A magical bat has bitten recovering vampire Barnabas Collins on the neck and Barnabas appears to have died. Barnabas’ friend Julia and his servant Willie have a conference to discuss their next steps. Barnabas had expected such an attack, knowing that the witch who made him a vampire in the first place has been working to renew her curse. Willie laments the situation, crying out, “Aw, now we’re gonna hear the dogs howlin’ again!” Evidently that’s the bad part.
Barnabas had directed Julia and Willie to drive a stake through his heart once it had stopped beating. They can’t do it. They decide to bury him in the woods instead. Willie mentions a cross; a silver cross inside the lid of his coffin had kept Barnabas immobilized for the 171 years before Willie inadvertently released him to prey upon the living in April 1967, so perhaps that’s how they plan to show mercy to their friend.
Once Willie has dug the grave and put Barnabas’ coffin in it, he and Julia decide to pray. She takes the lead, kneeling and throwing dirt, presumably including stones, onto the coffin. Dark Shadows avoided the topic of religion almost completely until repressed spinster Abigail Collins made her first appearance in #367; she and the Rev’d Mr Trask, introduced in #385, presented a wildly unfair, highly entertaining lampoon of eighteenth century New England Congregationalism. Recently the show has been lurching towards a vaguely friendly attitude towards Christianity. If Julia keeps strewing stones onto the grave once it is filled in, we might think that this friendliness extends to Judaism as well.
Meanwhile, a very tall man named Adam is having a bad time. Adam is a Frankenstein’s monster, and when he was created he drew the effect of the vampire curse from Barnabas. He does not feel the effects of that curse, but he does suffer pain when Barnabas is injured. When heiress Carolyn calls on Adam at the old shack in the woods where he is hiding, she finds that his neck hurts where Barnabas was bitten. When Julia declares Barnabas dead, we cut back to the shack, where Adam has stopped moving. Occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes has joined Carolyn; he feels Adam’s wrist, and in a bit of Collinsport English that is becoming increasingly prominent on the show says that he can find no “pulsebeat.”
Barnabas was bricked up in a wall from #512 to #516, and Adam felt his pain during that period. So it is no surprise to returning viewers that Adam suffers along with Barnabas now. We also have heard countless repetitions of something neither Julia nor Willie has ever heard, an audiotape in which Eric Lang, the mad scientist who created Adam, explains that as long as Adam lives Barnabas will be free of vampirism. So we doubt that Barnabas’ curse will return, and hope that Adam’s suffering will be the clue that leads Julia and Willie to rescue Barnabas from being buried alive. Since Julia and Willie have no idea where Adam is and Adam hates them both, it’s as difficult to see how they could find out what he’s going through as it is to see how Barnabas could get out of the grave any other way. In that difficulty is the suspense with which the episode ends.
Dark Shadows Commentary 