acilius

Episode 333: Why are you lying?

A few days after Dark Shadows began, we learned that high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins had squandered his entire inheritance. He and his son, strange and troubled boy David, then moved into Roger’s childhood home, the great house of Collinwood. The house belongs to Roger’s sister Liz. Roger lives there as her guest, and draws a salary from her business as an employee.

Time and again, Liz tells Roger that he must behave himself; time and again, she shields him from the consequences of his actions. Liz may want to believe that she is a model of adult authority, but in fact their relationship is one of Bossy Big Sister and Bratty Little Brother.

Liz extends that enabling behavior to the rest of the family. In episode #10, David overheard Roger in the drawing room, telling Liz that he wanted to send him away to school. Liz refused, because she saw that as Roger’s attempt to resign his responsibilities as a father. For his part, David reacted by tampering with the brakes on Roger’s car so that they would fail when he was driving down a steep hill and kill him. His murder plan failed. When Liz discovered it in #32 she lied to the sheriff in order to keep the whole thing quiet, and a few days later she ordered the family’s handyman to take the blame for the crash.

David had no big sister. Liz’ daughter Carolyn would later become a surrogate sister to him, but through the first months of the show she took no interest at all in her cousin. David spent his time with his well-meaning governess, Vicki. David was certainly bratty towards Vicki, trying to frame her for his attempt on Roger’s life in #27, and making an attempt on hers in #84. But while Vicki was glad to be sisterly towards David, she did not fall into the same pattern with him that traps Liz and Roger. She listened to him patiently, and enforced rules firmly. In response, David not only stopped committing crimes against Vicki, but when his mother, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, tried to claim him, he chose life with Vicki over death with her. Episode #191, the last installment of Dark Shadows 1.0, ends with David in Vicki’s arms, his new mother consoling him for the loss of his original mother.

Roger and Liz are minor characters in Dark Shadows 2.0, and Vicki is fast fading into the background as well. But #332 and #333 take us back to the first weeks. Yesterday, David again overheard his father in the drawing room saying he wanted to send him away to “a special school” where psychotherapy can cure him of his weird ideas. But Vicki’s influence has realigned David from evil to good, so that instead of trying to kill his father, he tries to collect evidence that his ideas are not a product of mental illness. In that effort, he went to the Old House on the estate and came upon the coffin in which his cousin Barnabas Collins, a vampire, rests during the day. Barnabas found him there and was closing in on him when mad scientist Julia Hoffman came into the house.

Julia and Barnabas are at the center of the show now, and they reproduce Liz and Roger’s Bossy Big Sister/ Bratty Little Brother dynamic. When Barnabas announces that someone or other “must die!,” Julia talks him out of doing anything to bring that death about. Sometimes she threatens to expose him, sometimes she promises to cure him of vampirism, sometimes she wears him down with lists of the practical difficulties of the murders he would like to commit.

But Julia also conceals and destroys evidence of Barnabas’ crimes. She induces grave amnesia in his victim Maggie Evans, and lets his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie Loomis take the blame for abducting Maggie. In fact, she very nearly killed Willie when it looked like he might not go down quietly. She may have rescued David today, but she protects Barnabas all the time, and it seems to be just a matter of time before she becomes an active participant in a murder for his sake.

Back in the great house, local man Burke Devlin is conferring with Dave Woodard, MD. Burke says that he is worried about David’s “fantasies,” to which Woodard replies “If they are fantasies.” Woodard is coming to believe that Barnabas is an uncanny being responsible for Maggie’s abduction and the other troubles the town of Collinsport has seen recently, and he takes everything David says very seriously. When David comes home and announces that he found the coffin, that Barnabas tried to kill him, and that Barnabas is a dead thing that can move around at night, Woodard listens intently.

Julia comes in, as does Roger. Julia dismisses all of David’s assertions. She claims to have seen Barnabas’ basement, and to know that there is no coffin there. David looks at Julia, and asks in an oddly calm voice “Why are you lying?” Roger is appalled at this question, but Woodard studies David carefully as he asks it and studies Julia’s reaction just as closely afterward.

In #331, Woodard gave David a sleeping pill and asked him questions about the strange goings-on. Robert Gerringer and David Henesy played that scene marvelously. Gerringer showed Woodard’s struggle, as a man of science, to come to terms with a set of facts that made logical sense only in a world where supernatural forces are at work, while Mr Henesy showed David’s desperation to find a responsible adult who will listen to what he knows. Gerringer also showed Woodard’s tender affection for David, tugging the covers of his bed over him when he fell asleep. As Woodard watches David today, we see the same intellectual crisis and the same tenderness that he played then.

Roger demands David apologize to Julia. He will not. Woodard says they ought to go look at Barnabas’ basement and see if there really is a coffin there. Roger is horrified by the implied insult to his cousin, and forbids any such thing. Burke points out that Roger is in no position to forbid it, and accompanies Woodard to the Old House.

There, Barnabas presents himself as shocked that Burke and Woodard want to search his basement. Woodard is polite about the whole thing, but Burke is an utter swine, declaring that they won’t leave until Barnabas submits to their demand. This is not the first time returning viewers have seen Burke impose himself as an unwanted house-guest, and it doesn’t get more attractive the more we see it. When Barnabas orders them to leave, Burke says they will come back “with a search warrant!” Even under the law codes of soap opera land, this would seem to be an empty threat- neither of them is a police officer, and while it may be eccentric to keep a vacant coffin in your basement I can’t think of a reason to suppose it would be a crime. Watching this scene, my wife, Mrs Acilius, said that Burke is so obnoxious that he makes us root for Barnabas despite everything we know.

Burke and Woodard start to go, and Barnabas relents. He takes them to the basement. The coffin is usually in the main area at the foot of the stairs, but when the three of them get there some crates and a trunk are stacked up on that spot.

Burke goes down a little corridor and sees nothing there, either.

Burke and Woodard are embarrassed, and Barnabas grins. We know that he had moved the coffin so that when someone came to check out David’s story they would see nothing, and that his resistance to Burke and Woodard’s requests to search was put on for effect. Barnabas spends most of his time with other people pretending to be a living man born in the twentieth century; his grin is that of an actor who finds he has given a particularly convincing performance.

We had seen corridors in the basement when Barnabas was holding Maggie prisoner there. We saw them most prominently in the episode that ended with her escape, #260. In that one, they looked very extensive. He had kept Maggie in a prison cell at the end of one of those corridors. That cell had been there since Barnabas’ time as a living being in a previous century, but none of the many people who had visited the basement before Barnabas moved in, including Burke in #118, had seen the cell. So there must be quite a bit of space down there that only Barnabas knows about, but he has chosen to put his most embarrassing possession in the one place no one coming to the basement could fail to notice. It’s like the old days, when you’d go to visit a single guy at home and find that he had left sexually explicit magazines or videos on his coffee table.

