art wallace – Acilius on Dark Shadows

Episode 330: bat by Bil Baird

Dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis spent a week staring at the eighteenth century portrait of Barnabas Collins in the foyer of the great house of Collinwood back in April, then tried to rob Barnabas’ grave. That turned out to be an awkward situation when Willie found that Barnabas wasn’t entirely dead. Barnabas was a vampire who bit Willie, turned him into his sorely bedraggled blood thrall, and had lots of conversations with him. Yesterday, Willie was written out of the show.

Today we open with strange and troubled boy David Collins staring at the same portrait. As Willie was obsessed with the idea that there were jewels hidden in the Collins mausoleum in the old cemetery north of town, where in fact Barnabas’ coffin was hidden, so David is preoccupied with the idea that Barnabas has something terrible stashed in the basement of the Old House on the estate, where in fact his new coffin is hidden. As Willie sneaked off to the cemetery on his ill-starred expedition, David will sneak off to the Old House today and try to search Barnabas’ basement.

Unlike Willie, David is not driven by greed. He is afraid of Barnabas, and his friend, the ten year old ghost of Barnabas’ sister Sarah, has told him that he must not go to the Old House. But his aunt Liz and his father Roger dismiss his attempts to warn them about Barnabas, and he thinks it is his duty to provide them with evidence. So he screws up his courage and makes his way across the property.

David lets himself into the Old House by opening the parlor window. Not only have we seen David do this before, but Willie’s sometime friend, seagoing con man Jason McGuire, got into the house the same way in #274. Barnabas would kill Jason when he reached the basement in #275, so you might think he’d have put a lock on that window by now.

Jason’s fate is certainly on the minds of returning viewers when David tries to open the basement door. It comes as a relief when he finds the door locked. Barnabas’ co-conspirator, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, catches him there.

Julia demands to know what David is doing in the house, and he tries to brazen it out. He claims that he has a right to be there, since it belongs to his Aunt Liz. This is a bit of a murky point- we never see Liz transfer title to Barnabas, but she and others act as if he owns the place and its contents. Julia doesn’t clarify it when she responds that Liz gave the house to Barnabas- she doesn’t deny that it still belongs to Liz, only says that it also belongs to Barnabas.

Back in the great house, Roger is banging away at the piano. We saw Liz play the piano in #47 and #91, a reference to the conception of her character writer Art Wallace developed in his original story bible, titled Shadows on the Wall, in which she, like similar characters in a couple of TV plays he wrote in the 1950s under the title “The House,” gave piano lessons. Since then, Liz’ daughter Carolyn tried her hand at “Chopsticks” in #119 and used the piano as a prop in a teen rebel scene in #258, and Jason poked at a few keys in #198. Roger isn’t exactly Vladimir Horowitz, but he’s the first one we’ve seen who actually achieves a melody.

Liz comes in and tells Roger that David isn’t in his room. They fret over David’s attitude towards Barnabas. Julia brings David home and tells Liz and Roger where she found him. After an angry scene between father and son, David goes upstairs, and Liz scolds Roger for his inept parenting. In these as in all of Liz and Roger’s scenes together, we see a bossy big sister who tries to govern her bratty little brother, but who ultimately abets all of his worst behavior.

In the Old House, Barnabas notices that Julia is troubled. He keeps asking what’s on her mind, and she has difficulty deflecting his questions. This is odd- Julia has been established as a master of deception, and Barnabas is the most selfish creature in the universe. All she has to do is start talking about something that does not affect him directly, and he will lose interest at once. Rather than talk about her personal finances, or the job from which she is apparently on an indefinite leave of absence, or some ache or pain she might have, or how sad she is to miss her Aunt Zelda’s birthday, she brings up Willie. That does get Barnabas’ mind off her tension, but it also reminds him of David. He thinks David knows too much about him, and is thinking of murdering him. Julia assures him that the boy doesn’t know so very much, that whatever he does know he hasn’t told anyone, and that if he does say something his reputation as an overly imaginative child will lead the adults to ignore him.

From the beginning of the series, we’ve heard people say that David is “imaginative.” The audience finds an irony in this, since we have never seen David show any imagination whatsoever. All his stories of ghosts are strictly literal accounts of apparitions he has seen. We’ve seen some drawings he has done and heard quotes from some essays he has written. Some of these are technically accomplished for a person his age, but they are just as literal as his ghost stories. And when he tells lies to cover his various misdeeds, he tells simple little tales that fall apart at once.

In #327, well-meaning governess Vicki became the first character to dissent from the “David is a highly imaginative child” orthodoxy. Liz and local man Burke Devlin were dismissing David’s laboriously accurate account of his latest encounter with Sarah as a sign of his “imagination,” and Vicki interrupted with “I don’t think it has anything to do with his imagination.” Now, Barnabas goes a step further. After pronouncing the word “imaginative” in a truly marvelous way that makes it sound like something I’ve never heard before, he tells Julia that she has given him an idea. Frightened, she asks what he means. All he will say is “You’ll see.”

