Overbearing undertaker Lamar Trask is on a mission to find out what happened to his late father, fanatical witchfinder the Rev’d Mr Trask. Trask was last seen entering the gates of the estate of Collinwood in the 1790s. Lamar is pretty sure that he was murdered by Barnabas Collins and that his remains are in the Old House on the grounds of Collinwood.
Lamar is correct on these points. There is a Barnabas Collins staying at the Old House now; he has identified himself as the son of the Barnabas who was there in the late eighteenth century and who left for England. Unknown to Lamar or the others who live on and around Collinwood in 1840, he is in fact the same person, and never went to England. A witch turned him into a vampire in 1796, and he was sealed in a coffin in the old cemetery north of town after he had taken many victims. He was released to prey upon the living in 1967. Now, Barnabas and his friend Julia Hoffman have traveled back in time from 1970 in hopes of preventing a disaster that will befall Collinwood in that year as the result of events in the current year, 1840.
Lamar is in a mansion near Collinwood known as Rose Cottage. He is visiting Gerard Stiles, a guest of Flora Collins, the lady of the house. Lamar tells Gerard and Flora that he is searching for his father’s remains and that he hopes to take revenge on his killer. When he says that he believes Barnabas has something to hide, he piques Gerard’s interest. Barnabas saw Gerard’s ghost as the face of the disaster in 1970, and when he encounters a potential adversary Barnabas is incapable of concealing his hostility for one second. So when he met Gerard as a living being, Barnabas all but announced himself as his sworn enemy. Gerard wants to know who this new foe is and what he wants, so he suggests holding a séance to contact the late Mr Trask. Flora avidly agrees, and Lamar goes along.
The séance is barely underway when the disembodied voice of Trask rings out. It speaks of evil in the room and evil all around them. It says that soon the evil will walk again. Since Barnabas is not in the room and can already walk, it does not seem to be a reference to him. We cut to an alcove in the room shaded by a curtain; in it there is a glass case holding a severed head. Flora’s adult son Desmond brought it home with him from a trip to Macau, and it has already taken possession of him and killed two men. Returning viewers know that the evil Trask is speaking of is that which emanates from the head. Since Barnabas murdered Trask, and did so most cruelly, it really is quite decent of him to forgo an opportunity to ask that Barnabas be punished and to focus on this immediate problem.
Trask was a villain in life, whose fanatical sincerity not only led him to commit grave injustices but also turned itself into hypocrisy when he saw that only crime could prevent an embarrassment that would interfere with his mission. But he has been somewhat redeemed in death. In #523, made and set in 1968, a warlock raised Trask’s ghost and tried to manipulate his hostility to Barnabas for evil purposes, but he would not be used. He was about to warn well-meaning governess Vicki of the danger the warlock posed to her when he met a character played by Roger Davis. At the sight of him, Trask instantly returned to whence he came. Say what you will about Hell, at least you don’t have to put up with Roger Davis while you’re there.
None of Trask’s ominous utterances is very definite, but one would have puzzled the assembled spiritualists more than the rest. He warns them to “Beware the cross!” Trask wasn’t consistently orthodox in his approach to Christianity, but he was all for the cross. What we can see that Lamar, Gerard, and Flora cannot are cross-cuts to a secret underground chamber in an old cemetery. Desmond, in search of the body that used to go along with the head, uncovered the chamber and found a coffin in it. A large cross is wedged between the ceiling of the chamber and the lid of the coffin, holding the main part of it shut. There is a Dutch door cut into one end of the lid. Desmond opened it, and found a golden mask with many precious jewels embedded in it. The opening looked big enough to pull the body through, but Desmond decided to put the mask back and get help moving the cross.
Desmond went to the Eagle tavern. There, he found a drunken sailor named Tim Braithwaite. He offered Braithwaite a $20 gold piece if he would do a job for him, no questions asked. Tim starts asking questions. The first is whether Desmond wants him to beat someone up. His tone and manner suggest that Desmond has hired him to do that before. This reminds us that they’ve never got round to telling us much about Desmond. All we know is that he is the sort of person who goes to Macau and buys severed heads, which come to think of it is also the sort of person who hires guys to beat people up.
