Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, has gone missing. The audience knows that she is in the keeping of vampire Barnabas Collins and Barnabas’ sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie Loomis, but the show isn’t ready for any of the characters to get suspicious of Barnabas. So today is taken up with people bemoaning their ignorance of Maggie’s whereabouts.
To keep from stumbling upon information that might advance the plot, the sheriff and the doctor have to be idiots, and they both get particularly embarrassing scenes today. Not only does a frequently caustic commentator like Danny Horn mock them, but even the recap on the Dark Shadows wiki takes some potshots at their stupidity. It cites, as the sheriff’s most brilliant insight, that if Maggie is no longer where she was last seen, she “either got out… herself or was taken out by someone.” And it points out that the doctor goes on at length about the absolutely unique nature of Maggie’s ongoing illness, only to be reminded that Willie exhibited exactly the same symptoms a few weeks before.
Our point of view character in the first months of Dark Shadows was well-meaning governess Vicki. The other day Vicki received a phone call about Maggie from Willie, with whom she had spoken minutes before and who was not disguising his voice in any way. Somehow she failed to recognize him. They bring this up again today. They don’t replay the call, and she says that the voice was “muffled,” so people watching for the first time may not bracket her with the sheriff or the doctor among the show’s dum-dums. Regular viewers, however, will see further reason to despair that the characters will learn enough any time soon to get the story going again.
Seagoing con man Jason McGuire goes to Barnabas’ house and calls on Willie, who was originally his henchman. Jason is worried that Willie is attracting official attention, something which cannot be good for his own nefarious purposes. He refers to Barnabas as “His Nibs,” a phrase indiscreet housekeeper Mrs Johnson had applied to Jason himself in #185, and demands Willie leave town. Willie tells him he can’t do that. Willie threatens Jason with a hammer. Jason disarms Willie and beats him to the floor. As Jason leaves the house, he is surrounded by howling dogs and looks frightened.
Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, has vanished from her hospital bed. We start with a long succession of characters talking about this fact with Maggie’s father Sam. Had David Ford played Sam as effectively as he did in his first weeks on the show, one such exchange might have made for a good scene. But Ford is overacting today, and the first part of the episode drags on and on.
We cut to the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood, where Maggie’s boyfriend Joe and dashing action hero Burke Devlin have gone. Vampire Barnabas Collins resides in the Old House along with his sorely bedraggled blood thrall, Willie Loomis. Joe and Burke have no clue there is anything odd about Barnabas, but they don’t like Willie and suspect he may know what happened to Maggie.
Barnabas lets Joe and Burke in the house and explains that he sent Willie to run some errands for him out of town. When they tell him about the evidence that has led them to think Willie might be connected with Maggie’s disappearance, he persuades them that there is nothing to their suspicions. Once they are gone, he calls out “It’s all right, they’ve gone. You’re safe here- safe here with me.” Maggie walks into the room.
Barnabas talking to Burke
This scene is very good. Barnabas is made up to look much more like The Vampire than he has been in previous encounters with characters he was trying to fool into thinking he was a harmless eccentric recently arrived from overseas. He is polite enough to Joe and Burke that they can chalk his appearance up to the lateness of the hour, but as the audience watches him extract information from them point by point, until he knows exactly what they do and don’t know, we can see him calculating when and how he will have to kill them. It is as good a scene as Jonathan Frid has had since he debuted as Barnabas.
Frid’s performance in this scene benefits from his flawless line delivery. Not so, unfortunately, the scene that follows. His bobbles are not especially bad by Dark Shadows standards, but his task is far more fragile than any he has taken on before. We’ve seen him pretending to be the Collins family’s mild-mannered cousin from England; in those moments, Barnabas himself is taking on a challenging acting job, and Frid’s difficulties sometimes dovetail with troubles we might expect Barnabas to have in his performance. We’ve seen him abusing Willie; in those moments, we might expect him to sputter a bit, and Frid can hide some of his memory lapses in that mannerism. But now, he is telling Maggie what his plans are for her. As he does so, we realize he is a crazy man spilling out his deepest and sickest obsession. That context leaves nowhere to conceal even the slightest flub. As a sign of triumphant psychosis, the lines have to flow without interruption. Every time Frid stumbles for a fraction of a second, he breaks character.
Nor can Kathryn Leigh Scott bail him out. As Maggie, her part is to wander around in a stupor and occasionally repeat the last word or two of whatever is said to her. She makes that a lot more interesting to watch than you might expect, but there’s only so far it can take you.
Barnabas’ plan takes us outside the themes we are familiar with from vampire fiction. He wants to brainwash Maggie into thinking that she is Josette Collins, who has now been retconned into the woman Barnabas loved in his human days. His goal is that Maggie Evans will cease to exist, and that in her body Josette will live again.
Dracula never wanted to do anything like that, though after Dark Shadows has a hit with this storyline it will become part of vampire lore. Prince Mamuwalde, the menace in the 1972 film Blacula, kidnapped the heroine and tried to turn her into his long-dead love. Another undead fictional man from Africa had tried the same thing in 1932, when Imhotep, played by Boris Karloff, had spent the bulk of The Mummytrying to turn the heroine into a revived form of his adored Princess Ankh-esen-amun. Frid’s face and coloring were somewhat similar to those of Bela Lugosi, a fact often remarked in connection with his casting as a vampire. But his voice and movements are strongly reminiscent of Boris Karloff, and as a mashup of Dracula and Imhotep he is a synthesis of these two actors.
Barnabas gives Maggie a music box that he had intended to give Josette. He says that he bought it for Josette in his travels in “the Orient,” intending to give it to her “on a very special day,” and “this is that day.” This leaves us wondering why the day never came when he could give it to Josette. Did he become a vampire before he returned from his travels? Did he come back from his travels to find that she was no longer available to him? Or was it supposed to be a present at their wedding, a wedding that never occurred?
