From March until July 1970, Dark Shadows was set in a universe other than the one where the action had taken place up to that point. In that universe, which the show insists on calling “Parallel Time,” the counterparts of heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard and woebegone lowlife Willie Loomis were a married couple. That other Will Loomis was a bestselling but hard-drinking author who had squandered his earnings, and Carolyn Loomis was a poor relation of the master of the great house of Collinwood. They bickered incessantly, in an adaptation of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? that, in the hands of John Karlen and Nancy Barrett, sometimes seemed to rival Edward Albee’s original.
We’ve been back in the original continuity for five weeks now. The Carolyn we have known from the first week of the show is back, but she is half mad, intermittently possessed by a ghost known as Leticia Faye. Willie is helping time travelers Barnabas Collins and Julia Hoffman in their efforts to battle two distinct supernatural menaces, one consisting of a group of ghosts including Leticia, the other a vampire whose identity they have not discerned but whom they know to be feeding on governess Maggie Evans. Carolyn and Willie have their first scene together today since the return from Parallel Time. It is infused with the energy Karlen and Miss Barrett brought to their versions of Albee’s George and Martha. Karlen has some scenes alone where he wanders around and shouts in the general direction of a microphone; those don’t work at all. But when he has Miss Barrett to anchor him, he’s terrific and so is she. When she addresses him as “Willie Loomis!,” we are, for one lovely moment, right back in Loomis House.
Carolyn gives Willie a riddle and tells her that unless he’s too stupid to solve it, it will lead him to the missing governess: “Where the north woods path is narrow, you’ll be at sixes and sevens, but look for the H and follow the arrow, that points to Maggie Evans.” That riddle reminds longtime viewers how far the show has come in the last three years. The last time Maggie was the victim of a vampire, it was the summer of 1967 and the ghoul was Barnabas. The ghost of Barnabas’ little sister Sarah appeared to Maggie in the cell where he and his blood thrall Willie were keeping her and gave her a riddle which she solved, finding an escape route and avoiding the death Barnabas had planned for her. Now Maggie is helpless, and Willie and Barnabas are the good-ish guys. This riddle will enable Willie to come to her rescue.
Willie goes to the narrow part of the path through the north woods. He shines a flashlight directly into the camera, a sure sign that we are watching Dark Shadows. Willie finds himself in a graveyard. He notices a tombstone inscribed with the name of Harrow. Subtracting the H, what’s left is “arrow.” He keeps moving his eyes rightward beyond the edge of the stone and sees the door of a mausoleum. He goes inside and finds Maggie on the floor, beside an empty coffin. He infers that the empty coffin must be where the vampire rests during the day.
Willie takes Maggie back to her room at Collinwood and confers with Julia and Barnabas. Barnabas decrees that Willie and Julia should go to the mausoleum during the day and stake the vampire. When they do, they are uneasy to find that no one is guarding the coffin. The episode ends with Julia’s expression of shock when she sees inside the coffin.
Dark Shadows Commentary 