Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 346: Neither good nor gentle

Well-meaning governess Vicki has learned that her depressing fiancé Burke probably died in a plane crash yesterday. His body hasn’t been found yet, and she still hopes he will turn out to be alive.

We open with a dream sequence. Vicki finds herself in the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood. She is in the bedroom once occupied by legendary grande dame Josette, restored to its original condition by the house’s current occupant, Old World gentleman Barnabas Collins. Barnabas enters, accompanied by permanent house guest Julia Hoffman. As is usual in dreams, much of it is a rehash of the dreamer’s recent experiences. Vicki had met Barnabas and Julia the preceding night while on a walk and told them that Burke was missing and feared dead. Barnabas told Julia that it was too cold for her to be outdoors and sent her home, then he told Vicki that he was sure she would be a bride soon. These same lines occur in the dream.

The dream deviates from the waking scene in three key ways. First, Barnabas addresses Julia as “Doctor.” In fact, Julia is a medical doctor, a mad scientist who has come to Collinwood with an experimental treatment intended to cure Barnabas of a chronic ailment, vampirism. But Vicki doesn’t know that Julia is a doctor, any more than she knows Barnabas is a vampire. Still less does she know that Barnabas always addresses Julia as “Doctor” when they are alone. That suggests that it is not a normal dream, but is a message from the supernatural.

Second, Julia looks humiliated when Barnabas tells her she is suffering from the cold and orders her to leave. That did happen in yesterday’s encounter, but Vicki didn’t see it. So that is further evidence that the dream is a transmission from worlds beyond.

Third, while Barnabas yesterday encouraged Vicki to believe that Burke was alive, in this dream he shows her a shrouded figure on the bed and identifies it as Burke. He still insists that she will be a bride. When she says that she can never be a bride if Burke is dead, Barnabas adopts a chipper tone and says that he doesn’t see why. She is saying “He is dead, he is dead” and the camera is focused on Barnabas when the dream ends. Evidently the message is something to do with Barnabas being dead, as he is during the daylight hours, and therefore being an unsuitable groom for her.

Later, we cut back to Josette’s room, where we see Julia standing around and hear her thoughts in an extended voiceover. She has resigned herself to spending the rest of her life linked to Barnabas, and has decided that she may as well fall in love with him. For his part, he is still hung up on his long-dead love Josette and believes that Vicki will someday turn into Josette and come to him. Julia is ruminating about this crackpot notion when she senses a ghostly presence. She wonders if it is Josette. Indeed, for 28 weeks, from #70 to #210, Josette’s ghost was the foremost supernatural presence on Dark Shadows, and it was based in the Old House. But Julia resists the idea that it could be her.

In her resistance, we can hear one of the themes the show has been exploring lately. Even characters who have accepted the reality of particular supernatural phenomena don’t have a frame of reference for those phenomena. They keep snapping back to Logical-Explanation-Land and trying to find mundane answers to unearthly questions. Julia is personal physician to a vampire, and even she starts telling herself that she’s being silly to expect to see a ghost.

There is a good deal of noise from off-screen, and Julia finally accepts that there is a ghost in the room. She says aloud that it is not Josette’s ghost, it is a man’s. She thinks it is the ghost of Dave Woodard, her old medical school classmate, whom she and Barnabas murdered a week ago. She is calling out “Dave!” when she hears Vicki in the hallway outside.

Julia calls to Vicki, who joins her in Josette’s room. Vicki tells her that after she left them the night before, Barnabas volunteered to help her restore the west wing of the great house of Collinwood. Vicki wants to accept that offer. Julia becomes angry and says that Barnabas is much too busy to do any such thing, and that if he offered to do it he was only being polite.

Later, Vicki is back in the great house. Barnabas visits her there. When she tells him what Julia said and how agitated she was when she said it, he assures that he sincerely wants to help her with the project, and they speculate that Julia is working too hard.

Julia joins them. She is carrying flowers and in an abashed mood. She apologizes to Vicki for raising her voice and says that she must have been working too hard. Vicki goes to get a vase, leaving Julia and Barnabas alone in the drawing room.

Barnabas demands that Julia put her feelings to one side and approach their relationship simply as one of doctor and patient. He doesn’t ignore her feelings, nor does he make the slightest attempt to be gallant about them; he speaks of her attraction to him as if it were a mildly ridiculous offense against good manners. I suppose if someone treated you that way, it would be relatively easy to get over your unrequited passion for them, but Julia is stuck with Barnabas. When he tells her to stop being foolish and keep their relationship simple, she says that it is too late for that. Barnabas understands that as a reference to their murder of Woodard, which has indeed cut her off from any other potential life partner for the foreseeable future.

This whole conversation is conducted in loud stage voices with the doors wide open. Vicki walks in as Barnabas and Julia are in the middle of a fairly incriminating topic. She is sufficiently absorbed in her worries about Burke that it is believable that her only reaction would be a startled look after she enters the room and sees Barnabas and Julia in an intense confrontation, but they really are being remarkably careless.

Vicki finds that the flowers, which were in full bloom when she left the room a few minutes before, are now dead and shriveled. Barnabas had held the flowers briefly; evidently the vampire’s touch drained them of life. He squirms and looks up, the picture of someone embarrassed by his failure to control a bodily function in a social setting.

Looks like David Ford isn’t the only one whose metabolism creates awkward moments.

Back in the Old House, Barnabas and Julia are in the basement laboratory. She is preparing to give him an injection. He wants her to accelerate the treatments so that he can woo Vicki now, while she is lonely and confused. In case Burke does come back, Barnabas wants to have established a foothold from which to compete with him for Vicki’s affections. Julia is nervous, fumbling with the needle and complaining about the way Barnabas is looking at her. When she is about to give him the shot, he stops her, telling her that he suspects her jealousy will lead her to do something to harm him. He warns her against any such attempt. After this last moment of unrelenting hostility, we end with a closeup on Julia, her lower lip trembling.

