Frankenstein’s monster Adam wants recovering vampire Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman to build him a mate. Adam has threatened to kill well-meaning governess Vicki Winters and everyone else at the great house of Collinwood unless they comply. Today, Barnabas and Julia have to tell Adam that the procedure has hit a snag and they are not sure how to resolve it. So Adam goes to Vicki’s bedroom and, while she sleeps, prepares to strangle her. We hear Adam’s thoughts in a voiceover, saying that he does not hate Vicki, but that because Barnabas loves her and Barnabas “has condemned me to being alone forever,” Barnabas “must be alone too.” Barnabas knocks on Vicki’s door while Adam puts his hands on Vicki’s throat. Adam has hold of Vicki before she has a chance to cry out.
Adam first came to life when Barnabas donated his “life force” to him. When the episode ends with Barnabas trying to save Vicki while Adam tries to kill her, we therefore see two sides of the same character in conflict with each other. The donation that created Adam freed Barnabas from vampirism. The sides in this particular conflict reverse what we saw at Adam’s creation, when he represented an end to the danger Barnabas posed to Vicki.
Had the show been made in the 1990s or the 2000s, this ending might have been very suspenseful indeed. By this point in the series, Alexandra Moltke Isles was rather vocal about her dissatisfaction with the role of Vicki, and wanted out of her contract. In the era of soap opera magazines and internet discussion fora, that would have been well-known to the fans. When they saw a week-ending cliffhanger in the form of an attack on Vicki, they might have wondered whether this meant Mrs Isles had succeeded in escaping from the show. But none of those media existed in 1968. Besides, the broadcast networks’ Standards and Practices offices enforced rules that murderers had to be punished. If Adam killed Vicki, those rules would limit what they could do with the character. So I doubt the original audience really thought they might tune in Monday to see that Vicki was dead.
Closing Miscellany
They shot this one with cameras that were in very bad shape. Most of the episode is so heavily green tinted that it is surprising it met ABC’s broadcast standards.
Early in the episode, there is a fight scene between Adam and Barnabas. Violent scenes like these usually give way to woodwind music and the sight of either Vicki or heiress Carolyn in the sedate setting of the great house. But today it is followed by more heavy music and another scene of violence, as Adam finds Julia in the woods and assaults her. After that, we hear the woodwinds and see Vicki in her bedroom.
There, longtime viewers will be reminded of the fourth episode. In that one, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins tried to let himself into Vicki’s bedroom while she slept, and when he was caught and his sister Liz scolded him, he told her not to supervise his “morals.” That choice of words leaves little doubt he meant to violate Vicki in some sexual way. Since then Roger has ceased to be a villain and has become occasional comic relief. Today, he knocks on Vicki’s door, identifies himself, and she very calmly lets him in while in her nightgown, with no suggestion anything untoward might be in the offing. They have a little conference about Vicki’s relationship problems and Liz’ mental health. We can see why Mrs Isles was frustrated with Vicki’s part on the show- even when a man comes into her room in the middle of the night, half the time it’s for some dull recapping, and the other half she doesn’t even get to scream.
Recovering vampire Barnabas and mad scientist Julia are under pressure to create a female Frankenstein’s monster. The process they are using requires draining the “life force” from a woman into a constructed corpse. The other day, Barnabas announced they would force the role of donor onto Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town and one of his former victims. When Barnabas’ servant Willie heard of this plan, he was horrified. Willie has a crush on Maggie, and is determined to spare her this fate.
Now, Willie has abducted Maggie and is hiding her from Barnabas and Julia. Barnabas is worried about what will happen if they cannot find another woman to use in the experiment. Julia says “If worse came to worst, I could do it.” Barnabas points out that only she is prepared to operate the equipment, and that she could not do that if she were serving as donor. She makes a feeble suggestion that their onetime lab tech, an unpleasant man named Peter who prefers to be called Jeff, might run the equipment. Barnabas says that Peter/ Jeff does not have her training. In any case, Barnabas had to fire Peter/ Jeff because he had reason to believe he was trying to sabotage the experiment, so he can scarcely trust him now.
This is not the first time Julia has offered to solve a problem by destroying herself, only for Barnabas to turn her down. In #350, when Barnabas was still a vampire and was desperately thirsty for blood, Julia volunteered herself as his victim. Barnabas was sufficiently moved to address her for the first time as “Julia” rather than with a distinctly contemptuous pronunciation of the title “Doctor,” but he still said the reason he was refusing was that he had use for her medical expertise. Barnabas’ cruel plan for Maggie suggested that he isn’t really any nicer now than he was as a vampire; this echo of that moment would suggest that he hasn’t even stopped seeing Julia, who after all loves him, as a kind of higher servant.
