alexandra moltke – Page 8 – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 427: I object

The opening voiceover melds into a sequence in which we cut back and forth between repressed spinster Abigail Collins and the fanatical Rev’d Mr Trask standing in front of black backgrounds, looking directly into the camera, and declaring that the trial of bewildered time-traveler Vicki for witchcraft must begin at once.

Trask against a balck background. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Soap Opera Land famously does not observe the legal codes that prevail elsewhere. If that is going to bother you, you probably aren’t in the right frame of mind to enjoy the show at all. But there is an art to depicting a fictional trial. You can deviate as much as you like from the rules that prevail in the real world, but there have to be some kind of rules the audience can understand. We can either see those rules applied with the result that a disorderly world is reduced to order, or see them flouted so that our heroes’ hopes of justice are cruelly dashed. If we aren’t aware of any rules, there is no point in setting the play in a courtroom.

That’s the first problem with Vicki’s trial. Now and then her lawyer/ gaoler/ boyfriend/ etc Peter will object to some question or move that a statement be stricken, and once or twice the judges will agree with him. But they are just as likely to respond to identical protests by ordering him to stop interrupting. The witnesses respond to questions with extended free association sessions. Vicki herself interrupts testimony repeatedly, usually to make self-incriminating remarks, and no one tries to stop her. Trask is for some reason simultaneously the prosecutor and one of the witnesses. Opposing counsel periodically engage in shouting matches with each other while the judges watch. The whole thing is so chaotic that it may as well be taking place in a bar-room or at the county fair or on the waterfront after dark.

The second problem with the trial is that it requires Peter to raise his voice repeatedly. Actor Roger Davis can deliver dialogue more or less competently when he is speaking in a normal conversational tone, but his loud voice always tends toward an ugly snarl. This is a major limitation for any performer on a show as shouty as Dark Shadows, but the opposition of Peter to Trask puts Davis head to head with Jerry Lacy, who is a virtuoso of shouting. Next to Lacy’s, Davis’ shouting is not recognizable as a performance.

When I’m watching a scene on Dark Shadows that suffers because of an actor’s shortcomings, I sometimes try to make it bearable by imagining what it would have been like had someone else who may have been available for the part been cast instead. Harvey Keitel was an extra on the show in #33; no doubt he would have accepted a speaking part if offered. Roger Davis plays Peter as a deeply angry man, and Mr Keitel is one of the very best at making audiences empathize with such characters. So it’s interesting to try to picture him as Peter.

On the other hand, there’s nothing in the scripts that requires Peter to constantly seethe with barely contained rage. That was Mr Davis’ contribution. Had the show gone with a more amiable Peter, they might have been able to cast Frederic Forrest in the part. In #137, Forrest was a background player. While Forrest played his share of angry men over the years, he also excelled as goofily cheerful characters, most famously as Chef in Apocalypse Now. I would have liked to see Peter played that way. I think he would have had some real chemistry with Alexandra Moltke Isles’ Vicki, and that we would have had protective feelings for him as he went up against the formidable Trask.

There is a third problem with the trial that neither Harvey Keitel nor the late Frederic Forrest could have done any more with than could Mrs Isles. That is that Vicki and Peter are written as phenomenally stupid. Vicki hasn’t done a single intelligent thing since arriving in the late eighteenth century in November,* but she has become, if anything, even dumber since 1795 gave way to 1796. Peter’s behavior has also been deeply foolish, and today he hits rock bottom when he blurts out to the court that he abused his position as gaoler to help Vicki sneak out, to commit a burglary at the great house of Collinwood, and to steal evidence against her so that it could not be presented to the court. Even under Soap Opera Law, that’s three felonies.

Some claim that the phrase “Dumb Vicki” is ableist. I disagree. “Dumb” really does not mean “mute” anymore, so that using it isn’t ableist against people who do not have the power of speech. And the intelligence characters like Peter and this version of Vicki lack is not the intelligence that IQ tests are supposed to measure. One of the most interesting characters in the part of Dark Shadows set in the eighteenth century is fluttery heiress Millicent Collins, who would probably fall far short of a triple digit score on a Stanford-Binet scale, but whose behavior makes sense to us because we tell what she wants out of life and how she thinks her actions will help her get it. That’s really all we mean when we talk about a “smart character.” A well-crafted story about someone with profound developmental disabilities can depict that person as a smart character, in that sense, as easily as can one about a great sage or a brilliant scientist. Vicki and Peter are not smart characters, no matter how what kind of school we might suppose would best suit them as students, because there is nothing for us to learn by observing their behavior and no suspense as to what their several actions will add up to. They just do one damn thing after another.

Clarice Blackburn and Jerry Lacy do some fine acting today, as does Grayson Hall in a brief turn as the Countess DuPrés. The pre-title bit with Blackburn and Lacy in front of the black backgrounds is so specific to theater in the 1960s that I can’t help but smile at it, but I’m glad it’s there. It isn’t as though you could ever really forget that the show is 56 years old, and I like to see that they preserved something that would have been so typical of the off-Broadway productions that would have been such a big part of the working lives of the cast and other creatives in those days.

*In her testimony today, Abigail gives the dramatic date of Vicki’s arrival in the past as 12 October 1795. The episodes in which the events she describes happened were broadcast on 17 November and 20 November 1967. In the last few weeks, the show has explicitly told us that the day and month of the dramatic setting in 1796 is the same as the broadcast date in 1968, so it’s confusing.

Episode 421: A series of prepared speeches

The Countess DuPrés (Grayson Hall) complains to her niece, gracious lady Josette (Kathryn Leigh Scott,) that life on the great estate of Collinwood is nothing but “a series of prepared speeches.” It’s hard to top that for commentary on this episode, but I do have a couple of things to add.

Josette has been seeing her lover and onetime fiancée, the late Barnabas Collins. Since his death, Barnabas has become a vampire. On Friday, he bit Josette. Now, she is trying to conceal her neck wounds from her aunt.