Barnabas also produces Josette’s wedding dress and tells Maggie that she, as the new Josette, will wear it. When Imhotep produces Ankh-esen-amun’s clothing and jewelry, we remember that royal personages in ancient Egypt were buried with their possessions and assume that he has retrieved them from her tomb. The show did lead us to wonder if the Collinses once had a similar practice. Willie released Barnabas because he had heard a story that some of the Collinses were buried with expensive jewelry and so was trying to rob a grave. The story of the buried jewels was framed as an echo of the Gothic romances that inspired the first weeks of Dark Shadows, but has now become an anticipation of the show’s journey into Universal Pictures’ back catalogue of horror movies.
If Barnabas does manage to somehow erase Maggie and bring Josette back to life in her body, it won’t be the first time Miss Scott has played Josette. In #70, Miss Scott was the ghost who emerged from Josette’s portrait and danced outside the Old House. Miss Scott put Josette’s veil on again in #126 when she led the ghosts who scared maniacal handyman Matthew Morgan to death before he could murder well-meaning governess Vicki. In that one, she delivered a few lines as Josette. Miss Scott’s name did not appear in the credits as Josette in either of those episodes, and the only time we caught a glimpse of Josette’s face was in #149, when she was played by stand-in Rosemary McNamara. But if by any odd chance a viewer does know that Miss Scott has played Josette before, the final dissolve from a closeup of Miss Scott to one of Josette’s portrait suggests a definite possibility that Barnabas’ plan, nonsensical though it seems, will somehow succeed.
Danny Horn’s post about this episode on his Dark Shadows Every Dayis particularly good. He compares its visual strategy to that of the one surviving contemporary segment of General Hospital, and praises the ambitious approach director Lela Swift took to composing images. I should also mention Patrick McCray’s Dark Shadows Daybook post, in which he analyzes the way the story alienates us from our rooting interest in Maggie’s safety by promising a more exciting story if Barnabas has his way with her for an extended period.
Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, is in the hospital with a mysterious ailment that may kill her at any moment. Her father Sam and her boyfriend Joe visit her there. Sam’s alcoholism and its effect on Maggie was a story element for the first 40 weeks of the show. Lately Sam has somehow become a social drinker, and early in today’s episode he shows zero interest when offered a drink. Still, when Maggie asks from her sickbed that he abstain from alcohol, he says “I’ll go on the wagon. I promise this time!”
The doctor tells Sam and Joe they have to leave the room to let Maggie sleep. The two of them stay in the hospital, sitting in a lounge, where Sam reminisces that he sat on that very spot waiting for Maggie to be born. Joe tries to reassure Sam that everything will be all right, but can’t conceal his own fears. As Sam, David Ford usually underacts. When he has gone big before, as he did especially in his first weeks on the show, he has been very effective. In his scene with Joe in the hospital lounge, he overacts for the first time, and it is pretty bad.
Sam starts crying, while Joe reacts with the embarrassment of a true New EnglanderSam asks Joe his opinion
This utterly typical soap opera material occurs in the context of a story no other daytime serial has told before, the attacks of a vampire. It is the undead Barnabas Collins who is the cause of Maggie’s illness. Most of the characters we see today think Dark Shadows is still a conventional soap of the period, and are at a loss to explain what is going on with Maggie.
Twice, the doctor seems to be forming a suspicion that might carry him in the direction of the truth. Before the ambulance comes to take Maggie from her house to the hospital, he says he has an idea that’s “too wild.” Well-meaning governess Vicki, who the other day suggested that Maggie’s condition and other events that the audience knows to have been caused by the vampire might have a supernatural origin, perks up and asks him to explain.
Vicki thinks the doctor might have something interesting to say.
The doctor then speculates that the wounds on Maggie’s neck may have been produced by an animal. Vicki allows that she heard some dogs outside the window before Maggie sustained her latest injury.
At the hospital, the doctor instructs his nurse that she is under no circumstances to open the window to Maggie’s room, and under no circumstances to leave her alone for an instant. She asks him to explain why he is giving these instructions, and he declines to do so. Evidently he can’t come up with a scientific-sounding explanation.
Maggie wakes up and pleads with the nurse to open the window. Within seconds, she gives in. Shortly afterward, Maggie codes. The nurse dashes out of the room, closing the door behind her to ensure Maggie will be out of view. When the doctor comes, they go into the room together. Maggie is gone, the window is wide open, and a hound is howling nearby.
In the early part of the episode, when Maggie was still at home, the doctor himself had closed the door to her bedroom when she was alone in there. That was a bit less exasperating than it is when the nurse closes the door. First, the audience knows nothing is going to happen to Maggie in the first ten minutes of the episode, but in the last three she is in extreme danger. Second, while the doctor has several times this week ordered Sam never to leave Maggie alone, we don’t hear him talk about that today until he gives the same order to the nurse. So when he closes Maggie’s door, it is insulting to the intelligence only of people who watch the show every day, and frankly how smart can anyone be who does that. But nursing is a most distinguished profession, and we should all object when a nurse is represented as a big dummy.
We open with the sight of sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie Loomis broken and crumpled on the floor of the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. He is under the heavy cane which vampire Barnabas Collins carries and which he uses to beat Willie. Barnabas demands Willie confess that he played a part in preventing him from taking full possession of Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. Willie at first tries to deny his responsibility, but finally swears that he won’t disobey Barnabas again. Barnabas gives him some orders and dismisses him.
At the Evans cottage, Maggie is sick in bed. When her friend, well-meaning governess Vicki, comes to sit with her, she makes Vicki promise she won’t leave her alone no matter what she says or does. She won’t even let Vicki go as far as the kitchen to fetch her a glass of milk- she doesn’t dare spend one second by herself.
Maggie’s father, artist Sam, has called Vicki because he himself has had to go to the Old House to work on the portrait he is painting of Barnabas. He is working on some problems in the background, and encourages Barnabas to take a walk. While Barnabas is away, Willie comes into the room and asks Sam where he is. Sam is concentrating hard on his work and responds to Willie’s questions with irritated grunts.
When Willie asks Sam how his daughter is doing, Sam turns to him and angrily snaps “Don’t mention her name!” He didn’t mention her name, but he was very rude to Maggie more than once in the days before he met Barnabas, when he was still dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis. In #207, Willie was so crass in his behavior towards Maggie and Sam in The Blue Whale tavern that dashing action hero Burke Devlin had to beat him up and order him to leave town, the incident that prompted Willie to launch the grave-robbing expedition that released Barnabas. Sam was unhappy to see Willie again at the end of #222. By #225/226, he was willing to tell Burke that Willie had reformed, but that doesn’t mean he wants him to have anything to do with Maggie.