Episode 332: Worse than a nightmare

Strange and troubled boy David Collins stands outside the drawing room at the great house of Collinwood and overhears his father, Roger, talking with permanent house-guest Julia Hoffman. Roger and Julia are discussing David’s fear of his cousin, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, and his belief that Barnabas is hiding something terrible in the basement of his home in the Old House on the estate. Roger takes it for granted that Barnabas is above reproach, and has therefore concluded that David is suffering from some sort of mental disorder. Julia encourages Roger in this conclusion, and urges him to send David away to boarding school. Roger is amenable to this idea, but tells Julia that his sister, matriarch Liz, will never allow it.

The last time David overheard his father in the drawing room saying he wanted to send him away to school, he attempted to murder him. But that was in episode #10, almost fifteen months ago. Since then, David has been through a lot, and has decided he wants to align himself with good against evil. So he doesn’t try to kill Roger this time. Instead, he steals a set of keys to Barnabas’ house that Liz keeps in her study and sets off to gather evidence with which he can prove himself right.

Returning viewers will recall that David’s friend, the ghost of ten year old Sarah, has repeatedly warned him not to go near the Old House, and especially to stay away from the basement. David remembers her words, but makes his way into Barnabas’ basement regardless. There, he sees an open coffin. While David is looking the other way, Barnabas comes up behind the lid and slams it shut. David turns, and Barnabas glares at him. Since Barnabas is a vampire who has spent quite a bit of time thinking of killing David, this would seem to leave the boy in something of a pickle.

David caught in the act. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Closing Miscellany

There are three firsts in this episode, all relating to voice acting. This is the first time Alexandra Moltke Isles appears in an episode but does not read the opening voiceover. Sharon Smyth appears only through the pre-recorded voice of Sarah; her name does appear in the closing credits, the first time a performer is credited for something other than an on-camera appearance. And the closing titles end with Grayson Hall saying “Dark Shadows is a Dan Curtis Production,” the first time someone other than an ABC staff announcer* has delivered that line.

*Usually Bob Lloyd, though someone else filled in for Lloyd in #156 and #167.

Episode 331: Not always sure of the answers

Strange and troubled boy David Collins is at his wit’s end. A bat entered his room and menaced him. He can’t even convince the adults in the great house of Collinwood that the bat existed. Still less can he get a hearing for his correct surmises that his cousin, courtly gentleman Barnabas Collins, used magical powers to send the bat against him.

David’s aunt and father call the family doctor, addled quack Dave Woodard. Woodard gives David a sleeping pill, waits a few minutes, and starts asking him questions. David tells him about his friend, mysterious girl Sarah. He asks if Woodard believes that Sarah is a ghost. Several times, the audience has seen Woodard wrestle with evidence pointing in this direction, so we know that he is telling the truth when he answers David’s question with “I don’t know what I believe.” Robert Gerringer does a fine job of acting today, and draws the audience into Woodard’s struggle to come to terms with the idea that he lives in a world where supernatural forces are at work.

Later, Sarah wakes David up. She says she’s angry with him. In her last apparition, she specifically told him to stay away from Barnabas’ house, but the very next morning he went there, sneaked in through a window, and was trying to get into the basement when Barnabas’ co-conspirator Julia Hoffman caught him. He keeps asking for more information, and she complains that he asks too many questions. She keeps insisting that he stay away from Barnabas’ house.

The messenger. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Sarah gives David an antique toy soldier and tells him to keep it with him. She says it belonged to someone who played with it long ago, and that it will keep David safe as long as he has it with him. Returning viewers know that Sarah is the ghost of Barnabas’ sister, so the “someone” must be Barnabas himself. Also, we saw Sarah give a doll of her own to Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, with the same instructions, so we know this is her usual mode of operation.

When Sarah is complaining that David asks too many questions, she says that she isn’t always sure of the answers. This makes an interesting contrast with Woodard’s earlier remark that she seems to know everything. It also brings up a mystery from recent episodes. In #325, David had a dream in which Sarah led him to a basement where they saw Barnabas rise from a coffin. This must have been a dream visitation, since it includes information only she would have. But in #327, David sees Sarah in the woods and surprises her when he tells her about the dream. Later in that same episode, she makes it clear that she does not want him to know the information he gained from it.

The sight of Sarah in the corner of David’s room, lit from below, might cast the minds of regular viewers back to the first supernatural being to make an entrance in that spot. David’s mother, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, drove the story from #126 to #191. In the early part of the Laura arc, the show made a great deal out of the uncertainty about how the various events and appearances associated with her related to each other. There was a more or less substantial, apparently living woman who comes to stay in the cottage on the estate of Collinwood; an image of the same woman that occasionally flickers on the lawn of the estate; and a scorched corpse in the morgue in Phoenix, Arizona. These three, and an undetermined number of other phenomena, might all be aspects of the same being, or they may not. They may be pursuing the same objective, or they may be working at cross-purposes. They may be organs of a single mind, or they may be entirely unaware of each other. As the story went on, Laura became an ever-more dynamic personality, but it was never made altogether clear just how many of her there were.

The difference between the Sarah who led David to Barnabas in his dream and the Sarah who demands that he stay away from Barnabas when he is awake raises the same question. Sarah used to be a little girl, and she still looks and sounds like one. But she isn’t really that, nor is she anything else that belongs in our world anymore, and she can’t be expected to follow any rules we can understand. She is a focal point around which uncanny phenomena gather, and through which information passes into our world from an alien plane of existence. Sarah is not only a messenger- she is herself the message.

The uncertainty Sarah admits to today, along with our uncertainty about how her various manifestations fit with each other, show that David is wrong if he finds her a reassuring presence. She is part of a world in which the living have no place, and her irruption into David’s experience thrusts him into the company of the dead. David cannot fully understand Sarah’s world, much less control it. If he keeps trying to find his own way to safety, he will quickly meet his doom.

Episode 330: bat by Bil Baird

Dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis spent a week staring at the eighteenth century portrait of Barnabas Collins in the foyer of the great house of Collinwood back in April, then tried to rob Barnabas’ grave. That turned out to be an awkward situation when Willie found that Barnabas wasn’t entirely dead. Barnabas was a vampire who bit Willie, turned him into his sorely bedraggled blood thrall, and had lots of conversations with him. Yesterday, Willie was written out of the show.

Today we open with strange and troubled boy David Collins staring at the same portrait. As Willie was obsessed with the idea that there were jewels hidden in the Collins mausoleum in the old cemetery north of town, where in fact Barnabas’ coffin was hidden, so David is preoccupied with the idea that Barnabas has something terrible stashed in the basement of the Old House on the estate, where in fact his new coffin is hidden. As Willie sneaked off to the cemetery on his ill-starred expedition, David will sneak off to the Old House today and try to search Barnabas’ basement.

Unlike Willie, David is not driven by greed. He is afraid of Barnabas, and his friend, the ten year old ghost of Barnabas’ sister Sarah, has told him that he must not go to the Old House. But his aunt Liz and his father Roger dismiss his attempts to warn them about Barnabas, and he thinks it is his duty to provide them with evidence. So he screws up his courage and makes his way across the property.

David lets himself into the Old House by opening the parlor window. Not only have we seen David do this before, but Willie’s sometime friend, seagoing con man Jason McGuire, got into the house the same way in #274. Barnabas would kill Jason when he reached the basement in #275, so you might think he’d have put a lock on that window by now.

