Vampire Barnabas Collins has come unstuck in time and traveled from 1969 to 1897, a year in which he hopes to prevent a disaster. Unfortunately, Barnabas generates disasters with his every action, and so he has taken the grim situation he found upon his arrival and made it incalculably worse.
Now, Barnabas has been exposed as a vampire. Shortly before dawn, he returns to the cave where he has been hiding his coffin. There, he finds lawyer/ Satanist Evan Hanley (Humbert Allen Astredo) waiting for him, holding a cross. When Evan makes it clear he has no immediate plans to destroy him, Barnabas says that he does not want to be treated as an exhibit for the curious or a subject for research. This will remind longtime viewers of Barnabas’ initial response when in 1967 Dr Julia Hoffman (Grayson Hall) offered to develop a medical treatment for his vampirism. That treatment was not entirely successful, but it set Julia and Barnabas on a path that led them to become fast friends, and a later medical intervention did free him of the effects of his curse.
Barnabas needs all the friends he can get, and indeed there have been some signs that he is about to make new ones. But Evan is not going to be one of them. He knows that Barnabas has the famed “Hand of Count Petofi,” a relic of someone to whom Barnabas refers as “the most evil man who ever lived.” When Dark Shadows was set in 1968, Astredo played suave warlock Nicholas Blair, who was hung up on the idea of recruiting “the most evil woman who ever lived” to take part in one of his schemes, an idea which led directly to the failure of his mission and his own recall from Earth to Hell. Evan forces Barnabas and Barnabas’ reluctant sidekick, broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi (Grayson Hall,) to let him look at the hand. That backfires immediately, and leaves Evan’s face severely disfigured. When Barnabas sees what has happened, he declares that Magda must not go through with her plan to use the hand to release rakish Quentin Collins from the werewolf curse she placed on him.
Meanwhile, the cruel and hypocritical Rev’d Gregory Trask proposes marriage to wealthy spinster Judith Collins (Joan Bennett.) In the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s, Bennett plays reclusive matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Liz stayed in her house for 19 years because she thought she had murdered her husband Paul; only when seagoing con man Jason McGuire tried to use this belief to force Liz into marrying him and giving him control of the estate of Collinwood and the Collins family businesses did she confess to the killing. It then turned out that Paul wasn’t dead at all, and the whole thing was a cruel trick he and Jason played on Liz.
Unlike Liz, Judith actually has killed someone. She shot neurotic intellectual Rachel Drummond to death in #775. Gregory prevented Judith from telling the police about this, persuading her that because she was under a vampire’s* power at the time she was not responsible. Since then, Judith has been putty in Trask’s hands. She accepts his proposal, and they are married by the end of the episode.
On Dark Shadows, wedding days are always occasions of horror and sorrow, and today is no exception. Trask’s wife Minerva was murdered in #773; unknown to Judith, Trask conspired with Evan to commit this crime and leave everyone thinking that a man named Tim Shaw did it. Trask’s plan to frame Tim fell apart in #777, when Tim showed up at Collinwood and revealed that he had seen Judith shoot Rachel. Since Trask killed Minerva in order to free himself to marry Judith and take control of Collinwood and the Collins businesses, he cannot risk Judith’s conviction on a murder charge, and so he tells the sheriff that Tim cannot have killed Minerva. When Trask and Judith come home from their wedding, Judith sees Minerva’s ghost in the drawing room. Evidently Minerva is not ready to rest and let Gregory reap the rewards of her murder.
*Not Barnabas, another one. Collinwood is crowded at night in 1897.
Nine year old Nora Collins walks in on her teacher, Charity Trask, being bitten by vampire Barnabas Collins. Barnabas tells Nora to “Look into my eyes!” He hypnotizes Nora and mind-wipes away her memory of him. Barnabas has been on Dark Shadows for more than two years now, and this is only the second time he has pulled the “Look into my eyes!” move with someone whose blood he has not been drinking. The previous occasion was also with Nora, in #756. In the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s, Barnabas is usually paired with mad scientist Julia Hoffman, who is the master of a magical form of hypnosis that allows her to rewrite people’s memories at will. So if Barnabas exercised this traditional vampire power in those segments of the show, he’d be stepping on Julia’s territory. But this episode is part of a time-travel story set in 1897, and Julia is not here.
Barnabas has been exposed and is being hunted by a number of people. His current hiding place is inside a cave. He confers there with his reluctant sidekick, broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi. Today the show is being taped on new cameras, and the image is crisper and more nuanced than we have seen since it went to color in August of 1967. The cave would barely have shown up through yesterday’s cameras, but it looks nifty today.
Magda is Barnabas’ sidekick, she is quick with lies, and she is played by Grayson Hall, but she does not do hypnosis. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Magda has stolen a severed hand that a crime boss was keeping in a box, and believes that she can use it to undo a curse she placed on the rakish Quentin Collins. Barnabas is worried that they will not use the hand correctly when the time comes to release Quentin. Since there is no way to test the procedure they plan to use on Quentin, he asks if it will be able to help someone else. Magda says that it should. He has the bright idea to summon Charity. He evidently overate, and she is in danger of dying from loss of blood.
Vampires are metaphors for extreme selfishness, and with this suggestion Barnabas is a case in point. If the hand can lift curses from the people it touches, why does Barnabas not have Magda place it on him? If it freed him of vampirism, that would heal Charity and his other victims, and would allow him to stroll up to the vampire hunters on some sunny day and watch their suspicions of him collapse. But that is out of the question, because he does not know how to control the hand. He is simply using Charity as a laboratory animal.
Barnabas telepathically summons Charity. As it happens, lawyer/ Satanist Evan Hanley is at her bedside. Evan is among the vampire hunters, and knows Charity is under Barnabas’ power. He physically restrains her from leaving her room. Barnabas and Magda despair of bringing Charity and the hand together. The hand then disappears from its box. Magda thinks the hand is simply lost and is terrified that she will not be able to return it to its owner, but Barnabas is serenely convinced that it has gone to Charity under its own power.
This turns out to be true. The hand materializes in Charity’s room. Evan sees it, and, expert that he is in occult lore, exclaims “The hand of Ojden!” It settles on Charity’s face, and when it vanishes the bite marks are gone from her neck and she is once again her brisk, authoritative, and intensely priggish self, no longer a thrall of Barnabas. The hand reappears in the cave next to the box, and Barnabas smugly announces to Magda that it completed its mission.
For some reason, Barnabas’ self-satisfied certitude crumbles and he feels compelled to check on Charity to see that she has indeed been healed. He materializes in her room, but she is not there and the cock is already crowing. When he returns to the cave, Evan meets him, holding up a cross and keeping him from getting back into his coffin.
Vampire Barnabas Collins has been exposed and is in hiding. Most of those who would destroy him are as evil as he is, and none is as much fun to watch, so we’re on his side.
