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Episode 466: Four o’clock in the afternoon

At the end of Friday’s episode, the well-meaning Vicki Winters was driving her car and bickering irritably with her passenger, Barnabas Collins the vampire. Barnabas wants to elope with her, which she doesn’t object to doing. But first she insists on running an errand in his old neighborhood, the deserted cemetery north of town, and he hates that idea.

A pedestrian wandered into the middle of the road. To keep from hitting him, Vicki had to slam the brakes so hard she lost control of the car and crashed. At least she learned the lesson of the cowardly Roger, who ran over a pedestrian years before the show even started and as punishment was condemned to spend months looking for some guy’s fountain pen.

Today, Vicki and Barnabas are in the hospital. We see Barnabas in bed, moaning alternately for Vicki and his long-lost love, the late Josette. It doesn’t bode well for the planned elopement that in his delirium Barnabas gives Vicki only equal time to Josette. We then see Vicki in her bed, moaning for Peter, an unpleasant young man she got to know recently while visiting the late eighteenth century. She doesn’t mention Barnabas’ name at all.

Vicki comes to and finds Peter at her bedside. He denies that he is Peter, claiming merely to be a strange man who let himself into her room to watch her sleep. She recognizes him not only as her boyfriend from the 1790s, but also as the wayward pedestrian involved in the crash. He admits to this, but will not answer any of her questions.

A nurse enters and finally gets Peter to leave Vicki’s room. Perhaps he will let himself into other girls’ rooms and stare at them while they sleep. The doctor, a man named Lang, comes in.

Dr Lang asks Vicki if she knows Barnabas well. This is an interesting question. Before he bit her on Tuesday, Vicki definitely did not know that Barnabas was a vampire. Her behavior towards him since has been so blasé, not only by contrast with the behavior of his other victims but also by contrast with the eager friendliness and habitual deference she had always shown him in the many months they have known each other, that we can’t tell if she has learned that he is one even now. Indeed, we have no idea what Vicki thinks is going on between her and Barnabas, and as a result their scenes together have been pure comedy.

Vicki nibbles on her index finger and thinks for a moment about Lang’s question. Since they were going off to spend the rest of eternity together, it would be pretty embarrassing for her to admit that she doesn’t really have much understanding of Barnabas, so she says that she does know him well. As she does so, she glances away for a moment, and the light flashes off her eye, emphasizing her unease.

Lang asks about Barnabas’ health before the crash. Vicki puts her hands down and stutters slightly as she says “He was in excellent health.” A note of uncertainty gives her voice a childlike quality. When Lang replies with “Really?,” her voice sounds even more childlike when she answers “Y-yes, have you discovered something Mr Collins didn’t know about?” Lang says that he thinks Barnabas knew about it.

Lang looks at Vicki’s neck and finds the marks of Barnabas’ bite. They are just two dark dots, not conspicuously different from the last stages of an ordinary hickey.

When Lang asks about the marks, Vicki’s grogginess suddenly vanishes and she becomes hyper-alert. Since Vicki has been so bland about her experience with Barnabas, returning viewers might well expect her to answer Lang’s questions about the bite marks by saying that Barnabas gave them to her when they were making out. Instead, she gets defensive, at first denying that she remembers how she got the marks and then asking “What’s wrong with them? Why are they so bad, please tell me?” Alexandra Moltke Isles reads that line brilliantly. There is a touch of defiance in her voice, but also a sincere question- she genuinely does not see any reason she should have to hide the marks or explain them to anyone.

Early in the episode, the telephone rang at the great house of Collinwood, and long-term houseguest Julia Hoffman answered. It was the nurse, reporting that Vicki and Barnabas had been brought in after a traffic accident and that “Mr Collins is on the critical list.” Now Julia is in Barnabas’ room trying to arrange transport to his house. Lang comes in and is astounded at the thought of taking an unconscious patient, who is in critical condition, out of the hospital.

Lang and Julia have a showdown. Lang makes it clear that he knows that Barnabas is a vampire, and has deduced that Julia, who is a doctor doubly qualified to practice as a psychiatrist and a blood specialist, has been trying to cure him. Lang marvels that Julia has been treating “a legendary condition.” He asks to examine her neck; she never removes her scarf, surprising returning viewers who know that Barnabas has not bitten her. He continues to pose direct, well-informed questions, which she continues to parry with lies and evasions. She grits her teeth when he refers to Barnabas as “our patient.” At the last, she agrees to go, and he agrees to keep the room dark.

Barnabas awakens and sees Lang. He becomes agitated and demands to be released. Lang refuses. Lang tells him the time is nearly four o’clock. Dawn broke in central Maine at 4:33 on the morning of 8 April 1968, so Barnabas has little more than a half hour to get back home to his coffin. It is no wonder that Barnabas puts on his murdering face when Lang will not let him go. Lang backs away and says he must explain something Barnabas does not understand. Lang reaches the window. As he opens the heavy curtains, he intones, “Yes, it is four o’clock! But it is FOUR O’CLOCK- IN THE AFTERNOON!!” The sunlight floods the room. Barnabas screams and covers his eyes with his hands. But he does not turn to dust- he is no longer a vampire.

Four o’clock in the afternoon. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

This marks the end of the epilogue to the 1795 segment, and with that the end of Dark Shadows 3.0. Unlike version 1.0, which ended with no unresolved story threads of any interest, and version 2.0, which ended at a moment when the only way forward was the annihilation of all the characters, they have cued up at least three major storylines. Eventually Peter will stop pretending to be someone else and something will happen between him and Vicki; Roger will bring wicked witch Angelique home with him; Lang and Julia will work together to manage Barnabas’ aftercare. There are several other characters available for story-building. We have met kindly eccentric Professor Stokes and expect him to contribute to some or all of these storylines. We do not know how Barnabas’ cure will affect his blood thralls Vicki and Carolyn. Carolyn’s relationship with Humphrey Bogart-esque lawyer Tony is in an awkward spot, and Tony is in a position to trigger a major storyline if he starts telling people what he thinks he knows about Carolyn and Barnabas.

On his blog Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn often identified Addison Powell, who plays Lang, as “THE WORST ACTOR EVER TO APPEAR ON DARK SHADOWS.” I don’t think he deserves that title. In fact, he isn’t even the worst actor in this episode. I’m sure the Nurse was written to be pretentious and silly, but Katharine Balfour’s stiffness and relentlessly exaggerated vocal mannerisms are simply excruciating. Powell isn’t great, and will get much, much worse, but he is basically competent today. Mrs Isles, Jonathan Frid, and Grayson Hall all do excellent work in their scenes with him, and he never once gets in their way. But when Balfour is on stage, the others can do nothing but stop and wait for her to leave. She had an extensive stage career, so I suppose she must have played many parts well, but she is stupefyingly bad today.

After Lang’s big “FOUR O’CLOCK- IN THE AFTERNOON!!,” we cut to the closing credits. Under them is a set where a clock’s hands indicate four. From April 1967 to July 1968, ABC suggested its affiliates run Dark Shadows from 3:30 to 4:00 PM. There were a great many stations which insisted on showing it at 10:30 AM. While it was a hit by this point in the 3:30 slot, its ratings were always rock bottom where it was shown in the mornings, so the great majority of viewers would have seen the correct time as they read the names of the people who worked on the show.

Yep, four o’clock, sure thing. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Credits.

