Episode commentary – Page 72 – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 250: A servant’s name

Maggie Evans, the Nicest Girl in Town, has been the prisoner of vampire Barnabas Collins for some time. At rise, she is in front of her mirror, struggling to remember who she is. Her name and her father’s come back to her, but then the music box Barnabas gave her starts playing, and she begins to believe that she is Barnabas’ long-lost love Josette. This scene takes about a minute more than is necessary.

She renews the struggle later, and this time overcomes the hypnotic power of the music box. She decides to pretend that she believes that she is Josette in order to trick Barnabas and Barnabas’ sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie into giving her enough freedom to escape. She fools them, only to hear Barnabas tell Willie that her compliance means that the time has come for the final part of his plan.

Maggie hears carpentry work, and sneaks down to the basement. She finds Barnabas watching Willie build a coffin. It sits next to the coffin in which Barnabas spends his days. It becomes clear that once Maggie is fully Josettified, she will be a vampire as well. Unfortunately, Jonathan Frid has a great deal of trouble with his lines in this scene. I don’t usually mind Frid’s bobbles, but his line troubles here take us out of what needs to be a terrifying moment.

In the morning, Maggie goes back to the basement. Willie finds her there. He is not convinced that she believes she is Josette. He presses her, and she finally breaks down and gives up the act.

Maggie shows Willie the diamond necklace Barnabas gave her as a present for their wedding, and tells him it will be his if they destroy Barnabas and escape. Willie’s fascination with jewels was what led him to undertake the grave-robbing expedition that freed Barnabas in the first place, and the necklace does distract him for a little while. But then he hears Barnabas’ heartbeat. He heard that sound before, in #208, #209, #210, and #217, but in those episodes no one else could hear it. Maggie can, since Barnabas has been drinking her blood too, but she can still resist the vampire’s spell. She is holding a large awl, ready to drive it into Barnabas’ heart, but Willie cannot overcome his urge to protect his master. He disarms Maggie.

We see Maggie in her room and hear Barnabas’ voice on the soundtrack going over what she heard him say in the basement. This is the first time an interior monologue has played quotes from another character. They aren’t the lines Jonathan Frid actually delivered, but cleaned-up, intelligible lines, presumably the ones that were in the script.

As sunset nears, Willie takes Maggie back to the basement. He leaves, telling her that she and Barnabas must be alone when he completes “the ceremony.” She finds the awl, picks it up, and opens the coffin. Before she can drive it into Barnabas’ heart, he awakens and shows his fangs. She screams and presses herself against the brick wall behind her.

This is the second episode credited to writer Joe Caldwell, and is certainly the best teleplay Dark Shadows has seen since Francis Swann left the show in November of 1966. Like Swann and Art Wallace, Caldwell understood what actors could do and knew how to give them a platform to show their stuff.

Aside from Frid’s one bad scene, the actors excel. In 1967, Kathryn Leigh Scott was already a highly trained actress. Maggie Evans, on the other hand, has never acted before. When Maggie is pretending to believe she is Josette, Miss Scott shows her giving a crude imitation of Barnabas’ high-flown style, mixed with some prancing movements you might see from a little girl playing the princess in a school play. Barnabas is so desperate to believe that his lunatic scheme is working that he falls for it completely. When he and Maggie are in the front parlor together, he responds to her amateur performance as a sign that she is matching his pomposity, which of course thrills him.

When Willie and Maggie are in the basement, John Karlen plays his earthy skepticism with a simplicity that makes Maggie’s pretending look ridiculous. When Maggie gives up her act and whispers a plea for Willie to help her, Miss Scott matches the force of Karlen’s performance and the resulting encounter is as powerful as anything the show ever achieves.

The episode is good enough that we barely noticed some major lapses in story logic. If Maggie can sneak down to the basement to eavesdrop on Barnabas and Willie, why can’t she slip out the front door? She knows how to get from Barnabas’ house to the great house of Collinwood, where she has friends and there is a telephone to call the sheriff.

And when did she learn that you can destroy vampires by driving stakes through their hearts? She’s lived in Collinsport all her life, and no one in that town has ever heard of vampires. Granted, the show would move a lot faster and could have more layers of irony if the characters had read Dracula and seen movies from Universal and Hammer, but this is the first hint that any of them has.

My wife, Mrs Acilius, was very interested in the fact that Maggie calls herself “Maggie, or Margaret” in this one. First time we hear the name Margaret! I’m not sure why that impressed her so much, but she’s very bright, so I’m sure it’s important. All I can think of is that “Maggie” waits tables in the diner, cleans up after her Pop has had one drink too many, and is everybody’s pal, while “Margaret” is a saint’s name, and a queen’s name. So Margaret might have a bigger destiny than we’ve seen.