Episode 345: That place in Brazil

In Dark Shadows #3, man of mystery Burke Devlin mentioned that he started on the path to riches when he was in a bar in South America. Since then, he has mentioned his business interests on that continent several times, and the old standard “Brazil” has emerged as his informal theme song. Yesterday’s episode, one of the finest in the series, called back to the early days of the show several times, and today they close the loop on Burke’s connection to Brazil. His plane crashes in that country, and he dies there.

We learn of Burke’s fatal accident when housekeeper Mrs Johnson tells her employer, Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, that she has heard a radio report of an aviation disaster in Brazil. Mrs Johnson first came to work in Liz’ home, the great house of Collinwood, in #81. At that time Burke had sworn to wreak a terrible vengeance on the Collinses and Mrs Johnson was his secret agent. Burke renounced his quest for vengeance in #201, which was just as well, since it was never very interesting anyway. But they never told us that he had stopped paying Mrs Johnson or that she had stopped funneling information to him. So viewers who have been watching all along may wonder if she really did just happen to be listening when the radio announced that a Varig flight had gone down outside Belém. Maybe she was in touch with some associate of Burke’s who told her more than she could repeat to Liz. Or maybe not, but in any case it is satisfying to be reminded of the connection.

Burke was engaged to marry one of Collinwood’s residents, well-meaning governess Vicki. When she is told that Burke is missing and presumed dead, Vicki declares that she is certain he will come back. Vicki was originally the audience’s point of view character, an outsider to whom everything we did not know had to be explained. We now know many things she does not, but in this declaration she once more seems to be closer to us than to the other characters in her knowledge. She knows, as we do, that she lives in a soap opera and no major character is likely to stay dead permanently, especially not when his death is supposed to be the result of a plane crash in a faraway jungle.

On the other hand, Burke has been fading in importance for a long time. After his revenge story fizzled, he never really found a new reason to be on the show. His relationship with Vicki might have made things happen when he was still in conflict with the Collinses. She would then have found herself torn between her lover and the family that had all but adopted her. But once Burke and the Collinses patched things up, there was no obstacle between him and Vicki. In the last few days, it has seemed that she might even be able to stay in the house and keep her job after marrying him. There has been a theme where Burke tried to gaslight Vicki out of believing in supernatural phenomena that he himself had plenty of evidence to suppose were real, but that was less a storyline than a speed bump. Burke’s part was recast after the charismatic Mitch Ryan showed up for #252 too drunk to work; since then he has been played by the woefully miscast Anthony George, and it has been obvious that the character needed to be written out of the show before he did permanent damage to George’s career. So maybe Burke won’t come back after all.

Meanwhile, in the Old House on the same estate, vampire Barnabas Collins is moping around while mad scientist Julia Hoffman works on her notes about her attempt to turn him into a real boy. When she asks if there is anything she can do to lighten his mood, he sarcastically suggests that they play a game of cards or of cribbage. She’s up for either one, but he says that he won’t be happy until Vicki comes to him. He doesn’t know about Burke’s accident, but has somehow convinced himself that Vicki’s personality will eventually disappear and be replaced with that of his long-lost love Josette, and that as Josette she will be his bride. Barnabas goes on so long about how wonderful it will be when the Josettified Vicki is in the house that we start to wonder just how the two of them will pass the time. The day may come when Barnabas is glad of a cribbage board.

Julia only recently committed her first murder. She and Barnabas killed her old medical school classmate Dave Woodard a week ago, and she is still reeling from the shock of it. One thing she has settled on is the fact that she is going to be linked to Barnabas for the rest of her life. It doesn’t seem likely that she will ever be able to tell anyone else about Woodard, and being a murderer is, like it or not, an important part of her identity. So no one other than Barnabas can ever really know her. She’s making the best of this by trying to fall in love with him, but his sick obsession with reenacting the plot of the 1932 film The Mummy with himself in the Boris Karloff role and a woman in her early twenties in Zita Johanns’ double role as the dead princess and her reincarnation would seem to leave her at an impasse.

Julia presses Barnabas about his relationship with Josette. When he keeps insisting that the Josettified Vicki will come to him of her own free will, she asks if the original Josette ever did that. Barnabas’ silent grimace answers her question. She goes on to ask why Josette is so important to him if he was never very important to her. He says he will explain it all to her, but that they must have the proper setting. He leads her to the place of Josette’s death, the cliff at Widows’ Hill.

Barnabas has given us at least two versions of his relationship with Josette. In #212, he gave a speech to her portrait which implied that she was his grandmother, and that she sided with his father her son when he and Barnabas had a fateful clash. Soon after, Josette was retconned into Barnabas’ lost love. In #236, Barnabas was trying to brainwash Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, into thinking that she was Josette. He told her then that he had sailed with Josette from her home in the French West Indies to Collinwood, where she was to marry his uncle Jeremiah Collins. It was his task to teach her English on the voyage. Aboard ship, they fell in love. This reenactment of the tale of Tristan and Isolde ended as sadly as did the original, though the particulars of the story were not the same.

Now, Barnabas tells Julia that he met Josette for the first time when she arrived at Collinwood. He had taken no interest in his uncle’s betrothed until he saw her, but was stunned by her beauty and quickly fell in love with her. He found himself compelled to be “her good and faithful friend Barnabas,” a position he found humiliating. As a vampire, Barnabas is a metaphor for selfishness and cruelty, and so it is hardly surprising that he confines Julia to the same position with regard to himself and that he openly delights in her humiliation. It is a bit dizzying that she expresses so much sympathy for him, telling him in this scene that he never seems more human than when he talks about Josette.

In telling this latest version of the story, Barnabas says that as Josette came to feel that her youth was wasted on the elderly Jeremiah, it dawned on him that there was a way he could offer her eternal youth. This harks back to #233, when Barnabas told Vicki and Liz’ daughter Carolyn the story of Josette’s death, that she leapt off the cliff because she was being pursued by her lover. So we are to assume that Josette killed herself rather than let Barnabas turn her into a vampire. But it might suggest more than that. Whenever Barnabas met Josette, and whether it was aboard ship or on her arrival, he was not yet a vampire. We have not heard how he turned into one. Perhaps he involved himself in some kind of black magic in an attempt to keep himself and Josette young forever, and as a result he became a vampire and she fled from him to her death.