Episode 465: Too cool for ghoul

The other day, vampire Barnabas Collins added well-meaning governess Vicki to his diet. Barnabas has bitten several people in the year he has been on Dark Shadows, and his victims have reacted to the experience in a wide variety of ways. Vicki’s post-bite syndrome is unique on the show, and as far as I know unique in vampire stories. Her reaction could most succinctly be summarized as “not feelin’ it.”

Barnabas had hoped to enslave Vicki with his bite, as he had enslaved others, and attributes her blasé response to the unseen presence of wicked witch Angelique. But it may be that Barnabas has himself to blame. Several times in 1967, Vicki went out of her way to make herself available to Barnabas for biting. She invited herself to his house for a sleepover in #285, pressed her neck towards his teeth while embracing him in #311, and has rarely missed a chance to be alone with him. There is a hilarious meta-fictional element to this theme, as Vicki tries to secure a place for herself in the main storyline by becoming the vampire’s thrall.

For his part, Barnabas has time and again looked at Vicki’s neck, shown his fangs to the camera, and then backed off. Even when he finally did bite Vicki in #462, he spent so much time and energy displaying his internal struggle that my wife, Mrs Acilius, commented “Barnabas is about to make himself sick.” Indeed, he took so long making that display that the episode ended before he sank his teeth into Vicki, and we had to wait until the next day to be sure he’d actually gone through with it. You hardly expect Vicki to be excited that such a reluctant suitor has at long last deigned to attach himself to her.

Vicki has recently returned from a long visit to the year 1795,* when the human Barnabas died and the vampire began his career. Barnabas fears she may have discovered his secret while in that period, a fear that deepens as her scattered memories return.

In fact, Vicki never discovered that Barnabas was a vampire. She does have some information that, coupled with what she and others have already found out, could lead to his exposure, but she isn’t thinking about that at all. Instead, her main focus is on an unpleasant man named Peter, whom she met and with whom she fell in love in the 1790s. On Wednesday, she learned that shortly after she left the eighteenth century Peter had been hanged for a killing she committed,** and she is frantic with guilt about it.

At the top of today’s episode, Barnabas sends Vicki a telepathic message that they will be eloping tonight. She accepts this without any visible emotion. Then her friend, hardworking young fisherman Joe (Joel Crothers,) comes to the door. In the 1790s segment, Crothers played naval officer/ sleazy operator Nathan Forbes, a villain who was responsible for many terrible crimes against Vicki and people she cared about. This is the first time we’ve seen Joe since the show returned to contemporary dress, and Vicki takes a while to adjust to the fact that it is her trusty old pal before her, not the detestable schemer who did so much to blight her time in the eighteenth century.

Joe has come to bring Vicki a charm bracelet that his girlfriend Maggie had given her. The charm bracelet turned up in the old courthouse in the village of Collinsport. The courthouse has been disused for years and is about to be torn down. Joe wonders when Vicki was there; she makes many cryptic remarks in reply, but can’t bring herself to tell such a sensible fellow that she was tried there for witchcraft and sentenced to death 172 years before, much less that his counterpart gave the testimony that condemned her to the gallows.

After Joe has gone, Vicki still isn’t motivated to do anything to prepare for her departure with Barnabas. Instead, she takes a nap in the drawing room. She has a dream in which she sees Peter in his gaol cell. She promises him that she will prove his innocence, and marches off. She finds Nathan dozing at a desk. She tells Nathan that he could prevent Peter’s execution if he were to tell the judges that he lied when he told them he saw Peter kill the man whom Vicki actually killed. Nathan cheerfully explains that he cannot tell the judges anything, since he is dead. He tells Vicki that she is dead, too- he was strangled, she was hanged.

Nathan, having a wonderful time in the afterlife, proposes a toast “to Death- the best of all possible worlds!” Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Nathan’s statement is proof that the dream is not simply a product of Vicki’s psychology, but a communication with Nathan’s spirit. Barnabas strangled Nathan, but his father Joshua Collins hid that fact from the world, and neither Vicki nor anyone else alive in 1968 has any way of knowing about it. Vicki wasn’t hanged, but she was about to be when she was whisked back to her own time, and Nathan would have no way of knowing she survived.

Vicki goes back to Peter’s cell and finds it empty. She turns and sees the gallows, on which Peter is hanged before her eyes. She wakes up calling out Peter’s name.

Vicki opens her eyes to see Barnabas standing in front of her. He asks her who Peter was; she says he was someone she knew long ago, and that it will be hard for her to forget him. He asks if she knew he was coming; she affirms that she did. If he knew about the contents of the very elaborate dream she just had, he would have all the more reason to ask such a question. The only action of Barnabas’ mentioned in it was Nathan’s murder, and Nathan doesn’t bother to tell Vicki by whom he was strangled. There are four speaking roles and a background player in the dream, and not only is Barnabas not one of them, no one mentions in it his name, sees his image, or comes into contact with any of his belongings. Barnabas has been dominating the show since he was first named in #205, and Vicki, whom he was under the impression he had enthralled, has lost all interest in him.

Barnabas tells Vicki it’s time to go. She says she has to do something else first. She wants to go to the old Collins mausoleum and see if there is a secret room hidden there. If there is, she will know she really did travel back in time.

Barnabas was trapped in his coffin in that secret room from the 1790s until 1967, and is anxious that no one should discover its existence. He is also eager to get going with whatever plan he has made for Vicki. But he finds himself powerless to oppose her. Not only is he not her dark and irresistible master, as he had been of his other blood thralls, he isn’t getting nearly as much deference from her as she had always shown him before he bit her.

We cut to a car, in which Vicki is driving Barnabas to the cemetery. Apparently it is Vicki’s car. This is the first time we have seen Vicki driving, and it brings up a bit of a riddle for viewers who have been paying close attention to Dark Shadows from the beginning. In the first 46 weeks of Dark Shadows, Vicki was continually asking to borrow heiress Carolyn’s car, getting rides from people, walking longer distances than others thought reasonable, trying to catch the bus, and wishing she had a bicycle. In #232, #233, and #259, it was implied that Vicki had a car of her own. They never explained how or when she came into possession of such a thing, but they stopped all the business of her trying to find a way to get around. As we watch Barnabas squirming in the passenger seat, we can believe he would rather be standing with her at a bus stop.

Barnabas keeps telling Vicki that he doesn’t think they ought to go to the mausoleum. She snaps at him that he was originally enthusiastic about going. The statement is entirely false, and the line is entirely convincing. We saw that Barnabas was appalled at Vicki’s interest in the mausoleum, and we saw that she was too absorbed in her own thoughts to notice his feelings. The two of them bicker about the need to get settled before sunrise, and they sound for all the world like an old married couple. Barnabas exercises exactly zero control over Vicki, and the result is hilarious.

The bickering couple. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The show so often puts Vicki in the role of Designated Dum-Dum, requiring her to facilitate the mechanics of the plot by doing things she would have no reason to do, that the show’s original protagonist is eventually swallowed up by Dumb Vicki. It’s always refreshing to see Smart Vicki put in an appearance. I don’t know if the woman we see today is a perfect example of Smart Vicki, but she certainly is Smart Alexandra Moltke Isles. Mrs Isles’ performance is so good that even a hater like Danny Horn had to admit in his post about the episode on Dark Shadows Every Day that she is fun to watch. And the character is Strong Vicki, taking action in pursuit of her own objectives, making use of the information available to her, and bending Barnabas to her will.