Willie has taken Maggie to the hidden chamber inside the old Collins family mausoleum. It was in this chamber that Barnabas was trapped in his coffin from 1796 until Willie inadvertently freed him to prey upon the living in #210. When she was his prisoner in #248, Barnabas took Maggie to that chamber and shut her up in the coffin there. While Willie tries to assure Maggie that she will be safe as long as she is with him, the memories that Julia used her preternatural powers of hypnosis to erase start coming back.
We see a flashback, not to Maggie’s time at Barnabas’ mercy, but to #283, when she was Julia’s patient at Windcliff Sanitarium. Julia took her on a trip to the old cemetery north of Collinsport, and they went into the mausoleum. Julia did not know about the hidden chamber, and did not understand why Maggie became upset when they were in the publicly known part of the mausoleum. Maggie remembers visiting the mausoleum with Julia, and cannot remember why it frightened her to be there. But the fact that she recognizes the chamber as part of the mausoleum means that her memory of what Barnabas did to her is coming loose.
This creates a truly suspenseful situation. Maggie is an audience favorite with connections to several other characters, and so it seemed unlikely anything Barnabas and Julia did would result in her leaving the show. But if she remembers what they did to her and tells the police about it, they will go to prison. Since Barnabas and Julia are the source of all the action on Dark Shadows, that would mean the end of the series. So her memory coming back sets up a crisis that might be resolved with a significant change.
Perhaps Barnabas and Julia will force Maggie to donate her “life force” with the consequence that her body dies and she wakes up in the newly created woman, who just so happens to look exactly like her but to have a drastically different personality. That seems plausible, since the long-running storyline of her romance with hardworking young fisherman Joe seems to be over, the minor theme of her relationship with her hard-drinking father Sam had been resolved long before Sam died a few months ago, and we have reason to expect her to move out of her house, which has long served as our window into the working class of Collinsport. If Maggie is running out of story, they may very well decide to keep Kathryn Leigh Scott on as another character.
Closing Miscellany
The flashback is not made of tape cut from #283. It couldn’t be- the show was in black and white then, and is in color now. So they recreate it. It’s kind of adorable to see Julia in her old wig.
This was not the episode they intended to shoot. It was the dress rehearsal. Shooting the flashback scene put them so far behind schedule they didn’t have time to do the episode, and they had to send this footage to the network. I believe that is the only occasion they ever resorted to that desperate expedient. The camera is out of focus much of the time and occasionally does not seem to be pointed in the right direction, the microphones are misplaced so that it sounds at one point like Julia is referring to Maggie as “Greg,” booms and other equipment intrude into the shots, and the actors frequently blow their lines. In other words, it is in no way different from any other episodes.
Some time ago, mad scientist Eric Lang promised Barnabas Collins that he could cure him of vampirism. His cure involved building a Frankenstein’s monster and draining Barnabas’ “life force” into it. Lang expected that this experimental procedure would end with Barnabas’ body dead and his consciousness awakening inside the newly constructed creature.
Lang died before he could complete the experiment. Barnabas’ friend, Dr Julia Hoffman, picked up where Lang left off. To their surprise, both Barnabas and the new man lived. Barnabas was freed of his curse, but he and Julia turned out to be the worst parents conceivable. They took the new man, whom they named Adam, to the prison cell in the basement of Barnabas’ house and kept him chained to the wall, alone for all but a few minutes a day, with nothing to stimulate his mind. Adam eventually escaped, and quite understandably hates Barnabas.
Adam has fallen under the influence of suave warlock Nicholas Blair. Nicholas persuaded Adam to go to Barnabas and threaten to murder well-meaning governess Vicki and everyone else Barnabas cares about unless he provided him with a mate. Barnabas enlisted Julia to take charge of the process and his servant Willie to steal dead bodies to use for parts. Now there is a constructed female corpse on a table in Barnabas’ basement and an apparatus to use in its animation. All that is missing is a woman to donate her “life force.”
Yesterday, Barnabas’ servant Willie overheard Barnabas telling Julia that he wanted her to hypnotize Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, so that she would submit to the procedure. When Barnabas was a vampire, he took Maggie as his victim, keeping her in the cell where Adam would later be chained. After Maggie escaped from Barnabas, Julia hypnotized her to forget her ordeal. She now believes that Barnabas is just peachy.
Today, Maggie is on the terrace at the great house of Collinwood. She is having coffee with Vicki. The two of them are lamenting the fact that their fiancés have both become strangely distant lately, leading to the end of their engagements. Some of the fan-sites mention that both Kathryn Leigh Scott and Alexandra Moltke Isles have moments during this sad scene when they seem to be stifling laughter. In the years since the show ended, several of the actresses have said that Louis Edmonds had a habit of making wickedly hilarious remarks to them immediately before a taping that would involve a deeply serious scene, and that it would take everything they had not to burst out laughing at the worst possible moments. Edmonds’ character Roger Collins isn’t in this episode, but maybe he was on set for some other reason.