Vicki shows up and tells Barnabas and Julia about Burke. They are stunned. Julia’s reflex is to lean in and touch Vicki’s arm, Barnabas’ is to stagger back.

Barnabas quickly senses opportunity, and he shoos Julia away. He says that she was complaining of the cold and that for the sake of her health she ought not to stay. She is so obviously humiliated that only Vicki’s absorption in her own distress keeps her from noticing.

Barnabas plays the “good and faithful friend,” and Vicki looks over the edge of the cliff. She talks about the widows who have thrown themselves to their deaths from it over the years. She says that she had at first assumed that they were just “make-believe creatures,” but that if she thought Burke were really gone she would throw herself after them. Barnabas grabs her and urges her to stop such talk.

As this goes on, we hear the “Widows’ Wail,” a sound effect prominent in the early months of the show that the uninitiated mistake for wind, but that indicates something terrible is about to happen. When Vicki and Burke had their final conversation yesterday, they heard it, and he refused to admit its meaning. Vicki and Barnabas hear it now. The Widows bewail upcoming disasters, and Burke is already dead. Barnabas tells Vicki that she will be a bride very soon, and she nods and repeats, “A bride… very soon.” As she does, the Wail sounds louder than before.

Closing Miscellany

This episode includes one of the most famous bloopers in the entire series. When Liz is on the telephone getting the news about Burke’s plane crash, she refers to “That place in Brazil… (long pause)… (separate, equally long pause)… (fidget)… (different kind of pause)… Belém!” It is a wonder to behold.

This episode was taped on 16 October 1967. On the 28th of that month, Alexandra Moltke married Philip Isles. So, whether or not Vicki was going to become “a bride very soon,” her player was. The wedding announcement in The New York Times doesn’t mention Dark Shadows; it does mention that “Mrs David Ford” was part of the bridal party. That Mrs David Ford was Nancy Barrett, who played Carolyn, and her Mr Ford played Maggie’s father Sam.

From The New York Times, 29 October 1967

Neither Mrs Isles’ marriage to Philip nor Miss Barrett’s to David Ford lasted very long. Mrs Isles is still known as Mrs Isles, even though she was married to a doctor named Alfred Jaretzki for 33 years, ending with his death in 2014. By the time she met Jaretzki, she was a nationally known documentary filmmaker, and there is her son Adam Isles, the father of her three grandchildren and a former high official of the US government. So I suppose it made sense to stick with that name. In any case, I doubt very much that the widows were wailing for her.

My wife, Mrs Acilius, mentioned that even though we have seen the whole series before, she fully expected Barnabas to push Julia off the cliff. The episode pulled her in so completely that she didn’t stop to tell herself that she would have remembered if he’d done that.

Episode 344: Listen to the music, listen!

Strange and troubled boy David Collins is sitting on his bed. The ghost of his cousin Sarah is with him, playing “London Bridge” on her flute. She has told him that local physician Dave Woodard is dead, and he is depressed. She explains that she thought she had to tell him.

Sarah says she thinks that Woodard’s death was a terrible one and that it shouldn’t have happened. She denies knowing any more than that, and when David presses her for further information she becomes uncomfortable and vanishes.

David’s aunt, matriarch Liz, comes into his room to break the news to him about Woodard. She is startled to find that he already knows. She is distressed at his attitude of complete resignation. Woodard was the only adult who believed all of the facts about the supernatural menace looming over the great estate of Collinwood and the town of Collinsport that David and Sarah have shared with each other, and when David last saw him Woodard was trying to do something about that menace. David takes Woodard’s death as the end of all hope.

Downstairs, Liz meets her daughter Carolyn and well-meaning governess Vicki. She tells them how sad David is, and Carolyn goes up to see him. She starts talking about imaginary friends, and David asks if she means Sarah. Carolyn says that she doesn’t think Sarah is imaginary, and David replies “You don’t have to pretend. I don’t care.” He isn’t the least bit angry with her- he means exactly what he says when he tells her he doesn’t care how she feels about him.

Viewers who have been with the show from the beginning could see that reaction coming. For the first 24 weeks or so, Carolyn was a flighty heiress, a self-centered young woman who took no interest at all in her little cousin. Since then they have discarded that theme and Carolyn has become a mature and caring person. She and David have had some moments where she has seemed like a big sister. Still, she is still far less involved with him than is Vicki, and David doesn’t have any hopes that even Vicki will listen to him when he tells the truth about the strange goings-on. So when David says “I don’t care,” Carolyn is hit by a freight train that we’ve seen coming for a long time.

This new Carolyn won’t give up on David. She confides that when she was nine years old, she had a friend named Randy, a little boy who always wore a red sweater and who may or may not have existed. Carolyn admits that Randy may have been a ghost, and there is a moment when, as Danny Horn puts it on his Dark Shadows Every Day, “David stands up, and he looks at her, as if they’re really seeing each other for the first time in a long while.” The first time ever, I’d say- David and his father Roger only moved into the house a month or so before the show started, and by that time Carolyn was the character we first saw.

This isn’t the first time the audience has seen this side of Carolyn. In the opening weeks of Dark Shadows, she was one of several characters who had brief conversations with Vicki about the legendary ghosts of Collinwood, and she was the most persistent about laughing those legends off. But before the show had been on the air for five weeks, Carolyn admitted to Vicki that the legends were all true, and that she had tried to downplay them only because she liked Vicki and wanted her to stay.

That development is recapitulated in this scene. Where Vicki had reacted with confusion, telling herself that she ought to be concerned about Carolyn’s mental health but unable to quash a sickly feeling that she might be right, David reacts with wonderment. He is beyond trying to do anything about the horrors that he knows are in progress, let alone appealing to anyone to join him in fighting them, but we can see him absorbing the information that Carolyn is not at all the person she had led him to believe she was.

Once Carolyn stops pretending she does not believe in ghosts, we see why she and the other adults in the family are so insistent about keeping the door shut on the supernatural back-world behind the main action. “London Bridge” starts playing on the soundtrack; Carolyn and David can both hear it. As it goes on, David declares that something terrible is about to happen. It will be an accident- no one will cause it, no one wants it to happen. But it can’t be stopped. Carolyn asks how he knows, and he says he just does.

