Yesterday, mad scientist Julia Hoffman discovered that vampire Barnabas had sent his distant cousin and devoted blood thrall Carolyn to steal the notebook in which she recorded Barnabas’ secrets. Julia knew that this meant Barnabas had decided to kill her, and that only by keeping the notebook hidden could she save herself.
At the beginning of today’s episode, Julia hides the notebook inside the clock in the foyer of the great house of Collinwood. At the end, Carolyn notices that the clock has stopped chiming. The foyer clock is a very impressive piece of property, and it’s always nice when it gets screen time.
Yesterday’s episode ended with vampire Barnabas Collins telling his distant cousin and newly acquired blood thrall Carolyn that he would punish his associate Julia Hoffman. Carolyn smiled delightedly when she asked “Are you going to kill her?”
Today begins with a reprise of that scene. But there is a difference. Now, it is Barnabas who brings up the idea of killing Julia. Carolyn reacts with horror, tries to talk him out of it, says she won’t be part of a murder, and only reluctantly yields to him.
This instant retcon is disappointing to regular viewers for four reasons. First, while we can accept the show changing course from time to time, we do expect the story to build on itself as a reward to us for watching every day. If they’re going to pull a U-turn as abruptly as this, it may as well be an anthology series. Second, Carolyn’s reluctance to go along with Barnabas’ evil plans is nothing new to us- even her lines are recycled from objections her predecessor Willie and Julia herself had made to Barnabas’ earlier declarations that he intended to kill someone or other. Third, Nancy Barrett was tremendously fun to watch as a happy assistant murderer. She was nowhere near done exploring the possibilities of that persona.
The fourth disappointment goes deeper. It’s easy enough to see why the writers wouldn’t want Carolyn to rejoice in her situation for an indefinitely long period. As Stephen Robinson put it in a comment on Danny Horn’s Dark Shadows Every Day, “There’s no conflict [if] Barnabas’s partner in crime is a fully willing psychopath. They would just stand around going bwah-ha-ha.” But the excitement in the first four episodes of this week came from that very lack of dramatic possibility. It was so clear Carolyn’s relationship to Barnabas could not stay as it was for very long that we’re waiting for some big event to change it at any moment. When they slide back to the same old stuff we’ve already been through with Willie and Julia, that excitement gives way to the sinking feeling that nothing much is going to change in the foreseeable future.
Matriarch Liz and her brother Roger come to the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood. They have news for Liz’ daughter Carolyn. Roger’s son, strange and troubled boy David, will be going to Boston for a few days with his well-meaning governess Vicki. Liz and Roger suggest Carolyn go with them. She refuses, but cannot give a reason. They tell her about the wonderful parties full of men her own age “Aunt Catherine,” a person we have never before heard mentioned or hinted at, will give for her in the city, and point out that she has no social life at all around Collinwood. Carolyn continues to refuse, and leaves the room.
Liz and Roger talk about how uncharacteristically Carolyn has been behaving of late, and Roger hopes there isn’t anything wrong with her. What they don’t know but returning viewers do is that Carolyn was recently bitten by a vampire and is now his eagerly devoted blood-thrall. They don’t even know that there is a vampire, much less that it is their distant relative and close neighbor Barnabas. But Carolyn’s demeanor has changed so drastically since she fell under Barnabas’ power that everyone has been remarking on it.
The only resident of the great house who knows what has happened to Carolyn is permanent house-guest Julia Hoffman. Liz and Roger think Julia is an historian researching the old families of New England, but in fact she is a mad scientist who has come to the estate to attempt to cure Barnabas of vampirism. He has given up on her treatments, but has agreed that she might stay on to help guard him during the day.
Carolyn has discovered that Julia is working at cross-purposes with Barnabas. He wants to win Vicki as his bride. In episodes #347 and #352, Julia hypnotized Vicki, took her to Barnabas’ house, and showed her items that suggest the grisly fate that Barnabas has in store for her. Vicki does not consciously remember these trips, but she has begun to react to Barnabas with fear.
Today, for the third time in two weeks, we see Julia hypnotize Vicki. Again she shows Vicki the same pieces of antique crystal; again she tells her to “find the center” of the crystal; again we hear a tinkling sound and see a kaleidoscope-like image; again she takes her to Barnabas’ house; again she does a show-and-tell, this time with the coffin Vicki will spend her days in when she and Barnabas are resting up from their nights together preying upon the living; again she takes Vicki back to the drawing room, and says “You will never remember.” This ritual stretches out over a period of several minutes.
The difference is that this time, Carolyn has followed them to Barnabas’ house and eavesdropped on their entire conversation.
When Carolyn reports Julia’s actions to Barnabas, he says that Julia must be punished. Carolyn brightens and with a big smile asks “Are you going to kill her?” He says that he might do something to her that will be far worse than that. Unfortunately, we don’t see Carolyn’s reaction to this news.
It is rather odd that Julia wasn’t on the lookout for Carolyn. Yesterday the two of them clashed repeatedly as Carolyn made it clear she did not think Julia was sufficiently subservient to Barnabas, and in Act One of today’s episode Julia accuses Carolyn of following her. All Carolyn does to throw Julia off her trail is say that she is going into town for a couple of hours. Julia simply takes that at face value- she doesn’t even bother to see if Carolyn’s car is gone before she takes Vicki to Barnabas’ house.
This blitheness is not typical of Julia, who is one of the smartest and most cunning characters on the show. Still, it may make sense to viewers who have been with Dark Shadows from the beginning. Neither the flighty heiress we saw in 1966 nor the determined if feckless protector of family we have known since February of 1967 is the sort of person Julia would be inclined to take seriously. Julia is a medical doctor fully qualified in two unrelated specialties, hematology and psychiatry, and when we first saw her she was the director of a sanitarium. In the eyes of someone with such a formidable professional background, a young woman with a fashionable hairdo, a big wardrobe, and no formal education who has never lived anywhere but in a country house outside a fishing village in central Maine must be easy to underestimate. This pretty little hick might be the doctor’s undoing.