Stuffy Edward Collins catches Barnabas’ blood thrall Charity Trask in the basement of the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. Barnabas sent her there to fetch some soil from his original grave which he will use to make a new coffin habitable. Edward asks Charity what she is doing in the basement; she lies and claims that she can’t remember. This is an interesting moment for fans of Dark Shadows. Nancy Barrett’s acting style is uninhibited and often larger-than-life; one suspects that she was often accused of overacting. But Charity really does overact. In the contrast between her one-dimensional, exaggerated manner when she feigns amnesia and Miss Barrett’s own very noisy but highly textured performances, we see the definitive refutation of any such charge.
Charity got into the basement through a tunnel that connects the beach below Widows’ Hill to a prison cell in the basement of the Old House. In #260, set in 1967, we saw that the tunnel was in place when Barnabas and his little sister Sarah were living beings in the eighteenth century, that Sarah was aware of the tunnel, and that their father Joshua forbade her to tell Barnabas about it. Sarah’s ghost told Barnabas’ victim Maggie Evans how to escape through the tunnel. When Barnabas pursued her through it, we could see from his reaction that he was seeing the tunnel for the first time. The other Collinses of the 1960s were unaware of the existence even of the cell, let alone of the tunnel.
Now it is 1897, and when Charity mentions the tunnel to Edward he impatiently responds that he knows all about the tunnel. His tone suggests that he would expect Charity to know that he knows about it; evidently it is no secret among the residents of Collinwood. Since Edward’s twelve year old son Jamison is one of those residents, and Jamison’s daughter Liz and son Roger will be the adults at Collinwood in the 1960s, one wonders how that knowledge was lost in the seventy years separating this time-travel story from the principal time frame.
In the last scene, Barnabas is in Charity’s bedroom, about to chow down on her bloodstream. We pan from a two-shot to a closeup of Charity. She gives a thirty five second speech about how it isn’t safe for him to stay long, since her father knows that she is under Barnabas’ power and is lying in wait for him. Thirty five seconds is evidently how long it took for Jonathan Frid to put in Barnabas’ fangs, because when we pan back to him they are showing and he is ready to bite. At that moment, Jamison’s nine year old sister Nora walks in and reacts with horror to the sight of Barnabas with his mouth on Charity’s neck.
When vampire Barnabas Collins first appeared on Dark Shadows in April 1967, regular viewers may have thought they knew what to expect. They had just spent four months focused on undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, mother of strange and troubled boy David. David’s well-meaning governess Victoria Winters gradually realized that Laura was a deadly threat to him. After some initial confusion, Vicki rallied the other characters in opposition to Laura. Ultimately Laura went up in smoke and David escaped her clutches, choosing Vicki and life over his mother and death.
In many ways, the Laura story was modeled on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. So when Laura’s successor as supernatural menace was an out and out vampire, we may have expected further mining of that source. Barnabas bit and abducted Vicki’s friend Maggie Evans. As the daughter of drunken artist Sam, Maggie had played a key role in the “Revenge of Burke Devlin” storyline. But that storyline fizzled in the show’s early months, and by #201 even Burke Devlin lost interest in it. Maggie was at that point surplus to requirements, and when Barnabas added her to his diet we might have suspected that she would die and rise as a vampire. As Mina and the group she led in Dracula had to destroy her friend Lucy when Lucy rose as “the Bloofer Lady,” so Vicki and her friends would have to destroy Maggie. Vicki herself would then stake Barnabas. The average viewer would have expected this to be the sign to move on to the next menace; those who were aware of TV ratings and programming decisions might think it would be Dark Shadows‘ way of going out with a flourish before its impending cancellation.
Barnabas turned out to be a hit. The idea of a vampire on a daytime soap was such an oddity that a sizable new audience tuned in out of curiosity, and Jonathan Frid’s portrayal of Barnabas’ scramble to impersonate a living man native to the twentieth century resonated with so many of them that he became a breakout star. So they had to figure out a way to make him a permanent part of the cast. That meant Maggie couldn’t die. In the first place, they couldn’t risk making Barnabas responsible for the death of so likable a character. Second, as the survivor of the horrendous abuse Barnabas inflicts on her Maggie would have a new function, as the witness who might emerge to expose him and wreck the show. Third, while Maggie was in Barnabas’ clutches Kathryn Leigh Scott proved herself such a versatile actress that it would obviously damage the show to lose her. So Barnabas not only failed to kill Maggie, he completed only two homicides in the whole of 1967. Each of his two victims was a male character who had run out of story. As a result, the killings and the victims were quickly forgotten.
Barnabas’ nonlethal vampirism made it easier to keep the cast intact, but it also drained him of the lurid novelty that had made him such a draw. To reassure the audience that Barnabas really was a bloodthirsty fiend from the depths of Hell, the show had Vicki come unstuck in time in #365. She found herself in the 1790s, when Barnabas first became a vampire. That gave us a whole cast of characters whom we did not expect to see again once the show returned to contemporary dress. So Barnabas was free to slaughter people to his heart’s content.
The 1790s flashback was a hit in the ratings. When Vicki brought us back to 1968 in #461, the makers of the show had to figure out a way to keep the momentum going. They cured Barnabas of the effects of the vampire curse and surrounded him with a hectic parade of other refugees from 1930s horror movies- mad scientists, Frankensteins, witches, werewolves, and a couple of fresh vampires. After that Monster Mash period exhausted itself, they took us through a long, deliberately paced segment focusing on just two stories, one about a tormented werewolf and the other about a ghost who takes possession first of two young children, then of the whole estate of Collinwood. Barnabas, who has come to see himself as a good guy and the protector of the family, tries to cure the werewolf and reason with the ghost. His efforts instead transport him back in time to 1897.
In that year, Barnabas is a vampire again. He keeps saying that his only goal is to prevent the evils that will befall the family in 1969, but he is as uninhibitedly murderous as he ever was in the periods when he was unambiguously a villain. In Friday’s episode, he murdered one of the principal members of the Collins family, prankster Carl Collins, uncle of the Jamison Collins whose daughter and son are the adults at Collinwood in the 1960s. Barnabas had become so careless after so many killings that he left Carl’s body propped up behind the curtains in the windows of the drawing room, where it fell into plain view moments after Barnabas’ foe the Rev’d Gregory Trask entered. In this episode, Trask enlists Edward Collins, brother of Carl and father of Jamison, to help him hunt Barnabas.
My wife, Mrs Acilius, points out that when we see a character closing the doors to the drawing room, that person is in charge of the house. So in the early months of the show matriarch Liz was the one to close the doors; when Liz was taken to a hospital and her daughter Carolyn was in charge, Carolyn closed the doors. When Vicki was fully in command of the campaign against Laura, she closed the doors to consult privately with her lieutenants. When Trask and Edward go into the drawing room to discuss the situation, it is Trask who closes the doors. Vicki was good, so consistently so that she had to be written out of the show months ago. But Trask is overwhelmingly evil. That he has ascended to the rank of door-closer means that virtue has no stronghold anywhere.