Episode 249: The most pitiful exhibition I’ve ever seen

Seagoing con man Jason McGuire stands outside the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood, eavesdropping. The conversation is among heiress Carolyn, Carolyn’s uncle Roger, and well-meaning governess Vicki. Carolyn tells Roger and Vicki that she wants to stop Jason from blackmailing her mother, reclusive matriarch Liz, into marriage. She doesn’t know what hold Jason has over Liz, but is sure it has to do with something secreted in a locked room in the basement. Roger agrees to help Carolyn break into the room.

Jason reports this conversation to Liz and suggests they give Carolyn the key to the room. What Liz is desperate to hide is that Jason buried the body of her husband, Paul Stoddard, under the floor there eighteen years ago. Jason tells her that he sealed the floor up well enough that there is nothing to see unless you start digging. Liz is unsure, and Jason offers to go to the room and look.

First-time viewers may not make much of this, but those who have been watching from the beginning will be exasperated. Liz has gone into the room herself many times over the years; Vicki has even caught her coming out of it. When they take us to the room and show us that there is nothing interesting to see there, they are telling us that there was no point to any of the scenes where Liz gets frantic at the prospect of someone going into the room. It’s a slap in the face of the audience.

The cast assembles in the room and pokes around a little. They don’t open all the trunks and cases; there is a big barrel that could hold the remains of several missing husbands, and they never so much as look at that. After this has gone on for some time, Jason declares that it is “The most pitiful exhibition I’ve ever seen.” That’s good, it’s always fun when the villain has a chance to put the audience’s feelings into words. After they go back upstairs, Roger says that he’s never been more embarrassed in his life. Louis Edmonds delivers that line with tremendous feeling, it doesn’t sound like he had to act at all.

The whole miserable mess leads to Liz and Jason announcing their engagement, something Carolyn had been talking about when she lamented for “Poor mother- abandoned in her first marriage, blackmailed into a second.” But Carolyn, Roger, and Vicki all look shocked, a dramatic sting plays on the soundtrack, and the closing credits start to roll, as if this were some kind of news.

Closing Miscellany

On his great Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn analyzes the action of the episode as a series of devices to prevent anything interesting happening. He also goes through much of the unbelievably repetitious dialogue that clutters it up. He’s hilarious, the post is highly recommended.

When Jason goes to the basement to make sure that there is nothing there worth looking at, he shines his flashlight directly into the camera several times. It’s a flashlight we haven’t seen before, with a bulb mounted on top of a box. I’ve never been a particular flashlight aficionado, but that prop is the most dynamic part of today’s show.

Episode 248: The bride of Barnabas Collins

At the end of yesterday’s installment, artist Sam Evans looked out the window of his house and saw his daughter, missing local girl Maggie. Today, the sheriff shows up and reports that he and his men couldn’t find anything to substantiate Sam’s report. The sheriff then tries to convince Sam that he didn’t really see Maggie at all. When last we see Sam, he is telling himself that it was only his imagination.

Maggie had escaped from the custody of vampire Barnabas Collins and Barnabas’ sorely bedraggled blood thrall, Willie Loomis. Today, Barnabas meets Maggie in the graveyard, chokes her, and takes her into the tomb where he spent a century or two. He declares that he will punish her for trying to leave him.

As Barnabas talks, Maggie seems inclined to go along with his plan to annihilate her personality and replace it with that of his long-dead love, Josette. He wonders aloud if the punishment he was planning is necessary after all. But then she remembers that she is holding her father’s pipe, and she calls out “Pop!” Barnabas then takes her to the hidden room in the back of the tomb and shuts her up in his old coffin.

Director Lela Swift was uncharacteristically sloppy with the framing yesterday, but today she makes up for it with one of the most remembered shots of the entire series. When Barnabas shuts Maggie up in the coffin, we see him from her point of view. Claustrophobic viewers beware!

The next morning, Willie releases Maggie from the coffin, takes her back to Barnabas’ house, and urges her to convince herself that she is Josette. For a while, she tries it. We start to wonder if Willie will have as much success with Maggie as the sheriff had with her father. But then she looks in the mirror and shouts “I’m Maggie Evans!”

That may not sound like much story for 22 minutes, but it never feels slow. Swift and the actors are all in fine form today.

On the other hand, there are a couple of script problems. The sheriff is written as such a fool that we can’t help but be distracted, and the scene between Maggie and Barnabas in the outer section of the tomb goes on too long. But even at its lowest points the actors just about save it. Dana Elcar always makes it seem that Sheriff Patterson knows more than he’s letting on, so it isn’t until he starts trying to talk Sam into believing he didn’t really see Maggie that we get the sinking feeling that he is absolutely useless. And Jonathan Frid and Kathryn Leigh Scott are electric as Barnabas and Maggie, so much so that we could forgive the scene between them even if it had been twice as repetitious as it fact is. With two consecutive episodes including as much good stuff as was in yesterday’s and today’s, it’s starting to seem like they are due to land one in the ranks of the Genuinely Good Episodes any day now.