The reference to “Aunt Catherine” is a bit of a riddle. We have never heard of any member of the Collins family who lives anywhere but Collinwood, and considering that both Liz’ marriage and Roger’s ended in something rather more disturbing than a run-of-the-mill homicide, neither is likely to have kept in touch with the former in-laws. If the writers and producers were not intending to bring Aunt Catherine on screen or to mention her again, as they do not in fact do, then it would have been just as easy to make up some name that a rich Bostonian might have and say that the glamorous parties and eligible bachelors are waiting for Carolyn at Mrs Broadbottom’s house. So Aunt Catherine joins the “House by the Sea” in the “I wonder where that was supposed to lead” category.
Vampire Barnabas Collins stops by the great house of Collinwood to talk with well-meaning governess Vicki. Vicki is depressed because her fiancé Burke is missing and feared dead in the Amazon jungle. Barnabas offers to pay for a private search party to look for Burke. Vicki declines this offer, saying that she is sure the Brazilian authorities are doing all that can be done.
One might wonder what would have happened if Vicki had accepted. Barnabas has sold a few pieces of jewelry that he remembered were hidden around Collinwood when he was alive, but he does not appear to have any other source of income, and he has spent a great deal of money fixing up the Old House on the estate. If he were going to pay for a team of investigators to go to South America, presumably the writers would have had to come up with some story about how he got to be so rich.
Vicki starts to cry about Burke. Barnabas reaches out to touch her, and she recoils from him. This startles them both. Vicki is genuinely bewildered by her reaction; she has been very comfortable with Barnabas up to this point. He is hurt, but assures Vicki she need not explain. He backs away, looks at her sadly, and excuses himself. Jonathan Frid and Alexandra Moltke Isles play this scene with real pathos.
Her reaction mystifies them both
Blonde heiress Carolyn joins Vicki in the drawing room. Carolyn is surprised that Barnabas has already gone. Vicki tells her she is ashamed of herself. She tells Carolyn of her reaction, and of her inability to understand it.
Carolyn has recently become Barnabas’ blood thrall, and is working to advance his goal of winning Vicki’s love. She goes to Barnabas in the Old House. She finds that mad scientist Julia Hoffman is with him. Barnabas dismisses Julia so that he and Carolyn can talk privately. She tells him that she saw Julia and Vicki take a walk earlier in the day. There was nothing unusual about that, but afterward she found that Vicki had no memory of the walk. When she asked Julia about it, she lied to her. Barnabas realizes that Julia, who has extraordinary abilities as a hypnotist, is working to undermine his chances with Vicki. He declares that Julia may have signed her own death certificate.
This episode, like the two before it, is really about the conflict between Carolyn and Julia. We started with a contrast between them. In the pre-title teaser sequence, Carolyn was staring at the portrait of Barnabas in the foyer of the great house while we heard her deliver a pre-recorded monologue about her situation. “Vicki was my friend… but I can no longer have friends… other than you, dear cousin Barnabas.” In #341, Julia helped Barnabas murder her medical school classmate and onetime friend, Dr Dave Woodard. When Julia tried to back out of the murder, saying that Woodard was her friend, Barnabas growled “You no longer have friends.” Before they left the scene of the crime, Julia heard Woodard’s voice echoing “You no longer have friends, Julia.” This statement shattered Julia. When the same thought occurs to Carolyn, her devotion to her role as blood thrall allows her to receive it calmly, even cheerfully.
That gives way to a three-scene with Carolyn, Vicki, and Julia, in which Vicki makes it very clear that she does not remember walking with Julia the day before. Vicki exits, and Carolyn makes it equally clear to Julia that she knows she is up to something. Julia and Carolyn had almost nothing to do with each other until Barnabas bit Carolyn; Julia certainly had no reason to suppose that Carolyn was a likely threat to her. But yesterday and today Julia has found that she is up against a formidable adversary.
Blonde heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard is under the power of her distant cousin, Barnabas the vampire. She begins today’s episode in the foyer of the great house of Collinwood. She stares at Barnabas’ portrait, lifting her scarf to bare the marks of his fangs to it. She is eager to comply with Barnabas’ commands. He has ordered her to do two things- stop strange and troubled boy David Collins from sounding the alarm about him, and induce well-meaning governess Vicki to become his bride.
Ever since she stopped being a vicious narcissist in February, Carolyn has spent her time trying to protect her family members against threats she didn’t quite understand. She’d been trying to protect David, a first cousin who has come to be something like a little brother to her, when she stumbled upon Barnabas in his lair and became his slave. Her glad willingness to help Barnabas do whatever it takes to silence David shows how complete her subjection to him is.
Today, Carolyn wakes David before 6 AM. David asks “Are you sick or sum’thin?” David Henesy had a real gift for comedy, and Mrs Acilius and I laughed out loud at this line. Carolyn tells David that she does not believe any of the things he has been saying about Barnabas, that she never saw the ghost of ten year old Sarah Collins, and that if he keeps talking about supernatural menaces he will have to be sent to a mental hospital.
David’s reaction will puzzle regular viewers. Last Wednesday, in #348, Carolyn told David she had seen Sarah and was inclined to believe him about the other things. He was horrified. He said that local physician Dr Woodard saw Sarah, believed him, and died as a result. He begs Carolyn to say that she doesn’t believe him and that she didn’t see Sarah, and when she can’t he sobs in her arms. On Friday, David overheard matriarch Liz telling Carolyn he might have to be sent away to an institution, to which Carolyn responded that she had seen Sarah and did not think David was mentally ill. Afterward, David invited Carolyn to believe that he was crazy rather than accept the stories he had told before Woodard’s death. So when Carolyn shows up and tells David that she has decided to disbelieve the things he was desperate she disbelieve, and that the only danger will come if he repeats stories he wasn’t going to repeat anyway, he ought to be happy.
