Mad scientist Cyrus Longworth has developed a potion that changes his appearance so drastically that even those closest to him cannot recognize him when he is under its influence. In this disguise, he calls himself “John Yaeger” and indulges his sadistic impulses. He has just committed his first murder, killing a man who had learned his secret. The potion he needs to restore his usual looks is in his lab, but he can’t get there without passing the police. So he has ordered Buffie Harrington, a young woman he has been terrorizing, to fetch it for him. He was waiting for Buffie in a cave on the beach near the estate of Collinwood when he saw the signs of a secret passage, and decided to see where it would lead him.
It has led him to the basement of the Old House on the estate, home of writer Will Loomis and his wife, the former Carolyn Collins Stoddard. We have known that this passage was here since #1003, when strange and troubled teen Daniel Collins suggested that his young cousin, Amy Collins, join him in opening it and exploring the basement. Amy refused to go there at night, prompting Daniel to taunt her as a scared-y-cat. We also know, if only because the opening voiceover has been telling us every day for the last five and a half weeks, that vampire Barnabas Collins is chained in a coffin in the basement. Will is holding him captive and forcing him to dictate his autobiography to him.
Barnabas is a visitor from a parallel universe. Longtime viewers are familiar with that universe; Dark Shadows was set there for its first 196 weeks. There is a tunnel between the beach and the basement there as well, and each time it has figured there has been a major development in the story. So when Cyrus, disguised as Yaeger, follows the tunnel and discovers Barnabas’ coffin, we can believe something big is about to happen. He starts to unchain the coffin; if he frees the vampire, that would certainly qualify.
Will and Carolyn are upstairs. She hears the sounds Cyrus is making in the basement and tells Will to go down and check. He takes this as an invitation to another of their drunken quarrels, in which he taunts her for being Barnabas’ victim. Eventually he does go downstairs, where he pistol-whips Cyrus into unconsciousness. He and Carolyn rather improbably manage to carry Cyrus up to the parlor.
When Cyrus comes to, he finds Carolyn aiming the pistol at him. He calls her by name. She does not recognize him, and asks how he knows her. He tells her that he makes it his business to know who all the attractive women are. He asks why Will isn’t there. She doesn’t answer the question. He sees that she is trembling so violently that she can barely keep hold of the pistol; he knocks it out of her hands and runs away. Later, he will meet Buffie in the cave, get the potion from her, and shed his disguise in time to get away with his crimes.
Will rejoins Carolyn in the parlor. He scolds her for letting the intruder escape; she says he was wrong to leave her alone with him. He says he was busy sealing up the panel so that no one else could come into the basement through the tunnel. He says that Barnabas’ coffin must be moved. His idea is to carry it up the stairs and hide it in a secret chamber behind the bookcase in the parlor.
This chamber, too, has its counterpart in the original continuity. We first saw it in December 1966, when crazed handyman Matthew Morgan abducted well-meaning governess Victoria Winters and planned to kill her there. After Barnabas joined the cast of characters in April 1967 and became the master of the Old House, he several times used the chamber as a hiding place. Matthew’s plans for Vicki backfired on him when the ghosts of Collinwood and scared him to death before he could carry out his fell design. None of the occasions when Barnabas used the chamber worked out very well for him. So longtime viewers may suspect that, even if Will and Carolyn can somehow transport Barnabas and his coffin up the stairs and into the hidden chamber, things will not go as they project.
Will and Carolyn let Barnabas out of his coffin. They wear large crosses around their necks, and hold them towards him when he looks at them. They get him up the stairs and into the secret chamber this way.
Once there, Will resumes interrogating Barnabas. Barnabas protests that Will has “enough story” and ought to set him free; Will disagrees. One wonders if Barnabas’ line represents Sam Hall’s feelings as one half of the two-man staff currently charged with writing five scripts a week for Dark Shadows.
Will’s counterpart in the original continuity is Willie Loomis, who was Barnabas’ sorely bedraggled blood thrall. In #326, Barnabas had framed Willie for some of his own crimes, and the police had obligingly shot him several times. Barnabas was worried that Willie was not dying quickly enough. He railed to his associate, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, that Willie continued to “cling to life with leech-like persistence!” When Julia assured him that Willie would probably die without regaining consciousness, Barnabas said that he might just as easily make a full recovery and set about “writing his memoirs!”
The show picked up on that line after it went back in time to the 1790s. We learned in #510 that Ben Stokes, the much-put-upon indentured servant who was Barnabas’ friend before and after he first became a vampire, did indeed write a memoir, and in #756 we learned that Ben’s memoir included the story of Barnabas’ curse. I wonder if Barnabas’ line to Julia about Willie writing his memoirs was the seed, not only of Ben’s memoirs, but of the whole story of Will Loomis.
Barnabas’ cartoonish villainy in #326 was hilarious, but his objections to Will’s behavior today are quite reasonable. Will would have been doing his civic duty had he staked Barnabas, and indeed Barnabas asked Will to let him die when he first found him in his coffin. Keeping him trapped in the coffin endangers the community irresponsibly, and when Will opens it night after night with Barnabas immobilized by the cross and forces him to produce an oral history he can use use as a source of material he is choosing to be as much of a parasite on Barnabas as Barnabas’ curse has forced him to be on his victims.
Moreover, when Will tells Carolyn today that the book he extracts from Barnabas will be “all true” and that “every critic” will hail it as “a classic,” he seems to be delusional. If it is “all true,” the book will be a novelization of the last 160 weeks of Dark Shadows. The show is fun to watch, but that’s largely because the writers know what kind of material the actors and directors can use to create exciting moments. I can’t imagine anyone looking at it as so much text sitting on the page and calling it “a classic.”
Will turns his back on Barnabas and takes a note. Seeing an opportunity, Barnabas grabs the cord by which the cross hangs from Will’s neck, choking him. Will falls to the floor, and Barnabas bares his fangs.
I haven’t read Anne Rice’s 1976 novel Interview with the Vampire. Ms Rice says she wrote a short story about a reporter taking an oral history from a vampire no later than 1969, the year before this storyline premiered. That story has never been published, but biographers of hers report having seen it and they accept the dating. She also says that she decided to turn it into a novel in 1973, not because she had seen Dark Shadows, but because her daughter had died and she thought it would be a way of exploring her grief. So, any similarities are mere coincidence. I bring it up here, because it represents the definitive refutation of Will’s expectation that “every critic” would hail his retelling of Dark Shadows from the time Barnabas debuted as “a classic.” Ms Rice was free to craft a story that would be right for a novel, unconstrained to copy material produced to keep a soap opera spinning, and most of the reviews she received were quite hostile.
Dark Shadows Commentary 