would be returning to the 1960s soon but unclear whether Angelique would follow her. Showing us that they had commissioned a portrait of Lara Parker was their way of telling us she would be back. Having Roger become obsessed with the portrait is their way of telling us that he will be the instrument of her arrival, as Willie was the instrument of Barnabas’.
We learn that Roger’s obsession will blur the distinction between him and Joshua when long-term houseguest Julia Hoffman approaches him and he speaks to her in Joshua’s voice, addressing her as the Countess DuPrés, who was a houseguest at Collinwood in Joshua’s time. Julia and the countess are both played by Grayson Hall. Vicki mistook the countess for Julia when she first met her in 1795, and since her return to 1968 has kept mistaking Julia for the countess. Now that Roger has made the same mistake, Julia must be trying to figure out what’s going on.
A man comes to the front door. Vicki answers it and sees a familiar face. It belongs to Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes. She hasn’t met him before, but she met his ancestor, much put-upon servant Ben Stokes, in the 1790s.
Like Ben and crazed handyman Matthew Morgan from 1966, Professor Stokes is played by Thayer David. Matthew and Ben were both major characters, so we can assume that Stokes will be as well. Matthew was a bad guy, Ben a good guy. When Ben was on the show, the contrast between him and Matthew was drawn very heavily to make the point that Matthew’s crimes are what Ben’s virtues would have led him to do had his personality been warped by the environment in which Matthew grew up. That environment was the consequence of the curse that Angelique placed on the Collinses in the 1790s. Burke expressed this idea in #64 when he said of Matthew that “Collinwood breeds murderers,” but he was understating the effect. Matthew grew up, not on the estate, but in the nearby village of Collinsport, and the curse leaves its mark on everyone who comes from there. Since Stokes is an out-of-towner, he is likely to be unaffected by the consequences of the curse, and so we do not know what we will find under his worldly and self-possessed exterior.
Stokes is researching his ancestor Ben, and wanted to buy the portrait because he thought it might depict a woman Ben knew. Stokes says that Ben wrote a memoir. Barnabas is in the room; in the 1790s, Ben was his closest friend, and knew all about his vampirism. So he is alarmed by the idea of a volume of memoirs by Ben. He can take some comfort when Stokes tells him that most of the manuscript was lost in a fire a few years ago.
The idea of a servant writing memoirs that might expose Barnabas’ secret first came up in #326. At that point, Willie was out of his control, and Barnabas told Julia, who is a mad scientist and his confederate, that he was afraid Willie might start “writing his memoirs!” That phrasing was meant to raise a laugh, since Willie is conspicuously not burdened with literary ambitions. But it planted a seed that flowers for the first time here, and that will flower again later.
Stokes offers Vicki $200 for the painting. Barnabas is eager to get the thing out of the house and urges her to take Stokes’ money, but before she can Roger bids $500. Stokes can’t afford that, and so it stays at Collinwood.
Stokes’ interest in family history establishes a contrast between him and Roger. Stokes, like Roger, appears to be a confirmed bachelor. But while Roger’s lack of interest in the responsibilities of marriage is of a piece with his indifference to all family ties, so that he was eager to divorce Laura and palm David off on her even after it had become clear to other characters that she was a danger to the boy, Stokes is an avid genealogist. He has renounced the prospect of marriage because he has other ways to be of service, not simply because he wants to wallow in his own crapulence as Roger does.
Suddenly Vicki remembers that the woman in the portrait is named Angelique, that Angelique was a witch, and that her spells caused all the misfortune that began at Collinwood in 1795. We hear all of this while Barnabas is in closeup, squirming gloriously. Stokes leaves with Barnabas and tells him he knew that the woman’s name was Angelique, but that it’s news to him that she was a witch. He is impressed by Vicki’s knowledge, and says that he can sense that she is attuned to paranormal phenomena. He wants to get to know her better.
