An extraordinarily uneventful outing. In yesterday’s episode it looked like heiress Carolyn would go to visit Chris the werewolf as he is in the middle of a transformation and would be attacked. But she didn’t go. Governess Maggie did go to Chris’ cottage, and at the end of the episode it looked like she might be attacked. As we open today, she is there and he is about to change, but she leaves and gets home safely while he is still in human form.
It again looks like Carolyn might be attacked when she walks through the woods to visit the mausoleum where her mother, matriarch Liz, is entombed. Liz was alive when she was mistakenly buried and is still alive now. Liz is unable to move or speak, but she somehow shares the audience’s thought that Carolyn might possibly be attacked. We see her in her coffin and hear her interior monologue as she thinks about the “terrible danger” her daughter is in.
As it happens, Carolyn makes it home fine. Later she goes out again; we see the werewolf prowling nearby, again raising the theoretical possibility that she will be attacked. But Carolyn hears Liz’ voice in her head, a telepathic warning that she should hasten off. The werewolf also reacts as if he can hear Liz’ voice, and he goes off in another direction. The screen goes dark and the credits start rolling. The werewolf hasn’t attacked anyone and no one has learned anything about him.
It appears that the werewolf is trying to figure out where Liz’ voice is coming from.
It’s kind of interesting that Liz can transmit telepathic messages now. She could use a supernatural power or two if she’s going to get into the swing of things on the show. It’s also interesting that the werewolf seems to be able to overhear the messages Liz sends to Carolyn. Chris’ little sister Amy lives in the great house of Collinwood now, and along with strange and troubled boy David she is falling under the power of the evil ghost of Quentin Collins. Quentin communicated with Amy before he could get through to David. David was miffed by this, since “Quentin is my ancestor.” That suggested that Quentin will turn out to be Amy’s ancestor as well, making her and Chris members of the Collins family. If so, that might explain why Chris, even in his lupine form, was able to pick up a telepathic transmission Liz directed to her blood relatives.
There is a wardrobe malfunction in this one of a type that showed up several times in the first year of the show. When Carolyn makes her first entrance, she walks down the stairs in the foyer. At each step, Nancy Barrett’s chest thrusts into her sweater with results that would probably not have made it on the air had anyone from the ABC network’s office of Standards and Practices been watching the show. In the early days, they put the actresses into very form-fitting tops often enough that I thought they were challenging the audience to take an adult attitude towards female anatomy, and so I did my best to rise to that challenge by leaving it unremarked when we could see the exact shape of their breasts. But it’s a rare occurrence now, so I think we have to list it among production faults.
The only story that reliably worked in the first 38 weeks of Dark Shadows was the attempt of well-meaning governess Vicki Winters to befriend her charge, strange and troubled boy David Collins. Its success was less to do with the writers than with the actors. When we saw Vicki in David’s room giving him his lessons, her dialogue was as bad as anything else the actors found in the scripts, including one moment when she had to read a description of the coastline of Maine to him from a geography textbook. But Alexandra Moltke Isles and David Henesy used everything other than the words to show us a young woman and a hurting boy learning to trust each other. Their use of space, of body language, of facial expressions, of tones of voice, all showed us that process step by step, and it was fascinating to watch.
Vicki and David’s story reached its conclusion in #191, when David’s mother, undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, tried to lure David to his demise in a burning shack while Vicki tried to rescue him. At the end, David ran from the shack into Vicki’s arms. When he chose Vicki and life over his mother and death, there was nowhere left for their relationship to go. We saw a few more tutoring scenes in the spring and summer of 1967, when vampire Barnabas Collins was first on the show, but have seen none since. Mrs Isles left Dark Shadows in November, and the recast Vicki made her final appearance a week ago, in #665.
The new governess in the great house of Collinwood is Maggie Evans, who was introduced in #1 as a wisecracking waitress and a hardboiled representative of the working class of the village of Collinsport, but whom actress Kathryn Leigh Scott shortly afterward reinvented as The Nicest Girl in Town. The town barely exists anymore, so when Vicki disappeared into a rift in the fabric of time and space it was almost a foregone conclusion Maggie would move into Vicki’s room upstairs in the great house. After all, the room was first occupied in the 1790s by the gracious Josette, whom Miss Scott played in the parts of the show set in that period.
Today, we see our first tutoring scene in over a year and a half. David isn’t Maggie’s only charge; he has been joined by permanent houseguest Amy Jennings. Yesterday and the day before, we saw evidence that Maggie is a poor disciplinarian. We see further such evidence at the beginning of the tutoring scene, when the children complain about their lessons and Maggie quickly starts to explain herself and bargain with them. Amy and David are coming under the influence of the evil spirit of the late Quentin Collins. If the adult who is employed full-time to supervise David and Amy were up to her job, they wouldn’t be much help to him. So it’s no wonder the show three days in a row tells us that Maggie is a squish.
Maggie on the job.
To advance a plan of Quentin’s, Amy pretends to be ill and to faint during the lesson. David Collins is almost as subtle an actor as is David Henesy; when he is pretending to see signs of illness in Amy’s face, he looks at her with one eye and speaks with a most convincing note of concern. By contrast, Amy’s performance is exaggerated, showing none of the easy fluency Denise Nickerson brought to her roles. My wife, Mrs Acilius, chuckled at Amy’s fake faint and at some of the fussing she and David do when they are left alone together. She said it was refreshing to see that David and Amy are still kids. It certainly adds to the poignancy of what we are seeing Quentin do to them when we think of them as real children whose innocence he is exploiting for his evil project.