But David goes to pieces. He is as upset by Carolyn’s newfound disbelief as he was a few days ago by her belief. The actors do such a good job with the material that I am reluctant to complain about it, but if people are going to be watching the show every day the writers really should keep track of what’s in each other’s scripts.
As David is the functional equivalent of a brother to Carolyn, so Vicki is the equivalent of a sister. In fact, Art Wallace’s original story bible for Dark Shadows, titled “Shadows on the Wall,” called for a story that would climax with the revelation that Vicki was Carolyn’s half-sister, the daughter of Carolyn’s father Paul Stoddard. Well before the show went into production, the part of Vicki had been cast with Joan Bennett-lookalike Alexandra Moltke Isles, setting up the hints that run heavily throughout the first 92 episodes that Vicki is Liz’ daughter by some man other than Paul. Whichever half of her genealogy Vicki has in common with Carolyn, Liz has been tacitly treating her as a daughter all along. Liz has referred to Vicki and Carolyn as “the girls” for a long time, and now she is even encouraging Vicki to restore the west wing of the great house, which sounds very much like a project a person undertakes on something she is set to inherit. For a time Carolyn showed some resentment and jealousy towards Vicki, but the last clear indication of that was in #263. Since then, Carolyn has been treating Vicki as if she had always known her as a sister.
The enthralled Carolyn is as happy serving Vicki up to Barnabas as she was betraying David for his sake. Or she would be, if she had the chance.
Barnabas’ co-conspirator, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, is staying in the house. Julia has been passing herself off as an historian studying the old families of New England while secretly trying an experimental treatment meant to cure Barnabas of vampirism. That treatment reached an impasse before Barnabas bit Carolyn, and he has decided to discontinue it. Yesterday, Julia persuaded Barnabas to let her stick around to help guard him when he lies in his coffin during the day.
A few days ago, in #347, Julia hypnotized Vicki and showed her Barnabas in his coffin. By a post-hypnotic suggestion, she kept Vicki from consciously remembering what she had seen, but left her with an emotional aversion to Barnabas. That hypnosis gag is reenacted today, with Julia taking Vicki to the room in Barnabas’ house which he has prepared for her when she becomes his bride. There, she tells Vicki the details of Barnabas’ plans for her. Again, she gives a post-hypnotic suggestion confining this knowledge to her subconscious mind.
The difference between #347 and today is that Carolyn is working for Barnabas now. In that one, Julia had free rein to take hypnotized governesses in and out of Barnabas’ house all day long, without a care in the world. But now, Carolyn is watching. Even before Julia did her thing with Vicki, Carolyn confronted her and asked a series of pointed questions. That scene set up an interesting take on the whole idea of a relationship triangle- Carolyn and Julia are in conflict over Barnabas’ attentions, though neither is going to be his lover in any conventional sense. Triangles are so important in soap operas that this clash calls our attention to how Dark Shadows is rewriting the rules of the genre.
Carolyn sees Vicki and Julia leave the house. After they have returned, she asks Vicki about the walk she and Julia took. Vicki doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Carolyn says that she saw them down by Barnabas’ house, implying that she followed them. Vicki is still baffled. In a recorded voiceover monologue, Carolyn wonders why Vicki would lie. She concludes that she wouldn’t, and that Julia must be up to some kind of hocus-pocus.
Carolyn then asks Julia about her walk with Vicki. Julia feigns ignorance. Carolyn says she saw them leave the house together. Julia is defensive, but Carolyn waits patiently for an answer. Julia claims that they just stepped outside the door for fresh air, and Carolyn leaves it at that. Julia exits, and Carolyn ends the episode as she began- staring at the portrait of dear cousin Barnabas.
Nancy Barrett’s acting style is to throw herself unreservedly into whatever the script calls for her character to be doing on any given day, without regard for what the character may have done in past storylines. This turns out to be the perfect approach to playing Carolyn Collins Stoddard. In the first months of the show, flighty heiress Carolyn was fickle, capricious, and self-centered, traits that were all the more disturbing in someone who never showed any particular awareness of what she had said or done as recently as the day before.
That all changed when Carolyn shouldered responsibility for the Collins family business while her mother, matriarch Liz, was away for several weeks in February and March of 1967. After that period, her chief motivation was an earnest concern for the family’s well-being, and her chief difficulty was incomplete information. In her frustration, she tried to save her loved ones by doing just the wrong thing. So when Liz was going to marry seagoing con man Jason McGuire, Carolyn figured out that Jason was blackmailing Liz into the marriage. She also deduced that Liz’ fear was that her secret, if exposed, would ruin Carolyn’s chance at happiness. But Carolyn did not know what the secret was. So, she first tried to ruin her own happiness by dating motorcycle enthusiast Buzz, then when the prospect of Buzz as a son-in-law did not suffice to prompt Liz to stand up to Jason, Carolyn brought a gun to the wedding and planned to shoot Jason dead while he was saying his vows.
By Friday, Carolyn’s concern centered on her young cousin, strange and troubled boy David Collins. David was in touch with the supernatural, and had said that distant relative Barnabas Collins was an undead creature who posed a terrible threat to everyone. Carolyn thought Barnabas a fine and pleasant fellow, but she knew that much of what David had said was true. Though the boy kept pleading with her to forget everything he has said lest she die as the previous adult to believe him, Dr Dave Woodard, died, Carolyn could not do so. She decided to slip into Barnabas’ house to investigate David’s claims. There, she found Barnabas’ coffin. When he bit her and sucked her blood, she learned that he was a vampire.
