angelique – Page 8 – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 547: I can’t let you lose this moment

In the great house of Collinwood, well-meaning governess Vicki awakens to find a strange glow emanating from the portrait of wicked witch Angelique which, for some reason, she keeps on a stand in her bedroom. The portrait transforms itself before her eyes into that of an extremely old woman. Vicki goes to get permanent houseguest Julia. Seeing the transformed portrait, Julia agrees with Vicki that the portrait is like a living thing, says that Vicki knows more about Angelique than anyone else, and is unable to answer when Vicki asks what the portrait’s transformation means for someone called Cassandra.

Transformed portrait. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Vicki and Julia know that Cassandra, wife of sarcastic dandy Roger, is Angelique in a black wig, come from the eighteenth century to wreak a terrible vengeance on old world gentleman Barnabas. Vicki apparently does not know what form that vengeance was meant to take.

In the 1790s, Angelique/ Cassandra turned Barnabas into a vampire, and her curse was in effect for 172 years. After his vampirism went into remission, she returned, obsessively driven to restore him to his undead state. Since it was the vampire story that first made Dark Shadows a hit in May and June of 1967, and it has ever since been known as the “1960s vampire soap opera,” Angelique/ Cassandra’s obsession likely reflected the concern of ABC network executives who must have been nervous when the makers of the show decided to turn Barnabas into a human. Angelique/ Cassandra’s attempts to revive the curse do keep the threat of vampirism at the center of the action.

Julia knows all about Barnabas and Angelique/ Cassandra, and so she rushes from Vicki’s room to Barnabas’ house. There, she finds Angelique/ Cassandra slumped in a chair in the front parlor, her face concealed inside a deep hood. Barnabas explains that Angelique/ Cassandra told him that her associate Nicholas told her she had wasted too much time trying to restore his curse, that Nicholas had then punished her by stripping her of her powers, that one of those powers was her immunity to aging, and that she had come to his house to shoot him to death before her 194 years caught up with her and she turned into a pile of dust. Angelique/ Cassandra began to collapse before she could fire the gun, and now it is on the mantel.

Julia is a medical doctor, and makes an effort to examine Angelique/ Cassandra. Angelique/ Cassandra rushes out of the house, and Julia asks Barnabas why he didn’t kill her when he had the chance. Barnabas, who had already killed his uncle in a duel before he began his long career as a bloodsucking fiend and part-time serial murderer and who within minutes of being freed from the effects of the curse picked up a gun with the intention of shooting a man named Adam, gives a self-satisfied little speech about how much he values life. Julia, who was extremely reluctant to join Barnabas in the murder of her onetime friend Dave in #341 and was miserable when he gleefully taunted her afterward with her “new status” as a “murderer!,” takes the gun and announces that she will go kill Angelique/ Cassandra herself.

Outside the door of the great house, Barnabas tries to talk Julia out of killing Angelique/ Cassandra. Julia says that if Angelique/ Cassandra is out of the way once and for all, she might herself be able to return to her old life. Barnabas points out that she is overlooking the obstacle that a murder charge might present to that plan. Julia says that no one would convict her if they knew what Angelique/ Cassandra was, to which Barnabas replies that no one will know, since no one would believe the true story. He does not mention what he had brought up earlier, that Nicholas is more powerful than Angelique/ Cassandra, or draw the obvious inference, that he must be at least as dangerous. As long as Nicholas is around, killing Angelique/ Cassandra won’t gain Julia or Barnabas very much.

Inside, Barnabas and Julia find that Roger has let Angelique/ Cassandra into the house. She has aged tremendously, so much so that Roger did not recognize her as his wife. She is resting on the couch in the drawing room, where Julia examines her while Roger and Barnabas talk in the foyer.

Julia comes out and tells the men that her patient’s heartbeat is so weak she can have only minutes left to live. Barnabas gives a stern response, and Julia assures him she did nothing to change the woman’s condition. The word “minutes” will strike a chord with returning viewers, who remember that Nicholas yesterday referred to Angelique/ Cassandra’s future as “the minutes remaining to you.” If we also remember how easy it is to underestimate Angelique/ Cassandra, we will not be very surprised when, after Roger insists on driving the old woman to the hospital, they go into the drawing room they find that she is gone and the windows are open. Angelique/ Cassandra is so interesting that the number of minutes she will continue to exist is rarely less than the 22 minutes that make up an episode of Dark Shadows.

Angelique/ Cassandra is Lara Parker’s usual young and beautiful self at the beginning of the episode. She then goes off camera for a moment and comes right back with her face hidden inside a hood. She is in a couple of scenes as a hooded figure before we see her face again, close to the end, when she is wearing the same old age makeup she had on in #499. Considering that the show was done live-to-tape, that leads me to wonder if the makeup was applied in stages during multiple commercial breaks.

Episode 546: A woman, born on Martinique in 1774

Suave warlock Nicholas has expressly forbidden his subordinate, the wicked witch known variously as Angelique and Cassandra, from killing Frankenstein’s monster Adam. But now he has twice caught her trying to do just that. He punishes her by stripping her of her powers. He tells her that she is now a human being, and that she will die soon.

Nicholas de-witches Angelique/ Cassandra, while also trying to hold her wig in place. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Angelique/ Cassandra’s husband, sarcastic dandy Roger, comes downstairs and confronts her about her indifference to him. She responds that there never was anything between them and never will be, and rushes out of the house. My wife, Mrs Acilius, is a soap opera fan from way back, and she says that as far as she is concerned this archetypal soap moment makes for a “Genuinely Good Episode.”