David communes with the spirits. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The little girl we saw in the opening is Sarah, but in this moment we realize she is not the whole of Sarah. The girl is only one manifestation of an unfathomably vast complex of phenomena. The world in which the action appears to be taking place is a tiny, fragile thing by comparison with forces like Sarah. If the characters stray from their little paths of denial and evasion the whole thing may at any moment dissolve altogether, thrusting the back-world into the foreground and leaving them adrift. After a few minutes of David’s soothsaying, Carolyn protests that “None of this is real, it can’t be!” But it’s too late- she knows that it is all too real, and the world of love affairs and hotels and motorcycles and dress shops and restaurants in which she has spent the last 69 weeks trying to find a place is a dream from which she is already starting to awaken.

Meanwhile, Vicki and her depressing fiancé Burke have declined Liz’ offer to live in the west wing of Collinwood when they are married. Liz had hoped to keep Vicki around so that she could help with David. When Burke asks if he should talk to David, Liz tells him not to bother. Carolyn already talked to him, Liz explains, and so far from calming David down she got herself upset too.

That response would suggest that Liz wants to tranquilize David, not to communicate with him. On the heels of the scene between David and Carolyn, it tells us more. Liz has lived in Collinwood longer than anyone, and she has struggled harder than anyone to keep the non-supernatural fore-world in operation. After Carolyn’s experiment in facing facts comes so close to sweeping the “logical explanations” away once and for all, we can see what Liz is trying to protect by keeping David quiet.

Burke is leaving the house, about to go on a business trip to South America, when David emerges from his room and says goodbye. David’s tone makes it clear that it is a final farewell. Burke keeps telling David that he will come back, but David is certain that Burke will die. Burke is shocked by David’s attitude, and says that perhaps they should live in the west wing after all. Vicki is thrilled by the idea.

Burke and Vicki go to a terrace outside the house. There, they hear the wind whistling through the rocks along the shore. On Vicki’s first night in the house, she heard from Liz’ brother Roger the legend of “The Widows’ Wail,” according to which this sound is a warning from the spirits of the widows who haunt the area. In those days, Vicki had little patience for ghost stories, and the “Widows’ Wail” seemed to be the easiest of all the legends to dismiss. But the wind blows every night, and she’s only heard it make that sound on a handful of occasions, usually right before something terrible happens. She’s also seen multiple ghosts, done battle with a humanoid Phoenix, and encountered what anyone with access to old movies would recognize as evidence that a vampire is operating in the vicinity. So she hears the Widows’ Wail the same way regular viewers of the show do, as the sound of the supernatural back-world blasting through and knocking everything else down.

Vicki hears the Widows’ Wail. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

When Vicki pleads with Burke not to go to South America, he replies “Don’t tell me you’re starting to believe all that stuff!” For months now, Burke has been gaslighting Vicki, pretending that she is crazy for believing in supernatural phenomena, including phenomena he himself witnessed and previously acknowledged. But hearing the Widows’ Wail, which was a prominent topic in the early days, and seeing the black and white imagery of the kinescope, we can remember a more appealing version of Burke. Back then, Burke was one of several longtime residents of Collinsport who used the word “ghost” figuratively in conversation with Vicki, each time prompting her to exclaim “Surely you don’t believe in ghosts!?,” to which he would reply that it was entirely possible that there were literal ghosts at Collinwood. For a moment, we see that Burke, and forget the gaslighting abuser. That moment lasts just long enough that we can share David’s sorrow and Vicki’s terror at Burke’s imminent death.

Episode 343: Not as a monster

Vampire Barnabas Collins is in a chirpy mood. He and his associate, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, have just committed the premeditated murder of Julia’s medical school classmate Dave Woodard. As we saw when Barnabas made his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie to help him hide the corpse of seagoing con man Jason McGuire, nothing makes him happier than forcing someone to help with the killing of a former friend.

I think the actors were placed behind the laboratory apparatus intentionally, to highlight the characters’ helplessness and isolation.

Today, Julia wants to stop her attempt to cure Barnabas of vampirism, but he won’t hear of it. When she tells him she might try to kill him instead of curing him, Barnabas relishes telling her that he trusts her completely. She does knock him out of his blissful state when she suggests that if she manages to turn him into a real boy, he might have a conscience. He gives a little speech in which he says some brave things about being willing to accept the punishment fitting a man who had done the things he has done if he also gains the ability to love as a man can love. Jonathan Frid puts enough into this speech that it is possible to sympathize with Barnabas in the moment that he is delivering it.

That moment doesn’t last very long. By the end of the episode, we are back on this set, where Julia says that “someone” might love Barnabas as he is, and he takes delight in her humiliation as he makes it obvious that he knows she is referring to herself.

Some say that Barnabas’ speech about wanting to love is meant to make the character more likable, but it has the opposite effect when he so smoothly transitions back into this gleeful cruelty. The other day, Julia told Barnabas that she had wondered whether he was capable of feeling any emotions at all, but we see in this scene what we’ve seen all along, that he is nothing but emotion. Except when he is acting, trying to convince the living members of the Collins family that he is their long-lost cousin from England, his feelings are right on the surface. For a minute or two, he has some feelings about love and justice, and we see those very clearly. But that is a brief interlude in the middle of his entirely gratuitous torture of Julia. We are left in no doubt that he takes an utterly unmixed pleasure in causing her pain. We’ve already seen very cold villains on Dark Shadows and before the series ends we will see more, but by the end of this scene Barnabas claims the crown of most detestable character ever to appear on the show. It’s so hard to imagine how he could possibly sustain such a level of malignity that it’s no wonder viewers still keep tuning in to see what he will do next.

The main theme of the episode is the contrast between Barnabas’ relationship with Julia and his relationship with well-meaning governess Vicki. For the first 39 weeks of Dark Shadows, Vicki was the audience’s main point-of-view character; now Julia is the one who knows what we know, and who makes things happen when she learns new information. Seeing Barnabas first with one woman, then with the other, we see how the show has been changing since he joined the cast.