Of course, Maggie has already become Willie’s colleague, Barnabas’ second blood thrall. That’s the point of showing us the results of the beatings Barnabas inflicts on Willie. We’ve known Maggie for over 46 weeks and have liked her the whole time, so the idea that she is on her way to suffer that kind of abuse horrifies us. Willie’s determination to help Maggie, asking Sam about her even after the beatings, shows us how much he wants to spare Maggie the fate that has befallen him.
Back in the Evans cottage, Maggie has had another mood swing. These are familiar to readers of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, where the vampire’s victims Lucy and Mina are at one moment desperate to be rescued from him and at the next equally desperate to go to him. Maggie has been displaying these swings for several days now, and it is only because Kathryn Leigh Scott is a highly trained actress with a big bag of tricks that the scene where she demands Vicki leave is not painfully repetitious. My wife, Mrs Acilius, was particularly impressed with the way Maggie enunciates the word “leave” in her commands to Vicki.
Dogs make alarming noises near the french windows, sending Vicki into a state of panic. Maggie denies that she hears them at all. When the windows rattle and it seems that a pack of fierce dogs are about to burst in, Vicki runs to the next room to telephone Burke. When she is out, the door to Maggie’s room slams shut and Vicki finds that she is unable to open it.
Some wonder why Vicki goes to the next room to make her call when there is a telephone next to Maggie’s bed. Maggie used it to make a call in #225/226, and it was prominently featured in several shots in #231. I think it makes sense, though. Maggie is between Vicki and that telephone, and she is being extremely uncooperative. Vicki doesn’t want to take the time to fight her, she wants to call for help at once. Besides, Vicki is so terrified that we wouldn’t expect her to look around, and she has used the telephone in the other room before.
Others might wonder why she calls Burke rather than calling the police. Considering what we have seen of the Collinsport sheriff’s office, I don’t think this is a difficult decision to defend. Vicki tried to call the sheriff from the Evans cottage the other day, and no one was there to answer the phone. Nor have they managed to solve any of the crimes that have been committed on the show so far, even though the perpetrators left so much evidence lying around that Vicki herself, while going about her business, has accidentally stumbled on the solutions to one murder and two attempted murders.
The final shot of the episode, with Vicki banging on Maggie’s door and pleading with her, is not very compelling, and brings a wince to the faces of viewers who remember #84-#87, when Vicki was locked in a room in an abandoned part of the great house of Collinwood and spent several hundred hours of screen time* banging on the door and calling for help. Today’s ending isn’t exactly a Dumb Vicki moment, but it certainly isn’t an interesting moment, and we hope there aren’t any more like it.
*An approximation. It seemed like at least a thousand hours, but since the whole story played out in three and a half episodes lasting 22 minutes each I don’t suppose it could actually have been quite that long.
Well-meaning governess Vicki and flighty heiress Carolyn are in the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood talking about how nervous the electrical storm outside is making them. Vicki describes her reactions while driving a car a few moments before. This deepens a mystery that opened yesterday- what car? They’ve so often made a point of having Vicki ask to borrow Carolyn’s car, or accepting rides from people, or catching the bus, or walking much further than people thought was sensible that you’d expect them to have mentioned something if she got a car of her own.
The lights go out, and the women get even more nervous. A figure appears in the doorway and frightens them. They are relieved to discover that it’s just cousin Barnabas. Barnabas is getting to be such a familiar presence that one suspects they might have been relieved to see him even if they knew he is a vampire.
Barnabas looks out the window at the storm and talks about how fierce the storms are on the hilltop Collinwood occupies. He mentions something we haven’t heard about for months, the “Widows’ Wail.” The wind makes a peculiar sound as it blows over Widows’ Hill, and there is a legend that it is really the disembodied voices of the widows whose menfolk died on the fishing boats of the cruel Collins family. We heard the sound effect several times in the first ten weeks of the show, and the legend often came up in those days.
Barnabas then goes on at great length about a woman who leapt to her death from the cliff on Widow’s Hill well over a century before. He makes it clear that the woman was alone with her lover, then describes particular words and gestures in such detail and with such feeling that only the lover himself could provide them. He assures the women that “every word” of his account is true, including the parts about the woman unable to face a future in which she would be transformed into something she found intolerable, the lover putting his lips on the woman’s neck, her growing faint as a result, her finding a last burst of energy to fling herself to death on the rocks below, and her body found bloodless, but with a look of serenity on her face.*
Carolyn was on edge to start with, and the story deepens her anxiety. She excuses herself to go to bed. Vicki was even more anxious than Carolyn before Barnabas started his tale, but as he goes on her fear vanishes. She tells Barnabas that she wonders if there is a connection between the “bloodless” body and the recent incidents of blood loss involving cows, Barnabas’ servant Willie, and Maggie Evans, the Nicest Girl in Town. Barnabas reminds her that his story took place in an earlier century. She says she knows that, but that she is thinking that the ordinary logic of the natural world may not be enough to solve the ongoing mysteries. Regular viewers will remember that Vicki has had extensive experience with the paranormal, and have been expecting her to be the first to consider the possibility that Willie, Maggie, and the cows have encountered something that is not subject to the same laws that describe ordinary phenomena.
Barnabas squirms, and at one point drops his “cousin from England” mask altogether. As Vicki is explaining her thinking, he says in a bland voice that she is a “very clever girl” and should be careful lest the same thing happen to her that happened to Willie, Maggie, and the cows. Then he looks up and starts to walk away from her, leading to an ominous music sting and a commercial break.
After the break, we see that Barnabas is still in the drawing room with Vicki. She looks startled, and asks him what he meant by his remark. He says that he merely meant that whatever happened to them might happen to anyone. If that is intended to retroactively veil his unveiled threat, it fails miserably- it sounds even more menacing.
