A lot happens in this one. Inveterate prankster Carl Collins realizes that his fiancée, Cockney showgirl Pansy Faye, is dead. He has a dream in which he meets Pansy backstage as she is preparing for her final performance, then sees her standing on stage before him, his sister Judith, and their distant cousin Barnabas; when he awakes from the dream, Carl is sure he has figured out what happened to Pansy, and he sets out for the very place where Barnabas is planning to rest during the day. This seems to imply that Carl will discover that Barnabas is a vampire.
The dream sequence is like nothing we’ve seen before on Dark Shadows, though it is strongly reminiscent of the kind of thing you would have seen on near-contemporary shows like ABC’s prime-time horror anthology Night Gallery hosted by Rod Serling and the Paulist Fathers’ syndicated morality plays Insight hosted by the Rev’d Fr Ellwood Kieser. It starts with a closeup of a sign on which Pansy’s name is emblazoned in glittery letters, and plays over a soundtrack of an audience applauding thunderously. Pansy calls Judith, Barnabas, and Carl to join her on stage, each in their turn; their behavior in this drama-within-a-drama mirrors their behavior in the framing narrative.
Meanwhile, Barnabas’ unwilling sidekick, broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi, has returned from Boston. There, she met with a leading member of the Romani people, whose name she alternately pronounces as “King Johnny Romana” and “King Johnny Romano.” She shows Barnabas a box she took from King Johnny. It contains a severed hand wearing a ring, which Magda declares will solve their troubles. Magda has placed a curse on Judith and Carl’s brother Quentin, turning Quentin into a werewolf. After placing that curse, Magda learned that her sister Jenny had borne two children to Quentin, and since the curse is hereditary she is desperate to find a way to lift it. Barnabas traveled back in time to 1897 in the course of his own attempt to resist the effects Magda’s curse will have in 1969, so they are allied in this effort.
Barnabas is utterly unimpressed with the hand and with Magda’s plan to place it on Quentin as he is about to transform. He seems convinced that Magda is just trying to conceal the fact that she failed to find anyone in King Johnny’s camp who could actually help them. He doesn’t care about the original owner of the hand, a legendary nobleman named Count Petofi who was himself cured of lycanthropy, or about an incantation Magda says over the hand that is supposed to prepare it to draw the curse from Quentin. He isn’t even interested when she admits that she stole the hand from King Johnny and that if they don’t get it back to him before he realizes it is missing he will send someone to kill her. He reacts as if the whole thing is a show she is putting on to build up her cover story.
In a metafictional set of way, Barnabas is onto something. The original storylines the writers had prepared for the 1897 segment are coming to a head. Several of its major characters have already died, and others, such as Carl, would not be very attractive customers for a life insurance salesman. Apparently the original flimsies, written six months ago, gave only a few more weeks until Barnabas was to return to 1969 and take the show back to contemporary dress. But 1897 is a hit. The ratings are soaring, and there are some dynamics among the characters that they want to explore in a lot more depth. So they want to stay, but to keep the momentum going they need more story and a number of new characters, including a major villain whom Barnabas and Quentin can team up to fight together. So the writers find themselves in the same position with regard to us that Magda is in with regard to Barnabas, trying to sell us on their latest preposterous brainstorm.
Pansy’s farewell performance in Carl’s dream is, alas, Kay Frye’s final appearance on Dark Shadows. Some fans seem unable to look past Pansy’s own hilariously inept performance when we first see her doing her act, and to see that Miss Frye herself does a terrific job playing a cold, cynical working girl. She is good today, when Pansy is on stage and in her character as the “world-famous mentalist and singer,” but is also trying to tell Carl the truth about Barnabas. I only wish they could have brought Miss Frye back as someone else, either in the extended 1897 segment or in another time period.
The opening voiceover, delivered by Kay Frye, tells us that a vampire named Dirk Wilkins has been destroyed. We hear that Dirk was the pawn of someone called Barnabas Collins, who hoped to use him to conceal a secret of his own. The narrator also says that “certain things cannot be forgotten, as Judith Collins will learn this day.” This implies that the day’s action will center on challenges in information management.
Returning viewers may not recognize Miss Frye’s voice. We have seen her as Pansy Faye, Cockney showgirl, improbable fiancée of prankster Carl Collins, and victim of Dirk’s first murder. As narrator, Miss Frye forgoes Pansy’s rather uncertain East London accent. She also takes a different approach to the role of narrator than she had to that of Pansy. When we first saw her, Pansy was putting on an act for Carl’s benefit, and Pansy is a terrible actress. When Carl left, Pansy dropped her act and we could see that Miss Frye is as capable a performer as the character is a poor one. Today’s voiceover gives Miss Frye a still better role. The crass and cynical Pansy did not call for much nuance. But as narrator, Miss Frye speaks with a quiet urgency and subtle modulation of the voice that leaves us wondering what might have been had she been cast in a bigger part.
We cut to what regular viewers recognize as the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood in the year 1897, where a man in a cassock is talking tenderly with a woman in a colorful dress. The man is very affectionate, even stroking the woman’s neck with two fingers.
The woman is the Judith Collins mentioned in the opening voiceover; the man is the Rev’d Gregory Trask. It is not mentioned in the episode, but Trask is the keeper of a boarding school called Worthington Hall. Also unmentioned is that Trask conspired with a Satanist named Evan Hanley to brainwash a young man named Tim Shaw, one of the teachers at Worthington Hall, and that once he was under their control they used Tim to murder Trask’s wife Minerva. Trask wanted Minerva out of the way, evidently because he plans to marry Judith and take control of her vast fortune.
Judith is disconsolate at the thought that she was under Dirk’s control. While Trask is talking sweetly to Judith, Tim enters. Trask pulls a gun on him and instructs Judith to call the police and report that Minerva’s murderer has been captured.
Tim, who has up to this point ranged from mousy to timid to utterly defeated, is suddenly assertive. He tells Judith that she won’t want to telephone the sheriff. He says that there are two murderers at Collinwood, and she is one of them.
Tim says that he came upon Judith in the act of shooting neurotic intellectual Rachel Drummond to death. Returning viewers know that this is true; Tim, Judith, and Rachel were all under Dirk’s power at the time, and for reasons that made sense only to the dim-witted Dirk he ordered Judith to kill Rachel. A vague memory comes back to Judith and prompts her to confess; when Trask realizes that Tim will not back down from his accusation and Judith will not participate in a cover-up, he tells Tim he will make a deal with him.