Josette, her neck wounds visible. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

These wounds are a single piece of makeup. Kathryn Leigh Scott still has it, she showed it in a Dark Shadows cast reunion on Zoom in 2020. The other cast members didn’t know why she wanted it any more than I do. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Those who have been watching Dark Shadows for a while will find this story all too familiar. Until #365, the show was set in contemporary times, 1966 to 1967. Since then, it has been set in the years from 1795 to 1796. In the segments set in the 1960s, Miss Scott plays Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, and Hall plays mad scientist Julia Hoffman. Maggie was Barnabas’ victim in May and June of 1967, and after she escaped from him, Julia was her psychiatrist. The countess is different enough from Julia that Hall has a lot of room to maneuver. But there are only so many ways an actor can convey the idea that her character is in a daze and alternately blissful and defensive. So Miss Scott winds up recycling the performance she gave as Maggie, and the result is pretty stale.

We traveled back to the 18th century with well-meaning governess Vicki. Vicki has not in any way adapted to her new environment, with the result that she is now in gaol on charges of witchcraft. When the countess visits her today, Vicki tells her that she is from the 1960s and that in that period she had learned from history and legend that a grim fate awaits Josette. The countess concludes from Vicki’s presentation that she is indeed a witch, and that she is not giving her warnings, but is cruelly gloating over the evil spells she has cast.

Vicki is accompanied by her gaoler/ defense attorney/ boyfriend, Peter. Peter had tried to stop her blabbing to the countess, and asks her why she did it. Vicki says that she is counting on the idea that if she keeps telling the truth, people will have to believe her. Peter asks her to think of how she would react if someone from the 21st century traveled to 1968 and went around telling everyone how and when they were going to die. At this, Vicki’s eyes widen. “Oh, Peter, what a fool I’ve been!”

At that, we can hear the sound of the viewing public giving up on Vicki once and for all. Peter isn’t even the first person to try to explain her situation to her. Both kindly gentleman Jeremiah Collins and caddish naval officer Nathan Forbes gave her explicit instructions about her need to lie and scam her way through her predicament, and neither of them made any impression on her. Movie reviewer Roger Ebert famously described stories that work only because the characters do things the average member of the audience would be too smart to do “idiot plots”; for the last eleven weeks, Vicki has been the Designated Dum-Dum at the heart of the most irritating idiot plot imaginable.

There actually is a very sweet little scene between Vicki and Peter right after that low point. She tells him about airplanes and other features of twentieth century life, and he tries to figure out what she’s talking about. Almost all of the anger we feel towards Vicki for being written so badly and towards Peter for being played by Roger Davis melts away by the end of that scene.

Episode 412: The book

For the first 39 weeks of Dark Shadows, well-meaning governess Vicki was the main protagonist. Her understated, sometimes diffident manner fit with the pace and themes of the show in that period. When the show introduced its first supernatural villain, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, Vicki rose to the occasion and led the opposition to her. When Laura went up in smoke, the last of the themes that made Vicki a suitable lead went with her. Vicki remained our chief point-of-view character for some time after that, but she didn’t find much footing in any of the stories. She receded steadily from center stage for months.

In November 1967, Vicki came unstuck in time and found herself in the year 1795. At first this seemed to be an opportunity for a reset, but Vicki wound up being written in the time-travel story as a complete moron. She kept yelling at the other characters that they were being played by actors who had other parts in the first 73 weeks of the show, refused to take advice from people who tried to explain how she could fit in with her new surroundings, and insistently held onto possessions that eighteenth century people would take as evidence that she was evil. Now she finds herself in gaol, accused of witchcraft and facing a possible death sentence.

The other day, the gracious Josette visited Vicki in gaol and begged her to lift the spell that had brought a terminal illness on the gallant Barnabas Collins. Unable to persuade Josette that she was not a witch, Vicki told her that she had come from the future and brought with her a book about the history of the Collins family printed in the twentieth century. She told Josette where to find this book. When she did find it, Josette was more convinced than ever that Vicki was the witch.

Now, Barnabas has died. Josette visits Vicki again, and vows to do whatever she can to see that she is hanged. Josette is so distraught over Barnabas’ death that she quite calmly says she may want to take her own life soon, but she does look forward fondly to testifying against Vicki and seeing her execution.

Josette takes consolation in the idea that she will help get Vicki sentenced to death. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

After Josette leaves, Vicki asks her gaoler/ defense attorney/ prospective boyfriend Peter to sneak her out of the gaol. She wants to go to Collinwood and steal the book back.

Evidently Peter is no brighter than Vicki, because he agrees to this plan. Vicki goes to Josette’s bedroom. As we might have expected, Vicki is seen in the room- Josette’s aunt, the Countess DuPrés, opens the door and finds her with the book in her hands. By the time the countess returns with Josette and the witch-hunting Rev’d Trask, Vicki and the book are gone. This will be Vicki’s own bedroom in 1967, and she knows of a secret passage leading out of it. The other three do not know of this passage, and no one in 1795 knows of any reason Vicki would be aware of it. So far as they know, she has appeared and disappeared by magic.

Back in the gaol, Peter locks Vicki in her cell and hides the book in his desk. Trask and the ladies knock on the door and demand to see Vicki. Peter swears that she has been in her cell all night. Josette is concerned that they no longer have the book, but Trask says they don’t need it- only a witch can be in two places at once. Peter’s statement will suffice to put Vicki’s neck in the noose.

As of this writing (18 January 2024,) four of the five actors in this episode are still alive. Only Grayson Hall is no longer with us; she died in 1985. Hall’s countess, like Kathryn Leigh Scott’s Josette and Jerry Lacy’s Trask, is a lot of fun to watch. Vicki is so brainless that the part defeats Alexandra Moltke Isles, and Roger Davis is never an agreeable screen presence. So we wind up cheering on the people who want to put the heroine to death and hoping that her love interest joins her on the gibbet.

Episode 400: Fire knows your name

The Rev’d Mr Trask, a cleric of sorts, is convinced that there is a witch in the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood. He is right about this. He is also convinced that the witch is the eccentric Victoria Winters. He is wrong on this point. The real witch is Angelique Collins, wife of the master of the house, the gallant Barnabas. Barnabas, who as a man of the Enlightenment asserts that there are no witches, is hiding Vicki, and has reluctantly agreed to let Trask perform a rite of exorcism, believing that once he is finished he will have to go away and everyone will have to admit that Vicki is innocent.