Angelique/ Cassandra goes to see recovering vampire Barnabas. He opens the door and asks what she wants. She says that she was once the mistress of the house and that as such she has a right to enter.

Ever since she showed up in the year 1968, Angelique/ Cassandra has been trying Barnabas’ patience and the audience’s by pretending that she was not the witch he married in the 1790s. He asks her why she has dropped that pretense now, and she says that she, like he, has become human. She also says that she will die at dawn. It is unclear why she thinks this- all Nicholas told her was that her life expectancy was to be measured in “minutes.” She declares her intention to kill Barnabas, and is pointing a gun at him when the episode ends.

If it does not lead to her immediate demise, depriving Angelique/ Cassandra of her powers would be an intriguing way of making her a more flexible character. In the costume drama segment set in the late eighteenth century, she was so powerful that she painted herself into a corner, facing no real opposition. The only suspense she could generate came when she was indecisive or distracted and got in her own way. In 1968, her subordination to Nicholas has pushed her to the opposite extreme. She has been very busy, but hasn’t done much. If she survives without her powers, it might be interesting to see her learn how to live as a human after all this time.

Angelique/ Cassandra’s appearance reflects the end of her dual identity perhaps more clearly than was intended. When she answered to the name Angelique in the 1790s, she had blonde hair; when she turned up in 1968 calling herself Cassandra, she wore a black wig. Throughout this episode, the wig keeps sliding around on her head.

This episode includes another of the innumerable replays of an audiotape message about Barnabas and Adam. The other day, it seemed that Nicholas and Cassandra had taped over the message, as undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins taped over a recording she didn’t want parapsychologist Peter Guthrie to hear in #172. But Friday they played it for us yet again. When Nicholas threatens Angelique/ Cassandra with death if she keeps disobeying him, Mrs Acilius said to the screen “I’ll kill you myself if you play that tape again!” I am glad to report that this is the last time we will hear the thing.

Danny Horn’s Dark Shadows Every Day post about this episode juxtaposes screenshots and dialogue from the scene in which Nicholas strips Angelique/ Cassandra of her powers with screenshots and dialogue from a contemporary episode of General Hospital. The contrast is hilarious. It also shows why even the conventionally soapy scenes with Roger and Barnabas stand out from the other daytime dramas of the period. Director Lela Swift’s use of the camera was incomparably more dynamic and ambitious than anything General Hospital was doing, Robert Cobert’s original orchestral score is comprehensible to a modern audience in a way that an organ playing in the background would never be, and the action is paced so that it takes less time for Angelique/ Cassandra to lose her supernatural powers, end her marriage to Roger, and pull a gun on Barnabas than it took Lucille to explain to Audrey that she had an idea about how she could learn to play bridge.

Episode 545: Another living soul

Suave warlock Nicholas Blair has learned that Frankenstein’s monster Adam is hiding in a room in the long-deserted west wing of the great house of Collinwood. He materializes there and talks as if he’s trying to recruit Adam into a self-esteem cult. He says “You mustn’t worry about what other people think, Adam. And you needn’t always do what other people want you to do. You must learn to be a strong-willed individual.” In response, Adam carefully articulates the new vocabulary item: “In-di-vi-du-al.” It sounds like the big guy will be signing up for courses at the Nathaniel Branden Institute in no time.

Nicholas recruits Adam. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Later, we see Adam in the main part of the house. He has let himself into the bedroom where his patroness Carolyn Collins Stoddard, the acting mistress of Collinwood, is sleeping. He wakes her and tells her of Nicholas’ visit. Carolyn tells him to wait there while she goes to the drawing room and scolds Nicholas for wandering into parts of the house he had no permission to explore. Nicholas apologizes, and tells Carolyn her secret is safe with him.

In the final part of the episode, the wicked witch known variously as Angelique and Cassandra makes her way to Adam’s room in the west wing. She finds his door locked, and makes a graceful little hand gesture to magically open it. Standing over Adam while he sleeps, she decides that she cannot use magic to kill him, since Nicholas wants Adam to live and she would like him to believe that a human committed the murder. Therefore, she lifts an ax and is ready to chop into him when the episode ends. The ax wasn’t there earlier and she didn’t conjure it up; presumably she found it in “hammerspace,” the dimension where fans of animated cartoon say characters find whatever tools they need to do whatever the script calls for them to do at any given moment.

Adam’s residence in the west wing is a drab storyline, but longtime viewers will notice that it marks a change in the geography of Collinwood. The west wing was introduced as an area separated from the rest of the house, not only by a locked door, but some kind of metaphysical rift. In #14, well-meaning governess Vicki Winters saw the locked door inexplicably open and close itself; that was the clearest indication up to that point that in Collinwood, the word “ghost” referred to something more than unresolved conflicts among people. A reminiscence of that moment in #27 reinforced the suggestion that there was something supernatural about breaching the barrier between that wing and the main part of the house.

From #84 to #87, Vicki’s charge, strange and troubled boy David Collins, locked her up in a room in the wing; that was such an isolated place that it seemed Vicki might die before the family found her. Again, the distance was not only physical- while in captivity there she saw a full fledged ghost, a glowing figure dripping seaweed and singing to her. When sarcastic dandy Roger went to look for Vicki in #87, we saw him open the first of Dark Shadows‘ secret panels, a bit of the wall in the drawing room that opens to a long, dusty passage leading to the west wing. That was startling to see then, and we haven’t had a look at it since. Viewers who remember it have been looking at that spot on the wall ever since, wondering what worlds lie behind it.