Most characters we have met spend a long time slowing the story down by scoffing at the idea of the supernatural. That Stokes is a self-identified student of the occult and immediately receptive to Vicki’s identification of Angelique as a wicked witch tells us that he will serve to speed up the pace of events.
This again makes a stark contrast with Roger. When Vicki managed to get Roger away from the painting for a moment in Act One, he told her that he refused to believe that she traveled to the past and returned to the present. When she lists some of the abundant evidence he and everyone else saw that can be explained no other way, he says he attributes all of that to mass hallucination.
In his Dark Shadows Every Day post about this episode, Danny Horn at one point refers to Stokes as a character whose function is “to backfill Dr. Woodard’s spot in the cast,” referring to a stolid medico whom Barnabas and Julia murdered several months back. But in this contrast, we see that the character whose place Stokes is actually taking is Roger. When the show started, the Collinses of Collinwood were the central frame of reference for the action. But Roger and his sister, matriarch Liz, are for various reasons locked out of the supernatural storylines. Since those are the only storylines they have, the show needs to build another family to anchor the action, and that family is going to be defined, not by marriage and genealogy, but by a shared commitment to getting as deep as possible into the weirdest shit going.
Stokes tells Barnabas that there was a series of unsolved murders in Collinsport in the 1790s, and wonders if it might be possible to prove that Angelique was responsible for them. Barnabas suggests that it is too late to do justice in such an old case, to which Stokes replies that it is never too late to do justice to history. Not only does this reply deepen the contrast between Stokes and the amoral Roger, it has, by happenstance, a deep resonance for many who might see the episode today. It originally aired on 4 April 1968, just a few hours before the Rev’d Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, was assassinated. Millions are still unsatisfied with the official answers about who killed Dr King and why; they might cheer the idea that there is a species of justice that is still possible even after 56 years or more have gone by.
Barnabas bit Vicki the other day in an attempt to control her and keep her from revealing any information about him she may have acquired during her sojourn in the past. Disquieted by his conversation with Stokes, Barnabas stares out his window and summons Vicki to his house. In her bedroom, an enchanted music box Barnabas gave her as part of an earlier brainwashing attempt opens itself and begins to play. She rises from bed and goes to him listening to the music box all the way.
At Barnabas’ house, Vicki gives him the music box. He tells her that the next time he calls her, they will go away together forever. He bites her neck.
We cut to Vicki’s bedroom. The music box is back in its place and she is back in bed, asleep. Julia comes in to check on her. Vicki says she’d had a bad dream, and Julia finds the bite marks on her neck.
In the weeks leading up to Vicki’s visit to the past, Julia had alienated Barnabas by opposing his efforts to seduce Vicki. Now she marches over to Barnabas’ house and renews her opposition. She accuses him of having been in Vicki’s bedroom. He answers that he brought her to his house. This might seem to be a trivial distinction, but perhaps not to viewers who have been with the show from the beginning. Today’s focus on Roger might remind us of #4, when Roger tried to let himself into Vicki’s room while she was sleeping, obviously in search of some kind of sexual thrill that would not be preceded by her consent. Barnabas can’t deny that he is the moral equivalent of a rapist, but he isn’t going to miss an opportunity to differentiate himself from Roger.
Barnabas doesn’t seem very interested in anything Julia is saying. Even when she gives him an ultimatum, threatening to expose him if he doesn’t back off by tomorrow night, he reacts with a mild irritation. Regular viewers, remembering the displays of jeering contempt and seething rage which are typically the options from which Barnabas chooses his response to this sort of thing, will be startled by his relative blandness. Julia should be unnerved by it.
We open in the old cemetery north of town, where well-meaning governess Vicki and matriarch Liz are looking for the grave of Vicki’s old boyfriend Peter. Vicki last saw Peter this past Friday, which was over 170 years ago. That discrepancy was the result of some time travel she did in between. Vicki met Peter while spending nineteen weeks in the late eighteenth century. She came back home on Monday. By the end of her visit to the past, Vicki and Peter were both scheduled to be hanged for their many crimes. Vicki was whisked back to 1968 at the last possible instant, escaping by such a narrow margin that she had rope burns on her neck.
