Recovering vampire Barnabas Collins has brought his former blood thrall Willie Loomis home to the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood. Willie had been confined to a mental hospital during the several months that have passed since Barnabas framed him for crimes he himself committed against Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. The chief of the mental hospital, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, is now Barnabas’ best friend, and he talked her into releasing Willie to him.
Today, Barnabas tells Willie he is going to send him back to the hospital for the rest of his life. Barnabas is furious that the first thing Willie did after promising not to leave the Old House without him was to sneak off and go to Maggie’s house. Barnabas found out about this when Maggie’s boyfriend Joe came to the Old House and told him about it. Joe also told Barnabas that he would kill Willie if he ever again saw him anywhere near Maggie.
Yesterday, it was impossible to tell what was going on in Willie’s mind. At one point he seemed to be in a childlike state, remembering nothing of his time with Barnabas and believing that they had been friends. When he went to Maggie he seemed to have reverted to the way he was when Barnabas was holding Maggie prisoner in the Old House and Willie was desperately trying to spare her the worst. At the end of the episode he pointed an unloaded rifle at Joe and squeezed the trigger, grinning maniacally when he heard the click. Perhaps two of those attitudes were fakes meant to cover the third, or perhaps his personality really is unstable and was fluctuating as the episode went on.
Barnabas has concluded that Willie’s childlike friendliness is a fake and that he is exactly the same as he was when he lived with him. So he gets impatient with Willie when he doesn’t seem to remember that he was a vampire. He talks to Willie as if he remembers everything. He tells him that he can go around in the daytime now, but that he is not really free of the curse yet. He persuaded Julia to release him so that he could help with an experiment that will complete the cure.
Julia enters in time to hear that, and reacts angrily. The experiment is the work of another mad scientist, Eric Lang. Julia is opposed to the experiment and had no idea Barnabas was planning to use Willie to further it. She and Barnabas stand on either side of Willie and argue. At the end of their argument, Willie says he will do whatever Barnabas and Lang say.
Lang comes to the Old House. Julia tells him that Willie was Barnabas’ victim, and says he has hidden resentments against Barnabas that will likely surface and prompt him to sabotage the experiment. This is interesting as an explanation of Willie’s visit to Maggie, which was after all one of the most self-destructive things he could possibly have done. However much damage Willie did to himself by going to Maggie’s house, he also subjected Barnabas to considerable embarrassment and inconvenience. So maybe Willie’s puzzling behavior yesterday was the result of a neurotic complex, unconscious hostilities towards Barnabas combined with feelings of guilt that drove him to actions he himself couldn’t have explained. On this interpretation, Barnabas is accidentally functioning as Willie’s therapist. By modeling the conversations they used to have when Barnabas was a vampire and Willie was his blood thrall, Barnabas is helping Willie recover his memory.
The rest of the episode is taken up with a dead end story called the Dream Curse. This consists of frequent repetitions of an acting exercise that gives each cast member an opportunity to show what they can do when they don’t have many lines and just have to emote. Unfortunately, this time it is Lang’s turn to run through the exercise, and Addison Powell’s abilities as an actor were severely limited. He’s pretty nearly unbearable.
There are two things going on while Powell is shouting and stumbling around that I want to mention. Julia appears to him at the beginning of the sequence, and she makes a series of delightful little balletic movements with her arms. There is no apparent reason in the story for her to turn into a ballerina, but those movements are more worth watching than anything we’ve seen from
Powell.
At the end of the sequence, Lang opens a door and is greeted by a headless body with a turtleneck sweater. The men in the segments of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s all wear either neckties or turtlenecks, and lately the turtlenecks have been getting ever more prominent. I suppose it was just a matter of time before a character appeared whose turtleneck replaced his head altogether.
Dark Shadows Commentary 