Jason’s fate is certainly on the minds of returning viewers when David tries to open the basement door. It comes as a relief when he finds the door locked. Barnabas’ co-conspirator, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, catches him there.

Julia demands to know what David is doing in the house, and he tries to brazen it out. He claims that he has a right to be there, since it belongs to his Aunt Liz. This is a bit of a murky point- we never see Liz transfer title to Barnabas, but she and others act as if he owns the place and its contents. Julia doesn’t clarify it when she responds that Liz gave the house to Barnabas- she doesn’t deny that it still belongs to Liz, only says that it also belongs to Barnabas.

Back in the great house, Roger is banging away at the piano. We saw Liz play the piano in #47 and #91, a reference to the conception of her character writer Art Wallace developed in his original story bible, titled Shadows on the Wall, in which she, like similar characters in a couple of TV plays he wrote in the 1950s under the title “The House,” gave piano lessons. Since then, Liz’ daughter Carolyn tried her hand at “Chopsticks” in #119 and used the piano as a prop in a teen rebel scene in #258, and Jason poked at a few keys in #198. Roger isn’t exactly Vladimir Horowitz, but he’s the first one we’ve seen who actually achieves a melody.

Liz comes in and tells Roger that David isn’t in his room. They fret over David’s attitude towards Barnabas. Julia brings David home and tells Liz and Roger where she found him. After an angry scene between father and son, David goes upstairs, and Liz scolds Roger for his inept parenting. In these as in all of Liz and Roger’s scenes together, we see a bossy big sister who tries to govern her bratty little brother, but who ultimately abets all of his worst behavior.

In the Old House, Barnabas notices that Julia is troubled. He keeps asking what’s on her mind, and she has difficulty deflecting his questions. This is odd- Julia has been established as a master of deception, and Barnabas is the most selfish creature in the universe. All she has to do is start talking about something that does not affect him directly, and he will lose interest at once. Rather than talk about her personal finances, or the job from which she is apparently on an indefinite leave of absence, or some ache or pain she might have, or how sad she is to miss her Aunt Zelda’s birthday, she brings up Willie. That does get Barnabas’ mind off her tension, but it also reminds him of David. He thinks David knows too much about him, and is thinking of murdering him. Julia assures him that the boy doesn’t know so very much, that whatever he does know he hasn’t told anyone, and that if he does say something his reputation as an overly imaginative child will lead the adults to ignore him.

From the beginning of the series, we’ve heard people say that David is “imaginative.” The audience finds an irony in this, since we have never seen David show any imagination whatsoever. All his stories of ghosts are strictly literal accounts of apparitions he has seen. We’ve seen some drawings he has done and heard quotes from some essays he has written. Some of these are technically accomplished for a person his age, but they are just as literal as his ghost stories. And when he tells lies to cover his various misdeeds, he tells simple little tales that fall apart at once.

In #327, well-meaning governess Vicki became the first character to dissent from the “David is a highly imaginative child” orthodoxy. Liz and local man Burke Devlin were dismissing David’s laboriously accurate account of his latest encounter with Sarah as a sign of his “imagination,” and Vicki interrupted with “I don’t think it has anything to do with his imagination.” Now, Barnabas goes a step further. After pronouncing the word “imaginative” in a truly marvelous way that makes it sound like something I’ve never heard before, he tells Julia that she has given him an idea. Frightened, she asks what he means. All he will say is “You’ll see.”

Roger goes to David’s room and has a friendly talk with his son. Throughout the conversation and afterward, David is thinking intensely, trying hard to figure out what his next step should be.

Once he is alone in the room, the window blows open and a bat enters. More precisely, a bat-shaped marionette is brought in on clearly visible strings by a pole that casts a shadow we can see the entire time, but no one who has been watching the show up to this point will doubt for a second that David’s fear, as depicted by David Henesy, is fully justified. David tries to flee from the bat, but he cannot open the door to escape from his room. His back against the door, David slides onto the floor and screams as the bat comes near him.

David finds that he cannot escape. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

David helpless before the bat. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

When Barnabas is about to attack someone, dogs start howling. Sometimes this works to his advantage, but it so often puts his intended victims on their guard that it doesn’t really seem to be something he is doing on purpose. So this bat represents something new. Perhaps Barnabas is using magic to control a bat- if so, it marks the first time we have seen Barnabas use magic to project influence over something other than a human mind. Or perhaps he himself has assumed the form of a bat. If so, that is the first indication we’ve had that he has shape shifting powers. In either case, Barnabas’ powers have just gone up a level.

Closing Miscellany

The bat was created by famed puppeteer Bil Baird. Most famous today for the puppets he created for “The Lonely Goatherd” sequence in The Sound of Music, Baird was a frequent guest on television programs like The Ed Sullivan Show, and Jim Henson cited Baird’s own TV series, the short lived Life with Snarky Parker, as a major influence on the Muppets. In December 1966, Baird opened a marionette theater in New York City, at 59 Barrow Street in Greenwich Village; it operated until 1978, and many leading puppeteers, including dozens who would go on to work with Henson, were members of its company in those years.

Bil Baird’s bat-credit. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The original string wasn’t quite so conspicuous. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

This is the last episode to end with ABC staff announcer Bob Lloyd saying “Dark Shadows is a Dan Curtis production.” We do hear the announcement again in February of 1969, but that won’t be because Lloyd has returned- they used an old recording for the music under the closing credits that day, and they picked one with him on it.

Fans of Dark Shadows will often talk about “the early episodes” which ended with Lloyd making that announcement. So I suppose #330 is the last of “the early episodes.”

Danny Horn’s post about this one on Dark Shadows Every Day includes a morphology of episode endings. He divides them into five categories, Haiku,* Restatement of Threat, ** New Information,*** Crisis Point,**** and Spectacle.***** It’s an intriguing scheme, and he makes a good case for it.

*Danny explains that “Haiku” “aren’t necessarily recognizable as endings in the traditional sense, because nothing is resolved and no progress is made. It’s just a little moment when a character pauses, and possibly has a feeling about something… In some extreme cases, the audience may not realize that the episode is over until halfway through The Dating Game.”

**Restatement of Threat, at this period of Dark Shadows, usually means Barnabas looking at us through his window and saying that someone or other “must die!” Which of course means that you can safely sell a million dollar life insurance policy to that character.

***”A New Information ending provides an actual plot point, which either advances the story another step, or tells us something that we didn’t know.”

****”The Crisis Point cliffhanger is the big game-changer, and for best effect, it should come at the end of a sequence that’s been building up for a while. This is a big turn in the story, and it should feel satisfying and thrilling… The defining feature of a Crisis Point ending is that the resolution marks a change in the status quo, ending one chapter and setting up the next.”

***** “Obviously, plot advancement is always welcome, but every once in a while the show needs to set its sights a little higher. These are the moments when the show goes above and beyond, in order to surprise and dazzle you… The point of a Spectacle is: You can’t take your eyes off the screen. Housewives in the audience have put down the iron, and switched off the vacuum. Teenagers have stopped swatting at their siblings… A Crisis Point cliffhanger will bring you back for the next episode, because you want to see what happens next. But a Spectacle cliffhanger is bigger than that — you’ll be coming back for the next episode, but it’s because you can’t believe what you’re seeing, and maybe tomorrow they’ll do it again.”