Amy’s fake faint convinces Maggie, and it leads to a lot of running around, ending with Maggie going to the cottage on the estate where Amy’s big brother Chris is staying as a guest of heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard. Chris is a werewolf and is about to transform, and Quentin’s goal was to get Carolyn to go to the cottage. David has been making terrible pronouncements to Amy about how Carolyn will never bother them again, and the two of them are distressed to hear that Maggie rather than Carolyn is going to see Chris. So we are supposed to take it that Quentin knows about Chris’ situation and wants him to attack Carolyn.
Governess Maggie Evans forbids her charges, David Collins and Amy Jennings, from going outside. They ask her to play hide and seek. She agrees, and accepts the role of It. She searches for them for a long time, ultimately finding them outdoors. She points out that she had told them to stay indoors, and they pretend not to have understood that this applied to their hiding places.
Maggie does not punish Amy and David for this obvious insubordination. This establishes that Maggie is a squish who will not maintain discipline. That point had already been made in yesterday’s episode, when Maggie caught Amy hiding in David’s room, in defiance of orders from heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard. At that time, Maggie lied to housekeeper Mrs Johnson to cover up what the children had done. Maggie’s irresolution bears repeated exposure, though, since the children are coming under the influence of the evil spirit of the late Quentin Collins and would not be very effective as his helpers if they were subject to even moderately competent adult supervision.
Today Mrs Johnson and her son Harry are under orders from Carolyn to fix up the caretaker’s cottage on the estate. Carolyn has invited mysterious drifter Chris Jennings, Amy’s big brother, to live in the cottage. In the opening, Mrs Johnson tells Maggie she objects to this idea on the grounds that the cottage is cursed. Maggie dismisses Mrs Johnson’s belief in such a curse, but she really shouldn’t. Mrs Johnson keeps calling it “Matthew Morgan’s cottage” after the crazed handyman who lived there for eighteen years. Matthew killed Mrs Johnson’s beloved employer Bill Malloy, then tried to kill Maggie’s dear friend and predecessor as governess at Collinwood, Vicki Winters. Maggie knows all about those incidents. Mrs Johnson also says that no good happened at the cottage after Matthew; the only resident of the cottage since Matthew’s death was David’s mother, undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. Maggie knows plenty about Laura as well, since her father Sam was deeply involved in the strange goings-on concerning Laura and Vicki led the fight against her.
Under orders from Quentin, the children contrive to trap Mrs Johnson in the cottage by herself. Quentin appears to her there. She is terrified. This is quite a surprise to regular viewers. Quentin has appeared on screen only once before, in #646. Moreover, the children have made it very clear that Quentin is confined to the little room hidden in the long-deserted west wing of Collinwood where they found him. We are left to wonder how he gained the ability to manifest himself in the cottage and even to walk outside it when no one is looking.
Perhaps we are to think that Quentin is in some way connected with the curse on the cottage, and with Chris. When the children first contacted Quentin, Amy could communicate with him before David could. This left David miffed, since “Quentin Collins is my ancestor.” That line of David’s led us to expect that we would learn that Quentin is also Amy and Chris’ ancestor. Tomorrow, David will tell Amy that Quentin is “quite pleased” that Chris is living in the cottage. Maybe it was Amy’s presence in the room in the west wing that activated the ghost of Quentin there, and Chris’ impending arrival in the cottage that activates it in that space.
This episode marks the last appearance of Harry. Until today, he was played by Craig Slocum. Edward Marshall takes Harry over the horizon. Mr Marshall must have been watching the show; he does a flawless imitation of Slocum’s very peculiar line delivery. His Harry is just as petulant and resentful as Slocum’s was, but he is so much more physically relaxed and so much more responsive to his scene partners that he is enjoyable to watch in a way Slocum never was. I can’t help but wonder if Harry would have caught on and become a bigger part of the show had Mr Marshall taken the part earlier. Harry’s personality made it impossible for him to figure in a romance of any kind, limiting his usefulness on a soap, but there’s plenty of room on Dark Shadows for comic relief in the form of an inept, grumbly, dishonest servant.
Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, in temporary charge of the great house of Collinwood, has decided to pack children David Collins and Amy Jennings off to boarding schools in Boston. They pretend to be happy about this, but in fact want to stay in the house, where they have come under the power of the evil ghost of Quentin Collins. Neither they nor Quentin can figure out a way to stop Barnabas’ plan. David takes a photo of Barnabas standing with heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard; when the photo is developed, a mysterious figure appears in the background, hanging by the neck. Barnabas believes that the figure represents vanished governess Victoria Winters, and that he must travel back in time to rescue her. He therefore has no time to go to Boston and put the children in schools, so the plan is off.
Several characters see the photo, but only Barnabas recognizes the hanged woman as Vicki. No wonder- Vicki has been played by two actresses, and neither of them posed for it. The original Vicki was Alexandra Moltke Isles; the second was Betsy Durkin. This is Carolyn Groves, who will play Vicki in a couple of upcoming episodes. The usual rule of nomenclature when discussing recast parts is to give the performers numbers, and so Mrs Isles would be Vicki #1, Miss Durkin Vicki #2, and Miss Groves Vicki #3. But in deference to their first names, we might call them Vicki A, Vicki B, and Vicki C.
Craig Slocum appears on the show for the last time today. He plays Harry Johnson, a household servant. When Carolyn Stoddard orders Harry to fetch the children’s luggage, the camera lingers on the look of distaste she gives him. Carolyn and Harry had some unpleasant dealings several months ago, when she was hiding a Frankenstein’s monster named Adam in the long deserted west wing of the house and Harry tried to use this information to blackmail her. Carolyn kept control of that situation, but her facial expression as she looks at him today shows that she remembers Harry’s behavior and does not regard him as a man to be trusted.
