Every crisis we have seen in the five and a half weeks since well-meaning governess Vicki came unstuck in time and found herself in the year 1795 has begun with lady’s maid/ wicked witch Angelique attempting to use black magic to win the love of young gentleman Barnabas Collins.
Angelique cannot be satisfied with the progress of her efforts. She has managed to end Barnabas’ engagement to the gracious Josette and has now become engaged to Barnabas herself, but even when he was proposing to her Barnabas explicitly told Angelique that theirs will be a sham marriage, something he is settling for because he knows he can never have his true love, Josette. Along the way, she cast one spell causing Josette to conceive a mad passion for Barnabas’ uncle Jeremiah and another causing Jeremiah to reciprocate it, leading them to elope and Barnabas to kill Jeremiah in a duel. She briefly turned Barnabas’ father, haughty overlord Joshua, into a cat. These events led Barnabas’ aunt Abigail and Josette’s aunt, the Countess DuPrés, to suspect that sorcery was afoot among them and to call in a professional witch-hunter, the Rev’d Mr Trask. Only the chance combination of Trask’s comic ineptitude, Vicki’s total failure to adapt to her new surroundings, and Barnabas’ cowardly unwillingness to tell anyone that he and Angelique had had an affair some time before kept Angelique from being exposed before she could lure Barnabas into even a sham marriage.
Barnabas’ agreement to marry Angelique came as the indirect result of another near-disastrous blunder of hers. In a fit of pique, she brought a grave, potentially fatal illness upon Barnabas’ little sister Sarah. When Barnabas happened to see her while Sarah was at her sickest, it dawned on Angelique that she could use his fear for her life as leverage. So she extorted from him a promise to marry her if she cured Sarah. Barnabas has told that story to his mother Naomi, who repeated it to her husband Joshua. Evidently none of them realized that it was much stronger evidence of witchcraft than were even the most bizarre of Vicki’s words and deeds, but that was another case of dumb luck sparing Angelique from the consequences of her actions.
In #377, we heard Angelique thinking about her spells and telling herself that once she has cast them she cannot undo their effects. You might think that because she knows about this limitation on her powers and has already seen one spell after another go wrong, she would be somewhat circumspect about raising the dead, but she is nothing daunted. Yesterday, Angelique summoned Jeremiah from his grave. She also caused Josette to go to the grave in time to see his hand burst out of the soil. This was part of a plan to drive Josette crazy. But again, her efforts misfire. Naomi saw Josette leaving the house and followed her to the grave, where she too saw the hand. With a witness confirming that she saw what she thought she saw, Josette would seem much likelier to keep her grip on sanity than she would be were she the only one who saw the phenomenon.
Today, Josette and Naomi run into the manor house of Collinwood, finding Joshua in the front parlor with Josette’s father André. They tell the men what they saw, and do not get an intelligent response. André hustles his daughter upstairs and puts her to bed, while Joshua stays in the front parlor and verbally abuses Naomi. When Naomi sees Jeremiah’s reanimated corpse outside the window, Joshua refuses to look until it has gone, then declares that its absence proves that she is an unreliable drunkard.
Later, Naomi tells the countess what she and Josette saw. The countess asks if Naomi now agrees that there is witchcraft at Collinwood. Naomi agrees that it seems probable, but says that she cannot believe that Vicki is a witch. They run through the other possible suspects. When they get to Angelique, the countess says that “It would make her more interesting.” She thinks a moment, then dismisses the possibility, saying that Angelique was a child when she entered her service, and that she has always been too boring to be a witch.
We spend some time in Josette’s bedroom. Jeremiah’s ghost wakes her, demanding that she come with him. This had not been Jeremiah’s attitude before his death, when he was so consumed with remorse at what he and Josette had done that he resolved to let Barnabas kill him. He is functioning as Angelique’s sock puppet. We might wonder if he is simply compelled to speak these words, or if she has deposited some share of her personality in his body.
In the morning, Josette awakens again, this time finding her aunt in the room. The countess offers to stay, but when Angelique comes with coffee the ladies decide it would be best for her to take over the vigil while the countess prepares for the upcoming move from the current manor house to the newly built great house.
Angelique breaks the news to Josette that she and Barnabas are to marry. Josette is devastated, but tells Angelique only that she must no longer do the work of a servant, and that she hopes her marriage will be a happy one. Whatever we may know about the injustices of the social system that has exalted Josette and subordinated Angelique, Josette as an individual shows such perfect kindness to Angelique that even the most class-conscious socialists in the audience would have to sympathize with the grand lady and be angry with her rebellious maid.
Joshua and Naomi arrive in the foyer of the great house, followed a moment later by the countess and Angelique. This is the home of the Collins family on the segments of Dark Shadows set in centuries other than the eighteenth, and was where regular viewers got to know them in the first 73 weeks of the show. The old manor house was introduced in #70 as a haunted relic, and since #221 has been the lair of Barnabas, who is in 1967 a vampire. So in terms of its dramatic date, this is the first time the family has settled into what we know as its proper home.
The ladies go upstairs to the room assigned to the countess. The room was originally to be Jeremiah’s. They find that the door is locked. The countess suspects that Vicki is hiding inside; indeed, she had hidden in the house earlier, making her the first person ever to spend a night there. But the countess’ theory is exploded when they hear a man laughing maniacally from the inside. We know that Jeremiah has moved into the room after all. Hearing the laughter, Naomi and the countess are horrified; Angelique is simply bewildered. She stands behind the others, partially blocked from our view. Unable to control what comes next, she is pushed out of the center of attention.
In episode 368/369 of Dark Shadows, haughty overlord Joshua Collins of Collinsport, Maine told his house-guest, the Countess DuPrés, that he was surprised she still chose to “affect a title,” since in this year of 1795 “France has followed our example and become a republic.” After the countess handed Joshua his head, he fumed to his wife Naomi that her snobbish Old World ways offended him, since he is such a devout believer in human equality.
It was immediately clear to any viewer that Joshua was being hypocritical. He tyrannizes his family and treats his servants as domestic animals that have unaccountably, and rather inconveniently, gained the power of speech. When he says that all men are equal, he means that he, personally, is the equal of anyone in a sufficiently lofty position, and the superior of everyone else.
Audience members who know something about the history of the late eighteenth century in the USA and France will find more to savor in Joshua’s preposterous position. By 1795, the French Revolution had gone through its most radical phases, and was anathema to everyone in the USA other than some of the nascent political tendency led by Thomas Jefferson, a tendency known in the southeast and New England as the Republican Party and in the middle states and the west as the Democratic Party. When Joshua says with great satisfaction that “France has followed our example and become a republic,” he is identifying himself with the most militant factions of the Jeffersonian party, and when he tells Naomi that “all men are equal” he is echoing the most famous passage of Jefferson’s most celebrated writing.
Ridiculous as it is to hear Joshua invoke the egalitarian rhetoric for which Jefferson was so well known, as a major landowner in a rural area far removed from the major cities he was perfectly typical of the most important backers of the Democratic/ Republicans. Jefferson himself was a member of this category, and he displayed both a remarkably sophisticated understanding of the leftwardmost theorists of the French Revolution, as demonstrated for example in the edition of the works of Destutt de Tracy that he prepared for publication in 1817, and a dismally cruel approach to his livelihood as a slave-holding planter.
When Dark Shadows was on the air in 1966-1971, the party that traced its origins to Jefferson was undergoing a revolution of its own. The coalition he forged between working-class groups in the north and rich slave-owners in the south had been an inspiration to the Democratic Party from the days before the Civil War right through the presidencies of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. After World War Two, the African American freedom movement finally scrambled this unlikely coalition, winning Black southerners the vote and challenging the dominance the heirs of the slave-owners had long held in the Democratic Solid South. Thoughtful Americans, seeing this change, might well think back to the origins of the Democratic Party and to the ridiculous incongruity of Jefferson’s soaringly egalitarian words coming out of his and other oligarchic mouths.
At the top of today’s episode, Joshua is very thorough about betraying all of Jefferson’s ideals. He tells Naomi that the common folk of the town must not know that their son Barnabas killed his uncle Jeremiah in a duel. Naomi replies that everyone already knows; Joshua insists that they do not, and declares that they will believe what he tells them to believe.