Trask calls the sheriff. He addresses himself to “Sheriff Furman,” a name we have not heard before. It quickly becomes clear that we are not likely to hear it again. He tells the sheriff that Tim was out of town the night Minerva was poisoned and that, in his grief, he had forgotten this fact. Returning viewers know that Evan has told the sheriff that he saw Tim with Minerva while she was dying. One might assume that Trask would at least have to call Evan first to ensure that he gave the sheriff a story to account for this discrepancy, but Trask doesn’t bother to contact Evan at all. Evidently the sheriff is such an abysmal moron that Trask can safely assume he won’t think of any questions.
Sheriff Furman’s manifest incompetence prompts one of Danny Horn’s funniest posts at Dark Shadows Every Day, in which he writes a series of hypothetical police reports about the killings we have seen so far in the 1897 segment. One of Danny’s recurring themes is that law enforcement characters on Dark Shadows serve only to delay the plot. There is so much story in 1897 that the producers saw no need to slow things down, so it shouldn’t be surprising that neither Sheriff Furman nor any of his deputies appear on-screen.
For my part, I wish they had stayed in 1897 considerably longer, so I would have liked to spend one day a week or so without much forward narrative movement. That might have included some episodes when the police show up and you do a lot of recapping, some built around character studies of the type Joe Caldwell wrote so well in 1967, some in which we reconnect with Collinwood as it is on the night in 1969 when Barnabas left for the past, and so on. Not only would that have extended the show’s strongest period and helped new viewers catch up to what is going on, it would also have enabled them to make more use of the many fine actors whom we go weeks on end without seeing. Even David Selby, whose handsome rake Quentin Collins is breaking out as a pop culture sensation at this point, hasn’t been on the show since #768. Other fan favorites are in the midst of even longer unexplained absences; for example, Lara Parker’s wicked witch Angelique has not been seen since #760.
Tim, who was out of the room while Trask was on the phone, returns. He “gladly!” agrees to leave Trask’s employ, and at first says that he will “gladly” leave the village of Collinsport. But then it dawns on him that he needs a job, and he blackmails Judith into assuring him that she will find a place for him in her business.
This will remind longtime viewers of the spring and early summer of 1967. At that time, Dark Shadows took place in a contemporary setting, and there were two major storylines. One was the introduction of the vampire Barnabas Collins. The other was the blackmail of matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard by seagoing con man Jason McGuire. Like Judith, Liz owns all of the Collins family’s assets; also like her, she is played by Joan Bennett. Threatening to expose the terrible secret that she was a murderer, Jason forced Liz to take him into her home, pay his debts, give him a job, and agree to marry him. When she finally balked rather than go through with the marriage, it turned out Liz wasn’t a murderer after all, the whole thing was a scam Jason cooked up.
Jason was a short-term character brought on to tie up the last non-supernatural narrative loose ends and fill time while Barnabas found his footing, as witness the casting of Dennis Patrick, who refused to sign a contract for the role since he wanted to be free to move to Los Angeles without giving more than 24 hours notice. But in those days, before the internet or soap opera magazines, the audience had no way of knowing that. They may well have thought that Barnabas would be destroyed and Jason’s oppression of Liz would become the show’s backbone.
In yesterday’s episode, a vampire was in fact destroyed. In May and June 1967, Barnabas’ chief victim was Maggie Evans, who like Rachel was played by Kathryn Leigh Scott. It was possible then that he would kill Maggie and that she would rise as a vampire, as Lucy Westenra did in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, compelling the good guys to stake her. Rachel doesn’t become a vampire, but Trask does tell the sheriff that it was the men hunting Dirk who shot her, accidentally. So when the final appearances of Dirk and Rachel lead to Judith both submitting to blackmail because of her mistaken belief that she is a murderer and taking steps towards marrying an overwhelmingly evil man, longtime viewers will remember a resolution that seemed to be on the horizon back in 1967.
Carl enters. Judith has no patience for her childish brother, and dismisses his concerns about Pansy. She tells Carl to go with Tim to the Old House on the estate. Tim took Rachel to the Old House when she was dying. Barnabas, who has traveled back in time to 1897, is staying there, and he had befriended Rachel. Tim had hoped Barnabas would help them, but it was daylight and he was not available. Rachel died in the Old House, and Tim left her corpse there when he came to the great house.
When Carl and Tim leave, Trask warns Judith that she almost gave herself away. “You must be more cautious, Judith! Even Carl was suspicious.” Judith agrees, showing that Trask is luring her into his world of lies.
We see Tim and Carl at the Old House. Rachel’s body is no longer there. Who took it, and why didn’t Tim and Carl leave with them? We are not told. Carl goes on about how wonderful Pansy is, and says he is going to the police because he thinks someone at Collinwood has done her harm. Evidently Carl’s suspicions are more highly developed than Trask realizes. Trask underestimates Carl because he is focused exclusively on Rachel and Tim. He never met Pansy, and knows nothing about her.
Carl leaves the house, and Pansy’s ghost appears to Tim. Tim is bewildered, and asks Pansy if she is looking for Barnabas. That is a natural assumption- after all, it is Barnabas’ house and Tim has no idea who Pansy is. When she vanishes into thin air, he shouts for Carl. He finds Carl not far outside the door, and describes the woman he saw. Carl jumps to the conclusion that she is Pansy, and starts calling for her. He sends Tim along to the great house, and continues searching for Pansy.
Evidently Carl’s search did not take long, because we see him standing next to Tim in the drawing room at the great house in the next shot. It is Rachel’s funeral.
Trask delivers a eulogy in which he says of Rachel that “The littlest angels have a new teacher.” Even first-time viewers are likely to laugh out loud at this ridiculous turn of phrase, and those who have been with the show for a while will see more in it than that. From childhood on, Rachel was Trask’s prisoner, first as one of the pupils imprisoned in his horrible school, then when he extorted her into staying on as a teacher with threats that he would have her prosecuted on false charges of theft and murder if she tried to leave. He made flagrant sexual advances to her as well, all the more hideous because he has been responsible for her since she was a small girl. In Rachel and Tim’s helpless personalities, we saw what can happen when a criminal like Trask is given an opportunity to turn a person into filet of human being, and an ominous sign of what might lie in store for Judith’s nephew and niece Jamison and Nora, who are currently among the inmates at Worthington Hall.
Tim and Carl bury Rachel themselves. My wife, Mrs Acilius, asked “Isn’t this usually handled by professionals?” Presumably whoever took Rachel’s body from the Old House would have been a better choice for the work than are Tim and Carl, but that isn’t the Collins way.
Tim announces his intention to get drunk. Carl brings up other things they might do, and Tim says that those will have to wait until after he gets drunk. After Tim leaves to pursue his eminently sound plan, Carl hears Pansy singing. He wonders if she is dead. He realizes that her voice is coming from the mausoleum which we know to have been Barnabas’ longtime home. Carl is played by John Karlen, who in the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s plays the luckless Willie Loomis. It was Willie who inadvertently released Barnabas from the mausoleum, so longtime viewers who see this actor on this set will expect something important to happen in the story.