Upstairs, Harry finds the children in David’s room. He catches them using an antique telephone through which they have been able to communicate with Quentin. He wants to know what they have been doing. David says that they might as well tell him, prompting an alarmed reaction from Amy. He gives a partly accurate account. The true parts are the ones Harry instantly disbelieves. This wouldn’t have worked with any of the other grownups at Collinwood; they have all had too much experience of the supernatural to disregard such a story. But Harry is relatively new to the house, and is too dim-witted to understand what he has seen. Their secret is safe with him.
Slocum ‘s performances were uneven in quality. He first appeared as Noah Gifford, a criminally inclined sailor who figured in five episodes from #439 to #455, a period when Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the 1790s. He was very bad in those five. He didn’t know what to do with his voice, so that he always sounded like he was reading words one at a time off a teleprompter that kept speeding up and slowing down on its own. Dark Shadows returned to contemporary dress a few weeks after Noah’s last appearance, and Slocum returned to the cast as Harry. He had the same trouble with his speech in his early stabs at that role, but he did eventually learn to relax. In #551, he amazed the world by doing a genuinely good job. He has been passable most of the time since, and he is all right today. Still, Harry doesn’t have much room to grow, and Slocum was so bad so many times that it’s a relief to see him go.
There is an intriguing little blooper near the beginning. Barnabas is supposed to say that he is on his way to see Carolyn. Jonathan Frid actually says that he is going to see “Barrah- Carolyn.” In a recent episode, a day player asked to see “Mister Jonathan” and was ushered to Barnabas, so perhaps he caught the bug and is going to call Carolyn “Barrett, Nancy.”
Hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell has been through a lot lately, and it is taking its toll. He was bitten and enslaved by a female vampire, with the result that he lost his job and his fiancée. He was still under her power when he realized that his cousin and close friend, Tom Jennings, was also a vampire. Now he has been attacked by a werewolf and has discovered that that werewolf is, on the few nights of the month when the moon is not full, Tom’s brother Chris. Last night he saw Chris transform in his lupine shape. He took Chris’ revolver and emptied it into the werewolf’s furry chest, but that only slowed him down. Joe escaped from the werewolf’s wrath, but we see today that he is never going to be right again.
Chris’ nine year old sister Amy is staying at the great house of Collinwood as the guest of matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. As we open, Liz’ daughter Carolyn is in the drawing room, recently returned from a trip. She is terribly distraught to hear a recap of the last couple of weeks from permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, MD. While they talk, Joe slips into the house, crazy-eyed and bent-backed.
Joe makes his way up to the bedroom where Amy is asleep. He dwells on what her brothers became, then approaches her bed with his hands in strangling position. After a commercial break, he says “Save her!,” then agrees with himself that he ought to save Amy.
Joe wakes Amy, urges her to be silent, and starts packing her clothes. She asks if they are going to join Chris, and Joe becomes violently agitated. Amy grows frightened. Joe grabs her, puts his hand over her mouth, and carries her out of the house, leaving her half-packed bag behind.
In the woods, Joe hears sounds which he believes to be the werewolf. He starts shouting that he won’t let it have Amy. He is so absorbed in this that Amy gets loose and runs from him.
Joe’s derangement is entirely explainable as a natural response to the horrible and incomprehensible traumas he has undergone. The same could be said of the other mentally ill character in today’s episode, Liz, and in Monday’s episode Julia very nearly said it. Today, however, the show raises the possibility that Liz’ trouble might be the result of ongoing persecution by the spiritual forces of darkness.
Months ago, Liz fell afoul of her brother Roger’s wife. She called herself Cassandra, but was really an evil sorceress named Angelique wearing a black wig. This wiggéd witch cast a spell that caused Liz to sink into a deep depression, obsessed with the idea she would be buried alive. Twice before, Liz has sunk into similar depressions. The first was the result of a spell cast by Roger’s previous wife, Laura Murdoch Collins, who like Angelique/ Cassandra was an undead blonde fire witch. (Roger has a type.) The second was a response to a long blackmail to which a seagoing con man named Jason McGuire subjected her. For the last several weeks it has seemed that this third bout might be lifting, but it came back with a vengeance last week when well-meaning governess Victoria Winters dematerialized before Liz’ eyes.Vicki’s departure was as much a shock to Liz, in its own way, as Chris’ transformation was to Joe. Even before any spells were cast on her, Liz had shut herself up in the house and refused to leave for eighteen years. So we know that Liz is given to depression.
Today Liz has a nightmare. The dream sequence begins with a melody that for all the world sounds like “Rock-a-bye Baby” played on a kazoo, but which turns out to be a distorted recording of Amy singing that lullaby. Liz sees Amy atop the cliff on Widows Hill, a place associated with death and peril. In the past, several women have fallen to their deaths from Widows’ Hill; we have seen Liz and Vicki attempt suicide there. Amy’s image is as distorted as is the sound of her voice. She is swaying from side to side, perhaps dancing the hula; the visual effects exaggerate this sway.
Liz is trying to get Amy away from the cliff when she sees Angelique/ Cassandra. The witch tells her that she will fulfill her curse and see that Liz is buried alive. Liz finds that she can no longer communicate with Amy, for which Angelique/ Cassandra taunts her.
Shortly after Liz wakes up from her dream, Carolyn and Julia come to her room. They hear her crying out that “she” is a danger to her, but a moment later Liz cannot remember who that was. Julia mentions to Carolyn today that multiple psychiatrists have reported that Liz cannot remember how her depression started; that she sees Angelique/ Cassandra in the nightmare but cannot remember who she was so shortly after suggests that the nightmare is part of the depression. If Angelique/ Cassandra’s continued activity is causing the one, it must therefore be causing the other.