One of the major themes of Jefferson’s correspondence, as indeed of Destutt de Tracy and other Enlightenment philosophes, was what Karl Marx, a close reader of Destutt de Tracy, would call “false consciousness,” the tendency of the oppressed classes to see the world in categories generated by the ruling class, and that if false consciousness were erased the oppressed would rise up and sweep away all manner of social evils. Joshua’s determination to keep the working people of Collinsport in the dark about what is happening on the estate of Collinwood puts him at the opposite extreme from the beliefs his leader Jefferson professed. In his own life, Jefferson himself set about enforcing regimes of lies on more than one occasion, as for example when he used his office as president of the United States to cover up the crimes of General James Wilkinson. Even viewers who hadn’t read Jefferson’s letters and who were unaware of Jefferson’s less inspiring actions may well have known, in 1967, that the confidence which the Declaration of Independence expresses in what will happen if “the facts be submitted to a candid world” sat uneasily with the lies on which slavery in particular and white supremacy in general rests.
Joshua begins dictating to Naomi a fictitious story that sounds oddly familiar to regular viewers. Before well-meaning governess Vicki was plunged into her uncertain and frightening journey into the past, we had heard several versions of the Collins family history, none of which resembles the events that we have actually seen play out so far. As Joshua tells Naomi what he has decided people should believe, for the first time the outlines of the Collins family history published in the 1950s come into view. That history is not only sustained by false consciousness, but has its origins in a brazen lie.
Joshua is busy fabricating when Naomi interrupts him with more bad news. Barnabas has decided to marry Angelique, maid to the Countess DuPrés and to the countess’ niece, Barnabas’ former fiancée Josette. The great egalitarian Joshua is thunderstruck that his son would fall into the clutches of an “adventuress.”
Joshua sends Naomi to fetch Barnabas. He thunders his disapproval of the marriage, and Barnabas stands his ground.
Later, we see Josette in the cemetery, at Jeremiah’s grave. Barnabas spots her, and wonders whether he should tell her about his engagement to Angelique. He doesn’t want her to hear of it from someone else, as she surely will very soon. But the place could not be less appropriate. He approaches her; they have an awkward little talk, in the course of which he urges her to hate him for killing her husband. She says she cannot. She tells him not to say any more. He is helpless.
Angelique arrives and tells Josette that her carriage is waiting. Josette invites Barnabas to ride back to the manor house with them; he declines. Josette leaves the two of them alone for a moment; with a note of jealousy that belies her agreement to a sham marriage to a man who will always love Josette, she asks Barnabas if she interrupted something. He says that she did not. That’s true- he had already given up the idea of telling her about their engagement when Angelique joined them.
Back in the manor house, Joshua summons Angelique to the front parlor, where he offers her $10,000 to relinquish her claim on Barnabas and go back to the island of Martinique. It is difficult to compare prices between 1795 and 2023; to get a sense of proportion, we might remember that when Joshua offered Vicki a job as governess to little Sarah Collins in #367, he offered her a salary of $4 a week, and that this was rather a generous rate of pay for the position. So it would take even an upper servant 2500 weeks, that is to say almost fifty years, to earn the amount of money Joshua is offering Angelique.
Angelique refuses Joshua’s bribe. He says he is prepared to offer more, but when he sees that she is firm in her refusal he switches to threats. Naomi intervenes and says that she does not want to break ties. With Naomi’s promise of friendship, Angelique agrees to wait until the mourning period for Jeremiah is complete before marrying Barnabas.
What returning viewers know that Joshua, Naomi, Barnabas, the countess, and Josette do not is that Angelique is not only a maid, but is also a witch. It was under her spell that Josette, though in love with Barnabas, conceived a mad passion for Jeremiah, that Jeremiah, though a loyal friend to Barnabas, reciprocated that passion, and that the two of them, though they struggled with their consciences, eloped. That elopement prompted the jilted Barnabas to challenge his uncle to a duel, and his bewilderment at his own actions prompted Jeremiah to delope and let Barnabas kill him. Angelique and Barnabas had had a brief romantic fling before he became engaged to Josette, and she believed that once Josette was out of the way Barnabas would return to her.
It hadn’t quite worked out that way. In her frustration at Barnabas’ continued preference for Josette, Angelique cast a spell on Sarah, sickening her and threatening her life. When she saw how upset Barnabas was by his little sister’s illness, Angelique said that she could cure it, and extorted his promise to marry her if she did so. She released Barnabas from that promise in #390/391. When he told her that Josette would always come first for him, even though he knew there could never again be anything between them, she said she would marry him anyway. Apparently thinking he wouldn’t be likely to find another woman willing to enter a sham marriage on that basis, Barnabas proposed, and Angelique accepted.
In their conversation in the parlor, Joshua tells Angelique that he knows about the promise she extorted from Barnabas with her ability to cure Sarah. Evidently Barnabas told Naomi about that. There are those in the house who believe that witchcraft is afoot; indeed, Vicki is in hiding, having been accused as the witch. This story would seem to be proof positive that Angelique, not Vicki, is the guilty party, and she does widen her eyes when Joshua brings it up. But he and Naomi don’t make the connection.
Back in the graveyard, Angelique is holding a miniature coffin and casting a spell.
Where did she get that miniature? Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
In her bedroom, Josette hears Angelique’s disembodied voice, saying that Jeremiah is not dead. She runs to the front door, where Naomi sees her. Unable to dissuade her from going out in the night, Naomi follows Josette to Jeremiah’s grave. Josette keeps hearing the voice; Naomi does not hear it. But when Jeremiah’s hand bursts out of the soil, both women see it.
Jeremiah waves to the ladies. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
In the parts of Dark Shadows set in the twentieth century, Joan Bennett played matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Of all the major characters, Liz was the most reluctant to acknowledge the existence of supernatural forces, and she was the one who was least likely to see the evidence of such forces that abounded in the world around her. So when we see her as Naomi watching Jeremiah’s hand reaching out of his grave, it is the first time we have seen her react to an incontrovertible sign of the paranormal. It makes us wonder how far back in the Collinses’ past the roots of Liz’ denial extend.
Wicked witch Angelique cast a spell bringing a painful and apparently terminal illness to little Sarah Collins, beloved baby sister of young gentleman Barnabas. Angelique was enraged that Barnabas would not love her and wanted him to watch Sarah in agony, so that the love he felt for his sister would torture him. Barnabas happened by Angelique’s room in the servants’ quarters of the manor house of Collinwood while Sarah was languishing, and it occurred to Angelique that she had some leverage to use against him. She told him she might know of a cure for Sarah, and extorted his promise to marry her if she effected it. He agreed, Sarah recovered, and today Angelique comes to collect.
At first, Barnabas is bewildered by Angelique’s belief that they are going to marry. She brings up his promise. He is flabbergasted to find that she took it seriously. He does not know that she is a witch, and only now seems to suspect that she is a crazy person. She asks if he won’t have her because she is a servant. He gallantly denies that class makes any difference. He says that the real problem is in his feelings for Josette, his former fiancée, who eloped with his uncle Jeremiah. He says that he knows there can never again be anything between him and Josette, but neither will he ever cease to love her. Barnabas asks if Angelique would be willing to marry him, knowing that Josette will always have the first place in his heart; she asks what that matters, as long as she gets to be his wife. She repeatedly releases him from the promise he made while Sarah was ill, but he agrees to marry her anyway.
Yesterday’s episode and today’s include writer Ron Sproat’s first significant scenes featuring Angelique and Barnabas. In the scenes Sam Hall and Gordon Russell gave them, it seems that, while Barnabas has definitely made up his mind that Josette is the one for him, he also has the hots for Angelique. So he squirms and looks unhappy when Angelique throws herself at him, but he does kiss her and he does not hesitate to accept her invitation to visit her alone in her room in the servants’ quarters. So we can imagine that when Barnabas first met Angelique on the island of Martinique, believing as he did at that time that Josette could never love him, he was just doing what came naturally to him when he availed himself of her favors.
But in Sproat’s scenes, Barnabas isn’t attracted to Angelique at all. Yesterday he saw her while he was frantically worried about Sarah’s illness, so any sign of attraction would have had to be subtle. But today, they have a long, deeply emotional conversation in the course of which they decide to get married, and throughout he looks and sounds like he’s talking to his grandmother. That invites us to imagine their affair on Martinique in quite a different light. Perhaps he settled for Angelique then in the same way he is settling for her now- he despaired of ever getting the relationship he really wanted, and decided to give the path of least resistance a try.
