Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, matriarch of the ancient and esteemed Collins family of Collinsport, Maine, receives a telephone call. Her daughter Carolyn is in jail. Driving drunk, Carolyn barely missed a pedestrian, smashing instead into a tree. The almost-victim rescued Carolyn from the car moments before the fuel tank exploded, and Carolyn rewarded her with some nasty remarks. Liz is upset that her brother Roger isn’t available to pick Carolyn up from the police station.
Well-meaning governess Vicki suggests that Liz go to the police station herself. Liz hasn’t left home under her own power for eighteen years, and so reacts to this idea with dread. Vicki talks her into it, giving Alexandra Moltke Isles a chance to show that there is some substance to her character. Looking in through the front door, we see Liz taking a series of halting, forced steps to Vicki’s car.*
Seen in isolation from the rest of the series, Liz’ march is a poignant evocation of agoraphobia. But the Liz-is-a-recluse story is a dead end. They never showed us anyplace Liz would want to go, and the reason for her staying in the house was exposed in #249 as nonsensical. Still, they’ve been presenting Liz as a recluse from the beginning, so sending her into town feels like a promise that something big will happen.
In the police station, we see that Sheriff Patterson has grown a mustache. He didn’t have one when last we saw him, in #248, and he won’t have one when next we see him, in #272. So this is our only chance to appreciate it.
Carolyn is doing a “teen rebel” bit. This would have been one thing earlier in the series, when she was supposed to be fresh out of high school and wildly capricious. But she took charge of the family business for a month early in the spring of 1967, and has been relatively level-headed since. When she makes sassy remarks to the sheriff, they are just throwing all that character development out the window.
Liz shows up, to the sheriff’s amazement and Carolyn’s. Carolyn recovers from the shock, and claims she is not impressed by Liz’ leaving the house. Liz supposedly stayed there for eighteen years waiting for Carolyn’s father, Paul Stoddard, to come back. Now she is divorcing Stoddard and marrying seagoing con man Jason McGuire. If Stoddard means nothing to Liz anymore, what’s the big deal about going into town? Carolyn then makes some superheated remarks about Liz’ disloyalty to Stoddard. Finally, she refuses to leave with Liz. She insists on spending the night in a cell.
In #244, Liz tried to tell Carolyn that her father was a terrible man who never loved anyone. Carolyn became upset and wouldn’t listen to her, then jumped to believe Jason’s stories that Stoddard was a fine fellow who doted on her. That was understandable as a first reaction to dismal news, but we’ve never seen any other indication that Carolyn is especially hung up on the father who disappeared from the house when she was an infant. All the shouting about “my father!” comes out of nowhere. The scene amounts to nothing.
Back in the drawing room, Liz has a conversation with Jason. She has agreed to marry him because he has threatened that if she does not he will reveal to the police that she killed Stoddard and he buried him in the basement. The blackmail plot has been dragging on for months, and we have yet to see anything happen between Liz and Jason that didn’t happen in the first five minutes they were on camera. At this point, scenes like this are just a test of the audience’s endurance.
Upstairs in Collinwood, Vicki hears sobbing in Liz’ bedroom. She calls to her, and lets herself in. She apologizes for urging her to see Carolyn. She suspects that Liz has something she wants to say, and gently presses her to say it. Liz finally confesses that she killed Stoddard. The whole scene is very effective, a strong conclusion to a weak outing.
*It became clear in #232 and #233 that Vicki has a car. How and when she came into possession of this vehicle has not been explained.
Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, is giving up hope. Vampire Barnabas Collins locked her up in the jail cell in the basement of his house some time ago, and everyone she knows is coming to believe that she is dead.
The other day, a little girl in eighteenth century clothing appeared outside Maggie’s cell. The girl did not respond when Maggie tried to get her attention, nor did Barnabas’ sorely bedraggled blood thrall, Willie, see her when she walked past him. Only on her second or third visit to Maggie did the girl interact with her, and then only to warn her not to tell her big brother that she had seen her. Maggie suspects that the girl was a hallucination of hers.
We know that the girl is real, because we saw her interacting with someone else. Outside Barnabas’ house, the girl talked with strange and troubled boy David Collins and played catch with him. If we’ve been watching the show from the beginning, we also know that there are many ghosts in and around Barnabas’ house, and that they have a special rapport with David. Further, this girl gives her name as Sarah and says that everyone she knows went away a long time ago. We’ve been told that Barnabas had a sister named Sarah who died in childhood, so we know that Sarah is the ghost of that sister.
Today, the girl appears to Maggie again. This time she shows up in the cell itself. At first, she tosses her ball in the air, sings “London Bridge,” and ignores Maggie’s repeated questions. Eighteenth century kids didn’t have mobile phones, apparently they had to resort to a ball and “London Bridge” when they wanted to tune out the grownups. Sarah finally comes around when Maggie puts her hand on her shoulder.
Sarah explains that she came because Maggie was crying. She asks what Maggie is sad about, which Maggie doesn’t try to explain.
Sarah won’t answer many of Maggie’s questions. Sarah says that she has been looking for her parents, and she is puzzled as to where they and everyone else have gone. She says she does have one friend. If that is a reference to David, it would show that Sarah can learn information during one apparition and retain it during subsequent apparitions. It is unclear whether she knows that she is a ghost, and her understanding of Maggie’s situation is remarkably slight.
Maggie and Sarah play catch and sing “London Bridge” together. Sarah vanishes a moment before Barnabas arrives. Maggie reacts to him with terror, but when it becomes clear that he isn’t planning to kill her right away her excitement at Sarah’s visit comes bursting out. She tells him that she has a secret friend who visits her in her cell and plays with her. When he asks what she’s talking about, she tells him it’s a secret. She babbles in a gleeful, childlike way.
Barnabas reacts to this with discomfort. He keeps his eyes on Maggie and edges away from her, speaking to her in a pitying tone. Bleak as Maggie’s situation is, this is a laugh-out-loud moment- she’s become too weird for Barnabas.
Maggie weirds Barnabas out
Upstairs, Barnabas tells Willie that Maggie isn’t working out. In a moment of wild hope, Willie asks if that means he’ll let her go. Barnabas sourly replies that of course it does not mean that- they will have to kill her. His plan is to kill her in such a way that no trace of her will ever be found, “because there will be no trace.”
Willie takes a meal to Maggie and demands she stop pretending to be crazy. It isn’t helping her, he says. She denies that she is doing any such thing, and babbles cheerfully that “I do whatever anyone tells me to do.” Willie leans in, putting his face close to hers, and screams and shouts that she has to be her usual self if she is to have any chance of survival.
After Willie leaves, Maggie starts crying again and telling herself that there is no little girl. But then she looks at the floor and finds a doll Sarah left behind. Maggie smiles, knowing that her secret friend does exist.