Episode 329: The truth about Willie

We open in the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood, home to courtly gentleman Barnabas Collins. In a bedroom there occupied by Barnabas’ servant Willie, Sheriff George Patterson and artist Sam Evans have found evidence that convinces them they have solved the case of the abduction of Sam’s daughter Maggie. They found Maggie’s ring hidden in a candlestick. The room is in Barnabas’ house and he has unlimited access to it. Further, the house is the only place Willie could possibly have kept Maggie if he had held her prisoner. But for some unexplained reason, they are sure that the ring proves that Willie and only Willie abducted Maggie. When Barnabas says that he feels somehow responsible, Sam rushes to tell him that he mustn’t blame himself.

The sheriff says that he will be going to the hospital, where Willie is recovering from gunshot wounds the sheriff’s deputies inflicted on him when they were looking for a suspect. Barnabas hitches a ride with him.

At the hospital, Willie’s doctor, addled quack Dave Woodard, is conferring with his medical colleague Julia Hoffman. When he steps out of the room for a moment, we hear Julia’s thoughts in voiceover. She is thinking about killing Willie before he can regain consciousness and tell a story that will make it impossible for her ever to practice medicine again. She thinks of Barnabas’ voice demanding that she kill Willie. She is reaching for the catheter through which Willie is receiving fluids when Woodard comes back in. She tells him she was checking it, and he is glad when she confirms it is working correctly.

Returning viewers know that Barnabas is the one who abducted Maggie and committed the other crimes of which Willie is suspected, that he is a vampire, that Julia is a mad scientist trying to cure him of vampirism, and that in pursuing her project she has become deeply complicit in Barnabas’ wrongdoing. We also know that she has several times told him that she will draw the line at killing anyone herself, but that she has involved herself in so many other evil deeds that it was just a matter of time before she found herself on the point of crossing that line.

Barnabas and the sheriff arrive at the hospital. In the corridor, Barnabas is bewildered to find that the sheriff will not allow him to be present while he questions Willie. The sheriff has been so careless about treating miscellaneous people as if they were his deputies- for example, enlisting Sam yesterday to help him search Willie’s room- that Barnabas’ puzzlement is understandable. The conversation goes on for quite a while.

Note the poster that reads “Give Blood.” That’s a message Barnabas could endorse. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The sheriff enters Willie’s room, and greets Julia as “Dr Hoffman.” Woodard thinks Julia has come to Collinsport to investigate Maggie’s abduction, and so he has agreed to keep her professional identity secret from most people in town, including the sheriff for some reason. Therefore, she is startled at this form of address. Woodard explains that now that Maggie’s abductor has been identified, he doesn’t see a point in keeping law enforcement in the dark.

Julia meets Barnabas in the corridor. When she tells him that she didn’t kill Willie, he fumes and calls her a “bungling fool.” He says he will do the job himself, but Julia points out that Woodard and the sheriff are in the room with Willie now. They wind up staring at the clock for hours.

Willie regains consciousness. He doesn’t recognize Woodard. When the sheriff shows him Maggie’s ring, his eyes gleam and he claims that it is his. Returning viewers will remember that before Willie ever met Barnabas, he was obsessed with jewelry. He is terrified when he learns that it is night-time, and says that he knows why he is afraid.

The sheriff and Woodard go out into the corridor to talk with Julia and Barnabas. Woodard tells Julia that she was right- Willie is hopelessly insane. Apparently when they asked him what he was afraid of, he mentioned “a voice from a grave. Nothing else made more sense than that.”

Julia and Barnabas go into Willie’s room. He looks at Barnabas and asks “Who are you?” Barnabas shows surprise that Willie doesn’t know him. Willie asks if he is a doctor. “Yes,” replies Barnabas. “I am a doctor.”

Sheriff Patterson is played by Dana Elcar today. It is Elcar’s 35th and final appearance on Dark Shadows. He would go on to become one of the busiest and most distinguished character actors of his generation.

Elcar had his work cut out for him with the part of Sheriff Patterson. If a police officer on the show ever solved a case, or followed any kind of rational investigative procedure, or interpreted a clue correctly, the story would end immediately. So all the sheriffs and constables and detectives have to be imbeciles. Elcar reached into his actorly bag of tricks almost three dozen times, and always came out with some way to make it seem as if something more was going on in Sheriff Patterson’s mind than we could tell.

My wife, Mrs Acilius, exclaimed “I’m so glad Dana Elcar is playing this scene!” when Barnabas and the sheriff had their long conversation in the hospital corridor. This week’s episodes were shot out of sequence, so yesterday’s was made after Elcar had left. It featured Vince O’Brien as Sheriff Patterson. O’Brien was by no means a bad actor, but he didn’t make the character seem any smarter than the script did. Elcar seems so much like he has something up his sleeve that Jonathan Frid’s insistent pleading makes sense as a cover for a mounting panic. Without Elcar to play against, it might just have come off as whining.

With the conclusion of Willie’s story, this is John Karlen’s last appearance for a long while. Beginning shortly after Barnabas’ introduction to the show in April, his conversations with Willie have been the main way we find out what he is thinking and feeling. More recently, Willie and Julia have been having staff conferences in which they come up with new ideas and add a new kind of flexibility and dynamism to the vampire storyline. From time to time, Willie’s conscience gets the better of him, and he adds an unpredictable element to the story as he tries to thwart one of Barnabas’ evil plans. For all these reasons, removing Willie from the show drastically reduces the number of possible outcomes in any situation they might set up involving Barnabas. His departure, therefore, seems to signal that some sort of crisis is at hand.

In fact, Karlen wanted to leave Dark Shadows because he had a better offer from a soap called Love is a Many Splendored Thing. But the producers knew that no one else could play Willie after the audience had got used to Karlen, and so they wrote the character out until they could get him back. Still, losing Willie puts Barnabas’ story on a much narrower track. So far, each development has led us to speculate about an ever-growing list of directions the story might possibly take. From now on, we are entering a phase where we will often be stumped as to what might be coming next.

Episode 328: My entire career

In the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood, vampire Barnabas Collins frets that his sorely bedraggled blood thrall, Willie Loomis, is failing to die. A couple of weeks ago, the police shot Willie and jumped to the conclusion that he was responsible for the abduction of Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, among many other crimes that Barnabas actually committed. He’s been in a coma ever since, and if he dies, Barnabas will be off the hook.

Barnabas tells his co-conspirator, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, that he will go to the hospital and murder Willie. Her assurances that Willie will soon die of natural causes don’t stop Barnabas, but her news that the sheriff is on his way to the house does. Barnabas then orders her to go to the hospital and carry out the murder, but she refuses.