Liz says that she is afraid for Amy and asks Carolyn to check on her. When she finds Amy missing, she asks Julia what to tell her mother. Without missing a beat, Julia says “Lie to her!” This is perfectly fitting- Julia is the show’s most fluent and most accomplished liar. Julia and Carolyn begin a search. Julia is on the phone asking for the sheriff when Amy comes in the front door, followed by Joe.
Julia is at first relieved to see Amy with good ol’ Joe. But Amy is terrified of Joe, and when she runs upstairs Julia blocks the staircase to keep him from following. Joe says that he must take Amy far away from Collinsport at once. Julia says that if he can explain why, she will let him. Nothing he can put into words makes much sense to her, and he is so obviously unhinged that there is no way anyone would think he was the right person to assume responsibility for a child. Julia tells Joe that whatever he may have encountered in the village poses no threat to Amy in the mansion. He laughs, shakes his head, and mutters “You don’t know… you don’t know…”
Julia’s attempt to reassure Joe is interrupted by a blood-curdling scream from upstairs. She hurries up to see what is happening. Joe goes on laughing and muttering, wandering out of the house. That the scream coming from upstairs, where Amy is, does not catch his attention when he is so determined to protect Amy from imminent danger shows that he is truly lost, never to recover.
Julia finds a distraught Carolyn standing over an immobile Liz. She gives Liz a quick look, and tells Carolyn that she is dead. You might think Julia would be more careful about this. She has several times made erroneous death pronouncements, most recently when she pronounced Liz herself dead in #604. That incident led Julia to conclude that Liz had an unusual disorder that could cause her to appear to be dead. Especially since Julia knows about Liz’ overwhelming fear that she will be mistakenly thought dead and be buried alive, this hasty diagnosis is bizarre. Of course we end with a shot of Liz on the floor and hear her voice on the soundtrack saying “I’m not dead! I’m not dead!”
Liz had collapsed after she had a vision of Angelique/ Cassandra appearing in her room and touching her. This would seem to be a strong suggestion that the show wants us to think that Liz is still actively hag-ridden, and that her depression is therefore among Dark Shadows‘ supernatural storylines. On the other hand, the vision might have been an hallucination on Liz’ part, and her apparent death might be the result of a psychological syndrome. There may not be any mental process in our world that can induce a seizure so complete that it would fool doctors into thinking that a patient was dead, but in the world of Dark Shadows Julia, whose abilities are all supposed to be strictly the result of her scientific training, can use hypnosis to erase and rewrite people’s memories at will. If the power of suggestion is that great in this fictional universe, it is easy to suppose that self-hypnosis could conceal anyone’s vital signs from the most sophisticated examination.
This was the first episode directed by Henry Kaplan. Lela Swift directed the first twenty episodes of the show, and half of the rest. From #21, she shared directing duties with John Sedwick, usually trading off from one week to the next. Sedwick left the show in June, and several other men have taken turns as Swift’s relief. Kaplan will occupy that spot until the end of the series.
Swift and Sedwick were both ambitious and accomplished visual artists, and the others have more or less lived up to the standard they set. Today’s episode doesn’t look particularly bad, but a great many of the hundreds of segments Kaplan would go on to direct would be made up of one closeup after another, most of them badly out of focus. Swift will continue to work at her usual high level, but the sludge Kaplan dumps on our screens day after day will go a long way towards breaking people of the habit of watching Dark Shadows and discrediting it in the eyes of critics and television professionals.
Moreover, Kaplan did not work well with actors. Many of the cast hated Kaplan for his habit of using a stick, not only to point to their marks, but often to prod them physically. Others hated him for the verbal abuse he casually heaped on them. In a recent panel discussion, Marie Wallace and Donna Wandrey share stories about the difficulties of working with this disagreeable hack. The performances in this one do not show Kaplan’s malign influence. Joel Crothers does a marvelous job as Joe. While the actresses step on each others’ lines so often that it is clear they are nervous, that is not so very unusual.
Well-meaning governess Victoria Winters has vanished into the past, sarcastic dandy Roger Collins is on a long business trip overseas, and matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard is in the grips of a paralyzing depression. That leaves a shortage of adults in the great house of Collinwood, and old world gentleman Barnabas Collins has left his own house on the estate to be of assistance. He is fussing over Liz and insisting that she take the sedatives permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, MD, prescribed for her. Liz says that all she cares about is that someone take Vicki’s place in the lives of the children in the house, Roger’s son David Collins and houseguest Amy Jennings. To address that concern she orders Barnabas to telephone Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, and ask her to replace Vicki starting tonight.
Maggie is in her house talking with her ex-boyfriend Joe Haskell about his plan to move out of town soon when the telephone rings. Soon the two of them are in the drawing room at the great house, where Barnabas fills them in about recent developments.
Joe is Amy’s cousin. He has been doing what he can to fill the void left in her life by the deaths of her parents and her brother Tom, and more particularly by the puzzling refusal of her brother Chris to settle down and live with her. Amy comes downstairs and sees Joe; she is delighted to spend time with him while Maggie is upstairs with Liz, accepting the offer.
Amy’s delight gives way to alarm when she sees a pentagram superimposed on Joe’s face. She does not know what the returning viewers do, that Chris is a werewolf and the pentagram is the mark of his next victim, but she does know that it is a sign that Joe is in great danger. She pleads with him not to go to Maggie’s house and collect her things; she tells him that if he stays at Collinwood tonight, he will be safe. Joe dismisses her concerns as the result of staying up past her bedtime.
Joe enters the Evans cottage. While he is looking over the list Maggie gave him, he hears growling noises outside the window. He turns to look, and sees the window shatter and the werewolf jump through the glass.