It may not be irrelevant that Sproat was gay. For that matter, so was actor Jonathan Frid, a fact that wasn’t publicly acknowledged by his representatives until he’d been dead for ten years, but that can’t have been all that hard for sophisticated viewers to figure out in 1967.
Before Dark Shadows took us back in time to 1795, we knew Barnabas as a vampire trying to convince people he was a living man. In his efforts to pass, we often saw him alienated from his own feelings, isolated from others, and unable to express himself through any conventional form of masculinity. It wasn’t hard to find gay subtext in him then. But I think that in this scene we see the most specific and recognizable closet situation he has been in so far. When he expresses disbelief that Angelique will “accept me as I am,” even knowing “the way I feel,” the character collapses into the actor for a moment, and Josette merges into some guy to whom Frid would never feel comfortable introducing us. When he takes Angelique at her word and agrees to a sham marriage, he sees her as someone who has a place for the man he is. From what we have seen of her single-minded pursuit of Barnabas’ devotion, we know that she expects to turn him into someone else, and that they will both be terribly disappointed.
Like every other episode of Dark Shadows, this one opens with a voiceover delivered by a member of the cast. The voiceovers in the segment of the series set in the year 1795 usually begin thus:
A séance has been held in the great house of Collinwood, a séance which has suspended time and space and sent one girl on an uncertain and frightening journey into the past, back to the year 1795. There, each of the Collins ancestors resembles a present-day member of the Collins family. But the names and relationships have changed, and Victoria Winters finds herself a stranger in a sea of familiar faces.
The “sea of familiar faces” results from the same actors appearing in the parts of the show set in different periods. The emphasis the show places on this, both by the repeated use of “sea of familiar faces” in one opening voiceover after another and by the hapless Vicki’s (Alexandra Moltke Isles) exasperating habit of telling the characters that they are being played by actors who previously took other parts, gives the audience a reading instruction. Evidently we are meant to compare and contrast each actor’s twentieth century and eighteenth century roles.
The first face we see today is the only unfamiliar one that has bobbed to the surface of the 1795 sea. It belongs to wicked witch/ lady’s maid Angelique, played by Lara Parker. Angelique had a brief fling with young gentleman Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid) some time ago. They met when he first went to the island of Martinique and met her employers, the wealthy DuPrés family.
Barnabas had fallen in love with the gracious young Josette DuPrés (Kathryn Leigh Scott,) but was convinced Josette could never love him. Barnabas consoled himself in Angelique’s arms until he realized Josette did love him. Barnabas and Josette agreed to marry. Josette came to Collinwood for the wedding, accompanied by her father André (David Ford) and her aunt, the Countess DuPrés (Grayson Hall.) Angelique is the countess’ maid, but also attends Josette.
Angelique used her powers of black magic to make Josette and Jeremiah Collins (Anthony George,) Barnabas’ uncle, conceive a mad passion for each other. Josette and Jeremiah eloped, breaking Barnabas’ heart. Barnabas and Jeremiah fought a duel; consumed with remorse, Jeremiah let his nephew kill him. Even after all that, Barnabas realized he would always love Josette, a fact of which he apprised Angelique. Frustrated to find that she could never have Barnabas, Angelique yesterday announced in a soliloquy that she would punish him by forcing him to watch his beloved little sister Sarah (Sharon Smyth) suffer. At the top of the episode, Angelique is in her room in the servants’ quarters of Collinwood’s manor house with Sarah’s doll and some pins.
We cut to the front parlor, where Sarah is looking up adoringly at her mother Naomi Collins (Joan Bennett,) who is reciting a story. We cut back to Angelique, who drives a pin into Sarah’s doll. In the front parlor, Sarah clutches her chest and cries out in pain. Angelique sticks more pins into the doll, and Sarah cries out again.
In the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s, Joan Bennett plays matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, owner of the great estate of Collinwood, of the Collins family enterprises, and of any other piece of property that they decide to tell a story about. In Liz’ time, the Collins family is much decayed from its eminence in 1795, but she is still the foremost figure in the town of Collinsport, and would have the authority to make just about anything happen. In fact, Liz can rarely bring herself to do very much that pertains to the plot, but when she does speak up we can see that she has great depths.
Naomi, by contrast, is utterly powerless, shut out by her husband, haughty overlord Joshua (Louis Edmonds) even from the management of the house. In today’s pre-title teaser, we see Sarah sitting on the floor of the front parlor, looking up adoringly while Naomi recites a story to her. That Naomi is reciting to Sarah rather than reading to her reminds us of what we learned when first we saw her in #366, that unlike most women in eighteenth century New England Naomi is altogether illiterate. Naomi occasionally bewails her inability to spend her time productively, and often drinks.
Sharon Smyth plays Sarah in 1795. In 1967, she was Sarah’s ghost, a frequent visitor to Collinwood and its environs. Sarah’s ghost was quite a different character than is the living Sarah. The little girl in the white bonnet who showed up in the oddest places and made the oddest remarks was only one aspect of a vast and mighty dislocation in time and space. It was Sarah’s ghost that started Vicki’s “uncertain and frightening journey into the past.”
Miss Smyth* nowadays describes her acting style when she was nine and ten saying “the first word that comes to mind is ‘clueless,'” but that works out surprisingly well for a ghost. It isn’t clear to us how the visible part of the Sarah phenomenon relates to the rest, much less how the whole thing works, and it can’t be clear- if a phenomenon stops being mysterious, it isn’t supernatural anymore. So it is gripping to see that the visible Sarah is herself in the dark about what she represents. That doesn’t work so well for living characters. When Miss Smyth can’t take her eyes off the teleprompter while delivering lines like “Help me, mother! It hurts!,” we can perhaps see one reason why the unfathomably mighty Sarah of 1967 was reduced to such a subordinate role in 1795.
But Miss Smyth’s limitations as a performer were not the only reason this development was inevitable. The whole idea of the supernatural is that something which appears to be very weak is in fact very strong. So children usually have fewer resources at their disposal than do adults, females are less likely to be found in positions of authority than are males, and the dead cannot rival the dynamism of the living. So the ghost of a little girl will of course be an immense force. The Sarah we see in 1795 is not yet a supernatural being, and so it would ruin the irony if even before her death she were already great and powerful.
In the part of the show set in 1967, Liz was one of the few major characters who never saw the ghost of Sarah. Liz was pretty firmly in denial about all reports of paranormal phenomena, and in #348 Sarah would declare that she could appear only to people who were prepared to believe in ghosts. So it is a bit startling for regular viewers to see these two actors together for the first time. Naomi is the same calm, indulgent presence to Sarah that Liz is to the children in her life, suggesting that though “the names and relationships have changed,” Liz and Naomi are two versions of the same person.
If the viewer’s main activity in watching the 1795 segment is contrasting the characters with those played by the same actors in the first 73 weeks, Angelique’s prominence is a puzzle. She is the only one who doesn’t fit into that scheme, yet she has driven all of the action so far. By the end of today’s episode, I think we can see a 1967 character with whom Angelique stands in juxtaposition. That character is Barnabas.
From April to November of 1967, Dark Shadows was largely the story of vampire Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid) and his attempt to impersonate a living man native to the twentieth century. It was so much fun to watch Barnabas scramble to keep this game going that the audience found it easy to put to one side the horrible evil he did and to look for reasons to think of him as good. But if we ever succeeded in doing that, Dark Shadows would be ruined. A deep-dyed villain allows a drama to be less serious overall than it might otherwise be, so that a thoroughly bad Barnabas lightens the tone. Make him relatable, or even forgivable, and everything gets terribly serious again. Yet a nonthreatening vampire is a purely comic character, like Count von Count on Sesame Street. So until they can establish another Big Bad, Barnabas has to be beyond redemption. If he is a lovable guy who just needs help dealing with his neck-biting problem, he has no place on the show, and it has no story left to tell. So they spent the fall systematically kicking away every possible mitigating factor and forcing us to behold Barnabas’ unrelieved evil.
The last hope of redemption for Barnabas in 1967 was his attachment to the late Sarah. Sarah had died when she was about ten, and her ghost started haunting the estate of Collinwood back in June, when Barnabas was holding Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town (Kathryn Leigh Scott,) prisoner in his basement. By November, many people had seen and talked with Sarah, but she had shunned Barnabas, even though he was desperately eager to reconnect with his baby sister. In his speeches about his longing for Sarah and in two moments when a suggestion he might see Sarah distracted him from a murder he was in the middle of committing, we saw the possibility that when Barnabas was finally reunited with her, he would change his ways.