Adam’s presence in the west wing fits in with its unearthly character, as do Nicholas and Angelique/ Cassandra’s activities there. But since those two witches live at Collinwood, the rest of the house has taken on that character as well. The separation of the west wing from the main part thus comes to lose its significance. Why shouldn’t Adam be able to visit the rest of the house, and why shouldn’t he know his way around well enough that he goes directly to Carolyn’s bedroom? Why shouldn’t unlovely ex-convict Harry Johnson, the most mundane character on the show now, have adventures in the west wing?

Angelique, the camera in front of her, the secret panel to the west wing behind her. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 540: Intervening factor

Suave warlock Nicholas Blair tells his subordinate, the wicked witch known variously as Angelique and Cassandra, that she has an hour to figure out why her recent attempt to turn Barnabas Collins back into a vampire failed. When she tells him that won’t be enough time, he suggests she spend the hour preparing for her final destruction. At the last minute, her stepson David tells Angelique/ Cassandra about an audiotape message that happens to give her exactly the information she needs.

Nicholas threatens Angelique. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Angelique/ Cassandra has been an extremely unsympathetic villain, so it is daring to have an episode mostly from her point of view which is suspenseful if and only if we want her to stay around. My wife, Mrs Acilius, says that might have been a reasonable bet when a character as dynamic as Angelique/ Cassandra is played by a performer as appealing as Lara Parker, but it doesn’t pay off today, for two reasons. First, the episode doesn’t have much of a plot. Second, returning viewers will be angry with Angelique/ Cassandra right now. She just subjected us to a three month ordeal called “The Dream Curse,” in which we saw the same dull sequence play out a dozen times, heard it described almost twice as many times, and then found out that there was no point to any of it. We know perfectly well that Angelique/ Cassandra is too interesting to stay off the show for long, so that the “final destruction” Nicholas is threatening will probably last for three weeks at most. But we really do want to see her punished for wasting our time.

This is the first episode in which John Karlen reads the opening narration, and only the third episode in which any male performer reads it. Most cast members have read these narrations more or less in the characters they will play in that day’s episode; Karlen takes his place alongside Kathryn Leigh Scott as one of two who strive to invest the role of Narrator with its own personality.

This was the last of the five episodes credited to director John Weaver. It isn’t hard to find reasons why they wouldn’t have contracted him to do more. There are a number of moments when the action jolts to a standstill for no apparent reason, Humbert Allen Astredo as Nicholas never seems to know what direction he should be facing, and when Angelique/ Cassandra orders the bedraggled Willie Loomis to “Look into my eyes!” we get a shot of him looking past her.

Episode 539: Child’s play

The wicked witch known variously as Angelique and Cassandra is standing in the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood, thinking evil thoughts. The camera zooms out and we see that her stepson, strange and troubled boy David Collins, is standing next to her. She starts to speak her thoughts out loud, saying “You will pay!” David asks “Who will pay?” Angelique/ Cassandra is startled to discover that David is there, and is flustered when she tries to change the subject. She so often delivers incriminating soliloquys while standing out in the open that the comic effect of this scene must be intentional.

Angelique/ Cassandra oblivious to David’s presence.

David asks Angelique/ Cassandra to help him figure out the correct operation of a tape recorder he received some time ago as a present from permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman. After Angelique/ Cassandra refuses to help, he goes upstairs and finds his cousin, heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard, emerging from the long-deserted west wing of the house. He asks Carolyn what she was doing in the west wing. She asks him why he thinks she was in the west wing. When he says he saw her coming out of it, she drops her attempt to evade his question and tells him she was looking for some old family photos to show well-meaning governess Vicki. She has enough trouble remembering this story that it must be obvious to David that it is a lie, but he isn’t interested enough to follow it up. He just wants someone to help him figure out which buttons to push on the tape recorder.

On their Dark Shadows Before I Die, John and Christine Scoleri speak for longtime viewers of the show when they say that it is surprising David needs help with the tape recorder. When the show started, David was two years younger and had the mechanical skill to sabotage his father’s car in a very creditable attempt at patricide. All Carolyn has to do to get the tape going is read the label that identifies the play button. This apparent loss of cognitive function is of a piece with David’s massive loss of narrative function. For the first 39 weeks of Dark Shadows, David was the fulcrum on which every story turned, and actor David Henesy had abundant opportunities to show a level of professional skill that would be remarkable in a performer of any age. But he has been receding into the background for a long time now, and his extraordinary dim-wittedness today marks a low point for him.

Once the tape starts playing, Carolyn makes a hasty exit. David listens to a minute or so of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, hoping it will end and he will hear “something spooky.” His wish is granted when the music abruptly stops, giving way to a voice addressing itself to Julia. The voice rambles about David’s distant cousin Barnabas Collins, saying that if both he and “my creation” live, Barnabas will be all right, but that if “Adam” dies, “Barnabas will be as he was before.” The name “Adam” should mean something to David. He shared a confused and frightening moment with a mysterious man of that name in #495. That man subsequently abducted Carolyn, and is still the object of a police search.

What only Julia, Barnabas, and Barnabas’ servant Willie know is that Adam is a Frankenstein’s monster created in an experiment that freed Barnabas of the effects of the vampire curse that Angelique/ Cassandra placed on him in the 1790s. The voice on the tape is that of Eric Lang, the mad scientist who began the experiment. Minutes before he died of the effects of one of Angelique/ Cassandra’s spells, Lang recorded this message for Julia. The audience has heard this message approximately a gazillion bajillion times, but until now, the only character to have heard it was Adam, and he could make no sense of it.