Edward and Trask go to the Old House on the estate, where Barnabas has been staying. They find Barnabas’ reluctant sidekick, broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi. Magda denies that Barnabas is in the house and pretends not to know what Trask and Edward are talking about when they say that Barnabas is a vampire. Trask slaps Magda in the face; we have seen many face-slaps on Dark Shadows, but so far as I can recall this is the first delivered while the slap-ee has her back to the camera. Since he does not have to swing his hand very close to Grayson Hall’s face, Jerry Lacy can therefore put full force into the gesture, making it look like Trask is delivering a truly brutal blow to Magda. Afterward, Magda rubs her face and vows revenge on Trask. She quotes a rather confusing “old gypsy saying”: “Walk fast and the Devil will overtake you; walk slow and misfortune will catch you. You’d better not walk slow, because I will never be far behind.”
Edward and Trask search the Old House and find nothing. At dusk, Barnabas emerges from the secret room behind the bookcase in the front parlor. Magda hadn’t thought to look there, and Trask and Edward didn’t know the room existed. Barnabas says he will have to find a new hiding place for his coffin. Magda says she will do whatever she can to help him. Barnabas is surprised at her support for him; after all, he has bitten and enslaved her husband Sandor, and his destruction would mean Sandor’s restoration. Magda has an atypical moment of speechlessness, after which she says that Trask is an “animal” and must be punished at all costs.
Trask and Edward went back to the main house early in the morning to look for the plans to the Old House. It apparently took them all day to find them. By the time they have gone through them and identified all of its secret rooms, Barnabas is already up. They come back to the Old House and find the empty coffin in the secret room. Trask says that he will make the coffin “unusable” for Barnabas before daybreak. He leaves Edward, who is carrying a gun loaded with silver bullets, to guard the house.
Barnabas goes to one of his blood-thralls, Trask’s daughter Charity. He tells Charity that he is “in serious trouble” and commands her to go to the basement of the Old House. There, she will find some soil from his original grave, which he needs to prepare his new resting place. He tells her about a tunnel from the beach to the basement which she can use to elude detection by Edward. Since Barnabas has just materialized in Charity’s room and will shortly materialize in the secret room in the Old House while Edward is standing on the other side of the bookcase, we wonder why he can’t use that same power to get into the basement himself.
Barnabas finds that the coffin is topped with a cross. He can’t get close enough to take hold of the coffin and move it, so presumably even after he gets the soil he needs he will have to plunder a mortuary showroom to get a fresh resting place before dawn.
Charity does go to the basement. She puts some soil in her purse, then knocks over a crate, attracting Edward’s attention. She does not run away, but merely hides in an alcove until Edward comes down, sees her in shadow, and orders her to show herself.
In yesterday’s episode, inveterate prankster Carl Collins told his brother, the rakishly handsome Quentin, that their distant cousin Barnabas was a vampire. Quentin has problems of his own, and he is counting on Barnabas to help him. So he locked Carl up in Barnabas’ hiding place, expecting that when night came Barnabas would prune one more branch off the Collins family tree.
Today, Quentin finds that Carl has escaped. He goes to Barnabas and tells him what has happened. Carl’s practical jokes annoy Barnabas intensely, and Barnabas has never bothered to conceal his disdain for him. He reacts to Quentin’s news with fury and a lot of orders. When Quentin later finds Barnabas standing by Carl’s corpse in the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood, he is really torn up about his brother’s death for almost a whole minute.
A knock comes at the door; it is the oppressively evil Rev’d Gregory Trask. Quentin keeps Trask in the foyer for a bit while Barnabas hides Carl’s body. When Trask forces his way into the drawing room, Barnabas is gone. Carl’s body is cunningly hidden… behind the curtains, propped upright. Of course it falls out almost immediately. Earlier in the episode, Carl took Trask to Barnabas’ hiding place, and we saw that Barnabas had single-handedly lugged his coffin and the structure on which it rests some distance away. If he is strong enough to do that, surely he could have tossed Carl’s body out the window. And regular viewers know that there is a secret panel in this room, of which Barnabas has repeatedly shown that he is well aware. They would probably have expected him to hide the body there. That he just stashes it behind the curtains where it is certain to come into Trask’s view suggests that he isn’t even trying to get away with this particular murder.
Closing Miscellany
John Karlen is breathing pretty deeply during Carl’s big closeup as a corpse. It’s really confusing, I thought they were telling us he wasn’t dead yet.
I don’t know what the writers planned for Carl in the flimsies they sketched out six months before this episode was made, though there is so little room for him in subsequent plot-lines that I suspect he was supposed to die at about this point in the story. Still, his death was accelerated because Karlen had other things to do. He won’t be back on the show until #956, in February of next year.
The creaky little waltz that Quentin listens to obsessively was released as a single in June of 1969 and would hit #13 on the Billboard Hot 100 in August. Regular viewers may be sick of it already, and the characters certainly wish Quentin would get another record. It’s Trask’s turn to complain about it today, giving him something in common with Barnabas.
Trask wears a cross which he uses as a weapon against Barnabas. The show is oddly inconsistent about the effect of the cross on vampires. We’ve seen other characters use crosses against them, and at one point it was said that a cross inside the lid of Barnabas’ coffin immobilized him. But his hiding place is in the middle of a cemetery full of grave markers in the shape of huge crosses, and we see several of them today. Barnabas just walks right past those with no problem. You might think that since the show was made in the USA, where sincerity is so highly regarded, that the cross might be effective against him only if it is wielded by the pure of heart. But Trask is every bit as evil as are Barnabas and Quentin, and it works for him. It’s a puzzlement.
I think of the climax of the Iliad. As Achilles moves in to kill Hector, Athena takes hold of his spear and drives it in, delivering the fatal wound herself.
For modern readers, this may ruin the story. The whole poem has been leading up to this moment; we’ve spent a lot of time with Achilles, listening to him try to figure out what it would mean for him to kill Hector. So why have the goddess take over at the last minute? Isn’t it an evasion of Achilles’ responsibility for his actions, and a cheat for us as we’ve been observing his psychological development?
For the original audience, it was not. They actually believed in their gods. Athena really existed, as far as they were concerned. When an event was important enough, they took a interest. If it was really huge, they would get involved. Moreover, the gods worked closely with each other. So much so that you didn’t pray to one at a time, but always to groups of them. When Athena joins Achilles in his fight, it isn’t her pushing him aside- it’s him doing something so important it blurs the boundary between human and divine.
Something like that is at work in the traditional, pre-modern, conception of demonic possession. To say that a person is possessed is a way of looking at behavior that is reducible neither to moralistic judgment nor to psychological analysis. It isn’t individualistic in the way that those modes of discourse are. Rather, it suggests that the boundaries between the person and the spiritual forces of darkness have broken down. Perhaps the person is partly to blame for that breakdown, but the whole point is that s/he is no longer a distinct being, but is merging into those supernatural forces.