That reunion finally took place in #364. Sarah walks in as Barnabas is strangling his only friend and sometime co-conspirator, mad scientist Julia Hoffman (Grayson Hall.) Barnabas does let Julia go, and has a heartfelt conversation with Sarah. Sarah says that she will not come back until Barnabas learns to be good. We can see just how long that is likely to be when, less than two minutes after Sarah has vanished, Barnabas tells Julia that, while he may not kill her tonight, her existence means no more to him than does that of a moth.
When even a direct encounter with Sarah cannot move Barnabas to find value in human life, we see that what Barnabas wanted when he was yearning for her to come near him was not to renew a relationship in which anything would be expected of him, but was something more like nostalgia. He has moved into the house where he spent his time when he was alive, and has restored it to its appearance in those days. He once persuaded his distant relatives, Liz and the other living members of the Collins family, to attend a party in that house dressed in clothing that belonged to their ancestors of his period and answering to their names. And he cherishes a fantasy that a young woman will discard her personality and replace it with that of Josette, then come to him and live out the life he had once believed he would have, long ago. His wishes for Sarah are of a piece with these attempts to recreate a past world. He wants to reenact the time he had with her, not to face the present alongside her. Barnabas is a damned soul, unable to love, unable to grow, unable to do anything for the first time.
Today, the show pushes Angelique into the same “Irredeemable” category where his reaction to Sarah’s visit had landed Barnabas. Again, it is an interaction with Sarah that represents the last straw. Josette and Barnabas made a sweet couple, but we knew before we ever saw them together that they were not fated to end up together. Jeremiah was likable enough, but we knew that he, too, had a sharply limited future. But Sarah is a child, a particularly adorable one, and is someone we have come to feel we know through her months as a ghost. When Angelique treats her so cruelly, we cannot imagine ever forgiving her.
And yet, there were times we felt that way about Barnabas, too. Angelique’s insane fixations are remarkably close to those vampire Barnabas exhibited in 1967, so much so that we keep wondering if whatever she does that turns Barnabas into a vampire will also put her personality into his body. We have come to be attached to the vampire; perhaps we will eventually discover it is Angelique we were watching until Vicki came to the past.
That isn’t to deny that the human Barnabas we have seen so far has points of contact with the ghoul from 1967. He was selfish enough to take advantage of a servant girl in Martinique when he didn’t think he could win the love of the grand lady he wanted and to discard her when he learned he could. He is cowardly enough that it never occurred to him to tell Josette that he had a past with Angelique at a time when doing so could have prevented Angelique casting the fatal spells on her and Jeremiah.
Real as these vices are, they are endemic to soap opera characters. Few daytime serials would have any stories to tell if they were about people who had a gift for monogamy, and we are supposed to find ourselves yelling at the screen “Just tell her!” and “Just tell him!” at regular intervals. Even the power differential between Barnabas the scion of the wealthy Collins family and Angelique the servant girl, problematic** as it would be in real life, is less troubling in the soaps, which take place in worlds where heirs and heiresses marry servants and their relatives all the time. Of course, most viewers know that Barnabas is destined to become a vampire, a metaphor for selfishness, and will be inclined to see in his use of Angelique the seeds of his subsequent damnation. And Angelique has enough lines about Barnabas’ selfishness that even viewers who joined the show during the 1795 segment can’t let him off the hook altogether.
Still, there is a great deal of good in the living Barnabas. We see him at Sarah’s bedside, consumed with worry for his beloved little sister. The doctor has been to see Sarah, and he has nothing to offer. Sarah asks to see her governess Vicki, who is in hiding because a visiting witch-hunter named Trask has blamed her for a series of inexplicable misfortunes that have befallen the house since she showed up in #366. It was Vicki’s own odd behavior that first made her a suspect, and Angelique has taken advantage of Trask’s foolishness to fabricate evidence against Vicki. She has gone into hiding, and Barnabas is helping her.
When Sarah keeps asking to see Vicki, Barnabas promises to bring her. Naomi is surprised to learn that Barnabas knows where Vicki is, and is not at all sure Trask isn’t right about her. But when she sees her daughter with Vicki, she is sure that she is innocent.
Vicki was the audience’s main point-of-view character throughout 1966 and well into 1967. Major story developments took place after Vicki found out what was going on. Vicki was the chief protagonist in the most important story of that period, the crisis represented by undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. Vicki took charge of the household, organized a group to fight Laura, and rescued strange and troubled boy David from the flames when Laura tried to burn him alive. That intelligent, forceful character has been fading ever further into memory in recent months, and we haven’t seen a trace of her in the 1795 storyline. Sarah is happy to see Vicki and says she likes the stories she tells, but she is a passive witness to today’s events. She serves chiefly as a prop, used to demonstrate that the human Barnabas, whatever his faults, is capable of heroic action.
Barnabas’ compassion for Sarah and his valiant defense of Vicki do not negate his vices. As the heir to Collinwood, Barnabas can express his self-regard both by gratifying his urge to treat some women badly and by earning admiration for treating other women well. In her low station, the same trait leads Angelique directly to the “Dark Triad” of Narcissism, Manipulativeness, and Psychopathy. As a vampire, Barnabas will exhibit the same three qualities in abundance, but for now, we still have license to hope for better from him.
As it was so much fun to watch Barnabas trying to pass as a modern man that we wanted to like him even after he had been terribly cruel to Maggie, a character we like very much, it was so much fun to watch Angelique twist Trask around her finger that we wanted to like her. Besides, her desire to remake Barnabas as her lover is understandable for those who have been watching the show and wanting him to be something other than a heartless murder machine. So, perhaps we will wind up liking Angelique after all.
Angelique has bewitched indentured servant Ben Stokes (Thayer David) and forced him to act as her assistant. Ben is devoted to Barnabas and miserable that he has been the instrument of so much evil done to him, but has been powerless to resist Angelique’s commands. When he realizes that Angelique is causing Sarah to sicken and perhaps die, he goes to her room and demands that she stop. He threatens to kill her if she does not relent. In response, Angelique causes him to have a heart attack. She lets his heart start pumping again when he promises to be quiet.
This is the second heart attack a character of David’s has had on screen. The first also prevented a servant in this same house from killing a young woman. That came in #126, when crazed handyman Matthew Morgan had been holding Vicki prisoner here and was about to decapitate her. The ghost of Josette led several other supernatural presences who scared Matthew to death before he could complete his fell purpose. Matthew and Ben are both devoted to the Collinses, and both are led astray so that they become parties to terrible crimes. As the benevolent spirit of Josette put a stop to Matthew’s crimes, so the malign Angelique prevents Ben from putting a stop to her own.
Barnabas drops by Angelique’s room to ask if she has seen Sarah’s doll, which she calls Samantha. He tells her that Sarah is very ill and has asked for the doll. It occurs to Angelique that she has some leverage over Barnabas. She says that she can brew a special kind of tea that might cure Sarah’s symptoms. He asks her to do so. She makes him promise to marry her if she does.
Several times, we have seen that Angelique is flying by the seat of her pants. She had no idea of using Sarah’s illness to gain a hold over Barnabas until he chanced to come into her room. Nor is she thinking ahead- as it stands, the witch-hunters have fastened on Vicki as their suspect, and are not thinking of her. If word gets out that she had the power to cure Sarah’s mysterious ailment and exercised it only after extorting Barnabas’ promise of marriage, that would seem to be proof positive that she is a witch.
In her own bedroom, Sarah sips the tea. At the same moment, Angelique, in the servants’ quarters, pulls the pins from the doll. How exactly Angelique got the timing just right isn’t exactly clear, but she must have had a way- she is perfectly confident when she tells the doll that it has served her well.
*Mrs Lentz now, but it’s strange to say “Mrs” when you’re talking about a ten year old.