Barnabas shows up and talks with each woman separately. While Vicki is away getting a cup for Barnabas, Maggie tells him she might be leaving town soon. He is distressed to learn she may not be available for the crimes he is planning against her. After Maggie leaves, Vicki mentions that her charge David just left on a camping trip, and “It was quite something getting him off.” On Danny Horn’s Dark Shadows Every Day, a commenter named “Chris” remarked on this:
During the outdoor coffee scene after Maggie leaves Vicky with Barnabas, is the funniest blooper ever…….
Vicky, paraphasing: “I was getting David ready for his trip to Boston.”
Actual finish: “It was quite something getting him off.”
And then, she buries her face in the coffee cup, knowing that everyone is holding back laughter, and the awkward pause goes on forEVER.
Comment left by “Chris” at 7:57 AM Pacific time, 21 March 2016, on “Episode 583: Every Woman We Know,” by Danny Horn, on Dark Shadows Every Day (12 February 2015.)
To which I replied, “Vicki, no, he’s only twelve!”
When Mrs Isles is trying not to laugh, she bites her upper lip. She visibly does that before lifting the coffee cup to cover as much of her face as she possibly can, and the pause does go on a long time. So it could be that “Chris” is correct. I can only imagine Edmonds saying that now we know why they stopped showing the audience what goes on when Vicki and David are alone together.
While Maggie was Barnabas’ prisoner, Willie came to be very fond of her. Barnabas eventually framed Willie for his own crimes against Maggie; Willie was sent off to the mental hospital Julia is in charge of. After a few months, he was released. Willie came back. Since his return, Willie has been firmly convinced that Barnabas is his friend. Willie is also in love with Maggie. These attitudes thrust Willie into a crisis when he learns of Barnabas’ cruel plan for Maggie.
At first Willie tries to persuade Julia to refuse to bring Maggie into the experiment; she will not. Then he tries to stab the constructed body. Barnabas caught him before he could plunge the knife in, and threatened to kill him if he tried again.
Later, Willie goes to Maggie’s house and tries to persuade her to leave town immediately because “people” will hurt her if she doesn’t. When she asks what people, he with great reluctance tells her that “Barnabas, he’s involved… Now look, it’s not his fault- but he’s in it whether he likes it or not.” When Maggie expresses disbelief that Barnabas could be a part of any plan to hurt her, Willie says “I’ve got my loyalties to Barnabas, because he’s been good to me. And I’m being as loyal to him as I can be.” Even first-time viewers who do not know that Barnabas was a vampire who fed on Willie, beat him unmercifully, killed his friend Jason and forced him to dispose of the body, etc, will remember the opening of today’s episode when Barnabas greets Willie with a death threat. When we see that Willie sincerely believes that Barnabas has been good to him, we know that we are seeing a man who is as utterly lost as he can be.
After he fails to talk Maggie into getting on the next bus out of town, Willie goes back to the lab and steals a bottle of chloroform. He knocks over a stool; the noise brings Barnabas. Barnabas glances around the room, concludes that he is alone, and leaves. We see Willie cowering behind a table. Barnabas’ brief visit to the lab makes Willie seem even more pitiable. Barnabas doesn’t know where Willie is, does know that he has access to the lab, and has seen him trying to sabotage the experiment. Even so, he has so little regard for Willie’s ability to take action that he doesn’t see any need to do a real search. We hear his thoughts in voiceover as he thinks “There’s no one here.” Seeing Willie making himself small, we might suspect that Barnabas would have the same thought even if he were looking directly at his onetime slave.
Willie hiding.
Meanwhile, Barnabas encounters Adam on the terrace at the great house. Adam says that he will murder Vicki tonight unless Barnabas returns to the lab and gets back to work.
Willie breaks into Maggie’s bedroom. She awakens to find him pressing a cloth to her mouth. She screams, he apologizes, and the chloroform takes effect. He hears Barnabas let himself into the house and call for Maggie; when Barnabas comes into the bedroom, he finds the room vacant and the French windows open. We first saw this room in May 1967, when Barnabas was a vampire taking Maggie into his power. In those days, her father Sam and fiancé Joe were horrified to find that she had disappeared from it, leaving the windows open. That was because she was answering Barnabas’ call. Now Sam is dead and Joe is estranged from Maggie, and it is Barnabas’ turn to find that Maggie is gone. When he does, Adam’s threat to kill Vicki replays in his thoughts.
Recovering vampire Barnabas Collins goes into his basement, where an experiment is being planned that is intended to bring a female Frankenstein’s monster to life. He finds lab tech Peter, who prefers to be called Jeff, running the equipment with electrodes attached to the constructed body. He demands to know what Peter/ Jeff is doing. Peter/ Jeff makes some lame excuses, and Barnabas fires him.
