In #134, strange and troubled boy David saw his mother Laura Murdoch Collins for the first time in years. To everyone’s surprise, not least his own, David reacted to Laura with terror. It turned out that he had good reason for this reaction, as Laura was actually an undead blonde fire witch come to lure him to his own death.
In #489, David learned that his father Roger had remarried. Like everyone else in the great house of Collinwood, David was stunned to learn that Roger had known his new wife for less than a day before he married her. Unlike the others, his speechless reaction prompted Roger to jump to the conclusion that he disliked his new stepmother. Roger scolded David and sent him to play outside until he could come back and be charming.
While outside, David had stumbled upon the new Mrs Collins kissing a man other than her husband. Later, he found her alone in the drawing room, told her what he had seen, and informed her that he would tell his father about it.
Roger’s new wife wears a black wig and calls herself Cassandra. What the audience knows, but neither Roger nor David do, is that she is actually an undead blonde witch. Roger does have a type.
The new Mrs Collins’ real name is Angelique. She has come to 1968 from the late eighteenth century to resume her punishment of Barnabas Collins, whom she turned into a vampire in their time, but who has now been freed from the symptoms of the curse. When David told Angelique/ Cassandra that he would report her misconduct to Roger, she used her magic powers to strike him dumb. When his muteness became inconvenient for her in #492, she cast another spell to erase his memory and restore his speech. To execute this spell, she took fire from the hearth and spoke words to David that caused him to drift into a trance. We remember #140, when Laura urged David to stare into the flames of this same hearth while she told the story of the Phoenix, causing him to drift into a trance. From that point on, he liked his mother very much.
Today, David meets Roger in the foyer of Collinwood. He tells his father that Angelique/ Cassandra took him into town, where she bought him a Swiss army knife. He says she would have bought him anything he wanted. Thus we learn that, though she is a wicked witch (as well as a wigged one,) Angelique/ Cassandra is in some ways a typical step-parent. When Roger says he is glad to see that David now likes Angelique/ Cassandra, David is mystified. As far as he can recall, he always liked her.
Roger sends David to answer a knock at the door. It is their distant cousin Barnabas. This is the first time we have seen David and Barnabas together since #333, when David barely escaped with his life after Barnabas caught him looking at his coffin. David now greets him quite calmly.
David leaves. In the foyer, Roger scolds Barnabas for his rudeness to Angelique/ Cassandra. Barnabas could hardly be expected to fail to recognize his old nemesis, but he has indeed shown an extreme lack of prudence in his uninhibited talks with her. Not only has he created unpleasant scenes to which Roger is bound to object, but he has also let Angelique/ Cassandra know exactly what he does and does not know about her.
Roger says that if Barnabas cannot be friendly to Angelique/ Cassandra, he shouldn’t come to the great house anymore. Barnabas asks if Roger shouldn’t ask his sister Liz, who after all owns the house, what she thinks. Roger says that will be unnecessary, since Liz has even less tolerance for rude behavior than he does. Barnabas is promising to do better when Liz runs in, frightened by a tall man she met on the grounds. Liz told the man he was on private property and directed him to leave. The man said nothing at all in response to this challenge or to her subsequent questions. He stood still and appeared to be mute until he spoke Barnabas’ name. Liz ran from him when she saw that he had a shackle attached to his leg. Roger flies into a panic, assuming that a shackled man must be dangerous and remembering that David is alone in the woods. He gets his gun, and rushes out. Barnabas accompanies him.
In the woods, David is playing Mumblety-Peg with his new knife. The tall man shows up; when David finds that the man cannot talk, he says that he is glad. He says that he often wishes no one could talk. He goes on at considerable length about the disadvantages that come with the ability to speak. He then explains to the man that you play Mumblety-Peg by dropping the knife into the ground so that it sticks there. The man becomes excited and grabs the knife. David objects and demands he return it. They struggle; David falls and hurts his ankle. David grumbles that all the man had to do was give him his knife back. The man looks alarmed and picks David up. David doesn’t like that one bit, and insists he be put down.
David’s shouting brings Roger and Barnabas. Roger points his gun at the man and orders him to put David down. When the man does not move, Barnabas tells Roger not to shoot. David, in the line of fire, seconds this recommendation. Barnabas talks to the man in a soothing voice, gesturing towards the ground, and the man does set David down. David runs to Barnabas and gives him a hug.
This is the second time David has run into Barnabas’ arms. The first was in #315. David had been trapped in the hidden chamber in the old Collins family mausoleum, where Barnabas was confined in his coffin from the 1790s until 1967. Barnabas learned that David was there, suspected he might have deduced his secret, and decided to kill him. David got out of the chamber just as Barnabas was approaching it, and ran from it directly to him. He had not in fact figured out Barnabas’ secret while in the hidden chamber, but Barnabas’ behavior in the minute before someone else came along was menacing enough that David caught on that he had sinister plans for him. For the next ten weeks, his fear of Barnabas would deepen, leading him to discover the whole horrible truth about his distant relative. All that is forgotten now, evidently.
Roger jumps to the conclusion that the tall man had “tried to kill David!” He shoots him in the shoulder and runs after him with his gun, over Barnabas’ objections. Roger had been quite unconcerned with David’s well-being throughout the first year of the show. In the first months, he openly hated the boy and continually tried to persuade Liz to send him off to an institution; in #83, he coldly manipulated David into attempting to murder someone who posed a problem for him; even after other characters had begun to realize that Laura was a deadly threat to David, Roger continued to press eagerly for her to get full custody of him and take him away; and in #313, when David was trapped in the mausoleum, Roger could barely be bothered to take part in the search. Roger’s behavior will therefore be less likely to suggest to regular viewers that he is overcome with paternal feeling than that he is a panicky fool who is much too excited about an opportunity to shoot someone.
The tall man is Adam, a Frankenstein’s monster created in the procedure that caused Barnabas’ vampirism to go into remission. Though he is 6’6″, Adam is only a couple of weeks old, effectively a baby. Barnabas has been keeping him in his basement, chained to the wall in the prison cell he maintains for those times when he has abducted a pretty girl and has to keep her from running away. The opening voiceover tells us that “no man has suffered more” than Barnabas, just as we cut to Adam, despondent in his shackles. Barnabas comes in to give Adam a cup of broth and a couple of minutes of rigidly formal social interaction, then leaves him alone again. Somehow this sequence makes it difficult to sympathize as deeply with Barnabas as the narration would have us do.
Dark Shadows Commentary 