**I know people don’t really say “problematic” anymore, but it seems to be the right word here.
Gracious lady Josette DuPrés left her home on the island of Martinique to marry her fiancé, young gentleman Barnabas Collins. She is Mrs Collins now, but not Mrs Barnabas Collins.Her aunt’s maid, Angelique, is a wicked witch who wants Barnabas for herself. To that end, she cast one spell to cause Josette to conceive a mad passion for Barnabas’ uncle and dearest friend, Jeremiah Collins, and another to cause Jeremiah to reciprocate her feelings. On what was supposed to be the night of Josette’s wedding to Barnabas, she ran off with Jeremiah. The two of them married. When they returned to the estate of Collinwood, Barnabas challenged Jeremiah to a duel. Remorseful, Jeremiah let Barnabas shoot him. Now, he is hovering at the point of death.
We open with Angelique in Barnabas’ room, massaging his forehead. She wants him to say that he hates Josette. He says “I hate her!,” but can’t bring himself to say “I hate Josette.” He kisses Angelique and agrees to visit her room in the servants’ quarters later.
The results of Angelique’s magical activities have not gone unnoticed. Some members of the household believe there is a witch at work among them, and have called a professional witch-hunter named the Rev’d Trask to conduct an investigation. No one suspects Angelique- Trask and his supporters have fastened on recently arrived governess Victoria Winters. Vicki is in hiding, and Barnabas and his friend, caddish naval officer Nathan Forbes, have been helping her.
Downstairs in the manor house, Trask is questioning Josette. When he raises the possibility that she may have been the victim of demonic influence and therefore not responsible for her recent actions and their tragic consequences, she is intrigued. But she cannot take the escape he offers. She insists that she is responsible for her actions. Even so, she allows Trask to begin an exorcism.
Barnabas interrupts the ceremony. He makes no secret of his contempt for Trask. When Trask tells him that Josette has been under the control of forces alien to herself, Barnabas demands Josette tell him what she did that she did not want to do. She will not say anything to suggest disloyalty to Jeremiah. “He is my husband, and he is dying. That is all that matters.” When Barnabas asks if she loves him, she says yes. He asks if she married him because she loved him, again she says yes. She says she wishes things had been different; he asks what she could wish different, if she has married the man she loves. She cannot answer.
Barnabas is back in his room, looking depressed. Angelique enters and asks why he didn’t come to her. He says that it can’t work between them. He still loves Josette, in spite of everything. She asks what Josette told him to make him feel that way. He says that all she said was that she is married to Jeremiah and loves him.
Angelique is devoted to manipulating people, and cannot believe Josette did not somehow trick Barnabas into loving her. But we can see that Barnabas is responding to Josette’s attempt to do her duty to Jeremiah. He does not believe in magic, and is convinced that Josette and Jeremiah willfully betrayed him. But he knows virtue when he sees it, and in Josette’s attempt to be a good wife to the dying Jeremiah he recognizes the trustworthy partner with whom he had expected to share his life.
Barnabas asks Angelique if it is still possible for them to be friends. She notices a doll on a shelf, a favorite plaything of Barnabas’ ten-year old sister Sarah. She takes the doll, saying she will return it to Sarah.
Back in her room, Angelique talks to herself. She says that she will punish Barnabas for spurning her. This time, she will not cast a spell on Josette. Instead, she will use her powers to make Sarah suffer. Barnabas will watch Sarah suffer, Angelique proclaims, and that will be the hardest experience of his life.
Angelique is a fun character, and up to now the roots of her behavior in her unrequited love for Barnabas have made it possible for us to sympathize with her. But we’ve known Sarah since she first showed up as a ghost in #255, back in June. She is adorable, and the doll Angelique is planning to use against her was something she used in lifesaving good deeds back in the summer. There is nothing sympathetic about a threat to hurt her. With her final scene today, Angelique crosses into very dark territory.
Lady’s maid Angelique is keeping busy, even though none of the ladies is on the show today, by carrying tea trays in and out of the front parlor of the manor house on the great estate of Collinwood. As she does so, she hears the Rev’d Mr Trask, a professional witch hunter visiting from Salem, Massachusetts, lay out his plan for uncovering what he believes to be a coven of witches operating in the house. Since Angelique spends her non-tea related time being a wicked witch and causing all the suffering that everyone has undergone on the show since we arrived in this year 1795, it is unsurprising that she reacts to Trask’s plan with concern.
We see the servants’ entrance to the manor house. Not only is this a new set, it is a new kind of set for Dark Shadows. So far, we have seen at most one entrance for any building. Since we are in the middle of the 78th week, we have come to expect that’s all we ever will see, so it comes as a bit of a jolt to see this doorway.
Angelique sees caddish naval officer Nathan Forbes coming out of the servants’ entrance. She remarks that the family and their guests never use it; he jokes about breaking rules. She asks what he has in his hands; he asks what hands she means, then admits that he stole some food from the kitchen. He claims to be on his way to a picnic, and invites her to join him. He is typically uninhibited in his dealings with young women, and he certainly doesn’t try to keep Angelique from thinking that if she accepts his invitation she will have her work cut out for her if she wants to remain fully clothed. She declines, insisting that she has duties to attend to.
She watches him go, and in a soliloquy says that she sees through him. He is taking the food to Victoria “Vicki” Winters, governess to young Sarah Collins and Trask’s prime suspect, who is in hiding. Perhaps Nathan was leveraging his reputation as a lecher by presenting his invitation to Angelique in terms he knew she would have to decline.
Back in the front parlor, Trask is asking the master of the house, haughty overlord Joshua Collins, why Angelique did not report when the servants were summoned for his questioning. Joshua replies that she is not the Collinses’ servant, but that she belongs to their house-guests, the DuPrés family. Trask rails against the DuPrés, and Angelique enters, meekly saying that her mistress told her she was wanted.
Even though Angelique was bustling around the room in the opening teaser, Trask does not recognize her. It may not have been customary to take much notice of servants in the eighteenth century, but Angelique is rather a hard person to miss. For one thing, she looks exactly like Lara Parker. A person would have to be pretty intensely focused not to notice someone who was so obviously meant to be a movie star.
Trask asks Angelique where she was when the other servants came. When she tells him she was walking alone in the woods, he asks if she went there to meet with someone- “perhaps the DE-VIL!!!” Jerry Lacy is an accomplished sketch comic, and the laughs he raises when Trask shouts about “The DE-VIL!!!” and “THE ALMIGHTY!!!!” must be intentional.
Trask questions Angelique closely, and for a fraction of a second it seems like he might know what he is doing. That produces mixed feelings in the audience- if he exposes Angelique, he will save Vicki and other characters we care about from the terrible fates that are apparently in store for them. On the other hand, Dark Shadows might then become The Adventures of the Heroic Reverend Trask, and that would be so ridiculous that no writing staff in the world could possibly keep it going for more than a few episodes.
Angelique sees through Trask as easily as she had seen through Nathan. She falls to her knees and claims to be having a vision. She hams it up shamelessly.
At first Trask says that she is either a complete charlatan or is speaking under divine inspiration; before Joshua can express a doubt as to which it is, he proclaims it genuine. She has claimed to hear the voices of a man and a woman speaking in a large new house that is otherwise vacant. Trask and Joshua decide it is the new house under construction on the estate, and rush off. We see Angelique with a weary look on her face, as if she can’t believe she is up against such a load of idiots.
In the drawing room of the new house, Vicki is eating the food Nathan has brought. She starts talking about her situation. As it happens, Vicki is not native to 1795 at all. She was thrust back to that year from a séance she was attending in 1967, after Sarah’s ghost took possession of her and said she wanted to tell “the story from the beginning.” Vicki hasn’t told anyone about this, but she is continually saying and doing things that make it obvious she doesn’t belong in this world. She tells Nathan that “In order to get here, I had to transcend time and space.” Nathan says he doesn’t know what she’s talking about, but that if she keeps saying things like that even her friends will think she’s a witch.
There was a time when Vicki was an intelligent, dynamic character. Apparently she left her brain in 1967, because what Nathan says comes as news to her. A few days after Vicki arrived, kindly gentleman Jeremiah Collins befriended her; when she answered his questions about her past by claiming to have amnesia, he bluntly told her she would have to make up a better story than that. Someone who needs advice at that level is not likely to do well in a situation where only a con artist could survive.
Vicki and Nathan hear voices in the foyer. Trask and Joshua have arrived. Nathan goes out to meet them, claiming to have come to inspect the architecture of the house. Joshua is appalled that Nathan has not asked his permission to enter the house, and Trask is sure he has come to visit Vicki.