Episode 247: A fix on this man’s character

Artist Sam Evans can think of nothing but his daughter Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town. Maggie disappeared from the hospital weeks ago, and the police haven’t found a clue as to how she got out or where she is. Sam’s friend, dashing action hero Burke Devlin, drops by Sam’s house and offers to take him to dinner. Sam isn’t hungry. Burke urges Sam to work on a painting; he says he can’t concentrate.

Burke brings up the idea of Sam painting a portrait of him. Burke did commission Sam to paint him in #22, and for weeks and weeks afterward Sam vacillated about doing so. That was part of the since-abandoned “Revenge of Burke Devlin” storyline. In the notes about this episode on the Dark Shadows wiki, we read that “the episode’s writer seems unaware of the portrait-painting history between Sam and Burke, the fact that it was a sore subject, and even of the general animosity between the two.” I don’t think that is necessarily so. Burke gave up on his revenge in #201, and everyone was thoroughly bored by the topic well before then. So I suspect this conversation is telling us that Burke and Sam have turned the page on all that.

Before Maggie disappeared, Sam had been painting a portrait of mysterious eccentric Barnabas Collins. Barnabas insisted on working only at night and on doing all the painting at his place, the Old House on the estate of Collinwood, which does not have electricity. Since Maggie vanished, Sam has offered to take the canvas home and work on it there, but Barnabas would not let it leave his house. Tonight, Sam decides to go to Barnabas’ and do some painting by candlelight.

Sam knocks on Barnabas’ door. Barnabas’ servant, Willie Loomis, answers. Before he met Barnabas, Willie was a dangerously unstable ruffian. Willie menaced Sam and Maggie in the local tavern so severely that Burke had to beat him to a pulp, and Sam came away from the experience hating Willie. But in his time working on the portrait, Sam has come to believe that Willie is a changed man.

Willie explains that Barnabas is away, that he doesn’t know when he will be back, and that he isn’t supposed to let anyone in the house in his absence. Sam protests that he is no stranger, and that he is sure Barnabas will want the portrait finished. Willie finally suggests that he take the canvas home and work on it there. That’s what Sam has wanted to do all along, so he is delighted to hear it. He carries the painting to his station wagon while Willie carries the easel. The two are in a jolly mood as they leave the house, seeming very much like good friends.

Sam leaves his pipe on a table in the front parlor of Barnabas’ house. In the first months of the show he went back and forth between smoking this pipe with its white bowl carved into a likeness of George Washington and puffing on cigarettes. We haven’t seen the pipe in a long while, but today we get a number of closeups of it. The first comes before Sam leaves home to go visit Barnabas, and the second when he and Willie are on their way to the station wagon.

As soon as Sam and Willie are outside, a figure draped in white comes down the stairs into the parlor. It is Maggie. It turns out Barnabas is the one who is holding Maggie. He has taken his cue from the 1932 film The Mummy, in which Boris Karloff is an undead creature who tries to convince a woman that she is the reincarnation of his lost love so that he can kill her and bring her back to life as that other person. Barnabas, it turns out, is a vampire. He wants to erase Maggie’s personality, replace it with that of his long-lost Josette, and then turn her into a vampire.

Maggie is sufficiently under Barnabas’ sway that doesn’t know who she is, but she is not fully convinced that she is Josette. When she picks up her father’s pipe she seems to remember something. She doesn’t sniff it, but a pipe is a highly aromatic object, and scents are powerful drivers of memory.

Maggie wanders back upstairs, keeping the pipe with her. Sam and Willie come in, and Sam is mystified that his pipe has vanished. When Willie says he must have left it outside, Sam starts to argue. Seeing that the pipe isn’t in the room and believing there is no one else in the house, Sam laughingly calls himself absent minded and asks Willie to keep an eye out for it.

Maggie wanders back downstairs after her father has gone. She and Willie argue about whether she ought to leave her room and who she is. She doesn’t let on that she knows anything about the pipe. She goes upstairs again, and Willie goes to the basement.

This is the first time we have seen the basement, and we get a long look at it. There is a metal door with a barred window, big cobwebs, a stone staircase, big candelabra, and a coffin. The coffin lid opens, and we see Barnabas inside. This is the first time we’ve seen him there.

Barnabas asks Willie why he has come. When Willie tells him he has news, Barnabas beckons him closer. When Willie obeys, he grabs him by the throat. When Willie has delivered his report, he flings him to the floor, apparently on general principles. He stands over Willie’s crumpled form and gives a lecture about the importance of keeping visitors out of the house during the day. Notably, he does not object to sending the canvas home with Sam.

Maggie wanders downstairs a third time. We see her face and hear her recorded voice on the soundtrack. This is the third instance of interior monologue on Dark Shadows, after we heard Willie thinking at the portrait of Barnabas in #205 and #208. As Willie did not know who Barnabas was or why he was drawn towards him when we heard his thoughts, so today Maggie does not know who she is or what Barnabas is doing to her. She looks at the pipe in her hand, concludes that there is someone she must take it to, and walks out the front door.