Angelique/ Cassandra recently made an unsuccessful attempt to renew Barnabas’ curse, and is desperately searching for the obstacle that prevented it from working. Carolyn’s actual task in the west wing was showing Adam to a hiding place there. So Angelique/ Cassandra is now under the same roof with both the information she needs to identify her obstacle and the person she can remove that obstacle by killing. Things are looking bad for Barnabas and for Adam.

While David is upstairs with the tape recorder, Vicki is sobbing in the drawing room. Suave warlock Nicholas, who is staying in the house in the guise of Angelique/ Cassandra’s brother, enters and asks her what’s wrong. She says that she has just learned that Barnabas is dead. His back to her, Nicholas smiles brightly when he first hears this news, then puts on a sad face and turns to her with sympathetic words. In response, Vicki reveals that she knows all about Angelique/ Cassandra and that she has little patience for Nicholas’ pretensions. Carolyn enters and doubts Vicki’s news. Angelique/ Cassandra is the last to enter. She says that she saw Barnabas alive and well after the time when he is supposed to have been dead. Vicki and Carolyn look at each other, and do not see Nicholas’ look of disappointment. They go upstairs, and Nicholas and Angelique/ Cassandra go into the drawing room.

Nicholas scolds Angelique/ Cassandra for her failure. He addresses her as “dear sister.” He suggests she may not hate Barnabas sufficiently to impose a curse on him. When she denies this, he leans to her ear and teasingly asks if she loves him. He threatens to send her back where she came from if she doesn’t re-vamp Barnabas by midnight, and to focus her mind replaces her arm with a fleshless bone.

Director John Weaver was not much of a visual artist, and in his post about the episode on Dark Shadows Every Day Danny Horn analyzes the dismally inept blocking of the scene between Vicki and Nicholas. Danny also has some unkind words for writer Ron Sproat, but I think those are unfair. It’s true the opening scene between Adam and Carolyn goes on too long, David’s helplessness with the tape recorder is dismal, and Vicki and Carolyn’s reaction to Angelique/ Cassandra’s report that Barnabas is still alive doesn’t make sense. That’s a long enough list of flaws that we might fairly classify Weaver and Sproat as the B-team, not on a par with director Lela Swift and writers Sam Hall and Gordon Russell.

But it is genuinely funny when we first see David standing next to Angelique/ Cassandra, David’s questioning of Carolyn is intelligently written, Lang’s message is for once an actual source of suspense, Vicki’s lines to Nicholas as Alexandra Moltke Isles delivers them show the character’s strength, Nicholas’ teasing Angelique/ Cassandra with her alleged love of Barnabas raises a laugh as it makes them sound like a couple of kids, and the final gag with the arm bone is at once goofy enough to keep up the humor in the episode and startling enough to be effective as a touch of horror. All in all, it’s an enjoyable episode, if not one that fans would be tempted to use to turn their friends on to the show.

Episode 535: The dream begins

Three months ago, the wicked witch known variously as Angelique and Cassandra cast a spell that has kept the story going in tight little circles ever since. It is “The Dream Curse.” A character has a nightmare, is compelled to tell it to another person, that person has the same nightmare, and the process repeats. When the nightmare makes its way to well-meaning governess Vicki Winters, she is compelled to tell it to old world gentleman Barnabas Collins. She and Barnabas both know that he is Angelique/ Cassandra’s real target. Vicki thinks the dream will kill Barnabas; he knows that it is meant to turn him back into what he was for 172 years, a vampire.

Vicki is struggling against the urge to tell Barnabas the dream. He knows that she is suffering mightily, and is resigned to his fate. So he shows up at the great house of Collinwood and insists that she tell him the dream. When she resists, he says that “I haven’t loved many things in my lifetime, but, Vicki, I love you.” The last time we heard Barnabas say “I love you” was in #415, when his little sister Sarah died in his arms. We have reason to believe that Vicki knows a lot more about Barnabas than she seems to; for example, she officially believes Barnabas’ story that he is the descendant of Sarah’s brother, but in this conversation she mentions that “the original Barnabas” died before he could have had any children. We also know that her feelings about him are complicated; when she looks at him after his “I love you” we see that she has something she very much wants to say. What that might be, we can only imagine.

Vicki tells Barnabas the dream. After he leaves, permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, MD, sits with Vicki. Julia is Barnabas’ best friend and partner in crime, and she usually has trouble concealing her impatience with the ingenuous Vicki. But today the two women are united in their grief. They share a touching scene that ends when Angelique/ Cassandra enters. Julia slaps Angelique/ Cassandra’s face and storms off. Vicki tells Angelique/ Cassandra she deserves far more than a slap, then walks out as well.

Back in his house, Barnabas takes an evil looking pill. Julia comes in with her medical bag and offers to give him something to stave off the dream. He says that he has already taken a pill to bring sleep on. Further, he tells her that he has ordered his servant Willie Loomis to sharpen a wooden stake. When he has the dream and passes into apparent death, she is to drive the stake through his heart.

In moments of despair, Barnabas has often presented his resignation to reverting to vampirism as his noble self-sacrifice. But this is the first time he has presented a plan to ensure that he will not resume preying on the living. It suggests that there really is something in him other than narcissism. Maybe he knew what the words meant when he told Vicki he loved her.

Barnabas has the dream. It stops short of the climactic moment, and he awakens. He jumps to the conclusion that Angelique/ Cassandra botched her curse and it’s all over. He sends Julia to get Willie. As soon as he is alone, a knock comes at the door. He opens it and goes outside. A bat lowers on him, and he falls to the ground screaming.