The scene in the car will have an amusing echo for longtime viewers. From November 1966 to March 1967, instantly forgettable young lawyer Frank Garner kept telling Vicki how interested he was in her. Vicki went on some dates with him and accepted him as her sidekick in her struggle against undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, but all in all was almost as cool towards him as she has been to Barnabas post-bite. In #153, Vicki was Frank’s passenger in his car. He thought they were going out for a glamorous evening, but she abruptly insisted that they go to the old cemetery north of town and visit an old crypt. Frank was about as pleased then as Barnabas is now. I suppose a fellow ought to know what he’s getting into when he and Vicki get into a car together.

Barnabas sees a figure ahead and asks Vicki what it is. She looks and slows down. A man in contemporary dress who looks like Peter lopes into the road, smiles a big goofy grin, and waves. Even though Vicki’s movements and the sound effects told us she took her foot off the accelerator as soon as Barnabas said he saw something, the man is so close to the car that she slams on the brakes, the tires squeal, and she loses control of the vehicle. He must have wandered right in front of the car. That confirms for returning viewers that the man must be Peter. He always did the least intelligent and most dangerous thing, usually while grabbing at people and shouting in a petulant voice. Poor Vicki. Barnabas is a vampire and a cold fish, but she’s managed to get herself stuck with a guy who makes those shortcomings look minor by comparison.

Ugh, this guy. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

*It was 1795 in #365, and in #413 they explicitly told us the new year 1796 had come. But after Vicki returns to the 1960s in #461, the only year they talk about is 1795.

**With justification- she shot a man who was trying to strangle a young boy.

Episode 461: Crosses in life

Nineteen weeks ago, well-meaning governess Vicki disappeared from a séance in the drawing room of the great house at Collinwood and found herself in the year 1795. Her miserable failure to adapt to her new surroundings led to her conviction on charges of witchcraft. At the end of Friday’s episode, we attended her hanging.

Today we begin with an unusually long opening voiceover. These typically end before we see the actors; only a couple of times have they picked up again after a scene. This episode marks the first and only time the narration resumes after the opening title. It is necessary- they have to explain that what’s happening to Vicki in the 1790s is somehow simultaneous with the séance in the 1960s.

An unexpected guest in the drawing room. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

When Vicki disappeared in #365, a woman named Phyllis Wick materialized in her place. Now, we cut back and forth between the hanging and the séance. Phyllis clutches her neck and cries out in pain as the rope tightens around Vicki’s neck. Then Victoria reappears in the drawing room, wearing the dress she wore in the 1790s and bearing the wounds she sustained then. Back in the eighteenth century, the hangmen remove the hood they had put on Vicki and see Phyllis’ dead face underneath.

It’s a standard of stage magic for the magician to get into a box, for the box to be sealed tight, and for the magician’s assistant to be the one who gets out when the box is opened. That gag may not have been so familiar in the eighteenth century, but the inexplicable substitution can hardly undermine the certainty the executioners feel that Vicki was a witch.

By the end of the scene in the drawing room, first time viewers will be very largely caught up on what was going on when Vicki left in November. Before Vicki even appeared, we learned that Barnabas Collins recognized Phyllis Wick and was alarmed to see her, telling us that he is an interloper from the past trying to conceal a secret. Permanent house-guest Julia Hoffman announces that she is a medical doctor. Julia apologizes to Liz for having concealed this fact, which not only lets us know that she did conceal it but also tells us that the house belongs to Liz. Julia and Carolyn exchange frosty words, making it clear that they are enemies. Julia is even chillier to Barnabas, while Barnabas and Carolyn exchange a conspiratorial look. In contrast to all of these promises of drama, the reasonable observations Roger makes and his straightforward helpfulness suggest that he hasn’t been an active part of a storyline for some time.

The scene in the drawing room does not match the one Vicki left. Everyone is sitting in a different spot, the conversation after Vicki disappeared doesn’t seem to have played out the same way, and Phyllis is played by another actress. The Dark Shadows wiki has some fun with this, saying that the changes “can be rationalized as a changed history due to Victoria’s presence in [the] past.” This is the kind of theory that I enjoy very much, but I’m afraid it doesn’t work. If Vicki has come to a later stage of the time-band in which she spent the last nineteen weeks, Barnabas would remember her, not Phyllis, as his little sister’s governess.

As it is, Barnabas is desperate to find out what Vicki learned when she was in the era that holds the key to his secret. Julia leaves Vicki alone for a moment, and Barnabas appears at her bedside. She talks to him in a quiet, urgent voice about her fragmentary recollections of the 1790s. Alexandra Moltke Isles’ performance in this scene is so beautiful that I can’t imagine it failing to touch even the most shriveled hearts.

Vicki tells her tale to Barnabas. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

We end with Barnabas telling Carolyn that if Vicki knows enough to be a threat to him, he will stop at nothing to silence her. When Carolyn asks what he means, he repeats his ominous vow.

There are many line bobbles and a couple of physical stumbles today. Most obvious is a moment when Grayson Hall, as Julia, stumbles over a piece of metal equipment while entering Vicki’s room. But the whole thing is so well-structured and the actors are so completely into it that none of them bothered us.

Episode 460: Lies beyond the grave

In #365, well-meaning governess Vicki came unstuck in time and found herself in the year 1795. Now, Vicki is about to be hanged for witchcraft, and the last of the story threads that have been playing out around her are about to be tied up.

Yesterday’s episode ended in the study at the great house of Collinwood, where naval officer/ sleazy operator Nathan Forbes shot a wooden bolt from a crossbow into the chest of vampire Barnabas Collins. At the top of today’s episode, Barnabas pulls the bolt out, telling Nathan that the bolt didn’t hit him. Barnabas’ voice is dubbed in over this, clarifying that Nathan missed his heart. We then switch to Nathan’s point of view and see Barnabas approaching for the kill.

After the opening title, we see that Barnabas is still in the study. Time has apparently passed. Barnabas’ father Joshua enters. Barnabas asks him if Nathan has been buried. Joshua says that he has, and lists the stories that he will tell to cover up all the deaths that Barnabas has been involved with over the last few months. Barnabas wants Joshua to shoot him through the heart with a silver bullet right now and destroy him forever. Joshua cannot do that, but he promises that he will put Barnabas out of his misery come daylight, when he is in his coffin. Barnabas asks two more favors of his father, that he free much put-upon servant Ben and that he prevent the execution of the wrongly convicted Vicki. Joshua promises to do these things as well.

Joshua and Barnabas. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Throughout this scene, actors Louis Edmonds and Jonathan Frid hold back tears. Patrick McCray remarks: “Crying is not the most powerful thing an actor can do on stage. Rather, it is the attempt not to cry that seizes audiences. In these moments, Frid and Edmonds seize. In a medium of love scenes, there is none more poignant.”

The performers have a powerful theme to work with, one that Danny Horn explicates when he considers the question of why Joshua is still alive at the end of this storyline. When she made Barnabas a vampire, wicked witch Angelique decreed that everyone who loved him would die. Yesterday, Joshua confessed that he feared he was incapable of love, and Barnabas told him that such a disability might save his life. But when we see Edmonds and Frid struggling against the urge to weep, we know that Joshua loves Barnabas very deeply indeed, as we have in recent weeks seen that he loved others he has lost. Danny explains:

The reason why Joshua is spared from the curse is that the love he feels for Barnabas isn’t the kind of love that Angelique recognizes, and so he slips under her radar.