Among the representatives of the show’s supernatural back-world whom Vicki has already met, none is more important than the ghost of Josette Collins. The woman Barnabas is describing threw herself to her death off Widow’s Hill in a previous century while wearing a white dress, as Josette did. Other women have jumped from there in the years since, but Josette is still the most famous. When Maggie’s father, artist Sam Evans, saw the portrait of Josette in #185, he asked if she was the lady who went over the cliff. Vicki’s excited reaction to the story suggests that she thinks Barnabas might be talking about Josette.
If he is, it is a major retcon. When we first saw Barnabas in the Old House in #212, he told strange and troubled boy David Collins that she was “our ancestor,” meaning a forebear both of David’s branch of the family and of “the original Barnabas Collins,” that is, himself. After David left, he told the portrait that the house was his now, and that the spirits of his father Joshua and of Josette have no more power there. When he refers to Josette as his ancestor and brackets her with his father, he implies that she sided with his father against him. Since we know that Joshua’s wife, Barnabas’ mother, was named Naomi, and that Josette’s husband was named Jeremiah Collins, the likeliest explanation of these lines would be that Josette was Barnabas’ grandmother. Just a few weeks later, they seem to have reinvented her as his lover.
Barnabas’ story is also a bit of a departure from the usual depiction of vampires. Bram Stoker’s Dracula may have been a revenant form of Vlad III of Wallachia, but he doesn’t mope around obsessing over the good old days in the fifteenth century when he could stay up all day impaling people to his heart’s content. He is entirely focused on the task before him. Dracula’s colleagues in film and on stage had likewise tended to be killing machines, not given to nostalgia or introspection.
Barnabas’ claims to be a devotee of the late eighteenth century have so far been a technique for shifting the conversation from current events, of which he is after all comprehensively ignorant, to the deep past, in discussion of which he can show that he knows so much about the Collins family that he must be a member of it. Even when he gets carried away, as in #214 when he was telling Vicki about the construction of the Old House and started laughing maniacally about the word “death,” it’s a reminder that the events he is talking about seem quite recent to him, since he emerged from his coffin not long ago. But today, he seems to be brooding over the past in a way that has less to do with previous vampires than it does with the character Boris Karloff played in The Mummy (1932). Indeed, Jonathan Frid’s voice and movements are so strongly reminiscent of Karloff that one wonders if Barnabas will turn out to be a merger of Dracula with Imhotep.
Seagoing con man Jason McGuire enters. Vicki hates Jason, who is flagrantly blackmailing reclusive matriarch Liz. She likes Barnabas, but the encounter with him is getting extremely awkward. She quickly excuses herself to go to bed. When Barnabas says that he too must be going, Jason insists that he stay.
Barnabas’ reaction to Jason is pretty funny. When Jason says he wants to discuss something with him, Barnabas tenses and rolls his eyes. Suddenly the drawing room is the scene of a drawing room comedy, and Barnabas is the classic snob forced to deal with an uncouth bounder. For regular viewers, their scene is not just a well-played, if not particularly well-written, specimen of this genre. Barnabas is the latest of the supernatural beings who have been driving the action of the show for six months, while Jason is a throwback to the days when Dark Shadows was a noir-ish crime drama centered on the search for Burke Devlin’s fountain pen. Barnabas’ disdain for Jason mirrors our lack of interest in reviving that phase of the show.
Jason reveals to Barnabas that he had seen Willie earlier that night, that he suspects Willie is involved somehow in the troubles afflicting Maggie, and that he knows Willie has been visiting Eagle Hill cemetery. All of this is unsettling to Barnabas. He goes home to the Old House on the estate, shouts “Willie!,” and raises the cane he had earlier used to give Willie a severe beating.
Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, has been sick in bed. As long as the sun is up, she is very weak, has no memory of what’s been going on, and can sleep. When darkness comes on, she has wild mood swings and has to be physically restrained from running out into the night.
Moreover, the people who have spent the most time trying to help Maggie have no idea what is wrong with her and don’t seem to be making any progress towards finding out. Her doctor is as ignorant of medicine as are the writers, which is to say completely. The parts assigned to her father Sam and her boyfriend Joe consist of variations on the theme of helplessness.
As this episode begins, Maggie is still in bed, Joe is still sitting with her, and they are still at a loss to understand the situation or develop any plans. After yesterday’s episode, in which the actors labored mightily to inject three minutes of nonverbal storytelling into the half hour window Dark Shadows filled, things are looking pretty grim for the audience.
But then we get a sign of hope. Joe calls well-meaning governess Vicki and asks her to sit with Maggie. At the end of #229, Vicki realized that Maggie’s condition is the same as that which befell the luckless Willie Loomis a few weeks back. Moreover, Vicki is our point-of-view character, and she has consistently been the first to catch on to information after it has been shown to the audience. In the storyline centering on blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, Vicki led the team that opposed Laura’s attempt to burn her son David to death, and ultimately rescued David as Laura vanished in the flames. So if a battle is going to be waged for Maggie’s sake, we expect Vicki to be a central figure in it.
When Vicki takes Joe’s call, she is in the foyer of the great house of Collinwood. Seagoing con man Jason McGuire is in the same space, and asks her about Maggie. Vicki hates Jason, who is flagrantly blackmailing reclusive matriarch Liz. Vicki keeps trying to excuse herself without answering his questions, and won’t make eye contact with him. But Jason insists, and she tells him enough that he, too, recognizes that Maggie is suffering from the same thing that happened to Willie.
If we remember the ending of #229, this is a poignant moment. If Vicki and Jason could work together, they could solve the puzzle and discover that the mysterious Barnabas Collins is in fact a vampire who has enslaved Willie and is preying on Maggie. But Vicki’s eminently justified loathing of Jason, combined with Jason’s own shortcomings, makes this impossible. As a result, Barnabas is free to go on wreaking havoc.
While Vicki makes her way to Maggie’s house,* Jason goes to the Old House on the grounds of Collinwood to call on Willie. He finds that his onetime henchman’s face is badly bruised and scraped. Regular viewers know that Barnabas used his heavy cane to give Willie a beating the other day, and these disfigurements confirm that Barnabas is quite uninhibited in his use of violence.