Miss Barrett’s style usually produces a hot performance, in which she flings the character’s emotions directly before the audience. Today, though, she is playing a vampire’s newly acquired blood thrall. That is a part for a cold actor, one who keeps the audience guessing at the character’s feelings and intentions. On Friday, Barnabas told his co-conspirator, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, that if he bit her she would no longer have a will of her own; having heard that line, returning viewers are supposed to be unsure whether Carolyn even has an inner life now.
Miss Barrett rises to the challenge admirably. In her scenes with Julia at Barnabas’ house and with her mother and her uncle Roger at the great house of Collinwood, she manages to sound faraway and disconnected without seeming bored or confused; in her scenes with Barnabas, she sounds a note of unquestioning devotion without seeming robotic. All of the actors have been doing exceptional work the last few days, and with this eerie turn Miss Barrett is on a par with the very best.
Barnabas gives Carolyn two instructions. First, he tells her to convince everyone that David is mentally ill and that everything he has said should be disregarded. Carolyn smiles readily and says that this will not be difficult to accomplish. Since we have over recent months come to know Carolyn as the determined if maladroit protector of her family, and since she has been so focused on helping David, this easy acquiescence in Barnabas’ wicked plans for David comes as a heartbreak to regular viewers.
Barnabas’ second command is for Carolyn to encourage well-meaning governess Vicki to discard her personality, replace it with that of his long-lost love Josette, and come to him willingly as his bride. Carolyn is a bit puzzled by the Josettification project, but just a couple of days ago Vicki was telling her that she is “more than fond” of Barnabas. Besides, Vicki really is fascinated with Josette, and her current personality hasn’t given her much to do on the show lately. So Carolyn smiles again and says that she will see to it that Vicki comes to Barnabas.
The original videotape of this episode is lost, and the kinescope is particularly gray and scratchy. That is a happy accident. The very cheapness of its look adds to the Late Late Show quality of a story about a beautiful young blonde under the power of a vampire. The abstractness of black and white imagery also takes us out of the literal, workaday world of color pictures, into a realm of dreams and fables where we might expect to encounter vampires.
Most important, the kinescope makes a sharp contrast with images we saw last week. In #348, we got a look at Carolyn’s bedroom. It was the most brightly decorated set we have seen so far on Dark Shadows, so much so that I had to squint for a second when Carolyn switched a lamp on. In color, Barnabas’ house is drab enough, but in black and white it is so severely bleak that the idea of the resident of that glowing bedroom ending up there should give us a shudder. While Barnabas is on his way upstairs to see Carolyn, the camera lingers a bit on this shot of melted candles; for me, that was the moment that particular shudder comes hardest.
Smoldering in the ruins
Of course, a vampire’s bite is a metaphor for rape; of course, Barnabas’ investment in presenting himself as a member of the Collins family makes his attack on Carolyn a metaphorical incest. Every other Dark Shadows blogger who has posted about this episode has explored that theme- Danny Horn (and several of his commenters) here; Patrick McCray and Wallace McBride here and here; and John and Christine Scoleri here. All I have to add to that chorus of voices is that Carolyn’s role as doughty if misguided protector of her kindred makes her a particularly poignant victim of an incestuous assault.
Things have been happening fast on Dark Shadows for the last several days, and writer Ron Sproat was always aware of the need to let new viewers catch up. This is the first chance Sproat has had to write a Friday episode in some time, and since some people would watch daytime soaps only on Fridays, he goes in today for some extra heavy recapping about doings at the estate of Collinwood.
As a result, the first half of the episode is confusing to viewers who have been watching regularly. In recent days, the ghost of ten year old Sarah Collins gave a toy soldier to strange and troubled boy David to keep with him as a talisman against evil; David had a premonition that his cousin, heiress Carolyn, was in danger, and passed the toy soldier on to her; Carolyn saw Sarah, and gave the toy soldier back to David; and as we begin today, David brings the toy soldier back to Carolyn. David catches a glimpse of an extremely old man peering in through the window of the drawing room; he is gone by the time Carolyn turns to look. They talk about ghosts and visions, reenacting in one scene Carolyn’s whole progression from total rejection of David’s claims about the supernatural to total openness to them, and David’s from a desperate need to be believed to an even more desperate fear that Carolyn will be killed unless he can convince her he was lying about everything.
Carolyn tells her mother Liz that she doesn’t think David is lying, and decides to confront Liz’ aversion to the topic of ghosts and tell her that she has seen Sarah. Liz says she thinks David is mentally disturbed and must be sent away to an institution; eavesdropping, David reacts with horror. He meets Carolyn in the foyer afterward. He asks her if she thinks he is crazy. When she says she doesn’t, he says that maybe he is. He pleads with her to reject his stories as either delusions or lies.
The old man David saw looking at Carolyn is their distant cousin Barnabas, who is, unknown to them and the other residents of the great house on the estate, a vampire. Mad scientist Julia Hoffman has been trying to cure Barnabas of vampirism, but she inadvertently restarted the aging process which his condition had arrested. No longer does he look like a man in his forties- now he appears to be about ninety. He fears that if he does not start sucking people’s blood again tonight, he will soon turn into the pile of dust he would have been long ago were it not for his curse.
In Barnabas’ home at the Old House on the estate, we see him talking with Julia. His peeping at Carolyn might suggest that he has her in mind as his victim, but he does not mention her. Instead, he says he will go out into the town of Collinsport and find a stranger. Julia is disappointed that Barnabas is not planning to bite well-meaning governess Vicki, with whom she had hoped never to have another conversation. So she offers herself as a victim instead.
This offer stuns Barnabas so deeply that, for the first time, he addresses Julia by her first name. She smiles when he does this. He seems sincerely dismayed by the thought of enslaving Julia. When he tells her that if he bites her, she will have no will of her own, she smiles even more brightly. Evidently Julia believes that would be a price well worth paying if it kept Vicki from talking to her.