Vampire Dirk Wilkins has bitten neurotic intellectual Rachel Drummond, fugitive schoolteacher Tim Shaw, and wealthy spinster Judith Collins. As we open, it is early morning and all three of them are gathered in Dirk’s hiding place. At Dirk’s command, Judith shoots Rachel. Tim does not know of Dirk’s wishes for Rachel, whom he loves. He is shocked by Judith’s deed, and takes Rachel to the Old House on Judith’s estate, Collinwood. The Old House is currently home to Judith’s distant cousin, Barnabas Collins. Tim knows that Barnabas is fond of Rachel, and hopes he will help them. But Barnabas is not available, and Rachel dies in Tim’s arms.
In the great house on the estate, Judith’s brother Edward and overwhelmingly evil charlatan Gregory Trask are fretting about the situation. Edward says that Barnabas believes that the vampire is Dirk; Trask replies “Then I would tend to believe it is not.” In #774, Trask found that Judith was bleeding from wounds on her neck and was in a robot-like daze; he had heard her calling Dirk’s name, and drew the conclusion that Dirk was the vampire. But his prejudice against Barnabas is so strong that he forgets about that.
Judith comes back, holding her revolver. Edward takes the gun and finds that it has recently been fired, and three chambers are missing their bullets. Edward leads Judith to her bedroom, and Trask goes into the drawing room, where by himself and in evident sincerity he calls on God to help him smite the forces of evil.
Returning viewers might be amazed at Trask’s attitude. He just completed a deal with a Satanist to use black magic to murder his wife; how can he believe himself to be God’s chosen instrument for this sort of work? But we have already seen that Trask’s hypocrisy is so extreme that it has given rise to its opposite. He has fooled himself, and is capable of the most earnest faith. In this he is the mirror image of his ancestor, whom we came to know between November 1967 and March 1968, when the show was set in the 1790s. That Rev’d Trask was such a true-believing fanatic that he became a hypocrite, so convinced of the rightness of his ends that he could not see how rotten the means were by which he was pursuing them.
Later, Dirk summons Judith. Edward follows her to Dirk’s hiding place, where he manages to stake the vampire, destroying him. He strikes quite a few inches below the heart, pretty well in the mid-gut region, but that apparently suffices.
This is perhaps the bloodiest episode of Dark Shadows so far. Rachel’s blouse is covered with blood, and blood spurts out of Dirk’s mouth while Edward is driving the stake into his belly. There is a good deal of discussion of this in the comments section of Danny Horn’s post about the episode on Dark Shadows Every Day. Many who were too young to remember the original broadcast wondered if there was public pushback against the graphic violence. The original fans among the commenters responded that no, to the extent that people were worried about the content of daytime TV at the time their concerns were focused on sex, not violence. One of the most memorable responses came from Friend of the Blog Percy’s Owner:
Not really. My dad remarried a woman with very conservative ideas about what I should watch and read. She had to prescreen everything. She worked and got home after DS, so she couldn’t have stopped me from watching it, but once I assured her that no one was having sex, she was FINE with it. She actually asked me if this was the soap with the woman who didn’t know who the father of her baby was. When I was able to say with absolute truth that there were no babies at all on DS she didn’t care.
Comment left by “Percy’s Owner,” 24 November 2015, on Danny Horn, “Episode 776: Blood Sports,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 23 November 2015.
I didn’t participate in that part of the discussion, but I did join in on another topic. Some commenters expressed the opinion that the portion of Dark Shadows set in the year 1897 went on too long, and that too many actors played multiple roles in it. I said that I was of the opposite view:
Oh, I disagree- I wish 1897 had gone on longer and had included a lot more doubling. For example, I’d have liked to see John Karlen come back as a suave, smooth-talking fellow. And Don Briscoe as a straight-up imitation of W. C. Fields, in the same way that Tony Peterson gave Jerry Lacy a chance to do a straight-up imitation of Humphrey Bogart. And Clarice Blackburn as the diametric opposite of Abigail/ Minerva- she could have been Magda’s black sheep cousin, the shameless woman.
Comment left by “Acilius” 9 November 2020 on Danny Horn, “Episode 776: Blood Sports,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 23 November 2015.
Neurotic intellectual Rachel Drummond is the third character Kathryn Leigh Scott has played on Dark Shadows, and today she joins the other two in becoming the victim of a vampire. In the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s, Miss Scott plays Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. Vampire Barnabas Collins took Maggie as his victim in May and June of 1967, and tried to brainwash her into believing she was his lost love Josette. At first Maggie responded to the vampire’s bite with the same addictive behavior it prompted in others, but eventually she shook loose of Barnabas’ power and rebelled against him. She tried to stake Barnabas, and when that failed she escaped from him. It was only because her psychiatrist betrayed her to become Barnabas’ co-conspirator and to hypnotize Maggie into forgetting her experience that she did not expose Barnabas.
When Dark Shadows flashed back to the 1790s to show how Barnabas became a vampire and to suggest that he might still be interesting if he weren’t one, Miss Scott played Josette. After he had brought the vampire curse on himself, Barnabas bit Josette, who like Maggie at first responded blissfully. When Josette realized Barnabas wanted to make her into a vampire as well, she, like Maggie, resolved to escape. Maggie’s escape took her from the prison cell in Barnabas’ basement through a tunnel to the beach below the cliff of Widow’s Hill; Josette’s escape led to very nearly the same spot, but it began, not in the cell, but at the top of the cliff, and it involved her flinging herself to her death on the rocks below.
Early in 1968, Barnabas was freed of the effects of his vampirism, and he set about battling other supernatural menaces. In the course of one such battle, he has come unstuck in time, and taken us with him to the year 1897. In that year, he is once again a vampire. One of his victims was dim-witted servant Dirk Wilkins. Since Barnabas was beginning to attract suspicion, he allowed Dirk to die and rise as a vampire, planning to tip people off to Dirk’s hiding place so that he would be found and destroyed and everyone would attribute all the vampire attacks of the previous few months to him. This plan fell apart immediately, when Barnabas lost track of Dirk as soon as he first rose.
Rachel has stumbled into Dirk’s hiding place. She asks him if he knows what happened to her friend Tim, and he bites her. She shows some signs of a blissful initial reaction to the bite, but still has some questions about Tim. Dirk tells her to forget about Tim and to stay where she is. He returns before dawn to find her waiting. She brings Tim up again, and he ignores her. She helps him close the lid of his coffin, caressing it. Though Rachel is obedient, this does not mean that she is any more under Dirk’s power than Maggie was under Barnabas’ power when she rebelled against him or Josette was when she jumped off Widow’s Hill. Rachel’s personality is something that takes place deep inside her head and prevents her from asserting herself against other people. Even if Dirk were not a vampire, she would probably have been just as compliant.