At the top of the episode, we see Angelique building a house of cards and delivering a soliloquy about her plan to cast a spell to make it look like Trask’s fraudulent ritual has proven Vicki’s guilt. There is an element of suspense as we wonder what the character’s actions will lead to, and an even more powerful suspense as we marvel at the courage it took for the actress to remain calm enough build a house of cards on what is essentially a live television show. Forget the Daytime Emmys, Lara Parker deserved a medal for this feat.

Angelique recites a spell over the house of cards, then sets it on fire. The first time they used an incompletely contained fire on Dark Shadows was in #191, and as a result of that daring experiment a load-bearing beam caught fire and collapsed in the middle of a scene. They finished taping before putting the fire out, and somehow everyone survived. There was also an off-camera fire during a conversation between Barnabas and Vicki in #290, and Jonathan Frid and Alexandra Moltke Isles just kept delivering their lines while we heard fire extinguishers blasting in the background. As a result of an excessive pre-treatment of the cards with lighter fluid, today’s fire burns faster and expels debris over a wider area than had been intended. I suppose a technical term for a rapid fire that expels debris is an “explosion.” Parker keeps up her incantation while this explosion progresses directly in her face. That shows an entirely different kind of courage than she showed with the house of cards, but she exhibits it in an equally rare degree.

The fire starts. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Downstairs, Trask is standing at the threshold of the house, doing his own fire ceremony. He draws Vicki’s initials on the doorstep, holds up a dowsing rod, and jabbers for a while. Then he sets fire to the rod. In her room, Vicki sees flames erupting from the floor. She shouts in panic.

Barnabas is upstairs. He hears Angelique shouting “Eye of fire, heart of ice!” Her shouts grow louder and louder as she repeats the phrases faster and faster. My wife, Mrs Acilius, said that the pattern of Angelique’s voice sounded to her like someone having an orgasm. The willingness to risk the laugh that pattern might bring represents a third form of courage; by this point, we would have to admit that whatever we may think of Angelique, Lara Parker was one of the bravest people imaginable.

Barnabas is about to investigate, but then he hears Vicki shouting “Fire!” Between these two shouting women, he goes to the one who doesn’t sound like she’s enjoying herself. By the time he gets to Vicki’s room, she is gone. He sees no sign of fire.

Vicki runs out the front door, into Trask’s arms. He shouts “I’ve caught the witch!” and forces her to the ground. He looks delighted that his shtick actually worked, for once.

“I caught the witch!” Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

This moment is an odd inversion of the ending of #191. That episode ends with strange and troubled boy David running out of the burning building where his mother, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, was trying to immolate him, and finding refuge in Vicki’s arms. At that moment, life triumphs over death, and Dark Shadows version 1.0 reaches its conclusion.

When Vicki runs out of the house and into Trask’s arms, death and folly win a victory over life and reason. Nothing comes to a conclusion- the story just gains new layers of complexity. We don’t even go to a commercial break, but get a reaction from Angelique first.

Barnabas talks with Angelique, mystified by what just happened. When he mentions that he heard her in her old room shouting strange words, she lies and says she was in the sewing room. After she leaves, we hear his thoughts- he had searched the sewing room, and knows she is lying. He now believes that there is a witch. He would find it much easier to believe that Vicki, a strange girl who claims to be displaced in time from the year 1967, 172 years in the future, is that witch than to face the prospect that his own wife is, but he can neither overlook the lie she has told nor the sheer improbability that so flagrant a quack as Trask came up with the right answer to any question. He remembers that indentured servant Ben claimed to have been enslaved by the witch, and resolves to find out what Ben can tell him.

We first got to know Barnabas in the months between April and November of 1967, when he was a vampire preying on the living in Vicki’s native time. In those days, he never mentioned Angelique, and there was no indication that he suspected any of the witchcraft we have seen since we embarked on our journey to 1795. Perhaps in the original timeline, when the place Vicki has taken was occupied by a woman named Phyllis Wick, Angelique had to proceed more slowly and carefully, with the result that Barnabas was turned into a ghoul without ever picking up on what was going on. If so, it would be Vicki’s complete failure to adapt to her new time in any way that accelerated the pace of events and thereby exposed Angelique to Barnabas’ suspicions.

Episode 398: The only real witch there is

Wrongly suspected of witchcraft, bewildered time-traveler Vicki has found refuge in the home of young gentleman Barnabas Collins. Vicki doesn’t know it yet, but last night Barnabas married a woman named Angelique. Vicki knew Angelique when they were both working in the home of Barnabas’ family, Vicki as a governess, Angelique as a lady’s maid. Unknown to almost anyone, Angelique is the real witch and is glad Vicki has fallen into taking the blame for her evil deeds.

Angelique herself is in the dark about Vicki’s presence in the house. She chances upon Vicki in the morning. Angelique is the only character in the segment of Dark Shadows set in the year 1795 to address her as “Vicki”; everyone else insists on calling her “Victoria” or “Miss Winters.” Since we have known Vicki since the first episode, and we know that her friends call her “Vicki,” hearing her use that form of the name tells us that Angelique has presented herself to Vicki as a friend.

Angelique tells Vicki that she and Barnabas are now married. If Vicki had learned anything from the long string of failures to adapt to the mores of 1795 that have brought her to her current state, she would respond to this by lowering her eyes, curtsying, and saying “Mrs. Collins.” But instead, she reacts with a blank stare. Angelique asks what if she is merely startled by the news, or is shocked. Vicki resumes babbling, still calling Angelique by her first name, still referring to Barnabas by his.

Not only is Vicki continuing to flout the modes of address conventional to the period in which she finds herself, she seems genuinely unaware that a newlywed might be disturbed to stumble upon an attractive young woman her husband is hiding in the house. After a minute or two, it occurs to her to ask Angelique if she wants her to stay. Angelique says that because Barnabas is the master of the house, it is not for her to object. Vicki responds by jumping into her face and exclaiming “But you’re the mistress!” Even after that, she keeps on with her first-naming of Barnabas and Angelique and shows absolutely no sign of awareness that Angelique might be concerned about the nature of Barnabas’ attachment to her.