This was the last episode of Dark Shadows ABC-TV asked its affiliates to broadcast at 3:30 PM. Starting Monday, it moved to the 4:00 timeslot, suitable for viewing by kids running home from school. In his delightful post about the episode, Danny Horn envisions the show as a patient on a therapist’s couch, talking about its need to leave its tedious recurring dream behind before it makes its big move.

Episode 532/533: Your dream will end with me

Well-meaning governess Vicki has had a nightmare. She knows that it is no ordinary dream, but the penultimate stage in “The Dream Curse,” a spell cast by the wicked witch known variously as Angelique and Cassandra. She will feel a compulsion to tell the dream to old world gentleman Barnabas. If she gives in to this compulsion, he will have the same dream, and it is supposed to bring disaster to him. She does not know, but he does, that this disaster is to be his reversion to vampirism, a condition with which he was afflicted for 172 years.

Barnabas calls on Angelique/ Cassandra at the great house of Collinwood, where she lives as the wife of his distant cousin Roger. Barnabas says he will surrender to Angelique/ Cassandra and become her faithful lover if she will relieve Vicki of the suffering that the dream brings. He tells her that Vicki is a person of great strength, that she has deep affection for him, and that she will hold out for a very long time rather than endanger him. Angelique/ Cassandra says nothing, but after he leaves she thinks his offer over with great excitement.

Vicki comes home to the great house with her friend Maggie. No one is downstairs when they arrive; Maggie leads Vicki through the front door, approaches the partly open doors to the drawing room, and opens them the rest of the way.

This will intrigue longtime viewers. First, because the camera is looking out of the drawing room into the foyer when Maggie comes toward the lens, takes hold of the doors, and opens them, a visual composition we have never seen before. Second, because opening and closing those doors has always been a sign that a person had authority in the house, and while Maggie is very much in charge of the rattled Vicki at this moment, she has never had any connection to Collinwood.

Maggie meets the suave Nicholas, who flatters her extravagantly and offers her a ride to the hospital where she will visit her injured fiancé Joe. Nicholas is a warlock, and he has been very severe with his subordinate Angelique/ Cassandra for her ability to feel love for Barnabas. He is fun to watch when he is casting spells or deceiving people or giving bizarre motivational speeches to Angelique/ Cassandra, but his single-minded devotion to evil for its own sake is a shallow foundation for a regular character. When we see his obvious attraction to Maggie putting the lie to his scornful denunciations of Angelique/ Cassandra’s mushy feelings for Barnabas, we might wonder if he will develop another side to his personality, one which will make it possible for him to stay on the show for the long term.

After Nicholas returns from taking Maggie to the hospital, he meets Angelique/ Cassandra in the foyer. He asks her if Vicki has told Barnabas the dream yet. She says that she has not, and that it may be quite some time before she does. But she also tells him that that may not matter. She looks at Barnabas’ portrait and, in a blissful tone, tells Nicholas that she has won and the Dream Curse need not continue. When she describes Barnabas’ offer, Nicholas is appalled. He says that he brought her back to the world of the living to take revenge, not to indulge in love. She acquiesces.

Vicki comes downstairs and confronts Angelique/ Cassandra. She tells her that she will never go to Barnabas, no matter how much the dream makes her suffer. While Vicki tells her off, Angelique/ Cassandra’s back is against the large clock that stands on the floor of the foyer.

Vicki has had it with Angelique/ Cassandra.

Vicki was the main character on Dark Shadows for its first year, when the only story on the show that really worked was her difficult relationship with her charge, strange and troubled boy David. That story was resolved when David’s mother, undead fire witch Laura, vanished in a cloud of smoke in #191, and the show hasn’t known what to do with Vicki since. The writers often seem to have given up on her, and occasionally Alexandra Moltke Isles shows signs of withdrawing from the character. But she gives her all in this scene.

I’ve noticed that Mrs Isles tends to be at her most vigorous when she is in the foyer near the clock. Maybe she was inspired by Vicki’s complex relationship with time- in #85 and #126, she was the first character to interact with ghosts, and from #365 to #461 she was displaced to the late 1790s. She was therefore the key figure in breaking down the barriers between past and present in the narrative universe of Dark Shadows. Moreover, her old role as the audience’s point of view long put her at the beginning of every episode with a voiceover beginning “My name is Victoria Winters,” and the cast credits for every episode she is in still end with “and Alexandra Moltke as Victoria Winters.” Her position as the last in the long, long line of victims of the Dream Curse is another example of her function as an indicator that a narrative arc is approaching its climax. So maybe she could sympathize with the clock.

Episode 530: A fine line between love and hate

In the eighteenth century, wicked witch Angelique loved scion Barnabas Collins. He betrayed her in those days, rejecting her in favor of the gracious Josette, and ever since she has been casting deadly spells on him and everyone close to him. Today she encounters him in the woods. After a brief confrontation, she is left thinking about the feelings of love for him that still linger in her and undermine her killing power.

A few months ago, Frankenstein’s monster Adam imprinted on Barnabas when he saw him at the moment he came to life. Barnabas betrayed Adam’s filial love time and again, chaining him to a wall in a windowless basement cell, leaving him alone for all but a few minutes a day, and entrusting his care to his abusive servant Willie. When Barnabas beat Adam with his cane to stop him retaliating against Willie, Adam’s love turned to hate and he adopted “Kill Barnabas!” as his motto.

Today, well-meaning governess Vicki stops by Barnabas’ house to update him on the progress of Angelique’s latest attempt to destroy him. Vicki is to be the next to have a nightmare that Angelique has sent to a series of people, and after she has it she will pass it to Barnabas. Vicki doesn’t know that Barnabas was a vampire from the 1790s until 1968, much less that Angelique is trying to turn him back into one, but she does know that if Barnabas has the nightmare he is supposed to die as a result.