In the Evans cottage, Sam is working on the portrait of Barnabas when Burke comes in with a sandwich to share. They chat about the painting. Sam explains that he can’t get the eyes right- they keep looking cold and forbidding, while he and Burke agree that Barnabas doesn’t seem that way at all.

We cut back to the Old House, where Barnabas is sitting in his armchair, giving Willie some orders. He may not seem cold and forbidding to Sam, but he couldn’t be more blatantly malevolent than he is with Willie. When they discover that Maggie is gone, Barnabas and Willie run out the front door.

This is the first episode in which Barnabas is just a total bastard the entire time. When he is with people who don’t know that he is a vampire, he plays the role of the Collins family’s mild-mannered cousin from England; Barnabas is so committed to that performance that we wonder to what extent he is a monster pretending to be a nice guy, and to what extent he is a nice guy forced to function as a monster. When we’ve seen him alone with Maggie, he has obviously been a crazy person, but a twisted sweetness comes peeping out as he talks about his longing for Josette. Even in his previous scenes alone with Willie, scenes that have more than once ended with him beating Willie unmercifully, Barnabas has allowed Willie to go on talking about his feelings much longer than he would have to if he were entirely sincere when he tells Willie that his inner life is of no consequence. But there isn’t the least flicker of warmth in either of Barnabas’ scenes today.

In the Evans cottage, Sam is puzzling over the portrait while Burke is in the kitchen. Maggie comes drifting into view in the window behind Sam. The Evans cottage has been a prominent feature of the show from its early days, and the foliage visible through the window has changed often enough from episode to episode that regular viewers know there is an actual space behind it, but this is the first time we have seen a person there. In her white dress, with her dazed expression and her wafting movements, Maggie looks like a ghost. Sam sees her and is startled. He calls her name. She disappears. Sam and Burke run out of the house to look for her.

There are some significant flaws in the episode. The opening scene between Sam and Burke goes on too long, the repeated closeups on the pipe are embarrassingly heavy-handed, and Maggie’s three trips downstairs are one too many. There are also some badly framed shots, surprisingly so for director Lela Swift. For example, I cropped the fifth image above to zoom in on Sam and Maggie. Here is what actually appears in the show, cluttered with distracting junk on all sides and devoting more screen space to David Ford’s butt than anyone wanted to see:

Still, there is a lot of good stuff in the episode, and the ending is very effective. It is far from a gem by any reasonable standard, but it may be the best script Malcolm Marmorstein ever wrote.

Episode 246: A woman gets lonely

For the first months of Dark Shadows, the ancient and esteemed Collins family of Collinsport, Maine was deeply in debt and running out of money. Their nemesis, dashing action hero Burke Devlin, had become a corporate raider and was back in town, determined to strip them of their assets and leave them in poverty.

Now, the “Revenge of Burke Devlin” arc has fizzled to nothing. Burke himself formally gave up on it in #201. So we don’t hear any more about the Collinses’ financial insecurity. Indeed, they are being retconned as terribly rich.

Seagoing con man Jason McGuire showed up in #193 and set about blackmailing reclusive matriarch Liz out of the Collinses’ great wealth. He threatens to tell the police that one night, eighteen years ago, Liz killed her husband, Paul Stoddard, and that he helped her bury Stoddard’s body in a locked room in the basement of the mansion. Liz hasn’t left home since that night, and she gives in to all of Jason’s demands. Now, he is demanding that she marry him, and it appears she is giving in even to that.

Jason is an in-betweener meant to sweep away the few non-paranormal storylines left since Burke’s peace-out. They have waited rather too long to introduce him. When the Collinses had a great name but little money, we could believe that Liz would be immobilized with fear of disgrace. But now, when we hear that she inadvertently hit Stoddard so hard he died, we just wonder why she didn’t immediately call a lawyer. People as rich as the Collinses are coming to seem call lawyers as often as the rest of us brush our teeth, and they get away with far worse deeds than one Jason is using to control Liz.

A lawyer does show up at the house today, but Liz isn’t telling him what happened that long ago night or what Jason has been doing for the last ten weeks. Instead, she asks to be formally divorced from Stoddard. Her brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger, realizes that this is a preliminary to marrying Jason, a prospect that horrifies him.

When Roger passes the news on to Liz’ daughter Carolyn, Carolyn confronts Liz and Jason in the drawing room. She tells Liz that she knows Jason is blackmailing her and that it is obvious that whatever secret he is threatening to expose has to do with something in the locked room. She demands Liz give her the key. Liz denies everything and flees. Jason tells Carolyn that he will try to persuade Liz to give her the key, to which Carolyn replies with contemptuous disbelief.