Downstairs, Angelique asks Barnabas about Vicki. He asks incredulously if she is jealous. Barnabas didn’t visit Angelique in her bedroom on their wedding night and she knows that he tends to make free with servant girls, since that’s how they met. Even so, he can’t figure out why Angelique might be unhappy to find that he has Vicki stashed in the house. It really is a shame Barnabas and Vicki didn’t marry, just imagine what oblivious children they might have had. They might have been the progenitors of a whole line of Detective Frank Drebins.

Later, Angelique has a spell she wants to cast on Barnabas’ aunt, repressed spinster Abigail Collins. She summons indentured servant Ben, whom she has enslaved. She orders Ben to steal Abigail’s hair ribbon from her night-stand. Ben is horrified by the command. It would have been bad enough if he had been caught sneaking into one of the gentlemen’s bedrooms, but he might have been able to talk his way out of that. If he is found in a lady’s bedroom, he’ll be lucky if all that happens is that he’s sent back to prison for several years. Impatient, Angelique tells him not to get caught.

Abigail does catch Ben in her room with the hair ribbon in his hand. She was the first to suspect witchcraft at Collinwood, before there even was any. Ben begs her not to ask him any questions, but she isn’t having it. She presses him, and he says that the witch sent him. She demands he say the witch’s name, wanting to hear him say “Victoria Winters.” He is about to say “Angelique” when we see her, in the Old House, cast the spell that causes him to choke. This scene takes about a minute to make all the points the story needs, but goes on for several times that long. That doesn’t hurt a thing- Clarice Blackburn and Thayer David were such a pair of pros that they could hold the audience’s attention for a good deal longer with a lot less to work with. It’s a fine ending.

Episode 396: The doll and the pins

Well-meaning governess Vicki is wrongly suspected of witchcraft and needs a place to hide. Young gentleman Barnabas takes her into his house. In her gratitude, Vicki tells Barnabas the truth about herself. She is a time-traveler, yanked back to this year 1795 from her native 1967 by forces she does not understand. Indentured servant Ben enters the room and Vicki leaves. Mystified by her story, Barnabas asks Ben if he thinks Vicki might be a witch after all.

It is exciting when Vicki starts confiding in Barnabas. She has utterly failed to adapt to her new environment, and has none of the abilities she would need to scam her way into a secure place there. She has ended up as an obstacle to story development and an irritating screen presence. If Vicki isn’t going to lie competently, she may as well tell the truth. But that turns out to be a dead end as well- there is no use for Barnabas to make of the information she has given him.

Barnabas doesn’t repeat Vicki’s story to Ben- he just reports that she said something utterly bizarre. What Barnabas does not know, but Ben does, is that there really is a witch in the house- it is Barnabas’ bride-to-be Angelique. Angelique has enslaved Ben, so if he found out Vicki’s secret she would as well, and would be able to use it against her as she frames Vicki for all of her own crimes. Ben proclaims to Barnabas his absolute certainty that Vicki is not a witch, but since he can’t tell anyone about Angelique, this only puzzles Barnabas. Barnabas is further baffled when Ben says he hopes that Barnabas’ marriage to Angelique brings an end to his troubles.

The other day, Angelique tried to solve a problem of her own by raising a corpse from its grave. This was the late Jeremiah Collins, uncle of Barnabas and his best friend until, under the influence of Angelique’s spell, he and Barnabas’ fiancée Josette eloped together. Barnabas responded to that by challenging Jeremiah to a duel. Conscience-stricken, Jeremiah decided to let Barnabas kill him and told Josette that she would be free to marry Barnabas once he was dead.

Angelique had ordered Jeremiah to plague Josette and Barnabas with angry demands that they stay apart. We could interpret that simply as puppetry on Angelique’s part. But today, Jeremiah is harassing Angelique and refusing her repeated commands to go back to his grave. He says he was at peace in the earth until Angelique disturbed him. He was content with his decision to forfeit his life, but now he has become something he didn’t bargain for. Maybe it’s the indignity of that change that accounts for his change of personality, or maybe he’s just cranky because he can’t get back to sleep.

Regular viewers will think of a third possibility. In the segments of Dark Shadows set in 1966 and 1967, we saw other supernatural beings, such as undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins and the ghosts of Josette and of Barnabas’ little sister Sarah. These beings looked at first glance like humans, but the more we learned about them the clearer it became that each was in fact a complex of multiple entities, some of which operated independently of and occasionally at cross-purposes with others. As a witch, Angelique might also be a composite being. Perhaps each time she casts a spell, she breaks off a little piece of herself and deposits it within the person she is trying to control. If so, the creature she is trying to send away is not simply Jeremiah, but the body of Jeremiah animated by a chunk of the spirit of Angelique. That would explain why the actions of the risen Jeremiah are characterized by three traits that were alien to the living man, but that Angelique has in abundance- single-mindedness, vengefulness, and ineffectiveness.

Barnabas, Ben, and a clergyman are in the front parlor, ready for the wedding. Angelique takes a long time to come downstairs. Barnabas goes up to her room to see what is keeping her. He finds her terribly upset, insisting that they have the ceremony somewhere else. Barnabas looks in her suitcase, which had a moment before held the clothes she removed to put on her bridal gown. Those clothes have vanished, and in their place Barnabas finds a doll belonging to his little sister Sarah and some pins. Had Barnabas ever seen a horror movie, he would know to interpret this as a clue from Jeremiah that Angelique had caused a recent illness of Sarah’s by sticking pins in her doll, but people didn’t get to the cinema in 1795, so it’s another dead end.

Angelique composes herself and says she will be right down for the wedding. Barnabas leaves the room. The door closes itself, and Angelique cannot open it. Jeremiah enters and tells Angelique she must be punished for disturbing the dead. He takes her to his grave, which is open. Angelique raised Jeremiah some days ago- if the grave has been open this whole time, you’d think someone would have noticed and people would be talking about it. Anyway, he puts her in the grave, and from her point of view we see him throwing dirt into it.