Barnabas eavesdrops on Vicki’s conversation with her depressing fiancé Burke on the terrace at the great house of Collinwood, then slides in and claims to have inadvertently overheard the last few words of their conversation. Burke gives Barnabas a dirty look, then excuses himself to do some telephoning while Vicki and Barnabas stay on the terrace and talk for a little while.

Barnabas has some vague idea of seducing Vicki, an idea he has been remarkably desultory about pursuing. In this scene, he does the only thing he has ever really got round to doing about it, which is to listen sympathetically while Vicki tells him her troubles. This time, she’s trying to convince herself that she wants what Burke wants, which is to get away from Collinwood and start a new life somewhere else. It isn’t an exciting situation, but Alexandra Moltke Isles delivers her lines with so much urgency that it holds our attention.

Vicki shares her anguish with her kindly friend Barnabas

Julia eavesdrops on this conversation. She looks miserable. Whatever she may have had in mind when she first came to Collinwood, Julia is stuck with Barnabas for the foreseeable future. Not only has Julia murdered one of her oldest friends for Barnabas’ sake, she has involved herself so deeply in so many of his activities that it is unclear how she would go back to the successful professional life she had before she met him even if he were destroyed. If he is going to spend his time hanging around other women, she faces a drab prospect.

In the drawing room, Burke, Vicki, and Julia talk about the death of Dr Woodard. Julia can’t bear the topic, and excuses herself to go out to the terrace. There, she catches a glimpse of Woodard’s ghost. Julia screams, Burke and Vicki come, and all she can do when they ask what’s wrong is to keep jabbering that “he wasn’t there.”

There are some rough patches in the script today. For example, in the opening, Julia is touching the equipment when Barnabas exclaims “Don’t stop!” This is puzzling- she doesn’t appear to be stopping anything. And when Julia says “He wasn’t there,” Vicki has to ask “Who wasn’t there?” A person might reflexively say such a thing, and Mrs Isles’ rapid delivery of the line and simultaneous movement of the neck and the shoulders suggest such a reflex. That’s probably the best choice any actor could have made, but the line still gets a bad laugh. Barnabas and Julia’s successive eavesdropping expeditions also come off as some kind of joke, and all the scenes take too long. The whole thing could have used another trip through the typewriter. Still, writer Joe Caldwell was at his best with miniature character studies, and while he may not have had the time he needed to give this one his usual polish, the actors still have more than enough to show what they can do. It’s a fairly good outing, all things considered.

Episode 342: Perfectly natural

Word spreads that local physician Dave Woodard has died. Several people fear that he may have been murdered. At the end of the episode, artist Sam Evans and his daughter Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town, get a phone call from the sheriff. An autopsy has been conducted, and Woodard’s death has been ruled a heart attack.

Relieved, Maggie smiles and says that Woodard’s death was the result of natural causes. She is repeating the word “natural” when a sound like that of flatulence is heard. She breaks off at “natur-” and looks wonderingly at Sam.

If Kathryn Leigh Scott had played the scene straight through, we could have thought that the sound came from a piece of equipment turning at a joint that hadn’t had enough oil or something like that. Her reaction leaves little doubt that David Ford had made a little television history.

Considering that the show was done essentially live-to-tape, I guess it was just a matter of time before an actor audibly broke wind on camera. At least the perpetrator wasn’t someone who is supposed to seem sexy.

Episode 341: A fatal curiosity

Mad scientist Julia Hoffman and vampire Barnabas Collins are visiting Dr Dave Woodard in his office. Woodard has stolen the notebook in which Julia has recorded the truth about Barnabas and is planning to hand it over to the sheriff. At Barnabas’ insistence, Julia has prepared a hypodermic with a potion that will induce a heart attack. He orders her to give Woodard the lethal injection.

In her reluctance to kill her onetime friend, Julia suggests that Barnabas turn Woodard into a vampire. Julia believes she will soon find a cure for vampirism. So, Woodard will just be one more patient who will benefit from her imminent success. Neither he nor Barnabas receives her brainstorm with any great enthusiasm.

Woodard claims that, even if he became a vampire, he would have free will and would be able to fight Barnabas and destroy himself. He then asserts that Barnabas, too, has the ability to do the right thing. As viewers of drama, we are predisposed to believe that characters whom we hear talking and who have motivations we can understand are at liberty to choose what they will do, so we may believe that Woodard is right. But we haven’t seen any evidence to support his contention.

Julia keeps trying to postpone the killing. Exasperated with her procrastination, Barnabas tells her to hand him the hypodermic. She does so. As he is about to give the shot, Woodard claims to see the ghost of Barnabas’ little sister Sarah. Barnabas is so desperate to see Sarah that he falls for this and lets Woodard go. Julia calls out “Stop him!”

Barnabas is furious that Woodard has hit him at his most sensitive spot. As he regains his grip on Woodard, he jabs him in the shoulder with the needle. While Woodard crumples at his feet, Barnabas picks up on the words Woodard had earlier used to describe him, exclaiming “Loathsome I am, and evil! You can mock me for that, but leave my pain alone!” Even after that exclamation, Barnabas asks Julia if Sarah really was there. We don’t see her, but we do hear the strains of “London Bridge,” a song that has always before told us that Sarah is present.

Barnabas places Woodard’s corpse in the desk chair. He appears to be enjoying himself hugely while he taunts Julia for her squeamishness. He asks her, as a medical doctor, to verify that Woodard is dead; she can’t bring herself even to look at the body. She wants to leave immediately; he asks if she plans to leave the needle on Woodard’s desk. Once she puts the murder weapon in her purse, she again wants to rush out; he asks if she is planning to leave the notebook in Woodard’s pocket.

Even after they return to his house, Barnabas continues tormenting Julia. He tells her she will soon grow accustomed to her new identity as a murderer. She resists the label, and he magnanimously agrees to share half the responsibility for the killing. She says she will stop trying to cure him and go away; he tells her that will no longer be possible. They need each other more than ever now. When he tells her that he is her only friend, she hears Woodard’s voice saying “You no longer have friends.” As those words sound, so do the notes of “London Bridge.”