Angelique’s love is selfish, and spiteful. She uses it as a convenient excuse for running over anyone who gets in her way. She doesn’t understand love that arises from respect, and strength of character. And she will never feel the kind of deep, honest love that Joshua now realizes for the first time that he is in fact capable of.
Danny Horn, from “Eats, Shoots, and Leaves,” posted on Dark Shadows Every Day 16 August 2014

Danny goes on to explain that, while others had love for Barnabas that included a selfless element, there was also something in their feelings that Angelique could recognize, while Joshua’s love for him comes entirely from this higher plane. The portion of Dark Shadows set in the years 1795-1796 turns out to be The Tragedy of Joshua Collins, not only because Joshua has the highest social status among the characters, makes the most important decisions, and is played by one of the best actors, but because he grows into the sort of person who is governed by this kind of love. When the world around him is being ground down into dishonesty and cheapness, largely due to the consequences of his own misguided actions, Joshua discovers a new kind of strength within himself. Even amid the ruins of a world he himself did as much as anyone to wreck, Joshua represents the hope that something better might yet come into being.

After daybreak, Joshua stands beside Barnabas’ coffin in the secret chamber hidden inside the Collins family mausoleum, the pistol in his hand. Joshua cannot bring himself to fire the silver bullets into his son’s heart. Ben enters. Joshua orders him to affix a silver crucifix to the inside of the coffin to immobilize Barnabas there, and then to chain the coffin shut. Joshua and Ben assure each other that Barnabas will never be released. Later, we see Ben in the chamber, alone with the chained coffin. He looks at it and says “Goodbye, Mr Barnabas, goodbye.” Thayer David delivers that line with an unforgettable simplicity.

Returning viewers know that Joshua’s plan to keep Barnabas confined will work only until April of 1967, when Barnabas will be freed to prey upon the living once more. That July, in #276, Barnabas will stand in the hidden chamber and say that, while in chaining the coffin rather than destroying him his father “thought he was being merciful, what he did was no act of mercy.” This remark, combined with a story he told Vicki in #214 about his conflict with Joshua, just may have been the germ from which the whole story of Joshua grew. At any rate, the promise ABC-TV made to its viewers when it aired this promotional spot in November 1967 has been fulfilled:

Back in the study, Joshua frees Ben and gives him a severance packet of $100, worth about $2500 in 2024 dollars. When Ben thanks him for his generosity, Joshua denies that he is being generous. I have to agree with Joshua there- that amount might get a fellow out of town, but he’d have to find a new job pretty fast if he wanted to stay in the habit of sleeping indoors.

Another servant brings a note while Joshua and Ben are in the study. The governor has refused Joshua’s plea that Vicki’s execution be stayed. She will be hanged tonight.

At the gaol, Vicki’s boyfriend, an unpleasant man named Peter, is brought to her cell. The gaoler tells them they have five minutes before Vicki will be taken to her death. It is little wonder Vicki’s last request was to have time with Peter. Spending five minutes with him is like living to a ripe old age. Peter vows to overcome death and reunite with her. The last time we heard that was when Barnabas died the first time. In #409, he used his dying breaths to ask gracious lady Josette to wait for him to return to her. Fool that she was, Josette did, leading to disaster for her. Returning viewers may well wince, not only at the ominous parallel with Josette’s grim fate, but also at the memory of the many tedious scenes in which Josette at first insisted that Barnabas was coming back and was then at a loss when asked to explain herself. Besides, we don’t want to see any more of Peter.

The scene of Vicki’s hanging is quite elaborate by Dark Shadows standards. They’ve built a fairly realistic gibbet, hired several extras, put hats on them, and given them burning torches to hold. They test the equipment with a heavy sack, slowly lead Vicki to the place of honor, ask her if she wants a mask, and command the Lord to have mercy on her unrepentant soul. The camera drifts up to the top of the rigging, leaving Vicki out of the shot. When the time comes, we hear the drop and see the rope tighten.

Swing time for Vicki. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

This marks the end of the 1795 flashback, but not necessarily of Dark Shadows 3.0. In #437, Vicki told Peter that she often had nightmares in her childhood, so often that she became a connoisseur of nightmares. She would stay asleep throughout the whole process, waking up only at the very moment she was about to be killed. That was a rather heavy-handed way of telling the audience that Vicki would ascend the gallows, put her head in the noose, and find herself back in the 1960s. Once she is back in her own time, what she has learned in the 1790s will have consequences for what she does next. So we can expect an epilogue of some kind before Dark Shadows 4.0 begins.

Episode 446: You have given me nothing I can understand

Haughty tyrant Joshua Collins goes to the basement of the Old House on his estate and finds his son Barnabas rising from a coffin. Barnabas explains to his father that he has become a vampire.

Joshua and Barnabas in the coffin room. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

This scene prompts considerable discussion in fandom about gay subtext. In his post about the episode on Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn points out that actors Jonathan Frid and Louis Edmonds were both gay, and speculates that this fact might have had some influence on the way they play Barnabas’ coming out to his father. “I’m not suggesting that this situation is intended to be a metaphor for a gay child talking to his father about his terrible, shameful secret life… But the ‘keep the secret, don’t tell my mother’ part — there’s some resonance, isn’t there? At least, it’s a hook into the story that helps us to get closer, and really feel some of the horror of this moment. A father hands a gun to his son, and says, Kill yourself, so that your mother never finds out.”

Even this tentative raising of the question, with its “I’m not suggesting” and “some resonance” and “at least,” is too much for Patrick McCray. In his Dark Shadows Daybook post about #446, he concedes that “homosexuality is the obvious choice” for an interpretive lens through which to read the scene, but goes on to flatly assert that “this isn’t a veiled metaphor for something like homosexuality.” For him, as for Danny, Barnabas figures in the scene as a murderer first and last, and Joshua as a man finding himself irrevocably severed from the world of rationally explainable phenomena.

For my part, I think that we have to remember that intentionality is always a more complicated thing in a work of art than it is when lawyers are interpreting a contract or cryptographers are cracking a cipher. Certainly the scene is not simply a coming-out scene played in code. Barnabas’ murders do not map onto any metaphor for sexual encounters. While the vampire’s bite is often a metaphor for the sexual act, Barnabas presents his acknowledgement in this scene that he has murdered three women in terms of the secrets he calculated he could keep by killing them and maintains a cold, matter-of-fact tone while doing so. When in the course of the scene Barnabas exasperates Joshua by attempting to murder him, there is nothing erotic between the men. No doubt the scene is at one level meant to be what Danny Horn and Patrick McCray say it is, the point when Joshua realizes he is part of a supernatural horror story and the audience realizes that Barnabas is a cold-blooded killer. As such, it is one of the key moments that defines the 1795 flashback as The Tragedy of Joshua Collins.

But there are other levels of intentionality here as well. One has to do with the word “vampire.” When Barnabas is trying to tell his story to Joshua, his first approach is to give him the facts and leave it to him to apply the correct label. But the facts are so alien to Joshua that they only deepen his confusion. Seeing his father’s bewildered reaction, Barnabas’ frustration mounts until he finally shouts “I am a vampire!”

We have heard this word only once before on Dark Shadows, when wicked witch Angelique mentioned it in #410, but it figured in the show as a metaphor for outness long before it was spoken. In #315, Barnabas’ associate, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, urges him not to murder strange and troubled boy David Collins. She catches herself, breaking off after saying that David deserves better than “to die at the hands of a-” Barnabas grins and teases her, asking “At the hands of a what, doctor?” He dares her to say the word and taunts her for her faux pas in coming so close to using it. Julia and Barnabas have a tacit understanding that they will discuss his vampirism only in euphemisms and circumlocutions. To say the word would be to push beyond the limits of Barnabas’ outness to Julia.