Jeremiah dropping dirt onto Angelique, from her point of view. Screenshot by

This is the first live burial we’ve seen on Dark Shadows. It’s true that the POV shot from inside the grave echoes a moment in #248 when Barnabas, who is in 1967 a vampire, shuts his prisoner Maggie Evans in a coffin and we see him through her eyes, but that coffin wasn’t in the ground.

Barnabas shuts Maggie in a coffin in #248. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Harking back as it does to that shocking moment from Barnabas’ early days on the show, the image of the reanimated Jeremiah dropping dirt in the grave invites us to make a comparison between Jeremiah and Barnabas. In life Jeremiah was a mild-mannered, good-hearted fellow, as is the living Barnabas. The destructive behavior he has exhibited since Angelique raised him from the dead is not only typical of her, but also of what we saw from the vampire Barnabas in 1967. Again, we wonder if the fate that awaits Barnabas is not only something Angelique will do to him, but if everything we saw of him in the months between April and November was what Angelique was doing disguised as him.

Closing Miscellany

Angelique’s repeated commands to Jeremiah today to “Go back to your grave!” find an echo in one of the great moments in the history of Dark Shadows conventions, when Lara Parker used that line to explain the Dark Shadows house style of acting:

“Go back to your grave!!!!!”

When Vicki tells Barnabas the truth about herself, the camerawork makes Alexandra Moltke Isles’ strabismus impossible to miss. Previously they had taken great care to photograph her from angles that would obscure this condition, but we’re going to get another clear look at it on Thursday. Combined with the lousy lines the scripts have given Vicki since the beginning of the 1795 segment, it is hard not to suspect that there was some kind of deliberate effort behind the scenes to push Mrs Isles aside.

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

This was the first episode of Dark Shadows broadcast in 1968. The copyright date printed on the screen at the end still says 1967. They were several months late before they stopped putting “1966” there, so I guess we shouldn’t be surprised they didn’t update it for an episode shown on New Year’s Day.

Episode 387: Just how does one go about sensing an evil spirit?

Lady’s maid Angelique is keeping busy, even though none of the ladies is on the show today, by carrying tea trays in and out of the front parlor of the manor house on the great estate of Collinwood. As she does so, she hears the Rev’d Mr Trask, a professional witch hunter visiting from Salem, Massachusetts, lay out his plan for uncovering what he believes to be a coven of witches operating in the house. Since Angelique spends her non-tea related time being a wicked witch and causing all the suffering that everyone has undergone on the show since we arrived in this year 1795, it is unsurprising that she reacts to Trask’s plan with concern.

We see the servants’ entrance to the manor house. Not only is this a new set, it is a new kind of set for Dark Shadows. So far, we have seen at most one entrance for any building. Since we are in the middle of the 78th week, we have come to expect that’s all we ever will see, so it comes as a bit of a jolt to see this doorway.

Angelique sees caddish naval officer Nathan Forbes coming out of the servants’ entrance. She remarks that the family and their guests never use it; he jokes about breaking rules. She asks what he has in his hands; he asks what hands she means, then admits that he stole some food from the kitchen. He claims to be on his way to a picnic, and invites her to join him. He is typically uninhibited in his dealings with young women, and he certainly doesn’t try to keep Angelique from thinking that if she accepts his invitation she will have her work cut out for her if she wants to remain fully clothed. She declines, insisting that she has duties to attend to.

Angelique sees through Nathan. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

She watches him go, and in a soliloquy says that she sees through him. He is taking the food to Victoria “Vicki” Winters, governess to young Sarah Collins and Trask’s prime suspect, who is in hiding. Perhaps Nathan was leveraging his reputation as a lecher by presenting his invitation to Angelique in terms he knew she would have to decline.

Back in the front parlor, Trask is asking the master of the house, haughty overlord Joshua Collins, why Angelique did not report when the servants were summoned for his questioning. Joshua replies that she is not the Collinses’ servant, but that she belongs to their house-guests, the DuPrés family. Trask rails against the DuPrés, and Angelique enters, meekly saying that her mistress told her she was wanted.

Even though Angelique was bustling around the room in the opening teaser, Trask does not recognize her. It may not have been customary to take much notice of servants in the eighteenth century, but Angelique is rather a hard person to miss. For one thing, she looks exactly like Lara Parker. A person would have to be pretty intensely focused not to notice someone who was so obviously meant to be a movie star.

Trask asks Angelique where she was when the other servants came. When she tells him she was walking alone in the woods, he asks if she went there to meet with someone- “perhaps the DE-VIL!!!” Jerry Lacy is an accomplished sketch comic, and the laughs he raises when Trask shouts about “The DE-VIL!!!” and “THE ALMIGHTY!!!!” must be intentional.

Trask questions Angelique closely, and for a fraction of a second it seems like he might know what he is doing. That produces mixed feelings in the audience- if he exposes Angelique, he will save Vicki and other characters we care about from the terrible fates that are apparently in store for them. On the other hand, Dark Shadows might then become The Adventures of the Heroic Reverend Trask, and that would be so ridiculous that no writing staff in the world could possibly keep it going for more than a few episodes.

Angelique sees through Trask as easily as she had seen through Nathan. She falls to her knees and claims to be having a vision. She hams it up shamelessly.

At first Trask says that she is either a complete charlatan or is speaking under divine inspiration; before Joshua can express a doubt as to which it is, he proclaims it genuine. She has claimed to hear the voices of a man and a woman speaking in a large new house that is otherwise vacant. Trask and Joshua decide it is the new house under construction on the estate, and rush off. We see Angelique with a weary look on her face, as if she can’t believe she is up against such a load of idiots.

In the drawing room of the new house, Vicki is eating the food Nathan has brought. She starts talking about her situation. As it happens, Vicki is not native to 1795 at all. She was thrust back to that year from a séance she was attending in 1967, after Sarah’s ghost took possession of her and said she wanted to tell “the story from the beginning.” Vicki hasn’t told anyone about this, but she is continually saying and doing things that make it obvious she doesn’t belong in this world. She tells Nathan that “In order to get here, I had to transcend time and space.” Nathan says he doesn’t know what she’s talking about, but that if she keeps saying things like that even her friends will think she’s a witch.