Maggie’s mad scenes are fascinating. Even though she believes that Sarah is real and we know she is right, seeing Sarah has the same effect on Maggie a psychotic break might have. It takes her out of the reality that she shares with Barnabas and Willie, and gives her an affect that is neither continuous with her usual personality nor intelligible to them.
The three adult actors are all on the top of their form today, just superb. Nowadays, when Sharon Smyth Lentz describes her performance as Sarah, she says that “The first word that comes to mind is ‘clueless.’” But that works out surprisingly well. We know so little about what, if anything, is going on in Sarah’s mind that the keynotes of the performance would have to be “lost,” “confused,” and “vague,” and she had those three things down pat. Things sometimes get rocky when Sarah has a long stretch of dialogue or when multiple actors are moving at the same time, but neither of those is a problem today.
Joe Caldwell started making uncredited contributions to the writing of Dark Shadows early in 1967, and I am tempted to attribute every good thing in a script by Malcolm Marmorstein to him. But Caldwell’s name is showing up in the credits now, and this episode is excellent. So maybe Marmorstein could rise to an occasion every now and then.
My wife, Mrs Acilius, points out that this is the first episode set entirely in the Old House.
For almost 13 weeks, seagoing con man Jason McGuire (Dennis Patrick) has been blackmailing reclusive matriarch Liz (Joan Bennett.) Time and again, Liz has capitulated to Jason’s demands lest he reveal that she murdered her husband Paul Stoddard 18 years ago and he buried Stoddard in the basement. When Liz gave in to Jason’s demand that she marry him, her daughter Carolyn (Nancy Barrett) vowed to prevent the marriage.
Today, it looks like Carolyn may have found a way to fulfill that vow. She has announced her engagement to motorcycle enthusiast Buzz (Michael Hadge,) whom Liz cannot stand. Liz considers going to the police to keep from gaining Buzz as a son-in-law.
We spend the first half of the episode in the great house of Collinwood. Buzz has come to see Carolyn. The opening sets up a charge of comic energy that raises our hopes for another installment as funny as Buzz’ first star turn in #254. Buzz knocks on the front door, Liz opens it, and greets him with a disgusted “Oh.” She closes the door in his face, then goes inside to tell Carolyn that he is there. Carolyn goes out to meet Buzz, who is smoking a large cigar.* They kiss, and Carolyn lets Buzz in. He takes a seat on the staircase.
Buzz on the stairs
Instead of building on the comic potential Buzz brings with him, we then grind to a halt with a Buzzless scene in the drawing room. Carolyn recites teen-rebel cliches at Liz, punctuating her dreary lines with a few random pokes at the piano. Nancy Barrett’s all-in style of acting often exposes values that another performer might have left buried in the script, but when the writing is as tired as this not even she can dig up anything interesting.
Carolyn chose Buzz to mock her mother’s relationship with Jason. She defies Liz to find a reason for regarding Buzz as an unsuitable partner for her that would not cut at least as strongly against Jason. Buzz mirrors Jason in another way so far as the audience is concerned. Dennis Patrick was a gifted comic actor, and Jason is appealing when he gets to be a comedy villain. But most of the time he is stuck repeating the same deadly dull threat to Liz time and again.
Buzz is a villain only in Liz’ imagination, but he is funny all the time. His incongruity with everything else on Dark Shadows automatically produces a laugh whenever he is on screen. Michael Hadge’s near-total incompetence as an actor limits Buzz’ future on the show sharply, but within those limits he’s irresistible.
Jason comes down the stairs and finds Buzz blocking his way. They have a little confrontation which Jason wins by threatening to break Buzz’ shin. Not even Dennis Patrick can make that funny.
We are subjected to a second Buzzless scene in the drawing room. Liz tells Jason that she has yielded to his demands because she was afraid the truth would ruin Carolyn’s life. If Carolyn’s life is going to be ruined anyway, there is no point- she will just go to the sheriff and have done with it. Joan Bennett does have a couple of moments in this scene when she seems like she is about to get some comedy going, but the somber Dark Shadows musical cues ring out and darken the mood before Patrick has a chance to respond.
Jason goes to Carolyn’s room to try to talk her out of marrying Buzz. Since Carolyn’s whole motivation is her hatred for Jason, we may wonder what influence he has that will enable him to do this. It quickly becomes clear that he has none. This is followed by another scene between Liz and Jason in the drawing room. Liz tells Jason that it was obvious to her all along that his talk with Carolyn would produce no results. That is to say, we have a scene the point of which is to explicitly acknowledge that the preceding scene was a waste of time.
The second half is set in the Blue Whale tavern. Buzz and Carolyn are there on a date, and Jason comes to try to bribe Buzz into leaving her. The musical score behind this part comes from the jukebox. That music is much more suitable for comedy than is the heavily melodramatic stuff we hear when the action is taking place at Collinwood.
When we get to the tavern, Carolyn and Buzz are dancing. As a true Collinsporter, Carolyn’s style of dance consists of thrashing about as if she’d had a brain injury. Buzz, by contrast, moves quite gracefully. He must be from out of town.
Carolyn does the Collinsport Convulsion, while Buzz executes a fine Beer Stein Shuffle
Carolyn is in the ladies’ room when Jason shows up. He asks to join Buzz at their table. Buzz replies with that rallying cry of the 60s counterculture, “If you feel it… sit it!” I can only wish that had been the title of a spinoff of Dark Shadows featuring Buzz, it would have been great.
Buzz’ back is to the camera while he delivers his immortal line
Buzz tells Jason that Carolyn is from a family that “makes a lot of noise,” while he is from a family that “makes a lot of money.” Then he laughs. Buzz was credited as “Buzz Hackett” in his first appearance in #252, and is credited that way again today; in #254, he was credited simply as “Buzz.” We never hear him called “Hackett.” In #223, we’d heard about an unscrupulous local businessman called Hackett, but Buzz made a laughing reference to his lifelong poverty in #252, so I don’t think we can suppose he really is from a family that makes a lot of money. In view of Buzz’ laugh, the likeliest explanation is that this is a joke of some kind. A confusing joke, poorly told, but considering that it is a line written by Malcolm Marmorstein and delivered by Michael Hadge, that is to be expected.
Jason tells Buzz that Carolyn is using him to get back at her mother. Buzz blandly replies that Carolyn has told him all about that, and he’s having a great time with her whatever her intentions. This is reminiscent of the relationship between Carolyn and dashing action hero Burke Devlin in the early months of the show. Carolyn continued seeing Burke even after he tacitly admitted that he was using her to pursue revenge on her family. After Burke renounced his revenge, they met at this same table and had a soulful conversation about what they had been to each other (#213.)
Jason offers to buy Buzz a new motorcycle if he will stop seeing Carolyn. Buzz flatly refuses the offer, declaring “I like the bike I got, and the chick I got!” Carolyn returns to the table, and Buzz tells her about Jason’s attempt to bribe him. They laugh at Jason and leave the tavern. He staggers into a corner, looking bitter.
