Rakish Quentin and time traveling vampire Barnabas have each been fighting undead blonde fire witch Laura, and today they agree to team up. This marks the beginning of their friendship, which will be central to Dark Shadows for the next 90 weeks.
The script has some problems. The dialogue between Quentin and Barnabas runs in circles, and there are scenes where, for no apparent reason, the two of them go back and forth between Barnabas’ house and the cottage where Laura is staying. But the episode is still fun. The actors deserve a lot of credit for that. David Selby and Jonathan Frid both turn in such fine performances that even the most unnecessary scenes between Quentin and Barnabas hold our interest, and Diana Millay finds ways to make Laura intriguing even when she is saddled with the disagreeable Roger Davis as her only scene partner.
There is also a happy accident with a special effect. Barnabas has called on Laura to appear in his house as a ghost; she is before him as a transparency when Quentin enters. Quentin’s presence breaks the spell, and she vanishes. In the cottage where she has been staying, a male servant whom she has bewitched is waiting for her. She reappears there; she materializes and passes out. The image of her overlaid on the picture is a little too small and a little too high in the frame, so that when she collapses she doesn’t quite reach the floor.
The result turns out to be better than it would if the effect had worked as intended. Laura’s appearance and her fainting seem to play out in a window briefly opened between one world and another.
The episode ends with Laura sending a telepathic message to Quentin’s estranged wife, madwoman Jenny. The scene plays out with Laura in voiceover while Jenny is alone in the cell where Quentin’s brother and sister have been keeping her. Laura wants Jenny to escape and kill Quentin. Again the dialogue is awkward and repetitive, but Millay and Marie Wallace save it.
We open in the cottage on the grounds of the estate of Collinwood, where the rakish Quentin Collins has triumphantly confronted his sister-in-law and sometime lover, Laura Murdoch Collins, with a telegram from the authorities in Alexandria, Egypt, declaring that she died in that city the year before. Laura points out that the fact that she is standing in front of him and breathing would tend to limit the credence such a document might be expected to command. Quentin hadn’t thought of that. He looks puzzled for a moment, then says that even if no one else is convinced, he is now sure that she is dead.
Laura, unable to believe that Quentin really is this stupid. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Viewers who have been with Dark Shadows from the beginning will particularly enjoy this exchange. Another iteration of Laura, also played by Diana Millay, was on the show from December 1966 to March 1967, when the dramatic date was contemporary with the broadcast date. In those days, the authorities in Phoenix, Arizona, kept sending messages to the residents of the great estate of Collinwood concerning their reasons for believing that Laura was dead. Most of those messages were received with a laugh, then with irritation that a bunch of brain-dead bureaucrats wouldn’t stop pestering them with reports that were obviously false. But there were a few times when characters took them with an inexplicable seriousness. It’s a relief to see that this part of the show, set in the year 1897, will not include any of those jarringly foolish reactions.
Quentin and Laura argue about her children. She wants to take them and leave Collinwood; he asks what she will accept instead. Quentin’s pretense that he would have anything to offer her that might be tempting so amuses Laura that she doesn’t bother to be insulted. When he says that he will give her money, she laughs. The penniless Quentin says that he will steal any amount she names. He claims to “have powers.” Before Laura returned to Collinwood in #729, we twice saw Quentin take part in unholy summoning rituals on this set (#711 and #718,) each of which did result in communication with the spiritual forces of darkness. It does seem to be a bit of an exaggeration for him to claim to “have powers,” though. Especially so when he is talking to someone whom he believes to have transcended death.
A male servant comes to the door. Quentin believes this man to be Laura’s lover, and nearly says so today. In fact, Quentin has severely underestimated Laura in every way. She did die in Alexandria. But she has also died in other places, at other times, and will do so again. She is an undead fire witch who periodically incinerates herself and rises from the ashes as a humanoid Phoenix. The man is not her lover in any human sense. Rather, one of the ways she keeps herself more or less alive is by draining heat from his body in a kind of dry vampirism.
Quentin leaves Laura alone with the servant. Opposite David Selby, Diana Millay had shown her gift for dry comedy to great advantage. Once he exits and she is alone with the servant, her manner shifts abruptly. She suddenly starts overacting and sounding false. I think that is down to the actor who plays the servant, Roger Davis. Mr Davis was notoriously abusive of his female scene partners, and she has to play her scene in his arms. It would have been difficult for anyone to relax sufficiently to give a good performance when she was stuck in that unenviable position.
Laura is not the only vampiric presence at Collinwood these days. Time-traveler Barnabas Collins is the old-fashioned blood-sucking kind, and we see him rise from his coffin. He summons his blood thrall Charity Trask to come to him at the Old House on the estate. Charity comes. Several of Barnabas’ female victims have gone through a particular series of stages. First, they are elated at their new connection with Barnabas, and want to devote themselves to him as slavishly as possible. Then, they become reluctant to go on serving as his breakfast, and make anguished protests about wanting to return to their previous lives. Finally, they rebel. Charity has entered the second stage. She says that her father expects her. Barnabas has seen all this before, and has learned to have fun with it. He tells Charity that he needs her more than her father does. He bares his fangs and bites her, after which she is back to elated servility.
Barnabas tells Charity that she will be assisting him in a ceremony. She waits in the Old House while Barnabas goes to the great house on the estate to fetch something he needs for that ceremony.
We cut to Quentin’s room in the great house, where we see a mirror. It shows the reflection of Quentin kissing maidservant Beth. When we first saw them talk to each other in #701, Beth was fighting her attraction to Quentin and trying to resist his attempts to seduce her. That’s what was supposed to be going on, anyway, but we didn’t actually see it. Terrayne Crawford played Beth’s lines according to the literal meaning of the words, with the result that for the first six weeks of the part of Dark Shadows set in 1897 Beth seemed sincerely uninterested in Quentin, and his overtures were just sexual harassment. Now Ms Crawford no longer has to play conflicting emotions. Beth is simply in love with Quentin. She gets that point across adequately.