While Barnabas and Vicki confer, Angelique raises the ghost of Sam Evans from his grave. Sam was supposed to tell Vicki the nightmare, causing her to have it, but died before he could do so. Sam resists Angelique’s commands, but finds that Angelique can prevent him from returning to his grave. His soul needs rest, so he complies.

Back at Barnabas’ house, the sound of a gunshot interrupts the conversation. Barnabas goes out to investigate while Vicki waits in the parlor. Sam materializes there. Evidently his need to rest is quite urgent, since he sits down in an armchair while he talks to Vicki. The dead must rest! Or at least take a load off, it’s very tiring being dead apparently.

Vicki pleads with Sam not to tell her the dream, since she does not want to bring death to Barnabas. Sam says that in Barnabas’ case, death might come as a welcome relief. He declines to explain to Vicki what he means, but longtime viewers will be intrigued. Sam now knows about Angelique, so presumably he knows about Barnabas’ vampirism as well. Sam was the father of Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town, whom Barnabas attacked, imprisoned, tried to brainwash into thinking she was Josette, and set out to kill when his brainwashing plan failed. If Sam knows about that part of Barnabas’ career, you’d think he would be a bit more peeved with him than he seems to be. At any rate, Vicki can’t stop Sam telling her the dream. When Barnabas comes back, she tells him what happened, and tells him she is already tempted to tell him the dream. She must go far away for his sake.

Many people have already had the dream, and none of them had the compulsion to tell it until they awoke from it. Vicki’s relationship to Barnabas is an odd one; shortly after his attempt to Josettify Maggie failed, he decided to repeat the experiment with her. Yet he never made much of an effort to get close to her, even though she time and again went out of her way to present him with opportunities to have his way with her. She even invited herself to his house for a sleepover in #285, only to have him back off the opportunity to suck her blood. He finally bit her in #462, only for his vampirism to be put into remission less than a week later. In this scene, Vicki keeps looking at Barnabas with wide, longing eyes, while he reacts coolly. So perhaps Vicki’s compulsion suggests that her attachment to Barnabas causes the Dream Curse to affect her differently.

Back at the grave, Angelique asks Sam’s ghost whether he told Vicki the dream. He said he did. She heaves a sigh of relief and exclaims “Excellent!,” and lets him go back to his grave. She doesn’t ask any follow-up questions or require any evidence. Clearly she couldn’t read Sam’s mind, or she wouldn’t have had to ask the question in the first place. So he could just as easily have gone off to haunt someone else, then lie to her.

We cut back to Barnabas’ house. Evidently he went somewhere after Vicki left, because he is walking in the front door. He looks around, apparently sensing a presence. He calls for Willie and gets no response. He opens a closet door, and hardworking young fisherman Joe falls out, unconscious. He hears a loud dirty laugh and sees Adam at the window, jeering at him.

This episode marks the final appearance of Sam Evans and of actor David Ford. Ford brought a fresh energy to the show when he took over the part of Sam from the execrable Mark Allen in #35, prompting blogger Marc Masse to discern what he called “The David Ford Effect” in the brightened performances of all the cast in the weeks that followed. But ever since the major storyline he was part of fizzled out in #201, Sam has been at the outer fringes of the plotlines, and Ford has been coasting. He inhabits his characters comfortably enough that he is always pleasant to watch, but it’s easy to forget the verve he originally brought to the show.

A few months after leaving Dark Shadows, Ford would join many other Dark Shadows alumni in the original Broadway cast of the musical 1776. He played John Hancock on Broadway and in the 1972 movie, and John Dickinson in the national touring company. I’ve been in the habit of watching the movie every year on or around the Fourth of July since the 1980s, and so it’s oddly fitting that Ford should depart Dark Shadows early in July. Fitting too that Sam Evans’ grave should be decorated with what looks to be a red, white, and blue floral wreath.

Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 528: Old girl

In his post about this episode on Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn remarks on the recapping that permeates the dialogue and reckons it as writer Sam Hall’s critique of the ongoing storylines. That assessment will be familiar to those who, unlike Danny, have been watching the show from the beginning. When Ron Sproat joined the writing staff in October 1966, his first several scripts featured a systematic inventory of the available narrative material, with each plot very explicitly marked as suitable or unsuitable for further development.

In its first year, very little happened on Dark Shadows; now, it has swung to the opposite extreme, and there is a climax at every commercial break. But the result is oddly similar. They don’t take the time to explore the overall situation, so that little seems to be at stake even when a spectacular event takes place. No matter how much happens per minute of screen time, it feels like the pace is slow. We see suave warlock Nicholas in the gazebo on the grounds of the estate of Collinwood summoning his subordinate, the wicked witch known variously as Angelique and Cassandra, and hear him complain that she has spent weeks attempting to do what she should have accomplished in minutes. Thus Hall assures us that the pace will be picking up.

Angelique/ Cassandra comes to the gazebo, to which Nicholas refers as a “ga-ZAY-bo” in a bit of Collinsport English Angelique/ Cassandra herself introduced in #489. There, the two of them quarrel about her dilatory approach. They stand behind columns and look like debaters at podiums.

The debaters. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Every Day.