Roger goes to David’s room and has a friendly talk with his son. Throughout the conversation and afterward, David is thinking intensely, trying hard to figure out what his next step should be.

Once he is alone in the room, the window blows open and a bat enters. More precisely, a bat-shaped marionette is brought in on clearly visible strings by a pole that casts a shadow we can see the entire time, but no one who has been watching the show up to this point will doubt for a second that David’s fear, as depicted by David Henesy, is fully justified. David tries to flee from the bat, but he cannot open the door to escape from his room. His back against the door, David slides onto the floor and screams as the bat comes near him.

David finds that he cannot escape. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

David helpless before the bat. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

When Barnabas is about to attack someone, dogs start howling. Sometimes this works to his advantage, but it so often puts his intended victims on their guard that it doesn’t really seem to be something he is doing on purpose. So this bat represents something new. Perhaps Barnabas is using magic to control a bat- if so, it marks the first time we have seen Barnabas use magic to project influence over something other than a human mind. Or perhaps he himself has assumed the form of a bat. If so, that is the first indication we’ve had that he has shape shifting powers. In either case, Barnabas’ powers have just gone up a level.

Closing Miscellany

The bat was created by famed puppeteer Bil Baird. Most famous today for the puppets he created for “The Lonely Goatherd” sequence in The Sound of Music, Baird was a frequent guest on television programs like The Ed Sullivan Show, and Jim Henson cited Baird’s own TV series, the short lived Life with Snarky Parker, as a major influence on the Muppets. In December 1966, Baird opened a marionette theater in New York City, at 59 Barrow Street in Greenwich Village; it operated until 1978, and many leading puppeteers, including dozens who would go on to work with Henson, were members of its company in those years.

Bil Baird’s bat-credit. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The original string wasn’t quite so conspicuous. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

This is the last episode to end with ABC staff announcer Bob Lloyd saying “Dark Shadows is a Dan Curtis production.” We do hear the announcement again in February of 1969, but that won’t be because Lloyd has returned- they used an old recording for the music under the closing credits that day, and they picked one with him on it.

Fans of Dark Shadows will often talk about “the early episodes” which ended with Lloyd making that announcement. So I suppose #330 is the last of “the early episodes.”

Danny Horn’s post about this one on Dark Shadows Every Day includes a morphology of episode endings. He divides them into five categories, Haiku,* Restatement of Threat, ** New Information,*** Crisis Point,**** and Spectacle.***** It’s an intriguing scheme, and he makes a good case for it.

*Danny explains that “Haiku” “aren’t necessarily recognizable as endings in the traditional sense, because nothing is resolved and no progress is made. It’s just a little moment when a character pauses, and possibly has a feeling about something… In some extreme cases, the audience may not realize that the episode is over until halfway through The Dating Game.”

**Restatement of Threat, at this period of Dark Shadows, usually means Barnabas looking at us through his window and saying that someone or other “must die!” Which of course means that you can safely sell a million dollar life insurance policy to that character.

***”A New Information ending provides an actual plot point, which either advances the story another step, or tells us something that we didn’t know.”

****”The Crisis Point cliffhanger is the big game-changer, and for best effect, it should come at the end of a sequence that’s been building up for a while. This is a big turn in the story, and it should feel satisfying and thrilling… The defining feature of a Crisis Point ending is that the resolution marks a change in the status quo, ending one chapter and setting up the next.”

***** “Obviously, plot advancement is always welcome, but every once in a while the show needs to set its sights a little higher. These are the moments when the show goes above and beyond, in order to surprise and dazzle you… The point of a Spectacle is: You can’t take your eyes off the screen. Housewives in the audience have put down the iron, and switched off the vacuum. Teenagers have stopped swatting at their siblings… A Crisis Point cliffhanger will bring you back for the next episode, because you want to see what happens next. But a Spectacle cliffhanger is bigger than that — you’ll be coming back for the next episode, but it’s because you can’t believe what you’re seeing, and maybe tomorrow they’ll do it again.”

Episode 274: Compare a crime to an adventure

For sixteen weeks, from March to June, seagoing con man Jason McGuire had lived the high life blackmailing reclusive matriarch Liz. Now the blackmail scheme has blown up in Jason’s face, and the police have given him until sundown to clear out of Collinsport. Looking for someone else to exploit, Jason has come to the Old House on Liz’ estate, where her distant cousin Barnabas lives with Jason’s onetime henchman Willie.

Jason lingers outside a window. He sees Willie bring Barnabas a chest full of jewelry. He hears Barnabas and Willie talking about Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, whom they abducted, held prisoner, and, they believe, killed. He is still listening when Barnabas and Willie start talking about well-meaning governess Vicki, to whom Barnabas plans to give the same treatment.

A bit later, Jason finds Willie in the woods outside the house. He demands Willie meet him in the Blue Whale tavern at noon the next day and give him a pile of jewels from the chest. He tells Willie that he knows what he and Barnabas did to Maggie and what they are planning to do to Vicki. Willie agrees to the meeting.