So, imagine a version of Dark Shadows where Elizabeth Collins Stoddard really was the main character. Her whole approach to life is denial. So, you could have had a story with a beginning, middle, and end. In the beginning, we see the lengths she has gone to in her quest to keep from ever having to have an embarrassing conversation. In the middle, we see various horrors take place around her, each worse than the one before, each more obvious than the one before, and each time she finds a way to convince herself it doesn’t exist. At the end, a couple of innocent characters go to her in the drawing room of Collinwood to rescue her from the monsters who are running rampant there. She looks at them placidly and tells them she sees nothing wrong. Why ever do they think she would want to leave her home? All the while leathery-winged demons are fluttering about her head. She doesn’t see them, and they have no choice but to flee.
Comment left 10 November 2020 by “Acilius” on “Episode 780: The Establishment Vampire,” posted 2 December 2015 by Danny Horn at Dark Shadows Every Day
Vampire Barnabas Collins has stashed his coffin in its old hiding place, the hidden chamber inside the mausoleum where his parents and sister are buried. As dawn approaches, he tells his reluctant sidekick, broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi, that this is the last day he will have to leave the coffin there. The suspicions that had recently surrounded him have cleared, and he will move the coffin back to the basement of Magda’s home, the Old House on the estate of Collinwood, when he next arises.
The graveyard is immersed in a heavy fog. As Barnabas approaches the mausoleum, a familiar voice calls to him. His old nemesis and ex-wife, wicked witch Angelique, implores him to come with her and leave the year 1897. She warns him that he must return to 1969 now, or it will be too late. Barnabas tells Angelique that he has not accomplished the goals for which he came to the past, and that he will not leave until he has done so.
Longtime viewers may be puzzled when Angelique tells Barnabas that she has helped him before. In #757, Angelique did prevent her fellow undead blonde fire witch, Laura Murdoch Collins, from staking Barnabas, but that did not seem to be intended as a service to Barnabas. Rather, it recalled #417, in which Angelique prevented Barnabas’ friend Ben Stokes from staking him and freeing him of the effects of the vampire curse she had placed upon him. She told Ben that she wanted Barnabas to suffer forever, and nothing she says to Laura indicates that she has changed. Indeed, the only time she ever seemed to act out of goodwill towards Barnabas was in #410, when Barnabas was about to rise as a vampire for the first time and she, regretting the curse, tried to stake him herself. Perhaps there is a retcon coming up, in which it will be made possible for Barnabas and Angelique to join forces against some new enemy.
It certainly seems that the show is about to take a new turn of some kind. The major storylines with which the 1897 segment began are all approaching their natural conclusions, and a number of major characters have already been killed off. Longtime viewers will recognize an acknowledgement of these facts, not only in Angelique’s explicit statement that the proper time for Barnabas’ stay in the late nineteenth century is almost up, but also in the doings of another character in the graveyard.
Inveterate prankster Carl Collins suspects Barnabas of being a vampire, and in a dream visitation his late fiancée Pansy directed his attention to the mausoleum. Lurking outside it, he sees Barnabas open the secret panel and go into the chamber where the coffin is kept. Carl declares that “We’ll get him tonight! We’ll get cousin Barnabas… TONIGHT!”
Carl is played by John Karlen, who first appeared on Dark Shadows as the luckless Willie Loomis. It was Willie who, in a misbegotten attempt at jewel theft, inadvertently freed Barnabas to prey upon the living in #210. In consequence, Barnabas bit Willie and enslaved him. When Willie first served him, Barnabas would control him not only by the usual vampiric practices of blood-drinking and telepathic summoning, but also by frequent heavy beatings with his cane. Later, Willie would come to feel that Barnabas was his friend; it was never clear that Barnabas reciprocated this feeling.
Carl first met Barnabas in #706. He introduced himself by holding a gun to Barnabas’ head and threatening to shoot him if he did not admit that his story of being a long-lost cousin from England was a lie. The gun turned out to be loaded with a flag labeled “FIB,” and the whole thing was Carl’s idea of a joke. Barnabas’ icy response, starting with his incredulous tone while asking if “YOU are a COLLINS?,” set the tone for all of his subsequent dealings with Carl, in which his attitude ranged from undisguised contempt to barely disguised contempt. Yet Carl remained convinced that he and Barnabas were going to be great friends, and he even asked Barnabas to be the best man at his wedding to Pansy. Carl is much more enthusiastic about his supposed friendship with Barnabas than Willie is about his, and Barnabas is far more open about his hostility towards him, making the Carl/ Barnabas relationship a spoof of the Willie/ Barnabas one.
Ever since Pansy’s death, Carl’s thoughts about Barnabas have taken a darker cast. When we see him in the mausoleum, watching the panel open, we know that his plan to “get cousin Barnabas” will take him into the chamber where Willie forever lost his freedom. We know, too, that Willie’s misfortune revolutionized the show; when it puts this actor on this set, Dark Shadows is promising to make major changes.
We cut to the drawing room of the great house on the estate. Rakishly handsome Quentin Collins is talking with Magda. As Angelique cursed Barnabas to be a vampire, so Magda cursed Quentin to be a werewolf. Angelique placed her curse because she was upset that Barnabas did not love her and was under the impression she was about to die. Magda placed hers because Quentin had married and then murdered her sister Jenny. Magda did not know then that Jenny had borne twins to Quentin, a son and a daughter. Since the curse is hereditary, Magda has been trying desperately to reverse it ever since she learned of the children’s existence.
The children are still secret from Quentin, and so he does not understand why Magda is trying to help him. When he demands she tell him, she says “I. Did. Not. KNOWWW!” in exactly the same intonation she had used when she first heard about the children in #763. First time viewers don’t know any more than Quentin does what she is talking about- the children are not mentioned today. Magda makes up an obvious lie, saying that she hadn’t known how much Jenny loved him. That isn’t meant to fool the audience, and doesn’t fool Quentin. But when Carl enters, Quentin drops the subject and leaves new viewers in suspense about what Magda now knows that they do not.
Carl knows that Magda lives with Barnabas, and refuses to talk in front of her. She teasingly asks “Mr Carl” if he “don’t like me any more,” and walks out with a bold stride, suggesting that Carl may at some point have shown signs of liking her rather too avidly for her husband’s comfort. Once she is gone, Carl tells Quentin that there is a vampire in their midst. Quentin dismisses this out of hand, telling him that their brother Edward staked a vampire named Dirk and told him about it in vast and gory detail. Carl asks who made Dirk a vampire; Quentin says that it was Laura. No, says Carl, Barnabas made Dirk a vampire, and Barnabas is a vampire himself.