Laughing at Jason
This also harks back to an incident involving Burke in the early days of the show. In #3, Burke met hardworking young fisherman Joe in the tavern. Joe was at that point dating Carolyn. Burke offered to buy a fishing boat for Joe if he would spy on her family. Joe refused, and reported the contact to Liz. While Buzz is Joe’s opposite in many ways, regular viewers will see that the two men are equally honest.
*It appears to be a robusto, though it could be a corona gorda.
A mysterious little girl in eighteenth century garb shows up outside the dungeon cell where vampire Barnabas Collins is keeping his victim, Maggie Evans. The girl stands with her back to Maggie’s cell and sings a couple of verses of “London Bridge” over and over while tossing a ball. Maggie pleads with her to stop singing, to get away before Barnabas and his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie Loomis catch her, and to tell someone that she has seen her. The girl does not acknowledge Maggie in any way.
Seconds after the girl has strolled slowly away, Willie comes by the same path she had taken. Maggie is bewildered that Willie didn’t see her. She urges Willie to escape from Barnabas. Willie gives a big speech about how he thinks about escaping all the time, and that when he is in his car he has sometimes tried to keep driving. But Barnabas’ power keeps pulling him back. Regular viewers will be interested in this confirmation that Willie has a car.*
At the great house of Collinwood, strange and troubled boy David Collins is impatient with the geography lesson his governess Vicki is trying to give him. In the first 39 weeks of the show, the only set which consistently saw interesting scenes was David’s room, where he and Vicki became friends during his lessons. They don’t have the studio space to build that set today, so this lesson is conducted in the drawing room. When flighty heiress Carolyn comes into the room, Vicki sends David to play outside. Since the interrupted lesson was about Australia, he hops away kangaroo-style.
Vicki and Carolyn talk about Carolyn’s boyfriend, motorcycle enthusiast Buzz. Buzz is a refugee from Beach Blanket Bingo, so broadly comic a figure that he might have been too silly even for the biker gang in that movie and its sequels. Unfortunately, Buzz doesn’t show up today, and Vicki and Carolyn’s conversation is a pure specimen of old-time soap opera earnestness. There is an odd moment when Vicki asks Carolyn “How far do you intend to go with Buzz?” and Carolyn answers “All the way!” At the end of the scene, Carolyn uses the phrase “all the way” again. She’s talking about her plan to marry Buzz, but “all the way” was such a familiar euphemism for sexual intercourse in the 1960s that it is hard to imagine it wasn’t intentional on some level. When Carolyn tells Vicki that she and Buzz will go “all the way” while Vicki watches, we wonder what weddings are like in Collinsport.**
David has gone to the yard around Barnabas’ house. We see a location insert of him on the swing set there. This footage is reused from #130, when we discovered that he was being watched by his mother, blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. Laura had died sometime previously, but it didn’t take.
Now, he is being watched again. The mysterious little girl from the dungeon has made her way up to the porch and calls to him as “Boy!” When he tells her his name is David, she says “I know.” She gives her name as Sarah, and asks him to play with her. They toss her ball back and forth, and he finds fault with her fondness for “London Bridge.” She says she used to go to school, a long time ago. She lives around there, but everyone she lives with went away and left her all alone. She excuses herself to go look for them. Willie then comes out of the house. David tells him about Sarah, and Willie shoos him away.
Playing catch as best you can when you’re on a tiny set, photographed in 4X3. Screenshot byDark Shadows Before I Die
That Sarah can come and go from the dungeon without being seen shows that she is one of the ghosts who haunt the house. David has seen several of these, but does not recognize her. Her behavior in the opening scenes leaves us wondering if she is aware of Maggie’s presence; if not, she may simply be an apparition, unable to interact with the living characters.
When Sarah meets David, not only is she able to converse with him, but her ability to play catch with him using the ball she brought with her shows that she has a physical body and that she can manipulate material objects. That makes it all the more puzzling that she did not answer Maggie. Was she ignoring her, or was she somehow less capable in the dungeon than she is on the porch?
When Sarah uses the words “a long time ago,” we suspect that she knows she is a ghost and she has been displaced to a future century. But then she becomes confused as to where her people are, and is filled with a terrible urgency to go look for them. Again it is ambiguous just what sort of being Sarah is and what she can do.
There is always a vagueness about the supernatural- if you could explain a phenomenon fully in words and measurements, it wouldn’t be in that category at all. The key to holding an audience’s attention with a story about ghosts and such is to intrigue them with questions that seem like they might have answers and to use them to lead to another, equally imponderable set of questions before the first set gets old. So it is a promising sign that Sarah is introduced while we are still asking what Barnabas can do, what he wants to accomplish, what he needs for survival, and how he got to be the way he is.
That we see David in a lesson with Vicki and then hear him talking with Sarah about how neither of them goes to school anymore is also interesting to regular viewers. Dark Shadows is just about a year old. It started with Vicki’s arrival at Collinwood, where reclusive matriarch Liz had summoned her to teach David. David and his father, Liz’ impecunious brother Roger Collins, had been living at Collinwood for about a month. Before then, they had lived in Augusta, Maine, where David went to school.
When Vicki showed up, Roger objected that he knew nothing about her, and Liz refused to tell him or Vicki how she knew that she existed or why she chose her to be David’s governess. The show has been hinting very heavily that Vicki is Liz’ biological daughter and that Liz is desperate to keep that relationship secret. It is also clear that Liz wants above all for David to grow into her idea of a male Collins, an idea to which her bratty little brother Roger does not in any way conform.
Barnabas’ plan for Maggie is a ghoulish parody of Liz’ for David. He wants to erase her personality and replace it with that of his long-lost love, Josette Collins. Over the generations since her death, Josette has become the patroness of the Collins family and the emblem of its perfect female member. And of course Barnabas is as anxious to hide the secrets in his basement as Liz is to hide those in hers. That Sarah appears to both Maggie and David emphasizes that Barnabas is a funhouse mirror reflection of Liz.
Back in the great house, David hears Buzz’ motorcycle and tells Carolyn that he is there for her. She can’t quite bring herself to tell David that she and Buzz are planning to get married, but does encourage his interest in going for a bike ride with Buzz. As she leaves, he brilliantly mimes motorcycle riding.
David gives Vicki a detailed account of his encounter with Sarah. She is disappointed he didn’t bring her home. Though it is her job to be David’s only friend, Vicki is no more enthusiastic about his isolation from playmates his own age than Willie is about Barnabas’ treatment of Maggie.
Back in the dungeon, Willie finds that Maggie has not eaten. They share a sad moment. He leaves, and Sarah reappears. Maggie talks to her. At first, she doesn’t respond. But then she turns to her and says “If you see my big brother, don’t tell him you saw me. He doesn’t like anybody to come down here.” Then she leaves, a spring in her step.
