Eleven year old Amy Jennings and her big brother Chris joined the show recently, and they are the stars today. Amy has discovered the ghost of Quentin Collins, who haunts a room in the long deserted west wing of the great house of Collinwood. Strange and troubled boy David Collins is rather miffed that Quentin prefers Amy’s company to his- after all, “Quentin Collins is my ancestor,” not Amy’s. They hold a séance in an attempt to bring Quentin to them. David has only participated in one séance, back in #186, when he went into a trance and gave voice to the late David Radcliffe, a boy who died (by fire!) in 1867. So he hasn’t had a chance to catch on that séances on Dark Shadows require a minimum of three people- the first to begin the ceremony and bark orders at everyone else, the second to go into the trance and act as medium, and the third to grow alarmed, try to wake the medium from the trance, and be sternly rebuked by the first. Since David and Amy have no third person, they have no chance of contacting Quentin.
Instead, a shadowy figure appears in the doorway. She is well-meaning governess Vicki, or a rough approximation thereof. David Collins’ scenes with Vicki had been the highlight of the first year of Dark Shadows, not because of the writing or the direction but entirely due to the rapport between actors David Henesy and Alexandra Moltke Isles. A few weeks ago Mrs Isles left the show, and Vicki was recast. Her brief appearance is Mr Henesy’s first scene with the new actress, Betsy Durkin. They can’t recreate his chemistry with Mrs Isles, and Vicki ran out of story long ago. As a result, the scene sounds a discordant note for longtime viewers, reminding us that Miss Durkin, whatever her talents, is here nothing more than a fake Shemp taking up screen time.
Unknown to the other characters, Chris is a werewolf. Chris accepts an offer from the Collins family to host Amy at Collinwood while he deals with his mysterious problems; in gratitude, he takes heiress Carolyn for a drink at the Blue Whale tavern. While there, he sees a pentagram on the barmaid’s face and hurriedly excuses himself. Later, he transforms into his lupine shape and returns to the barroom, not through the door this time but through the window. He kills the barmaid.
The barmaid appears only in this episode; she doesn’t even get a name. But we see her face in closeup often enough that she feels like a person. Even more importantly, she is wearing the same wig that Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, wore in her first four episodes (#1, #3, #7, and #12.) Since Maggie was also a server, working the counter at the diner in the Collinsport Inn, this wig tells longtime viewers that the werewolf’s victim could just as easily have been Maggie, one of everyone’s favorite characters.
Don Briscoe played Chris in his human phase, Alex Stevens as the werewolf. Stevens was credited not as an actor, but as “Stunt Coordinator.” Yet today, his credit card appears in between Briscoe’s and that of Carol Ann Lewis, who was cast as the luckless barmaid. Some of the original audience may have caught on that Stevens was the man in the character makeup, but others who noticed the odd billing order would have chalked it up as another of the show’s frequent imperfections.
Dark Shadows Commentary 
To be fair to to Ms Durkin and the casting director, recasting with little to no notice is really hard to pull off. On Edge of Night, the soap that took the spot for DS, one of the cast was hit by a car and was in the hospital for weeks. He was involved in a front burner story with no way to write him out easily. The recast was a good actor, who had done well in other soaps, but it was so jarring to have the switch and it was hard to see a different interpretation of the character. I do feel for temporary replacements, especially those who are called in on short notice. DS, was notably poor at recasts after the show got going, see Burke Devlin, and pretty well avoided them later on.
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Absolutely. And even if all concerned had had months of warning, Vicki was so thoroughly played out that there was nothing any writer or actress could do to bring her back to life by the last weeks of 1968.
There was a similar problem when Burke was recast- the show couldn’t accommodate a dashing action hero if a vampire is going to operate freely for who knows how long, and there were no obstacles between him and Vicki that would make a viable storyline out of their romance. But Anthony George faced an even worse problem. Not only did the audience identify the character with Mitch Ryan, but the writers were all in the habit of writing Burke for Ryan’s acting style. So George, whose way of working was pretty nearly the exact opposite of Ryan’s, was left totally at sea.
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The part that makes it so bad is the effect it had on the 1795 storyline. As someone who watched the show from the beginning I remember that part of the history of Josette was that Jeremiah was so angry that she committed suicide that he buried her far from the family plot as a way to bury her memory, which becomes really a reach when he is buried right there, next to her, I think, with a tombstone saying he died first. Banishing your dead wife to a forgotten grave AFTER you died takes zombie powers to a new and silly heights. I’ve often tried to picture poor Joshua, after deciding to use Vicki’s book as a template for his memoirs, trying to figure out what to do about that and then just waving it off because apparently people bought it before.
I do wish that there had been an established and accepted actor for Burke that would have worked through the 1795 story, so that the pieces of history we had been told about would have been closer to what happened. The Josette comes to marry Barnabas but gets roofied into marrying an equally roofied Jeremiah and then continuing the marriage, while still loving Barnabas and eventually being pulled into his vampire orbit storyline would have given KLS far more to do with the character. Jeremiah falling in love with out of time Vicki and defending her against the witchcraft charges would have saved us from Roger Davis. Basically, I wish Mitch Ryan could have stayed sober for another year or they had found a better recast, or at least one who didn’t hate the role so much that he ditched as soon as he could. The only thing I don’t know is what actor at the time would have been a good Burke. I was in school, so my soap actor knowledge was confined to shows after 4:00 pm, i.e. Dark Shadows.
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I also wish Mitch Ryan could have stayed sober- George was a particularly bad recast, but I don’t think anyone would have been good. We just would have missed Mitch.
Sometimes I wonder what the original idea was for “The House by the Sea.” Maybe Vicki and Burke were going to get married, live there, be possessed by the ghosts of Caleb Collins and his doomed bride “F. McA. C.,” and reenact their tragedy. If they had followed that story with a trip to the eighteenth century, we might have seen that Caleb and F. were themselves cursed to reenact the tragedy of Jeremiah and Josette.
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