Julia contemplates enslavement. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Barnabas declines the offer, saying that he might need to call on Julia for medical treatment at some point in the future and that as a blood thrall she wouldn’t be able to function as a doctor. Julia is hurt by Barnabas’ refusal, and asks him if the only reason he won’t enslave her is that he wants to use her professional services, and he assures her that it is.
Back in the great house, Carolyn stands in the foyer under the gaze of Barnabas’ portrait. She looks at the toy soldier and wonders about David. She decides to go to Barnabas’ house and look for evidence of the things David had claimed to see there. Oddly, she sets the toy soldier on the table and leaves without it.
Carolyn lets herself into Barnabas’ house, goes to his basement, and finds his coffin. Julia sees her there and tells her to leave immediately, “before it’s too late.” We hear Barnabas’ voice announcing “It is already too late.” Carolyn is baffled by Barnabas’ aged appearance. He moves in, bares his fangs, and bites her.
Barnabas’ old man makeup is phenomenally good, as all the Dark Shadows blogs mention. The show was very lucky to land Dick Smith, one of the pre-eminent makeup artists of all time, to do it. But I would add that Jonathan Frid’s acting takes Smith’s appliances and turns them to the best possible advantage. It is utterly absorbing to watch him as a man suddenly thrust into extreme old age, trying to figure out how to move his newly enfeebled limbs. In Frid and Smith, two artists at the top of their form collaborated to create a remarkable turn.
Mad scientist Julia Hoffman has been trying to cure Barnabas Collins of vampirism. We open today with Julia fleeing from Barnabas in terror. You’d think he’d be used to this reaction, but she’s been pretty cozy with him for a long time, so he knows she isn’t doing it for the usual reason. He demands to know why, and she tells him it’s to do with his appearance. He can’t use a mirror, so he touches his face. He realizes that, as an unforeseen side effect of Julia’s treatments, he is starting to look his age. Considering that he’s about 200 years old, the typical look would be a pile of dust, so he is quite upset about the situation.
Barnabas accuses Julia of intentionally botching the experiment because he refused to let “our relationship become all you wanted.” For the last couple of weeks, Julia has been responding to the realization that she is going to be connected to Barnabas for the rest of her life by trying to fall in love with him. He has observed this attempt, and answers it by pouring scorn on her. The other day, we saw her struggling to hold back tears at the end of an episode. She keeps her cool this time, and dismisses this particular accusation quickly.
One of the aspects of Barnabas’ sudden aging that bothers him the most is that he will have to cancel a date to watch the sun rise with well-meaning governess Vicki. Julia can hardly keep from laughing out loud when she says that “Foregoing an appointment with Vicki must be a bitter pill.” Barnabas responds “Spare me your sarcasm!” Even before she decided she would have to cultivate a romantic interest in Barnabas, Julia often showed signs of impatience when conversing with Vicki. She often rolled her eyes as soon as Vicki wasn’t looking, and sometimes plastered on a smile and spoke to her very slowly. But this is our first direct confirmation that Julia thinks Vicki is an idiot.
The Vicki/ Julia relationship is the first time on Dark Shadows that one major character is oblivious of the fact that another holds her in disdain. That adds a fresh wrinkle to their scenes together, as we wonder if Vicki will catch on to Julia’s real attitude towards her.
Barnabas orders Julia to run up to the great house of Collinwood and tell Vicki that he won’t be able to watch the sunrise with her. Julia opens the front door to comply, and sees Vicki standing there. She has overheard the last part of their conversation. Barnabas sits in a high-backed armchair with his back to her and claims that he has an illness he is afraid she will catch if she comes too close to him. He also claims that he will be leaving town on a long business trip later in the morning. When Vicki points out that these two things don’t fit together, he makes a lot of statements that don’t add up to much more than throat-clearing.
It’s also odd that Vicki, who like the other residents of the great house of Collinwood does not know that Julia is a doctor, doesn’t seem to notice that she’s wearing a lab coat, much less to wonder what she’s doing in Barnabas’ house in the pre-dawn hours. The whole scene is so ridiculous that the comedy must be intentional, on the part of the director and the actors if not of writer Ron Sproat.
After Vicki goes, Barnabas says he will have to save himself by reverting to his bloodsucking ways. Julia is shocked by the thought that the horrors will resume, and laments that she will be “partially responsible” for them.
Julia’s shock doesn’t last long. She urges Barnabas to choose Vicki as his first victim. She is absolutely gleeful about this idea.
Barnabas is miserable- he has already passed up several prime opportunities to bite Vicki, including an occasion when she invited herself over to spend the night in his house and one on the terrace of the great house when she virtually pressed her neck into his mouth. There have been times when we have expected Vicki to draw an arrow on her neck and write next to it the words “MR VAMPIRE, BITE HERE!” But Barnabas doesn’t want to let go of the fantasy that Vicki’s personality will somehow disappear and be spontaneously replaced with that of his lost love Josette. His attachment to this fantasy suggests that Barnabas is as bored with the actually existing Vicki as is Julia.
Back in the great house, Vicki tells heiress Carolyn that Barnabas was in a strange mood. Carolyn says that Vicki has become quite fond of Barnabas, and Vicki says that she is more than fond of him. She has come to rely on him. Since Vicki’s depressing fiancé, Burke, is missing and presumed dead, there is no reason why this shouldn’t mean that Vicki will fall in love with Barnabas. No reason, that is, except Barnabas’ obvious lack of interest in her.
Later, we see Carolyn and her old friend, hardworking young fisherman Joe, sitting at the Blue Whale tavern. Yesterday, Carolyn had a visit from the ghost of ten year old Sarah Collins. As a result, she believes that her young cousin, strange and troubled boy David, was probably telling the truth when he claimed to have seen various weird things.