When he tries to avoid calling himself a vampire, Barnabas is trying to establish a relationship in which his father will know enough that he is no longer inclined to ask questions, but not enough to achieve any real understanding of his feelings. When he realizes that he cannot keep from using the embarrassing, ridiculous, utterly necessary word, Barnabas is forced to come out to Joshua in a way he had desperately wanted to avoid.

Moreover, Jonathan Frid’s performance as Barnabas departs starkly from anything else he does on Dark Shadows. After he calls himself a vampire, Frid’s whole body relaxes. His neck, shoulders, and hips are looser than we have ever seen them; even his knees bend a little. His voice shifts a bit away from the old-fashioned mid-Atlantic accent he typically uses as Barnabas, a bit toward twentieth century Hamilton, Ontario. At that point, he is not playing a murderer or a creature from the supernatural or an eighteenth century aristocrat- he is playing himself, enacting a scene from his own life.

Barnabas’ coming out to his father is not today’s only story about information management. Joshua rules his corner of the world by parceling out just that information he thinks people ought to have. We have seen this habit lead to disaster after disaster. In his scene with Barnabas, we see another such instance. Joshua has come to the basement because naval officer/ sleazy operator Nathan Forbes told him that he had seen Barnabas at the Old House, and that Barnabas had attacked Joshua’s second cousin Millicent. After Barnabas admits to his various murders, Joshua brings up the attack on Millicent. Barnabas denies that he had any involvement in that attack, sparking an angry response from Joshua. When Barnabas later asks Joshua why he came to the basement, he swears that Barnabas will never know why.

Had Joshua told Barnabas that Nathan sent him to the basement, the two of them might have figured out that Nathan faked the attack on Millicent as part of his scheme to trick her into agreeing to marry him and to blackmail Joshua into consenting to the marriage. That in turn might have helped Joshua find a way to prevent Nathan from carrying out his evil schemes. But his parsimony with information leaves Joshua believing Nathan’s story about the attack, and therefore puts him and the rest of the Collinses entirely at Nathan’s mercy. When we see the effect that the radical honesty of coming out as a vampire had on Barnabas, we can’t help but wonder how many misfortunes the Collinses might have avoided if they had not lived according to Joshua’s code of truthlessness.

A voice comes from the upstairs. Naomi Collins, wife to Joshua and mother to Barnabas, has entered the house. Joshua leaves his gun with Barnabas and tells him to do the honorable thing, then hastens up to meet her.

Naomi tells Joshua that she he came to the Old House because Nathan told her he had gone there. She insists that Joshua explain what is going on; he pleads with her not to ask. She tells him to think of her; a quiver in his voice, he says “I am thinking of you now.” Naomi is as mystified and as frustrated by Joshua’s refusal to explain himself as Joshua had been with Barnabas’ story, but even as she plays these reactions Joan Bennett also shows us Naomi softening towards her husband. She catches a glimpse of the lover hidden beneath the lord of the manor, peeking out from below the massive superstructure of his pride.

Back in the great house, Nathan is sprawled on the sofa, his boots resting on a polished table, guzzling the Collinses’ fine liqueurs. When Joshua and Naomi return, Nathan offers Joshua a snifter of brandy and invites him to drink it with him in the drawing room. Joshua reacts indignantly, protesting that he is not accustomed to a guest offering him the hospitality of his own house.

This exchange is familiar to longtime viewers. From March to June of 1967, when Dark Shadows was set in contemporary times, the great house was dominated by seagoing con man Jason McGuire, who was blackmailing reclusive matriarch Liz. Several times, most notably in #200 and #264, Jason poured himself a drink and invited Liz’ brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins, to join him. Roger would protest that he was not accustomed to being offered a drink of his own brandy in his own house, often drawing the rejoinder that it was Liz’ brandy and Liz’ house, and that he was as much her guest as Jason was.

Roger and Joshua are both played by Louis Edmonds. Roger represents the final stage of decay from the height Joshua represents. He has squandered his entire inheritance, committed acts of cowardice that cost the lives of two men, and let a more or less innocent man go to prison in his place. In #4 he tried to sneak into well-meaning governess Vicki’s room while she slept, and when Liz caught him he told her he didn’t want to be lectured on his “morals,” leaving no doubt that he was looking for some kind of cheap sexual thrill at Vicki’s expense. He openly scorns his responsibilities as a father, cares nothing for the family’s traditions, and the one time we see him working in his office at the headquarters of the family’s business all he does is answer the telephone and tell the caller to contact someone else instead. He drinks constantly, is always the first to give up on a difficult task, makes sarcastic remarks to everyone, and backs down whenever he faces the prospect of a fair fight. In #273, he even admitted to Liz that, had he known what Jason knew about her, he probably would have blackmailed her too.

Joshua’s relentlessly dishonest approach to life may be rooted in fear, and it is never difficult to see that its end result would be to produce a man as craven as Roger. But Joshua himself is as strong as Roger is weak. It is impossible to imagine Roger shaking off an attempt on his life as Joshua shakes off Barnabas’ attempt to strangle him today. While Roger is prepared to sacrifice any member of his family for his own convenience, Joshua will go to any lengths to protect Naomi from the truth of Barnabas’ horrible secret. Nor does Joshua take the easy way out even when he is knuckling under to Nathan. In their scene today, Nathan makes it clear that he is willing to accompany Joshua back to the Old House. Had Roger known what Joshua knows about that basement, he would never have missed an opportunity to send Jason there and let Barnabas do his dirty work for him. But Joshua cuts Nathan off the moment he raises the subject.

Joshua does go back to the coffin room, and he finds Barnabas standing around. He is disappointed that his son has not killed himself. Barnabas tries to explain that he cannot die by a gunshot, but Joshua dismisses his words. He takes the gun himself and, with a display of anguish, shoots Barnabas in the heart. Only thus, he believes, can he keep the unbearable truth from coming to light.

Episode 434: No business to run

Some people have conversations relating to the ongoing witchcraft trial of bewildered time traveler Vicki Winters. The trial itself is a waste of time, so a half hour listening to people talk about what might happen during the trial is a grim prospect. Indeed, none of today’s scenes is necessary to the overall development of the plot or of any major themes. Still, they give the actors an opportunity to show us what they can do, and four of the five members of the cast turn that opportunity to good advantage.

The exception is of course Roger Davis as Vicki’s defense attorney Peter Bradford. Mr Davis was usually tolerable when he delivered his lines in a normal conversational tone, but when he had to raise his voice, as characters on Dark Shadows have to do very frequently, the results were painfully bad. Voice teachers sometimes tell their students to sing from way down in their bodies; the more indelicate among them have been known to tell boys’ choirs that “The music escapes from the testicles.” Such a teacher would be displeased with Mr Davis. When he raises his voice, the muscles he is tensing are not those around the pelvic floor, but the sphincters in his buttocks, with the result that he seems to be having difficulty evacuating his bowels. I realize this is rather a distasteful discussion, but the topic is impossible to avoid when you listen to Davis going through one sentence after another, in each case building up to one word and grunting it out loudly. Yesterday, young Daniel Collins mentioned that repressed spinster Abigail’s personality was that of someone suffering from indigestion, and when today we hear Peter ask untrustworthy naval officer Nathan Forbes (Joel Crothers) “Why did you LIE!” or tell him “You already DID!” he sounds so much like someone struggling with constipation that we can think of nothing else.