As it happens, Peter/ Jeff is under the influence of Angelique. In the 1790s, Angelique was the wicked witch who made Barnabas a vampire. Recently, she defied her master, suave warlock Nicholas. Nicholas punished Angelique by stripping her of her powers and making her a vampire. The Frankenstein experiment involves draining the “life force” from a person into the constructed body. Barnabas served as the “life force” donor in a previous experiment that brought a man called Adam to life, and was freed from vampirism as a result. Angelique is trying to force Peter/ Jeff into conducting the experiment with her as donor, hoping for the same result. She was in the lab, strapped to a table next to the one bearing the body, when Barnabas entered, but used her vampire powers to vanish before he could see her.
The mad scientist who is in charge of the experiment is Barnabas’ best friend Julia. Barnabas and Julia meet in the basement lab and puzzle over Peter/ Jeff’s conduct. Barnabas concludes that Peter/ Jeff was trying to destroy the body because he knew the failure of the experiment would set off a series of events that would put Peter/ Jeff’s ex-fiancée Vicki in danger, and Peter/ Jeff now hates her so much he wants her to be killed. Julia dismisses this idea as absurd, but Barnabas seems really to believe it.
Barnabas and Julia talk about their need for a woman to serve as the creature’s “life force.” Barnabas announces that he has chosen Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town. In May and June of 1967, Barnabas was a vampire and Maggie was his victim. After Maggie escaped Barnabas, Julia hypnotized her into forgetting what he was and what he had done to her. Barnabas may no longer be bound by Angelique’s curse, but when he says that he has decided that Maggie is “the body” they will use, Julia responds that he still sounds very much like “the old Barnabas.” In a cold voice, Barnabas observes that “You don’t like to be reminded of him, do you.” She objects to the idea of forcing Maggie to take part in a procedure that may well kill her, but he tells her that he is sure she will agree with him once she has given it some thought.
My wife, Mrs Acilius, points out that Barnabas’ expectations of other people suggest that even though he is now a human being, he is still as alienated from others as he was when he was a vampire. Vicki broke her engagement with Peter/ Jeff, therefore it makes sense to him that he would want her to be brutally murdered. Julia abused her medical skills to cover up his crimes against Maggie, therefore he expects her to use them again to commit more crimes against the same victim. He has plans for Maggie; so far from trying to gain her consent, he calls her “the body,” as if she were a slab of meat. His sarcastic line to Peter/ Jeff, “Everything seems to be my fault now!,” drives this home for regular viewers. Almost every bad thing that has happened in and around the town of Collinsport for a very long time is entirely his fault, and he ought to know it.
Barnabas’ much-bedraggled servant, Willie, overhears this conversation. He has a crush on Maggie, and is horrified that Barnabas wants to endanger her life. He talks with Julia, pleading with her to refuse to conduct the experiment unless Barnabas chooses another woman. She will not agree. He tells her that she doesn’t know what it is like to think of someone you care about on that table; she tells him that he is wrong, because she watched Barnabas go through it.
Julia admits to Willie that she has feelings for Barnabas.
This is the first time we have seen Julia explicitly tell Willie that she has feelings for Barnabas. He looks stunned; she leaves before he can say anything else. If Willie were not caught off guard by Julia’s frankness, he might have said that it was different for Barnabas. He volunteered to be the “life force” donor, and laboring under the vampire curse he had little to lose even if the worst happened. But they do not plan to give Maggie a choice, and she is a healthy young woman with everything to live for.
The episode ends with Willie in the basement lab, raising a scalpel to stab the constructed body. This is a nice bit of ring composition, taking us back to the day’s starting point. But we saw Peter/ Jeff try to stab Adam with that same scalpel a few days ago, and that effort was a ridiculous failure. Moreover, the constructed body isn’t alive yet, and if Julia could sew it together from dead parts surely she could repair any damage Willie might do. So we don’t end with much suspense.
Vampire Angelique wants to take part in an experiment. The experiment is modeled on one in Hammer Studios’ 1967 film Frankenstein Created Woman. A mate will be created for patchwork man Adam by a process that involves draining the “life force” from a person into a female body made up of parts salvaged from several cadavers. Angelique wants to be the “life force” donor.
Angelique knows that when Barnabas Collins donated his “life force” to Adam, he not only survived the process but emerged cured of the vampire curse she had herself placed on him 172 years before, when she was a wicked witch. She is hoping that if she follows his lead, she too will be freed to walk in the daylight.
Angelique has been snacking on an unpleasant man named Peter who prefers to be called Jeff. Peter/ Jeff is working on the experiment as a lab tech. She keeps demanding that he run the experiment with her as the “life force” donor. He keeps explaining that he’s just there to set up the equipment and has no idea how to operate it. The only person qualified to do that is mad scientist Julia Hoffman. Angelique says that no one else must be involved, and gives Peter/ Jeff 24 hours to become an expert on the process.