We cut to the tavern. Jason is waiting at the bar when Vicki comes in. She grimaces at the sight of Jason, then asks Bob the bartender if he has seen Liz’ daughter Carolyn. Bob shakes his head no.

Jason insists on talking to Vicki. We do not know what to expect from this conversation. Jason is a villain who has often taken pleasure in being cruel to Liz and other characters, and the scenes in which he threatened Liz were so repetitious as to constitute cruelty to the audience. He believes that Barnabas is a serial killer of women, and his plan to squeeze money out of Barnabas requires him to turn a blind eye while he continues in that career. On the other hand, Jason showed genuine and unselfish concern for Willie when he was ill, and actor Dennis Patrick has taken every opportunity to play him as a comedy villain, with whom we can empathize while he scrambles to keep his lies from being exposed. So we can easily imagine Jason wanting to give Vicki some kind of warning.

Jason begins their talk with a question about Carolyn. Vicki tells him that Carolyn left the house because she believed the false story that he had used to blackmail Liz, and expresses her intense disapproval of him. He makes some defensive and self-pitying remarks, and Vicki continues to tell him how bad he is. He tells her that she will soon suffer hardships while he is far away, laughing at her. She says she doesn’t know what he means, and he refuses to explain. She says “There is nothing as sad as a hollow threat.” At no point in any of this had it seemed that Jason was about to warn Vicki of Barnabas’ plans.

As Vicki is going, Jason says he wonders who she really is and where she comes from. He then says that she does not know the answers to those questions. He says that he was in Collinsport 18 years ago, and he might know them. That stops Vicki in her tracks. She turns, looks at Jason, and asks him what he knows. He says that whatever he knows, he will take with him. She says that he is only trying to hurt her. He asks if he is succeeding. She goes.

It has been a while since we last heard about Vicki’s quest to solve the riddle of her origins. That story element never amounted to much, in part because, as Wallace McBride pointed out in a Collinsport Historical Society post in 2020, the very first episode of the show ended by showing us Liz and Vicki as each other’s mirror images. From that point on, everything has pointed to Liz as Vicki’s biological mother. Art Wallace’s original story bible for Dark Shadows had suggested that Liz’ ex-husband Paul Stoddard would be revealed as Vicki’s father and some other woman as her mother, but Art Wallace also said that the story might be better served by saying that Liz was her mother by another man, and that seems to be what they have tacitly done.

Art Wallace’s plan had also been that Vicki’s origins would be revealed at the climax of the blackmail story. It is not clear when they gave up on that. Since the actual episode, #271, runs drastically short, it is possible that they changed their minds only a few days before taping.

One of the possibilities was that Liz would admit that she was Vicki’s mother and Jason was her father. They haven’t done much to suggest that there ever was a sexual relationship between Liz and Jason, so this possibility lurks far in the background. If it were to turn out to be true, Jason’s indifference to Barnabas’ plans for Vicki becomes all the more chilling. Since Stoddard was also indifferent to Carolyn’s well-being, it would give Liz’ two daughters something miserable to have in common.

Jason was a friend of Stoddard, so he might have some information that would be meaningful if they are going for a twist in which all the hints that Liz is Vicki’s mother by another man were false and another woman were her mother by Stoddard. At any rate, when Jason says that whatever information he has will leave with him, it seems that he is telling the audience that the quest for Vicki’s origins will never be resolved.

Willie shows up at the tavern and gives Jason one piece of jewelry. Jason is loudly dissatisfied with this. Willie leaves him.

Later, Jason breaks into the Old House. As he enters, three notes ring out on the soundtrack. I sometimes laugh at this three note motif with my wife, Mrs Acilius. Not only because “dum, dum, DUMM!” is a corny way to end a show, but also because it often follows a three syllable closing line. So if the last words spoken before we hear it are “I want more!,” we will sing “I- want- MORE!” Since Barnabas is a far more dangerous person than Jason knows, this time Mrs Acilius sang “You- are- DEAD!”

Episode 273: Why is there nothing there?

For sixteen weeks, starting with the introduction of seagoing con man Jason McGuire in #193 and ending today, Dark Shadows has subjected its viewers to a storyline about Jason blackmailing reclusive matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Thirteen times in those sixteen weeks, we saw iterations of the same dreary scene- Jason makes a demand of Liz, Liz resists, he threatens to expose her terrible secret, she capitulates.

Now, Liz has exposed her own terrible secret. She has told everyone that eighteen years ago, she killed her husband Paul Stoddard and Jason buried Stoddard in the basement of the great house of Collinwood. Jason denied that Stoddard’s body could be found there, and as we open Sheriff Patterson and Fake Shemp Burke Devlin are digging up the basement to see who is right.

Liz and her brother Roger are in the drawing room. He asks why she didn’t confide her terrible secret in him. She says that perhaps she was too proud of her role as his older sister and the family’s moral compass. He admits that, if had told him the secret, he probably would have used it to blackmail her himself. This startling admission tells us just how completely isolated Liz is.

