Wiggèd witch Cassandra shakes off an attempt to burn her and finds out that Sam Evans, an artist whom she blinded a little while ago, is in the hospital with a severe head injury. Sam is on the critical list.
Cassandra has cast an elaborate spell that takes the form of a series of nightmares one person after another has. Sage Timothy Eliot Stokes managed to stop the dream curse a while ago, but Cassandra is determined to restart it. Sam must be the next person to have the dream, so she goes to his hospital room and puts a powder in his drinking water that does the trick.
We see Sam’s dream, as we saw the dream when each of the previous nine people had it. The dream is an opportunity for the actors to emote as fiercely as they want, and most of them seem at least a little bit silly as they go through the exercise. Today, David Ford is the most ridiculous yet. He has to scream several times, and we find that screaming was not one of his strengths as an actor. In fact, every time he did it Mrs Acilius and I laughed out loud. The other person in his dream, the well-meaning Vicki, is played by Alexandra Moltke Isles. Mrs Isles has a ghostly quality that makes her very effective as a mysterious figure in a nightmare. Next to her, Ford seems to be some random guy in a bathrobe who just wandered onto the set.
Vicki beckons Sam to the dream room.
Sam wakes up from his dream and begs his daughter Maggie to get her friend Vicki to come over. Only by telling her about it can he be relieved of the agony that comes to those who have had the dream. Regular viewers know that if he does this, Vicki will have the dream. In a soliloquy, Cassandra tells us that Vicki will pass the dream to recovering vampire Barnabas. Her purpose in setting the curse was to turn Barnabas back into an active vampire; this will therefore be the last step to her success.
Stokes knows how the curse works and knows that Barnabas will die if the dream gets back to him. He does not know that Barnabas was a vampire, much less that Cassandra wants him to revert to vampirism. Maggie was the first to have the dream and knows that Stokes is an expert on it. She does not know that it is designed to kill someone at its culmination. So she sends for both Vicki and Stokes. At the end of the episode, Vicki is at Sam’s bedside, inviting him to tell her the dream; Stokes is still on his way.
Cassandra chose Maggie to be the first to have the dream because she resembles Barnabas’ lost love, gracious lady Josette. They look so much alike that they are the same actress. She does not tell us why she chose Vicki to be the last, but Vicki had extensive contact with Josette’s ghost in the first 39 weeks of the show, and from November 1967 to March 1968 traveled back in time and got to know Josette as a living being. When Josette was alive, Cassandra was known as Angelique. She was a lady’s maid in Josette’s family’s home, and secretly hated the young mistress. Barnabas had an affair with Angelique until he realized he could marry Josette, when he discarded the servant and pursued the mistress. Eventually, Barnabas’ attachment to Josette led the enraged Angelique to turn him into a vampire. So it is logical that Angelique/ Cassandra uses the two women closest to Josette as the first and last instruments in her campaign to revamp Barnabas. It does make it all the more ironic that Stokes lumped strange and troubled boy David, who for the first months of the show was more involved with Josette’s ghost than anyone else, among the “comparative strangers” who have the dream when Barnabas is in relatively little danger.
We open with a reprise of yesterday’s close, with mad scientist Julia Hoffman and servant Willie Loomis in the basement of the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. They hear a sobbing in the air; Julia knows it is the sound of the ghost of gracious lady Josette. Yesterday, the sobbing sounded like Kathryn Leigh Scott, who played Josette in the part of Dark Shadows set in the 1790s; today, it is a recording used in the early months of the series when a mysterious sobbing was heard coming from the basement of the great house on the estate. That sobbing was implied at that time to be Josette also, but in #272 it turned out to be matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Using the same recording for Josette, and playing it on a redress of the set used for the basement at the great house, would seem to be a way of admitting to longtime viewers that it was a mistake to resolve the Mystery of the Sobbing Woman that way.
The performer on the old recording is Florence Stanley. Stanley would become nationally famous in the 1970s as Bernice, wife of Sergeant Fish on Barney Miller and later on a spinoff series titled Fish. Fish was played by Abe Vigoda, who will later appear in a couple of episodes of Dark Shadows. I doubt very much Stanley and Vigoda ever talked with each other about their experiences on the show, but it makes me happy that they were both alums.
Abe Vigoda and Florence Stanley as Phil and Bernice Fish.
Julia figures out that recovering vampire Barnabas Collins has been bricked up behind a wall in the basement by the vengeful spirit of eighteenth century witchfinder the Rev’d Mr Trask. She orders Willie to chisel away the bricks and rescue Barnabas. Willie is confused and frightened by what Julia has told him, and resists her command. As he chips away, he is interrupted first by a strange, sudden chill and then by the feeling of a hand on his shoulder. Julia conjured Trask up at a séance held on this spot a few days ago. But she at first refuses to acknowledge that he can be a real obstacle to Willie’s compliance with her commands, so she tells Willie to “shut up!” and get back to work. When Trask becomes visible to them both, Julia has no choice but to address herself to him.