While Rachel is sitting dutifully in his hiding place, Dirk calls upon Barnabas. He tells Barnabas that he will kill Rachel unless he brings blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins back to life before dawn. Returning viewers know that Barnabas has no idea how to revive Laura. We also know that no one else is going to bring Laura back, because she was running out of story when she vanished in #760 and they already have more characters than they can fully use. Even a fan favorite like Miss Scott is absent from the show for dozens of episodes at a time. So it seems that Rachel is doomed.
Meanwhile, Barnabas has another problem to deal with. His distant cousin, stuffy Edward Collins, has summoned him to the great house of Collinwood. Edward suspects Barnabas of vampirism, and has told him so. Edward’s sister, spinster Judith, has turned up with bite marks on her neck and an oddly subdued affect. Edward brings Barnabas face to face with Judith. When she does not react to him as Edward expects a victim to react to the vampire who bit her, Edward is embarrassed and stumbles through a series of half-expressed apologies. Barnabas declares that he will resume the search for Dirk, and instructs Edward to stay with Judith at all times. He hopes that Judith will lead Edward to Dirk’s lair.
Edward does sit with Judith for a time, but when he hears some noises in the foyer he leaves the room to investigate. He wanders all through the house for a number of minutes, long enough that the recorded background music plays beyond the cues we are used to hearing and gets to some tunes we haven’t heard in months.
While Edward is conducting this journey, Dirk sneaks up behind him on the walkway at the top of the foyer stairs and grabs him by the neck, knocking him out. Dirk then appears in Judith’s room, gives her a gun, and tells her he will have a job for her to do soon. He dematerializes before Edward comes back and finds Judith still in bed.
Later, Edward leaves again to make tea, and when he brings the tray back Judith is gone. In its first months, one of the themes of Dark Shadows was that the Collinses of 1966 were running out of money, so it made sense that they were chronically short of servants. In this period, however, the Collinses are supposed to be at the zenith of their wealth and power. It is simply a flaw in the story that Edward himself has to leave Judith to find out what the noises were in the foyer or to fetch her tea.
The task Dirk set for Judith was to murder Rachel. After dawn, she goes to the hiding place, pulls the gun, and tells Rachel she is sorry for what she must do. In the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s, Joan Bennett plays matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. In #569 and #570, it looked like Liz might be bitten by vampire Tom Jennings. But the show is firmly committed to a prohibition against involving Liz directly in the plot, so that came to nothing. When Judith presents herself as Rachel’s designated assassin, longtime viewers will be glad to see that Judith is not subject to the same restrictions.
Tim Shaw, uptight teacher turned victim of brainwashing turned fugitive murder suspect, makes his way into an abandoned root cellar. He finds a coffin there. Naturally, he opens the coffin. That’s what everyone does on Dark Shadows when they find a coffin where one shouldn’t be. You meet the most interesting people that way.
Tim finds that the coffin is empty, and goes into a dark corner to hide. Someone comes to the door, and Tim gets up to greet whoever it might be. He hasn’t been a fugitive very long, and hasn’t quite perfected all the skills that the status calls for.
Tim sees Dirk Wilkins, a dimwitted servant of the ancient and esteemed Collins family who has been missing for several days. Tim calls out “Dirk!” This is the first time we learn the two men know each other. They are unlikely to have been friends. Tim rarely left the school where he worked. The school has been housed in a building on the Collins family’s estate for several weeks, so it makes sense that he and Dirk would have met, but Dirk has been unpleasant to everyone we have seen him with, including his employers and pretty girls he wants to attract. It is hard to imagine the painfully shy Tim befriending him.
Dirk turns out to be a vampire, and he bites Tim. We then cut back to the school. The headmaster, the overwhelmingly evil Gregory Trask, is browbeating Tim’s fellow teacher and onetime girlfriend, neurotic intellectual Rachel Drummond. Returning viewers will recall that Trask has made flagrant passes at Rachel, and also know that Trask conspired with a local Satanist to cast a spell on Tim which caused him to kill Trask’s wife Minerva. Trask is pretending to be upset about Minerva’s murder and to believe that Rachel plotted with Tim to commit it. He tells Rachel that if she does not leave the school, he will accept that she is innocent. She goes to her room, distraught. Later in the episode, Trask will telephone his co-conspirator, gloating that the authorities are on their side.
Spinster Judith Collins, sole proprietor of all her family’s great wealth, shows up to offer her condolences to Trask. They find that Rachel is gone, and he tells her that she must have gone with Tim. Trask realizes that Tim and Rachel have no money, and wonders if there is anyone who might give them enough to allow them to flee the state. Judith says that her distant cousin Barnabas Collins, who is currently staying at the Old House on the estate, is very fond of Rachel and that he might give them some money. She says that she will get in her carriage and go to the Old House before Rachel can get there. She will tell Barnabas about the murder and about Tim and Rachel’s involvement in it, thereby ensuring that he will not give them any money.
Judith knocks on the front door of the Old House and gets no answer. She enters, and finds the house empty. She is still in the front parlor when Dirk enters. She chastises him for staying on her property after she dismissed him, and tells him she will call the police if he is not gone within 24 hours. He walks towards her, backing her against the wall and ignoring her demands that he let her leave. He says that he is no longer her servant, but that she will soon be his. He bites her.
Judith was right when she told Trask that Rachel would go to the Old House. Rachel does go there. She peeks in the window, sees Judith sitting in a chair, and scurries off. This is rather an odd moment- Judith told Trask just a few minutes before that she would go to the Old House in her carriage. It seems unlikely that she drove her own carriage and there is no driver waiting outside, but even if if she did the carriage must still be sitting there in full view. How did Rachel fail to notice it?
Trask comes to the Old House and tells Judith he wanted to offer her his support in her conversation with Barnabas. Trask knows how fond Barnabas is of Rachel, and may well suppose that he would want more details about Minerva’s death than Judith could offer before he agreed to regard Rachel as a criminal. Judith says Dirk’s name when Trask enters, and when Trask notices the bleeding wounds on her neck he quickly realizes that Dirk inflicted them.
We cut back to the root cellar, which we see Rachel entering. She sees the coffin, and of course opens it. That’s just good manners. She turns, and sees Dirk in the entryway.
In his post about this episode at Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn transcribes a conversation among Roger Davis, Jerry Lacy, and director Lela Swift captured on video when the three were on a panel at a convention:
Roger Davis: I do remember being very excited when I got to be a vampire on the show, so excited, and the first person that I got to bite was Joan Bennett, and I was so enthusiastic and excited I knocked her over — flat on her back!