The episode has a definite high point and an equally definite low point. The high point comes when Amy is staring at the full moon, which she senses is associated with something very bad. She cries as she does so. That is a powerful enough image that the following scene, when Barnabas sees her tears, asks her what is wrong, and she hugs him, is quite effective.
The low point comes when we see the werewolf sleeping on his bed. A werewolf can be terrifying if you catch only brief glimpses of him, and then only when he is in the middle of attacking someone. But this furry little fella isn’t scary at all. You keep expecting him to start flopping his legs because he’s dreaming about chasing a bunny. It generates a bad laugh that undercuts the final scene of the attack on Joe.
Whooooo‘s the goodest boy? Are you the goodest boy? I bet you are! Screenshot by Dark Shadows Every Day.
Amy has a couple of great one-word lines, too. Barnabas asks, “Amy, what are you doing with the door open?” To which she replies, “Nothing.” Later, Joe asks “Well what was all that you two were talking about?” To which she replies, “Nothing.” She really is a kid!
Mysterious drifter Chris Jennings telephones the great house of Collinwood. Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins answers. Chris asks to speak to permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, MD. Barnabas tells him Julia is busy with a patient, and Chris says that it is extremely urgent Julia call him back the moment she is free.
Julia comes downstairs. She had been tending to matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Liz is mentally ill. She is deeply depressed and fixated on the idea that she will soon be buried alive. Barnabas starts talking about the witch whose spell started Liz’ illness; Julia points out that the origin doesn’t really matter. Indeed it does not. Liz’ condition is quite logical when we realize that she has been exposed to a long series of traumatic events of supernatural character. Of course she feels helpless- her world really does not make rational sense, and there really are forces beyond her control that are determined to bring misery to her and those she loves. And of course she is preoccupied with death- she is surrounded, not only by people in mortal jeopardy, but also by figures who are at once dead and alive. Unknown to her, Barnabas is one of these- he died in the 1790s, became a vampire, and was restored to humanity less than a year ago. The story of Liz’ depression is not really a tale of the supernatural, but of a person responding to her environment in a perfectly natural way.
Liz’ depression is not exactly a fun story, and the show hadn’t done anything with it for months. We might have hoped it was all over. What has brought it back is the disappearance of well-meaning governess Victoria Winters. The other day, Vicki embraced her husband, an unpleasant man known variously as Peter and Jeff, and vanished into thin air as Barnabas and Liz watched. She and Peter/ Jeff were traveling back in time to the 1790s, never to return. Liz was very close to Vicki; the show spent its first year hinting heavily that she was Vicki’s biological mother, though they never got round to saying so explicitly or telling us anything about Vicki’s father. Now that Vicki is gone, Liz is inconsolable.
That is the in-universe explanation for Liz’ trouble. There are two real-world reasons. First, Joan Bennett was going away for a few weeks to do a play in Chicago, and the show needed to explain why Liz wasn’t going to be around when so much of the action was taking place in her house. Second, the key figure in both of the ongoing storylines is Chris’ eleven year old sister Amy, who is staying at Collinwood. Barnabas is the show’s chief protagonist, and so far he does not have any particular connection to either of those stories. Plunging Liz into a paralyzing depression completes the task they started by sending her brother Roger on a business trip overseas. It means that Barnabas has a reason to camp out in the main house and act as a father figure to Amy.
Barnabas had a vague notion about a romance with Vicki, though he did almost nothing to develop such a relationship. His basic feeling towards her seems to have been that he might want her someday, and so he reacted with petulant anger to any person or event that made her unavailable to him. Thinking about Vicki’s departure with Peter/ Jeff, he spends several minutes pouting while Julia tries gently to reason with him.
Barnabas is very upset that Vicki was so inconsiderate as to move on with her life when he might someday have wanted her. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
At the end of his tantrum, Barnabas declares that he and Julia should go back upstairs and talk with Liz. As they are going, he sees the telephone and says “Oh. By the way, Chris Jennings called. He said it was urgent.” It’s even funnier that Barnabas remembers this call so late in the scene than it would be if he had forgotten it altogether. Chris may use words like “emergency” and “extremely urgent,” but in Barnabas’ world there is only one truly urgent matter, and that is whatever his feelings are at the moment.
Vampires are metaphors for extreme selfishness. Barnabas may not be a vampire anymore, but he is still very selfish. But perhaps is attitude towards Vicki is not so unsympathetic as I have made it out to be. When he was still under his curse, he thought he might be able to remake Vicki as an eighteenth century woman, then turn her into a vampire and take her as his bride. Vicki did indeed have an attachment to that era, so much so that she traveled back in time to the 1790s. And when he became human again, Barnabas was immediately embroiled with a succession of witches and monsters, to none of whom did he want to expose Vicki. He wanted to clear them out of the way so his life could start, and once it did he would be free to approach her. But her life was already underway, and of course his was too. The nemeses Barnabas and Julia fought together throughout 1968 are gone now, but so is Vicki, and it is the two of them who are alone together.
The other day, Chris dropped by to ask Julia for sedatives. She was unimpressed with his drug-seeking behavior, and so when Barnabas tells her about Chris’ call she says that he can wait. What she does not know is that Chris is a werewolf, and he was hoping that strong enough pills could knock him out throughout the night of the full moon.
Chris and Amy’s cousin Joe Haskell has been trying to fill in for Chris in the big brother role. He and Amy have gone to the movies, and we see them on their way back to the great house, looking at the moon. Amy tells Joe that she is terribly afraid of the moon, for reasons she can’t explain. Joe asks if she really saw a pentagram on his face in #648; she confirms that she did. Joe knows that someone else saw it too, visiting medium Janet Findley. He also knows that when he told Chris about it he was terribly upset. Neither Joe nor Amy knows what Chris and Madame Findley knew, that it is the sign that he will be the werewolf’s next victim.