Meanwhile, Sheriff George Patterson, addled quack Dr Dave Woodard, and Maggie’s father Sam are hanging around Willie’s hospital room recapping the story so far. The sheriff wonders where Willie could have kept Maggie during the weeks she was held prisoner. Willie lives in Barnabas’ house and does not appear to have access to any other building. You might think this would be grounds for suspecting Barnabas of involvement, but no such thought crosses the minds of any of the three luminaries keeping Willie company. They just take it for granted that no crime could have taken place in Barnabas’ house.

George, Dave, and Sam, or their intellectual equivalents.

Back in the Old House, Barnabas has had an inspiration. He took a ring from Maggie in #253, and today he hides it in a candlestick in Willie’s bedroom. When the sheriff and Sam come to search that room (but no other part of the house,) Barnabas watches until they’ve given up, then knocks the candlestick over and exclaims in a ridiculously fake voice “Look! A ring!” Sam recognizes it as Maggie’s, and he and the sheriff are convinced it is conclusive evidence of Willie’s guilt.

For her part, Julia has made her way to Willie’s hospital room. She is there with Woodard when Willie shows signs of regaining consciousness. Woodard rushes out to tell the deputy to get the sheriff, and leaves Julia alone with Willie. She looks at Willie’s IV and remembers Barnabas urging her to kill him.

The sheriff and Sam are leaving Barnabas’ house with the ring when the deputy comes to the front door. He announces that Willie is coming to and is likely to start talking at any moment. We end with a closeup of a horrified Barnabas.

Closing Miscellany

In his post about this episode on The Collinsport Historical Society, Patrick McCray gives a fine analysis of the intentional comedy that runs throughout it. In his post on Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn presents an equally fine analysis of the maybe not quite so intentional comedy of the thick-headed Dave, George, and Sam.

During the opening titles, announcer Bob Lloyd tells us that the part of Sheriff Patterson will be played by Vince O’Brien. This week’s episodes were shot out of broadcast sequence, so we will see Dana Elcar as Patterson one more time. O’Brien was on the show four times in January and February of 1967 as the second actor to play Lieutenant Dan Riley of the Maine State Police, an officer attached to an investigation concerning undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. Patterson isn’t much of a character, and even an actor as distinguished as Elcar had trouble making him interesting. If we remember O’Brien from his time as Dan Riley Number Two, we know that he was a competent professional, but we won’t have much hope that he will outdo Dana Elcar.

O’Brien does show beyond all doubt that he belongs on Dark Shadows, though. While the closing credits are rolling, he strolls onto the set behind technical director J. J. Lupatkin’s name.

Screenshot and annotation by Danny Horn at Dark Shadows Every Day.

Episode 327: Snap! Like that.

For the last eight weeks, Dark Shadows has been presenting a riddle about strange and troubled boy David Collins. In #288, he wondered if mysterious little girl Sarah might be a ghost. Since then, he has seen her several times, and every time she has given fresh evidence to corroborate that hypothesis. When he isn’t with Sarah, David is either looking for her or fielding questions from adults who are anxious to make contact with her, and in the course of every search and every question he finds still more reason to suppose that she is a ghost. David had always been the first character to believe in ghosts, yet he kept resisting the obvious conclusion that Sarah was one.

Friday, David had a dream in which Sarah told him that she died when she was ten years old. In that same dream, David saw his cousin Barnabas rise from a coffin, greet Sarah warmly, and threaten him with his cane. Yesterday, David woke up and told his well-meaning governess Vicki that he now understood everything about Sarah, because he knew that she was a ghost. Vicki listened carefully to his dream. Much to his frustration, she tried to talk him out of taking it literally. But today, when David is out of earshot, Vicki twice shows the other adults that she regards David’s dream with the utmost seriousness.

In the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood, mad scientist Julia Hoffman tries to hypnotize David so that he will stop making trouble for her co-conspirator Barnabas. Before she can induce the trance, David recognizes her medallion as the one a faceless woman held before his face in the dream. He flees from Julia and calls out for Vicki.

Vicki and matriarch Liz ask Julia what happened. Julia tries to play dumb, but Vicki recognizes her medallion both as the one David described when he was telling her about his dream and as the one Julia showed her and Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, when she dropped in on them at Maggie’s house in #298. During that visit, Vicki briefly left Julia and Maggie alone together. Before she left the room, Maggie was about to remember who abducted her and held her prisoner; after she came back, Maggie’s amnesia had returned in full force. During the interval, Julia had used the medallion to do a little emergency hypnosis, restoring the memory block that keeps Maggie from identifying Barnabas as her captor and as a vampire. Julia has reason to squirm when she realizes that Vicki has connected the medallion both with that incident and with David’s dream.

Vicki goes to David’s room to again try to talk him out of a supernatural reading of his dream. She finds him gazing into his crystal ball, looking for Sarah. He pleads with her to allow him to go look for Sarah. She resists, but he tells her that he saw Sarah in the crystal ball and that it won’t take him long to find her. He promises to tell Vicki what he and Sarah talk about. She lets him go, on condition that he be back within an hour.

The riddle of David’s long refusal to acknowledge that Sarah is a ghost is matched by the riddle of Vicki’s attitude. She has seen and interacted with ghosts on many occasions, a fact that is no secret from David. Both her recognition of Julia’s medallion and her acceptance of David’s claim to have seen Sarah in the crystal ball show that she knows she is operating in a world where supernatural forces are at work. Yet she keeps urging David back into “logical explanation”-land. Perhaps she has read Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw,” and doesn’t want there to be any ambiguity about whether the boy saw the ghosts himself or his crazy governess put the idea into his head.

David goes to the woods, hears the familiar strains of “London Bridge,” and sees Sarah. She tells him that she knows he saw her in his crystal ball. When he asks how she knows he was looking into his crystal ball, she answers only “I know lots of things.” He asks her about his dream; apparently that is not among the things she knows about, because it all comes as news to her. David tells her that in his dream, she told him that she was very sick when she was ten years old. She excitedly replies “That’s true!” He then says that she told him she died of that sickness. Even now, after the dream, after telling Vicki that Sarah is a ghost and shouting with frustration when she won’t agree, he follows up the idea that Sarah has died with “That isn’t true, is it, Sarah?”

Before Sarah can answer, Vicki’s depressing boyfriend Burke lumbers onto the scene. He hears David and Sarah’s voices and shouts “David!” Sarah then becomes alarmed and declares she has to go away. David asks her to stay, and goes to tell Burke to wait. By the time they turn around, Sarah has vanished.

Burke used to be an interesting character, back when he was a dashing action hero played by the charismatic Mitch Ryan. In fact, he was the one who gave David the crystal ball in the first place, back in #48. But he hasn’t had much to do on the show since his major storyline evaporated in #201, and now he is played by Anthony George, an actor whose cool, understated approach was the exact opposite of Ryan’s tendency to red-hot, larger than life reactions. In the scripts written by Ron Sproat, the part of Burke still depends on Ryan’s strengths, and George is entirely at sea with it. Today, Gordon Russell’s script takes advantage both of George’s actual abilities and of the dimwitted impression he has made previously.

David tells Burke that he doesn’t think Sarah will talk to anyone other than him from now on, not because she is shy, but because she doesn’t want anyone else to know that she is a ghost. Burke gives David a smug little speech about how foolish it is to believe in ghosts. David asks how Sarah got away so fast. Burke admits he doesn’t know. David gives Burke some details about Sarah’s way of vanishing into thin air, and he is left speechless.