Vicki and Liz find Peter’s grave marker. Liz remarks that his date of death is the same as today’s date- 3 April. This sets Vicki off. She says that the hangings took place at dusk, that it’s dusk now, and that Peter is therefore being hanged even as they speak. Liz declares that this is gibberish. The date on the stone is 3 April 1795, and today’s date is 3 April 1968. Vicki tries to explain that everything that ever happened is happening over and again someplace. Yesterday, Liz heard similarly opaque verbiage from her distant cousin Barnabas. She didn’t buy this line when Barnabas was pitching it, and she isn’t any more impressed when she hears it from Vicki.
Longtime viewers of Dark Shadows are likely to make a connection. From December 1966 to March 1967, Vicki led the battle against the show’s first supernatural menace, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. When she saw the dates on which Laura’s previous incarnations immolated themselves along with their young sons, Vicki realized that she acted at intervals of exactly one hundred years. Laura was an embodiment of the cyclical nature of time; fighting her, Vicki is trying to break the cycle of death and rebirth, like a comely young Buddha.
I don’t think the show is making a serious metaphysical point by developing this theme. When you’re telling a story about a place where the usual laws of nature don’t apply, you need to substitute some other set of rules the audience can understand in order to create suspense. The power of anniversaries will do as well as anything else.
Back in the great house of Collinwood, we see Liz’ daughter Carolyn come in the front door wearing riding clothes and carrying a crop. This is the first indication that the Collinses have horses. In the early months of Dark Shadows, the family was running out of money, the estate was decrepit and mortgaged to the hilt, and they were barely holding onto control of their business. The stories those circumstances generated never went anywhere, and they’ve gradually been retconning the Collinses to be richer and richer. If they’re up to horse ownership now, by next year they might have a luxury yacht and a private jet.
The drawing room doors open, and lawyer Tony Peterson emerges. He quarrels with Carolyn about their last encounter. That was two weeks ago in story time, but we saw it before Vicki left for the past in November. It’s an even deeper dive for us than that makes it sound, because our view of Tony has changed profoundly in the interim. He was first introduced as an example of Jerry Lacy’s famous Humphrey Bogart imitation, and he still is that. But in the 1790s segment, Mr Lacy played the Rev’d Mr Trask, the fanatical witchfinder who hounded Vicki to her death and occasioned many other disasters. By now, we have come to see most of the 1960s characters as the (not necessarily dark) shadows cast by their eighteenth century counterparts. When Tony shows up today we find ourselves trying to figure out what it is about Collinsport in the twentieth century that could turn a holy terror like Trask into a basically nice guy like Tony.
Carolyn browbeats Tony into coming back at 8 pm to take her to dinner. He leaves, and Carolyn’s distant cousin, Barnabas the vampire, enters. Barnabas asks Carolyn if she’s noticed a change in Vicki. She has no idea what he’s talking about. He asks if she’s “more like you.” Thus first-time viewers learn that Carolyn is under Barnabas’ power. Returning viewers learn something, too. Yesterday’s episode ended with Barnabas about to bite Vicki, but cut to the closing credits before he sank his teeth into her. We’ve seen that before. Now we know that he has finally gone through with it.
In the opening scenes, Vicki showed absolutely no sign that anything had happened to her; Carolyn hasn’t noticed any change in her either. Soon, Vicki and Liz come home, and Vicki doesn’t react to Barnabas any differently than she had before he bit her. The people Barnabas has bitten have shown a wide variety of effects afterward. Perhaps Vicki will be the first victim who just can’t be bothered.
Vicki has a painting with her that she bought in town after she and Liz visited Peter’s grave. It turns out to be a portrait of Angelique, the wicked witch whose curse made Barnabas a vampire in the 1790s. That portrait first appeared in #449, a sign to the characters that Angelique’s evil spirit was still at work and to the audience that actress Lara Parker would be back on the show after the costume drama insert ended. Barnabas is upset to see this token of his old nemesis, and leaves the house. Vicki does not consciously remember the events she saw during her visit to the past, but when she sees Barnabas go she tells Liz that it makes sense that he would not like the picture.