It tells regular viewers more than that. When Dark Shadows began, Roger was a deep-dyed villain. He hasn’t been directly connected to an ongoing storyline since his estranged wife, Laura Murdoch Collins, vanished in #191, and in the months since has figured as an immature, ineffectual person, a bratty little brother dependent on Liz’ money and unable to help her against Jason. With this admission he harks back to his first incarnation, and makes us wonder if we will see another side of him. If he has the strength to admit his villainy, perhaps he has the strength to change.

Meanwhile, Burke and the sheriff have turned up a trunk in the floor of the basement. It is empty and clean. There is no sign that there ever was a body in it.

Liz sees the empty trunk. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

Viewers who have been with the show from the beginning will think of Laura. Laura had died in Phoenix, Arizona shortly before showing up in Collinsport. After the apparently alive Laura had been in Collinsport for some time, her corpse mysteriously vanished from the morgue back in Maricopa County. Upon inspection, the graves of several of her ancestors turned out to be empty and clean. The Laura arc swallowed up most of the non-paranormal story elements left over from Dark Shadows’ early days as a Gothic romance tinged with the suggestion of a noir crime drama, and the blackmail plot is meant to sweep the last of them away and get the show on track as a supernatural thriller/ horror story. So we might think that the empty trunk is a sign that there was something not of this world about Stoddard.

They retreat from that intriguing possibility, as yesterday they retreated from the evidence they had already given us that a ghost haunted the place of Stoddard’s supposed burial. Jason admits to Liz that he and Stoddard cooked up a scheme where Stoddard would pretend to be dead so that he and Jason could help themselves to a big chunk of her wealth, then go away to live the high life. Jason says that he saw Stoddard in Hong Kong a bit over ten years ago, and that so far as he knows he is still alive and well.

Liz doesn’t want to press charges against Jason- she simply wants him to go away. Roger demands that Jason be charged with blackmail. In front of the sheriff, Roger announces that he is outraged at the money Jason took from Liz, including “business money.” This might make us wonder about Liz’ own criminal exposure. In #242, Roger told Liz that the company’s accounts were out of balance. We knew it was because she was slipping money to Jason, and they made a big enough point of her meeting with the accountants and telling them lies so that they would fix the books that for a moment it seemed like they were getting ready for a story about her getting in trouble for falsifying business documents.

That was dropped right away, and it doesn’t seem likely that Liz will be charged for paying hush money to Jason. Not many people in the USA in 1967 had any understanding of the crime of obstruction of justice. It wasn’t until the Senate Committee investigating the Watergate affair broadcast its hearings live in 1973 that the average viewer of daytime television would learn that giving a person money to stay away from the police is a felony. Before then, even many trained lawyers, among them several of the Watergate defendants, did not grasp this. So we can be confident that such matters would not enter Soap Opera Law in the 1960s.

The blackmail arc was dredged up from Art Wallace’s original story bible for Dark Shadows, called Shadows on the Wall. The first time Wallace told the story was in a 1954 installment of an anthology TV series called The Web; that segment was titled “The House,” and he had to pad it a bit to fill out a 30 minute time slot. In 1957, Wallace stretched “The House” to even greater length, into an hour-long entry in another dramatic anthology, Goodyear Playhouse. Wallace left Dark Shadows in October 1966, but the series has been hanging from the old rope he sold Dan Curtis for four full months now. Jason will still be on the show for a couple more days, but we’ve finally seen the last of this drab tale.

Episode 271: A secret you had no right to keep

A wedding is being held in the drawing room of the great house at Collinwood. Matriarch Liz is marrying seagoing con man Jason. Carolyn, Liz’s daughter by her first husband, Paul Stoddard, has a pistol in her purse, which she is planning to use to shoot Jason before the ceremony can be completed. Well-meaning governess Vicki is distressed, because Liz confided in her in #259 that she is marrying Jason only because he is blackmailing her. Liz killed Stoddard long ago and Jason buried the body in the basement, facts he will reveal if she does not comply with his demands. The other guests hate Jason, but they share neither Vicki’s understanding of the situation nor Carolyn’s sense of initiative, so they just stand around and scowl.

When the judge asks Liz if she takes Jason to be her lawful wedded husband, she exclaims that she cannot. She points to him and declares “I killed Paul Stoddard and that man was my accomplice.” Carolyn drops the gun, Vicki flashes a defiant look at Jason, and everyone else is stunned.

The judge excuses himself. He claims that he might be required to act as a judicial officer in a case that could arise from what Liz is about to say. That may not make sense in terms of the laws or canons of judicial conduct actually in effect in the State of Maine in 1967, where what he has already heard would be far too much to avoid being called as a witness. But it fits nicely with the logic of Soap Opera Law, in which neither the police nor the courts may be notified of any criminal matter until the prime suspect has completed his or her own investigation.

