They gave a number to each episode of Dark Shadows reflecting its place in broadcast order. They skipped the numbers for the days the show wasn’t on, so that episode #620 was actually the 613th episode. Fascinating, I know. Even more interesting, there were a total of 1225 episodes, making this one the exact middle of the series.
When Dark Shadows started in June 1966, its undisputed star was Joan Bennett as matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Describing Dark Shadows’ overall narrative structure, Bennett said “We ramble around.” At its beginning, the show was heavily atmospheric and slow paced, with stories very much aimed at an adult audience who remembered Bennett’s heyday in the 1930s and her father’s in the early twentieth century. As it developed, supernatural elements that had at the outset lurked in the background came to the fore and attracted a much younger audience. By this time, Dark Shadows is a slam-bang kid’s show with a cliffhanger at every commercial break and a cast including witches, vampires, mad scientists, and Frankenstein’s monsters. So it is appropriate that the episode at its chronological center is in a way the most unrepresentative of them all. Dark Shadows tended to go to great lengths to avoid anything that would get the audience thinking about Christianity. Yet this outing is all about the saving power of the cross.
Old world gentleman Barnabas is hiding in the long deserted west wing of the great house of Collinwood. Well-meaning governess Vicki took him there after finding him lying on the ground in the woods, grievously injured. Vicki does not know that Barnabas is the victim of a vampire, and so she does not know why he is anxious that she bring him a cross. When he sees that she has brought one, he mutters “The cross… I need it so.” He clutches it to him and tells her “I need no one but you, and nothing but this.” At the middle of the episode, he is going on about this again, saying “No one frightens me… All I need is the cross. The cross!”
When the vampire’s helper Adam comes to steal the cross from him, Barnabas exclaims “The cross! The cross, it will save us both!” Adam takes the cross back to the vampire. He offers it to her. She recoils from it and tells him to destroy it. She runs away, and he looks at it in wonder, not knowing what it is. We are left to ask if he will find out what gives the cross its power, and if learning about it will indeed bring salvation both to him and Barnabas.
Over the next few weeks, much will change on Dark Shadows. There will be major changes in the cast, several storylines will be resolved, new storylines will start, and the pacing will become more deliberate. As that goes on, the show will curve back around to something at once more reminiscent of its early days and more suggestive of what is to come than is this utterly zany period. Not that it will stop being weird- the weirdness will just be developed in greater depth over longer periods. I would say that this bizarre detour into Christian piety marks the most remote point it ever reached in its rambling away from its original concept.
Dark Shadows Commentary 