Danny Horn’s commenter “lakeplacidskater” made an interesting observation about the moment screenshotted above:

Maybe I’m reading too much into the set design, but in one of the photos Angelique and Nicholas are sperated by a statue of a Goddess (I assumed Venus). Wouldn’t it be awesome if it was Venus and that statue between them was to represent Angelique’s love for Barnabas blocking her efforts at villainy? More likely that the shot just looked better composed with the statue in the middle but how awesome if it was meant to be subtle symbolism! 🙂
“lakeplacidskater,” posted 25 February 2015 on Danny Horn, “Episode 528: This Tawdry Affair,” 21 November 2014.*

The statue appears to me to represent not Venus, but a harvest goddess. She is fully clothed, and there is a sack at her feet which seems to be full of grain. That makes a lot less sense than does the suggestion “lakeplacidskater” made. The Collinses derive their wealth from fishing and shipping, not from farming, so it is surprising that they would put a symbol of agriculture in such a prominent place. Perhaps she stands for wealth in general, but not for so much wealth that the family could afford to commission a statue of a sea goddess. And neither a bountiful harvest in particular nor wealth in general is any sort of obstacle between Nicholas and Angelique/ Cassandra. I suppose the visual metaphor might be emphasizing the image of the two of them as debaters, with the goddess serving as moderator.

Nicholas dominates Angelique/ Cassandra thoroughly and rather cruelly. Viewers who remember her from the portion of Dark Shadows set in the late eighteenth century may be taken aback by this. In those days, her power often seemed to be limited only by her own carelessness. That made for something of a shapeless narrative, since no one could oppose her effectively. Not only does Nicholas reduce her to a lowly state today, but he himself bungles a simple task when he sets out to do something nasty to well-meaning governess Vicki. Thus we see that the villains will have their work cut out for them.

Later, Vicki is in bed at her friend Maggie’s house. She has gone there to escape a curse Angelique/ Cassandra has placed that has caused several people to have the same nightmare. Since Maggie was at home when she was the first person to have the nightmare, and Vicki’s boyfriend Peter was sleeping there when he had it, it is hard to understand why Vicki thinks it is a place of safety.

We have several closeups of the face of the clock while Vicki goes to sleep. It’s an Ingraham eight day clock, apparently they wanted to make sure we knew that. When Vicki finally nods off, Angelique/ Cassandra materializes in the room with a jar of rose water that is supposed to make Vicki have the nightmare. Ever since the days when humanoid Phoenix Laura Murdoch Collins was on the show, we’ve been seeing undead witches materialize in people’s bedrooms while they sleep. This time, Maggie walks in and sees Angelique/ Cassandra. She screams at the sight. All of the women in the cast were required to scream frequently, so frequently that fans become connoisseurs of screaming. Kathryn Leigh Scott was one of the better screamers, not far behind Clarice Blackburn, so that makes for a satisfying ending.

*I can’t help but point that when “lakeplacidskater” left her post, all the members of the cast were still alive. Humbert Allen Astredo would die in 2016 and Lara Parker in 2023; Alexandra Moltke Isles, Roger Davis, and Kathryn Leigh Scott are still with us.

Episode 519: Poor suffering servant of Satan!

Roger Collins is on the telephone in the foyer of the great house of Collinwood. He is assuring the caller that it will be fine if Maggie, whom returning viewers know to be The Nicest Girl in Town, comes to stay. He says that he and Cassandra will be glad to have her for as long as she wants to be with them, and that he is sure Liz will approve. First time viewers thus learn that Roger has a wife named Cassandra, and that they live as guests in a house belonging to someone called Liz. A moment later, Liz enters, and is too distracted to hear anything Roger says to her.

Roger ends the phone call, and follows Liz into the drawing room. She stares out the window and makes a gloomy remark about death. He says he understands she must be very upset about Sam Evans. Returning viewers know that Sam was Maggie’s father, and that he died in yesterday’s episode. Roger goes on about how it is natural to be grieved at the loss of a friend like Sam, but soon learns that Liz’ mood has nothing to do with Sam’s demise- it’s news to her that he is dead.

Roger’s lines will startle longtime viewers. For the first 40 weeks of the show, Roger and Sam were united by a deep and abiding mutual hatred, and since then they have had no contact at all. Roger’s words about Sam as a family friend are so far from what we have previously seen that they should be considered a retcon.

Liz and Roger spend several minutes in the drawing room. She keeps going on about the all-pervasive reality of death, and he keeps urging her to see a doctor. There isn’t much to their lines, but Joan Bennett and Louis Edmonds were such extraordinary screen performers that it’s always fun to watch them together. This scene might be a particular pleasure to longtime viewers, who have rarely seen Roger as the responsible adult in any encounter.

We dissolve to a bedroom where a young woman in a black wig is sifting through some powders, looking directly into the camera, and telling Liz that her obsession with death will become even worse than it already is and will have dire consequences. Liz will believe that she is someone else, a woman who lived and died in another century, and may die by the same poison that killed that person.

There is a knock at the door. It is Roger. The woman hides her powders and lets him in. He addresses her as Cassandra and asks why the door was locked. Thus first-time viewers learn that she is his wife, that this is their room, that she is a witch, and that Liz’ problem is the result of a spell she has cast.

Cassandra tells Roger that she locked the door because David kept pestering her about Sam’s death and she wanted a moment to herself. With that, first-time viewers find out that David is Roger’s son, that Cassandra is his stepmother, and that she expects Roger to consider locking him out of the room an appropriate response to his grief about Sam.

Roger does not so consider it, and is bewildered by what Cassandra tells him. He tells Cassandra that Liz is in a bad way, and he is worried about her. Cassandra says she did not know that Roger was so concerned about his family. Baffled by this, Roger says that of course he is concerned, Liz is his sister. This tells first time viewers both what Roger’s relationship to Liz is, and that Cassandra has so little sense of family that she cannot imagine how other people feel.