Beth pulls away from Quentin, explaining that she has to get back to work. He talks about ending his marriage so that they can be together permanently; he says that it may serve their cause to stop being so discreet, since a little scandal may prompt the rest of his family to drop their opposition to any change in the status quo. While they get ready to part, we see the window, outside of which a bat is squeaking incessantly. They exit, and Barnabas appears.
Barnabas rummages through Quentin’s desk and finds a book. Beth reenters and catches him. He tells her he came for the book and was planning to leave a note. A smirk on her face, Beth says that it will not be necessary to do so, as she will tell Quentin all about what she has seen.
Beth goes downstairs and meets Quentin in the foyer. Quentin asks what book it was Barnabas took. She says that all she saw of the title was the word “dead.” Evidently Quentin has quite a few books with the word “dead” in the title, because he has to ask where exactly Barnabas found it. She says it was in the desk, and he rushes off to the Old House.
It was the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and Barnabas used it to perform a rite calling on Amun-Ra to cause the spirit of one of Laura’s previous incarnations to appear before him. At that, we cut to the cottage, where the currently alive-ish Laura grows weak and vanishes. Back in the Old House, we see the ghost take shape. Charity sees it too, and runs screaming out the front door. Quentin enters just in time to see the end of Barnabas’ conversation with the phantasmal Laura. The phantom looks at Quentin, screams, and disappears.
On Friday, Laura said that no one knew just how deeply Quentin was obsessed with the occult. His own absurd claim today to “have powers” so great that he could make it worth Laura’s while to leave without her children confirms that he is very far gone in this obsession. So when he sees that Barnabas is not only doing battle with the same adversary whom he is trying to confront, but is also able to conjure up spirits from the vasty deep, we can be confident that Quentin’s hostility to his recently arrived “cousin from England” will soon be evaporating. As Tony Peterson might say, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
In its early months, Dark Shadows was set in contemporary times, and from December 1966 to March 1967 undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins was its first supernatural menace. Now it is a costume drama set in 1897, and another version of Laura is on the show.
Well-meaning time-traveler/ bloodsucking ghoul Barnabas Collins recognized Laura from their acquaintance in the eighteenth century. Barnabas has taken it upon himself to engage Laura in battle, for no apparent reason. The scripts have also been hard to explain. At moments, they have dug deep into the old stories. So today, Laura orders ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi to take a portrait of her and burn it in the fireplace. Magda tells her to burn it herself, and Laura says she cannot. In her first tour of duty on the show, Laura was distressed to find herself depicted in a couple of portraits, which she was relieved to have burned. Late in the episode, a telegram comes from the authorities in Alexandria, Egypt, providing official documentation that Laura died there the year before. This echoes the police reports that kept coming to Collinsport from Phoenix, Arizona, substantiating a story that Laura had died in that city in 1966. And yesterday and today, we see Barnabas and his henchman Sandor on virtually the same set that Laura’s adversaries visited in 1967 when they looked for the tomb of her eighteenth century incarnation, and like them they open that tomb and find the coffin empty.
At other times, they deviate sharply from the old continuity. It was hugely important the first time that Laura’s previous dates of death were 1767 and 1867. Now they’ve changed that first date to 1785. That one is explicable as part of a doomed effort to pretend that actor Jonathan Frid was the age one would expect him to be, considering that he had somehow become a teen idol. Originally, Laura had married into a different prominent family in the Collinsport area with each incarnation. Now she always marries a Collins. That is also easy to explain. Dark Shadows has failed to develop any other prominent families, even as names of people we never see, so if she’s going to marry a rich guy the Collinses are the only game in town.
Another retcon is introduced today that is really hard to make sense of. The main thing about Laura in 1966 and 1967 was that each time she appeared, she had a son, named him David, and when he was about nine years old she incinerated herself with him so that she, but not he, would rise from the ashes as a humanoid Phoenix. In this episode, Barnabas declares that the Laura who died by fire in 1785 “had no children!”
This not only blows up the continuity completely, it also renders Barnabas’ insistence on making an enemy of Laura unintelligible. He has come to the past as part of an effort to prevent curses and hauntings that will make life impossible for everyone on the estate of Collinwood in 1969. The Laura of 1897 is the mother of Jamison Collins, a boy who will become the father of the adults at Collinwood in the 1960s. If Barnabas knew that Laura represented a danger to Jamison, we could understand his motive in undertaking this side-quest, even though his tactics would still be obviously self-defeating. But they kick that explanation away when Barnabas announces that the Laura he knew was childless. It seems they must have made a deliberate decision to deny any rational foundation for Barnabas’ behavior.
It’s true that they have established that Laura represents a danger, and that Barnabas is clearly the chief protagonist. Therefore, we expect the two of them to have a showdown sooner or later, and we might not notice if it isn’t really explained just how the two of them got on the path that leads to the climax. That would explain why they don’t wade into all the details they spent time on at the beginning of 1967. But there is no reason for them to do that. All they need are a few lines here and there affirming that the previous Lauras took their children into the flames with them, and it’s all settled. The decision to retcon David Stockbridge away really is bizarre.
Laura Murdoch Collins, estranged wife of the stuffy Edward, is settling into the cottage on the estate of Collinwood. Broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi is acting as her servant. Laura talks quite openly with Magda about Edward’s rakish brother Quentin. When Quentin was banished from Collinwood the year before, that is to say in 1896, Laura followed him to Alexandria, Egypt. That occasioned her estrangement from Edward.
Laura knows that Quentin uses the cottage for rendezvous with the various women in his life, and has Magda go through the place looking for things of his to box up and send to him. They find a doll and a deck of tarot cards; Laura tells Magda that no one knows how thoroughly Quentin is obsessed with the occult. Magda is an expert tarot reader, and Laura asks her to read the cards for her.
