A disruption in the very nature of time and space has thrust vampire Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman into the year 1995, where the great house of Collinwood is in ruins and everyone is annoyed with them.
Yesterday, Julia and Barnabas were poking around inside the great house against the express instructions of its owner, Carolyn Fredericks, as conveyed earlier in the evening by the sheriff when he arrested them for trespassing. A heavy bust fell from the railing on the top of the foyer stairs, narrowly missing Julia. She and Barnabas fled the house. They looked back, and saw a young man in nineteenth century garb glaring at them from a window.
Today, Barnabas and Julia are in the parlor of the Old House on the estate. She tells him that when she saw the man in the window she was overcome by a powerful sensation. “It was the very essence of evil! I felt evil all around me. I was trapped by it!” Regular viewers may have thought Julia would be used to that by now, but apparently not. “It made me aware of something deep inside me that I don’t even understand — as though, with that one look, he could concentrate every grain of evil I have in my nature! Make it grow, and grow…” She asks Barnabas if he felt the same thing, and he says he didn’t, not at all. He concedes that he is an inhuman abomination from beyond the grave, so maybe he’s immune to that kind of thing.
Meanwhile, Carolyn is at home in the old shack by Finley’s Cove, accompanied by Mrs Johnson, who was the housekeeper at Collinwood in the late 1960s. Carolyn is brushing her hair and smiling. She reminisces about when she was a little girl and Mrs Johnson used to brush her hair. Mrs Johnson is not shy then or later about contradicting anything Carolyn says that is not so, but does not deny that she did that. So the audience is supposed to believe it. Some say this is a retcon, since Mrs Johnson did not join the staff at Collinwood until 1966, when Carolyn was fully grown. But in a comment on Danny Horn’s post about the episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day, I expounded a theory as to how it might be true:
In the early episodes, Carolyn talks about having gone to school in town. How did she get there?
She can’t have walked; it was miles away, much of it along a winding road with several blind curves. Her mother never left the grounds during those years, she couldn’t have driven her. Roger was living in Augusta with Laura.
(I should expand on this point. Roger says that when Carolyn was born, he was away at boarding school. So he would still have been in college when his niece first became a pupil at Collinsport Elementary. He then busied himself squandering his inheritance, a process which included the ten years between his marriage to Laura and his return to Collinwood. So that doesn’t leave any time for him to have looked after his “Kitten” when she was little.)
The only servant was Matthew. Matthew and Carolyn don’t seem at all close; it doesn’t seem likely that he drove her to school every morning. If a school bus came up the hill to Collinwood day after day, the kids who rode it couldn’t have maintained the attitude Carolyn describes, whispering behind her back about her living with the witch in the haunted house. Sooner or later they’d have started talking to her face to face about it.
Carolyn also talks about Bill Malloy being more like a father to her than any other man, and the two of them do have a cozy relationship. Carolyn is also very quick to fall in with Mrs Johnson when Burke pitches the idea of her joining the household staff at Collinwood. So I think we have to conclude that Bill Malloy and his housekeeper were in charge of getting Carolyn to school in the mornings. Malloy was on the fishing boats, so that would require an early start to the day. There were probably many days when little Carolyn was still in her pajamas when she got to the Malloy house. On those days, Mrs Johnson brushed her hair while the water came to a boil for breakfast.
Comment left by “Acilius,” 27 January 2021, on Danny Horn, “Episode 1064: Here Comes the Hotstepper,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 20 August 2017.
Carolyn seems to be a crazy lady these days. Yesterday, we saw that much of this is an act, but in her scene with Mrs Johnson we see that it is an act she puts on even when she is alone with someone she trusts. It allows her to smile and laugh and be happy even when she is surrounded by the residue of an unimaginable catastrophe.