Carolyn says “You killed my father.” Before Liz can say much in response, Carolyn announces that she was about to kill Jason. Vicki’s boyfriend, Fake Shemp Burke Devlin, finds Carolyn’s gun. For some reason, Burke holds the gun up. He points it at whomever he is facing. When Jason announces he will be leaving the room, Burke is pointing the gun at him and forbids him to go. Again, giving orders to a person on whom you have a deadly weapon trained may be a felony in our world, but it is all well and good under Soap Opera Law.

Liz mentions that Vicki already knows that she killed Stoddard and that Jason has been blackmailing her. This prompts Liz’ brother Roger to tell Vicki “That was a secret you had no right to keep.” Liz responds that, had Vicki told anyone, she would have denied it and sent her away. Liz then describes the events of the night eighteen years before when she and Stoddard had their final showdown. We see them in flashback, on this same set.

Stoddard told Liz he was leaving her, never to return. She replied that she did not object to his going, but that the suitcase full of bonds, jewels, and other valuable assets he was planning to take was Carolyn’s property and would have to stay.

When the show started, just over a year ago, Stoddard’s disappearance had been 18 years in the past. So it still is, moving its date from 1948 to 1949. At that time, Stoddard was last seen six months before Carolyn was born. Later, they would say she was a newborn when her father vanished. In the flashback today, he answers Liz’ assertion of Carolyn’s right to the contents of the suitcase by saying that he has been putting up with the child for two years. We saw her birth-date as 1946 the other day, so apparently they are planning to stick with the idea that she was a toddler when Stoddard was last seen.

Stoddard and Liz quarrel over the suitcase. He confirms that he and his friend Jason have a plan to convert its contents into a big bundle of cash. He is walking away from her when she takes a poker from the fireplace and hits him on the back of the head. This may be another deed entirely unjustifiable by real-world law, but under Soap Opera Law any act committed against a man who openly despises his two-year old daughter and tries to steal from her is outside the jurisdiction of the courts.

Stoddard fell to the floor, bled, and remained very still after Liz hit him. Shocked by what she had done, she reeled out of the drawing room and closed the doors behind her. As she stood in the foyer wishing she were dead, Jason entered the house. Liz sent him into the drawing room to look at Stoddard. He came out, told her Stoddard was dead, and offered to bury him for her. After all, everyone in town knew he was leaving- there need be no scandal to cloud Carolyn’s future.

Liz asks why Jason wants to help her- he was Stoddard’s friend, planning to help Stoddard steal from her. Jason explains that Stoddard is beyond help now. Liz goes along with his plan.

In this flashback, Jason’s Irish accent is convincingly realistic. It sounds like he’s from Antrim, or someplace else in Norn Iron. That’s a contrast with what we’ve heard so far, when he’s been more than a little reminiscent of this guy:

My in-universe, fanfic theory is that Jason hadn’t been home or spent much time with other Irishmen in the years between 1949 and 1967, and so his accent drifted into a music hall Oyrish. My out-of-universe theory is that Dennis Patrick spent some time with a dialect coach after joining the show, but by the time he had learned to sound plausible Jason’s silly accent was already such an established part of the character that he couldn’t change it.

When Jason was done with his work downstairs, he showed Liz the storage room where he buried Stoddard in the floor. We got a long, long look at that floor in #249, when it was clean and tidy and there were many boxes and crates on it. When Jason left it to Liz “18 years ago,” there was dirt piled up all over the floor, a shovel in the corner, and few boxes or crates. Evidently Liz cleaned it up herself and organized its contents at some point. That doesn’t fit with the idea she had before #249, that a person entering the room would immediately discover her secret. Since Liz had often gone into the room in the early months of the show, it never had made sense she would believe such a thing, but it is annoying to be reminded of it.

In voiceover, Liz tells us that when Jason left her with the key to the room she knew she would be a prisoner of the house forever. The episode then ends, after less than 18 minutes of scripted content. That’s the shortest installment so far. The closing credits roll slowly, so slowly that they run out of music. The names scroll by in silence for 25 seconds before ABC staff announcer Bob Lloyd says “Dark Shadows is a Dan Curtis production.”

That cannot have been Plan A. This episode has eight speaking parts, two segments of events set in different decades, voiceover narration, a costume change, etc. So there was plenty of stuff that might have proven impossible in dress rehearsal, requiring a quick rewrite that might have left them running a little short. But they’ve been ambitious before, and have never ended up like this. So I suspect that the late script change that got them into trouble was more complicated than that.

Art Wallace’s original story bible for Dark Shadows, titled Shadows on the Wall, called for the mystery of Vicki’s parentage to be resolved at the same time as the blackmail plot. Wallace’s first idea was that Vicki would be shown to be the illegitimate daughter of Paul Stoddard, and that Liz’ interest in her well-being began with guilt after she responded to the news of Vicki’s existence by attacking Stoddard. Wallace also said that if it were more story-productive, they could say that Vicki was Liz’ illegitimate daughter.