Magda lays out the cards, and they keep indicating death. Laura is initially distressed by this, but brightens at the thought that they might mean that Quentin will soon die. When Magda says that the death to which the cards pertain is one that has already taken place, Laura loses all patience and dashes the cards from the table. We know that Laura is an undead fire witch who periodically incinerates herself and reemerges as a humanoid Phoenix, and so it would seem that she is upset that the cards are confirming Quentin’s story that he saw her burn to death the previous year in Alexandria.
A recently arrived, quite distant cousin of Edward’s, the mysterious Barnabas Collins, comes calling on Laura. Barnabas has come with a present. Laura at first believes that this means that her evening has taken a turn for the better, and tells Barnabas that she is glad to think they might become friends. When she unwraps the present and finds an eighteenth century oil painting that appears to be a portrait of her, she is caught off guard. She at first acknowledges the resemblance, saying that she might have sat for it herself; Barnabas agrees that she might have. When she tries to backtrack and asks Magda if her chin looks like the one in the portrait, Magda replies “They look the same to me.” After Barnabas leaves, Laura orders Magda to put the portrait in a closet.
We know that Barnabas is a vampire, who has traveled back in time to 1897 to prevent Quentin from dying and becoming a ghost who will ruin things for everyone at Collinwood in 1969. We also know that he was acquainted with Laura in the eighteenth century, when he was alive. In the early part of the episode, Magda reproached Barnabas with his carelessness, telling him he must want people to know about him. Showing Laura the portrait would seem to prove that Magda was right. It serves no purpose but to arouse her suspicions. All the more so since Barnabas’ own eighteenth century portrait hangs in the foyer of the great house at Collinwood. He has used it as evidence that he is a descendant of an ancient member of the family, and Laura has apparently accepted it as such. But now that he has confronted her with her own portrait from the same epoch, she has every reason to search for another explanation.
Laura was Dark Shadows‘ first supernatural menace, from December 1966 to March 1967. In those days a lot of details were established about her previous incarnations, many of which they have been retconning away with some violence over the last few episodes. We learned then that in each of her appearances, Laura’s maiden name was Murdoch. It is confirmed today that when Edward met her she was Laura Murdoch. We also learned then that in the eighteenth century Laura Murdoch married into the Stockbridge family, one of the most prominent in the area, and that she and her young son David Stockbridge died (by fire!) in 1767. We saw her tomb in a crypt belonging to the Stockbridges and still maintained, two centuries later, by an old caretaker.
Today, Barnabas and his blood thrall, Magda’s husband Sandor, go to the same set. But it does not represent a freestanding building, nor does it have a staff. It is in the basement of “the old meeting house.” And the stone panel sealing Laura’s tomb is quite different. The one we saw in #154 and #157 read “Here Lyes Buried The Body Of L. Murdoch Stockbridge, Born 1735, Died 1767.” Just the initial L because, as the Caretaker explained repeatedly, “The Stockbridges cared nothing for first names!” But this panel is inscribed “In Memory of Laura Stockbridge Collins, Who died in 1785.” The name “Collins” is because the show has neglected to develop any other elites in the Collinsport area, so if Laura is going to keep coming back and marrying into a leading family, she’s going to have to pick a Collins every time.
The date 1785 is just mystifying. Barnabas said yesterday that he was ten when Laura came along. In November 1968 we flashed back to the year 1795, when he was still human. Actor Jonathan Frid was just about to celebrate his 43rd birthday at that time; if Barnabas is the same age as his player, he would therefore have been born in 1752. That would make him 15 in 1767. That would give him five years to have known Laura before she took her son with her into the flames. It would also be plausible that she would not have been startled when she met Barnabas Wednesday, seeing only the resemblance to the person whom he claims was his ancestor. But if he were born in 1752 and she lived until 1785, she would certainly have realized she was looking at the same person.
It seems that the show really wants us to think that Barnabas was in his twenties in 1795. Of course life was hard back then, but the 43 year old Jonathan Frid was not going to pass for any age much less than his own.
Barnabas orders Sandor to open the wall. In the cottage, Laura can hear the chisel tapping at the stone. Magda can hear nothing. Barnabas orders Sandor to open the coffin; Laura rushes out of the cottage, leaving a bewildered Magda behind. Laura reacted when they messed with her tomb in 1967 as well, so they’ve preserved that much of the continuity, at least.
Well-meaning time traveler/ bloodsucking ghoul Barnabas Collins has met Laura Murdoch Collins in 1897, and has recognized her as the Laura Murdoch Stockbridge he knew when he was a ten year old boy in 1767. The audience knows that she is also the Laura Murdoch Radcliffe of 1867, and the Laura Murdoch Collins who was on Dark Shadows as its first supernatural menace from December 1966 to March 1967. We learned in that period that Laura is an undead blonde fire witch who incinerates herself and a young son of hers named David at intervals of exactly one hundred years so that she- but not the Davids- will rise from the ashes as a humanoid Phoenix.
We have already seen two major retcons of Laura’s story as it was told in 1966-1967. The precise regularity of her one hundred year cycle was stressed heavily in those days; it was not only the central piece of evidence that led the other characters to figure out what was going on and rise up against her, but was also the first instance of Dark Shadows using anniversaries as a way of creating suspense when the supernatural elements of the story meant that the usual patterns of cause and effect did not apply. Laura’s presence in 1897, thirty years off her established cycle, tosses all of that into a cocked hat.