Closing Miscellany

There are a few moments when characters allude to other storylines, past and present. Roger, Carolyn, and well-meaning governess Vicki all talk about missing local girl Maggie Evans and the vampire attacks in Collinsport. When Liz first tells Roger she is getting a divorce, Roger says that neither of them was cut out for marriage. Roger does not mention the name of his ex-wife, blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, but regular viewers remember her well as the principal antagonist on Dark Shadows from #126-#191.

When people take off their coats in the foyer of Collinwood, they usually lay them on a polished table. Several weeks ago they introduced a coat closet, but not everyone has made the switch. Today, Liz’ lawyer puts his coat neither on the table nor in the closet, but flings it at Carolyn so that it lands on her shoulder. This is presented so blandly that I wonder if they are telling us that this is an accepted custom in-universe.

Episode 245: Microscopic views of hideous malignancies

Two of the best blogs about Dark Shadows share the same web address. One is Dark Shadows Every Day, a series of more than a thousand well-crafted, insightful, often hilarious essays by Danny Horn about episodes #210 through #1245 and related topics. The other is the group blog that Danny’s readers maintain in the comment threads under each of his posts. The commenters outdid themselves in their remarks on Danny’s post about this episode.

At the beginning of the episode, addled quack Dr Woodard has figured out that the two victims of vampire Barnabas Collins, sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie Loomis and missing local girl Maggie Evans, have something in common. He hopes that if he can compare a sample of Willie’s blood with Maggie’s he will figure out what that is. Willie is terrified that this will lead to the exposure of Barnabas. Puzzlingly, Barnabas is unworried and orders Willie to cooperate. Only after Willie has given the blood and the doctor has left do we learn that Barnabas switched Willie’s sample with a normal one. “DS Willie” comments:

Barnabas is seriously messing with Willie’s mind in this one. So much of what Barnabas says has double meanings, even triple. Of course he’s playing with Woodard too, but Woodard never realizes it.

For one thing, just after Willie’s blood is taken, Barnabas makes creepy blood comments, ending with “…surrendering your utmost self” and his next line “Now, you had no choice.” I suspect this is all meant more for Willie than for the doctor. Willie had no choice but to surrender his utmost self.

Barnabas delights in repeatedly demonstrating his control over Willie, all to the doctor’s approval. When Willie flares up momentarily at Dr. Woodard’s remark about understanding being frightened, Barnabas immediately brings Willie to heel with a harsh word and harsher look.

Later Barnabas jerks Willie’s chain some more, just because he can, and to tighten his control even more. It’s classic Stockholm syndrome type stuff. The victim is abused and in absolute fear for his life, and yet any lessening of the captor’s threats or violence can be perceived as mercy, bonding the victim to his captor.

His shirt in Barnabas’ menacing grasp, Willie swears he would never, never betray Barnabas. He is only thrown to the ground instead of being choked or beaten. Barnabas proceeds to make Willie feel stupid and disloyal and dishonorable and undeserving of future protection. Add enthrallment on top of that. Oh, and the police having Willie as their top suspect, and Jason having beaten and threatened to kill Willie, even though Willie was trying to protect him.

It is actually pretty amazing that Willie has held up under the strain. He is in full-on survival mode, and yet still has the decency to try to shield Maggie and others insofar as he can, given his powerlessness.

Hey, what was up with Barnabas saying Willie’s blood is a “delicate little flower painted on glass”? He says it twice (once to Woodard and once to Willie) while looking directly at the slide. That doesn’t come across as a remark about blood in general.
“DS Willie,” on Dark Shadows Every Day, 13 October 2018 at 12:38 AM Pacific time

He adds another comment:

Oh. Barnabas was using yet another method to get Willie under his thumb: verbally emasculating him with the “delicate little flower” reference to Willie’s blood on the slide. But I think Willie was so relieved that he missed the diss.
“DS Willie,” on Dark Shadows Every Day, 26 December 2018 at 5:57 PM Pacific time

I made a contribution of my own to the thread. In response to Danny’s unfavorable comparison of Dr Woodard with Bram Stoker’s Professor Van Helsing, I commented:

I don’t think Woodard is Van Helsing at all. He’s Dr John Seward, treating Lucy and Renfield and baffled by the whole thing until he calls in his brilliant old professor. The mysterious Hoffman, one of the best men in the field, that’s the expert who is going to shake things up.

Seward is young, dynamic, and ready for adventure, while Woodard is middle aged, pudgy, and ready for an afternoon tee-time at the local country club. But that change is necessary. Readers of the novel have plenty of time to think about the sort of group that might go on the expedition Van Helsing organizes, and will expect a bunch of high-spirited youths. On a soap, a character like Seward would be the heroine’s new love interest, and Dark Shadows is flailing about trying to figure out what to do with the love interests Vicki and Maggie have now. The last thing they want right now is another bold, handsome young man who is apparently under a vow of celibacy.
“Acilius,” on Dark Shadows Every Day, 19 May 2023 at 7:26 PM Pacific time

In response to Danny’s remark that Jonathan Frid’s bobbles make it hard to guess what lines the script originally gave vampire Barnabas Collins, commenter “TD” replies:

#1. “Now, in a way, isn’t that understandable?