The last time a ghost spoke to an imprisoned woman was in the same house, in #126. That time, Vicki was bound and gagged and hidden in a secret room on the main floor by crazed handyman Matthew Morgan. When Matthew had gone to get an ax with which to decapitate Vicki, the ghost of Josette had appeared to her and said, in a perfectly cheerful voice,*** “Do not be afraid.” Josette didn’t untie Vicki or anything, she just told her that and vanished. Later in the episode, she and some other ghosts scare Matthew to death before he can kill Vicki. When Sarah goes away from the stunned Maggie and skips along the floor, regular viewers might remember that event and see a promise that Sarah has something up her sleeve.
Closing Miscellany
Sarah is identified in the closing credits as “Sarah Collins,” the name given in #211 for Barnabas’ sister who died in childhood. That rather blunts the surprise of her closing reference to her “big brother.”
Sarah’s identity raises a couple of other questions. Barnabas’ house was the original Collins family home, and he and Sarah would have lived there. The cell in which he keeps Maggie is covered with cobwebs, evidently a feature of the house from its beginning. When she tells Maggie that her big brother “doesn’t like anybody to come down here,” she is speaking from experience- the adults don’t like it when you go near the jail cell in the basement.
Slavery was a legal institution in Massachusetts**** until 1783, and indentured servitude under conditions not so far removed from those to which slaves were subject continued long after. The Old House has been described as a “huge mansion,” so presumably its owners would have held people under at least one of these statuses. As a Collins of the eighteenth century, Sarah’s blithe attitude towards someone held in the cell would seem to be chillingly appropriate.
Sarah’s address to David as “Boy!” when she knows his name is also interesting coming from her. To be sure, if she had called him by name before they met, he would have known right away that there was something very strange about her. Since he has seen many ghosts and knows that ghosts congregate in and around the Old House, he may have identified her as one right away.
On the other hand, during the “Revenge of Burke Devlin” storyline that ran from #1-#201, there was considerable doubt as to whether David was Roger’s natural son or Burke’s. That doubt came to a head when Laura was on the show. Laura only left 13 weeks ago, and Burke is still hanging around. As far as we know, the question may come back up, and David Collins may turn out to be David Devlin. In that case, Sarah may have chosen to call him “boy” because she is a Collins and therefore better than everyone who is not.
I posted a couple of long comments about this episode on Danny Horn’s Dark Shadows Every Day. I won’t copy them here, because they contain spoilers for people who haven’t seen the whole series. But I’ll link to them- under the post about this episode, I argued that Sarah’s introduction was the most important plot development in the entire series; and under a post about a much later episode, I wish one of the words in her closing line had been different.
*Regular viewers are interested in some weird stuff, what can I say.
**My wife, Mrs Acilius, is very much taken with the actresses’ recollections of how Louis Edmonds, who played Roger, would make them laugh so hard during rehearsals that it was sometimes difficult for them to stay in character during filming. She says it is just as well that Roger wasn’t in this episode, because there is no way they could have got through this scene if he had been.
***Provided by Kathryn Leigh Scott, who also plays Maggie.
Imperious eccentric Barnabas Collins wants to reinvent working girl Maggie Evans as a member of his class- genteel in manner, florid in speech, thirsty for the blood of the living. Willie Loomis does not believe Barnabas’ plan will work, but because of the nature of their relationship he of course helps him with it. Living in their house, Maggie sometimes seems to be well on her way to developing the traits Barnabas is trying to inculcate in her, but at other times protests that she will never change.
Maggie’s father Sam is a drinking man. He comes to the house today to get some cash from Barnabas. Sam doesn’t know about Barnabas’ project; his visit has nothing to do with Maggie. He is an artist, and is delivering a portrait Barnabas commissioned him to paint.
The episode ends with a musical number. Maggie is in the basement prison cell where Barnabas keeps her between elocution lessons. Through the bars of her door, she sees and hears a little girl in eighteenth century garb singing “London Bridge is Falling Down.” The girl sings an obscure variant of the song with a verse that runs “Take the key and lock her up, lock her up, lock her up. Take the key and lock her up, my fair lady.”
Up to this point, the Barnabas story has been a mashup of Dracula with the 1932 film The Mummy. There isn’t any particular reference to vampirism today. Maggie’s neck is uncovered throughout the episode, and we don’t even see the bite marks. It’s all about The Mummy and its possible sources.
Imhotep’s attempt in The Mummy to turn Helen Grosvenor into Princess Ankh-esen-amun may have been inspired in part by George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. Imhotep only has Helen in his custody for a few minutes of screen time and those minutes are so heavy with images of Egyptian antiquities, suggestions of magic, and the threat of extreme violence that they never find time for an explicit comparison.
Dark Shadows, on the other hand, keeps Maggie in Barnabas’ house for weeks and weeks, so it’s inevitable that sooner or later they would explore the connection. Thanks to Lerner and Loewe, the story of Pygmalion was very familiar to American audiences in 1967. It’s only surprising that Sam isn’t getting married in the morning, Maggie’s boyfriend Joe doesn’t tell us that he’s often walked down Barnabas’ street before, and Maggie never shouts at a race horse to move its bloomin’ arse. Considering the alarmingly awkward movements people in Collinsport make when music is playing, there was never any prospect she could have danced all night.
Just You Wait
Maggie uses the word “undead” to describe Barnabas. The first time we heard that word on Dark Shadows was in #183, when parapsychologist Dr Guthrie told blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins that he believed her to be “the undead.” Though Laura’s story owed many structural elements to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, not least Guthrie’s own depiction as a Van Helsing-like figure, she was not a vampire. So “undead” is not simply a euphemism for “vampire” on this show, though it is true they will avoid saying “vampire” until Barnabas’ 41st week.
Regular viewers who find a reminder of Laura in the word “undead” will be especially interested in today’s ending. When Laura was first on the show, she was a vague presence. There were indications that she wasn’t so much a person as she was a whole collection of phenomena, some of them physical, some of them purely spectral, each of them with its own purposes. As Laura became more dynamic, those phenomena resolved themselves into the deadly fire witch and her adversary, the benevolent ghost of Josette Collins.
Like Laura, Barnabas seems to have stirred up numerous uncanny forces with his arrival. The clearest indication of this so far has been the howling of dogs when he is forming an evil plan, a howling which is not related to his physical location and which, often as not, hampers his efforts. There have also been some shenanigans with the doors in his house which don’t seem to have a natural explanation and which he wouldn’t have had a motive to arrange. The appearance of the mysterious girl* suggests that this time, the antagonist will pull a whole new cast of characters out of the supernatural back-world behind the main setting of the show.
*The girl is a lot less mysterious than she ought to be, since the closing credits identify her as “Sarah Collins.” That’s enough to tell even first-time viewers that she is a member of the ancient and esteemed Collins family that is at the center of the show. It gives more away to regular viewers. The tomb from which Barnabas emerged has marked graves for his parents, Joshua and Naomi, and his sister, Sarah, who died in childhood.