Meanwhile, Adam visits heiress Carolyn in her bedroom. He describes their relationship in terms that show a far greater maturity than she has seen from him before, and she calls him an “amazing creature.” The word “creature” wounds him. We hear his thoughts in a voiceover monologue, the first time Dark Shadows has used this device in mid-conversation. It is quite unnecessary; Robert Rodan’s face tells us everything we need to know about Adam’s feelings. Carolyn certainly sees that she has hurt Adam, and scrambles to make up for it.
Carolyn gives Adam a bright green sweater, and he bursts into tears. He says that no one has ever given him a gift before. Carolyn does not know about Adam’s origin, and is puzzled by this remark. He tells her no one is as nice as she is, that he wants to be her friend forever and never to hurt her, and rushes out of the room, overwhelmed by his emotions.
The experiment to build a female Frankenstein’s monster began after Adam told Barnabas that if he were not given a mate, he would murder everyone in the great house of Collinwood, including Carolyn. The scene in Carolyn’s room shows that this threat is a hollow one. On Friday, Adam dropped in on suave warlock Nicholas, who put him up to extorting Barnabas and Julia, and told him he loved only Carolyn and was ready to tell Barnabas to forget about the experiment. Nicholas talked him out of that, promising him that he would make it possible for him to have both his mate and Carolyn if only he would do everything he told him to do.
Angelique returns to the lab. Peter/ Jeff isn’t there, but Adam is. She tells Adam that he is breaking his word to Nicholas. Nicholas did not in fact tell Adam to stay away from the lab, but he did give Angelique that command. Adam is skeptical of Angelique, but he has no reason to stay in the lab or to throw her out. So he leaves her there.
Soon Peter/ Jeff is back. He keeps trying to explain to Angelique that he has no idea what he is doing, but she puts herself on the table and insists he start right away. While he throws switches, she moans.
Danny Horn’s post about this episode on Dark Shadows Every Day details the similarities between this scene and the way TV variety shows of the period presented “psychedelic” rock and roll acts such as The Doors. Danny’s commenter “PrisoneroftheNight” (a.k.a. Marc Masse of the intermittently available blog Dark Shadows from the Beginning) points out that The Doors themselves were likely aware of the similarity, as witness a voice that can be heard at the eight second mark of track 11, disc 2, of the CD release of The Doors in Concert calling similar visual effects “Dark Shadows time!”
Danny doesn’t say anything about Lara Parker’s rendering of Angelique’s experience on the table. On Dark Shadows Before I Die, John Scoleri says that Angelique “seemingly enjoys the experiment (because we’ve seen her shriek in pain, and this definitely was not the same),” to which his sister Christine adds that Peter/ Jeff “seemed to be pressing all the right buttons.” When we were watching the episode, Mrs Acilius noticed Peter/ Jeff’s uncomprehending reaction to Angelique’s moans and remarked “Yeah, yeah, we know you’ve never heard a woman make those sounds.”
Two of the four actors in this episode, Nancy Barrett and Roger Davis, are still alive as of this writing. I believe it is the first episode to have a cast that all survived as late as 2021. Robert Rodan died in that year, and Lara Parker in 2023. I don’t know if there are any episodes that still have all-surviving casts. (UPDATED: #751 does!)
Dark Shadows never really followed the traditional soap opera formula of a week that begins with an eventful Monday episode, followed by slower paced installments on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and culminating in a big finish on Friday. Major developments often occur midweek, while there is no guarantee anything much will happen on Mondays and Fridays. Today is one of those slow Fridays.
Suave warlock Nicholas talked Frankenstein’s monster Adam into serving his evil scheme. Nicholas wants mad scientist Julia and recovering vampire Barnabas to construct a mate for Adam in order to found a RACE OF ATOMIC SUPERMEN!!! race of artificial people who will be subject to his control. Adam told Barnabas that he would kill everyone at the great house of Collinwood unless he and Julia built a woman for him.
Adam has a crush on heiress Carolyn. Shortly before yesterday’s episode was taped, Nancy Barrett fell ill, and so the part of Carolyn was temporarily recast with Diana Walker. Adam comes to Nicholas’ house today and declares “There can never be another Carolyn.” Miss Walker wasn’t that bad, but Miss Barrett is a unique talent, so I see where he’s coming from. Adam says that he is going to tell Barnabas to forget about the experiment.
My wife, Mrs Acilius, points out that Adam is a smart character who must know that Nicholas will try to talk him out of giving up on the experiment. If he had really given up on the mate-building process, he would have gone directly to Barnabas. He wants Nicholas to talk him into sticking with it, so it is no surprise when Nicholas persuades him. Nicholas does have to resort to promising Adam that he can somehow have both Carolyn and his lab-made mate.
Nicholas’ sidekick, vampire Angelique, is in the room when he has his conversation with Adam. After the big guy leaves, Angelique asks Nicholas how he plans to arrange for both women to be Adam’s lovers. Nicholas responds “I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.” Angelique is amused by that response, as she had been amused by his attraction to Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town.