Moreover, her identity as the wife of stuffy Edward Collins and mother of twelve year old Jamison and nine year old Nora Collins is also incompatible with the previous story. The Stockbridges were supposed to have been, in their day, among the most prominent families in the part of Maine where the great estate of Collinwood sits. But the fire in which Laura and David Stockbridge went up in smoke occurred two hundred years before. In the USA, that is a long enough interval for anything to be forgotten. Laura and David Radcliffe met their demise only half as long before, but the Radcliffes do not seem to have been quite as well-known or as close geographically to Collinwood as were the Stockbridges. So we could believe that when the twentieth century Laura Murdoch showed up in Collinsport in the 1940s or early 1950s, no one there would have remembered her namesakes. But we saw in #684 and #685 that there were still elderly people around Collinsport in the late 1960s who remembered 1897 quite well. And Jamison was himself the father of Elizabeth Collins Stoddard and Roger Collins, the adults at Collinwood in the 1960s. It is not plausible that no one would have said anything when in 1956 Roger, the only son of the family that owns the town, married a woman named Laura Murdoch who was the exact double of his grandmother who was also named Laura Murdoch.
The show doubles down on that implausibility today, when Barnabas summons his blood thrall Charity Trask to look at a portrait he has found in the Old House at Collinwood. It shows Laura Stockbridge, and is a perfect match for the Laura they have met. Barnabas says that Laura was the first wife of his uncle Jeremiah, and that he himself was ten years old when she came to Collinwood.
This gives us a Laura who does not marry into various leading families of the region, but into the Collinses over and again. That makes a kind of sense- the show has not developed any other leading families, not even as characters who are only mentioned but never appear. The Collinses now make up the entire local upper class. In #474, permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman called the Collinses “a very inbred family”; I don’t think she meant that in quite the sense which this new version of Laura is giving it, but as they move towards a dramatis personae that is all-Collins all the time there’s no escaping it.
It also represents a reverse retcon. When Barnabas talked about Jeremiah in his first months on the show, he said that when he was a young man Jeremiah was an old one, and that Jeremiah’s beautiful young wife fell in love with him. But when from November 1967 to March 1968 Dark Shadows became a costume drama set in the 1790s, we saw that Barnabas and Jeremiah, though nephew and uncle, were virtually the same age. With Jeremiah marrying Laura when Barnabas was ten, we return to the previous conception of their ages.
Barnabas’ first conversation about Laura today with Charity is interrupted when another undead blonde fire witch turns up. She is Angelique, who in the 1790s turned Barnabas into a vampire in the first place. She introduces herself to Charity as Barnabas’ fianceé, which prompts Charity to run away and go to bed. Angelique then tells Barnabas that he ought to leave Charity alone, because her father, the Rev’d Mr Gregory Trask, can make trouble that will defeat his mission. Barnabas starts to explain how bad Trask is, to which Angelique responds that he has one job and he’d better stick to it if he is to have any hope of success. She tells him that he will have to settle for blood slaves he selects from among the girls at the docks, girls who have nothing going for them “and above all no fathers.”
Charity, asleep in an upstairs bedroom in the great house of Collinwood, has a dream in which she is getting married. She is in fact engaged to marry a man named Tim, but in the dream Angelique tells her that she is not marrying Tim. She is, instead, to be the bride of Death. This is a very old image indeed; one of the main motifs that runs throughout Sophocles’ Antigone is that the heroine, engaged to marry Haemon, her first cousin (both simple and once removed- Antigone is the daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta, so she knows from inbred families) will instead be married to Death itself. At the climax of the dream, Barnabas bares his fangs at Charity.
Charity’s father comes to the great house. He meets Angelique, who identifies herself as Barnabas’ fiancée and charms him. She urges him to see to it that Charity marries Tim as soon as possible, and warns darkly that there are many kinds of flames burning around them.
The mistress of the house, spinster Judith Collins, then enters and explains to Trask that Charity is still in bed. Trask is shocked by this “sloth” (which he pronounces “slowth,”) but Judith explains that Charity is ill. Judith is sure Charity will be fine after a day of rest. Judith tells Trask that she is deeply saddened that his boarding school has burned down. She offers Trask a great deal of money to rebuild it, and the use of a house on the estate as temporary quarters for the school in the meantime. Trask is delighted. When Judith mentions that his wife Minerva had said that his health was poor, Trask says that it is in fact Minerva whose health is poor, and getting worse. The audience knows that Trask is evil, and many will interpret this remark as a sign that he plans to hasten the deterioration of Minerva’s physical condition.
Judith takes Trask to Charity’s bedroom. They are shocked to find her gone. Judith is sure that she wandered off in delirium, but the filthy-minded Trask raves that she must have set out on some errand of grievous sin. He’s right about the sinfulness, though wrong to focus the blame on Charity- she has answered Barnabas’ summons and is with him in the Old House.
Charity comes back to the great house. Her father is ranting at her when she collapses. He looks at her neck, and finds the bite marks. Perhaps Angelique’s warning to Barnabas came too late.
This episode ends with one of the most thrilling moments in all of Dark Shadows.
The show’s first supernatural menace was undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, who was on it from December 1966 to March 1967. Its second was vampire Barnabas Collins, who first appeared in April 1967. Laura herself was presented with many tropes that conventionally mark vampires; for example, they laid great emphasis on the fact that Laura was never seen eating or drinking. And Laura’s story was structured very much like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, with well-meaning governess Vicki taking Mina’s role as the driving force behind the opposition to her. Presumably, if Barnabas had been staked and destroyed as the original plan envisioned, Vicki would have led the fight against him as well, and in #275 driven the stake into his heart. But Barnabas brought the show a new audience, and so Vicki was never called on to go to battle with him. Her character withered and was written out, and he replaced her as its chief protagonist.
In early 1967, Vicki learned that Laura had appeared at least twice before, and had died in strikingly similar ways each time. In 1767, Laura Murdoch Stockbridge was burned to death with her young son David; in 1867, Laura Murdoch Radcliffe was burned to death with her young son David; and in 1967, Vicki found Laura Murdoch Collins beckoning her young son David to join her in the flames consuming a wooden building. At the last second, Vicki broke through David’s trance and he ran to her, escaping the flames.