And right before Sarah appears, Barnabas was looking at Josette’s portrait. From #70 to #191, that portrait would glow when the ghost of Josette was about to do something. So if we didn’t know her name, we might think that the girl was an ally Josette had recruited, or perhaps Josette herself in a different form than the adult ghost we have seen before. That in turn would send us into the weekend speculating about the ghostly adversaries who might be lining up to oppose Barnabas. Giving the name, even to viewers who’ve forgotten about Barnabas’ sister, limits our speculations to possible one-on-one confrontations.
Reclusive matriarch Liz and well-meaning governess Vicki are in the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood. Liz is depressed because her daughter Carolyn is dating motorcycle enthusiast Buzz. She asks Vicki if she has any idea how to break Carolyn and Buzz up, then answers her own question. Liz knows that Carolyn is protesting her engagement to seagoing con man Jason McGuire, and that only by breaking it off with Jason can she change things with Carolyn.
When Liz claims that she is marrying Jason because she wants to, Vicki says it’s none of her business. Vicki has seen abundant evidence that Jason is blackmailing Liz, and won’t pretend she hasn’t. She manages to be quite respectful to her employer without backing down an inch. Despite herself, Liz is impressed with Vicki’s firmness and diplomacy.
Alexandra Moltke Isles was cast as Vicki because she and Joan Bennett looked so much alike, and this is one of the scenes that uses their resemblance to show Vicki as a reflection of Liz. As Vicki is finding tactful ways to express her suspicions, she says things that we have heard Liz say and that we know she is thinking. Each time she does so, Joan Bennett does a quarter turn one direction from the shoulders and a quarter turn the other direction from the neck, as if she were being twisted open. When Liz tells Vicki to stop, she calls her “Victoria,” a name we haven’t heard her use since 1966, and when Vicki asks permission to leave the room she responds, in a near-whisper, with the usual “Vicki.” This alternation also suggests twisting, and to regular viewers who remember that Liz has a secret connected with the fact that “Her name is Victoria” it is another twisting open.
Meanwhile, Jason is entering the Blue Whale tavern with his former henchman, Willie Loomis. Jason wants to confront Willie with the fact that he saw him in town earlier in the day selling a piece of jewelry. Willie says that he was selling it on behalf of his employer, wealthy eccentric Barnabas Collins. Jason knows of Willie’s obsessive fascination with jewels and his tendency to steal them, and does not believe that Barnabas would entrust him with such a task. What Jason does not know is that Barnabas is a vampire and Willie is his sorely bedraggled blood-thrall. As such, Barnabas has a power over Willie that makes it rational to entrust the most remarkable tasks to him.
Carolyn and Buzz enter. They almost leave when Carolyn sees Jason and Willie. Jason and Willie rise and meet them at the door. Jason assures Carolyn that they were just going. Before they do, he taunts Carolyn with his engagement to Liz.
On Tuesday, Carolyn and Buzz started dancing together in the drawing room. Buzz made a few very graceful moves, saw Carolyn going into the Collinsport Convulsion, and sat down to observe. Today, Buzz sees two background players twitching awkwardly while the jukebox plays and declines Carolyn’s invitation to join her on the dance floor. He wants to stop drinking, saying that he is looking for something that will make him feel like he’s never lived before, while “drinking only makes you feel drunk.” It sounds a little bit like he’s going to offer Carolyn a drug stronger than alcohol, but by the end of the scene he just wants to get back on his bike. Liz’ fears to the contrary, Buzz seems pretty darned wholesome.
While Carolyn and Buzz are on their way out of the tavern, hardworking young fisherman Joe comes in. Carolyn asks Buzz to wait outside while she talks with Joe. Buzz reluctantly agrees to spend a few minutes alone with his bike.
Carolyn and Joe were dating when the show started, and there was a whole storyline about how they were tired of each other and couldn’t get themselves sufficiently organized to break up. Their scenes together reminded us that the 1960s were the decade in which Michelangelo Antonioni used the cinema to explore the nature and significance of boredom.
But they are far from boring today. After he and Carolyn finally called it quits, Joe started seeing Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. Maggie is now missing and feared dead. Carolyn sits next to Joe at the bar and expresses her sympathies. When I say that Nancy Barrett’s acting style was to throw herself unreservedly into whatever the script gave her character to do that day, it may sound like I’m saying she was undisciplined or that she lacked subtlety. That is not at all what I mean, and in this scene she does one of the most delicate drunk acts I’ve ever seen. Carolyn sits a fraction of an inch too close to Joe, tilts her head back a fraction of a degree too far, opens her eyes the tiniest bit too wide, and speaks ever so slightly too slowly. No one of those signs would even be noticeable by itself, but together they make it very clear why Buzz was anxious that he and Carolyn should leave their drinks unfinished.
Back in the drawing room, Jason is badgering Liz into setting the date for their wedding. Carolyn and Buzz come back, and Jason tells them he and Liz will be married two weeks from tonight. Carolyn says that she and Buzz ought to get married the same night. Buzz is delighted when she first says this, and is still smiling when she insists she is being serious.
My wife, Mrs Acilius, urged me to call this one “A piece of that action,” something Jason says to Willie. Trekkie that she is, that seemed irresistible to her. But Joe’s line that Buzz seems to be “about as much fun as a bag of spiders” is the funniest of the many witty lines in today’s script, and when you remember that Dark Shadows has, since December of 1966, been basically a horror story, you have to think that in its terms a bag of spiders might be a lot of fun. So that had to be the title.
Vampire Barnabas Collins is keeping Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, in a prison cell in his basement. He won’t let her out until she discards her personality and adopts that of his long-lost love Josette. That would seem to rule Maggie out as a source of plot development for quite some time.
Writer Joe Caldwell knew that he was not the first dramatist to have to tell a story in which one of the main female characters is cooped up. In ancient Athens, women of citizen rank were supposed to be immured in the house, hidden away from all men outside their immediate families. While the reality was a great deal more complicated, audiences at the city’s dramatic festivals liked to see plays set in a world that approximated that ideal. So tragedians like Euripides, and after him the Greek and Roman playwrights of the New Comedy, devised a whole repertoire of ways that ladies could send messages to their boyfriends without leaving home.
One of the most prominent of these methods was the dispatch of an identifiable token by a household servant. Since many people, both men and women, wore rings with unique decorations, rings were very often used for this purpose. In plays where the heroine has been captured by pirates and is being held prisoner by someone to whom the pirates made a gift of her, as in Plautus’ Miles Gloriosus (sometimes translated into English as The Swaggering Soldier,) the heroine and her accomplices will use the villain’s greed or that of his servant to trick them into taking a valuable ring and showing it to someone who will be able to help her. Plautus would have been relatively familiar to audiences in 1967, and very much front-of-mind for the Broadway-oriented people involved in making Dark Shadows, because of the success of the 1962 show A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and its 1966 film version, both of which end with a recognition prompted by the sight of an unusual ring.