“You don’t know much about Sarah, do you?” Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Back in the drawing room, Burke tells Vicki and Liz that David thinks Sarah is a ghost. Liz reflexively asks if he ought to be taken to a doctor. Burke suavely says that he doesn’t believe it is as serious as all that, that David is just letting his imagination run away with him.

Vicki speaks up. She says that she disagrees with Burke on two points. First, she thinks the matter is very serious. Second, she doesn’t believe it has anything to do with David’s imagination. Sarah really is a ghost.

Burke starts giving another sanctimonious speech about how one oughtn’t to believe in ghosts. Some weeks ago, Sproat and recently-departed, never-lamented writer Malcolm Marmorstein had given Burke some angry speeches in which he demanded Vicki stop taking the supernatural seriously. Those speeches would have marked Burke as bad news had Mitch Ryan delivered them, but at least they might have suggested that he was going to become an interesting villain- coming from an actor as cold as Anthony George, they were just pointless nastiness. Vicki’s attempts to comply with Burke’s gaslighting campaign also did a lot of damage to her character in the audience’s eyes, presenting her as weak-willed and empty-headed.

But today, Gordon Russell doesn’t write Burke as a loudmouth or Vicki as an aspiring doormat. Instead, he lets George make a reasonable-sounding case in the quiet, detached manner in which he excelled, and he has Vicki surprise him with an equally quiet but unyielding disagreement. She tells Burke to hire all the private investigators he likes to use and tell them to search for Sarah. If they can produce the girl in the flesh, she will admit that she is mistaken. But she tells Burke that won’t happen, because “David is right- that little girl is a ghost.”

If we remember Vicki’s earlier attempts to submit to Burke’s gaslighting, this scene answers the riddle about her. She knows that there are a lot of Burkes and a lot of Lizzes in this world, and that if you want to get along with them you have to be able to present yourself as someone who doesn’t believe in ghosts. She is trying to teach David how to play the role of the practical-minded fellow who takes it for granted that what we can see in the plain light of day is all we have to concern ourselves with. If she and the other adults can shelter him from enough of the uncanny doings that she knows full well are afoot all around them, perhaps he might get through his childhood actually being something like that fellow. It worked out that way when David’s mother, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, came to Collinwood to claim him- the storyline around her drew him deeper and deeper into the world of the occult, but once Vicki had rescued him and it was all over he didn’t remember anything about that side of it.

Upstairs, David is trying to sleep. Sarah appears in the corner of his room, lit from below. Laura stood on the same spot, in the same lighting, when she visited David while he slept in #150. His mother had called his name in a whispering voice and had a subtle message for him, but Sarah yells “David!” and says she’s ready to answer more questions.

“You said you had more questions to ask me.” Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

David doesn’t ask her if she died. Perhaps when he told Burke that she doesn’t want anyone to know that she is a ghost, he meant that he has realized it is a sensitive subject for her. He does ask about the coffin he saw in his dream. She says she doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He says it was in a room that he felt he’d been in before, and she says maybe it was. He says he doesn’t know where it is, and she tells him that’s good- she doesn’t want him going anywhere near it.

David keeps talking about the coffin, and it dawns on him that it is in the basement of Barnabas’ house. She insists that he stay away from Barnabas’ house, that it isn’t safe for him there. She won’t answer any of his questions about that, but she keeps insisting that he stay away from Barnabas’ house.

David asks Sarah if Barnabas’ servant Willie really was the man who abducted Maggie, as the police think. Sarah answers, “Oh no, poor Willie only went to Maggie’s house to warn her.” David asks what he was trying to warn Maggie of, and Sarah says that she has to go away. She repeats that he must stay away from Barnabas’ house. He pleads with her to stay, but she dematerializes in front of him. This is the first time we’ve seen a ghost vanish in this way since #85, when the ghost of Bill Malloy appeared to Vicki, sang a sea shanty, and then disappeared. It’s also the first time Sarah has let David see her dematerialize. Evidently, she’s more relaxed about these things now that she’s out to him.

Closing Miscellany

There is a particularly funny blooper 14 minutes and 20 seconds into the episode, when Burke comes out of the door that leads to the bedrooms at Collinwood, an off-camera voice calls out “Go in!,” he turns around, goes back in the door, then comes out again with exactly the same expression on his face.

Burke and Vicki have a little conversation about why Julia spends so much time at Barnabas’ house. Burke guesses Julia might have “a mad crush on Barnabas.” Vicki reacts as if this is absurd. The same idea had occurred to Julia’s old acquaintance Dave Woodard, MD, in #324, and Julia had been delighted to find that she had inadvertently acquired a cover story. That Burke came up with the notion independently leads us to wonder if we will be hearing more about it, and that Vicki regards it as so self-evidently preposterous reminds us of the times she has seemed more interested in Barnabas than in Burke. Perhaps the Vicki/ Burke/ Barnabas love triangle has a future after all.

Episode 326: Some experience with child psychology

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, most households in the USA had television sets that received only in black and white. So the first requirement of any program’s visual strategy was that it look good on those sets. Prime-time programs with big budgets and long production schedules could sometimes look good in black and white and dazzling in color; the most noteworthy example was the 1966-1968 Batman series. But even most prime-time shows limited themselves to a palette that resembled a plate of processed baby food, with the green of strained peas next to the orange of puréed carrots and the purple of mashed prunes. The use of color on a show like Dark Shadows, which every week had to crank out five episodes on a total budget of $70,000, could rarely rise even to the level of a well-presented infant’s breakfast. Directors Lela Swift and John Sedwick were ambitious visual artists who sometimes managed to use color to advantage, but most of the time the color is a gimmick as worthless as any spear pointed at the viewer of a 3D movie.

Today begins with a reprise of the dream sequence that ended Friday’s episode so effectively. But where that episode survived only on a black and white kinescope, the original videotape of this one has come down to us. As a result, we see the dream in color today. Black and white images are abstract; color images, even when they are composed of only two or three flat colors, make everything literal. So while the dream we saw in Friday’s ending was a terrifying message from a mysterious realm, today’s opening is something that might trouble the sleep of someone who ate a big meal too soon before bedtime.

Strange and troubled boy David wakes up from his nightmare, and well-meaning governess Vicki tries to calm him down. David is frustrated that Vicki won’t take him seriously when he tells her that he learned from the dream that his cousin Barnabas is an undead ghoul and that his friend Sarah is a ghost. We know that he is right, but after the color version of the dream, we can understand why Vicki thinks all he needs is a warm glass of milk.

Vicki checks to see if David has a fever. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Meanwhile, Barnabas is at home, being unpleasant to his co-conspirator, mad scientist Julia Hoffman. He snaps at Julia for sitting in his house browsing through medical journals. This is unfair of him- since Julia is concealing her medical degree and pretending to be an historian studying the old families of New England, she can’t very well read medical journals anywhere else.