Carolyn tells Mrs Johnson that she will be going to the great house of Collinwood to get ready to host a picnic at the gazebo, which she pronounces “ga-ZAY-bo” in a bit of Collinsport English that we’ve been hearing intermittently since Lara Parker invented it in the summer of 1968. Mrs Johnson reacts with horror, saying that no one can go to the devil-haunted wreckage of Collinwood, but Carolyn laughs off her objections. Carolyn shows a picture of a picnic they had at the ga-ZAY-bo in 1970, the last year Collinwood was habitable. Mrs Johnson spots a figure in the background and declares that was “the first time we saw him.” Carolyn gets upset and tears up the picture.
Barnabas had insisted to Julia that the man they saw at the window may not be the only supernatural entity operating within the great house, and Carolyn seems to confirm that he is right. She does not want to hear Mrs Johnson referring to him, nor does she want to have a picture of him. But she happily says that she is going to the great house tonight with a present, because it is his birthday. Apparently him and his refer to different beings, each of which inheres in the haunting. One wonders how much of supernaturalism would dissolve if people would just use proper names instead of pronouns.
Julia and Barnabas barge into Carolyn’s house. Carolyn tells them to get out, which they refuse to do. They badger her with the story of what happened when they were illegally roaming around in her other house, and Mrs Johnson runs out. Eventually Carolyn resumes her crazy lady demeanor. Barnabas and Julia give up and leave, and for a moment we wonder if they are on their way to let themselves into some other property of Carolyn’s.
Julia and Barnabas go back to the Old House. They find that Mrs Johnson is waiting for them there. They tell her that they are time travelers, and that if she will tell them what happened they might be able to go back and prevent it. She is dubious about this claim, but starts telling the story anyway. She casts her mind back to the summer of 1970. “It all began when the days were so beautiful, you couldn’t help but be happy. There was a spirit of joy at Collinwood; there was a feeling that hadn’t been there in a long time. There was so much love among all of us at that time…” This would be the period that began immediately after Barnabas and Julia left.
Mrs Johnson says that all of the beauty and joy and love and other things you might experience when you don’t have a vampire and a mad scientist around your estate came to an end one quiet night. She seems to be on the point of saying something important when she looks at the window of the parlor and sees the glaring young man. She breaks off, screams that she won’t tell, and runs out into the night. Julia tells Barnabas she felt the evil presence, and that the ghost was there. They go out to look for Mrs Johnson.
The ghost catches up to Mrs Johnson first. He touches her shoulder, and she dies. When Barnabas and Julia find Mrs Johnson, she is sitting on the ground, her back against a tree, her eyes open. This was the same posture in which Clarice Blackburn’s character Abigail Collins was found when we saw her corpse in #432. That image was a brief shocker in the last couple of seconds of the episode; this time the camera zooms in on Blackburn’s face and pans across it, allowing her to show that an outstanding actress can give a powerful performance even when she is altogether motionless.
Carolyn happens by. Julia and Barnabas hide. Carolyn thinks Mrs Johnson is alive and chatters to her. As the truth begins to dawn, Carolyn’s alarm mounts. Finally Barnabas and Julia emerge from the shadows. Carolyn accuses them of killing Mrs Johnson. They deny their guilt. Carolyn is unconvinced, and indeed we cannot help but think that since Mrs Johnson lived through the 25 years of their absence and turned up dead so shortly after they returned, Julia and Barnabas cannot be exactly innocent.
Barnabas and Julia follow Carolyn into the great house. Julia wonders what Mrs Johnson could have meant by “the children’s old room.” This is a blooper on Grayson Hall’s part- Mrs Johnson mentioned “the room the children called The Playroom.” Julia and Barnabas hear music playing, and follow it to a room upstairs. Barnabas looks at the doorway and remarks that the room was never there when he knew the house. The shot is framed at such a severe Dutch angle that we can tell something isn’t on the level.
They hear Carolyn inside, talking and laughing with at least one other person. Since their whole philosophy of life now seems to be making themselves as obnoxious as possible to Carolyn, they let themselves in.
Dark Shadows Commentary 