Maggie doesn’t seem to be up on her New Comedy. In the first part of the episode, she asks Barnabas to take her ring to her father to let him know she is still alive. Barnabas is insulted that she would think he was dumb enough to do that.
There is some good dialogue in this scene, and Kathryn Leigh Scott and Jonathan Frid are always fun to watch together, but we have to share Barnabas’ reaction. Until today, Maggie had been one of the few characters on the show who had never done or said anything inexplicably stupid, and asking Barnabas to give her father the ring breaks that streak. Barnabas’ complaint lampshades the problem, which does help a bit- it gives us time to think that maybe Maggie is trying to distract Barnabas from another plan she is cooking up, or maybe the script is telling us that she is so desperate she doesn’t know what she’s doing.
Later, Barnabas’ sorely-bedraggled blood thrall Willie Loomis comes to check in on Maggie. Willie is so obsessed with jewels that when Maggie offered him a diamond necklace on Friday, he turned his back on Barnabas’ coffin while she stood there preparing to stab him through the heart. Maggie persuades Willie to take her ring as a token of her gratitude for keeping Barnabas from killing her on Monday. That marks a good recovery from the earlier dumbness, and gets us off to a fresh start.
Strange and troubled boy David Collins sneaks into Barnabas’ house through an unlocked window. He often visited the house in the months before Barnabas was introduced to Dark Shadows, when the ghost of Josette was the principal supernatural presence on the show and the house was her stronghold. David can’t feel her presence there now, and calls for her forlornly as he wanders through the front parlor.
Willie catches David and demands to know why he is in the house. David tries to defend his indefensible behavior, and when that fails he goes on the attack. He says that he knows what Barnabas and Willie are doing. Willie tenses and asks what it is they are doing. David says they are hurting Josette. Willie listens until he is sure that David is talking only about the ghost, not about Maggie. Then he picks David up and throws him out the front door. There is so much hilarious stuff in this part that not even the bit in the middle when Willie briefly thinks he may have to murder David dampens the mood.
Willie picks David up……and throws him down.
In the course of bodily ejecting David from the house, Willie drops the ring. David finds it on the ground while he is getting back onto his feet. He calls to Willie and tries to return the ring, but Willie has already locked the door and will give no response but shouts of “Go away!” David takes a good long look at the ring and goes home to the great house of Collinwood.
Well-meaning governess Vicki greets him there, scolding him for having gone so far from the house. She notices the ring in his hand. This moment comes straight out of ancient comedy- David’s clothes have pockets, after all, but this scene is written for an actor wearing a pallium and a terracotta mask. David won’t tell Vicki where he found the ring, and she examines it. She has seen that there is an inscription in it and is just about able to read it when a knock comes at the door.
It is Barnabas. He tells David that he wants to apologize for Willie’s forcible ejection of him from his house. Vicki turns to David and asks if that’s where he was. The boy has little choice but to admit it, and suggests that the ghost of Josette invited him. Vicki asks if he found the ring at Barnabas’ house. Barnabas, startled by the mention of a ring, asks to see it. He claims that it is a family heirloom which he gave Willie to sell. He takes it, and in a genial voice suggests David steer clear of Willie.
Back home, Barnabas returns to Maggie’s cell. She pretends to be coming around to believing that she is Josette. Barnabas shows her the ring and shatters her hopes. He leaves. Rather than end the episode with a shot of her staring helpless through the barred door, we follow Maggie into the cell and see her slam shut the lid of Josette’s music box. We see her thwarted, but no less able to take action than she was when we began.
Caldwell deserves credit for a fine script, aside from the awkwardness in Maggie’s early scene with Barnabas. Director John Sedwick keeps it looking clean and crisp, and the final shot of Maggie in her cell is a triumph of timing. Best of all, the actors all liked each other and were having fun working together today, and that gives an irresistible energy to the finished product. The result is the fourteenth episode, and the first since #182 early in March, that I would label “Genuinely Good.”
Frustrated that her mother, reclusive matriarch Liz, has decided to marry seagoing con man Jason McGuire, flighty heiress Carolyn spends the day and night with motorcycle enthusiast Buzz Hackett.
Buzz is modeled on the biker dude villains of Beach Blanket Bingo. Some of his mannerisms, such as speaking in a Beatnik slang that was a decade and a half out of date by 1967 and wearing sunglasses when he rides his motorcycle at night, would have been a little too broadly comic even for that movie, and are ludicrously out of place on the rather solemn Dark Shadows. The very sight of Buzz therefore raises a laugh.
I mean really
Nancy Barrett’s acting style was to throw herself unreservedly into whatever the script had her character doing that day, and seeing her present Carolyn as a newly minted biker mama is hilarious from beginning to end. When Carolyn and Buzz show up at the Blue Whale tavern, she’s already sloppily drunk. They see well-meaning governess Vicki and hardworking young fisherman Joe at a table, and Carolyn insists they go over and greet them. Vicki and Joe give Buzz and Carolyn frosty stares, which are of course the main ingredients of drawing room comedy.
If Vicki put on a police uniform, Carolyn wore a big feathered headdress, and Joe were a construction worker, they could make beautiful music together
As Danny Horn points out in his post about the episode on Dark Shadows Every Day, Buzz is actually pretty nice. That’s a good comic move- the obvious outsider is the one who knows enough to be uncomfortable, while the one who has been a central member of the cast from the first week is oblivious to the social awkwardness surrounding her. If it were the other way around, we might feel sorry for Buzz or be angry with him, but since we know that Carolyn’s place is essentially secure we can laugh at her uninhibited behavior, no matter how much it may make others squirm.
Buzz takes Carolyn home to the great house of Collinwood, parking his motorcycle a few feet from the front door. That isn’t a sign of inconsideration- there only are a few feet in front of the door, they’d be off the set if he parked any further away. It’s still pretty funny to see.
Buzz and Carolyn
Inside the house, Buzz jokes about riding his bike up the main staircase. Carolyn laughs, then urges him actually to do it. He refuses, clearly appalled that she would want such a thing.
Carolyn shocks Buzz
They go into the drawing room. Carolyn picks up a transistor radio and finds some dance music. Buzz is ready to dance, but takes a seat when Carolyn goes into the violent, rhythm-less jerks people in Collinsport do when music is playing. Buzz watches her, apparently ready to provide first aid.
As Carolyn’s performance of the Collinsport Convulsion ends with her falling face first, Liz comes downstairs. She protests against Carolyn and Buzz making so much noise at 3 AM. For the first time, Buzz is rude. He does not stand up when Liz comes into the room, and when Carolyn introduces her as “Mommy,” he greets her with “Hiya, Mommy!” Liz orders him to go.
Before Buzz has a chance to comply, Carolyn starts taunting her mother, yelling at her that her name will soon be “Mrs McGuire!” Liz retreats up the stairs as Carolyn taunts her with repetitions of this name. When Liz is on the landing, Carolyn and Buzz clench and kiss passionately. While they kiss, we see Liz above and behind them, trying to exit the scene. As it happens, the door she is supposed to go out is stuck, so she has to struggle with the knob until she’s out of the frame. Thus, the longest period of intentional comedy on the show ends, not with a break into angry melodrama, but with a huge unintended laugh. It is one of the few truly perfect things ever seen on television.
