From #227 to #260, Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, was under the influence of vampire Barnabas Collins. As Barnabas tried to brainwash Maggie so that her personality would disappear and that of his lost love Josette would take its place, she began to rebel against him. From #251 until she escaped in #260, Barnabas kept Maggie locked up in a prison cell in his basement.
Throughout this whole period, Barnabas’ sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie Loomis tried to spare Maggie the worst. Willie anonymously telephoned Maggie’s friend Vicki in #230 so she and her friends could interrupt Barnabas’ first attempt to take Maggie into custody; while Maggie was Barnabas’ prisoner he several times pleaded with Barnabas to show her mercy; and when in #260 Barnabas had decided to kill Maggie with extreme cruelty, Willie brought a glass of poison to her cell so she could die painlessly.
Now, Barnabas’ vampirism is in remission. He has brought Willie back to work for him, arranging his release from the mental hospital where he was confined after Barnabas framed him for all of his crimes against Maggie. It is by no means clear what effect Barnabas’ loss of his vampire powers has had on Willie. At times he seems to be confused and childlike; at times, to be the dangerously unstable ruffian he was before he fell into Barnabas’ clutches. But he is still fascinated by Maggie, and still longs for her friendship. The very night Barnabas brought him home from the hospital, Willie sneaked off to visit Maggie and tell her he was innocent.
For her part, Maggie’s memories of her experience with Barnabas were excluded from her conscious mind when mad scientist Julia Hoffman hypnotized her. The other day, Maggie had a nightmare as part of the “Dream Curse,” and in the course of the nightmare she heard the sound of Josette’s music box, which Barnabas forced her to listen to while in captivity. She also saw a skull with eyes, suggesting that her deepest fear has to do with the dead watching her. Since Barnabas, as a vampire, was dead and yet kept Maggie under surveillance, this image combines with the music to suggest that Maggie’s memory might soon return.
Today, Willie is minding Adam, a Frankenstein’s monster whom Julia brought to life in a procedure meant to cure Barnabas of his vampirism once and for all. Barnabas and Julia have no idea what to do with Adam, and so they have chained him up in Maggie’s old cell. Barnabas’ jewel box is stashed behind the secret panel Maggie used to escape from the cell, and Willie shows Adam some of its shinier contents to calm him.
Among the shiniest are a pair of emerald earrings. Barnabas has been talking to Willie as if Willie remembers everything that happened when he was his blood thrall, yet Willie has not confirmed that this is so. When he sees the earrings, Willie gets very intense. He says that he saw Josette wearing them, then realizes that it was Maggie. Perhaps Barnabas, by modeling the conversations they used to have, is inadvertently providing the therapy Willie needs to recover his memory.
Willie decides to give the earrings to Maggie. He goes to Maggie’s house and peeks through the window. He sees her with her boyfriend Joe. When he came to the house the other day to tell Maggie he never meant to hurt her, she was terrified and Joe stated as a matter of fact that he would kill Willie if he ever came near Maggie again. Willie does not knock on the door to greet the two of them.
Instead, he slips into the house while they are out of the room. He plants the earrings in Maggie’s purse, and is gone by the time she and Joe come back. Maggie finds the earrings. The tinkling sound of Josette’s music box plays on the soundtrack while she looks at them. She is fascinated:
Maggie says that the earrings “remind me of something- something I’ve forgotten. I know they don’t belong to me yet. But somehow when I look at them, I seem to think they were meant for me- I mean from the start. They are lovely, a very beautiful and thoughtful gift. Only a man who has gazed into my eyes with deepest love would know they were meant for me.” As she delivers these lines, Kathryn Leigh Scott fades out of Maggie’s voice, into the tones she used while playing Josette from #370 to #430.
Barnabas’ attempt to turn Maggie into Josette would have reminded many viewers at the time of the 1932 film The Mummy, in which the undead Imhotep (played by Boris Karloff, whose voice Jonathan Frid often seems to be imitating as Barnabas) abducts the beautiful young Helen Grosvenor, whom he believes to be the reincarnation of his lost love, the Princes Ankh-esen-amun. In that movie, Helen and the Princess were both played by Zita Johanns, suggesting that Imhotep was onto something. From November 1967 to March 1968, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the 1790s and we saw that Maggie and Josette are both played by Kathryn Leigh Scott, suggesting the same about Barnabas. The bleakness and horror of Barnabas’ treatment of Maggie in the summer of 1967 makes this suggestion a daring one, and that Maggie makes a speech blissfully describing the one who looked at her and saw Josette as a “man who gazed into my eyes with deepest love” in the middle of an episode that begins and ends in the cell where he confined her and planned to torture her to death is more daring still.
I don’t think the risk pays off. Miss Scott was usually one of the most reliable performers on Dark Shadows. She found Maggie in her relationship to her father Sam, whose drinking problem was a major story point for the first 40 weeks of the show, and articulates the character as a series of very intelligent answers to the question “How would an Adult Child of an Alcoholic respond to this situation?” This scene presents her with a very complex challenge, as she is supposed to show that the earrings have jarred loose some fragment of a memory but to keep us guessing just what that fragment is. Joel Crothers plays Joe’s disquiet at the appearance of the earrings with a simplicity that sets Miss Scott up for a star turn. But she doesn’t seem to have any idea what to make of her lines. For the first time on the show, she is physically stiff and vocally overbearing. As a result of her atypical overacting, the scene does not deliver the sense of mystery and foreboding it requires. It just leaves the audience confused.
Acilius on Dark Shadows 