In November 1967, the show established that Barnabas lived on the great estate of Collinwood as a human in 1795, and that he became a vampire as a result of the tragic events of that year. If Barnabas were the same age in 1795 that Jonathan Frid was in 1967, he would have been born late in 1752, meaning that he would have been a teenager when Laura Murdoch Stockbridge and little David Stockbridge went up in smoke. The Stockbridges were a very wealthy family, so they would likely have been on familiar terms with Barnabas and the other rich Collinses of Collinsport, and the deaths of Laura and David would have been one of the major events in the area in those days. So longtime viewers have been wondering ever since whether Barnabas knew Laura, and if so what he knew about her.
Now Barnabas has traveled back in time to the year 1897, and there he meets another incarnation of Laura. He is thunderstruck at the sight of her. In her bland, enigmatic way, she expresses curiosity about his reaction, and he collects himself sufficiently to make some flattering remarks about her beauty. As soon as he is alone with his blood thrall, Miss Charity Trask, he declares that Laura has been dead for over a hundred years. So has he, but apparently when a woman rises from the dead to prey on the living that’s different, somehow. We saw this same old double standard a couple of weeks ago, when libertine Quentin Collins expressed shock at Laura’s return from the dead, when he himself had died and been a zombie just the week before.
If Laura did know Barnabas when she was as she is now and he was an adolescent, it is no wonder she does not seem to recognize him. She knows that there is a Barnabas Collins on the estate, and has heard that he is a descendant of the eighteenth century bearer of the same name. She would expect him to resemble the boy she knew, but would not necessarily know what that boy looked like when he was in his forties.
This is the first time we’ve seen Charity since Barnabas bit her in #727. She lives in the town of Rockport, which in the 1960s was far enough away from Collinwood that in #521 it was worthy of note that you could dial telephone numbers there directly. In 1897, when automobiles were rare and roads weren’t made for the few that did exist, a long-distance relationship between vampire and blood thrall would seem quite impractical. Still, in #732 we saw a character make two round trips between Rockport and Collinwood in a single evening, so I suppose it could be managed.
Barnabas’ recognition of Laura is a fitting conclusion to a fine episode. Much of it is devoted to a three-cornered confrontation between Laura, her twelve year old son Jamison Collins, and her brother-in-law/ ex-lover/ mortal enemy, Quentin. Danny Horn analyzes this in his post about the episode at Dark Shadows Every Day. I recommend that post highly. All I would add is that as it plays out today, the confrontation makes me suspect that the writers of the show may have done more planning than Danny usually credits them with. Jamison is the only person Quentin loves, and so far we have seen that Jamison loves Quentin back. When he learns that Quentin is his mother’s foe, Jamison turns against Quentin. Barnabas traveled back in time after Quentin’s ghost had made life impossible for everyone in 1969. The evil of Quentin’s spirit fell heaviest on David Collins, whom Quentin had possessed, turned into another version of Jamison, and was in the process of killing. Nothing yet has explained why Quentin’s ghost would focus its malignity on the image of Jamison. Actress Diana Millay used to claim that Laura was added to the 1897 segment at the last minute because she told Dan Curtis she wanted to work, but Millay famously enjoyed testing the credulity of Dark Shadows fans with outlandish remarks. I wonder if a falling-out between Quentin and Jamison over Laura was in the flimsies all along.
Charity makes her first entrance in the great house of Collinwood. Quentin is apologizing to her for some boorish behavior when he realizes she hasn’t been listening to him at all. She is completely absorbed in the eighteenth century portrait of Barnabas that hangs in the foyer. She excuses herself and wafts out the front door.
In Barnabas’ house, Charity says that he makes her feel beautiful, and that she wants to see herself in a mirror. Barnabas is a bit sheepish about the particulars of vampirism, and so he changes the subject. We cut from this exchange to Laura’s room in the great house, where she is with a servant named Dirk whom she has enthralled to serve as a source of body heat. That scene opens with a shot in a mirror, making the point that Laura’s relationship with Dirk is a reflection of Barnabas’ relationship with Charity. Earlier, there had been a clumsy attempt at an artsy shot of Laura reflected in Quentin’s sherry glass. That does show us that Laura casts a reflection and that her relationship with Quentin has been affected by his drinking, but it calls too much attention to itself to do much more than that.
The portrait in the foyer is hugely important to Barnabas. It made its debut on the show in #204, the day before his name was first mentioned and more than a week before he himself premiered. His thralls stare at it and receive his commands through it. He himself uses it as a passport, appealing to his resemblance to it as proof that he is a descendant of its subject and therefore a member of the Collins family. Today, Barnabas is surprised when Charity comes to his house; he wasn’t transmitting a message through the portrait summoning her. Instead, it was functioning as another mirror, in which Charity, who has become a part of Barnabas, could see the motivating force within her own personality.
Dirk is played by Roger Davis, a most unappealing actor. At one point he makes this face while Dirk is involved in some kind of mumbo-jumbo:
At one point today, Quentin tells Jamison that he shouldn’t be afraid of telling the servants what to do, since after all he will someday be the master of Collinwood. Jamison takes this altogether too much to heart, and spends the rest of the episode ordering everyone around. David Henesy is a good enough actor to extract the comic value from this. For example, when he turns to Quentin, says “I’ll talk to you later!,” and keeps walking, we laughed out loud.
Laura Collins is the estranged wife of stuffy Edward and the mortal enemy of Edward’s brother, libertine Quentin. Only Quentin knows that Laura is an undead fire witch. He has found the Egyptian urn housing the magic flame that gives life to Laura, and has extinguished the flame.
In the great house of Collinwood, Quentin and Edward’s spinster sister Judith notices that Laura has taken ill. Judith goes off to order a servant to prepare a hot cup of tea for Laura, and is alarmed when she returns to the drawing room and finds that Laura has gone. Quentin enters, and Judith asks him if he saw Laura. Judith explains that Laura is ill, and is appalled at Quentin’s indifference.