Jason discovers Willie’s wounds
Jason reminds Willie that he has found him a couple of times in Eagle Hill cemetery.** After one of those visits, Willie turned up very sick, with two little punctures in his skin and a great loss of blood. Though he was desperately weak during the day, at night he gained strength and ran out. Now, Maggie Evans has been found wandering in the same cemetery, and she exhibits the same symptoms.
Jason tells Willie that he won’t tolerate anything that might bring the police to Collinwood, and demands to know what is behind the troubles he and Maggie have had. Willie tells him it isn’t wise to probe into that matter. When Jason says that sounds like a threat, Willie replies that it is simply a warning. “Threat or warning, I don’t need either from you!” Willie has a strange faraway look as he replies “OK… but, at the moment, it’s all I have to give.” Willie then says “You’ll have to excuse me, but Mr Collins doesn’t like my entertaining guests.”
The reluctant host
The dialogue between Jason and Willie in this scene is spare and elegant, without a wasted word. The actors match it, giving delicate performances of a sort the scripts rarely support.*** As Willie, John Karlen begins it trying to conceal his wounds from Jason and scampering about the set looking for a place to hide. As Jason, Dennis Patrick begins in a stern but solicitous manner. When Jason cannot get Willie to tell him how his face was hurt, Jason finally declares “I’m not going to concern myself with what happened to you.” He then becomes more directly menacing, but with a faint undercurrent of panic as his fear that whatever is happening with Willie will upset his own plans grows. He loses his advantage, and Willie stops trying to hide. By the time the scene ends, Willie is in control. Jason promises to find out what Willie is up to, and Willie replies “Fortunately, you’re not a man who keeps his promises. Fortunately for you, that is.”
The scene is not only an improvement over the repetitious jabbering we heard in the episode Malcolm Marmorstein wrote yesterday, but such a departure from the usual standards of the show in this period that it’s hard to believe it was actually written by Ron Sproat, as the credits say it was. Joe Caldwell has been making uncredited contributions to the scripts for months now, and I believe this scene must have been one of his.
Vicki doesn’t know about Willie’s connection to Eagle Hill. She also doesn’t know that it was Willie who called to tell her where to find Maggie, something Jason figures out in his scene with Willie. Again, if it were possible for Vicki and Jason to pool their knowledge, things would start moving very quickly.
Back in the Evans cottage, Joe tells Vicki that Maggie is not herself. “I was in that room with her most of the day. I never missed her so much in my life.” I think that line was also one of Caldwell’s. Sproat was capable of writing the occasional lapidary epigram, as indeed was Marmorstein, but neither of them had much feeling for what the actors could do. So few people could deliver that line in as natural a tone as Joel Crothers achieves that it must have come from a writer who had Crothers’ voice in his head.
When Maggie was alone with Joe, she yelled at him to go away and never come back. Then, she sounded like a sick person who didn’t know what she was saying. With Vicki, she says very calmly that she and Joe must never see each other again as long as she lives. It leaves no doubt that she is protecting him, wanting him to stay away from her as she is absorbed into Barnabas’ world of the undead. That was clear enough to the audience yesterday, when she found herself receiving a transfusion of Joe’s blood and screamed that she didn’t want anyone’s blood, especially not his. If Vicki were able to add Jason’s information about Willie to what she already knows, she might begin to suspect something like it.
The thunder roars, the french windows swing open, and an ominous silhouette appears in the lightning. It is the figure of a man in a cape, holding a cane in his left hand.**** Vicki stifles a scream. The lightning illuminates the night again, and the figure is gone. Vicki rushes to close the windows, ignoring Maggie’s plea to leave them open.
Now you see himNow you don’t
After closing the windows, Vicki turns to Maggie, bends over, and creaks out in a frightened voice “Ma-a-aggie!” Maggie responds “It’s all right… it’s all right now… it’s all right.” We cut to the closing credits, wondering just how wrong Maggie’s version of “all right” has become.
*How, I’d like to know? It’s unlikely she walked- Collinwood is miles from town, it’s a dark and stormy night, and several local women have been attacked by an assailant who is still unidentified and at large. But she doesn’t ask anyone to lend her a car, as she always has when she has wanted to go anywhere in previous episodes. Joe doesn’t say anything about coming to get her. And there hasn’t been any indication that she herself has acquired a car, or a bicycle, or a pogo stick.
**The show is still equivocating on the name of the cemetery. When it was first mentioned in #209, it was called “Eagle’s Hill.” Vicki and Sam still call it that, but the other characters who have mentioned it call it “Eagle Hill.” Eventually that latter form will become usual.
***John Karlen uses a vaguely Southern accent at some moments today. The first Willie Loomis, James Hall, is from Mississippi, and Karlen sometimes tries to make his version of the character sound like he also came from that part of the world. Eventually he will give up on that, and Willie, like Karlen, will be a native of Brooklyn.
****As a private joke,amusing only to me, I think of this as “Barnabas Collins #4.” Before the part was cast, producer Robert Costello was the model in the first stages of the painting of the portrait of Barnabas. Then stand-in Timothy Gordon played the hand that darts out of Barnabas’ coffin and grabs Willie’s throat in #210. Jonathan Frid first appeared in #211, making him Barnabas Collins #3. Today, stand-in Alfred Dillay becomes Barnabas Collins #4.
Today is only the second time we hear a voice announce a recast over the opening title. The first time was in #35, when David Ford took over the part of drunken artist Sam Evans from wildly incompetent actor Mark Allen. This time Robert Gerringer is taking over the part of addled quack Dr Woodard from Richard Woods. Woods only played the role twice, and neither time could he find a way to distract the audience from the ignorance of medicine that the writers showed in their scripts.
Gerringer’s lines don’t make much more sense than did the ones they dumped on Woods, but he acts up a storm. Woodard is examining Sam’s daughter Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. Unknown to Sam or Woodard, vampire Barnabas Collins has been sucking Maggie’s blood. Woodard is firm with Maggie when she resists his examination. He seems to be somewhat on edge, just enough that we wonder if there is more to it than the difficulties we can see Maggie giving him. Perhaps he is thinking something he isn’t saying. Woods never managed to make us wonder if his version of the doctor was doing that.
