Sheriff Patterson is at the estate of Collinwood. In yesterday’s episode, local man Joe Haskell tried to strangle old world gentleman Barnabas Collins in his house on the estate. Joe is in custody now, and the sheriff opens the episode with questions for some people in the great house.
Sheriff Patterson is played today by one-time substitute Alfred Sandor. I don’t know how much notice Sandor had that he would be playing the part, but it wasn’t enough for him to memorize his sides. He takes at least as many glances at the teleprompter as he has lines. He has a fine sonorous voice, an easy physicality, and when he can break free from the teleprompter he creates the impression that the sheriff is listening and thinking. I wish that he, rather than Vince O’Brien, had become the default Sheriff Patterson after Dana Elcar left Dark Shadows. The sheriff never gets to catch any of the bad guys, but it would be nice if he at least seemed like he had some brains.
The sheriff tells Barnabas’ inseparable friend, Julia Hoffman, MD, that Joe had claimed Barnabas was trying to kill him. Julia dismisses this as absurd. Joe says he was in Barnabas’ house recuperating from an injury, and awoke to find Barnabas offering him medicine that was poisoned. Only Julia’s intervention kept Joe from taking the medicine. Julia concedes that this is true.
New viewers might conclude from this that Julia is a compulsive truth-teller; after all, she is the only one who really knows that the medicine was poisoned, and she found that out by conducting tests which would probably consume all of it. But not only does she share her findings with the sheriff, she went out of her way to leave a sample of the poisoned medicine for the police to do follow-up testing on.
In fact, Julia is Dark Shadows‘ most fluent and most persuasive liar. It is unaccountable, not only that she confirms that the medicine was poisoned, but that the only suspects she lists when the sheriff asks who could have added the poison to the medicine are herself, Barnabas, Barnabas’ servant Willie, and Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. While she and Barnabas have already proven their willingness to pin their crimes on Willie, he is too closely associated with them to be a desirable choice for the role of patsy, and no one will believe Maggie is guilty of anything- “The Nicest Girl in Town” might as well be her legal name.
Barnabas has been under the power of vampire Angelique for a couple of weeks. Julia is an expert on vampirism; she joined the cast in the summer of 1967 when she was treating Maggie for the aftermath of abuse she suffered from Barnabas when he was a vampire. She then won her way into Barnabas’ confidence and used him as the subject for an experimental treatment she had devised to cure vampirism. After that treatment failed, another mad scientist devised a different procedure for freeing Barnabas of the effects of his curse, and it was Julia who completed that procedure successfully. She then herself spent time as the victim of another vampire, giving her another perspective on the topic and making her uniquely knowledgeable on it. She has seen abundant evidence of Barnabas’ condition in the many days since Angelique first bit him, but it is only at the end of today’s episode, when she pulls back his cravat and sees the bite marks, that she finally puts two and two together. Combined with her sudden fit of honesty when the sheriff is questioning her, her slowness in figuring out what’s going on with Barnabas makes us wonder what is wrong with her. It’s true she hasn’t been getting much sleep lately, maybe that’s the problem.
There is a little support for this idea in a scene when the sheriff meets Julia in the woods. He is coming from Barnabas’ house, she is going there. He says that he’s surprised to find her in the woods at night, and she says “The woods are- are scary.” It isn’t like her to stumble and repeat a word, nor is “scary” a word she would typically use. Educated adults on Dark Shadows favor a more formal lexical register, saying “frightening” or something like that, leaving such words as “scary” to mark a grossly uneducated character like Willie or a child like young David Collins. Perhaps this line indicates that Julia just needs a good rest.
Many commenters remark on some irregularities in Angelique’s costume, speculating that one of them might be Lara Parker’s left nipple. I don’t think so; it just looks like fabric pilling, as witness the fact that there are multiple prominences in different spots. In the first year of Dark Shadows, Joan Bennett and Alexandra Moltke Isles sometimes did wear tight-fitting tops that revealed the shape of the flesh underneath more precisely than you might expect; that happened often enough that I took it to be a conscious decision to challenge the audience to take a matter-of-fact attitude toward female anatomy, and thought the grownup thing to do was not to mention it. But the show long ago forgot about grownup attitudes, so it is only to be expected that people are still giggling about what they think they can see in this shot.
Dark Shadows Commentary 