Laura has gone to the gazebo on the grounds, where she hid her urn under an armillary sphere. She finds that the urn is gone. Surly groundskeeper Dirk Wilkins chances upon her; she clutches at him. He is shocked at how cold she is, and is afraid of how the scene would be interpreted if anyone saw them in each others’ arms.
Dirk takes Laura back to the great house. Quentin insists on walking her upstairs to her bedroom. While she lies in bed, he taunts her with her doom, reminding her that she had treated him the same way a few nights ago when she thought he was dying. Quentin’s behavior is really abominable in this scene, but as David Selby plays him he keeps the audience’s affection. He visibly thinks about each line before he says it, so that we can really believe he is finding his way through what is after all a bizarre situation and is deciding what to say to Laura. He is relaxed and easy in his physical movement, and modulates his delivery subtly in response to every cue.
After Quentin leaves, Laura prays to the gods of ancient Egypt to take possession of Dirk and send him to her room. They oblige; Dirk finds himself standing by the fire in the drawing room and speaking a few words of old Egyptian, then heads upstairs.
Dirk and Laura take hold of each other while she is in bed. There are a few moments of dissonance when Diana Millay has to reposition herself to get Roger Davis’ hands onto more broadcast standards-friendly parts of her body while Laura insists Dirk hold her ever closer and he protests he must not, but it isn’t as bad as we might expect considering Mr Davis’ usual practice of assaulting his female scene partners. They speak each line more rapidly and more breathily than the one before. Mr Davis has both feet on the floor, but the result is still the most sex-like encounter we have seen so far on Dark Shadows.
Mr Davis’ performance is the opposite of Mr Selby’s. He is as stiff as Mr Selby is relaxed, holding himself rigidly still even when he is grappling with Diana Millay in bed. He tends to take a deep breath and deliver each speech as a single exhalation, making it impossible for him to show thought or adjust his approach while speaking. So even though today’s action shows us Quentin at his most despicable and Dirk at his most innocent, our loyalties are firmly with Quentin.
Joan Bennett famously said that Mr Davis was show business’ answer to the question “What would Henry Fonda have been like if he had had no talent?” Not only does his face resemble Fonda’s, but by his own admission he often mimicked Fonda while acting. There is nothing wrong with mimicry- John Gielgud was as good an actor as any, and he used to say that from the time he first saw Claude Rains in a play, his acting style consisted of imitating Claude Rains. He also said that imitating Rains was a great improvement over his previous style, which was imitating Noel Coward. Mr Davis’ readings of his one-line speeches today are distinctly Fonda-like, and the longer speeches may also have been if he had been breathing normally while delivering them. Today Mr Selby also sounds very much like the actor he tends to mimic, Joseph Cotten. I suspect Cotten would have been more flattered than Fonda had the two of them watched this episode!
In this episode, libertine Quentin Collins teams up with broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi to find an Egyptian urn belonging to Quentin’s enemy, undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. Quentin has learned that the urn contains a magic fire, and that if the fire goes out Laura will die.
Quentin and Magda find the urn hidden under an armillary sphere near the gazebo on the grounds of the estate of Collinwood. Quentin takes the lid off the sphere, and the flame jumps out. He then takes some sand from a decorative pot near the gazebo and starts heaping it on the flame. If the flame keeps burning when the lid is on the urn, you’d think only magic could put it out. Then again, it is Collinwood- maybe they have magic sand around. The flame does fade from view, and we cut to a scene of Laura losing her strength.
In a movie that runs two hours or less, the characters can be frantically absorbed in a search for any old thing. Alfred Hitchcock famously made that point when he called the objects of these searches “MacGuffins.”
But when a show that fills a thirty minute time slot five days a week and a storyline can stretch on for months, a MacGuffin has to represent something important about a character or a relationship between characters. So when, in the early days of the show, strange and troubled boy David Collins tried to kill his father Roger by sabotaging his car, it was fitting that the resulting plot spent a lot of time on the bleeder valve David removed from the car’s braking system. David is interested in mechanical work, and in his hostility to his son Roger refuses to share that interest or do anything to support it.
It was less successful when Roger was suspected of murder and the piece of evidence he spent several weeks obsessing over was a filigreed fountain pen belonging to his friend-turned-nemesis Burke Devlin. There was some obvious sexual symbolism in the question of where Burke’s pen is, and that symbolism did focus our attention on the question of what exactly Burke and Roger’s relationship was like before they turned against each other. Had writers Art Wallace and Francis Swann stayed with the show, they might have used that question to make the pen a powerfully evocative image. But Ron Sproat and Malcolm Marmorstein took over the writing duties as the fountain pen story was getting started. Sproat was gay himself, and perhaps for that reason made a point of avoiding any suggestion of homoeroticism in his work. Marmorstein was just clueless. In their hands, the pen was just a pen, and the 21 episodes devoted to the search for it were not among the great artistic achievements in the history of television.
The urn does remind us that Laura is supposed to have a mystical connection to Egypt, which is more meaning than Sproat dared or Marmorstein could attach to Burke’s pen. But her relationship to that country is not central to anything we see, as David’s relationship to his father was central to what we saw in the early days. So as metonymy for Laura and Egypt it is marginally more exciting than the pen was as a metonymy for Roger and Burke, but significantly less exciting than was the bleeder valve as a metonymy for David and Roger.
At the beginning of the episode, we have one of the most preposterously bad special effects we’ve seen so far, which is saying a lot. Teacher Tim Shaw is rescuing Laura’s daughter Nora from a burning school building. The school as seen in the green screen is hilariously unconvincing.
The highlight of today’s episode is a confrontation between two of Dark Shadows‘ most effective villains.