Barnabas is at his most compelling in these scenes, thanks to the actor who plays him. Jonathan Frid’s style of acting was rather old-fashioned even in 1967, but his achievement today is extraordinary. He takes us on a dizzying ride from horror at the brutal killing of Dr Woodard, to pity for the vastly lonely man longing for his little sister, and back to horror at Barnabas’ glee in bestowing the title of murderer on Julia. I can’t imagine any performer doing a better job.

The killing of Dr Woodard is quite a shock. It is only the second premeditated murder we see on Dark Shadows. Undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins used black magic to cause parapsychologist Peter Guthrie to have a fatal car crash in #186. There’s no magic this time- this is a plain old death by poisoning. We also saw Barnabas kill seagoing con man Jason McGuire, but that was not a premeditated act. Jason opened Barnabas’ coffin at sunset, and Barnabas, apparently by reflex, strangled him. That’s a reflex many of us might understand, I’m certainly not at my best when I first wake up. So when Barnabas wrestles with Woodard and jabs him with the needle, we are entering new territory.

When Julia and Barnabas are back in his house, she throws the needle into the fireplace. The Dark Shadows wiki disapproves of this action:

The destruction of the murder weapon was taken more lightly in this scene than it would have been in real life. The heat from a normal fireplace would not be hot enough to melt glass. The metal needle would have been blackened, and if someone looked through the ashes thoroughly, it would have been discovered. Had the syringe been discovered, Woodard’s death would have been ruled a homicide.
Dark Shadows wiki, episode 341.

I don’t see why the presence of a warmed-over medical sharp in Barnabas’ fireplace would mean that “Woodard’s death would have been ruled a homicide.” The police haven’t made any connection between Woodard’s death and Barnabas’ house. Even if they had, they would have no reason to suppose a hypodermic needle in his fireplace would have anything to do with Woodard. Julia is keeping it quiet that she is a medical doctor, but it isn’t a secret from the authorities. She spends most of her time at Barnabas’ house and is treating him for what she believes to be a rare blood disease, so she’s likely to have all sorts of medical supplies there. It is never specified what the chemical was that caused Woodard’s death, but if it was potassium chloride, it would have had the effects Julia describes and the heat of the fireplace would be sufficient to cause it to disappear without a trace in a little flash of dark purple flame. And of course potassium chloride dissolves in the bloodstream so completely that even a large dose of it cannot be detected in a normal postmortem examination. Unless they had dripped some of it into Woodard’s ashtray, Julia and Barnabas would have no reason to believe that the police would be looking for potassium chloride.

Julia moves to throw her notebook into the fire after the needle. Barnabas intercepts it in a move that looks so much like what you’d see on a basketball court that I count it as a blooper.

“Hoffman goes up, and is DENIED by Collins!” Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

In between the scenes with Barnabas and Julia, there is some stuff with the sheriff and artist Sam Evans. The sheriff ambles into The Blue Whale tavern and finds Sam starting his fourth shot of whisky. They talk about Woodard, and Sam insists they go to his office to look for him. For the first 40 weeks of Dark Shadows, Sam’s alcoholism was a substantial story element, part of the “Revenge of Burke Devlin” arc. When that arc finally dried up in #201, Sam’s alcoholism went away. He’s a social drinker now. Still, he used to be the town drunk, and apparently that’s a higher post than sheriff. The sheriff follows Sam’s orders and accompanies him to Woodard’s office.

They knock on the office door. There is no answer. Sam suggests they break the door down. They haven’t tried to turn the knob, so they have no reason to suppose it is locked. Returning viewers will recall that yesterday Julia just walked into the office, without even knocking, and she and Barnabas did not lock the door behind them. So we can be fairly sure it is not locked. Still, orders are orders, so when the Town Drunk (Retired) says it’s time to break the door down, the sheriff watches him respectfully. Of course the whole set is made of a sheet of plywood, so when Sam “flings himself” against the door, he has to maintain a ludicrous gentleness to keep any part of it standing.

Inside, they find Woodard dead in his chair. Their response is bewildering. At first they are going to call for help, but then decide that because Woodard is dead there is no point. Eventually the sheriff remembers that he ought to call the coroner. They also take turns declaring that they believe Woodard’s death was the result of foul play.

Episode 340: Medical silence

Dave Woodard, MD, has learned that Barnabas Collins is a vampire and mad scientist Julia Hoffman is his co-conspirator. We see Barnabas at home, pressuring Julia into helping him murder Woodard before he can go to the authorities. After a great show of reluctance, Julia prepares a hypodermic of some potion or other that will induce cardiac arrest. When Barnabas insists she administer the lethal injection herself, Julia resumes her attempt to find a way out. Barnabas finally allows her to go to Woodard and tell him that his only options are to cooperate with them and make a great contribution to medical science, or to go out into the night and suffer an unimaginably horrible death when Barnabas catches him.

Julia does go to Woodard’s office, and does deliver this message. Woodard replies that he doesn’t have to go anywhere to tell the sheriff about Barnabas and Julia. He picks up his telephone and starts dialing. High-pitched sounds play, and Woodard sees the shadow of a bat at his window. Yesterday we heard that Julia considered Woodard the most brilliant student in their medical school class, and we can see why- even though this was decades before Covid-19 or Nipah or other bat-borne viruses were in the news, he is transfixed by the outline of the squeaky little guy.

Perhaps Woodard is less prescient about bats as vectors for disease than he is mindful of the experiences of his young friend, strange and troubled boy David Collins. In #330, Barnabas sent a large bat to frighten David in his bedroom. Today, Barnabas materializes inside Woodard’s office after the bat has done its thing outside. This is the first indication we have had that Barnabas has the power to transport himself through walls.

Unfortunately, the National Association of Broadcast Engineers and Technicians were on strike during principal photography for this episode. No doubt the process shot of Barnabas’ materialization was added after they came back to work, but they could do only so much with the footage that the network executives and other amateurs had left them. The Barnabas who appears in Woodard’s office today is about three feet tall and is missing a chunk of his head.