Carolyn tries to enlist Joe in an effort to investigate David’s stories, but he won’t have it. He admits that Sarah exists. He has to- lots of people have seen her and she has made several observable things happen. Besides, Joe himself encountered the ghost of Josette in #179, so he can’t very well deny that there are such things as ghosts. But like other characters who have admitted that one or another supernatural being exists, he snaps right back to a frame of reference that doesn’t allow for the supernatural, or even for the unusual. Joe asks Carolyn if she really believes that there is “something sinister about Barnabas,” as David’s visions would imply. She admits that she doesn’t.
While Vicki sleeps, Barnabas materializes in her room. He stands there watching her, as he has done before. This time, his wizened appearance shows that it is a matter of urgency that he feed on someone. But he still can’t bring himself to bite her. Even when his existence is hanging in the balance, he just isn’t into Vicki.
After Barnabas loiters for a while trying to talk himself into doing what he so plainly has no desire to do, Carolyn comes to Vicki’s door. She apologizes for waking Vicki, and explains that she thought she heard someone in the room. Vicki isn’t upset at the interruption, but grateful for Carolyn’s concern. The two are startled when they see the silhouette of a giant bat outside Vicki’s window.
We open on a new set, the bedroom of heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard in the great house of Collinwood. Dark Shadows has been in color since #295 in August. Though directors Lela Swift and John Sedwick were both ambitious visual artists, they haven’t been able to do much with color so far. With Carolyn’s bedroom, Swift and the staging team have accomplished one of their first real essays in color. It is composed mostly of shades of yellow, pink, and orange.
The color schemes of the other interiors we’ve seen up to this point run the gamut from sedate to subdued to drab to dank, so we already know we are in a unique space. The only other room in Collinwood that might have matched this one for brightness was the kitchen, but we haven’t seen that since #208.
Carolyn’s young cousin, strange and troubled boy David, lets himself into her room. He touches her, and she awakes with a scream. He explains that he just dropped in to make sure she wasn’t dead. When she turns on the light, the screen is so bright that I reflexively squinted, a reaction I’d never before had to an image on Dark Shadows.
Bright room.
David can’t quite explain why he was afraid Carolyn might be dead, but he does insist that she take an antique toy soldier, saying that she will be safe if she keeps it with her. Carolyn’s mother, matriarch Liz, comes into the room to investigate Carolyn’s scream. Liz wonders what David is doing there. Carolyn hastens to say that he was just making sure she was all right.
David goes, and Carolyn tells Liz she doesn’t think anything can be done for him at home. Liz is reluctant to send him away. Regular viewers will not be surprised by this. We know that Liz took David and his father, her ne’er-do-well brother Roger, into Collinwood at the beginning of the summer of 1966 and summoned her unacknowledged daughter, well-meaning governess Vicki, to come look after David starting with #1 on 27 June 1966, so that her conviction that the family ought to look after him got the whole show started. Nonetheless, Liz is so disturbed by David’s unusual statements and depressive affect that she agrees that he needs residential care.
We cut to the Old House on the estate. Vampire Barnabas Collins is sitting in a basement room where mad scientist Julia Hoffman maintains a laboratory. The room is full of electrical equipment, a bit odd since the Old House has no electricity; the laboratory itself is lit by flaming torches. But if we’ve ever seen a Universal Studios production from the 1930s, we know that where you find a mad scientist, you will find electrical currents, so naturally things start buzzing when Julia flips a switch.
Barnabas confined
Julia is trying to implement a medical cure for Barnabas’ vampirism. In the first shot of this scene, we see a visual metaphor for that project. Barnabas, an uncanny being, is confined to a small space in the middle of an elaborate collection of technology. If Julia succeeds, the supernatural will be vanquished altogether and scientific rationality will fill the whole world. The color scheme emphasizes the contrast between Julia’s optimistic goal and the terrain on which she operates. The walls and floor are dominated by the grays and browns of the basement, but the frames and tubing of her equipment are a bright metallic hue, light plays on the glass components, and the intense greens, reds, and blues of the potions are distributed in a slightly unbalanced, lively pattern. The irregular shapes of the frames and tubing emphasize this pattern, and contrast with the solid gray of the floor and the even grid of the brickwork on the walls.
This image not only represents Julia’s plans, but also one of the major themes the show is exploring at this period. Too many characters have encountered too much evidence of supernatural forces and beings for anyone to simply deny that such things exist. But even those who have been most heavily exposed to them keep reverting to a naturalistic frame of reference. Sure, Julia spends all her time hanging around with a vampire and has encountered a couple of ghosts, but she’s determined to ring all of those phenomena around with scientific explanations and technological interventions until they yield to rational control.
Julia’s project has hit its first major setback, as the latest treatment led Barnabas’ hands to age dramatically. He expresses the fear that time will catch up with him, and his apparent age will soon catch up with his actual age, something like 200 years. Julia’s hope that her experiment will not only free Barnabas of his curse, but found a new kind of medicine that will free everyone else of aging and death, will thus be defeated.
Barnabas gives a remarkable little speech about the situation he finds himself in:
I’ve been granted privileges given to few other men… For most men, time moves slowly, so very slowly. They don’t even realize it. But time has revealed itself to me in a very special way. Time is a rushing, howling wind raging past me, withering me in one relentless blast and then continues on. I have been sitting here passively, submissive to its rage, watching its work. Listen. Time, howling, withering.
Writer Joe Caldwell has a fine sense of what actors can do, and this odd little bit of purple prose is right in Jonathan Frid’s wheelhouse. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but the sound of his voice delivering it is so gorgeous it may as well be Shakespeare. Well, maybe not Shakespeare, but Ben Jonson at least.