Trask, Joshua, and Nathan go into the drawing room. Vicki is not there. A window is open, and there is a piece of fresh food wrapped in a cloth on a crate. Nathan doesn’t claim that he opened the window or that he was eating the food; Trask and Joshua are left to conclude that Vicki had been there.
For the first nine months it was on the air, Dark Shadows was the story of well-meaning governess Vicki Winters and her efforts to befriend her charge, strange and troubled boy David Collins. That phase of the show reached a climax with the story of David’s mother, blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, who was on from December 1966 until March 1967. Vicki rallied the regular characters in opposition to Laura’s evil plans for David, and when Laura went up in smoke David found refuge in Vicki’s arms. He had exchanged his destructive, death-oriented mother for the loving, life-affirming Vicki. At that moment, Dark Shadows version 1.0 ended.
Now, Vicki has been thrust back in time to the year 1795. Vicki has managed to get another job as governess on the great estate of Collinwood, supervising the education of ten year old Sarah Collins and her second cousin once removed, the visiting (but so far unseen) Daniel Collins. There is a blonde fire witch here as well, the mysterious Angelique. Viewers who have been with the show from the beginning will remember Vicki’s leadership of the campaign against Laura, and are waiting to see how she will take charge of the effort to defeat Angelique.
It’s already been a long wait. Vicki has not adapted her thinking at all to her new surroundings. Angelique’s spells have wrought considerable havoc, and members of the Collins household have begun to wonder whether a witch might be at work among them. Angelique hasn’t lifted a finger to deflect suspicion to Vicki, but Vicki’s own behavior has been so bizarre that she is the obvious suspect. As we open today, she has been tied to a tree by the Rev’d Mr Trask, a visiting witch-hunter from Salem, Massachusetts.
Vicki’s ineptitude is particularly frustrating to watch because the major theme of Dark Shadows 2.0, which ran from Laura’s immolation in March to Vicki’s temporal displacement in November, had been a brilliantly successful deception by a different sort of time-traveler. Vampire Barnabas Collins presented himself to the Collinses and their neighbors, not as a blood-sucking ghoul native to another century, but as a distant cousin from contemporary England. Barnabas made plenty of slips and raised miscellaneous suspicions in the minds of various people, but he played his part well enough that the Collinses let him take possession of a house on their estate, the people of Collinsport accepted him as a member of the local aristocracy, and in one way or another he made himself indispensable to everyone around him. We began this version 3.0 expecting to see Vicki do in 1795 something like what Barnabas had done in 1967, and instead we see her as a tedious dingbat.
Barnabas is alive and benevolent in 1795. He and his friend, caddish naval officer Nathan Forbes, are men of the Enlightenment who are appalled that there are still people who believe in witchcraft. They hold Trask in contempt and are committed to saving Vicki from him. Barnabas and Nathan ask the Collins family’s house-guest, the Countess DuPrés, what Trask has done with Vicki. The countess had originally believed Vicki to be a witch, but after seeing Trask’s lunatic behavior while interrogating her came to regret her involvement in bringing him to Collinwood. She tells them that Trask tied Vicki up and took her out of the house, whither he would not say.
Outraged, the men head out of the house. They meet Trask coming in. He refuses to tell them where he has left Vicki. Barnabas thunders that “[I]t perhaps has escaped your memory that we have just fought a war recently-a war to establish certain rights. And I am defending the right of this girl to be judged innocent until she is proved innocent. I am sure that this idea is a little complicated for your mind to absorb.” He’s probably right about that, I certainly find it difficult to absorb.
Once Barnabas and Nathan are on their way to look for Vicki, Trask tells the countess he has tied her to a tree somewhere in the woods and that if she is a witch, the tree will be dead by morning. Angelique’s regular job is as the countess’ maid. She is in the room with a tea tray when Trask says this, and she smiles delightedly when she hears it. Later, she will sneak out of the house to go searching for Vicki herself.
Barnabas and Nathan find Vicki and untie her. They decide to hide her in the great house of Collinwood. The great house is Vicki’s home in the 1960s, and is under construction in 1795. They set off, and Angelique comes to the tree.
Once she is alone, Angelique takes a cutting from the tree and sets fire to it. This causes the tree itself to burn. It is not entirely clear why she doesn’t just set fire to the tree, since the cutting she has taken is the greenest and least flammable part of it, but witches gonna witch, I guess.
The next morning, Trask goes to the tree. The countess insists on accompanying him. They find that Vicki is gone and the tree is a hunk of scorched timber. Trask triumphantly silences the countess’ doubts.
In our time-band, the last witchcraft trial in the English-speaking world was held in Scotland in 1727. The Westminster Parliament finally abolished all laws against witchcraft in 1736, including those still on the books in Massachusetts* and some other British colonies in North America. Had they lived in our 1795, Barnabas and Nathan could have gone to the constable and reported that Trask had abducted Vicki, bound her, and left her outside. The constable would help them find her, arrest Trask, and that would be it. But of course Dark Shadows takes place in a world that differs from ours in many respects, not least in regard to the legal history of Massachusetts.
As the countess, Grayson Hall has been doing an excellent job establishing a character who is distinct from mad scientist Julia Hoffman, the role she plays in the segments of Dark Shadows set in the twentieth century. But as my wife, Mrs Acilius, points out, Hall does lapse into Julia a few times today. When she gasps in horror, she makes a little clicking noise in the back of her throat that is one of Julia’s most recognizable mannerisms. Julia is deeply entangled with Barnabas’ activities, and has developed an emotional attachment to go along with her inability to get away from him; shortly before Vicki took us with her to 1795, we heard Julia address him with a deeply felt “Barnabas, Barnabas.” The countess barely knows Barnabas, but in an anguished moment today, she says “Barnabas, Barnabas” to him. Hall does return to being the countess before the episode is over, but there is a weird little visit from Julia in the middle of it all.
Vicki went back to the past after Sarah’s ghost took possession of her at a séance and said she was going to “tell the story from the beginning.” Vicki has traded places with Sarah’s original governess, a woman named Phyllis Wick. Presumably Angelique chose Phyllis as a patsy, and she wound up as Trask’s target. Maybe Angelique did this simply because Phyllis was new to the house and had no old friends to object that she couldn’t possibly be a witch, but maybe it was because she had caught on to Angelique.
It would make it all the more exciting to see Vicki catch on to Angelique and do battle with her. We’ve already seen Smart Vicki defeat one blonde fire witch, so if we see her try to fight another, we will hope that she might win again. Only when we saw the attempt end in disaster would we realize that everything we’ve seen Vicki doing is what Phyllis Wick did the first time around, and that her intervention won’t have changed a thing. That would be a powerful twist ending to the whole 1795 flashback. Instead, we are subjected to Dumb Vicki doing things neither Phyllis nor anyone else who belonged in 1795 could possibly have done, and we end up wondering what she is doing in this story.
*Collinsport is in Maine, which until 1821 was part of Massachusetts.
Repressed spinster Abigail Collins has invited a visitor to the great estate of Collinwood. He is the Reverend Mr Trask. It’s 1795, so the Rev’d Mr T missed the big excitement in his hometown of Salem, Massachusetts by 103 years, but he’s trying to make up for it by hunting witches elsewhere.
Both caddish naval officer Nathan Forbes and young gentleman Barnabas Collins are appalled by Trask, and each of them wants to defend the target of Abigail’s suspicions, governess Victoria Winters. They are powerless to do much for her. Barnabas cannot overrule his father, haughty overlord Joshua Collins, who is the master of the house and has given Abigail “full rein” in re Vicki. And Nathan cannot persuade Vicki to run away with him, because she distrusts his intentions and cannot believe that she is really in danger.
Unknown to any of the other characters, Vicki is a time-traveler displaced from 1967 by the ghost of Sarah Collins, who is now alive and studying under her direction. Vicki has been making one inexplicably foolish mistake after another since she began her uncertain and frightening journey to the past four weeks ago, and now they are all catching up with her.
It is hard to imagine what the writers were thinking when they made Vicki do such dumb things. Today, Trask, accompanied by his supporters Abigail and house-guest the Countess DuPrés, confronts Vicki in her room. At first, her behavior in that scene makes sense. He keeps putting his hands on her, prompting her to object; he asks her leading questions based on the assumption that she is guilty of witchcraft, to which she reacts with disbelief. But she has been in 1795 for nearly a month, and that whole time she has been a servant in the house of the tyrannical Joshua. She must know that she is subject to arbitrary exercises of power.