Casting Alexandra Moltke Isles as Vicki committed them to that second course of action. Famously, when Joan Bennett first saw Mrs Isles on set she mistook her for her daughter, and the show has often capitalized on their resemblance to present Vicki as a reflection of Liz. For example, notice how the two women stand in this shot from today’s episode:

Pay particular attention to their legs- it’s the same posture

Moreover, the ghost of Josette Collins took a lively interest in Vicki in the first 39 weeks of the show, and Josette is specifically a protector of members of the Collins family. If Vicki is Paul’s illegitimate daughter, she is not a Collins and not linked to Josette.

The only advantage we’ve ever seen of establishing Vicki as a non-Collins would be the possibility of a romance between her and Roger. Since Vicki the foundling-turned-governess is Jane Eyre and Roger the father of her charge is Mr Rochester, this is an obvious direction to go. The show took a few feints towards such a relationship in the early days, but those clearly led nowhere. Vicki came to town in #1 on the same train as Burke, so they are fated to get together. Roger and Burke openly hate each other and often seem to secretly love each other, making for a potentially explosive love triangle if Vicki comes between them, but neither Roger and Burke’s much-advertised enmity nor their barely concealed homoerotic connection ever developed into a very interesting story. The whole thing fizzled out completely months ago. So there doesn’t seem to be a point in resolving the question of Vicki’s parentage any other way than with Liz admitting maternity.

So the first question is, when did they decide that this episode would not include that admission? The short running time would seem to suggest that it was only a few days before taping.

The second question is, why did they make that decision? Liz’ line today that she would fire Vicki if she had betrayed her secret, coupled with all the remarks she has been making to Vicki in the last few weeks about how Carolyn is the one and only person she really cares about, would suggest that the producers and writers are thinking of moving away from the idea of Vicki as Liz’ natural daughter. But the directors are still committed to it, as are the actresses.

We begin to suspect that the producers and writers are hoping that the viewers who have joined the show since the vampire came on in April won’t care about Vicki’s origin, so that they can just drop the whole thing. Since the only storylines they have going are the blackmail arc, which Liz is bringing to its end with her confession today, and the vampire arc, in which nothing at all is happening at the moment, you might think they would be glad to fill some screen time with Vicki and the rest of them reorienting themselves around a newly revealed family relationship. But, maybe not!

Episode 269: To recognize hopelessness

Matriarch Liz stands at the edge of a cliff. Rather than let seagoing con man Jason McGuire blackmail her into marrying him, she has resolved to throw herself to her death on the rocks below. As she takes a running start, well-meaning governess Vicki grabs her. Vicki talks Liz out of killing herself, and Liz hugs her.

In #140, Vicki had rescued strange and troubled boy David Collins, hauling him to safety as he hung from this same cliff. He too reacted by hugging Vicki. David had been impeding the progress of the story by refusing to spend time with his mother, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. Since Vicki is our point-of-view character, she represents the audience. To embrace her is to embrace the viewers, and to promise to do something we will find interesting, or at least intelligible. Laura’s arc consumed most of the non-paranormal story elements and committed Dark Shadows to become a supernatural thriller/ horror story.

The blackmail arc is meant to finish off the few daylight-world themes left unresolved and to complete that transformation. It has been slow and monotonous, taking a story that Art Wallace had to pad pretty heavily to fill a half hour in 1954 and stretching it over sixteen weeks. Liz’ suicidal moping has been terribly dull. As David’s embrace of Vicki at the cliff’s edge signaled that the real story of Laura and David could start and bring Dark Shadows 1.0 to its conclusion, so Liz’ embrace of Vicki signals that the she will now take action to get Dark Shadows 2.0 off the ground. That signal is amplified a moment later. Liz and Vicki are back in the drawing room, and Liz tells Vicki that she has made her want to live again.

Jason enters the drawing room. He presents Liz with a wedding ring and asks her to try it on. When she refuses to wear it before the wedding, he insists. Liz has already told Vicki about the terrible secret Jason is using to control her. Vicki offers to stay, and looks ready for a fight. The idea of a battle-royale among Vicki, Liz, and Jason is exciting, to the extent that anything within the blackmail story can be exciting, but it doesn’t come off. Liz looks confident and tells Vicki that she can handle the situation herself now. Vicki goes, and we have another dreary scene between Liz and Jason.

We cut to the Blue Whale tavern, where Vicki’s boyfriend, fake Shemp Burke Devlin, is using the pay phone. Burke is talking with a private investigator who has sent him a report about Jason. Seems like a call you’d want to take in a more private setting, but now that they have to keep the Old House set up all the time they no longer have the studio space to build the set for Burke’s hotel room. So Burke lives in the tavern now, and runs his business from there.

Vicki joins Burke. He shows her the report. Jason is wanted by the police in port cities around the world. In no country do the authorities have enough evidence against him to send an extradition request to the USA, but it does explain why he chose this time to put his sea papers away and try his luck with Liz.