When Woodard and Sam leave Maggie’s room, Woodard assumes an alarmed tone. He tells Sam that Maggie is on the point of death and needs a blood transfusion at once. By showing us that Woodard was concealing the true nature of his concern when he was with Maggie, Gerringer gives substance to our hopes that the character’s nonsensical words and deeds will turn out to be a screen hiding something interesting.
Maggie’s boyfriend, hardworking young fisherman Joe, joins Sam and Woodard. Woodard asks if either Sam or Joe has blood type A. Joe does. Woodard doesn’t ask about Rh factors or Joe’s medical history or anything else, he simply marches Joe into Maggie’s room and the bodily fluids start pumping right away. Joe holds Maggie’s hand at first, but her violent protests force him to let go.
Transfusion
In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Professor Van Helsing and Dr John Seward give blood transfusions to the vampire’s victims. That novel was written in 1897, and blood types weren’t discovered until 1900, so Van Helsing and Seward take blood indiscriminately from all the men cooperating in the effort to defeat Dracula. Van Helsing is particularly enthusiastic when he learns that Arthur Holmwood has given blood to Lucy Westenra, because Arthur “is the lover of her!” Van Helsing is Dutch, and speaks in a vaguely comical broken English. Woodard doesn’t seem particularly excited that Joe is “the lover of her,” but audiences who had read the book will recognize the allusion.
At this point in the production of Dark Shadows, the tentative plan was that Dr Woodard would become something like the expert on paranormal dangers that Dr Peter Guthrie had been during the Phoenix storyline, and that Barnabas would be destroyed in episode 275. Like Stoker’s Dracula, the Phoenix arc had featured a group of stout-hearted men and one valiant young woman coming together to do battle with an undead menace. Dr Guthrie had been their Van Helsing, an expert from out of town who leapfrogs over some weaknesses in the evidence actually available to the protagonists to get them to the same level of understanding that the audience has been given. Also like Van Helsing, Guthrie is the first to realize that the one female member of the team is the key to the success of their efforts, and so he insists on putting her in situations the other men regard as too dangerous for her. As Mina had been instrumental in the destruction of Dracula, so well-meaning governess Vicki is the person who finally thwarts the plans of the Phoenix.
If Woodard and Vicki are going to destroy Barnabas in #275, we have to wonder what story the show will have to tell in #276. The only other plotline going at the moment is the blackmail of reclusive matriarch Liz by seagoing con man Jason McGuire, and that can’t continue indefinitely. Not only will Liz run out of things for Jason to take away from her, but Dennis Patrick, the actor playing Jason, will leave the show no later than the end of June. Since the end of June is when #275 will be airing, we can hardly expect Jason to take the show over after that time.
In fact, Jason is an in-betweener brought on the show to clear away the last non-paranormal plot elements left over from the period before the show became a supernatural thriller in December 1966. By the time he leaves, both the reason for Liz’ long self-immuration in the great house of Collinwood and the identity of Vicki’s parents are supposed to be laid bare for all to see. Neither of those secrets ever generated an interesting story, but as long as they are around it is at least theoretically possible that the show will become a conventional daytime soap opera again. Without them, they are altogether committed to the spook show route. Destroy Barnabas, and you just have to come up with yet another menace from beyond the grave.
I remember Gerringer’s acting style from the first time I saw Dark Shadows. That was back in the 90s, when it was on what was then called the SciFi Channel. He so perfectly represented the doctor characters on the soaps my mother used to watch when I was a kid twenty years before that seeing him in the middle of a story about a vampire told me everything about the strangeness of a conventional daytime serial switching to a horror theme. If that guy is the one to drive the stake through Barnabas’ heart, or if he is even part of the team that finishes him off, it will be a statement that the makers of Dark Shadows have decided to stop being silly and start imitating The Guiding Light.
My wife, Mrs Acilius, was particularly frustrated with the dialogue in this episode. As Maggie, Kathryn Leigh Scott does a good job with nonverbal communication creating the image of a reluctant patient trying to get out of her skin, but her lines consist chiefly of repeating whatever is said to her. The other members of the cast are equally effective at projecting concern for a loved one whose grave illness they don’t understand and can’t help, but their lines too are so heavily loaded with repetition that we started to suspect that Malcolm Marmorstein was writing for a cast of myna birds. In particular, Woodard’s lines to Sam in the living room repeat the word “shock” so many times that they start to sound like he’s stuttering.
The original choices for the roles of Sam, Joe, Dr Woodard, and Maggie. Photo by Bird Ecology Study Group
In his post about this episode, Danny Horn complains that there is not a single interesting still image in it. I agree with that, though I would say that the actors’ movements tell a story. Granted, it is a story that could have been told in a tiny fraction of the actual running time, but they deserve credit for holding the show together when the script gave them zero support.
Danny says that the episode would have been just as good if it were a radio show. Mrs Acilius says that it would have been “a thousand times better” than it is if it were a silent movie. Maybe they could compromise, and it could be presented with neither audio nor video, and the audience could spend the 22 minutes doing something else.
Dark Shadows has been a supernatural thriller ever since the ghosts of Josette and the Widows scared Matthew Morgan to death in December 1966. But today’s episode is the first one that is structured like a horror movie.
Horror movies tend to focus on the visible damage done to the bodies of the female victims of the monster. The current victim is Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, and the monster is vampire Barnabas Collins. We open with Maggie’s father, artist Sam Evans, looking helplessly around the house. Sam doesn’t know it, but Maggie was compelled to leave by the power that Barnabas has gained over her by drinking her blood.
What Sam does know is that Maggie was in extremely poor health. He cannot understand how she could have gone anywhere under her own power. We then see Maggie looking awful and wandering around the graveyard. Later, a closeup of a professional headshot of actress Kathryn Leigh Scott will dissolve into an image of Maggie among the tombstones, contrasting her usual fresh-faced beauty with her present ghastly haggardness.
Maggie’s professional headshotThe dissolveBride of the monster
The monster who has reduced her to this sorry state, vampire Barnabas Collins, emerges from the fog. Barnabas has been on the show for four full weeks now, but this is the first time we see his face not in the pleasant disguise of a wealthy gentleman visiting from across the sea. He is wearing a more extreme version of the makeup Maggie has on, and his fangs feature prominently. This is the introduction of the monster, a key element on any horror film, and it suggests that Barnabas is now what Maggie will become.