Further, we have seen Vicki in 1966 teaching history to her charge, strange and troubled boy David. You would think that she would have some appreciation of social context and would make some effort to play along with people who are native to the setting in which she finds herself. When Trask tells her to kneel and pray, he’s giving her the option to get out of trouble by doing something she wouldn’t have any reason to find objectionable. But she just gets angrier. She and Trask take turns slapping each other, and Abigail helps him bind and gag her.
Later, Abigail and the countess are in the front parlor of the manor house. The countess has been pushing hard for action against Vicki, but she recoils from Trask’s methods. She tells Abigail that she wishes she knew where Trask had taken Vicki. Abigail reproves her, shocked that she would second-guess “a man of God!” The countess is played by Grayson Hall, who in the parts of Dark Shadows set in the twentieth century plays mad scientist Julia Hoffman. Like the countess, Julia is fascinated with the occult. Julia has expert knowledge that leads her to draw correct conclusions about this subject. Perhaps the countess’ misgivings about Trask show that she, too, is smart enough to see through the charlatans. Maybe Vicki will find herself with a more formidable ally than the irresponsible Nathan or the bumbling Barnabas.
Trask has tied Vicki to a tree deep in the woods. He tells her that if she is guilty of witchcraft, the tree will be dead by morning. He asks her to renounce Satan. In another Dumb Vicki moment, she refuses simply to say “I renounce Satan and all his works.” He leaves her tied up.
Jerry Lacy joined the cast in #357 as lawyer Tony Peterson. In his performance as Tony, Mr Lacy did his famous Humphrey Bogart imitation. Bogart slips out once or twice today; when Trask looks away from Vicki and goes into monologues, he does sound like he is about to start explaining how he will find out who stole the strawberries from the officers’ mess. But what’s more important about his performance is how very far he goes over the top. Lara Parker famously described the Dark Shadows house style of acting by talking about the hyper-intense manner in which she was expected to deliver the line “Go back to your grave!”; Mr Lacy’s performance today is as intense as any we will ever see.
As Vicki, Alexandra Moltke Isles is usually one of the quietest and most interior-directed members of the cast. In Vicki’s scenes with Trask today, she shows that she can shout with the best of them. If Vicki had taken her brain with her to 1795, it might have been fun to see what Mrs Isles could do with the part under the new regime.
Mr Lacy wasn’t the first shouty actor to share a scene with Mrs Isles. For the first several weeks of the show, the cast included a man named Mark Allen. In alternate episodes, Allen either shouted all his lines or whined all of them. Mrs Isles responded to that memorably in #20 by growing ever more still and quiet as he bellowed at her. But while Allen’s shouting was simply a sign of incompetence, Mr Lacy’s is textured, nuanced, and funny. When other actors shouted back at Allen, the result was a lot of noise. When Vicki shouts back at Trask, she comes to life.
I do wonder about Trask’s name. Just a few days ago, I was looking through a book about Marvel Comics in the 1960s, and learned that a villain named Bolivar Trask was introduced in The X-Men in 1965 and was a big deal in several Marvel titles for the next few years. The writers, producers, and directors of Dark Shadows were all middle-aged, and it is unlikely that they were reading comic books for pleasure. But they had shown engagement with comics before- a graveyard scene in #209 includes a rather clear echo of the visual style of the horror comics EC was putting out fifteen years or so earlier. Since that is part of the lead-up to the vampire story, the directors would have been making an obvious move had they sent a production assistant to a flea market to look for some old horror comics to which they could slip in an homage.
Besides, Dark Shadows itself had been licensed to Dell for comic books by this time. It would only have been natural for people involved with the show to have been curious what might come of that. Maybe they were browsing through Marvel’s output to get a sense of what was going on in that medium.
Or an influence could have come through an even less unusual vector. Several members of the production staff had children who were teenaged and younger, as did writer Sam Hall. Those children might well have been fans of Marvel’s in those days. So it is possible that someone behind the scenes might have heard the name “Trask” mentioned around the house as a good one for a villain.
It is 1795, and we are on the great estate of Collinwood. Under the influence of wicked witch Angelique, the kindly Jeremiah and the gracious Josette have eloped, breaking the heart of Josette’s fiancé, Jeremiah’s nephew and best friend Barnabas Collins. Barnabas, up to that point an idealistic man of the Enlightenment, responded by going against his beliefs and challenging Jeremiah to a duel.
Angelique is a lady’s maid. She was introduced as maid to Josette’s aunt, the Countess DuPrés, but today it seems she is Josette’s maid. She comes to Barnabas’ room. He demands to know why her mistress has sent her, meaning Josette, to which she replies she has come on her own account.
Angelique asks Barnabas why he has challenged Jeremiah to a duel, since he has never fought a duel or even seen one before. He explains that he could not stand being an object of pity- “I couldn’t be poor Barnabas.” In 1967, Barnabas will be a vampire. We saw him in that year, in #345, telling his sometime associate mad scientist Julia Hoffman the story of his relationship with Josette. The story he told was different from other versions he had told previously, for example in #233 and #236, and radically different from what we have seen play out in this extended flashback. In the story he told Julia, as in all other versions we had heard before coming to 1795, Josette was originally Jeremiah’s fiancée. One theme developed that resonates here was that all he could be to Josette was a faithful friend, and that he found that role humiliating. He was “poor Barnabas” in that version of the story, and he implies that it was to escape from that identity that he did whatever it was that made him the undead monster he became.
Angelique cast her spell on Josette and Jeremiah because she wanted Barnabas for herself. Now that she sees that he is likely to get himself killed before she can make her play for him, she asks him to wear a medallion of hers, one which she says will bring good luck. In the 1960s, a portrait of Barnabas hangs in the foyer of the great house of Collinwood. He is wearing a medallion in that portrait. Is Angelique’s medallion the one in the portrait? We can’t be sure.
Josette and Jeremiah have a conversation. They try to figure out what came over them. They don’t love each other, and regret hurting Barnabas. As their conversation goes on, Josette realizes that Jeremiah regrets it so deeply that he is planning to let Barnabas kill him in the upcoming duel. She is horrified by this. She doesn’t want anyone to die, and has accepted the fact that Jeremiah is the only husband she’s got. Nevertheless, she cannot dissuade him.
Josette’s father arranges for Jeremiah to have a final talk with Barnabas. Barnabas accuses Jeremiah of lusting for Josette all along, saying that “you wanted her the moment you saw her.” This is not true of Jeremiah, but in #345 it is exactly what Barnabas tells Julia he himself did. In that version, he conceived a wild passion for Jeremiah’s bride-to-be the moment he first saw her.
Barnabas tells Jeremiah “You must have hated me all your life.” As we have seen over these last few weeks, Jeremiah and Barnabas have been dear friends all their lives. But from his early days on the show in the spring of 1967 until we left for our voyage to the past in #365, Barnabas consistently said that he hated Jeremiah from his earliest days. The overall effect of comparing Barnabas’ various accounts of the past with each other and with what we are seeing in this flashback is something like reading the accounts of the patient’s memories in a case study by Freud. Not only does the order of the events jumble as retcon follows retcon, but guilt floats from one person to another and back again.
When Jeremiah tries to explain how he and Josette found themselves stricken with intermittent attacks of intense desire for each other and how they struggled against those attacks during the intervals between them, Barnabas asks “Why didn’t you come to me then?” That’s a good question, and it suggests another, equally good question. Angelique is casting spells because she and Barnabas had a brief affair before he became engaged to Josette. Why hasn’t he come clean to Josette about his past? If he had, Josette would not have put herself so completely in Angelique’s hands that she could bind her with her spells at leisure.
Jeremiah and Barnabas have their duel. We see them back to back, getting ready to pace off the prescribed distance. On Jeremiah’s face, we see his resolution to let Barnabas kill him.
The men are in place when Josette comes running up, pleading with them to stop. She arrives just in time to see Barnabas shoot Jeremiah. Some say they hear only one shot, but I hear two. I think Jeremiah deloped.
Josette goes to Jeremiah’s crumpled body and shouts at Barnabas. “You monster! You madman! You killed the only man I ever loved!” She claims that she and Jeremiah were happy together, and that in his pride Barnabas could not let them be happy. She refuses Barnabas’ offer to help move Jeremiah and get a doctor for him.