That mini-Bar doesn’t stock anything you want to drink. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Mini-Bar may be the funniest consequence of this attempt at strikebreaking, but there is another that isn’t amusing at all. Woodard is played by some stooge who took over the part when Robert Gerringer, who has been struggling valiantly since May to find something interesting to highlight in a character who usually doesn’t know anything and isn’t allowed to advance the plot, honored the NABET picket line. The scab annoys the audience every time he opens his mouth today, breathing directly onto his microphone, getting tangled up in trivial lines, and veering between a barking tone and a whine as high-pitched as the sounds the bat makes.

The result of his incompetence is that a conflict the audience is supposed to be experiencing as suspense does not come off. We’re supposed to be torn as Julia is torn, wanting Woodard’s threat to the continuation of the story to be removed, but feeling horror at the thought that he will be killed. Gerringer could have made us feel those incompatible desires, but this alleged actor makes us want nothing but that he be removed from our television screens as soon as possible and by any means necessary. So we find ourselves cheerfully rooting for the vampire and the mad scientist to get on with murder.

Episode 339: Even greater fool

This episode was taped during a National Association of Broadcast Engineers and Technicians strike. While the camera operators picketed outside, network executives and other amateurs were handling the equipment. It shows. As the episode begins, there is a lot of chatter and miscellaneous noise off camera; none of the shots is properly focused; each zoom shot moves at alarmingly fast pace; and at one point the camera swings wild. Dark Shadows was produced under such poor conditions that any one of those things might have made its way even into an episode made by trained professionals, but today is the single roughest cut yet.

At least the technical incompetence of the suits has some funny results. That can’t be said of the work of the alleged actor scabbing in the role of Dr Dave Woodard. Robert Gerringer, who started playing Woodard in May, honored his union obligations and refused to cross the NABET picket line; the stooge replacing him is so monotonous in his delivery of dialogue and so undistinguished in his bodily movement that he is little more than a blank spot on the screen. Much of this episode is devoted to him rummaging around looking for some papers; it would take considerably more skill than non-Woodard ever displays to make that interesting to watch.

The actor is so dull that he ruins one of the major sources of suspense. We ought to be conflicted about Barnabas’ plan to kill Woodard, because while we want the story to advance and Barnabas to stay on the show, we don’t want the good guys to be killed. Moreover, Woodard is the only one now who fully understands and supports one of our favorite characters, strange and troubled boy David. We certainly shouldn’t want David to lose his only backer. But this guy is such a waste of screen space that it is fatally easy for us to root for the character’s death.

There are a few interesting moments scattered here and there in Ron Sproat’s script. Mad scientist Julia Hoffman tells vampire Barnabas Collins that she tried to quell Woodard’s suspicions by telling him Barnabas had a rare blood disease that she was trying to treat. In fact, Julia does believe that vampirism is a rare blood disease, and she is trying to cure Barnabas of it, so she wasn’t lying when she told him that. It’s always startling to find Julia resorting to the truth.

Julia also tells Barnabas that Woodard came up with an idea she has encouraged him to believe, that she is in love with Barnabas. Barnabas laughs at this notion, and Julia objects that it doesn’t seem so preposterous to her. An incredulous look on his face, Barnabas glances at her wig, then at her clothes. He has a point- it really does not look like an ensemble a woman would wear if she was into dudes.

Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Yesterday’s episode gave us several clues that Julia is in fact attracted to Barnabas. Today, she not only seems hurt when Barnabas laughs at the idea she might be falling for him, but she flashes a look of jealousy later when he says something extravagantly complimentary about well-meaning governess Vicki. As my wife, Mrs Acilius, pointed out, this makes it rather unsettling when Julia remarks that she had thought Barnabas was incapable of feeling any emotion, even fear. We know that Julia is a very strange person, but as we find out what she looks for in a partner we start to wonder just how strange she is.

Barnabas is bewildered by everything Julia says and does. When she says she is surprised that he is frightened by Woodard’s investigation into him, he says that of course he is frightened, as it could easily result in his extinction. When she goes on to say that she had thought him a totally unemotional being, he becomes for a moment the audience’s point of view character- he doesn’t say anything, just gives her a look as if she is completely nuts.

At the moment, Barnabas is especially vulnerable because Julia is keeping her notes on the experiment in a little box in her bedroom at the great house of Collinwood. That is an odd place for them. She presumably makes the notes while she is working in her laboratory in the basement of Barnabas’ house, and she consults them while she is there. The laboratory is well-hidden- Woodard and local man Burke Devlin searched the basement in #333, and found no trace of it. So it doesn’t make any sense to create another danger of exposure by keeping them anywhere but there. Of course Woodard sneaks into Julia’s room today and finds the notes.

Housekeeper Mrs Johnson is in this one, after fourteen and a half weeks away. In fact, it’s only her second appearance since #211, the episode in which she was the first character to exchange lines with Barnabas. It’s great to have her back, though of course it saddens me that Clarice Blackburn crossed a picket line.

Episode 338: Suspicion itself

Dr Dave Woodard is onto vampire Barnabas Collins’ terrible secret. Woodard doesn’t think he can share his suspicions with the sheriff or a medical colleague or an expert in the supernatural or with any of his friends. Still, he has to tell someone. So he has gone to Barnabas and told him all about it. Barnabas tells him he’s crazy and orders him out of his house.

On his way out, Woodard crosses paths with his medical school classmate and onetime friend Julia Hoffman. He had introduced Julia to the case of Barnabas’ victim Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, hoping that her dual qualification as an expert in psychiatry and hematology meant that she would be the perfect person to find out what happened to Maggie. He knows now that Barnabas was the source of Maggie’s troubles, and that Julia has gone over to Barnabas’ side. The doctors engage in a brief verbal sparring match, then Julia goes into the house. Woodard pretends to leave, then crouches by the window where we have already seen several people eavesdrop on Barnabas’ conversations. Even though Julia herself is one of those people, neither she nor Barnabas thinks to look out the window before they launch into a hugely incriminating conversation.

Among the more important pieces of information Woodard learns are that Julia is performing an experiment on Barnabas, that she is keeping notes on that experiment, and that she keeps those notes in a box in her room at the great house of Collinwood. For some unaccountable reason, she thinks that no one will look for them there.