Amy is alone in the foyer of the great house when Liz comes down the stairs, apparently in a trance. She does not respond when Amy calls out to her, but walks out into the night. Amy is standing in the open doorway, watching her, when Barnabas comes and asks what she is doing. She tells Barnabas what happened. He tells her to go to bed; she refuses. He then decides it will be good enough if she waits in the drawing room until he brings Liz back. She goes to the drawing room, but when he goes off to tell Julia what has happened she slips out to look for Liz. Barnabas learns that she has left when Julia, whom he has sent to sit with her, reports that she is not in the drawing room.
Barnabas is out looking for Liz and Amy when Chris comes to Collinwood. He is upset that Julia did not call him back; she is skeptical of him. He tries to give a reasonable-sounding explanation; if only he knew of her background treating vampires and Frankensteins, he would realize that he has everything to gain by telling her the truth. She finally gives him a bottle of sleeping pills, along with a wary look and an injunction to use the pills only as directed.
Liz goes to the old Collins family mausoleum. Barnabas’ parents and sister are buried there, and he was himself trapped there for 172 years when he was a vampire. She thinks of it now as her tomb, and tells herself that she is ready to be buried there now. She collapses. Amy finds her, fears that she is dead, and cries out. Her voice brings Barnabas, who tells Amy that Liz is alive. He also says that they must get her back to the house at once. Barnabas puts his arms under Liz’ left side, Amy puts hers under her right, and they lift her. This brief glimpse of the two of them working together goes a long way towards establishing Barnabas’ closeness to Amy.
I’ve altered the saturation and exposure a bit in this still. Though the original is darker and the fog machine was working overtime, in the moving image you can see what Amy is doing clearly enough.
Joe pays another visit to Chris’ room. Chris has taken a bunch of sleeping pills from the bottle Julia gave him. Joe scolds Chris for his failure to visit Amy. Chris knows that he could transform at any time, and is desperate to get Joe to leave. Joe does leave. Chris goes to bed. He falls asleep. The camera pans to his hand, which has already become a werewolf’s paw.
This is the second of three episodes featuring Cavada Humphrey as Madame Janet Findley, a medium called in to investigate the strange goings-on at the great house of Collinwood. Humphrey’s performance so utterly dominates the segment, and I have so little to add to what I said about her style in yesterday’s post, that all I can do is make a series of more or less miscellaneous observations about its other aspects.
Today Madame Findley meets children David Collins and Amy Jennings. Amy and David are coming under the influence of evil spirit Quentin Collins. She questions them in the drawing room, and finds a hidden panel that leads to the long-abandoned west wing of the house. Over the children’s objections, she enters the secret passage. As soon as she is in, they hurriedly close the panel, locking her in. Evidently their objections were part of a ruse designed to lead her to Quentin’s stronghold. All too often on Dark Shadows, the audience knows too much about what characters are trying to do. This scene stands out, because they really do keep us guessing whether the children want Madame Findley to go into the secret passage. We don’t really know what their goals are until we see them shut her in.
Earlier in the episode, Amy’s brother Chris dropped in. He was very eager to see permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, MD. Amy mentioned to Chris that there was another visitor in the house. When Chris asked who it was, Amy replied, “Her name is Madame- Madame something- at least that’s what they call her.”
I heard these lines in the voice of T. S. Eliot. The rhythm is reminiscent of a section of his poem The Waste Land, which in 1968 was an extremely familiar text to people with literary ambitions:
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days.
It was indeed a mysterious Tarot card that prompted matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard to call for help, and that call brought Madame Findley to the house. The card she interprets is the Tower of Destruction, which unlike the cards Eliot’s Madame Sostris describes actually appears in existing Tarot decks. She doesn’t have a cold, and she isn’t in the business of selling horoscopes door to door. On the contrary, as Humphrey plays her she is a dazzling presence.
Liz did not call Madame Findley directly. She telephoned occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes, who introduced her to La Findley. At first sight, Stokes appears to be a stuffy academic with an impossible Anglophile manner, but as we get to know him he turns out to be very much at home in the bizarre netherworld in which the show takes place, so much so that his supernatural adversaries fear that he may have powers surpassing theirs. T(homas) St(earn)s Eliot was so much like T(imothy) Eliot St(oke)s in the first impression he made, so highly regarded by the sort of people who wrote Dark Shadows, and so generally famous in the 1960s that it is very likely that Stokes’ name was at least partly inspired by him.
It’s true that Madame Findley’s name lacks the exotic glamour Eliot gave his character. I suppose if you have all of Europe to choose from, you can take your stray Tarot cards to someone named “Madame Sosostris,” but if you are limited to central Maine, you have to settle for “Janet Findley.”
I made a remark about Madame Findley’s name in the comments on Danny Horn’s post about episode #647 on his great Dark Shadows Every Day:
It’s just delightful that they introduce an otherworldly, mystical character, played with an actress who brings a genuinely eerie note to her performance, and her name is… “Janet Findley.” It’s like Monty Python and the Holy Grail, when they meet the wizard who is known as “Tim.”
I wonder if there’s any connection between the name “Janet Findley” and the name “Janet Fisher,” whom Carolyn mentioned as a friend once of twice in the first season. Seems like a lot of Janet Fs. For that matter, I wonder if there’s a connection between Tim the Wizard from Monty Python and Tim(othy Eliot) Stokes, who a couple of episodes back had to tell Vicki that he isn’t a wizard.
–Comment left by Acilius, 8 October 2020, on Danny Horn, “Episode 647: The Wire,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 12 May 2015
That remark drew a response from a commenter who posts as “Mary”:
Findley is a popular name on Dark Shadows. In addition to Janet, Margaret Findley is one of the ghostly widows, Thomas Findley is one of Jeb’s zombies in the Leviathan storyline and Findley’s cove is the location of Carolyn’s cottage in 1995.