Angelique had rubbed Josette’s forehead with some of the rose water in which she had put her love potion not long before this, so Josette’s declarations that Jeremiah is “the only man [she] ever loved” and that they were happy together could be a sign of that influence. It could also be rooted in Josette’s realistic assessment of her situation. Earlier, she had told Jeremiah that she would never again allow herself to say that she loved Barnabas, and when Jeremiah said that his own death would make her a free woman she rejected the idea. Whatever the circumstances that led to the marriage, she is Jeremiah’s wife, and if she becomes his widow she will have an obligation to keep up certain appearances.
This was Anthony George’s last episode. George was woefully miscast when he first joined the show in #262 as the second actor to play Burke Devlin. Writers Ron Sproat and Malcolm Marmorstein kept writing Burke as if he were still being played by the explosively exuberant Mitch Ryan. George’s style was the exact opposite of Ryan’s. He was a cold actor whose characters keep us guessing as to their motives and intentions. He was utterly lost as the hot-headed Burke.
When Gordon Russell joined the writing staff in #292, things looked up for George. Russell understood what actors could do, and gave George some scenes he played very well indeed. In Jeremiah Collins, Russell and Sam Hall created a character who was perfect for George. It’s fascinating to watch Josette scrutinize Jeremiah until she gradually realizes that he has decided to throw his life away to do penance for the offense he and she have committed against Barnabas. It is also credible that, while we can see what Jeremiah is doing, Barnabas, who has known him all his life, would not catch on. George was so bad as Burke in the Sproat/ Marmorstein era that it seemed anything that got him off the show would be welcome. But Russell and Hall know so well how to take advantage of his strengths that it is sad to see him go.
All of the actors have trouble with their dialogue today, even the usually reliable Kathryn Leigh Scott and Lara Parker. Jonathan Frid always struggles, but is especially rough this time, and as for David Ford, what can we say. He mangles virtually every line. His character is supposed to be French; he doesn’t sound French, but doesn’t exactly speak English, either. Danny Horn transcribes many of Ford’s flubs in his post about the episode on Dark Shadows Before I Die, but you really have to hear it for yourself to absorb the sheer bizarreness of the speechlike sounds that come out of Ford’s mouth. I always enjoy watching Ford, and I think he made a major contribution to Dark Shadows‘ acting style when he first came on the show, but when he is off he is way, way off.
In 1966 and the early weeks of 1967, the Collinsport Inn was an important place on Dark Shadows. The restaurant there, presided over by Maggie Evans (Kathryn Leigh Scott,) The Nicest Girl in Town, was a place where people could meet each other unexpectedly and characters new to town could be introduced. Dashing action hero Burke Devlin (Mitch Ryan) lived in a suite at the inn, and the place often represented his territory, the base from which he conducted his war against the ancient and esteemed Collins family.
We haven’t seen Burke’s room since #206, at which point he had given up his vendetta against the Collinses and proceeded far down the road to irrelevance. We haven’t seen the restaurant since vampire Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid) met Maggie there in #221. By the time Anthony George took over the part of Burke in #262, Burke seemed to live in the Blue Whale tavern. He made business calls from the pay phone there, and in one episode apparently stayed behind when the bartender locked the place up for the night.
The inn makes a return appearance at the top of today’s episode. It is 1795, and Jeremiah Collins (Anthony George) is sharing a suite with Josette DuPrés (Kathryn Leigh Scott.) They are on their honeymoon.
Jeremiah and Josette eloped from the estate of Collinwood on the night when Josette was supposed to marry Jeremiah’s nephew, kindly gentleman Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid.) Josette truly loved Barnabas and Jeremiah was his dearest friend, but they were under a spell cast by wicked witch Angelique, who wanted Josette out of the way so she could have Barnabas for herself. The power of the spell waxes and wanes. When Josette and Jeremiah are in the grip of it, a trident shaped mark appears on their hands; when they return to their senses, the mark disappears.
When the episode begins, the tridents are showing, and the newlyweds are inflamed with passion. Shortly after, Josette’s mark is gone, Jeremiah’s still showing. She is filled with regret, he is still ardent.
Back in the manor house of Collinwood, Barnabas has a conversation with Josette’s father André and his own father Joshua. He resists André’s suggestion that Josette and Jeremiah must have left together, and resists even more strenuously Joshua’s declaration that they did so because they are the victims of witchcraft. Joshua says that his sister Abigail and André’s sister, the Countess DuPrés, found a blasphemous trinket in the quarters of governess Victoria Winters, and that a witch-hunting divine, the Reverend Trask, is coming to investigate the matter. Barnabas is appalled at the notion of an inquiry into witchcraft, and vows to defend Victoria if Trask comes. Joshua forbids him to do so.
Barnabas’ reaction to the idea of a witchcraft trial, coupled with what we have seen of him so far in the 1795 segment, looks like a retcon. In #358, only a week and a half before we began this uncertain and frightening journey to the past, vampire Barnabas told a story about studying witchcraft under a warlock on Barbados who taught him “the secret magic number of the universe.” Events are moving so fast that it doesn’t look like Barnabas will have time to sail to the Caribbean before he becomes a vampire, and he won’t be crossing any waters after that. But now he is a man of the Enlightenment, who scoffs at the idea of witchcraft today as he scoffed at the tarot when the countess introduced him to it in #368/369.
Jeremiah returns to the house. There is an exquisite little scene with a servant, Riggs, who is uncomfortable at the sight of the disgraced Mr Jeremiah. Riggs stands in for the establishment of Collinwood and the whole working class of the town of Collinsport, and in his reaction we see the disquiet that bad news from the big house on the hill would spread among the people whose livelihoods are at stake when trouble comes to the family there. Riggs makes haste when Jeremiah tells him to go out and fetch Joshua.
When Riggs is gone, Josette enters. The audience sees that the mark is gone from Jeremiah’s hand, and Josette can tell that his passion for her is gone. She tells him that he no more loves her than she loves him. He begins with a protest against this remark, but ends by saying that they must be kind to each other.
Joshua and André enter. André embraces his daughter and tells her everything will be all right; Joshua looks at his brother with distaste and demands an explanation.
Jeremiah says that he and Josette are married. He further says he realizes they are not welcome, and that they will return to the inn. This raises the prospect of a recreation of the early days, with the inn as a territory separate from and opposed to Collinwood. Joshua rejects the idea at once. He will not have the scandal of Jeremiah and his new wife living in town because they have been estranged from the rest of the Collinses. He decrees that they will live at Collinwood and put on a happy face for the townsfolk.
Barnabas enters. Joshua tells him that Jeremiah and Josette are married. He refuses to believe it until Josette confirms it herself. He takes the glove from Jeremiah’s hand and slaps him in the face. He gives him a choice of weapons.
Dueling may have been as alien to the ideals of the Enlightenment as were Barbadian warlocks, but so too is Joshua’s plan of forcing the whole family to commit itself to a massive lie in order to preserve its hereditary privileges. Joshua, the proud apostle of Jeffersonian republicanism, is simply being a hypocrite, but Barnabas is a more complicated figure. Seeing his every hope turned to dust before him, his ideals have become useless. He has only a moment to choose among the evils the Enlightenment had promised to stamp out, and he chooses the most macho one available.
Joshua forbids the duel, but Barnabas disregards his father’s authority and insists on it. In 1795 and for some time after, dueling was widely practiced in much of the United States, and particularly in the South and West a gentleman lost face if he refused a challenge. No such stigma attached in New England, where dueling was condemned by law and religion. Had Joshua or Jeremiah gone to the police, Barnabas would have been arrested. In 1719, Massachusetts, of which Maine was a part until 1821, passed a law making it an offense punishable by a fine of £100 (equivalent to about $7000 today) to challenge someone to a duel. Massachusetts law already considered it murder to kill someone in a duel, and prescribed death by hanging as punishment. Of course, Joshua’s declaration that Jeremiah and Josette will live in the house and the family will present a “united front” to deter scandal makes it clear he will never turn his son over to the police, and the pattern of cover-up with the support of law enforcement we saw among the Collinses in 1966 and 1967 leads us to doubt that anything a member of the family does will ever be a matter for the courts to judge.
There is a missed opportunity in the show’s lack of interest in Massachusetts’ actual laws about dueling. The 1719 law was amended to be even stricter in 1730. Among the provisions added to the law at that time was a requirement 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.
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