Jerry Lacy: I remember when you did it, it was rehearsal in the morning.
Roger: Was it?
Jerry: Yeah. You grabbed her, and you bit her, and then you just threw her. And she was already sixty years old then.
Lela Swift: Then we had to pick Joan up and put her together again.
Danny Horn, “Episode 774: What’s Up, Dirk,” posted at Dark Shadows Every Day, 21 November 2015.
To which my comment is, fuck that guy. I don’t make a habit of swearing, but there are not enough curse words in the language to express my reaction to Mr Davis chortling through his reminiscences of physically abusing his female scene partners. He can fuck off straight to hell.
This story gives an extra dimension to the scene between Judith and Trask in the Old House. Mr Lacy plays Trask’s relentless evil so effectively that he is difficult to watch; my wife, Mrs Acilius, refuses to watch his episodes this time through the series. It usually makes a viewer’s skin crawl to see Trask posing as a representative of something good. But knowing that behind Trask in the position of standing by Judith after she had been attacked by Dirk was Jerry Lacy standing by Joan Bennett after she had been attacked by Roger Davis, our response is much more complex. After all the times we might have wondered how anyone could fail to see through Trask’s blatant hypocrisy, this time enough of the thoroughly decent humanity of Jerry Lacy peeks through that we can understand why Judith has been so supportive of Trask.
The cast went into makeup after the morning rehearsal. From the looks of Dirk’s fake mustache and artificial pallor, makeup artist Vincent LoScalzo must not have brought his usual enthusiasm to his work when Mr Davis sat in his chair. The mustache in particular is so crudely affixed that it looks like Mr Davis might have done his own makeup today.
A little over two weeks ago, Dark Shadows started an homage to The Manchurian Candidate, with some touches added from Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades. The overwhelmingly evil Rev’d Gregory Trask, keeper of a sadistic cult disguised as a boarding school, coerced Satanist Evan Hanley into casting a spell on Tim Shaw, one of the teachers at the school. When Tim sees the Queen of Spades, he will be prompted to poison Trask’s wife Minerva.
The whole point of employing an assassin is to give yourself an unbreakable alibi. Since Tim will not remember Evan or the spell once he has killed Minerva, the logical thing would seem to be to arrange it so that Tim poisons Minerva in front of several witnesses and that he still has the vial of poison on him when he is caught. But instead, Evan himself turns up as Minerva is in her death throes, and he is the only witness. After Evan erases Tim’s memory, Tim defeats Evan in a sword fight, then runs away, taking the poison with him. Tim flees to his only friend, fellow teacher Rachel Drummond, and tells her that if it is a matter of Evan’s word against his, he will have no chance in court. Later, Evan confronts Rachel and roughs her up, trying to intimidate her out of helping Tim in any way.
Absent witnesses to accuse Tim on his behalf or an alibi for himself, Evan may as well have skipped the whole brainwashing bit. Had he simply strangled Minerva and claimed he saw Tim do it, he would be in exactly the position he is in now.
The problem for Evan’s plan is that it is taking place at this point in the series. The segment of Dark Shadows set in the year 1897 is stuffed to bursting with vivid characters, each of them involved in at least one dynamic storyline. That makes it, from most points of view, the best part of the show, but it also makes it very difficult to get a bunch of people together. Any two characters you put in the same scene are likely to join plot threads together in new and consequential ways. That makes for a lot of excitement, but it makes it very difficult to do just one thing at a time.
For example, say Tim had insisted on bringing Minerva the poisoned tea while in the drawing room at the great house of Collinwood with rich spinster Judith Collins, Judith’s brother Edward, and Minerva’s daughter Charity, while maidservant Beth waits on the company. Trask is apparently scheming to marry Judith and get her money once Minerva is out of the way. Put her in Minerva’s death scene, and you accelerate that part of the story, perhaps beyond the pace you are prepared to follow up. Edward is starting to suspect that his distant cousin, recently arrived Barnabas Collins, might be a vampire. Those suspicions are the result of two qualities in which Edward is no more than average, his ability to notice the obvious and his concern for his son. But if you make him a participant in another story about a crime, any remarks he might make that would display any brainpower whatever would transform him into the show’s resident sleuth. Beth and Charity are both blood thralls of Barnabas’; if either of them were in the room while the poisoning took place, we would therefore expect them to go directly to him and start wondering how he would react to the news. That would shift our focus to him, subordinating the Tim and Minerva story to the Barnabas story. Virtually every other character is disqualified from serving as a witness for similar reasons, leaving Evan to do the honors himself.
Two of the things that make THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE work so well are that we don’t see any of Raymond Shaw’s training, and that when he sees the Queen of Diamonds he goes into a trance that strips him of all personality.
The training scenes here show why the first of those was so important. Not only are the scenes tedious, they force us to realize that the very idea we most have to take seriously is in fact preposterous. Whatever power you might imagine hypnosis or drugs or other conditioning techniques to have, they obviously couldn’t turn a human brain into a digital computer.
And Tim’s talkativeness while in his trance shows why the second element is essential. Raymond might do absolutely anything when he’s in his hyper-suggestible state. A bartender mentions the phrase “Go jump in a lake” and Raymond jumps in the nearest lake. That’s terrifying, because it is terrifying to think of what people might do who had no mind or will controlling their actions from moment to moment. But Tim’s endless chit-chat doesn’t suggest a soulless automaton. There seems to be a mind in there, it just isn’t a very nice or very interesting mind.
Don Briscoe’s performance doesn’t add much to this unpromising material. I can’t think of anything he might have done to make it work, and neither could he. Anyway, I’m glad it’s over.
Comment left 8 November 2020 by Acilius on “Episode 773: The Persecution and Assassination of Minerva Trask as Performed by Tim Shaw under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade,” Danny Horn, Dark Shadows Every Day, 21 November 2015
The opening voiceover plays over this image, a type of visual effect we have not seen before at the beginning of an episode:
A transparent sticker of Barnabas superimposed on the exterior of the Old House. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Barnabas Collins has bitten dimwitted servant Dirk Wilkins, turning Dirk into a vampire like himself. Barnabas has been out all night, searching for Dirk’s hiding place. He hopes to expose Dirk and frame him for his own crimes.
Barnabas comes home to the Old House on the estate of Collinwood to find that Dirk seems to be trying to do the same thing to him. There is a blood-drained corpse in an armchair in his front parlor. It is that of Miss Pansy Faye, Cockney showgirl and Dirk’s first victim.
Barnabas’ distant cousins live in the great house on the estate. One of them, prankster Carl Collins, brought Pansy home with the intention of making her his bride. No sooner does Barnabas discover Pansy’s remains than Carl starts banging on the front door, shouting that he wants to speak with her.