When Barnabas hears Maggie’s friends approaching before he can complete his evil plan, he drops her on the ground and steps over her, again treating her body as a thing.
Barnabas steps over Maggie
After she is carried home, Maggie moans about her pain but can say nothing about what has happened to her, who is responsible for it, or what she is thinking. Again, we can connect only with her physical being, not her social relations or her inner life or the events that have involved her. At the end, the handkerchief tied around her neck is removed without her permission or objection, as if she were inanimate. The camera zooms in on open wounds on her neck, isolating that area and leaving us with the image of the wounds as things available to us to examine apart from Maggie’s personality or the rest of her body.
The Source of the Evil
The episode is an adaptation of elements from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Early in that novel, the vampire’s victim Lucy rose from her sickbed and wandered off to a graveyard. As Lucy is found by her friend Mina, so Maggie will be found by her friend, well-meaning governess Vicki. As Mina would spend the second half of the novel as the only female member of a group of stalwart and dynamic men doing battle with the evil Count, so Vicki is working with an otherwise all-male search party led by dashing action hero Burke Devlin. As Mina’s colleagues exclude her from their activities and thereby come close to total failure, so the men leave Vicki behind in the Evans cottage to wait by the phone, only to find that she is the one who will have the most to offer when she joins them in the field.
After Lucy dies and her undead form is destroyed, Mina becomes Dracula’s victim. Mina ends up as the precursor of the “Final Girl” in the mad slasher movie, playing a key part in Dracula’s final defeat, though unlike those movies Dracula ends with a successful team effort.
Since Vicki has been our point of view character from the beginning, was an effective protagonist in the “Phoenix” storyline, and is as relentlessly wholesome as the Final Girl typically is, we might expect that she will be Barnabas’ last victim. That expectation in turn suggests that Maggie, like Lucy, will die, rise as a vampire, and be destroyed by those who love her most. Maggie is one of every viewer’s favorite characters, so the prospect that she might turn into a monster and then leave the show altogether brings keen suspense.
Barnabas Beats His Willie
Vicki does have two important conversations with sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie Loomis while she is in the Evans cottage. The first occurs when Willie comes to the door to bring a message that his master Barnabas will not be available at the usual time to sit for the portrait Maggie’s father is painting of him. Vicki tells Willie that Sam is out searching for Maggie, and Willie becomes very upset to learn that Maggie is missing.
The second conversation comes a few minutes later, when Willie, not disguising his voice in any way, telephones the Evans cottage and tells Vicki that Maggie is in the cemetery and that she is in extreme danger. Somehow Vicki doesn’t recognize his voice. I suppose there were lots of people it might have been- maybe it was Detective Mary Beth Lacey’s husband Harvey from Cagney and Lacey, or Stefan from Daughters of Darkness, or Jock Porter from Love is a Many Splendored Thing, or Geoffrey Fitton from the original Broadway cast of All in Good Time, or any of dozens of policemen and criminals who were in single episodes of cop shows in the 1970s and 1980s.
Willie’s call to Vicki made me wonder about the extent of Barnabas’ powers. When we first saw Barnabas with Willie, his power over him was so extreme that it cost Willie a great effort even to ask Barnabas an unwelcome question, and a look was enough to drive Willie to scurry off and perform the most hateful of tasks. An act of defiance like this was out of the question. Perhaps Barnabas can only keep one blood thrall under total control at a time, and by adding Maggie to his diet he has weakened his hold over Willie.
Willie intrudes on Barnabas’ encounter with Maggie in the cemetery to warn him that Maggie’s friends are on their way. Barnabas instantly suspects that Willie told them where to look for her. When Vicki’s party arrives in the cemetery, Barnabas and Willie run away and hide in the back room of the Collins family tomb where Barnabas was trapped for about 170 years until Willie accidentally released him. This is a departure from Dracula– the Count would have attacked whoever interrupted him, no matter how many of them there were, and fled only if they were armed with crucifixes or consecrated communion wafers or other objects he couldn’t tolerate. But, as my wife Mrs Acilius pointed out, Barnabas has gone a long time without using his vampire powers, so he’s probably rusty.
Barnabas and Willie listen as Burke looks around the outer room of the mausoleum. Once they are sure he is gone, Barnabas confronts Willie with his suspicions. Willie’s lies do not satisfy him, and he lifts his heavy cane and starts beating Willie with it. All we see of this beating is Jonathan Frid’s face and the cane in his hand, but those images, coupled with sound of John Karlen’s cries, imply a violence that shocks us.
Burke picks Maggie up off the ground, grunting audibly as he does so. He carries her into her house, again with a lot of grunting. If I had been Kathryn Leigh Scott’s agent, the production staff would have received a very hot letter about that grunting. The good-looking young women on a soap opera aren’t supposed to weigh anything at all, certainly not enough to cause a dashing action hero to grunt like that even if he carried her all the way from the cemetery.*
In his post about this episode, Danny Horn has some lines about the ineffectiveness of the Collinsport police that I can’t resist quoting:
Sam tells the Scooby gang that he’s alerted the police — the sheriff and his deputies are out looking for Maggie. But, as everyone knows, the police department in Collinsport is 100% useless, so by now the deputies have probably arrested each other, and the sheriff’s all tangled up in a clothesline somewhere…
Vicki tries to call the sheriff, but there’s no answer; apparently every single person associated with the police department is out searching for Maggie, or falling down wells, or buying magic beans, or whatever the hell it is that Collinsport police officers do in a crisis.
When I first read about “the sheriff all tangled up in a clothesline somewhere” a few years ago, I laughed for about five minutes and knew I would be reading Danny’s blog to the end. I’m glad I did, it’s so much fun it inspired me to start this one.
*Mrs Acilius and I remembered a story Miss Scott tells nowadays. Early in the production of the show, Joan Bennett saw her eating a cheese Danish and said “The figure you have now can be your career for the rest of your life.” She put the cheese Danish down immediately, and hasn’t eaten another since. Our response to the story has been to eat cheese Danish on Miss Scott’s behalf at regular intervals.