Julia tells Trask that, as a man of God, he must know that murder is wrong. This changes nothing; evidently Trask’s moral theology has evolved considerably since his physical death. Then she tells him that if he wants to correct a terrible mistake he made in life, he should forget about Barnabas and turn to the witch he hunted then, who now calls herself Cassandra Collins and lives at the great house on the estate. Again, no change. When Julia says that Cassandra is the one who ultimately caused Trask’s own misfortunes and that if he is going to take revenge on someone, it should be her, he disappears and the cold, clammy feeling of a ghostly presence goes with him. Willie gets back to work, and they get Barnabas out of his predicament in the nick of time.
In the great house, Cassandra plays a scene with Elizabeth. Cassandra has caused Elizabeth to be obsessed with death, and now causes her to believe she is one of her own collateral ancestors, Naomi Collins, who died in 1796. Cassandra leads Elizabeth to Naomi’s tomb and shows her the stone wall plates inscribed with the dates of the people buried there.
Cassandra does some more spellcasting to deepen Elizabeth’s misery and confusion. Elizabeth resists and runs out; Cassandra laughs gleefully. Her laughter stops when Trask appears to her, a torch glowing in his hand. He tells her that she is the witch, and that he has come to burn her. He commands “Burn, witch, burn!” and she bursts into flames.
The scene in the basement is great fun, as is Cassandra’s confrontation with Trask. But the parts with Cassandra and Elizabeth drag. This is the second time Elizabeth has moped around hopelessly and thought of nothing but death; the first time was a year ago, in late June and early July 1967. It was deadly dull then, and is no better now. The show simply does not know what to do with Elizabeth, and usually wastes the great talents of Joan Bennett.
There are a couple of famous production faults at the tomb. When they get there, the plate over Naomi’s casket still reads “born, 1761; died, 1821,” as it did before the show settled on the 1790s as the decisive period. When Cassandra causes Elizabeth to see the tomb as incomplete and still awaiting Naomi’s interment, the inscription is covered by a piece of cardboard painted to match the stone and clumsily pasted on it.
Wiggéd witch Angelique/ Cassandra and her reluctant cat’s paw Tony are on the terrace at the great house of Collinwood, quarreling about Tony’s failure to complete his latest mission. Angelique/ Cassandra talks about the punishments she is capable of inflicting on Tony, and decides that she will force him to fall hopelessly in love with her. This punishment will begin as soon as she has kissed him.
This is not the first time Angelique/ Cassandra has found a reason to kiss Tony. The last time she did so, in #489, her stepson David caught them, and she had to scramble to come up with a spell to wipe his memory. This time, her sister-in-law Liz catches them, and she curses Liz to become obsessed with death. As she is casting the spell, she tells Liz that the obsession will make her life less empty. It does not promise to make it more interesting for the audience to watch.
Yesterday, wiggéd witch Angelique/ Cassandra sent her cat’s paw Tony to kill sage Timothy Eliot Stokes. Stokes pulled “the old switcheroo” on him, and Tony drank from the glass into which he had put Angelique/ Cassandra’s poison. Today, we learn that Stokes gave Tony an emetic to save his life. Stokes calls mad scientist Julia Hoffman, MD to examine Tony and assist with the next stage of the battle against Angelique/ Cassandra.
Recovered, Tony has no idea why he obeyed Angelique/ Cassandra’s command to kill Stokes, and is ready to surrender to the police. Stokes tells him he is under the power of a witch, and enlists him in the battle against her.
Stokes takes out the memoirs of his ancestor Ben, who was Angelique’s cat’s paw in the eighteenth century. He does some automatic writing in Ben’s hand and finds that they must contact the spirit of the Rev’d Mr Trask, a witchfinder who inadvertently helped Angelique in those days. Fortunately, Trask, like Tony, was played by Jerry Lacy, so it shouldn’t be too hard to get hold of him. Stokes also finds that Trask was walled up in “the coffin room,” which Julia tells him is for some mysterious reason a nickname given to the space at the foot of the stairs in the basement of the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. Stokes decrees that he, Julia, and Tony must go to this room and hold a séance there.
On his way to the Old House, Tony follows Stokes’ instructions and stops at the main house on the estate and tells Angelique/ Cassandra that Stokes is dead. This follows a scene between Angelique/ Cassandra and her husband, sarcastic dandy Roger, in which Roger complains about her lack of interest in him. Her mind isn’t on the game of chess they are playing, she hasn’t been attentive to him for several nights, and she refuses to go on a honeymoon. Angelique/ Cassandra ensorcelled Roger into marrying her so that she could have a perch at Collinwood, and he seems to be slipping out of the spell’s power.
Stokes, Julia, and Tony gather in the coffin room. They begin the séance. This is the fifth séance we have seen on Dark Shadows, but the first that does not include well-meaning governess Vicki. In four of the previous five, it had been Vicki who went into the trance. On the other occasion, it was strange and troubled boy David who became the vessel through which the dead spoke to the living. The first three times Vicki served as the medium, she channeled the gracious Josette Collins, and when David filled that role he gave voice to David Radcliffe. In those days, Vicki was closely connected to Josette, perhaps a reincarnation of her, as David was another version of the cursed boy David Radcliffe. The final time Vicki spoke for the dead, she spoke for nine year old Sarah Collins, with whom she was no more closely connected than were any of a number of other characters. Sarah has no present-day counterpart, so her appearance at a séance suggested that Dark Shadows was moving away from its use of necromancy as a way of connecting characters from different time periods.