Vicki and Burke go back to the house and show the report to Liz. She doesn’t care about it, and Burke admits that he has no means of fighting Jason. Jason kisses Liz, and Burke and Vicki see her recoil in disgust. If Liz has found the means to oppose Jason and break out of the dead end he has confined her to, neither they nor we can see what that means is.

Kissing the bride-to-be. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 251: Madness preferable to sanity

We reprise the final scene of Friday’s episode, in which vampire Barnabas Collins catches his prisoner Maggie Evans trying to stab him. He flashes his fangs at her.

The first time around, this had been the climax of a number of powerfully realized scenes, so it still carried a punch despite the silliness of the fangs. From a standing start, though, the result is a bad laugh.

In the 45 seconds following the first commercial, ABC staff announcer Bill Rice* summarizes the action of the previous week’s episodes.** This recap comes so close to exhausting every event we saw in those 110 minutes of scripted drama that regular viewers will have another unintended laugh.

The recap was inserted because many ABC stations preempted Dark Shadows to cover a United Nations debate about the Vietnam War. The show was about as resolutely disengaged from contemporary politics as it was possible to be, but conjoining US policy in Vietnam with a character like Barnabas, who combines a vast capacity for killing with a desperate need to be loved, does bring certain thoughts to mind.

Barnabas and Maggie have a conversation about his inclination to kill her. Barnabas’ sorely bedraggled blood-thrall Willie Loomis joins in, saying that Barnabas will have to kill him first. This would not seem to present Barnabas with any difficulty at all. Willie wouldn’t be missed- everyone else on the show remembers Willie from the days before he met Barnabas, when he was dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis, and has been urging Barnabas to get rid of him. Nor would it be especially difficult for Barnabas to replace Willie- he just has to bite someone else, and that other person will become his new slave. But Barnabas stands around arguing with Willie and Maggie. When someone knocks on the front door, he scolds Willie for failing to keep it locked, such a humdrum complaint under the circumstances as to bring another bad laugh. Barnabas leaves Willie and Maggie in the basement while he answers the door. Before he goes, he sticks out his lower lip, a facial expression known as “pouting.”

The visitor is well-meaning governess Vicki, who tells Barnabas that the sheriff has ordered that no woman go out alone at night. Some think it strange to send a woman out alone at night to carry this message to a man who is indoors, but considering what we’ve seen of the sheriff, doing the exact opposite of what he commands would seem always to be the wisest course.

Vicki notices an antique music box on a table in Barnabas’ front parlor. Vicki admires its tune and makes a few not-very-coherent remarks about “the past” while it is playing. Barnabas has been using this music box as a tool to hypnotize Maggie into believing that she is his long-lost love Josette. After Vicki leaves, he opens it again, then looks at the door through which she left. He turns his head and smiles, looking very much like someone who has just had an exciting new idea.

Meanwhile, Maggie and Willie talk to each other in the basement. The two of them had one of the most electrifying scenes of the entire series down there Friday. The last traces of that energy have been piddled away by the time Barnabas comes back downstairs and resumes his conversation with them.

Willie urges Barnabas to look at Maggie and see how beautiful she is. Barnabas says “No” and looks away. Coming at a moment of high dramatic tension, this might have been powerful. When we sit down as an audience, we enter into a sort of agreement that if the show includes something worth seeing, we will look at it. So when we see a character refusing to look at a sight as well worth contemplating as was the young Kathryn Leigh Scott,*** we might be shocked. But there has been too much idle chatter, and the memory of Barnabas’ pout is so fresh, that all we can think of is a petulant child saying “I don’t wanna look at her!”

Barnabas announces that he will not kill Maggie right away. He tells her that he will make her suffer torments worse than anyone has ever known so that death will finally come as a blessed relief, then locks her up in the prison cell in the basement of the house. What, your house doesn’t have a prison cell in its basement? It’s a standard feature of homes in Collinsport, as we will come to see in future episodes.

Barnabas goes to the great house of Collinwood and talks to Vicki. He brings a handkerchief that, legend has it, was a gift from the queen of France to Josette. They babble about “the past” and Barnabas invites her to drop in at his house “some day.” He says “day,” even though he’s busy being dead every day until sunset. And doesn’t specify when- any old time, if she hears screams coming from the basement she’ll probably just ignore them.

Evidently Barnabas is thinking of Vicki as a backup Josette in case Maggie doesn’t come around. This marks a retreat from #240 and #241, when strange and troubled boy David Collins, who has seen Josette’s ghost many times, saw Maggie in the gown Barnabas gave her and said that she must have been Josette because she looked “exactly the same” as he had seen her before. That suggested, not only that Barnabas chose Maggie because of her looks, but also that he might be right in thinking that she is Josette’s reincarnation. This storyline is modeled on the 1932 Universal film The Mummy, in which Imhotep’s idea that Helen Grosvenor is the reincarnation of his lost love Princess Ankh-esen-amun is substantiated when Zita Johann plays both roles. If Vicki and Maggie are interchangeable, then all of that goes by the boards.