It is possible to read this speech as a programmatic statement. Daytime soap operas of the 1960s were famously slow-paced; the old joke was that a viewer saw an episode that ended with a character hearing a telephone ring, missed four months of the show, and tuned back in to see the episode that started with the same character saying “Hello.” Even by the standards of the period, the first months of Dark Shadows were notoriously leisurely, with action often as not playing out in real time. When we are watching the 21 episodes centering on Roger’s attempts to find a fountain pen he misplaced, it is indeed the case that “time moves slowly, so very slowly.” But those days are behind us. The show is whipping through plot points at a pace that many prime time series contemporary with it would have had a hard time matching.
If the speech is programmatic, it is also autobiographical on the part of the screenwriter. A fast pace promises excitement for the viewers, but makes life hard for a writing staff that never numbered more than three. Indeed, this is the last episode Joe Caldwell will write for two and a half years. Perhaps he felt the demands of the new pace as “a relentless blast” withering his talents, and had to bow out.
We return to Carolyn’s room. She is in front of her mirror, contemplating the toy soldier. She hears the strains of “London Bridge” playing on a wooden flute, which she has learned is a sign that the ghost of ten year old Sarah Collins is present. Carolyn grew up in this haunted house, so it may not be entirely surprising that her response is to lean back and enjoy the music. But she sits up when Sarah manifests herself in visible form.
Ghost in the mirror
Sarah speaks, and Carolyn sees her reflected in her mirror. The following scene is so extraordinary I’m going to transcribe all of the dialogue:
Sarah: David must have given you that.
Carolyn: Sarah!
Sarah: He told you my name.
Carolyn: Sarah, how did you get in here?
Sarah: Didn’t David tell you?
Carolyn: Tell me what?
Sarah: All about me.
Carolyn: I’m not sure I understand.
Sarah: I think I’m a ghost. Matter of fact, I’m sure I am.
Giving the facts
This is the first time Sarah has described herself in any terms, certainly the first time she has called herself a ghost. Her coyness about herself had left David confused about what she was; it was not until #325 that he finally concluded that she was a ghost. After that, she became more forthright with him. When he wasn’t sure what she was, she would wait until she was out of his line of sight to appear and disappear. But in #327, she fades away while he’s looking right at her.
Coming out to David not only allowed Sarah to relax around him, but has led her to discard her coyness altogether. She is startlingly blunt with Carolyn as this conversation goes on:
Carolyn: B-but- I don’t believe in-
Sarah: Yes you do. Or I wouldn’t have been able to come here. You’re not afraid of me, are you?
Carolyn: No…
Sarah: If you are, I understand.
This is the first confirmation that Sarah can appear only to those who are prepared to believe in her. It’s true that most of the people who have seen and heard her- David; Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town; Maggie’s father Sam; Vicki; Barnabas; Julia; Barnabas’ sometime blood thrall Willie; and local physician Dave Woodard- have either had extensive contact with the supernatural or had reasoned their way to the conclusion that she existed. But she also showed herself to Maggie’s nurse at the mental hospital Julia runs, and we don’t know anything about her background or beliefs. And local man Burke Devlin heard Sarah when she and David were talking in #327. While Burke has had plenty of contact with supernatural beings and in the early days of Dark Shadows, when he was fun, was willing to believe in them, he was at that point tearing around bellowing that there were no such things as ghosts. So this is new and unexpected information.
Carolyn’s denial that Sarah frightens her is given in a trembling voice that shows it to be a lie. Still, she isn’t as frightened as she might be. The other day, in #344, Carolyn was in David’s room when Sarah manifested there, not in the visible form of a little girl, but as the sound of “London Bridge” and as information appearing in David’s mind about Burke’s imminent death. Carolyn was terrified of Sarah when she came that way.
Carolyn: Well, what do you want?
Sarah: Don’t send David away.
Carolyn: How do you know about that?
Sarah: I don’t know, I just do.
At this point, we see Carolyn’s fear fading. She is starting to react to Sarah as if she really were a ten year old girl.
Carolyn urging Sarah to be reasonable.
Carolyn: But Sarah, we have to send David away. It’s the only way we can help him.
Sarah: But if you send David away, I won’t have anyone to play with.
Carolyn: Well, maybe it isn’t good for David to play with you.
Sarah: Why do you say that?
Carolyn: Because it leads him into believing all sorts of things that aren’t true.
Sarah: How do you know they’re not true?
Carolyn: Well, they’re just not, they couldn’t be.
Sarah: He wasn’t lying about me, was he?
Carolyn: No.
Sarah: Well.. then maybe David is acting the way he is because no one will believe him.
Carolyn: But… it isn’t possible.
Sarah: People say I’m not possible, but I am. Why doesn’t that make the rest possible?
Carolyn: Sarah, maybe you don’t know the stories David’s been telling!
Sarah: Why do you think that?
Carolyn: Because they’re too fantastic! And besides, they’ve all been proved false.
Sarah: How do you know they’ve been proved false?
Carolyn: Sarah, are you trying to tell me that Barnabas actually slee-
This exchange is the ultimate example of a character accepting the existence of a particular supernatural being and then snapping back into a frame of reference that does not allow for supernatural beings. Carolyn knows that Sarah is a ghost, and starts arguing with her about how fantastic the world is permitted to be.
There comes a knock at the door. Carolyn turns away from Sarah to look at the door, and when she looks back, Sarah has vanished. Regular viewers know that Sarah was Barnabas’ little sister, that she wants to keep him from doing horrible things to people she likes, but that she will not say anything against him. So when Carolyn says Barnabas’ name, we know that Sarah is about to vanish.
Sarah’s part is an outstanding example of writing to an actor’s abilities, even more so than was Barnabas’ speech. Caldwell knew that Jonathan Frid had a flair for making flowery gibberish appealing, because that is what he has been doing the whole time he’s been on Dark Shadows. What Sharon Smyth has been doing well as Sarah is being a cutie pie and creating a vague and mysterious impression. When she has more than a few lines to deliver, things tend to get very wobbly. Today, she has to maintain a commanding tone and an adult demeanor throughout an extended patch of rapid-fire dialogue. Absolutely nothing we have seen on screen would suggest that she could handle that. But she pulls it off, more than competently. There are a few glances at the teleprompter, but at no point does she break out of the patient and authoritative manner she has to adopt. It is an impressive job of acting by any standard.