Laura Murdoch Collins (Diana Millay) was on Dark Shadows from December 1966 to March 1967, when the show took place in a contemporary setting. She emerged from the supernatural back-world behind the action, and at first she was as vague and indefinite as are the beings who lurk out of our sight there. Eventually she took on a forceful enough personality that Diana Millay could display her gift for dry comedy, but that personality was only a mask that Laura wore. The real Laura was something entirely different, unreachable, unknowable. The visible Laura marks the boundary between the world we can hope to understand and one where humans would find no points of reference, no standards of comparison. As such, she represents the danger that we might lose our way and find ourselves in a place where our minds will be useless to us. That is to say, she inspired the fear that comes from a well-told ghost story.
Now the dramatic date is 1897, and another iteration of Laura is the mother of twelve year old Jamison and nine year old Nora. Laura’s estranged husband, the stuffy Edward Collins, and Edward’s sister, spinster Judith, have sent Jamsion and Nora to Worthington Hall, a boarding school which doubles as a particularly cruel cult. Laura’s plans for Nora and Jamison require them to be home on the estate of Collinwood, and so she sets out to release them from Worthington Hall.
The headmaster/ cult leader of Worthington Hall is the vile Gregory Trask (Jerry Lacy.) Trask is at the opposite pole from Laura. She is terrifying because we can never understand her or the realm whose existence she implies; he is an overpoweringly oppressive presence because he is so thoroughly comprehensible. It is perfectly obvious what Trask has done, what he plans to do next, and why he wants to do it, but knowing all that is of absolutely no use in stopping him.
In today’s opening scene, Trask confronted fugitive teacher Rachel Drummond, whom he is extorting into coming back to work at Worthington Hall. He kept sidling up to Rachel and touching her, telling her that perhaps the two of them were destined to change each other. He could not make it clearer that he wants to exploit his power over Rachel to coerce her, not only into returning to her old job, but into a sexual relationship.
Trask has been in a position of authority over Rachel since she was a small child, suggesting that his unrelentingly punitive approach to his students and the undisguised joy he takes in being cruel to them are also sexual in their origin. Rachel even used the word “sadist” to describe Trask the other day, a word coined only in 1892. Someone using it in 1897 would certainly have seen it in its original clinical context, and the neurotic intellectual Rachel undoubtedly understood it very well in its technical sense.
We see Laura on a dark set. She looks at a candelabra. She points at its three candles, one by one. As she points at each candle, it lights. Thus first time viewers learn that Laura is a supernatural being with a relationship to fire.
At Worthington Hall, Nora wanders into a room where a fireplace is alight. Nora can hear her mother’s voice urging her to look into the flames, but cannot see her. She is afraid until she looks into the flames and sees Laura’s face. Nora begins to enter a deep trance. Before she can, a teacher finds her and interrupts her. We cut back to Laura, who is pleading with Nora not to look away from the fire. Nora does, and the candles on Laura’s candelabra go out.
We see Trask in his study, browsing through a Bible. He returns that to his bookshelf and finds more congenial reading. He picks up a ledger and brightens. We see its cover, on which is taped a label reading “PUNISHMENT BOOK.” Trask smiles blissfully and sits down to examine its contents.
A knock comes at the door, pulling Trask out of his sun-kissed dream of past cruelties. Irritated, he demands to know who it is, but receives no answer. When the knocking continues, he opens the door and sees Laura.
LAURA: Are there no servants at Worthington Hall? I’m not accustomed to letting myself in.
Longtime viewers will remember that when Laura was first on the show, they made a big deal out of the fact that she never ate or drank. So much so that they had the next uncanny menace, Barnabas Collins, drink a cup of coffee in #221. Even though Barnabas was a vampire and Laura was not, they had used up the traditional indicator of vampirism. non-consumption of food or drink, on Laura. Laura’s inability to open the door herself may be another borrowing from the same stock of imagery, from the idea that the vampire cannot cross a threshold without being invited.
TRASK: Who are you?
LAURA: I am Laura Collins and I come for my children. You are Mr. Trask, of course.
TRASK: Reverend Trask!
LAURA: Anyone can call themselves anything. I knew a woman in Brooklyn, once. Insisted she was a countess.
This is an inside joke. There was quite a well-known fashion correspondent-turned-executive in Brooklyn in 1969 named Mabel Wilson Gross. Mrs Gross’ first husband was a Danish nobleman named Count Carl Adam von Moltke, known to his friends as “Bobby.” Mrs Gross was known professionally as “Countess Mab Moltke.” She and “Bobby” were the parents of Alexandra Moltke Isles, who appeared in 333 episodes of Dark Shadows as well-meaning governess Vicki. I don’t believe Mrs Isles has ever used the title “Countess” herself, though under the laws of Denmark she would have the right to do so. Since it was Vicki who led the battle against Laura in 1967, a remark from Laura twitting Mrs Isles and her family might raise quite a laugh from longtime viewers who get the reference.
LAURA: (Goes to Trask’s desk and leafs through the “Punishment Book.”) But you are Trask. Yes, there’s no doubt about that.
TRASK: But you could be anyone as far as I’m concerned, anyone at all. I have too much respect for the defenseless souls in my charge.
LAURA: Oh, please, don’t be dreary.
TRASK: Dreary, Madam?
LAURA: Surely you know the word. Simply have my children brought down here, if there’s anyone to bring them.
TRASK: And how am I to know that you are their mother?
LAURA: Oh, what a trusting man you are.
TRASK: There is no question of the children leaving the school.
LAURA: Jamison possibly. Nora will leave here tonight. I’m willing to take them one at a time.
TRASK: As far as I know, Madam, their mother is away.
LAURA: You should keep more in touch.
TRASK: My wife returned from Collinwood this afternoon. She made no mention of your return.
LAURA: Hmm. How odd. I thought her a great gossip.
TRASK: Minerva? Madam.
That Minerva appeared to be “a great gossip” will also amuse longtime viewers. She is played by Clarice Blackburn, who in the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s played housekeeper Mrs Johnson. After a brief period in which Mrs Johnson was supposed to be a spy planted in the house by an enemy of the Collins family, she settled into the role of a benevolent but excitable woman whose chief function was to blab everything she knew to the character likeliest to use the information to advance the plot.