This time, Tony goes into the trance. In #481, Angelique/ Cassandra told Tony that she chose him as her cat’s paw because he resembled Trask, so when he is the medium through whom Trask speaks we are returning to Dark Shadows‘ original conception of how séances work. Trask mistakes Stokes for Ben, as Angelique did in a dream visitation last week. The brick wall behind which Trask’s remains are hidden bulges and is about to crumble when we fade to the credits.
True fans of Dark Shadows know that the episode’s real climax comes during those credits. Thayer David strolls onto the set under Louis Edmonds’ credit for Roger. He even looks into the camera when he realizes what he has done.
Unloved Frankenstein’s monster Adam has survived a plunge from the cliff at Widow’s Hill and made his way into the home of blind ex-artist Sam Evans. Sam realizes that Adam is badly hurt and cannot speak much English; with great kindness, he tries to clean and bandage Adam’s wounds.
Sage Timothy Eliot Stokes comes in. Adam, who in his few weeks of life has had little but hostility from humans, is alarmed by the sight of another one, and flees. Stokes explains to Sam who Adam is, and Sam’s sympathy for the big guy only deepens. This retelling of the creature’s encounter with the blind hermit in The Bride of Frankenstein is affectingly done.
Wicked witch Angelique, calling herself Cassandra, has made her way into the apartment of local man Tony Peterson. Tony is agitated by the presence of Angelique/ Cassandra and keeps telling her he wants her to go home to her husband and leave him alone. She tells Tony he is “Quite a Puritan,” reminding us that when Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in New England in the 1790s, actor Jerry Lacy played the Rev’d Mr Trask, a fanatical but utterly inept witchfinder who inadvertently served Angelique’s darkest purposes. Mr Lacy plays Tony quite differently than he did Trask, but Angelique/ Cassandra told Tony in #481 that she chose him as her cat’s paw because he reminded her of Trask. She gets him to strike his cigarette lighter, sending him back into the trance in which he can deny Angelique/ Cassandra nothing.
Well-meaning governess Vicki has made her way to Stokes’ apartment. It was Vicki who took Dark Shadows back in time to the 1790s, when she came unstuck in time during a séance in #365. It seemed at the beginning of the costume drama segment that Vicki would regain the position she held in the first months of the show as our point of view character, that she would again provide the emotional anchor of the show in her scenes as governess alone with the young children of the house, and that she would drive the action as she had to think on her feet and come up with plausible lies to secure a place in an unfamiliar century. As it happened, she did none of those things. She was shut out of all the main action, was never seen giving a lesson to either of her charges, and when she was on camera spent her time telling everyone she met that they were played by an actor who had another part in the first 73 weeks of the show. Long before Vicki came back to the 1960s in #461, the character had become all but insupportable.
The action now revolves around recovering vampire Barnabas Collins, and Barnabas steadfastly refuses to include Vicki in his life. Faced with that blank wall, Vicki has spent some time hanging around with a man named Peter whose only story point is that he wants to be called Jeff. This does not make for much drama. Vicki learned a great deal in the 1790s, and recognized Angelique/ Cassandra as soon as she showed up in 1968. But she can’t fight her by herself, and so she has responded to Barnabas’ aloofness by trying to forget what she knows.
Stokes has called Vicki to his apartment to enlist her help against Angelique/ Cassandra. Longtime viewers will remember that Vicki led the fight against Dark Shadows’ first supernatural menace, undead blonde witch Laura Murdoch Collins, and that for support in that battle she was the one who recruited the services of the show’s first sage, parapsychologist Peter Guthrie. This much diminished Vicki is now subordinated to the sage. He calls her in, he commands her to tell her story, he tells her that her story is true, and he requires her services. He shows her a silhouette of Trask and insists she overcome her reluctance to look at it. When a knock comes at the door, he even sends her out the back way and tells her that his next visitor must not know of her connection with him, as if he were dismissing a prostitute.
Stokes tells Vicki he can’t afford to be seen with her.
Oddest of all, Stokes already seems to know everything Vicki does before they talk. In #507, he laid out a theory that would be plausible to someone who knew exactly what Vicki knows about the strange goings-on, but not to anyone who knows one thing more or less than she does. Yet today we see that he is talking with Vicki about them for the first time. It is unclear what he could learn from her, or what contribution she could make to his efforts.
The visitor from whom Stokes wants to hide Vicki is Tony, giving his name as “Arthur Hailey,” perhaps in honor of the novelist whose Airport was topping the bestseller lists when the episode was made. Stokes is quite relaxed around Tony, offering him first brandy and then cheese. Tony accepts both. He exclaims “I like cheese!” in an awkward voice that makes it clear we are listening, not to Jerry Lacy’s acting, but to Tony’s. While Stokes is out of the room fetching the cheese, Tony sprinkles a powder Angelique/ Cassandra gave him into Stokes’ glass. Tony looks away from the table before they take their drinks. When they do, it is Tony who chokes and collapses, not Stokes.