Grayson Hall joined Dark Shadows as Julia in June 1967, making her first appearance in #265. No one else on screen today was on the show before that, making this the first episode with a cast made up entirely of actors who came to the show after Jonathan Frid’s Barnabas premiered in April 1967.
In the first 38 weeks of Dark Shadows, the best scenes were those between well-meaning governess Vicki and her charge, strange and troubled boy David. The scenes were not especially well-written- at one point, Vicki reads aloud from a textbook describing the geography of the state of Maine- but Alexandra Moltke Isles and David Henesy always found a way to use nonverbal cues to communicate to the audience exactly how matters stood in their characters’ relationship to each other.
Mrs Isles and Mr Henesy haven’t had a two-scene in donkey’s years, and so she has had to find another partner to play off. In recent months, her finest moments have come when she was standing next to the elaborately decorated clock in the foyer of the great house of Collinwood. Today, she stands there while confronting her fiancé, an unpleasant man named Peter who prefers to be called Jeff. She does a great job, and in response Roger Davis, whose performance as Peter/ Jeff was notably insipid in the first half of the episode, comes to life and is himself compelling to watch.
Mrs Isles standing next to her co-star. Also pictured: Roger Davis. Vicki confronts Peter/ Jeff
It’s been weeks since Peter/ Jeff has spent time with Vicki, and he has been extremely evasive when she asks him what is keeping him so busy. He has turned down a job offer that would have made it possible for them to start life together on a sound financial footing, again without an explanation. When he asks her simply to accept that he has a good reason, she explodes with “You put everything on that basis, and it’s just not fair!” They go into the drawing room and after he keeps dodging her questions she gives him his ring back.
Peter/ Jeff’s problem is that he is committed to spend all his time helping mad scientist Julia and recovering vampire Barnabas with an experiment meant to bring a Frankenstein’s monster to life, a project he doesn’t feel he can tell Vicki about. Earlier in the episode, he was in the lab in Barnabas’ basement and sneaked a peek at Julia’s notebook. Julia was angry when she caught him with her property. This appears to be the same little red notebook Julia hid from Barnabas in the autumn of 1967, at one point stashing it inside the clock that has such a salutary effect on Vicki.
Later, Vicki dropped by Barnabas’ house. Peter/ Jeff sneaked upstairs to eavesdrop on Vicki’s conversation with Julia. He stands inside the cellar door, which has a barred window. We’ve seen Barnabas’ front parlor through these bars several times, and it always catches my attention. This time, the shot is composed very much in the style of a panel from an old EC horror comic book, a style the show has borrowed in some of its most effective moments.
Nancy Barrett was taken ill not long before shooting began for this episode, and she was replaced in the role of Carolyn Stoddard by Diana Walker. Miss Walker had her sides letter perfect; her only flub comes when she delivers a line in a level conversational tone, and a moment later has to apologize for shouting. She doesn’t seem to have much idea of what was going on in the story, though. Her Carolyn is a calm, practical-minded homemaker of the sort you might find on another daytime soap of the period, not someone who is keeping a stray Frankenstein’s monster in the spare room. Besides, Miss Barrett is probably Dark Shadows’ most reliably entertaining performer, an impossible act for anyone to follow.
Aside from the two actors who at various times filled in for Vince O’Brien in the famously disposable role of Sheriff Patterson, I believe Miss Walker is the only person to have served as a substitute for a temporarily unavailable cast member. Many times, the makers of the show went out of their way to rearrange the shooting schedule or rewrite scripts to avoid substitutions. Many of the show’s fans were extremely young and extremely intense, so I suspect Miss Walker’s mail after this appearance would have included some ugly items that would have confirmed the producers in their reluctance to call up the reserves.
Today is the last time we see Jerry Lacy as lawyer Tony Peterson. Mr Lacy will be back in other roles. In 1969 and 1970, he and Diana Walker were reunited in the original Broadway cast of Play It Again, Sam, in which Mr Lacy scored a triumph with the same Humphrey Bogart imitation that is the basis of Tony’s character, while Miss Walker played Sharon and understudied Nancy.
Heiress Carolyn came running when her mother, matriarch Liz, woke her with her screams. Liz was having a nightmare about being buried alive. She tries Carolyn’s patience and ours with her obsession that this will in fact happen to her.
Liz tries to call her lawyer, Richard Garner. Whoever answers the phone tells Liz that Garner is not available, hardly surprising since it is the middle of the night. She responds that if he doesn’t call back within the hour, he need never call again. Since we last saw Garner in #246, and his name hasn’t been mentioned since #271, it seems like he may as well get some sleep.