Quentin begins to laugh, but within seconds realizes that there is a great deal of evidence in plain sight to support Carl’s assertion. He agrees to go with Carl to the mausoleum, but we hear his thoughts as he reflects that Barnabas’ efforts to help him are the only hope he has of release from the werewolf curse.
In the mausoleum, Carl wonders aloud where Barnabas came from. Quentin supposes that he was there all along. Carl is horrified at the thought that he is “the real Barnabas- our ancestor! Oh God, that makes it worse!” Quentin orders Carl to open the panel, and Carl obeys. As my wife, Mrs Acilius, points out, John Karlen once again plays the servant’s role.
In the hidden chamber, the brothers open the coffin, finding the diurnally deceased Barnabas. Quentin tells Carl to hand over the gun he has brought; Carl obeys. Quentin asks Carl if he knows how to get out of the chamber. When Carl says that he does not, Quentin turns the gun on him and forces him to stay. Quentin shuts his brother up in the chamber with the vampire.
In #384, set in the 1790s, Barnabas shot and killed his uncle Jeremiah. Barnabas and Jeremiah were about the same age, and had been very close; they were often compared to brothers. Barnabas was not yet under a curse when he committed that fratricide; it was an act entirely of his own will. Angelique was also partly responsible; she had cast spells on Jeremiah and on Barnabas’ fiancée Josette, causing them to conceive a mad passion for each other and to run off and get married. Enraged, Barnabas broke from the customs of New England and challenged Jeremiah to a duel. Consumed with guilt, Jeremiah deloped and let Barnabas kill him.
Barnabas’ killing of Jeremiah was murder under the laws which prevailed at the time in Maine, which was until 1821 part of Massachusetts. Indeed, Massachusetts’ anti-dueling act of 1730 provided that anyone who had either been killed in a duel or been put to death for winning a duel would “be given an unchristian burial at a gallows or crossroads, with a stake driven through their body.” Since the audience knows that Barnabas is fated to become a vampire, there is a chilling irony in seeing him volunteer for a staked burial.
Dark as was the shadow the duel cast over the subsequent history of the Collinses, at least Barnabas’ act showed a kind of twisted courage. But when Quentin uses Barnabas as a weapon to kill his brother, he is acting from the most abject cowardice. In the century that they have been subject to black magic, the Collinses have sunk from tragic grandeur to infantile squalor.
Quentin goes to the Old House and tells Magda what he has done. Magda is horrified at another murder. “No! Too many people are suspicious now. We’ve got to stop it or we’ll all be found out!” Since Magda is not a member of the Collins family, she is often the straight man reacting to revelations of their misdeeds and monstrosities. And since she is played by the charismatic Grayson Hall, the audience tends to adopt her point of view. So it is easy for us to forget that she is a functional sociopath. Despite all the killings we know to have resulted from her actions, it is still startling that Magda’s only objection to Quentin’s attempt to murder his brother is that she is afraid of getting caught.
We cut to another scene on the same set. Magda has summoned Angelique to the front parlor of the Old House. She asks Angelique to erase Carl’s memory so that Barnabas will not choose to kill him. Angelique taunts Magda as an “amateur” in the occult arts, and declares that she is done helping Barnabas. Magda says that she has read the Tarot, and that the cards tell her that Angelique loves Barnabas. She renews her plea to prevent the killing of Carl, but Angelique will not yield.
The reference to the Tarot rings a bell for longtime viewers. In the 1790s segment, Hall played the Countess DuPrés, Josette’s aunt. Angelique was introduced in that segment; she was the countess’ maidservant, and appeared to be a beginner in witchcraft. The countess was oblivious to Angelique’s sideline, and in #393 declared her to be an uninteresting woman whom she had known ever since she was an uninteresting child. The countess spent most of her time in the front parlor of the Old House reading the Tarot. That Angelique speaks so haughtily to the Tarot reader and “amateur” witch Magda on the same set highlights the reversal of roles in this segment.
Meanwhile, Carl searches the hidden chamber for a way to escape. He finds that one of the stones in the steps slides and reveals a lever. He turns the lever, opening the panel. He runs out and vows to destroy Barnabas, in the process almost knocking over a large tombstone that wobbles as if it were made of Styrofoam.
In episodes #310-315, made and set in 1967, strange and troubled boy David Collins was trapped in the hidden chamber for a whole week. He never did find the release lever- the ghost of Barnabas’ little sister Sarah finally took pity on him, materializing and showing it to him. The show avoids the implication that David is drastically dumber than his great-great uncle Carl by showing that the stone concealing the lever is already slightly ajar.
A lot happens in this one. Inveterate prankster Carl Collins realizes that his fiancée, Cockney showgirl Pansy Faye, is dead. He has a dream in which he meets Pansy backstage as she is preparing for her final performance, then sees her standing on stage before him, his sister Judith, and their distant cousin Barnabas; when he awakes from the dream, Carl is sure he has figured out what happened to Pansy, and he sets out for the very place where Barnabas is planning to rest during the day. This seems to imply that Carl will discover that Barnabas is a vampire.
The dream sequence is like nothing we’ve seen before on Dark Shadows, though it is strongly reminiscent of the kind of thing you would have seen on near-contemporary shows like ABC’s prime-time horror anthology Night Gallery hosted by Rod Serling and the Paulist Fathers’ syndicated morality plays Insight hosted by the Rev’d Fr Ellwood Kieser. It starts with a closeup of a sign on which Pansy’s name is emblazoned in glittery letters, and plays over a soundtrack of an audience applauding thunderously. Pansy calls Judith, Barnabas, and Carl to join her on stage, each in their turn; their behavior in this drama-within-a-drama mirrors their behavior in the framing narrative.
Meanwhile, Barnabas’ unwilling sidekick, broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi, has returned from Boston. There, she met with a leading member of the Romani people, whose name she alternately pronounces as “King Johnny Romana” and “King Johnny Romano.” She shows Barnabas a box she took from King Johnny. It contains a severed hand wearing a ring, which Magda declares will solve their troubles. Magda has placed a curse on Judith and Carl’s brother Quentin, turning Quentin into a werewolf. After placing that curse, Magda learned that her sister Jenny had borne two children to Quentin, and since the curse is hereditary she is desperate to find a way to lift it. Barnabas traveled back in time to 1897 in the course of his own attempt to resist the effects Magda’s curse will have in 1969, so they are allied in this effort.
Barnabas is utterly unimpressed with the hand and with Magda’s plan to place it on Quentin as he is about to transform. He seems convinced that Magda is just trying to conceal the fact that she failed to find anyone in King Johnny’s camp who could actually help them. He doesn’t care about the original owner of the hand, a legendary nobleman named Count Petofi who was himself cured of lycanthropy, or about an incantation Magda says over the hand that is supposed to prepare it to draw the curse from Quentin. He isn’t even interested when she admits that she stole the hand from King Johnny and that if they don’t get it back to him before he realizes it is missing he will send someone to kill her. He reacts as if the whole thing is a show she is putting on to build up her cover story.