The episode opens with a long scene between Peter and Nathan. One of Crothers’ great strengths as an actor was his ability to relax. He stays loose and moves fluidly, never stiffening in response to Mr Davis’ muscular tension, much less reacting to his straining sounds with either a giggle or a misplaced expression of disgust.

Nathan and Peter’s scene involves a fistfight, the first we have seen on Dark Shadows since dashing action hero Burke Devlin fought dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis in #207. The fight is well-choreographed and Crothers does a good job falling down and looking like he has been beaten, but that result stretches credibility. Not only was Crothers the taller man, but his easy physicality would have given him a great advantage in hand-to-hand combat against someone as rigid and awkward as Mr Davis.

Peter and Nathan do battle. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

We cut to the drawing room of the great house at Collinwood, where Naomi Collins (Joan Bennett) wants to talk to her husband, haughty tyrant Joshua Collins (Louis Edmonds.) Joshua is moping after the death of his sister Abigail, and doesn’t want to talk to Naomi or anyone else. At first they exchange a few words about Abigail. Naomi doesn’t try to hide her dislike of her late sister-in-law, saying that she led a senseless life. This of course offends Joshua, but Naomi stands her ground.

This part of the conversation includes two lines that are interesting to fans who are curious about the details of the characters’ relationship to their society. When Naomi says that it was because Abigail had too few responsibilities that she became a religious fanatic and a dangerous bigot, Joshua says that she did have some things to do. “She had her church,” he says. Not “the church,” not “our church,” but “her church.” This is not the first indication we have had that Abigail differed from the rest of the family in religion, but it is the most definite confirmation. As aristocratic New Englanders of the eighteenth century, presumably the family would be Congregationalists. Abigail might just have gone to the another, stricter meeting within the Congregationalist fold, or she might have joined a different group.

The other line marks Naomi as a remarkably advanced feminist for her time and place. She says that Abigail was “Like a businesswoman with no business to run.” The concept of “businesswoman” was hardly familiar in the days when this episode is set. Even the word “businessman” was not widely known then- the earliest citation of it in The Oxford English Dictionary dates to 1798, two years after this episode is supposed to be taking place, and its first appearance in the modern sense came several years after that. The same dictionary can find no use of “business-woman” until 1827, and then in only a strongly pejorative sense. But the audience, seeing Joan Bennett on this set, will think of her character matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, who in the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s runs the family’s business enterprises from this room. Naomi is looking towards the future, and she sees Liz.

Edmonds and Bennett are both wonderful in this scene. She is steady and authoritative throughout; he is alternately gloomy, irritated, and sullen. It is as compelling to watch her hold her single mood as it is to watch him navigate from one to the other. Joshua at no point concedes anything to Naomi, and he ends by turning his back on her and going away. But he is not at all in command today, as he has always been in command before. He is hurting too deeply to give orders and compel obedience by the force of his presence.

In the village of Collinsport, Nathan meets with the Rev’d Mr Trask (Jerry Lacy,) visiting witchfinder. The other day, Nathan capitulated to Trask’s blackmail and testified against Vicki. Now he wants Trask to intercede with Joshua and to talk him out of informing the Navy of his many crimes. He tries to sell Trask a bill of goods, claiming that all the things he did wrong were simply the result of his pure and innocent love for fluttery heiress Millicent Collins. The audience knows that this is entirely false, but Trask doesn’t even let him start on it- he responds that “Physical love is beyond my comprehension.” Mr Lacy is an accomplished comic, and he doesn’t fail to get a laugh with this line. Trask realizes that Nathan’s testimony would lose much of its persuasiveness if he were exposed as the scoundrel he is, Trask agrees.

Joshua comes to meet with Trask. Mr Lacy is a great shouter, and Trask is always on full volume. When he insists that Joshua meet with Nathan and forswear his plan to send a letter to the Navy, he builds Trask into a tower of hypocrisy and repression, and we remember all of the scenes where Joshua has demolished people he disdains, Trask among them. But Joshua is not going to demolish anyone now, not while he is mourning everyone he ever loved. He mutters, frowns, and finally caves in to Trask’s demand. The contrast between the overweening Trask and the fusty Joshua is electrifying to returning viewers.

Joshua then consents to meet privately with Nathan. He tells Nathan that he will keep quiet on condition he secure a transfer to another port as soon as possible. Nathan tells some lies and makes some excuses that impress neither Joshua nor anyone who has been watching the show for any length of time, but again, the actors are fascinating to watch together. The chaos and evil Trask represents has turned the world upside down, weakening the strong Joshua and emboldening the degenerate Nathan.

More bad news awaits Joshua when he goes home. Unhappy as Joshua was with Naomi’s insistence on discussing the faults of his recently deceased sister, he is much more upset when she tells him she has decided to go to court and testify in Vicki’s defense. Joshua is appalled she would do this. He is sure Vicki is to blame for the deaths of both of their children, of both of his siblings, and of various other people, some of whom he cared about when they were alive. He threatens to lock Naomi up in her room to prevent her going to court, but she replies that if he does that she will escape, and he will never see her again. The children are dead and she has no work of her own; she has no reason to stay.

Episode 428: Witness for the defense

Fluttery heiress Millicent Collins thought that she had a bright future to look forward to when she became engaged to young naval officer Nathan Forbes. That prospect shattered when she discovered that Nathan was already married. Making matters worse, Nathan’s wife, Suki, had presented herself to the Collinses as his sister, and he had gone along with this imposture. Suki is now dead, strangled in an apparently empty house, her body discovered by Nathan when no one else was anywhere near and he had a great deal to gain by her death. For some reason, no one seriously suspects Nathan of the murder, but the whole thing rather tends to cast him in a poor light.

Millicent has recently seen her second cousin, Barnabas Collins. Barnabas’ father, haughty tyrant Joshua, has put the word about that Barnabas has gone to England. Like most people in and around the village of Collinsport, Millicent had believed this story. But the other night she spotted Barnabas in the cemetery. Now she is determined to find Barnabas and recruit him to avenge her honor by fighting a duel with Nathan. She is indignant that Joshua and his wife Naomi keep insisting that she did not really see Barnabas, and that he is not available to fight Nathan.

As it happens, Barnabas did not go to England. Joshua invented that story to cover up the fact that Barnabas had died. Joshua believed that Barnabas died of the plague, and that if that became known the men would not show up to work at the family’s shipyard.

Today, Millicent hears for the first time that Barnabas has died. The news comes from an unpleasant young man named Peter, who is acting as attorney for accused witch Victoria Winters. Peter comes to the great house of Collinwood looking for much put-upon servant Ben Stokes, hoping that Ben will testify for Vicki. Millicent is uninterested in Peter’s mission, but asks him to look for Barnabas. Peter has heard that Barnabas is dead, and passes that information along to Millicent. Since she has seen Barnabas with her own eyes, she simply laughs at this.

As it happens, Peter and Millicent are both right. Barnabas is dead, most of the time. At night he rises as a vampire and preys upon the living. No one but his friend Ben knows this.

In her scene with Peter, Nancy Barrett’s Millicent is slightly, cheerfully crazy. She doesn’t get much support from Roger Davis as Peter, and winds up playing the part a little bit bigger than she might have wished. In her next scene, she has a partner who helps her stay on firm ground.