#2. “After all, blood is the life force.

#3. “It reaches into the deepest recesses of both the heart, and the brain.

#4. “It is the familiar of our complete being.

#5. “To surrender even one drop of it is to suggest a partial surrender of one’s utmost self.”

I’m not so sure this is actual Fridspeak. Yes, it’s kind of gibberishy, but it does make grammatical sense and some sort of syntactical sense. Frid delivers it smoothly and with confidence, unlike his halting fumblings when he can’t remember his lines. When he says this, it’s in a close-up shot, and he’s looking down. My guess is that he is reading it directly from a script. Also, this is Joe Caldwell’s first script (or first credited script–he did some writing on earlier Ron Sproat scripts, if another website is accurate). Maybe this is Caldwell exhibiting the enthusiasm of a first solo outing. Dr. Woodard has a couple of hi-falutin’ and rhetorically “poetic” (and gibberishy) speeches of his own in this episode.

Also, might this episode be marked as the first one to demonstrate the “reluctant” or “sympathetic” vampire in Barnabas’s character? In this episode (in another speechy series of lines), when Dr. Woodard and Barnabas are discussing the “madman” who broke into Woodard’s office and stole the blood sample, we get this exchange:

Dr. Woodard: You know, it’s the peculiar magnificence of the human spirit that’s required to provide the potential for such corruption. [See? This is like the Barnabas “blood is the life force” speech–who talks like this???]
Barnabas: Yes, I know what you mean. Whoever he is, he must certainly be, at one and the same time, more than a man…and less than a man.
Dr. Woodard: You seem almost sorry for him.
Barnabas: Sorry? No, I’m not sorry. The truth is, I loathe him. I loathe him very, very deeply.
“TD” on Dark Shadows Every Day, 2 June 2017 at 11:06 AM Pacific time

I agree with “TD” that today’s dialogue is marred by purple passages; I would go so far as to say that none of the lines would have survived a rewrite. Not among the lines delivered by the human actors, anyway- our beagle was fascinated when the hound howled on the soundtrack.

I should mention that at least one perceptive critic of Dark Shadows disagrees with me and “TD” about the script. Patrick McCray’s Dark Shadows Daybook is in its own way the equal of the two blogs at Dark Shadows Every Day. Patrick wrote two posts about this episode. In one from 2016, he wrote that “The language is poetic and evocative. Barnabas has moments of self-loathing and ambiguity that are gorgeously, hauntingly phrased, and the same can be said for Woodard’s exploration of science and mystery.” In 2019, he went so far as to call it “the best written episode of the series.”

John and Christine Scoleri also include some interesting material in the post about this episode on their recap-heavy blog Dark Shadows Before I Die. I particularly liked the series of screenshots at the end of the post captioned with some of the purple prose from today’s dialogue.

Episode 244: The nature of evil

The entire episode is taken up with the thirteenth iteration of something that wasn’t especially appealing the first time we saw it: seagoing con man Jason McGuire makes a demand of reclusive matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard; Liz resists; Jason threatens to expose her terrible secret; Liz capitulates.

Today, Jason makes the ultimate demand, that Liz marry him. In response, she laughs merrily, the first time we have seen her do this. She takes her resistance to the very point of calling the sheriff’s office and admitting that, eighteen years ago, she killed her husband Paul Stoddard and Jason buried him in the basement.

Jason stops her, telling her that the first person who ought to hear her confession is her daughter Carolyn. Liz agrees to this. Jason goes to summon Carolyn from the study, warning her that her mother is “on edge.”

Carolyn comes in. When Liz tells her that she has something important to discuss, Carolyn tries to lighten the mood by joking that it’s a bit late to break the news to her about the birds & bees. When Liz goes into detail about how Paul was a terrible man who never loved her, Carolyn is so upset that she refuses to listen to any more. She hurries out. This is the first time in months that flighty heiress Carolyn has had an opportunity to behave in a flighty manner.

Carolyn returns to the study. Jason is waiting for her there. She asks Jason how her father felt about her. He spins tales about what a loving father Stoddard was, which Carolyn eats up.

Jason returns to Liz. He stands over her, while she tells him Carolyn wouldn’t listen to her. We can see that her resistance is at an end. She asks him to give her time. He answers that he will give her time, but not much.

Liz, still examining Jason for vulnerabilities

Over the last several weeks, we’ve seen Jason doing things other than enacting his liturgy with Liz. He and Liz have even shared a few scenes where they don’t perform it. When Dennis Patrick gets to play a charming swindler who has to think on his feet, he is fun to watch. We’ve come to like Jason enough that seeing him twist Carolyn into a fetter binding Liz to his will is a genuinely horrifying moment.