Tony returns and spends a few moments twitting Carolyn for her glamorous attire, describing the homely pastimes in which a working class boy like himself whiles away his idle moments. This prompts her to tease him back. Viewers who remember Tony and Carolyn’s previous interactions will recognize this as their style of flirtatious banter. They agree to go to dinner.
Before Tony and Carolyn can leave, we cut to Barnabas, standing in the window of his own house and staring at the great house. He calls to Carolyn, summoning her to come to him immediately. We cut back to the great house, and see Carolyn’s face go blank while Tony is still talking. She excuses herself, telling him she will meet him later. He is outraged, and vows he will not wait for her.
In Barnabas’ house, Carolyn tells Barnabas she objects to his summons. Irritated by this, he starts talking about Vicki. He says that he couldn’t understand why biting her did not bring her under his power, but that seeing the portrait explained it to him. The witch is interfering with his efforts. Carolyn laughs at the idea of a witch. This is a bit odd. Carolyn has lived her whole life up to this point in a haunted house and is having a conversation with a vampire. It wouldn’t seem to be a stretch for her to believe in witches.
Barnabas has a bad habit of leaving his front window uncovered. Many times, we have seen people peer into that window and discover Barnabas’ secrets. Now, Tony sees Barnabas bite Carolyn’s neck.
Carolyn goes home to the great house and finds Tony in the foyer. She is delighted at the idea that he is waiting to go on their date, but such is not the case. He is there to berate her for her perverse relationship with her cousin Barnabas and to storm out.
In this, we see the first point of similarity between Tony and Trask. Trask was right that there was a witch at Collinwood and right that the witch was the source of all the troubles afflicting the Collinses. But he was wrong about her identity, and wrong about the means to combat her. Likewise, Tony is right that Carolyn and Barnabas are manipulating him, and is right that their relationship is unwholesome. But he has no understanding of their goals, and his belief that their relationship is sexual is quite mistaken.
Carolyn’s protest that Barnabas is merely her cousin, like Tony’s indignant implication that their family relationship makes what they are doing incest, is rather strained. In the cemetery, Liz mentioned that Daniel Collins was her great-great grandfather, which would make Daniel’s sister Millicent Carolyn’s great-great-great-great aunt. When Millicent and Daniel were introduced during the 1790s segment, Barnabas’ father Joshua identified them as his second cousins. That was a distant enough relative that Joshua considered Millicent a potential marriage partner for either Joshua’s brother Jeremiah or for Barnabas himself. Since Barnabas and Carolyn are second cousins five times removed, nothing going on between them could very well be called incestuous.
Later, Barnabas goes to the drawing room in the great house and looks at the portrait of Angelique. To his surprise, Carolyn is waiting for him. She tells him that she doesn’t want to be his blood thrall anymore. She declares that he loves Vicki and that she has her own life to live. He is too busy to discuss the matter with her, and she leaves.
Barnabas cuts the portrait out of the frame, and throws it into the fireplace. He gives a little speech about how this is the only way Angelique can be destroyed. He turns from the fire, and sees that the portrait has regenerated. Angelique’s laughter sounds in the air, and Barnabas realizes that she is present.
This is not the first time a portrait of an undead blonde witch has been thrown into the fire in the drawing room, prompting a woman’s disembodied voice to make itself heard. In #149, Laura’s estranged husband, Roger Collins, threw into it a painting featuring her with their son, strange and troubled boy David. When that painting burned, we heard a scream coming from no one we could see. Whether the screamer was Laura or benevolent ghost Josette was never explained. What was clear was that burning the painting accomplished none of the goals Roger may have had in mind, as Barnabas’ incineration of this painting serves none of his purposes.
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