This is the second time we’ve seen that staple of farce, “The Old Switcheroo.” In #402, Barnabas tried to poison Angelique, and had to think fast when she passed her glass to his mother. That use of the trope confirmed that, while Barnabas is undeniably a villain, he is a comic villain who endears himself to us as we watch him scramble through one failed scheme after another, while Angelique is a menace to be taken seriously. Now, Angelique has settled in for the long term, and the show will quickly run out of characters if she maintains the kill rate she had in the eighteenth century. They have to dial her threat level down considerably. One way of doing that is to give her a henchman who is, most of the time, unaware of her power over him, and who is consistently luckless when she activates him; another is for her to use comically unreliable means to pursue her evil ends. She does not yet cut the Wile E. Coyote-esque figure that Barnabas does, but neither is she in imminent danger of vaporizing the whole story and leaving ABC with thirty minutes of dead air on weekday afternoons.
This was the first episode directed by John Weaver. Except for one week in March 1968 when executive producer Dan Curtis took the helm, directing duties for the first 497 episodes of Dark Shadows alternated between Lela Swift and John Sedwick. Now Sedwick is about to leave the show. Associate director Jack Sullivan stepped up to direct #504 and will direct dozens more; Weaver, an associate director on some early episode, will only be credited as director four times before leaving in July. Several more directors will have similarly brief stints as fill-ins before Henry Kaplan joins the show as Swift’s alternate in December.
In #473, we saw that wicked witch Angelique had traveled from the eighteenth century to the year 1968 to reimpose the vampire curse she had once placed on old world gentleman Barnabas Collins. In a single day, Angelique met Barnabas’ distant cousin Roger, bewitched him, and married him. This secured her a home in the great house on the estate of Collinwood. Barnabas lives in the Old House on the same estate. Calling herself Cassandra and wearing a black wig, she pretends not to understand why Barnabas doesn’t like her.
In #477, Angelique appeared to Barnabas in a dream and told him and the audience how she would go about turning him back into a vampire. Her approach would essentially be a distributed malware attack on the wetware inside the heads of the people of Collinsport. One person after another would have the same basic nightmare. Each nightmare would begin with a visit from a person who had not yet had it, and after the dreamer awoke they would feel an uncontrollable compulsion to describe the dream to that person. Once they had done so, that person would have the nightmare, and the cycle would repeat. When the dream got back to Barnabas, he would become a vampire again.
Yesterday, heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard had the dream. Carolyn met with occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes and mad scientist Julia Hoffman at the Old House. Stokes managed to insert himself into Carolyn’s dream as the person to whom she must tell it. Today, Stokes has the dream. He sets out to function as an antivirus program. He has learned what the dreamer usually does, and consciously makes himself defy all those rules. His hack-back works sufficiently to force Angelique/ Cassandra to appear in the dream herself and get into an argument with him.
Angelique/ Cassandra addresses Stokes by the name of his eighteenth century ancestor Ben, an indentured servant whom she ensorcelled and used for her own nefarious purposes. She refuses to believe that Stokes is not Ben, and does not react strongly when he tells her that he knows her name is Angelique. When he later addresses her as Cassandra Collins, she is horrified and vanishes. It’s a staple of stories about magic that the act of calling adversaries by their true names can defeat them; Mrs Acilius brought up the story of Rumpelstiltskin. That the name “Angelique” has no effect while “Cassandra” drives her away suggests that she was using a pseudonym when we first knew her, and she really is Cassandra.
The power of naming also explains what Barnabas may have been thinking when he kept confronting Angelique/ Cassandra and telling her exactly what he did and did not know about her. Perhaps he hoped that simply by addressing her as “Angelique” he would make her vanish.
When Stokes awakens, he tells Julia he is confident that he has stopped the curse. That confidence is put to the test immediately when a knock comes at the door. Stokes opens it, and sees the man from his dream. He does not know the man, but we do. He is Sam Evans, an artist recently blinded by one of Angelique/ Cassandra’s spells. He is accompanied by Joe Haskell, fiancé to Sam’s daughter Maggie. They mention that Maggie is spending the evening in the nearby city of Bangor, Maine. Sam says that he heard the name “Stokes” in his head earlier in the evening, and that he also felt an urge to come to the Old House. He has a strong feeling that Stokes has something to tell him, and insists that he do so.
Stokes is disquieted to see Sam, but feels no compulsion to tell the dream. Sam is furiously dissatisfied. It is unclear whether his frustration at not hearing the dream will be as intense or as persistent as is the upset previous dreamers felt when they resisted telling it.
Sam and Joe leave. In front of Sam’s house, Joe reaches to open the front door. Sam is irritated with him. He not only insists on opening the door himself, but won’t do so until Joe leaves. Joe explains that Maggie made him promise to keep an eye on him, to which Sam replies with a threat to forbid their marriage unless he backs off. Joe mentions that a strange, very tall man who recently abducted Carolyn might still be at large; Sam replies that the man jumped off Widows’ Hill, which means certain death to “anything human.”