Episode 243: Something about your cousin bothers me

Jason realizing he is in an awkward position

Barnabas Collins has a problem. He wants people to think of him as a mild-mannered and highly respectable English gentleman, but he is in fact a vampire from central Maine. So he leaves it to his sorely bedraggled blood thrall, Willie Loomis, to keep people away from his house while he himself apologizes for Willie’s curtness.

Today, addled quack Dave Woodard has come to Barnabas’ house asking Willie to help him investigate the case of Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, who fell gravely ill and then vanished from the hospital. Willie refuses, but Barnabas promises Dr Woodard he will try to persuade Willie to cooperate. Since Barnabas is keeping Maggie in his house and doing various abominable things to her, we wonder how he will contrive to appear helpful.

Elizabeth Collins Stoddard has a problem. She wants people to think of her as an able businesswoman and a faultless model of virtue, but she is in fact being blackmailed. People have started to notice the money Liz is giving seagoing con man Jason McGuire, and they are certainly talking about the fact that Jason is living in her house. Today, Jason tells Liz that the solution to these problems is for the two of them to get married. Liz is not enthusiastic.

Jason has a problem. Before Barnabas enslaved Willie, Willie was Jason’s dangerously unstable henchman. So Jason doesn’t want people to think of Willie at all. But many do remember his violent ways, and suspect him of wrongdoing in connection with Maggie. Jason visits Barnabas’ house and the two of them talk about Willie and the case of Maggie Evans. Jason urges Barnabas to get Willie to cooperate with Dr Woodard.

Barnabas dislikes Jason; Jonathan Frid and Dennis Patrick play all their scenes together as a drawing room comedy about a snob burdened by the presence of an insufferable bounder. The script doesn’t always give them funny lines- today’s certainly doesn’t- but their nonverbal communication is enjoyable to watch. Frid and Patrick have so much fun with their scenes together that you never notice Frid stumbling over his lines. He is so deeply in character that you’d have to follow along with a copy of the script to catch any bobbles. He caps today’s scene with a moment when Barnabas watches Jason leave. His potentially comic expression of pained politeness gives way to a much colder look, the look of someone planning a drastic action.

Before Jason announces to Liz that he is engaged to her, he talks to her about some of Barnabas’ quirks, suggesting that he intends to continue probing into her cousin’s doings. The hour may be coming very soon when Barnabas will decide he has to deal with Jason permanently.

Episode 242: One of the best men in the field

Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, suffered from an ailment her doctor, Dave Woodard M. D., could not identify. She then vanished from her hospital room in a manner law enforcement, led by Sheriff George Patterson, could not explain. The opening voiceover says that Maggie’s troubles “mystify the finest minds.” This is the first and last time either Woodard or Patterson is classed with “the finest minds” even among the low-functioning characters who abound in the period when Dark Shadows is being written by Ron Sproat and Malcolm Marmorstein. Well-meaning governess Vicki is still the single smartest character on the show, and she turns into an absolute moron every two or three days.

In the opening teaser, dashing action hero Burke Devlin asks Dr Woodard if his studies of Maggie’s blood samples will help find her. He says that they won’t, but that if he can diagnose her he might be able to help her after she is found. Burke asks if he is about to make a diagnosis. He says that he might be making progress towards that goal. At that point, there is a dramatic musical sting, and we cut to the credits. That’s the hook, a statement that further study is needed.

Dr Woodard tells Burke that he has contacted “Hoffman, one of the best men in the field,” and that he hopes Hoffman will be able to get things moving. Under Burke’s questioning, he admits that he is pessimistic that Hoffman will see anything he has missed. This is the first mention of the name “Hoffman” on Dark Shadows. I believe it is only the second mention* of any surname that is not derived from Irish (as are such names as Collins, Devlin, Malloy, and McGuire,) English (as are names such as Woodard, Patterson, Loomis, Johnson, Stockbridge, and Garner,) Welsh (as are names such as Evans and Morgan,) Scottish (as are the names Adair and Murdoch,) or French (as are the names La Freniere, Bilodeau, and du Près.)** It is certainly the first name we have heard that suggests there might be Jewish people in the universe of Dark Shadows.

We then cut to the study in great house of Collinwood, where high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins has to confront his sister, reclusive matriarch Liz. The auditors have told Roger that the books are out of balance at the family business. Roger knows that the reason for this is that Liz is giving money to buy the silence of seagoing con man Jason McGuire. He reminds Liz that he himself was afraid of blackmail for the first 40 weeks of the show, so he knows from personal experience that it is no way to live. Liz refuses Roger’s plea that she tell him her secret. As he probes and she resists, they move around the room at times like fencers, at times like dancers performing a paso doble. Their movements are easily the most interesting element of the episode, a credit to director John Sedwick.

Roger’s first approach to the shielded Liz

Roger admits that he hasn’t been much help to Liz over the years, but begs her to let him help her now. Liz won’t tell him anything, but she is touched to see her bratty brother sincerely trying to step up.