Barnabas hides what’s left of Pansy in a secret chamber behind a bookcase, then lets Carl in. Grisly as the circumstances are, one person lying to another about the presence of a third nearby is a stock situation from farce, and John Karlen and Jonathan Frid play the scene with the particular brand of desperate seriousness that only works in farce. Barnabas persuades Carl to go away and search the grounds of the estate.
That takes a few minutes, starting from what the opening voiceover told us in so many words was “an hour before dawn.” In what remains of that hour, Barnabas takes Pansy’s body to a cemetery and buries her in a shallow grave between tombstones, telling her to “rest in peace.”
Barnabas comes home, and finds Carl, who has in the interval not only gone to the great house, the groundskeeper’s cottage, and a house on the estate which is currently occupied by a school, but has also gone into the village of Collinsport and made inquiries about Pansy. A speedy bunch, the Collinses.
Before Barnabas returned to the house, Carl had heard Pansy’s disembodied voice singing the song she had so memorably performed for Barnabas in yesterday’s episode. He had spoken to Pansy’s voice telling her that his grandmother’s will gave him a house to live in and that she could live there with him. This is puzzling for returning viewers. In #714, it was made perfectly clear that the will did not mention Carl at all. Edith Collins left her entire estate to Carl’s sister Judith, and the only one of the brothers who was mentioned was Quentin, who received no money or negotiable assets of any kind but who was guaranteed the right to stay at Collinwood as long as he pleased. Perhaps they are retconning that away, perhaps Carl is lying to Pansy, or perhaps Carl is losing his grip on reality.
Whether or not we are supposed to doubt Carl’s sanity, Barnabas talks Carl into suspecting that he might have hallucinated Pansy’s voice. Carl leaves, and Barnabas has time to return to his coffin before dawn.
The rest of the episode is taken up with doings at the school Carl had visited. We saw Carl questioning Charity Trask, daughter of the school’s master, the overwhelmingly evil Gregory Trask. The prim Charity was exasperated that Carl kept asking about Pansy after she had already denied having seen her. The scene is an interesting one- Charity and Pansy are such total opposites that it is a shame they never met. It would be amusing to see them juxtaposed.
Charity is engaged to marry Tim Shaw, a teacher at the school. Neither of them is happy about this situation. Tim was in love with Rachel Drummond, another of the teachers, and Charity is Barnabas’ blood thrall. But Gregory blackmailed Tim and bullied Charity into accepting the arrangement.
Charity’s mother, prudish Minerva Trask, does not like Tim or want him as a son-in-law. She urges Charity to set her sights on Carl. Charity says that she would rather marry Barnabas; Minerva says that her instincts are sound, but that she ought not to settle for a cousin of the rich Collinses when one of the brothers is available. Even if they have retconned Carl into owning a house, he is clearly not a rich man, so this reveals that Minerva knows as little about his financial position as she does about the curse under which Barnabas labors.
Charity tries to engage Tim in conversation, and is baffled that he is not willing to talk to her. Indeed, he does not seem like himself at all. Not only is he dismissive with Charity, but when Minerva confronts him he is bold and insolent, a far cry from the broken man we have seen interacting with the Trasks previously. When Charity tells him their engagement is off, he does not express the relief that she and we expect, but puts on a stagey voice we have not heard him use before and marches off to apologize to her mother.
There is a reason for Tim’s behavior. Gregory enlisted warlock Evan Hanley to brainwash Tim so that he would kill Minerva. There is some business with the Queen of Spades, first when Tim mutters the phrase “Queen of Spades,” then when Evan sends him a note on which is scrawled “Queen of Spades,” and lastly when he walks in on Minerva playing solitaire and sees her turn up the Queen of Spades. Many viewers in 1969 would have remembered Richard Condon’s 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate and its 1962 film version. In Condon’s novel, Raymond Shaw became a robot capable of murder when he saw the Queen of Hearts; in the film, the card was the Queen of Diamonds. Many first time viewers, seeing Tim Shaw’s reaction to the Queen of Spades, would have made the connection and understood why he ends the episode by poisoning Minerva’s tea.
Tim Shaw differs from Raymond Shaw in that he is under a spell for a long while, including the whole time we see him today, and he can talk and act independently while it operates on him. Raymond simply became catatonic when he saw the card and remained that way until he heard a command. He then executed the command and came back to himself once he was finished. Tim’s behavior may suggest a nod to another literary work, Pushkin’s story “The Queen of Spades.” That tale, which Tchaikovsky turned into an opera and which in 1949 was made into a feature film, is about a timid man who inadvertently kills a powerful woman and loses control of himself as a consequence. Like Tim, Captain Herman is coerced into marrying a woman he does not love. Presented with an opportunity to get out of the marriage, he finds himself making extraordinary efforts to go through with it, efforts which bring about his ultimate downfall.
Vampire Barnabas Collins is about to leave his house with his thrall, maidservant Beth Chavez, to look for Dirk Wilkins, a dimwitted servant whom he inadvertently turned into a vampire and let go. They are stopped when Barnabas’ distant cousin, inveterate prankster Carl Collins, comes in and insists on telling him about his recent trip to “Atlantic City, New Jersey, the Queen of the Boardwalk cities!”
Carl offers Barnabas some saltwater taffy, only to find that the tin is empty. He frets that “she” must have eaten it all on the trip back- “You know how women eat when they are nervous.” This leads to Carl’s second order of business, introducing Barnabas to Miss Pansy Faye. Carl met Pansy on the train, and he intends to marry her.
Carl opens the door, then stands before Barnabas and Beth and announces in his most booming voice “Presenting! Direct from her triumphs before Her Imperial Majesty, Queen Victoria of England, that world-famous mentalist and most beguiling songstress, Miss Pansy Faye!” Pansy enters, singing and dancing. In a vaguely Cockney accent, she intones:
I’m gonna dance for you! Gonna dance your cares away. I’ll do the Hoochie Koo, and the Ta Ra Boom De Ay! I’ll sing a happy song, as we dance the whole night long! When the music begins, I’ll give you some spins, I’ll even invent a step or two! So, on with the show! You’ll love it, I know! Oh, I’m going to dance for you!
Pansy’s dance is not particularly elaborate; it is performed almost entirely below the waist, and ends with her bending over and thrusting her rear end upward. That is followed by a cut to Barnabas wearing a look of stupefaction that all the black magic and demonic intrusions he has witnessed over the centuries have not elicited. He turns to Beth, who is visibly struggling to keep a straight face.