Door’s stuck
As Buzz, Michael Hadge really isn’t much of an actor- he shouts his lines and goes slack whenever he isn’t speaking. That doesn’t matter so much today. Nancy Barrett’s high-energy performance, the other cast members’ skill at comedy of manners, and the mere sight of Buzz combine to keep the audience in stitches throughout.
Still, I can’t help but wonder what might have been. Yesterday, vampire Barnabas Collins threatened to murder his blood thrall, the sorely bedraggled Willie Loomis. Viewers watching on first run might have wondered if Buzz was going to be his replacement. They might have, that is, if Buzz were played by an actor in the same league as John Karlen. With Mr Hadge in the role, that suspense never gets off the ground.
One of the little games I play in my head when the show gets boring is to ask who else might have taken a part and to imagine how it would have changed with that other actor in the cast. So, if Harvey Keitel was available to dance in the background at the Blue Whale in #33, then surely Mr Keitel’s friend Robert De Niro would have taken a speaking part in #252. Actors inspire screenwriters, and if Mr De Niro had played Buzz I would have wanted to write this line for him to speak to Liz: “Mrs Stoddard, you got me all wrong. You think I want to hurt you, or take something from you, but that’s not the way it is. Me and Carolyn, we’re just trying to have a good time.” Mr Hadge’s shouting wouldn’t have made much of a line like that, but delivered by Mr De Niro to Joan Bennett it could have started a scene between Buzz and Liz that would have expanded his role beyond comic relief and earned him a permanent place in the cast.
It may be for the best that it didn’t work out that way. A De Niro-Buzz might have been such a hit that Dark Shadows never would have got round to becoming the excursion into sheer lunacy that we know and love. And Martin Scorsese might never have been able to get soap opera star/ teen idol Robert De Niro to answer his phone calls.
Closing Miscellany
There are some other notable moments today. We might wonder why Vicki and Joe are sitting together in the Blue Whale, when Vicki has been dating dashing action hero Burke. In fact, the script originally called for Vicki to be out with Burke, but actor Mitch Ryan showed up too drunk to work the day they taped this one and was fired off the show. Burke gave up on his big storyline over ten weeks ago and there hasn’t been a reason for him to be on the show since. Besides, the same cast of characters cannot indefinitely include one whose type is “dashing action hero” and another whose type is “vampire.” The vampire is already pulling in bigger audiences than anything else they’ve done, so Burke has to go. Still, Ryan was such a charismatic screen presence that he was a high point in every episode he appeared in, so it’s sad we’ve seen him for the last time.
The bartender brings drinks to Vicki and Joe’s table and Joe calls him “Bob.” They have settled on this name by now. The same performer, Bob O’Connell, has been playing the bartender since the first week, but in the opening months of the show he had a long list of names. My favorite was “Punchy.”
There is some new music in the jukebox at the tavern and more new music while Carolyn and Buzz are outside the front doors of Collinwood. In the tavern we hear something with brass, and at the doors we hear a low-key saxophone solo.
The closing credits give Buzz’ last name as “Hackett.” We heard about a businessman named Hackett in #223, but Buzz doesn’t seem to be related to him. In the Blue Whale, Carolyn says that her mother has more money than Buzz will ever see, to which Buzz laughingly replies “That isn’t much!”
We reprise the final scene of Friday’s episode, in which vampire Barnabas Collins catches his prisoner Maggie Evans trying to stab him. He flashes his fangs at her.
Doctor Teeth and the Electric Mayhem
The first time around, this had been the climax of a number of powerfully realized scenes, so it still carried a punch despite the silliness of the fangs. From a standing start, though, the result is a bad laugh.
In the 45 seconds following the first commercial, ABC staff announcer Bill Rice* summarizes the action of the previous week’s episodes.** This recap comes so close to exhausting every event we saw in those 110 minutes of scripted drama that regular viewers will have another unintended laugh.
The recap was inserted because many ABC stations preempted Dark Shadows to cover a United Nations debate about the Vietnam War. The show was about as resolutely disengaged from contemporary politics as it was possible to be, but conjoining US policy in Vietnam with a character like Barnabas, who combines a vast capacity for killing with a desperate need to be loved, does bring certain thoughts to mind.
Barnabas and Maggie have a conversation about his inclination to kill her. Barnabas’ sorely bedraggled blood-thrall Willie Loomis joins in, saying that Barnabas will have to kill him first. This would not seem to present Barnabas with any difficulty at all. Willie wouldn’t be missed- everyone else on the show remembers Willie from the days before he met Barnabas, when he was dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis, and has been urging Barnabas to get rid of him. Nor would it be especially difficult for Barnabas to replace Willie- he just has to bite someone else, and that other person will become his new slave. But Barnabas stands around arguing with Willie and Maggie. When someone knocks on the front door, he scolds Willie for failing to keep it locked, such a humdrum complaint under the circumstances as to bring another bad laugh. Barnabas leaves Willie and Maggie in the basement while he answers the door. Before he goes, he sticks out his lower lip, a facial expression known as “pouting.”
Barnabas pouts
The visitor is well-meaning governess Vicki, who tells Barnabas that the sheriff has ordered that no woman go out alone at night. Some think it strange to send a woman out alone at night to carry this message to a man who is indoors, but considering what we’ve seen of the sheriff, doing the exact opposite of what he commands would seem always to be the wisest course.
Vicki notices an antique music box on a table in Barnabas’ front parlor. Vicki admires its tune and makes a few not-very-coherent remarks about “the past” while it is playing. Barnabas has been using this music box as a tool to hypnotize Maggie into believing that she is his long-lost love Josette. After Vicki leaves, he opens it again, then looks at the door through which she left. He turns his head and smiles, looking very much like someone who has just had an exciting new idea.
Lightbulb moment
Meanwhile, Maggie and Willie talk to each other in the basement. The two of them had one of the most electrifying scenes of the entire series down there Friday. The last traces of that energy have been piddled away by the time Barnabas comes back downstairs and resumes his conversation with them.
Willie urges Barnabas to look at Maggie and see how beautiful she is. Barnabas says “No” and looks away. Coming at a moment of high dramatic tension, this might have been powerful. When we sit down as an audience, we enter into a sort of agreement that if the show includes something worth seeing, we will look at it. So when we see a character refusing to look at a sight as well worth contemplating as was the young Kathryn Leigh Scott,*** we might be shocked. But there has been too much idle chatter, and the memory of Barnabas’ pout is so fresh, that all we can think of is a petulant child saying “I don’t wanna look at her!”