Liz then calls Tony, a young lawyer in town who used to date Carolyn. Tony comes over and Liz hires him to help with some changes to her will. She dictates excerpts from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Premature Burial” by way of a codicil protecting her from being buried alive, and he tells her he thinks she’s being weird.
The most prominent reference to Poe on Dark Shadows up to this point was in #442, when vampire Barnabas reenacted the plot of “The Cask of Amontillado” by bricking the fanatical Rev’d Mr Trask up in an alcove in his basement. Like Tony, Trask was played by Jerry Lacy, so it is possible that the writers hope the audience will recognize the connection.
Poe wrote punchy little short stories each of which leaves the reader with a single horrifying image. “The Cask of Amontillado” worked well as the basis for an episode, and the bricking up of Trask is one of the most enduring images in all of Dark Shadows. “The Premature Burial” could have made for the same kind of success, had Liz’ obsession begun and ended within one episode. But it has already gone on longer than that, and there is no end in sight. Each time we come back to it, the situation becomes more familiar and less urgent.
Meanwhile, Carolyn takes a glass of milk and a sandwich to Adam, a Frankenstein’s monster she is hiding in the long-deserted west wing of the house. Adam has little to do but read, and he has become quite intellectual. He is playing both sides of a game of chess when Carolyn arrives, pretending that she is his opponent. When she comes, he attempts a joke, pretending she has left him alone so long he does not remember her name. She is distressed about Liz’ obsessive fear of being buried alive, and so does not recognize that he is joking.
Carolyn looks at the chessboard and asks Adam who he is playing. He says that he is pretending to play her. He is smiling and relaxed when he admits this, and he starts joking again as he tells her about their imaginary games. Adam’s pretending that he did not remember Carolyn’s name was a weak joke, but he is actually pretty funny when he tells her that when he pretends they are playing, she doesn’t do as well as he does. She still does not realize that he is kidding, and reacts with horror. She says she doesn’t play chess; in #357, her uncle Roger mentioned that she does, but that she usually loses to him. Perhaps in the 44 weeks since then, she has given up the game altogether.
Adam shows Carolyn the book he has been reading, a volume of Sigmund Freud’s works, and is disappointed she has not already read it. When she tells him she is worried because of Liz’ condition, he invites her to sit down and says “Tell me about your mother,” suggesting that he is ready to set up shop as a psychoanalyst. Adam is being serious now, but this part of the exchange is hilarious.
Carolyn goes out to the terrace and looks at the night sky, wondering if Freud could help her understand what is happening with her mother. I live in the year 2024, and so I have difficulty imagining how people could ever have taken Freud seriously. But he was very very big in the 1960s, and in its first year Dark Shadows gave us a lot of heavy-handed Freudian symbolism and a number of storylines with obvious psychoanalytic themes. Longtime viewers will find it a reassuring sign of continuity that Freud is still around as the thinker “every twentieth century man should read.”
Tony joins Carolyn on the terrace. He greets her and sees that she has a book about Freud. “I don’t have to ask why you’re reading him,” he remarks. Carolyn asks if he is referring to her mother, and Tony’s response is so indiscreet he may as well spinning his finger around his temple and saying “Cuckoo, cuckoo!” It is clear enough that the concept of “confidential communication” is alien to the lawyers in Soap Opera Land, and now we see that “basic respect” is also very much on the optional list. Carolyn tells Tony to do whatever Liz asks, and starts crying.
I was startled by Carolyn’s crying turn, because it is the first time in the two hundred or so episodes she has appeared in thus far Nancy Barrett has given a subpar performance. The actors all had to work under virtually impossible conditions, so I rarely mention it when one of those who usually does well has a bad day at the office, but the 20 seconds or so she spends very obviously not crying in this scene mark the end of an extraordinary streak.
Tony embraces Carolyn and kisses her. Adam’s room in the west wing overlooks the terrace, and he spies on them while they kiss. After Carolyn excuses herself and goes back into the house, Adam comes up behind Tony, grabs him, forbids him to touch Carolyn, and throws him to the ground.
Well-meaning governess Vicki is engaged to marry an unpleasant man named Peter who prefers to be called Jeff. Vicki knows that Peter/ Jeff has some kind of job that keeps him busy during the day. She does not know that he has been spending all night working at a second job. He is helping to build a Frankenstein’s monster. This second job is unpaid; his incentive is that if the monster is not built, an already existing Frankenstein’s monster named Adam has said that he will kill Vicki and everyone else in the great house of Collinwood.
As we open today, Peter/ Jeff is bitten by vampire Angelique. After Peter/ Jeff regains consciousness, Angelique starts giving him orders. He ignores them, and she bites him again. After that, he seems dazed and agrees to do whatever she commands. She wants him to hook her up to the body under construction and to use her “life force” to animate it. He tells her that he doesn’t know how to do that, and that the body isn’t ready to come to life in any case. Turns out she needn’t have bothered.