Inside the house, Sam finds that a window Joe had closed before they left is open. He hears someone in Maggie’s room. It turns out to be the strange, very tall man, badly cut from his recent fall and wielding a kitchen knife.
They don’t explain what Maggie is doing in Bangor. From episode #1 until she was attacked by Barnabas in #227, Maggie was the principal waitress at the restaurant in the Collinsport Inn. After some time as Barnabas’ prisoner and a longer period as a patient in Julia’s hospital, she returned to town in #295. For all they’ve told us since then, Maggie may have got her job back or taken another one. But if she had, they would have told us today that she was working the night shift, not that she was on some unexplained trip out of town. So now we know that nobody in the Evans house is gainfully employed.
Well-meaning governess Vicki was the main character of Dark Shadows for its first year, but has been receding further and further to the margins since. Today she returns after a 14 day absence, the first time she has been off screen so long.
Vicki is in the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood with her employer, matriarch Liz. Liz is distraught because her daughter Carolyn has been abducted by a strange man. Liz fears that Carolyn is dead or dying; Vicki urges her to set those fears aside. The police telephone; they have captured the man, but Carolyn was not with him, and he has not answered any of their questions. Liz and Vicki set out for the gaol to see him.
They are accompanied by a sheriff’s deputy. The Collinsport police are exceptionally useless, but even by their standards this deputy is a low performer. Though the man is so strong that it took twenty men to subdue him and bring him in, the deputy enjoys taunting him. He sticks his service revolver in the cell; the man is shackled to the wall, but he is so tall he sweeps his hand into contact with the gun. If the script didn’t say otherwise, he could easily take it from the deputy. Liz orders the deputy to stand back out of the man’s line of sight. Since she owns most of the town, he grudgingly obeys.
The deputy puts his weapon within Adam’s reach.
Yesterday, Liz went looking for Carolyn at the Old House on the estate, home to her distant cousin Barnabas. She found Barnabas’ servant Willie on the ground, suffering from a fresh head wound. Willie told her that the man had been by a few minutes before, and that he had been carrying the unconscious Carolyn. He also referred to the man as “Adam.” When Liz asked him why he used that name, he denied that he did and began jabbering about some bad dream that had frightened him. Today, Liz addresses the man as Adam, and he responds, proving that Willie does in fact know more about him that he will admit.
Liz and Vicki tell Adam that they will treat him as a friend if he tells them where Carolyn is. Adam knows the word “friend.” He repeats it, and adds “food!” Again he says “Friend, food!” The women do not know what he is driving at. They give up and go home.
Returning viewers know that Adam has stashed Carolyn in an abandoned structure that looks exactly like Fred and Wilma Flintstone’s house, that he calls Carolyn “Friend,” and that he had gone out to look for food for her when he was captured. He is dejected when he cannot make it clear that she is hungry.
Liz and Vicki return to Collinwood. They spend several seconds taking off their coats in unison. In the early days of the show, there were a number of scenes designed to emphasize Liz and Vicki’s resemblance and to present each as the other’s reflection in support of a storyline that led us to believe that Vicki was Liz’ unacknowledged daughter. That storyline was forgotten long ago, and it isn’t entirely clear what director Jack Sullivan is getting at here.
Back in the drawing room, Liz tells Vicki her reasons for believing that Barnabas knows a great deal about Adam. Apparently the doors separating the drawing room from the foyer amplify sound, because as the camera takes us from the drawing room to the foyer Liz and Vicki’s conversation only becomes more audible. Liz’ new sister-in-law is in the foyer. This woman calls herself Cassandra, but regular viewers know that she is in fact wicked witch Angelique. Vicki knows that perfectly well. Vicki traveled back in time in #365 and spent nineteen weeks living under the same roof as Angelique while Angelique wrought havoc on the Collins family of the 1790s and framed Vicki for her crimes. Angelique’s only disguise as Cassandra is a black wig- otherwise, she looks, sounds, and moves exactly as she had when Vicki knew her in the eighteenth century. As a result, Vicki is very much on her guard around her.
Angelique/ Cassandra enters the drawing room. Liz excuses herself, and Angelique/ Cassandra demands to know why Vicki doesn’t like her. When Vicki says that she resembles someone she didn’t get along with, Angelique/ Cassandra proclaims that she isn’t that person, bursts into tears, and runs out. Vicki stays in the drawing room, but the camera follows Angelique/ Cassandra to the staircase, where we see her smile gleefully.
Liz returns, and Vicki tells her she may have misjudged Cassandra. It doesn’t speak well of Vicki’s brainpower that a single display of crocodile tears would override the memory of their long and painful acquaintance, but since Barnabas and the others who are doing battle with Angelique/ Cassandra refuse to accept Vicki’s help, she may as well forget everything she knows. Liz tells her that she doesn’t think she misjudged Cassandra, and says she doesn’t trust her either.
Back in the gaol, the idiotic deputy goes back to Adam’s cell to taunt him some more. When Adam protests, the deputy opens the door and waves his baton at him. He places himself within easy reach of Adam, who grabs him and knocks him unconscious.