Regular viewers will learn more. In the first year of the show, Roger’s keynote was his lack of loyalty to the family. That has now been set aside once and for all, and his normal attachment to his son and his sister provide a contrast with Cassandra’s apparently sociopathic coldness. Further, we saw a great deal of Cassandra from November 1967 through March 1968, when the show was a costume drama set in the 1790s and she was called Angelique. We saw then that Angelique had no conception of family or friendship, and that her idea of love begins and ends with her control over a person.

Cassandra promises to join Roger downstairs for a game of bridge in half an hour. He leaves, and she gets back to work spellcasting. As she does so, a figure in a black cassock materializes behind her. She turns, and the figure vanishes. In a quizzical tone, she says Roger’s name, revealing that she did not see the figure or realize that it is a supernatural presence. Together with her locking the door, scrambling to hide her magical paraphernalia when Roger knocked, lying to cover what she was doing, and failing to understand what a person with a reasonable amount of human empathy would consider acceptable behavior, her puzzlement shows that whatever her powers may be, they have definite limits.

Back in the foyer, another young woman with black hair lets a man into the house. She calls him Joe, and he calls her Vicki. Joe and Vicki talk about Sam’s death and about Maggie. Joe says that he wants to marry Maggie as soon as possible and to move away. Vicki is all for their marriage, but does not want them to go. Joe talks about how close he and Sam were. Longtime viewers will remember that when Sam and Roger were enemies, Sam was the town drunk. Even then, Joe was always happy to help him in whatever way he could, and did not see his condition as any obstacle to marrying Maggie.

Liz enters and angrily addresses Joe as “Lieutenant Forbes.” Joe has never heard of Lieutenant Forbes, and cannot understand why Liz, who knows him well, would not recognize him. Vicki clearly does know who Liz is talking about, and manages to calm her down. After Liz apologizes and hastens away, Vicki answers Joe’s questions only by saying that Forbes is someone from “the past.” Since we heard Cassandra talk about Liz taking on the personality of someone who lived in “another century,” this suggests that Vicki, too, has an unnatural familiarity with that same century.

Joe wants to go upstairs to the room where Maggie is sleeping so that he will be the first person she sees when she wakes up. Vicki is about to lead him to Maggie when Cassandra insists she join her in the drawing room to talk about David. Vicki tells Joe which door to open, and complies with Cassandra’s directions. This shows that Vicki is a member of the household staff whose responsibilities have to do with David. Regular viewers know that she is his governess, and that they are very close.

Cassandra tells Vicki that David has been asking about Sam’s last words. Vicki says that he addressed them to Maggie, not to her, and implies that she did not hear them. When Cassandra continues probing, Vicki protests. She asks if Cassandra can’t see that she is upset. Considering how clueless Cassandra was about human feelings in her conversation with Roger, it is entirely possible that she cannot. Vicki tells her that Liz is deeply depressed; Cassandra feigns ignorance. Vicki says in a cold voice, “You wouldn’t know anything about that,” then leaves.

Longtime viewers know that it was Vicki who came unstuck in time in #365 and took us with her to the 1790s. During her nineteen weeks in the past, Vicki came to know not only Forbes, but Angelique. She knows perfectly well that Angelique and Cassandra are the same person, that she is a witch, and that she is a deadly menace to everyone. She likely suspects that Liz’ depression is the consequence of one of Cassandra’s spells, and the tone of her parting remark would suggest that she does. Further, those who saw the show yesterday know that Vicki is lying about Sam’s last words. They were addressed to her, and she heard them clearly. She is choosing not to repeat them to Cassandra lest Cassandra use them for her nefarious purposes.

Cassandra is alone in the drawing room for only a few seconds. She is joined there by the same figure who had appeared in her room. This time she sees him. He confronts her.

Regular viewers know that the figure is the Rev’d Mr Trask, a fanatical witchfinder who mistook Vicki for the witch in the 1790s and sent her to the gallows. He tells Cassandra that he now has the opportunity to correct that error. He shows her a cross, from which she recoils. We cut to a scene in the woods. Trask has tied Cassandra to a tree and performs an exorcism on her. This is Trask’s go-to technique; he tied Vicki to a tree in #385 and performed an exorcism on her in #386. Since Cassandra actually is in league with the devil (or as Trask would say, THE DE-VILLL!!!,) he has more success this time. Cassandra vanishes and leaves the ropes hanging on the tree.

Trask exorcises Cassandra. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

A first-time viewer might take this climax as an indication that Dark Shadows is a Christian show and Trask is its hero. Not only is Trask going after the right target, he is clearly making some headway. He says all the right things about casting the evil out of Cassandra and saving whatever good is left in her. His delivery of his lines is so fervent that Mrs Acilius, a vigorous Christian, cheered him on. In fact, Trask’s wild incompetence throughout the 1790s segment led to one disaster after another, and was of a piece with the show’s light regard for religion. Not until #450 did a cross provoke a reaction from a monster; that was the first suggestion the show gave that there might be anything to Christianity, and the scenes between Cassandra and Trask today are the second.

Dark Shadows borrows story points freely from all sorts of books, plays, movies, and folklore. So far, it has steered clear of Christianity as a source. For obvious reasons- most of the audience is at least nominally Christian, and Christianity is, in one way or another, a live option for the rest. So it’s a topic that can take over very quickly once it is introduced. I suppose a specifically Christian version of Dark Shadows could have worked, but I can’t imagine that the staff they had would have been particularly interested in making a show like that. So when it looks like they are going to let Trask have even a temporary win, we see the show running one of its boldest risks yet.