Against the backing track of Dark Shadows super-solemn music, this scene is hilarious. Longtime viewers will savor it even more than others. Carl is played by John Karlen, who in the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s plays the luckless Willie Loomis, Barnabas’ first blood thrall. When Barnabas first enslaved Willie in the spring and summer of 1967, the show was at its bleakest. Barnabas was able to fool his distant relatives in the great house into regarding him as a living being and letting him occupy the Old House, but that was only because they had been isolated and embattled for so many months before. When we saw Barnabas and Willie on this set in those days, Barnabas was as grim as death itself, beating Willie with his heavy cane whenever he dared do more than whimper. That Karlen is now here as the man who is introducing a character as exuberantly and preposterously alive as Pansy and that Barnabas’ current thrall is suppressing a laugh takes the despair of that period and packs it with joy.
The despair reasserts itself at the close of the episode. Pansy will go out into the woods, Dirk will take her as his first victim, and Barnabas will come home to discover her body propped up in a chair in the parlor. But the comedy in between is so strong that we can be confident that this will not be the last word. Carl tries to persuade his sister, spinster Judith, to accept his marriage to Pansy. He tells her that he is a new man thanks to Pansy’s influence; he has actually managed to go 48 hours without playing a practical joke. Judith is impressed by this new record, but still will not believe that Pansy is fit to become a Collins. She controls all the family’s wealth, and threatens to cut Carl off without a penny if he goes through with the marriage. He reacts with a series of facial expressions that the Three Stooges would have admired.
While Barnabas and Carl are out, Pansy stays in the Old House with Beth. Beth offers her a cup of coffee; Pansy says she would prefer sherry. Beth goes to look for sherry, and Pansy is caught off-guard that Beth doesn’t live there. When Beth says that she is based at the big house on the property, Pansy asks how big it is. Beth says that it is very big indeed; Pansy says that Carl had told her it was like a palace, and Beth confirms that it is indeed on that scale. Pansy is surprised that Carl was telling her the truth. She takes the drink at a single gulp. With Carl, Pansy was acting a part, and she was a terrible actress indeed. Alone with Beth, she drops the act. The Cockney accent is still not too well-developed, but Kay Frye is much more convincing as a hard-boiled working class woman than Pansy is in any of her roles.
Carl persuades Judith to sit still in Barnabas’ parlor while Pansy does her mentalist act, trying to locate Dirk. Pansy actually goes into a trance and announces that Dirk is dead and his murderer is in the room. When she comes to, Pansy is as surprised as anyone at what happened. Judith is demanding an apology, and Pansy is shocked when Barnabas tells her that she accused someone in the room of murder. A moment later, she is alone, wondering what came over her and lamenting that she “mucked that one up.”
The Old House is a dangerous place to be a fake practitioner of supernatural arts. In #400, set in the 1790s, fanatical but inept witchfinder the Rev’d Mr Trask performed an exorcism of the Old House, and was visibly delighted when that exorcism seemed to work. That time it was the intervention of wicked witch Angelique that gave Trask his apparent success, but now it seems that Pansy is simply getting it right for the first time.
That Dirk leaves Pansy in a chair in Barnabas’ front parlor is also something that will bring back memories for longtime viewers. In the 1790s segment, another brassy dame on the make brightened up the show for a little while before meeting a grisly demise on this spot. She was Suki Forbes, estranged wife of untrustworthy naval officer Nathan Forbes. Barnabas strangled Suki in #423, after she had discovered his secret. Suki took until #424 to die, but did not manage to disclose what she knew about Barnabas.
An even closer parallel is to #530. In that one, Frankenstein’s monster Adam hates Barnabas for making him what he is. Adam attacks a man called Joe Haskell and thinks he has killed him. At the end of the episode, Barnabas finds that Adam has planted Joe’s body in the front parlor. Any doubt that Adam was trying to frame Barnabas for Joe’s murder would be removed by consulting the novel Frankenstein, in which the Creature frames another character for the murder of his creator’s brother. Dirk knows that Barnabas made him into a vampire, and so has the same motivation to pin a murder charge on Barnabas that Adam had.
Adam was just a few months old when he tried to frame Barnabas for murder, and Dirk is a simpleton. Neither of them had the skills to get the police interested in Barnabas, no matter how many dead bodies they add to the decor of his house. On the other hand, Barnabas himself once very nearly managed to make such a plan work. In #440 and #441, part of the 1790s segment, Barnabas left the corpse of his victim Maude Browning in a bed belonging to Trask. It was only Nathan Forbes’ timely intervention that kept Trask from the gallows that time.
Vampire Barnabas Collins first appeared on Dark Shadows in #210 and quickly became the show’s main character and star attraction, but the word “vampire” was not uttered on-screen until #410, and thereafter was used quite sparingly for a long while. Those days are definitely behind us now; the characters say “vampire” eight times in this one.
Barnabas has traveled back in time to the year 1897, and is embroiled in a great many storylines, none of which he fully understands or has any idea of changing for the better. Yesterday, crazed groundskeeper Dirk Wilkins told twelve year old Jamison Collins (David Henesy) that Barnabas was a vampire, and Jamison, checking on his story, found an empty coffin in Barnabas’ basement. Today, Jamison tells his father, the stuffy Edward (Louis Edmonds,) what Dirk said and what he saw.
Edward comes to Barnabas’ house, repeats Jamison’s story, and asks to see the basement. Barnabas has hidden the coffin, but Edward tells him that he cannot dismiss the story so easily. A few weeks before, Edward discovered that Jamison’s mother Laura was an undead blonde fire witch bent on incinerating her children to renew her own existence; since that experience, he can no longer disregard claims about the supernatural. There have been a number of attacks on the estate of Collinwood and in the village of Collinsport which have left victims drained of blood and showing bite marks on their necks; he must take Jamison’s claims seriously. He is alone with Barnabas in his basement while explaining this to him, rather a foolhardy position in which to lay out to a man one’s grounds for suspecting that he is a vampire.
Edward leaves. Barnabas is in a bind. Jamison’s children will be the adults at Collinwood in the 1960s, and they are the ones who accept Barnabas’ story that he is their distant cousin from England and give him the Old House on the estate to live in. If Jamison knows about him, it will hardly be likely that his children will be so welcoming. Even if he can reverse his journey through time, there will be no future for him to go back to. So he tells his blood thrall, maidservant Beth, that they must provide a vampire to take the blame for his earlier deeds and allay Jamison and Edward’s suspicions.
Barnabas thinks that he has already arranged a solution to this problem. He bit Dirk in order to shut him up and bring him under control, but apparently he over-ate. Dirk is not going to live through the night. When he dies, he will rise as a vampire. Barnabas and Beth will see to it that Dirk is caught and that he takes the fall for Barnabas’ crimes.