Yesterday, the high sheriff said “I’m not a stupid man.” He may not have been as stupid as is this grinning imbecile, but it is on his responsibility that he has a badge and a gun.
Another deputy enters. He sees his moronic colleague on the floor, the bars twisted in the window, and no sign of Adam.
Window.
Adam is 6’6″, so it’s difficult to see how he could fit through this opening. Perhaps he is not only tremendously strong, but is also a contortionist.
From #133, artist Sam Evans was compelled to paint a series of pictures that explained the evil intentions of undead blonde witch Laura Murdoch Collins, estranged wife of sarcastic dandy Roger Collins. In #146, Laura put a stop to Sam’s work by starting a fire that burned his hands so badly it seemed for a time he might never be able to paint again.
Sam shares his home, the “Evans cottage,” with his daughter Maggie, who is The Nicest Girl in Town and a waitress at the diner in the Collinsport Inn. Between her earnings there and the paintings Sam sells, the Evanses make a living, but it isn’t such a grand living that he can turn down any commissions, even very eccentric ones. Moreover, his work space entirely dominates the interior of the cottage. In the early days of the show, Sam’s old friend Burke Devlin often stopped by, and the conversation always turned to reminiscences of Burke’s youthful days of honest poverty. Nowadays the most frequent visitor is Maggie’s fiancé, hardworking fisherman Joe Haskell. Sam is delighted with the prospect of this upwardly mobile laborer as a son-in-law. When a representative of the moneyed world visits Sam or Maggie at home, as New York art dealer Portia Fitzsimmons did in #193 and old world gentleman Barnabas Collins did in #222, the contrast between their manner and the humble surroundings is meant to jolt us. The Evans cottage is therefore our window on the working class of Collinsport. When the troubles of the ancient and esteemed Collins family have an effect there, Dark Shadows is telling us that the whole town is dependent on the businesses they own and suffers as a result of their problems.
Yesterday, Barnabas came back to the cottage and brought Sam a very odd commission indeed. He presented a painting of a lovely young woman in eighteenth century garb and offered Sam $500* to paint over the image so that before morning the woman would look to be “about 200 years old.” Sam wasn’t in a position to refuse that much money, even though Barnabas wouldn’t explain why he wanted him to do such a thing.
If Sam knew what the audience knows, he would likely have turned the job down even if Barnabas had offered $500,000,000. The woman in the portrait is Angelique, and like Laura she is an undead blonde witch. In the 1790s, Angelique cursed Barnabas and made him a vampire. In #466, Barnabas’ vampirism went into remission. Shortly thereafter, the portrait made its way to the great house of Collinwood, where Roger became obsessed with it. In #473, Roger returned from an unexplained absence with a new wife. She is Angelique, wearing a black wig and calling herself Cassandra. From #366-#461, Dark Shadows had been a costume drama set in the 1790s; during this segment, we saw that Angelique was a far more dynamic and brutal menace than Laura ever was. Sam would hardly want to involve himself in a battle with this wiggéd witch.
For his part, Barnabas first appeared on camera in #210 and #211. But his portrait was first seen hanging in the foyer at Collinwood in #205, having been prefigured in #195. Dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis became obsessed with the portrait of Barnabas. Willie could hear a heartbeat pounding from the portrait in #208 and #209, and followed its sound to the crypt where Barnabas was trapped in his coffin. As Roger’s obsession with Angelique’s portrait would bring her back to the world of the living, so Willie’s obsession with Barnabas’ portrait led to his return.
In the opening teaser, we see Sam working on the painting. He tells it that he can’t understand why Barnabas would want to disfigure such a pretty face, then resumes his task. The camera zooms in on the painting, as it had zoomed in on Barnabas’ portrait in #208 and #209, and the soundtrack plays the same heartbeat. Sam doesn’t react- he can’t hear it. It is addressed to the audience, especially to those members of the audience who remember the show as it was 13 months ago.
Angelique/ Cassandra is in the gazebo on the grounds of Collinwood. She is wearing a hooded cloak to conceal the aging she has already experienced as a result of Sam’s work. Her cat’s paw Tony Peterson, a local attorney, shows up, responding to her psychic summons. She entrances him with a flame and he tells her that the artist who has been in touch with the Collinses most frequently of late is Sam Evans. From this she concludes that Sam is aging her portrait at Barnabas’ bidding. Before Angelique/ Cassandra and Tony can go their separate ways, heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard comes upon them.
Tony and Carolyn met in #357. In that episode, he was an instance of Jerry Lacy’s Humphrey Bogart imitation. A hard-boiled materialist, Tony had grown up in Collinsport as a working-class boy. He resented the Collinses and attributed all of their unusual characteristics to their wealth and social prominence. At that time, Barnabas was still a vampire and Carolyn was under his power. As a blood thrall, she knew that there was more to life than could be explained by Tony’s reductive logic, but she wasn’t free to offer any explanations. When Tony saw Barnabas biting Carolyn in #463, he interpreted their embrace as a sign of a sexual relationship.
