Vampire Barnabas Collins has been exposed and is in hiding. Most of those who would destroy him are as evil as he is, and none is as much fun to watch, so we’re on his side.
Stuffy Edward Collins catches Barnabas’ blood thrall Charity Trask in the basement of the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. Barnabas sent her there to fetch some soil from his original grave which he will use to make a new coffin habitable. Edward asks Charity what she is doing in the basement; she lies and claims that she can’t remember. This is an interesting moment for fans of Dark Shadows. Nancy Barrett’s acting style is uninhibited and often larger-than-life; one suspects that she was often accused of overacting. But Charity really does overact. In the contrast between her one-dimensional, exaggerated manner when she feigns amnesia and Miss Barrett’s own very noisy but highly textured performances, we see the definitive refutation of any such charge.
Charity got into the basement through a tunnel that connects the beach below Widows’ Hill to a prison cell in the basement of the Old House. In #260, set in 1967, we saw that the tunnel was in place when Barnabas and his little sister Sarah were living beings in the eighteenth century, that Sarah was aware of the tunnel, and that their father Joshua forbade her to tell Barnabas about it. Sarah’s ghost told Barnabas’ victim Maggie Evans how to escape through the tunnel. When Barnabas pursued her through it, we could see from his reaction that he was seeing the tunnel for the first time. The other Collinses of the 1960s were unaware of the existence even of the cell, let alone of the tunnel.
Now it is 1897, and when Charity mentions the tunnel to Edward he impatiently responds that he knows all about the tunnel. His tone suggests that he would expect Charity to know that he knows about it; evidently it is no secret among the residents of Collinwood. Since Edward’s twelve year old son Jamison is one of those residents, and Jamison’s daughter Liz and son Roger will be the adults at Collinwood in the 1960s, one wonders how that knowledge was lost in the seventy years separating this time-travel story from the principal time frame.
In the last scene, Barnabas is in Charity’s bedroom, about to chow down on her bloodstream. We pan from a two-shot to a closeup of Charity. She gives a thirty five second speech about how it isn’t safe for him to stay long, since her father knows that she is under Barnabas’ power and is lying in wait for him. Thirty five seconds is evidently how long it took for Jonathan Frid to put in Barnabas’ fangs, because when we pan back to him they are showing and he is ready to bite. At that moment, Jamison’s nine year old sister Nora walks in and reacts with horror to the sight of Barnabas with his mouth on Charity’s neck.
Dark Shadows Commentary 