In a metafictional set of way, Barnabas is onto something. The original storylines the writers had prepared for the 1897 segment are coming to a head. Several of its major characters have already died, and others, such as Carl, would not be very attractive customers for a life insurance salesman. Apparently the original flimsies, written six months ago, gave only a few more weeks until Barnabas was to return to 1969 and take the show back to contemporary dress. But 1897 is a hit. The ratings are soaring, and there are some dynamics among the characters that they want to explore in a lot more depth. So they want to stay, but to keep the momentum going they need more story and a number of new characters, including a major villain whom Barnabas and Quentin can team up to fight together. So the writers find themselves in the same position with regard to us that Magda is in with regard to Barnabas, trying to sell us on their latest preposterous brainstorm.
Pansy’s farewell performance in Carl’s dream is, alas, Kay Frye’s final appearance on Dark Shadows. Some fans seem unable to look past Pansy’s own hilariously inept performance when we first see her doing her act, and to see that Miss Frye herself does a terrific job playing a cold, cynical working girl. She is good today, when Pansy is on stage and in her character as the “world-famous mentalist and singer,” but is also trying to tell Carl the truth about Barnabas. I only wish they could have brought Miss Frye back as someone else, either in the extended 1897 segment or in another time period.
The opening voiceover, delivered by Kay Frye, tells us that a vampire named Dirk Wilkins has been destroyed. We hear that Dirk was the pawn of someone called Barnabas Collins, who hoped to use him to conceal a secret of his own. The narrator also says that “certain things cannot be forgotten, as Judith Collins will learn this day.” This implies that the day’s action will center on challenges in information management.
Returning viewers may not recognize Miss Frye’s voice. We have seen her as Pansy Faye, Cockney showgirl, improbable fiancée of prankster Carl Collins, and victim of Dirk’s first murder. As narrator, Miss Frye forgoes Pansy’s rather uncertain East London accent. She also takes a different approach to the role of narrator than she had to that of Pansy. When we first saw her, Pansy was putting on an act for Carl’s benefit, and Pansy is a terrible actress. When Carl left, Pansy dropped her act and we could see that Miss Frye is as capable a performer as the character is a poor one. Today’s voiceover gives Miss Frye a still better role. The crass and cynical Pansy did not call for much nuance. But as narrator, Miss Frye speaks with a quiet urgency and subtle modulation of the voice that leaves us wondering what might have been had she been cast in a bigger part.
We cut to what regular viewers recognize as the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood in the year 1897, where a man in a cassock is talking tenderly with a woman in a colorful dress. The man is very affectionate, even stroking the woman’s neck with two fingers.
The woman is the Judith Collins mentioned in the opening voiceover; the man is the Rev’d Gregory Trask. It is not mentioned in the episode, but Trask is the keeper of a boarding school called Worthington Hall. Also unmentioned is that Trask conspired with a Satanist named Evan Hanley to brainwash a young man named Tim Shaw, one of the teachers at Worthington Hall, and that once he was under their control they used Tim to murder Trask’s wife Minerva. Trask wanted Minerva out of the way, evidently because he plans to marry Judith and take control of her vast fortune.
Judith is disconsolate at the thought that she was under Dirk’s control. While Trask is talking sweetly to Judith, Tim enters. Trask pulls a gun on him and instructs Judith to call the police and report that Minerva’s murderer has been captured.
Tim, who has up to this point ranged from mousy to timid to utterly defeated, is suddenly assertive. He tells Judith that she won’t want to telephone the sheriff. He says that there are two murderers at Collinwood, and she is one of them.
Tim says that he came upon Judith in the act of shooting neurotic intellectual Rachel Drummond to death. Returning viewers know that this is true; Tim, Judith, and Rachel were all under Dirk’s power at the time, and for reasons that made sense only to the dim-witted Dirk he ordered Judith to kill Rachel. A vague memory comes back to Judith and prompts her to confess; when Trask realizes that Tim will not back down from his accusation and Judith will not participate in a cover-up, he tells Tim he will make a deal with him.
Trask calls the sheriff. He addresses himself to “Sheriff Furman,” a name we have not heard before. It quickly becomes clear that we are not likely to hear it again. He tells the sheriff that Tim was out of town the night Minerva was poisoned and that, in his grief, he had forgotten this fact. Returning viewers know that Evan has told the sheriff that he saw Tim with Minerva while she was dying. One might assume that Trask would at least have to call Evan first to ensure that he gave the sheriff a story to account for this discrepancy, but Trask doesn’t bother to contact Evan at all. Evidently the sheriff is such an abysmal moron that Trask can safely assume he won’t think of any questions.
Sheriff Furman’s manifest incompetence prompts one of Danny Horn’s funniest posts at Dark Shadows Every Day, in which he writes a series of hypothetical police reports about the killings we have seen so far in the 1897 segment. One of Danny’s recurring themes is that law enforcement characters on Dark Shadows serve only to delay the plot. There is so much story in 1897 that the producers saw no need to slow things down, so it shouldn’t be surprising that neither Sheriff Furman nor any of his deputies appear on-screen.
For my part, I wish they had stayed in 1897 considerably longer, so I would have liked to spend one day a week or so without much forward narrative movement. That might have included some episodes when the police show up and you do a lot of recapping, some built around character studies of the type Joe Caldwell wrote so well in 1967, some in which we reconnect with Collinwood as it is on the night in 1969 when Barnabas left for the past, and so on. Not only would that have extended the show’s strongest period and helped new viewers catch up to what is going on, it would also have enabled them to make more use of the many fine actors whom we go weeks on end without seeing. Even David Selby, whose handsome rake Quentin Collins is breaking out as a pop culture sensation at this point, hasn’t been on the show since #768. Other fan favorites are in the midst of even longer unexplained absences; for example, Lara Parker’s wicked witch Angelique has not been seen since #760.
Tim, who was out of the room while Trask was on the phone, returns. He “gladly!” agrees to leave Trask’s employ, and at first says that he will “gladly” leave the village of Collinsport. But then it dawns on him that he needs a job, and he blackmails Judith into assuring him that she will find a place for him in her business.
This will remind longtime viewers of the spring and early summer of 1967. At that time, Dark Shadows took place in a contemporary setting, and there were two major storylines. One was the introduction of the vampire Barnabas Collins. The other was the blackmail of matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard by seagoing con man Jason McGuire. Like Judith, Liz owns all of the Collins family’s assets; also like her, she is played by Joan Bennett. Threatening to expose the terrible secret that she was a murderer, Jason forced Liz to take him into her home, pay his debts, give him a job, and agree to marry him. When she finally balked rather than go through with the marriage, it turned out Liz wasn’t a murderer after all, the whole thing was a scam Jason cooked up.