**Vicki natters** away. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

There was a time when Vicki was an intelligent, dynamic character. Apparently she left her brain in 1967, because what Nathan says comes as news to her. A few days after Vicki arrived, kindly gentleman Jeremiah Collins befriended her; when she answered his questions about her past by claiming to have amnesia, he bluntly told her she would have to make up a better story than that. Someone who needs advice at that level is not likely to do well in a situation where only a con artist could survive.

Vicki and Nathan hear voices in the foyer. Trask and Joshua have arrived. Nathan goes out to meet them, claiming to have come to inspect the architecture of the house. Joshua is appalled that Nathan has not asked his permission to enter the house, and Trask is sure he has come to visit Vicki.

Trask, Joshua, and Nathan go into the drawing room. Vicki is not there. A window is open, and there is a piece of fresh food wrapped in a cloth on a crate. Nathan doesn’t claim that he opened the window or that he was eating the food; Trask and Joshua are left to conclude that Vicki had been there.

Episode 386: Innocent until proved innocent

For the first nine months it was on the air, Dark Shadows was the story of well-meaning governess Vicki Winters and her efforts to befriend her charge, strange and troubled boy David Collins. That phase of the show reached a climax with the story of David’s mother, blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, who was on from December 1966 until March 1967. Vicki rallied the regular characters in opposition to Laura’s evil plans for David, and when Laura went up in smoke David found refuge in Vicki’s arms. He had exchanged his destructive, death-oriented mother for the loving, life-affirming Vicki. At that moment, Dark Shadows version 1.0 ended.

Now, Vicki has been thrust back in time to the year 1795. Vicki has managed to get another job as governess on the great estate of Collinwood, supervising the education of ten year old Sarah Collins and her second cousin once removed, the visiting (but so far unseen) Daniel Collins. There is a blonde fire witch here as well, the mysterious Angelique. Viewers who have been with the show from the beginning will remember Vicki’s leadership of the campaign against Laura, and are waiting to see how she will take charge of the effort to defeat Angelique.

It’s already been a long wait. Vicki has not adapted her thinking at all to her new surroundings. Angelique’s spells have wrought considerable havoc, and members of the Collins household have begun to wonder whether a witch might be at work among them. Angelique hasn’t lifted a finger to deflect suspicion to Vicki, but Vicki’s own behavior has been so bizarre that she is the obvious suspect. As we open today, she has been tied to a tree by the Rev’d Mr Trask, a visiting witch-hunter from Salem, Massachusetts.

Vicki’s ineptitude is particularly frustrating to watch because the major theme of Dark Shadows 2.0, which ran from Laura’s immolation in March to Vicki’s temporal displacement in November, had been a brilliantly successful deception by a different sort of time-traveler. Vampire Barnabas Collins presented himself to the Collinses and their neighbors, not as a blood-sucking ghoul native to another century, but as a distant cousin from contemporary England. Barnabas made plenty of slips and raised miscellaneous suspicions in the minds of various people, but he played his part well enough that the Collinses let him take possession of a house on their estate, the people of Collinsport accepted him as a member of the local aristocracy, and in one way or another he made himself indispensable to everyone around him. We began this version 3.0 expecting to see Vicki do in 1795 something like what Barnabas had done in 1967, and instead we see her as a tedious dingbat.

Barnabas is alive and benevolent in 1795. He and his friend, caddish naval officer Nathan Forbes, are men of the Enlightenment who are appalled that there are still people who believe in witchcraft. They hold Trask in contempt and are committed to saving Vicki from him. Barnabas and Nathan ask the Collins family’s house-guest, the Countess DuPrés, what Trask has done with Vicki. The countess had originally believed Vicki to be a witch, but after seeing Trask’s lunatic behavior while interrogating her came to regret her involvement in bringing him to Collinwood. She tells them that Trask tied Vicki up and took her out of the house, whither he would not say.

Outraged, the men head out of the house. They meet Trask coming in. He refuses to tell them where he has left Vicki. Barnabas thunders that “[I]t perhaps has escaped your memory that we have just fought a war recently-a war to establish certain rights. And I am defending the right of this girl to be judged innocent until she is proved innocent. I am sure that this idea is a little complicated for your mind to absorb.” He’s probably right about that, I certainly find it difficult to absorb.

“Innocent until she is proved innocent!” Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Once Barnabas and Nathan are on their way to look for Vicki, Trask tells the countess he has tied her to a tree somewhere in the woods and that if she is a witch, the tree will be dead by morning. Angelique’s regular job is as the countess’ maid. She is in the room with a tea tray when Trask says this, and she smiles delightedly when she hears it. Later, she will sneak out of the house to go searching for Vicki herself.

Barnabas and Nathan find Vicki and untie her. They decide to hide her in the great house of Collinwood. The great house is Vicki’s home in the 1960s, and is under construction in 1795. They set off, and Angelique comes to the tree.

Once she is alone, Angelique takes a cutting from the tree and sets fire to it. This causes the tree itself to burn. It is not entirely clear why she doesn’t just set fire to the tree, since the cutting she has taken is the greenest and least flammable part of it, but witches gonna witch, I guess.

Building a fire the witchy way. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The next morning, Trask goes to the tree. The countess insists on accompanying him. They find that Vicki is gone and the tree is a hunk of scorched timber. Trask triumphantly silences the countess’ doubts.

In our time-band, the last witchcraft trial in the English-speaking world was held in Scotland in 1727. The Westminster Parliament finally abolished all laws against witchcraft in 1736, including those still on the books in Massachusetts* and some other British colonies in North America. Had they lived in our 1795, Barnabas and Nathan could have gone to the constable and reported that Trask had abducted Vicki, bound her, and left her outside. The constable would help them find her, arrest Trask, and that would be it. But of course Dark Shadows takes place in a world that differs from ours in many respects, not least in regard to the legal history of Massachusetts.

As the countess, Grayson Hall has been doing an excellent job establishing a character who is distinct from mad scientist Julia Hoffman, the role she plays in the segments of Dark Shadows set in the twentieth century. But as my wife, Mrs Acilius, points out, Hall does lapse into Julia a few times today. When she gasps in horror, she makes a little clicking noise in the back of her throat that is one of Julia’s most recognizable mannerisms. Julia is deeply entangled with Barnabas’ activities, and has developed an emotional attachment to go along with her inability to get away from him; shortly before Vicki took us with her to 1795, we heard Julia address him with a deeply felt “Barnabas, Barnabas.” The countess barely knows Barnabas, but in an anguished moment today, she says “Barnabas, Barnabas” to him. Hall does return to being the countess before the episode is over, but there is a weird little visit from Julia in the middle of it all.