LAURA: Now, will you have Nora sent down.
TRASK: I will not. Not without proper orders from Miss Judith Collins or Mr. Edward Collins. I shall call Collinwood and verify your strange appearance.
LAURA: Do.
(TRASK picks up the telephone receiver. Shows pain and drops it.)
LAURA: What’s wrong, Mr. Trask?
TRASK: It burned my hand.
LAURA: I’ve always thought the telephone an instrument of the devil, haven’t you?
TRASK: I have not!
Many times on Dark Shadows, as recently as this week, we have seen men forcibly intervene to stop a woman from talking on the telephone. I believe this is the first time we have seen a woman turn the tables and do this to a man.
TRASK: What a ridiculous conversation. I don’t know what I could have been thinking of to call Mr. Edward Collins. We have rules at Worthington Hall, Madam.
LAURA: Ah, rules are made to be broken.
TRASK: Not here. The children are asleep. They shall remain asleep. We do not encourage visits even from members of the immediate family unless of course it’s an emergency.
LAURA: Then you won’t reconsider?
TRASK: No.
LAURA: Not wise. Not wise at all.
TRASK: Are you threatening me?
LAURA: My children will not spend one more night in this school.
Laura remains perfectly calm throughout this conversation. Even her closing threat is delivered in a light tone, with an easy smile. Trask is agitated at the outset, and becomes ever more so as he realizes he cannot intimidate Laura. Since Diana Millay and Jerry Lacy are two of the most capable comic actors on Dark Shadows, the result is hilarious.
We first saw the effect of Laura’s imperturbability on an earnest interlocutor in #183 and #184, when she confronted a profoundly different character. In those installments, visiting parapsychologist Peter Guthrie called on Laura at the same cottage where she is staying in 1897. He introduced a new word to Dark Shadows‘ lexicon when he told her that he had concluded that she was “The Undead.” He said that he knew of her evil intentions, and said that if she abandoned them and turned to good, he would make every effort to help her live a different kind of life. Guthrie’s offer meant exactly nothing to Laura, and she responded to it with the same sardonic indifference Trask elicits from her today. Her next act was to cast a spell that caused Guthrie to crash his car and die in a ball of flame.
Trask gets off easier. Laura just sets his school on fire. The closing shot shows Nora apparently surrounded by flames. Laura does not want to burn Nora to death, at least not yet, but she is not one of your more detail-oriented otherworldly menaces. It will not surprise longtime viewers that she is blithely assuming that her children will somehow escape alive from the blaze she has started.
Until November 1967, Dark Shadows was set in contemporary times. So when #283 was shown in July 1967, we could assume that its dramatic date more or less matched its broadcast date.
In that one, psychiatrist Julia Hoffman (Grayson Hall) brought her patient Maggie Evans (Kathryn Leigh Scott) to the old cemetery north of the village of Collinsport, Maine. When Maggie reacted to one or another of the sights of the cemetery with a particularly strong emotion, Julia pressed closer to it. This technique led the two women to a mausoleum. Once inside the mausoleum, Maggie had the strongest reaction of all. Julia was trying to break through Maggie’s amnesia. She did not yet know that vampire Barnabas Collins had held Maggie prisoner, and that there was a secret room hidden in the mausoleum where he once tortured her.
Now, the dramatic date is 1897. Broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi (Grayson Hall) brings neurotic intellectual Rachel Drummond (Kathryn Leigh Scott) to the old cemetery north of the village of Collinsport, Maine. Rachel’s position as governess in the great house on the estate of Collinwood has been eliminated, and she is terrified that she will have to return to Worthington Hall, a hideously abusive school where she was forced to spend a miserable childhood as a pupil and an equally miserable first part of adulthood as a teacher. The headmaster of Worthington Hall, the evil Gregory Trask, is demanding Rachel return to his school-cum-cult, extorting her with threats of false criminal charges against her and her one friend from the school, fellow student-turned-teacher Tim Shaw. Magda takes Rachel to the same mausoleum we saw in #283, because she knows about the secret room and has decided it is the perfect place for Rachel to hide from Trask.
Meanwhile, Tim is on the job at the school, shaking his head at Rachel’s former charge, twelve year old Jamison Collins. Tim is played by Don Briscoe, who when the show was set in 1968 and 1969 played cursed brothers Tom and Chris Jennings. The Jenningses were supposed to be bad-boy sex symbols, and Briscoe often seemed stiff and uncomfortable when he had to take his shirt off or be aggressive. But as a beaten man who takes refuge from his guilt in pomposity, he’s just terrific. They found the perfect part for him.
On Dark Shadows Before I Die, Christine Scoleri says that she finds Tim Shaw the fretful schoolteacher to be “Totally hot!” Evidently Don Briscoe didn’t have to play a troubled bad boy to be a sex symbol for some people.
Jamison hasn’t done his schoolwork, and Tim is keeping him after class. Trask enters, and asks why Jamison is in detention. Tim claims that Jamison is not being punished, but that the two of them are just talking. Trask is displeased with that hint of friendliness, and before long he finds a reason to lock Jamison in a storage closet. Jamison objects to this confinement, prompting Trask to gleefully declare that “there are worse punishments! Much worse!” When Jamison lets himself out of the closet, he finds Trask waiting for him, grinning. Trask says that they will spend the day together tomorrow, and that in the course of their time together he will ordain Jamison’s further punishment.
Trask sends Tim to Collinwood to fetch Rachel. He makes a show of resistance before going. At first he has trouble finding her; he goes back to the school and reports to Trask that he has failed. Trask refuses to accept this, and sends him back. Tim meets Magda and persuades her that he is Rachel’s friend. She leads him to the secret room, and leaves him alone with Rachel. When Rachel and Tim leave the room, Trask is waiting for them.
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