Jason was a short-term character brought on to tie up the last non-supernatural narrative loose ends and fill time while Barnabas found his footing, as witness the casting of Dennis Patrick, who refused to sign a contract for the role since he wanted to be free to move to Los Angeles without giving more than 24 hours notice. But in those days, before the internet or soap opera magazines, the audience had no way of knowing that. They may well have thought that Barnabas would be destroyed and Jason’s oppression of Liz would become the show’s backbone.
In yesterday’s episode, a vampire was in fact destroyed. In May and June 1967, Barnabas’ chief victim was Maggie Evans, who like Rachel was played by Kathryn Leigh Scott. It was possible then that he would kill Maggie and that she would rise as a vampire, as Lucy Westenra did in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, compelling the good guys to stake her. Rachel doesn’t become a vampire, but Trask does tell the sheriff that it was the men hunting Dirk who shot her, accidentally. So when the final appearances of Dirk and Rachel lead to Judith both submitting to blackmail because of her mistaken belief that she is a murderer and taking steps towards marrying an overwhelmingly evil man, longtime viewers will remember a resolution that seemed to be on the horizon back in 1967.
Carl enters. Judith has no patience for her childish brother, and dismisses his concerns about Pansy. She tells Carl to go with Tim to the Old House on the estate. Tim took Rachel to the Old House when she was dying. Barnabas, who has traveled back in time to 1897, is staying there, and he had befriended Rachel. Tim had hoped Barnabas would help them, but it was daylight and he was not available. Rachel died in the Old House, and Tim left her corpse there when he came to the great house.
When Carl and Tim leave, Trask warns Judith that she almost gave herself away. “You must be more cautious, Judith! Even Carl was suspicious.” Judith agrees, showing that Trask is luring her into his world of lies.
We see Tim and Carl at the Old House. Rachel’s body is no longer there. Who took it, and why didn’t Tim and Carl leave with them? We are not told. Carl goes on about how wonderful Pansy is, and says he is going to the police because he thinks someone at Collinwood has done her harm. Evidently Carl’s suspicions are more highly developed than Trask realizes. Trask underestimates Carl because he is focused exclusively on Rachel and Tim. He never met Pansy, and knows nothing about her.
Carl leaves the house, and Pansy’s ghost appears to Tim. Tim is bewildered, and asks Pansy if she is looking for Barnabas. That is a natural assumption- after all, it is Barnabas’ house and Tim has no idea who Pansy is. When she vanishes into thin air, he shouts for Carl. He finds Carl not far outside the door, and describes the woman he saw. Carl jumps to the conclusion that she is Pansy, and starts calling for her. He sends Tim along to the great house, and continues searching for Pansy.
Evidently Carl’s search did not take long, because we see him standing next to Tim in the drawing room at the great house in the next shot. It is Rachel’s funeral.
Trask delivers a eulogy in which he says of Rachel that “The littlest angels have a new teacher.” Even first-time viewers are likely to laugh out loud at this ridiculous turn of phrase, and those who have been with the show for a while will see more in it than that. From childhood on, Rachel was Trask’s prisoner, first as one of the pupils imprisoned in his horrible school, then when he extorted her into staying on as a teacher with threats that he would have her prosecuted on false charges of theft and murder if she tried to leave. He made flagrant sexual advances to her as well, all the more hideous because he has been responsible for her since she was a small girl. In Rachel and Tim’s helpless personalities, we saw what can happen when a criminal like Trask is given an opportunity to turn a person into filet of human being, and an ominous sign of what might lie in store for Judith’s nephew and niece Jamison and Nora, who are currently among the inmates at Worthington Hall.
Tim and Carl bury Rachel themselves. My wife, Mrs Acilius, asked “Isn’t this usually handled by professionals?” Presumably whoever took Rachel’s body from the Old House would have been a better choice for the work than are Tim and Carl, but that isn’t the Collins way.
Tim announces his intention to get drunk. Carl brings up other things they might do, and Tim says that those will have to wait until after he gets drunk. After Tim leaves to pursue his eminently sound plan, Carl hears Pansy singing. He wonders if she is dead. He realizes that her voice is coming from the mausoleum which we know to have been Barnabas’ longtime home. Carl is played by John Karlen, who in the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s plays the luckless Willie Loomis. It was Willie who inadvertently released Barnabas from the mausoleum, so longtime viewers who see this actor on this set will expect something important to happen in the story.
Vampire Dirk Wilkins has bitten neurotic intellectual Rachel Drummond, fugitive schoolteacher Tim Shaw, and wealthy spinster Judith Collins. As we open, it is early morning and all three of them are gathered in Dirk’s hiding place. At Dirk’s command, Judith shoots Rachel. Tim does not know of Dirk’s wishes for Rachel, whom he loves. He is shocked by Judith’s deed, and takes Rachel to the Old House on Judith’s estate, Collinwood. The Old House is currently home to Judith’s distant cousin, Barnabas Collins. Tim knows that Barnabas is fond of Rachel, and hopes he will help them. But Barnabas is not available, and Rachel dies in Tim’s arms.
In the great house on the estate, Judith’s brother Edward and overwhelmingly evil charlatan Gregory Trask are fretting about the situation. Edward says that Barnabas believes that the vampire is Dirk; Trask replies “Then I would tend to believe it is not.” In #774, Trask found that Judith was bleeding from wounds on her neck and was in a robot-like daze; he had heard her calling Dirk’s name, and drew the conclusion that Dirk was the vampire. But his prejudice against Barnabas is so strong that he forgets about that.
Judith comes back, holding her revolver. Edward takes the gun and finds that it has recently been fired, and three chambers are missing their bullets. Edward leads Judith to her bedroom, and Trask goes into the drawing room, where by himself and in evident sincerity he calls on God to help him smite the forces of evil.
Returning viewers might be amazed at Trask’s attitude. He just completed a deal with a Satanist to use black magic to murder his wife; how can he believe himself to be God’s chosen instrument for this sort of work? But we have already seen that Trask’s hypocrisy is so extreme that it has given rise to its opposite. He has fooled himself, and is capable of the most earnest faith. In this he is the mirror image of his ancestor, whom we came to know between November 1967 and March 1968, when the show was set in the 1790s. That Rev’d Trask was such a true-believing fanatic that he became a hypocrite, so convinced of the rightness of his ends that he could not see how rotten the means were by which he was pursuing them.
Later, Dirk summons Judith. Edward follows her to Dirk’s hiding place, where he manages to stake the vampire, destroying him. He strikes quite a few inches below the heart, pretty well in the mid-gut region, but that apparently suffices.