Millicent answers the front door, as she had done when Peter knocked. This time she is appalled to find that it is Nathan. He puts his foot in the door and refuses to leave until she has heard him out.

Nathan spins a tale to Millicent that he and Suki were in the process of divorcing. We know this is false, and Millicent should as well. When they became engaged, Nathan insisted on the earliest possible wedding date. Since Suki did not show up with a final decree, Nathan could not have been sure that the divorce would be official by that date. Of course, we also know that there was no divorce in the offing; Nathan had abandoned Suki, she had tracked him down, and when she found out about Millicent, she planned to force Nathan to send as much of Millicent’s vast inheritance her way as possible.

Millicent doesn’t know about those details, but she is quite sure Nathan is lying. When he tries to embrace her, she takes a letter opener and tries to stab him.

Millicent takes matters into her own hands. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Millicent is not supposed to be particularly brainy, but she is a smart character in every sense that matters. She absorbs the facts presented to her, interprets them reasonably, forms plans, and pursues those plans by means which, if her interpretations are correct, might well succeed. She believes, correctly, that Nathan has mistreated her and made her look like a fool. She believes, as a young lady of the late 18th century well might, that matters can be set right only by Nathan’s violent death. Having seen Barnabas and knowing that he once fought a duel, she hoped that he would be her avenger. Since Barnabas is being kept from her for no reason she can fathom, she has decided to take matters into her own hands. Her actions may not be the optimal response to the situation, but we can follow her train of thought at each point and are in suspense as to what it will lead her to do next.

Joshua interrupts Millicent before she can accomplish her purpose. He sends her out of the room and confronts Nathan. He tells Nathan he will soon inform the Navy department of what he has done, and that he is sure they will share his eagerness to resolve the issue discreetly. Joshua’s horror of scandal, which we have seen many times, most spectacularly in his cover-up of Barnabas’ death, explains his willingness to believe that Nathan is innocent of Suki’s murder. There would be no way to settle that entirely out of the public eye.

Joel Crothers brought a great deal of wholesome charm to the role of the scoundrel Nathan. We are impressed when Millicent does not give him an inch, even though we can see that she is tempted to do so. We can understand why Joshua several times seems to have to remind himself that he disapproves of Nathan. When, as Joshua, he says he does not believe Nathan killed Suki, Louis Edmonds gives a little smile which flashes real affection for the man he is condemning. It is a testament to Crothers’ talent that his partners are able to achieve these subtle effects in the scenes they share with him in the drawing room.

We cut to the cemetery, where Ben is digging a grave in a heavy fog. Peter shows up to shout at him about testifying for Vicki. Thayer David answers him with an impressive simplicity. Roger Davis is as loud and monotonous as he usually is, but David’s Ben doesn’t waste the tiniest energy on any uncalled-for displays with his voice or face or gestures. It really is a master class in acting under difficult circumstances.

Joshua shows up and shoos Peter away. Joshua insists on going with Ben into the secret chamber where Barnabas’ coffin is hidden. The other night he went into the chamber alone, opened the coffin, and found it empty. Today he goes in with Ben and opens the coffin again. Unaware of the vampire curse, he is as shocked to find the body there as he had earlier been to find it missing.

Episode 426: Men change, and seldom for the better

For months now, fluttery heiress Millicent Collins has been staying at the great house of Collinwood as the guest of her cousin Joshua and Joshua’s wife Naomi. Tonight, she returns to the drawing room after a moonlight stroll and makes a series of statements that bewilder Joshua and Naomi.

Joshua and Naomi wonder what Millicent could possibly be talking about. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Millicent tells her hosts that she has seen their son Barnabas. Joshua and Naomi are shocked to hear this, because they know that Barnabas has died. Believing that Barnabas died of the plague and that this news would scare the workers away from the family’s shipyard, Joshua put the word out that Barnabas went to England. Millicent saw Barnabas standing in the graveyard, near the secret chamber where his coffin is hidden. This further shocks Joshua and Naomi.

Millicent says that she needs Barnabas. He is the only member of the family who has fought a duel, and there is a family matter that can be settled only by dueling. Joshua and Naomi have no idea what she is talking about. She tells them she has learned that naval officer Nathan Forbes, to whom she recently became engaged, was already married. That hits them so hard they almost embrace her, something characters on this show do not do. They are supposed to be New Englanders, after all. She shies away from them.

What neither his parents nor Naomi know is that Barnabas rises from the dead by night and walks the earth as a vampire. The only living person privy to this secret is Barnabas’ friend, much put-upon servant Ben Stokes.

Ben saw Millicent at the graveyard, moments after Barnabas vanished into thin air. He tried desperately to convince her that she did not see Barnabas, repeating Joshua’s story that he has gone to England. He tried to bargain with her, promising to look for Barnabas and tell her if he finds him. His insistent denials that she saw what she knows she saw frustrated her. She told him that she wants to be buried in the mausoleum, and that she thinks of herself as already dead, dead as of today, no matter how long her body may survive. She told him her grave marker should reflect this date of death. He begged her to let him walk her back to Collinwood. Irritated with him, she allowed him only to follow her at a distance.

Millicent complains to Joshua and Naomi that Ben kept telling her that Barnabas had gone to England. She says that he must be punished. Joshua has been telling Millicent she is ill, and he wants Ben to stick to the official story. But he is such a tyrant that he cannot help but warm to the idea of punishing Ben. He ends the episode by expressing his vigorous agreement with Millicent.

Ben and Millicent are both wonderful today. Millicent has dozens of lines, all of them quotable, and most of them quoted in Danny Horn’s post about this episode. Nancy Barrett developed a deliberately stagy style for Millicent that always works, and today it reaches its summit.

As Ben, Thayer David has a subtler part to play, and he does it perfectly in this one. In an opening scene with Barnabas, he begins with a gruff expression of distaste for the horrible things Barnabas does, and before we know it is pleading with him not to allow himself to be destroyed. In a tiny bit of time, with only a few lines to speak and only a few opportunities to show his face, he takes us from loathing for the vampire to devotion to his friend, and at no point does the transition feel forced.

Naomi and Joshua have recently lost both of their children, among other loved ones, and there doesn’t seem to be any end to the death that surrounds them. Joan Bennett and Louis Edmonds fully connect us to their grief today. Dark Shadows too rarely gives these two extraordinary actors a chance to show what they can do, and both of them make great use of this opportunity.

Barnabas’ part is somewhat ridiculous. Today, he outdoes himself in narcissism, describing the death of his true love Josette solely as a thing that happened to him. But we know going in that that’s his deal- as a vampire, he is a metaphor for selfishness, and he was pretty self-centered even when he was alive. By this time, Jonathan Frid’s performance has made this preposterous creature into a major phenomenon of the era’s pop culture, and when he is this deep in his wheelhouse he does not disappoint. The result is a surprisingly strong entry in the series.

Episode 416: Poor lost children

We open in the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood, where Naomi Collins (Joan Bennett) is drinking alone. Her husband Joshua (Louis Edmonds) enters, returning home after an absence of some days, and greets Naomi with a loud expression of scorn for her alcoholism. She looks up and recites these lines: “A little bird flew to the window. It hovered there for a moment, and then flew away. The first bird of the morning.” Many times, Joan Bennett found ways to show the viewers of Dark Shadows why she had been one of the biggest movie stars of her generation, but this is not one of those times. She delivers this little speech stiffly, as if embarrassed by it.

