The wicked witch known variously as Angelique and Cassandra is standing in the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood, thinking evil thoughts. The camera zooms out and we see that her stepson, strange and troubled boy David Collins, is standing next to her. She starts to speak her thoughts out loud, saying “You will pay!” David asks “Who will pay?” Angelique/ Cassandra is startled to discover that David is there, and is flustered when she tries to change the subject. She so often delivers incriminating soliloquys while standing out in the open that the comic effect of this scene must be intentional.
David asks Angelique/ Cassandra to help him figure out the correct operation of a tape recorder he received some time ago as a present from permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman. After Angelique/ Cassandra refuses to help, he goes upstairs and finds his cousin, heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard, emerging from the long-deserted west wing of the house. He asks Carolyn what she was doing in the west wing. She asks him why he thinks she was in the west wing. When he says he saw her coming out of it, she drops her attempt to evade his question and tells him she was looking for some old family photos to show well-meaning governess Vicki. She has enough trouble remembering this story that it must be obvious to David that it is a lie, but he isn’t interested enough to follow it up. He just wants someone to help him figure out which buttons to push on the tape recorder.
On their Dark Shadows Before I Die, John and Christine Scoleri speak for longtime viewers of the show when they say that it is surprising David needs help with the tape recorder. When the show started, David was two years younger and had the mechanical skill to sabotage his father’s car in a very creditable attempt at patricide. All Carolyn has to do to get the tape going is read the label that identifies the play button. This apparent loss of cognitive function is of a piece with David’s massive loss of narrative function. For the first 39 weeks of Dark Shadows, David was the fulcrum on which every story turned, and actor David Henesy had abundant opportunities to show a level of professional skill that would be remarkable in a performer of any age. But he has been receding into the background for a long time now, and his extraordinary dim-wittedness today marks a low point for him.
Once the tape starts playing, Carolyn makes a hasty exit. David listens to a minute or so of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, hoping it will end and he will hear “something spooky.” His wish is granted when the music abruptly stops, giving way to a voice addressing itself to Julia. The voice rambles about David’s distant cousin Barnabas Collins, saying that if both he and “my creation” live, Barnabas will be all right, but that if “Adam” dies, “Barnabas will be as he was before.” The name “Adam” should mean something to David. He shared a confused and frightening moment with a mysterious man of that name in #495. That man subsequently abducted Carolyn, and is still the object of a police search.
What only Julia, Barnabas, and Barnabas’ servant Willie know is that Adam is a Frankenstein’s monster created in an experiment that freed Barnabas of the effects of the vampire curse that Angelique/ Cassandra placed on him in the 1790s. The voice on the tape is that of Eric Lang, the mad scientist who began the experiment. Minutes before he died of the effects of one of Angelique/ Cassandra’s spells, Lang recorded this message for Julia. The audience has heard this message approximately a gazillion bajillion times, but until now, the only character to have heard it was Adam, and he could make no sense of it.
Angelique/ Cassandra recently made an unsuccessful attempt to renew Barnabas’ curse, and is desperately searching for the obstacle that prevented it from working. Carolyn’s actual task in the west wing was showing Adam to a hiding place there. So Angelique/ Cassandra is now under the same roof with both the information she needs to identify her obstacle and the person she can remove that obstacle by killing. Things are looking bad for Barnabas and for Adam.
While David is upstairs with the tape recorder, Vicki is sobbing in the drawing room. Suave warlock Nicholas, who is staying in the house in the guise of Angelique/ Cassandra’s brother, enters and asks her what’s wrong. She says that she has just learned that Barnabas is dead. His back to her, Nicholas smiles brightly when he first hears this news, then puts on a sad face and turns to her with sympathetic words. In response, Vicki reveals that she knows all about Angelique/ Cassandra and that she has little patience for Nicholas’ pretensions. Carolyn enters and doubts Vicki’s news. Angelique/ Cassandra is the last to enter. She says that she saw Barnabas alive and well after the time when he is supposed to have been dead. Vicki and Carolyn look at each other, and do not see Nicholas’ look of disappointment. They go upstairs, and Nicholas and Angelique/ Cassandra go into the drawing room.
Nicholas scolds Angelique/ Cassandra for her failure. He addresses her as “dear sister.” He suggests she may not hate Barnabas sufficiently to impose a curse on him. When she denies this, he leans to her ear and teasingly asks if she loves him. He threatens to send her back where she came from if she doesn’t re-vamp Barnabas by midnight, and to focus her mind replaces her arm with a fleshless bone.
Director John Weaver was not much of a visual artist, and in his post about the episode on Dark Shadows Every Day Danny Horn analyzes the dismally inept blocking of the scene between Vicki and Nicholas. Danny also has some unkind words for writer Ron Sproat, but I think those are unfair. It’s true the opening scene between Adam and Carolyn goes on too long, David’s helplessness with the tape recorder is dismal, and Vicki and Carolyn’s reaction to Angelique/ Cassandra’s report that Barnabas is still alive doesn’t make sense. That’s a long enough list of flaws that we might fairly classify Weaver and Sproat as the B-team, not on a par with director Lela Swift and writers Sam Hall and Gordon Russell.
But it is genuinely funny when we first see David standing next to Angelique/ Cassandra, David’s questioning of Carolyn is intelligently written, Lang’s message is for once an actual source of suspense, Vicki’s lines to Nicholas as Alexandra Moltke Isles delivers them show the character’s strength, Nicholas’ teasing Angelique/ Cassandra with her alleged love of Barnabas raises a laugh as it makes them sound like a couple of kids, and the final gag with the arm bone is at once goofy enough to keep up the humor in the episode and startling enough to be effective as a touch of horror. All in all, it’s an enjoyable episode, if not one that fans would be tempted to use to turn their friends on to the show.
Dark Shadows Commentary 