This is perhaps the bloodiest episode of Dark Shadows so far. Rachel’s blouse is covered with blood, and blood spurts out of Dirk’s mouth while Edward is driving the stake into his belly. There is a good deal of discussion of this in the comments section of Danny Horn’s post about the episode on Dark Shadows Every Day. Many who were too young to remember the original broadcast wondered if there was public pushback against the graphic violence. The original fans among the commenters responded that no, to the extent that people were worried about the content of daytime TV at the time their concerns were focused on sex, not violence. One of the most memorable responses came from Friend of the Blog Percy’s Owner:
Not really. My dad remarried a woman with very conservative ideas about what I should watch and read. She had to prescreen everything. She worked and got home after DS, so she couldn’t have stopped me from watching it, but once I assured her that no one was having sex, she was FINE with it. She actually asked me if this was the soap with the woman who didn’t know who the father of her baby was. When I was able to say with absolute truth that there were no babies at all on DS she didn’t care.
Comment left by “Percy’s Owner,” 24 November 2015, on Danny Horn, “Episode 776: Blood Sports,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 23 November 2015.
I didn’t participate in that part of the discussion, but I did join in on another topic. Some commenters expressed the opinion that the portion of Dark Shadows set in the year 1897 went on too long, and that too many actors played multiple roles in it. I said that I was of the opposite view:
Oh, I disagree- I wish 1897 had gone on longer and had included a lot more doubling. For example, I’d have liked to see John Karlen come back as a suave, smooth-talking fellow. And Don Briscoe as a straight-up imitation of W. C. Fields, in the same way that Tony Peterson gave Jerry Lacy a chance to do a straight-up imitation of Humphrey Bogart. And Clarice Blackburn as the diametric opposite of Abigail/ Minerva- she could have been Magda’s black sheep cousin, the shameless woman.
Comment left by “Acilius” 9 November 2020 on Danny Horn, “Episode 776: Blood Sports,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 23 November 2015.
Neurotic intellectual Rachel Drummond is the third character Kathryn Leigh Scott has played on Dark Shadows, and today she joins the other two in becoming the victim of a vampire. In the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s, Miss Scott plays Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. Vampire Barnabas Collins took Maggie as his victim in May and June of 1967, and tried to brainwash her into believing she was his lost love Josette. At first Maggie responded to the vampire’s bite with the same addictive behavior it prompted in others, but eventually she shook loose of Barnabas’ power and rebelled against him. She tried to stake Barnabas, and when that failed she escaped from him. It was only because her psychiatrist betrayed her to become Barnabas’ co-conspirator and to hypnotize Maggie into forgetting her experience that she did not expose Barnabas.
When Dark Shadows flashed back to the 1790s to show how Barnabas became a vampire and to suggest that he might still be interesting if he weren’t one, Miss Scott played Josette. After he had brought the vampire curse on himself, Barnabas bit Josette, who like Maggie at first responded blissfully. When Josette realized Barnabas wanted to make her into a vampire as well, she, like Maggie, resolved to escape. Maggie’s escape took her from the prison cell in Barnabas’ basement through a tunnel to the beach below the cliff of Widow’s Hill; Josette’s escape led to very nearly the same spot, but it began, not in the cell, but at the top of the cliff, and it involved her flinging herself to her death on the rocks below.
Early in 1968, Barnabas was freed of the effects of his vampirism, and he set about battling other supernatural menaces. In the course of one such battle, he has come unstuck in time, and taken us with him to the year 1897. In that year, he is once again a vampire. One of his victims was dim-witted servant Dirk Wilkins. Since Barnabas was beginning to attract suspicion, he allowed Dirk to die and rise as a vampire, planning to tip people off to Dirk’s hiding place so that he would be found and destroyed and everyone would attribute all the vampire attacks of the previous few months to him. This plan fell apart immediately, when Barnabas lost track of Dirk as soon as he first rose.
Rachel has stumbled into Dirk’s hiding place. She asks him if he knows what happened to her friend Tim, and he bites her. She shows some signs of a blissful initial reaction to the bite, but still has some questions about Tim. Dirk tells her to forget about Tim and to stay where she is. He returns before dawn to find her waiting. She brings Tim up again, and he ignores her. She helps him close the lid of his coffin, caressing it. Though Rachel is obedient, this does not mean that she is any more under Dirk’s power than Maggie was under Barnabas’ power when she rebelled against him or Josette was when she jumped off Widow’s Hill. Rachel’s personality is something that takes place deep inside her head and prevents her from asserting herself against other people. Even if Dirk were not a vampire, she would probably have been just as compliant.
While Rachel is sitting dutifully in his hiding place, Dirk calls upon Barnabas. He tells Barnabas that he will kill Rachel unless he brings blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins back to life before dawn. Returning viewers know that Barnabas has no idea how to revive Laura. We also know that no one else is going to bring Laura back, because she was running out of story when she vanished in #760 and they already have more characters than they can fully use. Even a fan favorite like Miss Scott is absent from the show for dozens of episodes at a time. So it seems that Rachel is doomed.
Meanwhile, Barnabas has another problem to deal with. His distant cousin, stuffy Edward Collins, has summoned him to the great house of Collinwood. Edward suspects Barnabas of vampirism, and has told him so. Edward’s sister, spinster Judith, has turned up with bite marks on her neck and an oddly subdued affect. Edward brings Barnabas face to face with Judith. When she does not react to him as Edward expects a victim to react to the vampire who bit her, Edward is embarrassed and stumbles through a series of half-expressed apologies. Barnabas declares that he will resume the search for Dirk, and instructs Edward to stay with Judith at all times. He hopes that Judith will lead Edward to Dirk’s lair.
Edward does sit with Judith for a time, but when he hears some noises in the foyer he leaves the room to investigate. He wanders all through the house for a number of minutes, long enough that the recorded background music plays beyond the cues we are used to hearing and gets to some tunes we haven’t heard in months.
While Edward is conducting this journey, Dirk sneaks up behind him on the walkway at the top of the foyer stairs and grabs him by the neck, knocking him out. Dirk then appears in Judith’s room, gives her a gun, and tells her he will have a job for her to do soon. He dematerializes before Edward comes back and finds Judith still in bed.
Later, Edward leaves again to make tea, and when he brings the tray back Judith is gone. In its first months, one of the themes of Dark Shadows was that the Collinses of 1966 were running out of money, so it made sense that they were chronically short of servants. In this period, however, the Collinses are supposed to be at the zenith of their wealth and power. It is simply a flaw in the story that Edward himself has to leave Judith to find out what the noises were in the foyer or to fetch her tea.
The task Dirk set for Judith was to murder Rachel. After dawn, she goes to the hiding place, pulls the gun, and tells Rachel she is sorry for what she must do. In the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s, Joan Bennett plays matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. In #569 and #570, it looked like Liz might be bitten by vampire Tom Jennings. But the show is firmly committed to a prohibition against involving Liz directly in the plot, so that came to nothing. When Judith presents herself as Rachel’s designated assassin, longtime viewers will be glad to see that Judith is not subject to the same restrictions.
Dark Shadows Commentary 