Comment left by “Mary,” 18 February 2021, on Danny Horn, “Episode 647: The Wire,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 12 May 2015
When Madame Findley asks about the closed-off parts of the house, Liz tells her about both the west wing and an east wing. The phrase “east wing” had come up a couple of times in the first year of the show, but it always seemed to be either a case of the writers not having made up their minds which side of the house the deserted wing was on or a slip of the tongue by the actors. This is the first time the show makes it clear that the house really does have two deserted wings.
Humphrey was too perfect for Dark Shadows to play only one role. In a comment on Danny’s post about this episode, I indulged in a little fanfic about another part that would have been right for her:
Cavada Humphrey looks quite a bit like Jonathan Frid. I wonder what 1795 would have been like if Barnabas had had an older sister who bossed him around, stood around during his ridiculously childish fits of petulance, occasionally acted as his conscience, and time and again serve as his enabler and protector. It would have been funny to see Grayson Hall’s Countess express disapproval of such a relationship.
Heck, that older sister could have been Sarah. Just because she’s a child in her ghost form doesn’t mean she has to have died at that age. Maybe she comes back in the form in which her relationship to her brother took its permanent shape, when she was about nine and he was about seven. Of course, that possibility is foreclosed at Sarah’s first appearance, when she tells Maggie not to let her “big brother” know she saw her, but I suppose they could have retconned that away with a phony flashback where she says “little brother.”
Comment left by Acilius, 8 October 2020, on Danny Horn, “Episode 648: Astral Disturbances,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 14 May 2015.
I’m very fond of Sharon Smyth, and Sarah’s last appearance in the 1795 segment was so poignant it would have been a substantial loss for her not to have been in it. On the other hand, she had so much less to do when she was playing a living being than she did in the preceding months when Sarah was a ghost, and so much of what she did get to do was outside her rather sharply limited range, that it is not difficult to imagine a different kind of Sarah making the eighteenth century insert a more compelling drama.
This is first of three consecutive episodes featuring Cavada Humphrey as Madame Janet Findley, a medium recruited to investigate the strange goings-on at the great house of Collinwood. Humphrey’s performance dominates these segments completely. Her style is more akin to pantomime than to anything native to spoken drama; she uses every muscle of her body to strike a series of exaggerated poses. Since that includes the muscles of the vocal tract, words occasionally come out in the course of her performance. The result is as bizarre as it sounds like it would be, and on Dark Shadows it is magnificent.
Granted, it is a shock when Humphrey reads the opening voiceover. Without seeing her, it is difficult to know what to make of her speech. When we watched it this time, I tried to make Mrs Acilius laugh by mimicking the poses a person might strike while speaking that way. So far from making the monologue sound silly, that just made it clear to us what Humphrey was doing, and left us both taking her performance seriously.
I’ll make a couple of random remarks about the non-Cavada Humphrey parts of the episode. Under the influence of the ghost of Quentin Collins, children David Collins and Amy Jennings have tried to murder David’s father Roger. Yesterday David took the lead in setting the trap that caused Roger to fall down the stairs while Amy showed reluctance in helping him. Today, the children see that Roger is not seriously hurt. David is relieved and wants to stop doing Quentin’s bidding, while Amy insists that they continue. Denise Nickerson delivers one of Amy’s monologues with her eyes fixed on the camera; the effect is unsettling in the extreme, suggesting as it does that Amy and David have taken leave of the other characters and are now in a dramatic space of their own where they may as well communicate directly with the audience.
Amy tells David and us that Quentin must be obeyed.
On his great blog Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn derides David and Amy’s exchange of roles in their conspiracy. He says that the reason they take turns being “Executive Child” is merely sloppiness on the part of the writing staff:
You can handwave and say that seeing his injured father shocked young David out of his temporary hypno trance, but really the explanation is that Gordon Russell wrote yesterday’s episode and Sam Hall wrote today’s, and they didn’t really bother to synch up on David’s emotional throughline. It happens. This is the “good enough for rock ‘n roll” approach to soap opera dramaturgy.
I disagree. There’s nothing hand-wavey about an appeal to David’s motivation. However little attention Hall paid to yesterday’s episode, David’s visit to his father, during which he all but begs for a way to help him in his recovery, leaves no doubt that he meant for us to think that David was relieved that he failed to kill his father and that, having seen where Quentin’s spell would lead, he wanted to break free of it.
And the actual effect of seeing the children waver back and forth in the intensity of their subjection to Quentin, alternating between attempts to break free and turns as “Executive Child” enforcing Quentin’s will on the other, is to show us that we are early in the process of obsession and to create suspense as to whether it will progress all the way to possession. So far, Quentin can dominate only one of the children at a time, while he just tugs at the other. In Madame Findley’s intervention, and for that matter in David’s scene with Roger, we can see paths still open that would lead to breaking his power altogether before he grows strong enough to fully control Amy and David simultaneously.
There is a similarity between David and Amy’s relationship to Quentin at this point and Amy’s brother’s relationship to his curse. Chris has been a drifter for a few years, suggesting that he has been a werewolf for that long, but he is still looking for ways to keep himself from hurting anyone when the Moon is full. The supernatural menaces the show has presented up to this point were introduced as already fully committed to the destruction it was ordained they would cause. David’s mother, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, was an collection of several entities, some of them more purposeful than others, when she joined the show in December 1966, but it was always her fate to lure David to a fiery death. Vampire Barnabas Collins would eventually become a nuanced character and has now been freed of his curse and become human again, but when he first showed up in April 1967 he was all-in on being a creature of the night. Wicked witch Angelique started her murderous rampage shortly after her arrival in November 1967, and all of the various villains of the Monster Mash period that ran from mid-April to early December 1968 showed up loaded and ready to do their thing. But Chris’ curse has only drawn him halfway into monsterdom, as Quentin’s obsession has only drawn Amy and David halfway into his world of evil.