Vicki went back to the past after Sarah’s ghost took possession of her at a séance and said she was going to “tell the story from the beginning.” Vicki has traded places with Sarah’s original governess, a woman named Phyllis Wick. Presumably Angelique chose Phyllis as a patsy, and she wound up as Trask’s target. Maybe Angelique did this simply because Phyllis was new to the house and had no old friends to object that she couldn’t possibly be a witch, but maybe it was because she had caught on to Angelique.

It would make it all the more exciting to see Vicki catch on to Angelique and do battle with her. We’ve already seen Smart Vicki defeat one blonde fire witch, so if we see her try to fight another, we will hope that she might win again. Only when we saw the attempt end in disaster would we realize that everything we’ve seen Vicki doing is what Phyllis Wick did the first time around, and that her intervention won’t have changed a thing. That would be a powerful twist ending to the whole 1795 flashback. Instead, we are subjected to Dumb Vicki doing things neither Phyllis nor anyone else who belonged in 1795 could possibly have done, and we end up wondering what she is doing in this story.

*Collinsport is in Maine, which until 1821 was part of Massachusetts.

Episode 385: How long have you been in league with the devil?

Repressed spinster Abigail Collins has invited a visitor to the great estate of Collinwood. He is the Reverend Mr Trask. It’s 1795, so the Rev’d Mr T missed the big excitement in his hometown of Salem, Massachusetts by 103 years, but he’s trying to make up for it by hunting witches elsewhere.

Enter Trask. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Both caddish naval officer Nathan Forbes and young gentleman Barnabas Collins are appalled by Trask, and each of them wants to defend the target of Abigail’s suspicions, governess Victoria Winters. They are powerless to do much for her. Barnabas cannot overrule his father, haughty overlord Joshua Collins, who is the master of the house and has given Abigail “full rein” in re Vicki. And Nathan cannot persuade Vicki to run away with him, because she distrusts his intentions and cannot believe that she is really in danger.

Unknown to any of the other characters, Vicki is a time-traveler displaced from 1967 by the ghost of Sarah Collins, who is now alive and studying under her direction. Vicki has been making one inexplicably foolish mistake after another since she began her uncertain and frightening journey to the past four weeks ago, and now they are all catching up with her.

It is hard to imagine what the writers were thinking when they made Vicki do such dumb things. Today, Trask, accompanied by his supporters Abigail and house-guest the Countess DuPrés, confronts Vicki in her room. At first, her behavior in that scene makes sense. He keeps putting his hands on her, prompting her to object; he asks her leading questions based on the assumption that she is guilty of witchcraft, to which she reacts with disbelief. But she has been in 1795 for nearly a month, and that whole time she has been a servant in the house of the tyrannical Joshua. She must know that she is subject to arbitrary exercises of power.

Further, we have seen Vicki in 1966 teaching history to her charge, strange and troubled boy David. You would think that she would have some appreciation of social context and would make some effort to play along with people who are native to the setting in which she finds herself. When Trask tells her to kneel and pray, he’s giving her the option to get out of trouble by doing something she wouldn’t have any reason to find objectionable. But she just gets angrier. She and Trask take turns slapping each other, and Abigail helps him bind and gag her.

Vicki slaps Trask. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Later, Abigail and the countess are in the front parlor of the manor house. The countess has been pushing hard for action against Vicki, but she recoils from Trask’s methods. She tells Abigail that she wishes she knew where Trask had taken Vicki. Abigail reproves her, shocked that she would second-guess “a man of God!” The countess is played by Grayson Hall, who in the parts of Dark Shadows set in the twentieth century plays mad scientist Julia Hoffman. Like the countess, Julia is fascinated with the occult. Julia has expert knowledge that leads her to draw correct conclusions about this subject. Perhaps the countess’ misgivings about Trask show that she, too, is smart enough to see through the charlatans. Maybe Vicki will find herself with a more formidable ally than the irresponsible Nathan or the bumbling Barnabas.

Trask has tied Vicki to a tree deep in the woods. He tells her that if she is guilty of witchcraft, the tree will be dead by morning. He asks her to renounce Satan. In another Dumb Vicki moment, she refuses simply to say “I renounce Satan and all his works.” He leaves her tied up.

Trask leaves Vicki tied to a tree. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Jerry Lacy joined the cast in #357 as lawyer Tony Peterson. In his performance as Tony, Mr Lacy did his famous Humphrey Bogart imitation. Bogart slips out once or twice today; when Trask looks away from Vicki and goes into monologues, he does sound like he is about to start explaining how he will find out who stole the strawberries from the officers’ mess. But what’s more important about his performance is how very far he goes over the top. Lara Parker famously described the Dark Shadows house style of acting by talking about the hyper-intense manner in which she was expected to deliver the line “Go back to your grave!”; Mr Lacy’s performance today is as intense as any we will ever see.

As Vicki, Alexandra Moltke Isles is usually one of the quietest and most interior-directed members of the cast. In Vicki’s scenes with Trask today, she shows that she can shout with the best of them. If Vicki had taken her brain with her to 1795, it might have been fun to see what Mrs Isles could do with the part under the new regime.

Mr Lacy wasn’t the first shouty actor to share a scene with Mrs Isles. For the first several weeks of the show, the cast included a man named Mark Allen. In alternate episodes, Allen either shouted all his lines or whined all of them. Mrs Isles responded to that memorably in #20 by growing ever more still and quiet as he bellowed at her. But while Allen’s shouting was simply a sign of incompetence, Mr Lacy’s is textured, nuanced, and funny. When other actors shouted back at Allen, the result was a lot of noise. When Vicki shouts back at Trask, she comes to life.