What is really bothering Barnabas is that his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie isn’t dead yet. The authorities have decided to blame Willie for the many unsolved crimes Barnabas himself committed, primarily because Willie is poor and unpopular, and if he dies of the gunshot wounds the police inflicted on him in #322, they will close all those cases. Yet Willie “clings to life with leech-like persistence.” Barnabas fears that Willie will make a miraculous recovery and set about “writing his memoirs.” Barnabas wants to break into the hospital and kill Willie, but Julia persuades him this would be counterproductive.

Barnabas then starts talking about his inclination to kill David. Julia persuades him that she can hypnotize David so that he will no longer be curious about him. In both parts of the conversation, Barnabas is a pouting child, Julia an authoritative figure, though because of her amorality ultimately a no less childish one. We see again the Bossy Big Sister/ Bratty Little Brother dynamic that has been at the heart of Dark Shadows since the first episode, when we were introduced to matriarch Liz and her brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger.

Back at the great house of Collinwood, Julia asks Liz and Vicki if she might talk alone with David about his fear of Barnabas. She explains that she has had some experience of child psychology. This led my wife, Mrs Acilius, to exclaim that Julia has forgotten her cover story and is presenting herself as what she actually is, a medical doctor dually qualified as a specialist in psychiatry and hematology. Liz remarks that Julia is “a woman of many talents.” This is not the first time Liz seems suspicious of Julia, but she nonetheless agrees to bring David to meet with her alone in the drawing room.

Julia and David sit on the couch, and she takes out the medallion she shows to people while she is hypnotizing them. David recognizes the medallion from his dream. He saw a faceless woman wearing Julia’s wig and coat showing him that medallion. He declares that the dream was warning him against Julia, and runs off, calling to Vicki.

Episode 325: Such pretty flowers

Strange and troubled boy David Collins was, for the first 39 weeks of Dark Shadows, the character most intimately connected to the supernatural back-world of ghosts and uncanny phenomena that would occasionally peek through the main action of the show. That changed in #191, when he chose life with well-meaning governess Vicki over death with his mother, humanoid Phoenix Laura Murdoch Collins. After that, he had little memory of his mother, and none at all of the paranormal experiences he had during her time with him on the great estate of Collinwood.

Not that David lost his connection to the supernatural all at once. When he first met his cousin Barnabas in #212, he cheerfully asked him if he was a ghost, and was disappointed to hear that he wasn’t. In #288, he speculated that his friend, mysterious little girl Sarah, might be a ghost, and he has taken it in his stride every time he has seen Sarah do something only a ghost could do. In #310, he took out his crystal ball, a gift he had received in #48 and hadn’t used since #82, and peered into it to try to find Sarah. He did see her in it, too.

Yet David seems to be resisting the idea that Sarah is a ghost, and indeed to be shying away from the whole concept of the supernatural. When she led him to the secret chamber in the Collins mausoleum in #306, she told him that the empty coffin there once had a body in it, but that the body got up and left. David objected that the dead don’t walk away, and was incredulous when she assured him that sometimes, they do. When David was trapped in the chamber in #315, Sarah materialized there and showed him how to get out. He had called on her to come, and was facing away from the only door when he did so, indicating that he knew she could pass through the walls. Yet when she did, he demanded a naturalistic explanation for her entrance, and when she vanished he asserted that she must be hiding in the chamber somewhere.

Now, David is terrified of Barnabas, much to the puzzlement of the adults he lives with. In the opening scenes, he is staring at the portrait of Barnabas in the foyer of the great house, and we hear Barnabas in voiceover, delivering the lines with which he frightened David in #315. He screams with terror, bringing his aunt Liz. She sees that David is upset, but he hurries away from her, upstairs to his bedroom.

There, we hear his thoughts in another voiceover. He remembers the events of #310, when he discovered that Barnabas and his servant Willie knew about the secret chamber in the mausoleum. In his agitation, he calls out to Sarah. He hasn’t admitted to himself that Sarah is a ghost, but evidently he expects her to materialize out of thin air. Sarah doesn’t come, but Vicki does, asking who he was talking to.

After David says he wants to work on his stamp collection, Vicki goes downstairs and finds Liz putting her coat on. She says that David is afraid of Barnabas for some reason, and that she is going to Barnabas’ house to ask him to help put the boy’s fears to rest. She says that David is more disturbed than he has been since his mother Laura was around; this is the first direct reference to Laura in months.

There is a knock on the front door. It is Barnabas, saving Liz the trip. Liz and Vicki explain how fearful David is, and Barnabas offers to have a talk with him.

Liz ushers Barnabas into David’s room. Once the door is closed on the two of them, Barnabas questions David aggressively about Sarah and the secret chamber in the mausoleum. He asks him if Sarah told him about her family, twice mentioning her brother. When David says that Sarah hasn’t told him anything about herself, Barnabas accuses him of lying. He sits next to David on his bed. David doesn’t know that Barnabas is a vampire, but if he did he couldn’t look much more uncomfortable than he does when Barnabas assumes this position.

Barnabas tells David repeatedly that he knows he was in the secret chamber. David denies it, Barnabas again tells him he is lying, and to prove it shows him the knife he left there.

A knock comes at the door. It is Vicki. Vicki adores Barnabas, and the smile she wears when she enters the room shows her certainty that a heart-to-heart talk with him will have relieved David’s anxiety.

Smiling Vicki, sure everything will be all right

Vicki sees that David is still frightened, and her smile gives way to a look of confusion. Vicki was originally the audience’s point-of-view character; the audience is now composed chiefly of people who have tuned in wanting to see how they were going to fit a vampire into a daytime soap opera, and so of course she has to be Barnabas’ biggest fan at Collinwood. She and Barnabas leave David’s room together, and Barnabas wishes David “Pleasant dreams…”

We see David tossing in bed. He is talking in his sleep, calling out to Sarah. In yet another voiceover, we hear his dream. It is a bit of conversation from #306, when Sarah told him about the empty coffin.

We then see the beginning of another dream. It takes place amid a composite of decorations from the cemetery set and from the set representing Barnabas’ basement. David at first appears in a corridor like the ones we saw in the basement in #260.

He then encounters a faceless woman whom regular viewers will recognize as Barnabas’ co-conspirator, mad scientist Julia Hoffman.

We see that she is wearing Julia’s wig and frock and holding the jeweled medallion she uses to hypnotize people:

David flees from the faceless woman, saying he has to find Sarah. He finds himself behind a grating like the one on the door to the Collins mausoleum:

He walks up a few stairs, and sees Sarah.

When David tells Sarah that she is hard to find, she denies it, saying that she is easy to find if you know where she is. David does not respond to this characteristically cryptic remark, but complains that she won’t tell him anything about herself. She asks what he wants to know, and says he wants to know who she is and where she comes from. She tells him:

Sarah: That’s easy. I was born the same place you were. I lived in a house on a hill until I was nine years old. Then I got very sick. Everyone came to see me, and they were very sad.

David: Because you were sick?

Sarah: No, because I died. I died, and everyone brought such pretty flowers.

“I died that time. I died, and everyone brought such pretty flowers.”