The opening voiceover tells us that “Evil reaches deeply into man’s soul, turning his heart to stone, transforming him into a vile monstrosity, and it is horrible to observe this process in an innocent and not be able to recognize it or prevent it.” Without that introduction, first-time viewers would have no reason to assume that Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, is going through anything other than an ordinary sickness that has her looking bad and snapping at people.
Kathryn Leigh Scott does play Maggie’s moodiness very well. She does an especially admirable job in the scene where she yells at her boyfriend, hardworking young fisherman Joe, and orders him out of the house. After Joe goes, Maggie looks directly into the camera, and returning viewers will recognize that she is well on her her way to becoming the undead.
Bloofer lady
Meanwhile, well-meaning governess Vicki and dashing action hero Burke are dressed up and having dinner in Collinsport’s only night spot, The Blue Whale. Most of the time, The Blue Whale is a waterfront dive with frequent bar fights. But when Burke and Vicki dine there in their good clothes, the place transforms into a respectable restaurant, as it did in #189.
Burke and Vicki recap some plot points surrounding the great estate of Collinwood. Later, Maggie’s father Sam comes in and tells them of her condition. Vicki replies to Sam’s description with “Now let me see if I understand this. You said that yesterday she was sick and she collapsed, and last night she was up and around, and this morning she was sick again?”
In his post about this episode on his great blog Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn’s response to this line is “IT IS NOT OKAY TO SUMMARIZE A RECAP THAT HE JUST SAID ONE SENTENCE AGO.” It’s true that the episode is heavy on recapping. A defter writer than Malcolm Marmorstein probably would have started the scene with Vicki putting this question to Sam, leaving out the recap that it re-recaps. But Vicki’s question itself is a good moment. As she delivers it, Alexandra Moltke Isles uses her face to show Vicki coming to a realization that has so far eluded everyone else.
The moment of recognition
Vicki recognizes that Maggie’s symptoms are identical to those which sorely bedraggled blood-thrall Willie Loomis displayed a couple of weeks ago. As she explains this, we see Burke gradually catch on and Sam absorb the information. Up to this point, everyone has been remarkably obtuse in failing to make this connection- the same doctor who examined Willie examined Maggie today, and doesn’t give any sign of recognizing it, or for that matter of understanding anything else relating to medicine.
As Vicki was the only character yesterday who escaped the long-running Idiot Plot that goes on because everyone fails to notice the abundant evidence that reclusive matriarch Liz killed her husband and buried him in the basement, so she is the only character today who spots the obvious similarity between the cases of the two victims of the vampire. The show is still sputtering along, but in a Smart Vicki turn like this we can find a glimmer of hope that it will start moving soon.
We start with the twelfth iteration of a ritual that has been numbing our minds since March. Seagoing con man Jason McGuire makes a demand of reclusive matriarch Liz, in this case a position as Director of Public Relations for the Collins family business. Liz resists. Jason threatens to expose her terrible secret. Liz capitulates.
Liz’ daughter, flighty heiress Carolyn, is fed up with Jason’s endless impositions on her mother and everyone else in and around the great house of Collinwood. She knows that Jason was a friend of her long-absent father, Paul Stoddard. When her uncle, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins, tells her that some belongings of Stoddard’s are kept in the mysterious locked room of the basement of Collinwood, Carolyn decides she wants to go into the room and examine them.
Liz has the only key to the room, and hasn’t let anyone in it in the 18 or 19 years since Stoddard disappeared. She is shocked when Carolyn asks for the key. She tells her that they have nothing of Stoddard’s and that the room is empty. Roger and well-meaning governess Vicki are there when Carolyn presses Liz on the subject and Liz becomes agitated.
Later, Liz talks to Vicki privately and apologizes for her tone in that conversation. Vicki can’t believe that the locked room is empty. Vicki turns away from Liz, looks down, and says she can understand that it would be painful for her if Carolyn went through Stoddard’s belongings. We’ve seen Vicki try to lie on several occasions. She has always been unsuccessful at it, in part because she has mannerisms like these that give her away.
Vicki lying to Liz
Liz is so desperate to recruit an ally that she ignores Vicki’s tells, and immediately confirms that she is keeping things of Stoddard’s in the room. She must not realize that Vicki is an inept liar, because she asks her to back up her own lie and to persuade Carolyn that the room is empty.
Liz choosing to believe Vicki
In the study, Vicki finds Carolyn searching for the key to the locked room. The two women argue a bit about whether Carolyn ought to let herself into the room. Vicki turns away from Carolyn, looks down, and asks her to consider that her father’s things might not be in the room at all. Since these are the same mannerisms that told us she was lying to Liz, at first we think she is getting ready to repeat Liz’ lie to Carolyn.
Vicki looking like she’s about to lie to Carolyn
Carolyn asks Vicki what she is talking about. She turns to Carolyn and says that she wonders if there is something hidden in the room that would be far worse to uncover than a few random possessions of Paul Stoddard’s could be. With that, we cut to the closing credits.
Vicki not lying to Carolyn
The whole story of the locked room is a case of what Roger Ebert famously called “Idiot Plot,” a story that would end immediately if any of the characters were as smart as the typical member of the audience. No one has seen or heard from Stoddard since he disappeared. Liz hasn’t left the house since that night. She fired all the household staff, replacing them with a single extremely unsociable man, and discouraged strangers from entering the house. She is terrified of anyone entering a room in the basement that she locked shortly after Stoddard left, and is now flagrantly being blackmailed by a man who was around at that time.
It’s refreshing that Vicki is the one who seems to be figuring out that Stoddard’s corpse might be buried in the locked room. Again and again, the writers have painted themselves into a corner and found themselves able to get from one story point to the next only by having a character disregard all available facts and logic and do something inexplicably foolish. Since Vicki gets more screen time than anyone else, it has usually fallen to her to be Designated Dum-Dum. Indeed, the writers will eventually rely on Dumb Vicki so often that the character becomes unusable. But today, we get a look at Smart Vicki, and that version of her is terrific.
Dark Shadows Commentary 