The person at Carolyn’s door is Liz. Liz is Dark Shadows‘ queen of denial. Viewers who have been with the show from the beginning have seen a few cracks in her facade of disbelief in the supernatural. In #10, she dozed off in the drawing room and started talking in her sleep about ghosts. When Vicki insisted to her in #127 that she had seen a ghost, Liz said she believed her. And in #280 and #281, Liz reluctantly agreed to participate in a séance, and afterward agreed that Vicki had been possessed by a spirit. But even in those moments Liz was fighting to keep the topic of ghosts at bay, and the rest of the time she has presented a blank wall to any attempt to face facts about the strange goings-on. So it is not surprising that Carolyn tells her mother she was talking to herself while tidying up her room.
Having talked Liz into sending David away, she now has to talk her back out of it. She manages to get her to agree to wait a few days. “London Bridge” plays. Carolyn reacts to it, Liz does not.
In his room, a distraught David is looking at a mobile. Its whimsical black and white markings suggest a puzzle and make a stark contrast with the vivid colors around them.*
Puzzling shapes.Back to the wall.
Carolyn comes in. She brings the toy soldier and tells David she doesn’t think she will need it. He insists that she will, but she explains that Sarah visited her and now she believes him and knows how to help him. David is horrified by this. He says that Sarah visited Dr Woodard, that Woodard believed him, and that led to his death. He begs Carolyn not to believe him and claims to have been lying. He sobs and clutches her.
Anguished embrace.
Back in the Old House, Julia prepares to give Barnabas another treatment. He snaps at her. She tells him that whatever happens, she wants him to know that she always wished him well. That prompts him to unload a further stream of sour remarks about her competence and intentions. Julia carries out the treatments, only to find that the aged appearance of Barnabas’ hands has spread to his head.
In his post about this episode on Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn puts it well when he says that “This is just good soap opera construction. People that we care about, facing terrible danger, and desperate to help each other.” He’s referring specifically to the scenes between David and Carolyn and Liz, but it applies to everyone. We care not only about the good people in the great house (well, they’ve been relatively good, lately,) but also about Barnabas and Julia, evil people who are the terrible danger David and Carolyn and Liz are facing, but who make the show fun to watch. We care about Sarah too, and she’s desperately trying to accomplish exactly the result we most want to see, an outcome in which David, Barnabas, and everyone else we enjoy watching stays on the show.
*Evidently this mobile was a commercially produced item. One of the commenters on Danny Horn’s Dark Shadows Every Dayreports having had one like it as a child.
In the great house of Collinwood, well-meaning governess Vicki is worried about her depressing fiancé Burke, who is missing and feared dead after a plane crash in Brazil. Permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman enters and shows her a piece of crystal. Julia says that she thinks the crystal might have been part of a chandelier that hung in the foyer of the long-abandoned west wing of the house. Vicki plans to restore the west wing and hopes to live there with Burke, so this is of interest to her.
Julia tells Vicki to peer into the center of the crystal. As she complies, Julia stares directly into the camera and continues to give instructions. The Federal Communications Commission was very nervous about hypnosis in the 1960s, so much so that even indirect references to the process would draw memos from the television networks’ Standards and Practices offices warning producers that they must not put anything on the air that could hypnotize the audience. Apparently ABC’s Standards and Practices office wasn’t vigilant enough about the daytime dramas, because after a while we hear the tinkling sound Julia tells us we will hear and instead of the picture we see a kaleidoscope effect. By the time we come out of the trance, Julia and Vicki are in the basement of the Old House on the estate.
The Old House is home to Old World gentleman Barnabas Collins. Vicki sees a coffin in the basement, and Julia orders her to open it. After a long display of reluctance, she does. She finds Barnabas inside, apparently dead. Julia shows her the crystal again. Once more the screen shows the kaleidoscope pattern, and next thing we know Julia and Vicki are returning to the drawing room of the great house.
There, Vicki is about to say that she wants to show the crystal to her dear friend Barnabas, only to find that she has an unaccountable difficulty bringing herself to say Barnabas’ name. Later, Barnabas comes to the house and asks Vicki to watch the sunrise with him. He is diffident about the invitation, and she is uncomfortable with him. Actor Jonathan Frid may have had some difficulty with Barnabas’ lines at this point, but if so, his stumbles dovetail so well with Barnabas’ own display of shyness that they don’t hurt the scene.
Vicki overcomes her discomfort and agrees to meet Barnabas at dawn. He is about to shake her hand when she notices that there is something wrong with his hand. He looks at it and is shocked. He says something about having injured it this morning. She pleads with him to stay and let her put something on his hand, but he rushes out.
Unknown to Vicki, Barnabas is a vampire and Julia is a mad scientist trying to turn him back into a human. The night before, Julia had given him an accelerated treatment that initially caused numbness in his hand, but that later gave him such a sense of well-being that he thought he would be free of his curse by the time the sun came up. After leaving Vicki, he returns to Julia’s laboratory in the basement of his house and shows her his hand, which has aged enormously.
Also unknown to Vicki, Barnabas has designs on her and sees Burke’s absence as a sign that he should move quickly to win her affections. That’s why he ignored Julia’s objections and insisted on the accelerated treatment. In the last few episodes, the show has put heavy emphasis on Julia’s wish to start a romance of her own with Barnabas and his scornful response to this wish; perhaps she took Vicki to Barnabas’ coffin to keep her from becoming a rival for his affections. Or perhaps her motives were altruistic- even if Barnabas weren’t a vampire, there would still be plenty of reasons why a woman would be well-advised to steer clear of him.
Dark Shadows Commentary 