When David asks why she is around now if she died then, she tells him she doesn’t really know. All she knows is that she is looking for someone. David asks who that might be, and Sarah says she will show him. Suddenly he becomes frightened and does not want to go with her. She insists. She takes his hand and leads him.

The camera follows the children on their journey across the set. At first Sarah takes David down some stairs, leading him from depths to depths:

The set is now unmistakably Barnabas’ basement, though with more candelabra casting more intricate shadows on the walls than we have seen there:

At last Sarah stops and looks straight ahead. They have reached their destination.

They see a coffin. David asks if this coffin is empty, as was the one in the secret chamber. Sarah tells him no. This one has a body in it. The lid starts to open. David points in astonishment, while Sarah looks on serenely.

Barnabas rises from the coffin.

David recognizes Barnabas and is stunned. Sarah has eyes only for her big brother.

Barnabas stands. He turns, and sees Sarah. He is glad to see her.

David watches Sarah’s reunion with Barnabas.

Barnabas notices David. He turns to follow him.

Barnabas blocks David from our view and from Sarah’s.

As Barnabas follows David, Sarah simply watches.

Barnabas follows David through another corridor. The shadows on the wall and floor form a design suggesting David is caught in a web. Readers of Gold Key comics’ Dark Shadows series will recognize the bend of Barnabas’ knees and the angle of his cane in this shot as their usual depiction of him:

David’s back is to the wall and Barnabas closes in on him.

Barnabas raises the cane he used to block David’s escape in #315 and which regular viewers several times saw him use to beat Willie. We zoom in on the wall, where we see the cane’s shadow rise and fall while we hear David cry out in distress.

Sarah’s fixation on Barnabas and her passivity when Barnabas follows David mark a pivotal moment in her development. She looks and sounds like a friendly little girl, and we have seen her rescue people from danger. She usually seems like a cross between Caspar the Friendly Ghost and the Powerpuff Girls. But she is not that at all. She is a symptom of the same curse that has brought Barnabas forth to prey upon the living, and she is leading David ever deeper into a world where only the dead belong. The show has given us no reason at all to think that she can bring him back to the realm of the living.

Even if Sarah wants to save David, she may still represent a deadly threat to him. We saw this in the Laura story. When Laura tried to lure David into the flames, she told him that he, like her, would rise from the ashes and live again. We had heard her say things like this before, and she may well have believed it to be true. But unknown to her, we saw a séance in which David spoke with the voice of a son Laura had in one of her previous incarnations. She had burned him with her, but while she gained a new life in the flames, he had become one of the unquiet spirits of the dead. Perhaps Sarah, too, is unwittingly leading David to his death.

Closing Miscellany

When Liz leads Barnabas into David’s room, she tells David that “Unc- Cousin Barnabas” wants to have a man-to-man talk with him. In later years, Jonathan Frid would refer to his character as “Uncle Barnabas” when he talked with interviewers about how the Collinses responded to him. I wonder if Joan Bennett’s blooper is a sign that he was already calling him that at this time.

There is a slight puzzle in Sarah telling David she was “born in the same place” he was. We’d heard in the early episodes that Laura and Roger never spent a night together in Collinwood as man and wife- the day of their wedding, they went to their new home in Augusta, Maine, and David was born a few months later. Perhaps Sarah’s remark is a retcon, and we are now to think of David as having been born at Collinwood. Or perhaps Sarah really was born where Augusta would stand- we know that her birth year was 1786, and that was the year the settlement that would become Augusta saw the establishment of its first public whipping post. Maybe her parents wanted to go there to celebrate the occasion.

When Sarah tells David she lived on the hill until she was nine, she interrupts herself and shouts “Ten!” This is an odd little blooper. Just a few days ago, David told Barnabas that Sarah was ten, and Barnabas jumped down his throat asking if she wasn’t “almost ten?” Now Sharon Smyth has been on the show long enough to have celebrated a birthday, and they aren’t done with Sarah yet. So they are retconning Sarah as having made it to ten.

Episode 324: They shot the wrong man

The Collinsport police have solved the case of the abduction of Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. The investigation has been stalled for months, because Maggie is suffering from amnesia covering the entire period of her captivity. So the authorities spread a rumor that Maggie’s memory was returning, camped out on her lawn, shot the first guy who strayed onto the property, and declared him to be the culprit.

Though this method would appear to be impeccably scientific, strange and troubled boy David Collins is unconvinced. The wounded man is the luckless Willie Loomis, servant of David’s cousin, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins. David is sure that Willie wouldn’t hurt anyone, and has developed an intense aversion to Barnabas.

David troubled. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

David’s aunt, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, is discussing this situation with his well-meaning governess Vicki. Liz mentions that Willie originally came to the estate of Collinwood as a friend of seagoing con man Jason McGuire. She says that she is prepared to believe any bad thing about any friend of Jason’s.

This is the third day in a row we have heard Jason’s name mentioned. That marks quite a departure from recent months of the show. In #275, Barnabas killed Jason, and in #276 he forced Willie to help him bury the body. He was forgotten, apparently forever, shortly thereafter.

It is not clear at all where the show is heading. A few weeks ago, David learned that the secret chamber where Jason is buried exists, that Barnabas and Willie know about it, and that there is something hidden in it that makes Willie uncomfortable. Barnabas knows that David has been in the chamber, and is thinking of killing him. So perhaps the next storyline will involve Barnabas trying to do away with David lest Jason’s death be discovered.

Bolstering that expectation is the fact that Willie has survived the shooting. When he was first shot, day before yesterday, the police said he had five bullets in his back and that only a miracle could keep him alive. Yesterday, we heard that he was in a coma and that the preliminary medical report on his case gave him virtually no chance of living. Today, his doctor, addled quack Dave Woodard, tells his medical colleague Julia Hoffman that the odds are a hundred to one against Willie seeing another day. Experienced soap opera viewers will know that when a man has been declared dead so many times, he will be with the series for years to come. Willie does feel bad about what happened to Jason, so if David manages to lead the authorities to the secret chamber, that might bring matters to a head.

The scene between Woodard and Julia marks an interesting first. Julia is, among other things, a psychiatrist, and Maggie was her patient for a time. Woodard believes that she is at Collinwood in order to find out who abducted Maggie. He is surprised she plans to stay on now that Willie has been named. She claims that she is trying to keep her cover story intact, that she is an historian studying the old families of New England. This doesn’t make much sense to him, but he doesn’t expect it to- he thinks he knows her real motive. He thinks she is in love with Barnabas. Julia smiles, and doesn’t deny it.

Julia the lover. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Returning viewers know that Julia’s actual motives are infinitely less wholesome. She is a mad scientist, and Barnabas is a vampire. She is conducting an experimental treatment which, if successful, will relieve him of that condition. For the sake of that experiment, she has become Barnabas’ accomplice. She induced Maggie’s amnesia, she has lied to everyone she has met, including the sheriff, and she is happy that Willie is likely to die and take the blame for Barnabas’ crimes. Woodard’s idea that she is in love with Barnabas delights her because it helps conceal her true role. It also starts us wondering if it is the beginning of a story in which the two of them avoid awkward questions by pretending to be a couple, then perhaps really do fall in love.