I do wonder about Trask’s name. Just a few days ago, I was looking through a book about Marvel Comics in the 1960s, and learned that a villain named Bolivar Trask was introduced in The X-Men in 1965 and was a big deal in several Marvel titles for the next few years. The writers, producers, and directors of Dark Shadows were all middle-aged, and it is unlikely that they were reading comic books for pleasure. But they had shown engagement with comics before- a graveyard scene in #209 includes a rather clear echo of the visual style of the horror comics EC was putting out fifteen years or so earlier. Since that is part of the lead-up to the vampire story, the directors would have been making an obvious move had they sent a production assistant to a flea market to look for some old horror comics to which they could slip in an homage.

Besides, Dark Shadows itself had been licensed to Dell for comic books by this time. It would only have been natural for people involved with the show to have been curious what might come of that. Maybe they were browsing through Marvel’s output to get a sense of what was going on in that medium.

Or an influence could have come through an even less unusual vector. Several members of the production staff had children who were teenaged and younger, as did writer Sam Hall. Those children might well have been fans of Marvel’s in those days. So it is possible that someone behind the scenes might have heard the name “Trask” mentioned around the house as a good one for a villain.

Episode 382: The devil sent one of his minions

Haughty overlord Joshua Collins, master of the estate of Collinwood in this year 1795, has gone missing. His sister, repressed spinster Abigail Collins, is convinced this is the result of witchcraft. One of the Collinses’ house-guests, the Countess DuPrés, agrees with Abigail, and like Abigail is sure that the witch is well-meaning governess Victoria Winters (whom we know as “Vicki.”) Abigail and the countess also blame Vicki’s black magic for the fact that Joshua’s brother Jeremiah and the countess’ niece Josette have apparently eloped, jilting Josette’s fiancé. That sad man is Jeremiah’s nephew and Joshua’s son, Barnabas Collins.

In fact, Vicki is the audience’s point-of-view character. One night in 1967, she was attending a séance, attempting to contact the ghost of Joshua’s ten year old daughter Sarah, when Sarah spoke through her, said she wanted to tell the whole story from the beginning, and yanked Vicki back through time to 1795, while her own governess Phyllis Wick took Vicki’s place at the table. Vicki can hardly tell this story, and the makers of Dark Shadows have decided not to show her being a con artist, or doing anything else interesting. So Vicki flails about, calling attention to the fact that she is profoundly alien to her surroundings.

If Sarah brought Vicki back to her own time so that she could see what happened then, Vicki’s failure to pick up where Phyllis Wick left off would seem to defeat her plan. Surely Phyllis didn’t go around telling everyone she met that they are being played by actors who had other parts in the first 73 weeks of the show, or constantly blurt out information that she learned from reading the Collins family history. Nor did she show up carrying a copy of that history and wearing clothes from 1967. In the first episode of the 1795 arc, we learned that Phyllis’ carriage overturned, that she is missing, and everyone else aboard is dead. If Vicki was going to become a part of what already happened, she should have been found at the scene of that accident, wearing Phyllis’ clothes and suffering a minor injury that left her unable to speak until she figured out when she was and that she had to pretend to be Phyllis.

Today, we begin with a shot of Vicki being silent while her voice plays in the background, thinking that she must somehow keep from verbalizing her every thought. This might not seem like a great challenge, but she hasn’t managed it yet. The countess enters and confronts Vicki about the evil she believes she has done. Vicki can only feign ignorance and run away.

We cut to the lady of the house, Joshua’s wife Naomi. Naomi is an alcoholic, a fact of which we are reminded when virtually every scene she is in begins with a shot of her alone, pouring herself a drink. This scene is no exception.

Naomi’s theme. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Abigail enters. After nagging Naomi about her drinking, she denounces Josette for being French and Vicki for being a witch. Naomi likes Vicki and dismisses the idea that she is a witch. She also likes Josette, but can’t deny that she is French.

The countess joins them. She is just as French as her niece, but Abigail is willing to overlook that fault, since they share a desire to persecute Vicki. Naomi resists their arguments.

Abigail and the countess make their case to Naomi. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Unable to persuade Naomi, Abigail goes on her own authority to Vicki’s room. She tells her Naomi wants to see her at once. Vicki asks her if she will be coming along. Abigail says she will stay in Vicki’s room. Vicki says she wouldn’t stay in Abigail’s room without her permission; Abigail replies “You don’t own this house. We do.” As the governess in the house in 1967, Vicki may have had an expectation of privacy in her room, but that is clearly not the case in 1795.

Vicki exits, and Abigail starts to rummage through Vicki’s things. Since she was looking through the family history right before Abigail came in, we expect her to find that book, which would be a pretty hard thing to explain. Before she can, a cat that had been squatting on Vicki’s bed disappears in a puff of smoke and Joshua takes its place.

Look who’s back. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Returning viewers know that the wicked witch is the countess’ maid Angelique, and that Angelique turned Joshua into a cat last week for reasons of her own. Abigail doesn’t know anything about that, and she is so discombobulated by the experience that she calls her brother “Josh.. ua!” As soon as he stands up, she faints in his arms.

Back in Naomi’s room, she and the countess are questioning Vicki about her life before coming to Collinwood and her many strange utterances since. Vicki pleads amnesia about the first topic and makes feeble responses about the second. Even so, Naomi is satisfied. Then Abigail and Joshua enter.

Joshua remembers nothing about his time as a cat, and is shocked by the news about Jeremiah and Josette’s disappearance. He and Naomi send Victoria downstairs to do some chores, and excuse Abigail and the countess.

Abigail and the countess let themselves into Vicki’s room and start searching through her things. They find the clothes she was wearing when she showed up. In them they discover a charm bracelet. Among the charms is a cartoon devil.

Abigail and the countess find the evidence. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The ladies are horrified by this blasphemous thing. Abigail says that she will write to a clergyman in Salem, Massachusetts, a Reverend Trask. The countess is glad to hear that the Reverend Trask has a way with witches.

We can only wonder whether Abigail and the countess called on the Reverend Trask to investigate Phyllis Wick in the original timeline, and if so, what it was about her that aroused their suspicions. Perhaps Angelique simply chose her as a convenient patsy. Or maybe Phyllis made some decisions that generated an interesting story leading up to it. Either way, it would have been significantly different from Vicki’s woeful blunderings.