Barnabas demands that Julia find out how much Woodard knows. He butters her up a bit, telling her that while she has said that Woodard was the most brilliant student in their medical school class, he is sure he can’t have been more than the second most brilliant. He even calls her “my dear,” the first time he has addressed her as anything more affectionate than “doctor.” She is facing away from him when he says all this, and we see her brighten. By the time she exits, she looks positively blissful.

Julia thrills to Barnabas’ non-hostile talk.

Perhaps this suggests that Julia is falling in love with Barnabas. She does get carried away with sympathy for him earlier in the scene, when he is whining about his situation and she exclaims “Poor Barnabas!” Perhaps it’s just that she has been spending all her time with him for months and is relieved to get some friendly attention. Whatever the cause of it, her excitement must be considerable- she even allows herself to bring up a topic to which she has never before so much as alluded, and says that “They didn’t take me as seriously as they should have because I’m a woman.”

Julia calls on Woodard at his office. She tries to sell him on an idea he himself had in #324, that she’s hanging around because she’s fallen in love with Barnabas. He confronts her with a list of the medical supplies she has ordered recently. She ignores the list and keeps saying that she is just a woman in love. Woodard isn’t having it, and she ultimately resorts to warning him that for his own good, he must stop asking questions.

Meanwhile, there is some activity at the great house. Well-meaning governess Vicki receives a visit from her depressing fiancé Burke. The two of them had hoped to buy a “house by the sea” that turned out to be unsaleable because of provisions in an old Collins family will. Matriarch Liz eavesdrops as they talk about this, then enters the room and offers to let them live in the long-abandoned west wing of Collinwood until the house they want becomes available. Vicki loves the idea, Burke is hesitant.

This echoes a theme of the first few months of the show, when Burke wanted to take possession of Collinwood and throw the Collinses out. In response, Liz vowed that Burke would never spend a night under its roof. This offer shows viewers who have been watching from the beginning how far we have come since those days.

I wonder if that vase is full of Cheetos

Episode 337: Disowned

We open on a set we haven’t seen since #180, the archives of the old cemetery north of town. There, a scene plays out between two actors who aren’t really on the show. Daniel F. Keyes created the role of the Caretaker of the cemetery; Robert Gerringer took over the role of Dr Dave Woodard some months ago and did as much with it as anyone could. But neither of those men was willing to cross a picket line and break the National Association of Broadcast Engineers and Technicians strike, and so they were replaced with a couple of stooges.

The stooges are both terrible. Patrick McCray, Danny Horn, and John and Christine Scoleri all go into detail documenting non-Woodard’s incompetence, but the non-Caretaker is just as bad. Patrick McCray memorably described the Caretaker, in Keyes’ realization, as a “refugee from the EC comics universe.” This fellow has none of Keyes’ zest or whimsy; he simply recites his lines.

At one point, the non-Caretaker tells non-Woodard that it will take some time for him to locate the document he is asking about. Non-Woodard replies “Take your time!” We then have about ninety seconds of the non-Caretaker sorting through papers. The show is moving away from the real-time staging that had often marked its earlier phases, so this comes as a surprise.

The episodes in which the archive set was introduced included a lot of talk about the geography of the cemeteries around the town of Collinsport. They told us that the old cemetery north of town was the resting place of the Stockbridges, Radcliffes, and some other old families, but that most of the Collinses were buried in their own private cemetery elsewhere. They also mentioned a public cemetery closer to town where the remains of less aristocratic Collinsporters might be found. In today’s opening scene, non-Woodard tells the non-Caretaker that they had met previously in Eagle Hill Cemetery. Eagle Hill is the name now associated with the old cemetery north of town. So perhaps this building, which also houses a tomb in which several of the Stockbridges were laid to rest, is not in Eagle Hill Cemetery, but one of the others.

In his last few episodes, Robert Gerringer had a couple of scenes in which he and David Henesy established a close relationship between Woodard and strange and troubled boy David Collins. Today, non-Woodard sits on the couch in the drawing room at Collinwood and tells David he has come to believe everything he has been saying, including the stories that have led the other adults to call in a psychiatrist. As my wife, Mrs Acilius, pointed out, that would have been a great payoff from Gerringer’s earlier scenes if he had been in it. It might have been effective enough if any competent actor had played the part of Woodard. Certainly Mr Henesy’s performance gives non-Woodard plenty to respond to. But he barks out his lines as if they were written in all-caps with randomly distributed exclamation points. It is a miserable disappointment.

There is also a scene where David’s father, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger, tries to convince his sister, matriarch Liz, that they ought to send David to military school. This both harks back to the first 39 weeks of Dark Shadows, when Roger openly hated his son and jumped at every chance to send him away, and illustrates the changes that have taken place since then, as Liz acknowledges that Roger is motivated by a sincere concern for David’s well-being. The scene is intelligently written and exquisitely acted. The high caliber of their work makes it all the more distressing to see Joan Bennett and Louis Edmonds on a scab job. David Henesy was ten years old, and had a stereotypical stage mother, so you can excuse his presence and marvel at his accomplished performance. But these two old pros don’t have any business on the wrong side of a strike.

Nor does Jonathan Frid. When non-Woodard goes to confront Barnabas, there are moments when Frid seems to be showing his own irritation with his scene-mate more than his character’s with his adversary. As well he might- neither man knows his lines particularly well, but even when Frid stops and looks down he expresses emotions Barnabas might well be feeling, and he is fascinating to watch. When non-Woodard doesn’t know what words he’s supposed to bark, he drifts away into nothing. But it serves Frid right to have to play off this loser- by this point, he knows full well that without him the show wouldn’t be on the air. He had no excuse at all for crossing that picket line.

The cemetery’s combination archive/ tomb was a prominent part of the storyline of undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. That storyline approached its climax in #183 when Peter Guthrie, PhD, confronted Laura in her home about being “The Undead,” prompting her to kill him. An episode beginning on that set and ending with someone holding a doctoral degree confronting an undead menace would seem to be an obvious callback to that story. Guthrie’s confrontation had a point- he wanted to offer to help Laura find a place in the world of the living if she would desist from her evil plans, an idea which Woodard’s old medical school classmate Dr Julia Hoffman picked up in her quest to cure Barnabas of vampirism. By contrast with Guthrie and Julia, Woodard is just being a fool.