One inconsistency that may be most profitably explained by carelessness comes when Amy tells David that Quentin calls him by the name “Jamison.” Jamison was the name of David’s grandfather, who was Quentin’s nephew. Earlier, David had, under Quentin’s influence, told Amy to call him “Quentin.” It might have been better if they had decided in advance just who it was whose personality was supposed to overwrite David’s, though I don’t think it is a major flaw.
The ghost of Quentin Collins has lured children Amy Jennings and David Collins to the room in the long deserted west wing of the great house of Collinwood where his skeleton is hidden. For the first time, Quentin appears. Later, a woman in a white dress will also materialize.
An old gramophone starts playing a sickly waltz, and David snaps into an odd mental state. He is slow to respond when Amy calls him by name, and tells her she knows that the waltz is his favorite piece of music. She does not know this, and is puzzled to hear it, since he hadn’t heard the waltz until the night before. Soon it becomes apparent that David is coming to be possessed by Quentin. He tells Amy that they have things they must do, including a conversation with “Roger.” Roger is David’s father; this is the first time we have heard him refer to him by name, and it makes it clear to regular viewers that David is not himself. Later, they are wearing clothes of the same period as those Quentin and the woman in the white dress wore, and they decide to address each other as “Quentin” and “Beth.”
Longtime viewers will also recognize the motif of a piece of music as a device with the power to overwrite a character’s personality. In #155, David’s mother, undead fire witch Laura, gave him a music box, apparently as part of her plan to prepare him to follow her to a fiery doom.
Another music box became much more famous a little later. In the summer and fall of 1967, David’s distant cousin Barnabas was a vampire, and he was determined to re-create his lost love, the gracious Josette. His plan involved forcing a young woman to listen to Josette’s music box incessantly. Barnabas hoped that someone who spent enough time listening to the box would forget her old habits and memories and turn into Josette. The music box did seem to have some measure of the power Barnabas had in mind. First Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town, then Vicki, David’s well-meaning governess, did spend substantial amounts of time listening to the music box with a vacant look on her face. Episode #303 ended with Vicki’s boyfriend Burke listening to the music box and staring off into space; Mrs Acilius wondered if that meant Burke was going to think he was Josette. Burke wouldn’t have looked so good in the dress that comes with the part, but who knows, maybe he and Barnabas would have been happy together.
David and Amy carry a chest out the front door of the great house. Roger and his sister, matriarch Liz, see them do this and ask what is in the chest. David says that it is full of his toys, and that he and Amy want to play with them outdoors. Roger points out that David has never taken a chest full of toys outdoors before, and asks what has led him to do so now. David tells him it is a military secret. Amy explains that one of David’s toy soldiers is broken and they are going to bury him with full military honors. Amused by this idea, Roger holds the front door open and salutes the children as they carry the chest past. In fact, the chest holds, not a toy soldier, but Quentin’s skeleton. It is that which Amy and David bury.
At night, Roger is about to go to sleep when a knock comes on his bedroom door. It is Amy, telling him she heard from sounds from the downstairs that made her suspect someone might be trying to break into the house. Roger takes this concern seriously enough that he retrieves a pistol from his nightstand and carries it as he goes to investigate.
David ties a wire across the second stair from the top of the case from the bedrooms to the foyer, opens the front door, then hides. Roger enters. He is alarmed to see that the front door is open. He stumbles on the trap David has set. He lies unconscious and bleeding at the foot of the stairs. Amy and David enter, see his condition, and nod at each other gravely.
This is the second time David has tried to kill Roger. The first time, in #15, he had sabotaged the brakes on Roger’s car. As he watched the car pull away, he called to his mother. Laura was not physically present, and would not be for another 22 weeks, but when those who watch the show from the beginning learn of her supernatural character they will ask if she influenced David to patricide. Today there is no doubt that David and Amy are doing the bidding of the ghosts, and so we wonder again if David was under Laura’s power when he took the bleeder valve from the wheel cylinder of Roger’s car.
I don’t know how much of a spoiler it is to tell someone reading a Dark Shadows blog that in the spring of 1969 Quentin would become a major breakout star, rivaling Barnabas’ popularity. Quentin would be such a big part of the show’s appeal that Dan Ross would give the last 16 of the 32 original Dark Shadows novels he wrote under his wife Marilyn’s name titles beginning with the words “Barnabas, Quentin, and the.” They were:
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Mummy’s Curse, April 1970
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Avenging Ghost, May 1970
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Nightmare Assassin, June 1970
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Crystal Coffin, July 1970
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Witch’s Curse, August 1970
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Haunted Cave, September 1970
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Frightened Bride, October 1970
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Scorpio Curse, November 1970
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Serpent, December 1970
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Magic Potion, January 1971
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Body Snatchers, February 1971
Barnabas, Quentin, and Dr Jekyll’s Son, April 1971
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Grave Robbers, June 1971
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Sea Ghost, August 1971
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Mad Magician, October 1971
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Hidden Tomb, December 1971
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Vampire Beauty, March 1972
My first choice is always to title these entries after lines of dialogue from the episodes, and “morbid games children play” was so perfect that I couldn’t pass it up. But Barnabas, Quentin, and the Bleeder Valve was also very tempting, and I do suspect I will use at least a few Barnabas, Quentin, and the titles in the next two and a half years.
Dark Shadows Commentary 