Meanwhile, Vicki gets some news. Roger, brother of matriarch Liz, tells her that he wants to send Peter/ Jeff on a six-week training program along with two junior executives from the Collins family business, and that if he works out there will be a job for him at the end of it. Vicki is dazzled by the offer.
Peter/ Jeff comes by. Roger meets him alone in the drawing room to make the offer. Peter/ Jeff can neither leave the Frankenstein project nor tell Roger about it. He has to turn the offer down without explanation, leaving Roger offended. Vicki then asks Peter/ Jeff what he was thinking, and he can’t explain the situation to her, either. She is frustrated that she tells him everything about herself, but she can’t get any information from him. She says that the offer must have represented a “family decision” on the part of the Collinses, implying that Peter/ Jeff’s refusal will reflect badly on both of them in their eyes.
When Dark Shadows started in June 1966, Vicki was its chief protagonist, Roger its most menacing villain, and the Collinses’ business interests a major part of the story. Vicki receded to the margins after her most interesting storyline, her difficult relationship with her charge David, was resolved in March 1967, and by that time Roger had become harmless and the business had long since ceased to be a source of interest. When we hear Roger talking about a job for Peter/ Jeff, for a moment it seems that he and the business might once again be important, and that Vicki might again have something to do with the plot. Vicki’s disappointment in her beau reminds us that the character doesn’t really have a place on the show any more.
Upstairs, Liz is taking clothes out of her closet and talking about them with her daughter Carolyn. They jar longtime viewers when they look at a particular dress and reminisce that they bought it on a trip to Boston. For the first 55 weeks of the show, Liz was a recluse who hadn’t left home since Carolyn was an infant. I suspect Liz had worn that dress during that period, and wish I’d looked for it when we were on those episodes during this watch-through. There certainly hasn’t been enough time since then for the trip to Boston to evoke the nostalgic tone in which they describe it, or for the dress to have fallen so far out of fashion that the ladies agree it is time to throw it away.
The Liz-is-a-recluse story was never exciting, and once they ditched it the show was quick to give us scenes of Liz happily going out. It is sometimes said that Dark Shadows is what Star Trek would have been if they had replaced space travel with agoraphobia, and Liz’ seclusion was the first exploration of this topic. Following the deep cut into the early days of the show in Roger’s offer to Peter/ Jeff with a moment when such a prominent part of its first year is simply forgotten is so typical of this period’s episodes that I wonder if some of the dialogue was written by uncredited contributors who weren’t up to date on bygone story points.
Carolyn is glad that Liz, who just recently escaped from a mental hospital, is taking an interest in her wardrobe. Liz lets her down hard when she says that she wants to get rid of as many belongings as possible in the short time before her death. Carolyn tries to tell her that she isn’t dying, but Liz refuses to listen. She demands that Carolyn promise to have an open casket at her funeral.
Liz was in the mental hospital because of a psychological disturbance with which Angelique afflicted her some months ago. When she did that, Angelique was a witch. Since then, Angelique has been stripped of her witchly powers, killed, and brought back to the world as a vampire. You might think Angelique’s spells would all have been broken when she was de-witched; that has been the pattern on Dark Shadows previously. For example, when blonde fire witch Laura vanished in #191, the spell she had cast that caused Liz to mope around and be obsessed with death until she was sent off to a hospital was broken. Longtime viewers wonder if Liz’ continuing obsession with death and her paranoid fear of being buried alive are natural symptoms of the trauma Angelique put her through, and if she just needs better therapy than she was getting in the hospital.
Liz has a dream. It opens with Angelique looking directly into the camera. Angelique is wearing the same costume she wore in the scene with Peter/ Jeff and laughing. When Liz knew Angelique, she never dressed that way, she wore a black wig, and so far as the audience knows she never let Liz hear her signature evil laugh. So it seems that Liz’ current troubles are indeed a part of Angelique’s ongoing spell.
Facing us, Angelique tells Liz that she will be plagued by her obsessions until she dies. This is enough to trigger PTSD flashbacks in regular viewers. Twenty weeks ago, in #477, Angelique was looking at us when she described “The Dream Curse,” an abysmally repetitious, ultimately pointless storyline that dragged on for months. Joan Bennett was a fine actress and a great star, but there was only so much even she could do with a character who just mopes around and talks about death, and Dark Shadows has already made her do it more than once. In a comment on Danny Horn’s post about this episode, I wondered if Angelique couldn’t have cast a spell on Liz that isn’t just a retread of one we’ve seen before, and suggested one that would give her “a compulsion to put on a top hat and tails and sing and dance.” Here’s an animated gif of a cartoon showing Joan Bennett’s sister Constance dancing with Jean Harlow and Joan Crawford; it has more entertainment value than did the entire Dream Curse, and might serve as a consolation to those of us left shaking by Angelique’s threat to clog up the story again:
Dark Shadows Commentary 