Tim is now in the chamber working the cross loose while Desmond is at the livery stable getting a cart in which to carry the coffin back to Rose Cottage. That’s the cross of which Trask wants Lamar, Flora, and Gerard to beware.
Tim finds the jewel-encrusted mask and decides to make off with it. The body comes to life, leaves the coffin, kills Tim, and escapes from the chamber.
Tim’s name recalls two other characters. At first glance I mistook actor Dick Sabol for Don Briscoe, and the resemblance between them is strong enough that every time Desmond calls him “Tim” I thought of Briscoe’s character Tim Shaw, who figured in the story when it was set in the year 1897. Tim inadvertently helped to reunite evil sorcerer Count Petofi with his severed and equally evil hand, so the resonance with that Tim is a clue to longtime viewers that this one will also thwart his own plans in the course of reconnecting the evil head with its missing body.
We’ve heard the name “Braithwaite” before as well. Abe Vigoda appeared in #684 and #685 as aged silversmith Ezra Braithwaite, and Edward Marshall played a much younger version of the same character in #764. We learned in those episodes that Braithwaite’s silver shop had been in operation in Collinsport continuously from 1781 to 1968. Vigoda returned to the show just last week, playing the head’s victim Otis Greene in # 1124. Nothing is said of any connection between Tim and the owners of the silver shop, though “Braithwaite” isn’t so common a name that we can assume he is not related to them. All we can be sure of is that the writers and producers had Abe Vigoda on their minds at this time.
A woman named Christine Domaniecki is seen gulping a drink at the Eagle. She is credited as “Christine Domaneck,” in the role of “Barmaid.” Whether “Domaneck” was a stage name or a typo, who can say. Ms Domaniecki has the role because she was the runner-up in the Miss American Vampire Contest, a promotion for the feature film House of Dark Shadows. She went on to become a highly accomplished makeup artist in Hollywood, working on dozens of well-known television and big screen productions. She was nominated for a primetime Emmy in 2016 for her work on a production of The Wiz. This episode is the first of six screen acting credits listed on her IMDb page. All of the others went direct to video, were produced in the 2000s, and involved her then-husband, Michael R. Thomas. Four of the five appear to be soft-core porn flicks.
The winner of the Miss American Vampire contest was Sacheen Littlefeather. Littlefeather made an appearance on a 1970 episode of To Tell the Truth in her capacity as Miss American Vampire, but was not able to be in New York to tape this episode. She became even more famous in 1973, when her friend Marlon Brando dispatched her to Hollywood to convey his refusal to accept the Academy Award for his work in The Godfather. As luck would have it, Abe Vigoda also had a part in The Godfather, playing doomed capo Sal Tessio.
Also, Brando’s performance in The Godfather always reminds me of David Henesy as strange and troubled boy David Collins in #667. I wonder if Brando insisted on holding a cat during the opening scene of the film because he didn’t want people catching on that he was copying Mr Henesy.
This one also includes a notable blooper. Jerry Lacy’s Lamar is telling Flora about his suspicions of Barnabas:
LAMAR: Ms. Faye corroborated my opinion. When I asked her to locate my father’s last remains, she had a vision of the Old House.
FLORA: But that is when the original Barnabas lived there, wasn’t it? Before the main house was built?
LAMAR: Yes, that’s true, but I don’t think… I do think he had something to do with it.
FLORA: You don’t think he had anything to do with it!?
LAMAR: What I think is my business.
It’s clear enough that Mr Lacy was supposed to stop with “Yes, that’s true…” and that he encroached upon Flora’s dialogue with “but I don’t think,” leaving him in a trap from which he could escape only by adding “I do think he had something to do with it.” Joan Bennett goes ahead with her scripted line, sounding exactly as you suppose she would if she had received the correct cue, and he responds with “What I think is my business.” Though the blooper makes this final line nonsensical, Mr Lacy delivers it with the full weight of Trask’s immense pomposity, and the effect is hilarious.