Barnabas has stashed Dirk in a secret room off the parlor of the Old House, a space behind the bookcase in the front parlor. Barnabas opens this space, intending to sit by Beth until they see Dirk die, only to find that it is too late- Dirk has wandered off.
Longtime viewers will find satisfactions in the reflections of earlier characters that run throughout this episode. The secret chamber in which Barnabas tried to keep Dirk is not a place which he has used before, but it first appeared on the show long before he did. In #115, another crazed servant, handyman Matthew Morgan, locked well-meaning governess Vicki up in the chamber, eventually attempting to kill her there. When Barnabas suddenly thinks of that chamber, he is emphasizing the echo of Matthew in Dirk’s rampage.
Edward’s fearlessness in standing alone before Barnabas in his basement and telling him that he suspects he may be a vampire is also something we have seen before. From November 1967 to March 1968, when Dark Shadows was set in the 1790s, Louis Edmonds played haughty overlord Joshua Collins. In #446, Joshua found his son Barnabas rising from his coffin in this same basement and confronted him about his bad behavior. When Barnabas moved to kill him, Joshua glared at him and Barnabas slunk away in shame. Edward is quite different from Joshua; on the one hand he lacks the earlier man’s sense of enterprise and drive for power, while on the other he is far more loving towards his children and quicker to set aside his individual pride for the sake of family unity. But we can see that he does share his kinsman’s ability to fend off vampire attacks by insisting on good manners.
The most fully developed echo is of #333. In that episode, set in contemporary times, strange and troubled boy David Collins (David Henesy,) had seen a coffin in Barnabas’ basement. Connecting that with an abundance of other readily available evidence, David concluded that Barnabas was a vampire. David’s father, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins (Louis Edmonds,) refused to consider such a notion. When local men Burke and Dave went to Barnabas’ house and demanded to search the basement, he initially resisted. At length he led them downstairs. The coffin was not there. Burke and Dave went back to the great house of Collinwood, and Roger crowed with triumph that they had been so silly as to take David’s story seriously. Embarrassed, Burke and Dave asked David if he might have made the whole thing up.
Barnabas may have had this incident in mind, and with it a hope that by showing Edward the empty basement he would embarrass him as he had embarrassed Burke and Dave, perhaps turning him into the same kind of ally that Roger was in 1967. But Edward is made of sterner stuff, and he sheds light on what was in the minds of the makers of the show.
Laura was another iteration of the show’s first supernatural menace. From December 1966 to March 1967, we learned that David’s mother, Laura Murdoch Collins, was a humanoid Phoenix who had returned from the dead to incinerate him along with herself and thereby renew her existence. Roger eventually came face to face with that fact and made himself marginally useful in the effort to stop her. Afterward, he was shocked out of his habit of openly expressing hatred for David, and eventually even showed a modicum of affection and concern for the boy. But he quickly snapped back into the Collins family’s traditional attitude of denial that the supernatural could have any role in human events, and he would not be budged from this denial.
The Laura we saw in 1897 was a violent retcon of many of the most important features of the story we saw in 1966 to 1967, and as Jamison’s mother she implies that Roger married his own grandmother. So it seemed inexplicable that the makers of the show would choose to introduce her. It is when Edward explains that his experience with Laura has opened his mind to the possibility of dangers intruding from the world of the supernatural, that we understand why they did it. They are showing us that Edward is on a continuum about halfway between Joshua and Roger.
Joshua was in a way too strong for his world to support, so that he defeated his own aims and produced tragedies for all those he meant to elevate. By contrast, Roger is like one of Nietzsche’s “Last Men,” what nowadays some call “cage-stage,” a person who is so degenerated he cannot exist on his own or create anything lasting but can be happy in captivity. Edward does not have Joshua’s anomalous strength; like Roger, he lives in his sister’s house as her guest and works for her business as an employee. But neither does he have Roger’s cowardly inability to face facts or his vicious glee in the humiliation of others. He is brave enough and strong enough and fair-minded enough to represent a grave threat to Barnabas.
Second consecutive episode ruined by Roger Davis’ performance as crazed groundskeeper Dirk Wilkins. Crazy Dirk has more fans than do any of Mr Davis’ other roles on Dark Shadows, which I do not understand. He is such a swivel-eyed loon from the first shot to the last that he is useless as a character- he doesn’t respond to anything anyone else does or says, just carries on with a chortling mania. The unvarying bombast suggests a desperate actor, and it leaves Mr Davis’ scene partners with nothing to do.
In a comment I left under Danny Horn’s post about the episode on Dark Shadows Every Day, I talked about my mental habit of imagining different actors playing parts that were not well executed:
I amuse myself during weak bits by wondering how characters would have come off if played by other actors. A character as well-written as Dirk, played by an actor as competent as Robert Rodan? Second only to Quentin Collins among the fans! Played by David Groh? Bigger breakout star than Barnabas! Played by Harvey Keitel? Such a hit the show is still in production!
Who knows how they would actually have done- maybe they would have made some kind of unfortunate choice and bungled it. And who knows what effect they would have had on the rest of the show- maybe if Dirk had been a massive hit and they’d rebuilt Dark Shadows around him, the result would have been a less interesting show. But the imaginary show in my head is good enough to get me through some pretty dire segments.
This time through I’ve been imagining Edward Marshall, who wore some of the wardrobe that became Dirk’s when he was cast as petulant ex-convict Harry Johnson in #669, in Mr Davis’ place. Mr Marshall took over the part of Harry from the not reliably brilliant Craig Slocum. He preserved the attitude and a great many of the mannerisms Slocum had given the part, but was substantially more interesting than Slocum ever was. Before he became violently insane, Dirk shared so many of Harry’s qualities that Mr Marshall would have been an obvious choice for the role. I’m sure he would have been better than Mr Davis, though perhaps not on a par with Robert Rodan, David Groh, or Harvey Keitel.
Today’s big plot point comes when Dirk tells twelve year old Jamison Collins that he has killed Barnabas Collins and that Barnabas was a vampire. Dirk is mistaken about the first of these points; he did not harm Barnabas at all. But he is right that he is a vampire.
This part of Dark Shadows is a costume drama set in the year 1897. Barnabas traveled to that year from 1969 while doing battle with some supernatural menaces. In the parts of the show set in the 1960s, the adults in the great house of Collinwood are Jamison’s daughter Liz and son Roger. Liz and Roger have accepted Barnabas’ story that he is their distant cousin from England and have let him take up residence in the Old House on the estate. If Jamison finds out that Barnabas is actually a bloodsucking ghoul, it is unlikely that his children will be sufficiently hospitable to him to allow the parts of the show in contemporary dress to exist. So when Jamison goes to the Old House to check on Dirk’s story and finds a coffin in the basement, we know that something will have to change if the show is to continue.
Dark Shadows Commentary 