Liz goes to the drawing room. The camera is behind her as she approaches the room. Jason is standing at the fireplace under the large portrait, the spot furthest from the camera. Not only does he look as small as possible, but at the moment we first see him he is turned away from us, his head tilted far back as he takes a drink. Jason’s smallness and obscurity, coming so soon after Roger’s speech about the dreariness of blackmail, feels like an acknowledgment that Jason doesn’t have much to offer the audience.***

Liz tells Jason she can’t give him any more money without blowing the secret they share. He amazes her by accepting this information calmly, but she is sure he is not done tormenting her.

Liz returns to the study, where Roger is still sitting. She tells him that she has talked to the auditor and straightened out the books. That sounds like something that would take quite a while, even if you are sitting across from each other, and Liz and the auditor had to do it over the telephone. So how long has Roger been sitting there?

Then we rejoin Burke and Woodard in the doctor’s office, which someone has ransacked. The perpetrator wrenched the metal bars out of the window and stole Maggie’s blood samples. Dr Woodard says that the only way the bars could have been twisted was by someone with the “supernatural strength of madness.” I’m not an expert in mental health, but that does not sound like a conventional psychiatric opinion to me.

*After Lieutenant Costa of the Arizona State Police, whom we saw when Dark Shadows took us to Phoenix in #174.

**It is pretty weird that a show set in Maine has so few French-surnamed characters. We’ve only heard of one working-class Mainer with a French name, Amos Bilodeau. La Freniere was given in #45 as the maiden name of Josette, a grand lady who came from France to marry into the Collins family in a previous century; eventually, Josette’s birth name will be retconned to du Près.

***My wife, Mrs Acilius, was the one who really noticed the visual strategy both in Liz and Roger’s first scene in the study and in Liz’ entry into the drawing room.

Episode 241: What other name?

Much of the first 39 weeks of Dark Shadows consisted of characters telling each other that strange and troubled boy David Collins was a “very imaginative child.” In fact, David showed remarkably little imagination. He simply gave accurate reports concerning ghosts and other topics the adults around him didn’t want to think about.

Today, David Collins sneaks into the Old House on the grounds of the estate of Collinwood. For a long time, the Old House was the stronghold of his friend, the ghost of Josette Collins, and he often went there to visit her. Now, his distant cousin Barnabas is residing there. Unknown to David and the rest of the family, Barnabas is a vampire. Barnabas has somehow stripped Josette of much of her power, and he is holding Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, and trying to brainwash her into thinking she is Josette.

David thinks he sees Josette’s ghost in the front parlor, but it is actually Maggie, wearing Josette’s dress and dazedly answering to her name. David hasn’t seen Maggie as often as he has seen Josette, but he’s met her several times and she’s been in the news since she disappeared from the hospital a number of days ago. Granted, he expects to see Josette, and Maggie is using a different voice than she used when she was slinging hash at the restaurant in the Collinsport Inn. But it is a bit odd that he doesn’t at least notice that Josette and Maggie look a lot alike. Perhaps he is finally showing the vivid imagination we heard about for so long, and is so carried away by the atmosphere that he overlooks the obvious.

David is delighted by the encounter, since he hasn’t sensed Josette’s presence since Barnabas moved in. After a few minutes, he remarks that it is the longest conversation they’ve ever had. He sees the portrait of Barnabas that Maggie’s father, artist Sam Evans, had been painting, and mentions Sam’s name. That triggers something in Maggie’s memory, and Barnabas’ name triggers something else.

Maggie’s reaction to the name “Evans” does not suggest anything to David

A knock comes at the door. David’s father, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins, and his governess, the well-meaning Vicki, call his name. Maggie slips away. Roger and Vicki scold David for intruding in Barnabas’ house. Roger asks David if he went there looking for Josette. David denies it, and also denies that he did see her. Vicki knows Josette well, a fact which she apparently forgot for the duration of Friday’s episode, but her memory is restored today. She detects the scent of Josette’s perfume, and knows that David is lying.

The three of them are still there when Barnabas comes in. He is irked, and Roger is terribly embarrassed. They scurry back to the great house, where Roger tells Vicki to have David copy the word “honesty” and its definition fifty times in tomorrow’s lesson.

Before David goes to his room, Vicki asks him to tell her the truth about Josette. She listens carefully. He mentions that Josette had a music box, to which Vicki reacts visibly. She has seen the music box and the perfume jar in Josette’s restored bedroom upstairs at the Old House, and looks like she is trying to find the connection. She promises to keep the story between them. This glimpse of Smart Vicki, after Friday’s excruciating Dumb Vicki, revives our hope that someday, something will happen on the show.

Back in the Old House, Barnabas is sitting with Maggie and giving her instructions. She only repeats his words in a quizzical inflection, often just the last word he speaks. She hadn’t known who she was when she was talking to David, but she participated in the conversation so much more actively than this that we might wonder if she is putting on an act to keep distance between herself and Barnabas. At the end of the episode, she wanders back downstairs and calls “Little boy! I need you!”