Now their roles are reversed. It is unclear what Carolyn remembers from her time under Barnabas’ control; Nancy Barrett often plays the character as if she remembers everything, but the dialogue doesn’t give her much support for that, and in this scene she is as this-worldly as Tony was in the Autumn of 1967. She interprets Tony and Angelique/ Cassandra’s meeting at the gazebo as proof positive of an adulterous liaison, and declares she will report it to Roger. When Tony tells her that Angelique/ Cassandra has some mysterious power, Carolyn is dismissive, declaring that the Collinses are the ones who have all the power in this town. Tony tries to explain that the power Angelique/ Cassandra has is of an entirely different order from the power their ownership of capital gives the Collinses, and Carolyn responds with unconcealed contempt.
Angelique/ Cassandra knocks on the door of the Evans cottage. Sam opens the door. She ignores his objections and enters. While he keeps ordering her to get out of his house, she stands next to the portrait as he has aged it and points out her resemblance to it. He is astounded, but keeps telling her to leave. She says that she has no grievance against him and that no harm will come to him if he hands the painting over to her. He refuses. She heads out.
Angelique/ Cassandra has barely closed the door behind her when Sam has trouble seeing. After a moment, he realizes he has been struck blind. She comes back in, takes the painting, tells him she warned him, and leaves.
Over the years, several members of the cast said on the record that Sam’s blindness was actor David Ford’s idea. He thought that if he could wear dark glasses it wouldn’t bother the audience that he read all his lines off the teleprompter.
In 2022, a commenter on Danny Horn’s post about this episode on his blog Dark Shadows Every Day identified the portraits of Angelique as the work of ABC Art Department specialist Joseph Guilfoyle:
You asked if anyone knew who painted these portraits. I can verify that the portraits of Angelique were painted by Joseph Guilfoyle. He was an artist in the Art Department at ABC. He was my Godfather and his daughter remembers this very well as it made her a bit of a celebrity at the time. Portraits were not commissioned out but instead were created in the Art Department as it was filled with many talented artists.
Also worthy of note are the two facial makeups representing Angelique’s aging. It’s no wonder they didn’t have the personnel to make David Ford’s fake mustache look convincing when they were lavishing all the work on turning Lara Parker into two quite distinct old crones.
The costumers were involved in a famous production error in the final scene. Angelique/ Cassandra’s hooded cloak cuts off above her knees. There is no old age makeup on her legs, which are featured from every angle, making a ludicrous contrast with her face and wig.
Sarcastic dandy Roger Collins has remarried. His previous wife, undead blonde witch Laura Murdoch Collins, was Dark Shadows’ first supernatural menace, posing a threat to the life of their son David from #123 until she vanished amid a cloud of smoke in #191. The ghost of gracious lady Josette joined in the battle against Laura. Among other things, Josette compelled artist Sam Evans to paint a series of pictures warning of Laura’s evil plans. Laura responded to those paintings in #145 and #146 by causing a fire that burned Sam’s hands so badly it seemed he might never again be able to paint.
Roger’s new wife is also an undead blonde witch, though she wears a black wig all the time. This wiggéd witch calls herself Cassandra, but is actually Angelique, who in the 1790s killed many of Roger’s ancestors and turned his distant cousin Barnabas into a vampire. Angelique/ Cassandra has returned to the world of the living because Barnabas’ vampirism is now in remission, and she is determined to restore it.
Before he met Angelique/ Cassandra, Roger became obsessed with a portrait of her. Barnabas concludes that this portrait is essential to her power. He orders his servant Willie to steal it from the great house of Collinwood. Barnabas takes the portrait to Sam and commissions him to paint over it so that Angelique will look tremendously old. He doesn’t offer Sam any explanations, but we heard him tell Willie his theory that what happens to the painting will also happen to Angelique. If her likeness is aged to reflect her actual years, then she will vanish from 1968 and be confined to the past. At the end of the episode, Angelique’s hands have aged dramatically, suggesting that Barnabas is correct.
This is David Ford’s first appearance on the show since December, and he had shaved his mustache in the interim. The fake is not up to the makeup department’s usual standards. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Portraits have been a very prominent part of the visual composition of Dark Shadows from the beginning, and a battlefield on which supernatural combat could be joined for almost as long. So it is hardly surprising that the show would eventually get around to doing a story based on Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.
It would seem Barnabas has little time to lose. Angelique/ Cassandra has distributed some malware to the minds of the people around Barnabas by means of a dream that one person after another will have. The first dreamer is beckoned into a Haunted House attraction by someone, opens some doors behind which there are scary images, is terrified, and cannot find relief until telling its details to the beckoner. That person then has the dream, changed in only two particulars, the identity of the beckoner and the image behind the final door. When everyone’s brain has been hacked, this worm is supposed to reset Barnabas as a vampire.
Yesterday, David had the dream, and Willie was his beckoner. Today, we open in Barnabas’ house, where Willie is paralyzed with fear. David has already told him the dream, and Willie knows he will have it. With all the previous instances of the dream, the audience had to sit through a highly repetitious dream sequence, then a scene in which the character agonizes about whether to tell the dream to the next person, and finally a speech repeating all the details of the dream. At least this time we skip the second and third of those rehashings.