Barnabas announces that he will not kill Maggie right away. He tells her that he will make her suffer torments worse than anyone has ever known so that death will finally come as a blessed relief, then locks her up in the prison cell in the basement of the house. What, your house doesn’t have a prison cell in its basement? It’s a standard feature of homes in Collinsport, as we will come to see in future episodes.
Barnabas goes to the great house of Collinwood and talks to Vicki. He brings a handkerchief that, legend has it, was a gift from the queen of France to Josette. They babble about “the past” and Barnabas invites her to drop in at his house “some day.” He says “day,” even though he’s busy being dead every day until sunset. And doesn’t specify when- any old time, if she hears screams coming from the basement she’ll probably just ignore them.
Evidently Barnabas is thinking of Vicki as a backup Josette in case Maggie doesn’t come around. This marks a retreat from #240 and #241, when strange and troubled boy David Collins, who has seen Josette’s ghost many times, saw Maggie in the gown Barnabas gave her and said that she must have been Josette because she looked “exactly the same” as he had seen her before. That suggested, not only that Barnabas chose Maggie because of her looks, but also that he might be right in thinking that she is Josette’s reincarnation. This storyline is modeled on the 1932 Universal film The Mummy, in which Imhotep’s idea that Helen Grosvenor is the reincarnation of his lost love Princess Ankh-esen-amun is substantiated when Zita Johann plays both roles. If Vicki and Maggie are interchangeable, then all of that goes by the boards.
*Presumably no relation to the main character of Gene Roddenberry’s 1963-4 CBS TV series The Lieutenant, one episode of which was written by Art Wallace.
For those who have missed the last few episodes of Dark Shadows: Elizabeth Collins [Stoddard,] at Jason McGuire’s insistence, has taken Vicki, Carolyn, and Roger into the basement room and convinces them that it holds no mystery. They don’t realize that beneath the flagstones on the floor is concealed the room’s secret—the body of Elizabeth’s husband, Paul. Elizabeth, now realizing that the secret can never be told, announces to the family that she and Jason will be married. Maggie Evans escaped from Barnabas and attempted to get to her father, but was recaptured and told by Barnabas that unless she assumes the identity of Josette Collins, she will die. Realizing that she can never escape, Maggie attempts to destroy Barnabas.
The title card shown during the recap
***Or for that matter as is the not-so-young Miss Scott of today, she’s one of the best looking octogenarians around.
Maggie Evans, the Nicest Girl in Town, has been the prisoner of vampire Barnabas Collins for some time. At rise, she is in front of her mirror, struggling to remember who she is. Her name and her father’s come back to her, but then the music box Barnabas gave her starts playing, and she begins to believe that she is Barnabas’ long-lost love Josette. This scene takes about a minute more than is necessary.
She renews the struggle later, and this time overcomes the hypnotic power of the music box. She decides to pretend that she believes that she is Josette in order to trick Barnabas and Barnabas’ sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie into giving her enough freedom to escape. She fools them, only to hear Barnabas tell Willie that her compliance means that the time has come for the final part of his plan.
Maggie hears carpentry work, and sneaks down to the basement. She finds Barnabas watching Willie build a coffin. It sits next to the coffin in which Barnabas spends his days. It becomes clear that once Maggie is fully Josettified, she will be a vampire as well. Unfortunately, Jonathan Frid has a great deal of trouble with his lines in this scene. I don’t usually mind Frid’s bobbles, but his line troubles here take us out of what needs to be a terrifying moment.
In the morning, Maggie goes back to the basement. Willie finds her there. He is not convinced that she believes she is Josette. He presses her, and she finally breaks down and gives up the act.
Maggie shows Willie the diamond necklace Barnabas gave her as a present for their wedding, and tells him it will be his if they destroy Barnabas and escape. Willie’s fascination with jewels was what led him to undertake the grave-robbing expedition that freed Barnabas in the first place, and the necklace does distract him for a little while. But then he hears Barnabas’ heartbeat. He heard that sound before, in #208, #209, #210, and #217, but in those episodes no one else could hear it. Maggie can, since Barnabas has been drinking her blood too, but she can still resist the vampire’s spell. She is holding a large awl, ready to drive it into Barnabas’ heart, but Willie cannot overcome his urge to protect his master. He disarms Maggie.
We see Maggie in her room and hear Barnabas’ voice on the soundtrack going over what she heard him say in the basement. This is the first time an interior monologue has played quotes from another character. They aren’t the lines Jonathan Frid actually delivered, but cleaned-up, intelligible lines, presumably the ones that were in the script.
As sunset nears, Willie takes Maggie back to the basement. He leaves, telling her that she and Barnabas must be alone when he completes “the ceremony.” She finds the awl, picks it up, and opens the coffin. Before she can drive it into Barnabas’ heart, he awakens and shows his fangs. She screams and presses herself against the brick wall behind her.
Back to the wall
This is the second episode credited to writer Joe Caldwell, and is certainly the best teleplay Dark Shadows has seen since Francis Swann left the show in November of 1966. Like Swann and Art Wallace, Caldwell understood what actors could do and knew how to give them a platform to show their stuff.
Aside from Frid’s one bad scene, the actors excel. In 1967, Kathryn Leigh Scott was already a highly trained actress. Maggie Evans, on the other hand, has never acted before. When Maggie is pretending to believe she is Josette, Miss Scott shows her giving a crude imitation of Barnabas’ high-flown style, mixed with some prancing movements you might see from a little girl playing the princess in a school play. Barnabas is so desperate to believe that his lunatic scheme is working that he falls for it completely. When he and Maggie are in the front parlor together, he responds to her amateur performance as a sign that she is matching his pomposity, which of course thrills him.
When Willie and Maggie are in the basement, John Karlen plays his earthy skepticism with a simplicity that makes Maggie’s pretending look ridiculous. When Maggie gives up her act and whispers a plea for Willie to help her, Miss Scott matches the force of Karlen’s performance and the resulting encounter is as powerful as anything the show ever achieves.
The episode is good enough that we barely noticed some major lapses in story logic. If Maggie can sneak down to the basement to eavesdrop on Barnabas and Willie, why can’t she slip out the front door? She knows how to get from Barnabas’ house to the great house of Collinwood, where she has friends and there is a telephone to call the sheriff.
And when did she learn that you can destroy vampires by driving stakes through their hearts? She’s lived in Collinsport all her life, and no one in that town has ever heard of vampires. Granted, the show would move a lot faster and could have more layers of irony if the characters had read Dracula and seen movies from Universal and Hammer, but this is the first hint that any of them has.
My wife, Mrs Acilius, was very interested in the fact that Maggie calls herself “Maggie, or Margaret” in this one. First time we hear the name Margaret! I’m not sure why that impressed her so much, but she’s very bright, so I’m sure it’s important. All I can think of is that “Maggie” waits tables in the diner, cleans up after her Pop has had one drink too many, and is everybody’s pal, while “Margaret” is a saint’s name, and a queen’s name. So Margaret might have a bigger destiny than we’ve seen.
Dark Shadows Commentary 