Joshua is about to leave the room when Naomi tells him that their daughter Sarah died the night before, on her eleventh birthday. He is thunderstruck and says that he cannot believe it. Naomi replies, “Yes, that is what we must do- not believe it!” With this line, Joan Bennett recovers her footing. As matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard in the first 73 weeks of Dark Shadows, when the show was set in 1966 and 1967, Bennett created a character who had devoted her entire life to this motto. Now that the show is set in the late 18th century, we see that the Collinses had been living by it for hundreds of years. Once she starts playing a character who is wrestling with denial, Bennett is in familiar territory, and she is terrific to watch.

Joshua believes that the bewildered Victoria Winters (Alexandra Moltke Isles) is a witch, and that a spell she cast on Sarah caused her death. He goes to the gaol in the village of Collinsport where Vicki is being held, awaiting trial on witchcraft charges. We see her in her cell, the first time we have seen this set. Joshua confronts her there. She denies his accusation. She tells him she is a time-traveler displaced from 1967 and that she has been trying to use her knowledge of history to rescue people from the fates that she has read about. This is true, as it happens, but of course Joshua is not favorably impressed. He tells her to enjoy the few sunsets and sunrises that she will see between now and the day she is put to death.

A week before, Naomi and Joshua’s other child, their forty-ish son Barnabas (Jonathan Frid,) had died of a mysterious illness. Joshua decreed that no one must know that Barnabas had died. He had Barnabas’ body interred in a secret chamber hidden inside the Collins family mausoleum, and put out the word that Barnabas had gone to England.

Unknown to Joshua or Naomi, Barnabas has become a vampire. Joshua’s remark to Vicki about sunrises and sunsets thus carried an ironic charge for regular viewers. When Barnabas emerges from his coffin after this sunset, his friend, much put-upon servant Ben Stokes (Thayer David,) tells him Sarah has died. Barnabas blames himself for this. Sarah had seen him with blood on his face, and in her fear had run away. Alone in the night, she suffered from exposure. Barnabas tells Ben that he will go into the village of Collinsport, confess everything to the authorities, and let the sunlight destroy him. At least that will save Vicki. Ben pleads with him to find another way, but Barnabas insists.

Sarah’s remains have been deposited in a vault in the outer part of the mausoleum. Naomi comes in to look at the vault again; Joshua follows her. Naomi has many bitter words for Joshua; he is ready to lament the deaths of their children. Barnabas and Ben, hiding inside the secret chamber, listen to this painful conversation.

For viewers who have been watching Dark Shadows from the beginning, the scene of Barnabas and Ben eavesdropping on Joshua and Naomi evokes two earlier scenes with particular force. In #318, Barnabas and his associate, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, stood on the same spots where Barnabas and Ben stand now, listening as two local men talking in the outer chamber revealed knowledge that might expose their many crimes. In #118, crazed groundskeeper Matthew Morgan, also played by Thayer David, held Vicki prisoner in a different secret chamber, and the two of them listened as another pair of local men searched for Vicki just outside. In those episodes, Frid and David played men who were bent on murder, but whom we knew to be unlikely to kill their intended targets. Today, they are playing characters who are both desperate to stop killing, but we know that they are doomed to take more lives.

After Naomi and Joshua leave, Barnabas tells Ben he cannot turn himself in. The family must not be disgraced. He tells Ben to come back in the morning with a stake made of holly and to drive it through his heart. He gives him this command in just the same words the witch Angelique had used in #410. Ben had not at that time known what had become of Barnabas, and had complied only because he was under Angelique’s power. He resists Barnabas’ command now, saying that he cannot destroy one who has been a true friend to him. Barnabas tells him he is already destroyed, and that staking him will be a mercy. Ben reluctantly agrees.

Episode 408: My imperfect science

Late in 1966, the ghost of Josette Collins emerged from the supernatural back-world behind the action of Dark Shadows and rescued well-meaning governess Vicki from homicidal groundskeeper Matthew Morgan. Early in 1967, Vicki and several other characters worked closely with the ghost of Josette to thwart the evil plans of undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. After these experiences, Vicki felt so close to the ghost that, to some, it seemed possible that her personality might disintegrate and she might become a sort of reincarnation of Josette.

In November 1967, the back-world and the foreground traded places. Vicki came unstuck in time and found herself in 1795, where Josette and others whom she had met as uncanny entities are alive and she is the alien interloper from another world. Vicki did not in any way adapt to her new surroundings, and immediately brought suspicion on herself. Now she is in jail, spelled “gaol,” awaiting trial on charges of witchcraft.

Josette visits Vicki today and begs her to lift the curse that has brought a mysterious and apparently terminal illness to gallant gentleman Barnabas Collins. Despite her situation, Vicki is shocked that Josette believes her to be a witch. Unable to persuade her of her innocence, Vicki tells Josette that she is a time-traveler and sends her off to look for a book she brought with her from the future. Josette interprets this as a confession of witchcraft, and when she finds the book makes it clear that she could not possibly have interpreted it as anything else.

Vicki makes Josette cry. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

If the show had kept the memory of Vicki’s friendship with Josette’s ghost fresh, this might have been a powerful scene. But Josette’s ghost receded from the action after the Laura story ended in #191, and in #223 and #240 it was made explicit that she is no longer a palpable presence on the estate of Collinwood. We’ve barely heard of Vicki’s connection to Josette in recent months. By this point, even viewers who have been with the show from the beginning are unlikely to make a connection between Vicki’s behavior in her scene with Josette and those old stories. Instead, we see yet another case of Vicki being a tiresome fool.

Disappointing as that scene is, it is not the low point of the episode. That came in the scene immediately before. Actor Jack Stamberger appears as a doctor called to treat Barnabas. Doctors on Dark Shadows are ineffectual figures brought on to fill time, unless they are mad scientists who take a bad situation that is troubling one or a few characters and make it so much worse that it can be a major narrative arc. Stamberger’s part is of the former sort.

It is a particularly objectionable specimen of the category. The other G.P.s usually started with at least a theoretical possibility that they might do something to advance the plot, or turn out to be old friends with established characters who could show a new facet of their personalities in interaction with them, or at least bring out some unusual medical equipment that would be fun to look at. They’ve already foreclosed all of those possibilities before this doctor appears, so the scene is advertised as a waste of time.

One of these is not like the others. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Worse, watching Stamberger’s performance is like sticking your head in a bucket of itching powder. His scene partners, Kathryn Leigh Scott, Lara Parker, and Grayson Scott with dialogue, and Jonathan Frid with moans and anguished facial expressions, are all totally committed to the period setting, and really do seem like gentlefolk inhabiting a mansion in a previous century. Stamberger doesn’t even try to do what they are doing. He puts on a growly voice that might have been acceptable if he were playing a trail-boss in a Western, but that doesn’t have much place in any scene set indoors. It certainly doesn’t make sense for a man in genteel surroundings who talks about nothing but how helpless he is. He doesn’t maintain eye contact with any of the ladies long enough to put himself into the same space with them. He bungles most of his lines, and even those he speaks as written he follows by shuffling his feet, breathing heavily, and looking around. Dark Shadows was, for all practical purposes, done live; if videotape editing had been freely available, it’s hard to imagine director Lela Swift wouldn’t have stopped the scene and taken the time to smack him upside the head.

On his Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn argues that Addison Powell was, as he stylizes it, THE WORST ACTOR EVER TO APPEAR ON DARK SHADOWS. I’m not sure who deserves that title, but today Stamberger locks up the award for Most Irritating Performance.