Since Willie is so close to Barnabas, it seems likely that he will be the last to have the dream before it gets back to Barnabas and makes him a vampire again. So it’s no wonder that Barnabas decides it’s time for the high-stakes gamble of a burglary at Collinwood.
There’s also a scene in Barnabas’ basement. Barnabas’ vampirism is in remission because some mad scientists created a Frankenstein’s monster, whom Barnabas named Adam. They connected Barnabas to Adam in a way that drains the symptoms of the curse from Barnabas without manifesting them in Adam. Barnabas has no idea how to raise any child, let alone a 6’6″ newborn with the strength of several grown men, and so locks him up in the prison cell where he used to keep Sam’s daughter Maggie.
The imprisonment of Maggie was a dreary, unpleasant story, but Adam’s time in the cell is even harder to take. Maggie was established as a strong, intelligent person who knew her way around, she could speak, and she had many friends who cared about her. So we never quite gave up hope that she would get away and be all right in the end. But Adam has none of that. As a result, his scenes in the basement are a tale of extreme child abuse, made all the harder to watch by Robert Rodan’s affecting portrayal of the big guy’s misery.
Moreover, Maggie was a major character, introduced in the first episode and connected to everyone else. It’s unlikely they would kill her off unless the show had been canceled and they were going out with a bang. But only the people holding Adam prisoner know who he is, and Frankenstein’s monsters meet their deaths practically every time they feature in a story.
Worst of all, the show is basically very silly right now. A story about a child locked in a cell from birth can be made bearable only by joining it to some kind of deep insight into the human condition, and there is little prospect that anything like that will crop up among all the witches and vampires and other Halloween paraphernalia. My wife, Mrs Acilius, watched the whole series with me in 2020-2021. She was avidly rewatching it with me this time. But when they took Adam to the cell, she suggested I start watching it on days when I get home from work before she does. I’m sure she isn’t the only Dark Shadows fan who takes a pass on the Adam story.
This is the first episode credited to director Jack Sullivan. Lela Swift and John Sedwick took turns at the helm until #450, when executive producer Dan Curtis tried his hand at directing a week of episodes. Swift and Sedwick then returned to their usual pattern. Sedwick will be leaving in a few weeks; Sullivan, who has been with the show as an associate director since the third week, will be Swift’s alternate until November, and from #553 on will be credited as Sean Dhu Sullivan.
In the 1790s, wicked witch Angelique turned scion Barnabas Collins into a vampire. When Barnabas realized what she had done to him, he killed Angelique.
In 1967, Barnabas was freed from a long captivity once more to prey upon the living. In 1968, Angelique also returned. Wearing a black wig and calling herself Cassandra, Angelique met sarcastic dandy Roger, ensorcelled him into marrying her, and thereby established herself as a resident of the great house of Collinwood. Wiggéd witch Angelique/ Cassandra found that Barnabas’ vampirism had gone into remission as a result of treatments he had received from mad scientist Eric Lang. She killed Lang before he could complete the process meant to make the cure permanent, but the senior mad scientist in the area, Barnabas’ friend Julia Hoffman, finished his work.
Angelique/ Cassandra and Julia know these facts about each other, but it is unclear how much Angelique/ Cassandra knows about Lang’s process. In particular, when today’s episode begins we do not know whether she has figured out that the main part of it was building a Frankenstein’s monster named Adam and trying to transfer Barnabas’ “life force” into him. Still less do we know whether Angelique/ Cassandra is aware that when Julia took over the experiment she brought Adam to life without killing Barnabas, and that as long as Adam is alive Barnabas will be free of the effects of the vampire curse.
Julia lives at Collinwood as a permanent guest. Today’s episode opens with her and Angelique/ Cassandra coming home, both smiling and chirpy, talking about an exciting conversation they had while they were out together. They had visited Angelique/ Cassandra’s former professor, Timothy Eliot Stokes. Stokes is an expert on paranormal phenomena. In #488 Barnabas told Stokes that Angelique/ Cassandra was a witch and he resolved to join Julia and Barnabas in the battle against her. Julia tells Roger that the exciting conversation she and Angelique/ Cassandra had at Stokes’ home was about the occult.
Considering what these three people know about each other, this conversation would have been fascinating to watch. Julia and Stokes want to probe for Angelique/ Cassandra’s weaknesses; she wants to make sure neither of them has any powers she doesn’t know about, to find out their plans, and if possible to bring them under her influence. Properly written and played by actors as accomplished as Grayson Hall, Lara Parker, and Thayer David, that scene might have been one of the highlights of the whole series. But it doesn’t happen. They just tell us about it in the first 30 seconds of the episode, then move on. It’s one of the major what-ifs of Dark Shadows.
Yesterday Adam escaped from the cell in the basement of Barnabas’ house where he has been confined and met several members of the family who live in the great house. They spend the day recapping that incident. Roger tells Cassandra that Adam seemed to know Barnabas, and she is all ears. It quickly becomes clear that Adam’s existence is news to her, that she is putting everything together, and that Adam is now in grave danger from her.
Angelique/ Cassandra takes in the news Roger has brought her. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Dark Shadows Commentary 