*Presumably no relation to the main character of Gene Roddenberry’s 1963-4 CBS TV series The Lieutenant, one episode of which was written by Art Wallace.

**As transcribed by the Dark Shadows wiki:

For those who have missed the last few episodes of Dark Shadows: Elizabeth Collins [Stoddard,] at Jason McGuire’s insistence, has taken Vicki, Carolyn, and Roger into the basement room and convinces them that it holds no mystery. They don’t realize that beneath the flagstones on the floor is concealed the room’s secret—the body of Elizabeth’s husband, Paul. Elizabeth, now realizing that the secret can never be told, announces to the family that she and Jason will be married. Maggie Evans escaped from Barnabas and attempted to get to her father, but was recaptured and told by Barnabas that unless she assumes the identity of Josette Collins, she will die. Realizing that she can never escape, Maggie attempts to destroy Barnabas.

***Or for that matter as is the not-so-young Miss Scott of today, she’s one of the best looking octogenarians around.

Episode 214: Nothing lasts forever

For the first 20 weeks of its run, Dark Shadows developed its story at a stately pace. When writers Art Wallace and Francis Swann were replaced by Ron Sproat and Malcolm Marmorstein, stately became glacial, and at times ground to a halt altogether. For the last few months, Joe Caldwell has been making uncredited contributions to the writing. While Caldwell is probably responsible for some of the glittering moments of witty dialogue and intriguing characterization that have cropped up, everything is still taking a very long time. And this is the second episode in a row in which nothing at all happens to advance the plot.

There are a few interesting moments. We begin with well-meaning governess Vicki entering the long-abandoned Old House on the grounds of the estate of Collinwood in search of her charge, strange and troubled boy David Collins. The doors swing shut, and she cannot open them. The recently arrived Barnabas Collins comes down the stairs, startling her. He opens the doors easily.

This may not sound like a big thrill, but regular viewers will remember that doors swung open at the approach of the previous supernatural menace, blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. When characters who did not know that Laura was anything other than a woman saw that happen, they didn’t react- it was a small enough thing that they could fail to notice it, and a weird enough thing that it didn’t register. So we have been prepared to watch for tricks with doors as a sign of the uncanny.

Barnabas’ big challenge today is a job of acting. He has to convince the residents of Collinwood that he is a living man from the twentieth century, not a reanimated corpse come to prey upon the living. He has trouble staying in character. When he tells Vicki that once, centuries ago, a father and son had a quarrel in the Old House that led to the son’s death, he starts laughing and repeats the word “death.” Vicki looks at him like he’s a lunatic. He gets it back together fairly quickly, but when Vicki goes back to the great house on the estate she will tell flighty heiress Carolyn that Barnabas is kind of strange.

“Death Ha Ha!” Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

Barnabas gives Vicki a long, flowery speech about the building of the house, one with no apparent motivation and many logical stopping places. Marmorstein has been giving these overheated orations to actor after actor, defeating them all. As Vicki, Alexandra Moltke Isles came the closest to selling one of them, at the beginning of #167, but she needed maximum support from the director in the form of close-up shots and lighting effects, and even then it was a relief when it was over.

Barnabas’ entire part consists of such speeches. Jonathan Frid stumbles over his lines quite a bit today, as he will do henceforth. No wonder- not only was he dyslexic, but at this point they were shooting seven days a week to make up for production time they lost in a strike late in March. That left him with precious little time to memorize the pages and pages of purple prose they kept dumping on him.

Listening to Frid struggle through his dialogue today, we discover the first reason why Barnabas became such a hit. In his voice, through his mannerisms, Marmorstein’s gibberish sounds gorgeous. Sometimes Frid’s struggle to remember what he’s supposed to say is a problem for the character. Since Barnabas is himself an actor essaying a demanding role, it gets confusing to see Frid’s own difficulties laid on top of his. But even at those times the sound of his voice is so appealing that we root for him to recover and deliver more of his ridiculous lines.

In his speech to Vicki about the building of the Old House, Barnabas mentions that the foundations were made of rocks deposited by glaciers. Any reference at all to glaciers is pretty brave, considering the rate at which the story has been moving in the Sproat/ Marmorstein era. It also raises a question about Barnabas. He is the man who posed for a portrait done in an eighteenth century style, and David told dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis stories about Barnabas’ mother Naomi that would place her towards the middle of the eighteenth century. We’ve also glimpsed a plaque on Naomi’s tomb that gives her dates as 1761-1821, but that prop hasn’t received anything like the screen time the portrait of Barnabas has had, and must have been made long before David’s lines to Willie were finalized. So the trend is to regard Barnabas as someone who was confined to a coffin from the eighteenth century until Monday night. When he starts talking about the rocks laid down during the Ice Age, an event unknown until the mid-nineteenth century, we wonder which night this week he spent updating his understanding of geology.

In the great house, high-born ne-er-do-well Roger comes home from a business trip to Boston. Before updating him and the audience on recent plot developments, Carolyn reminisces about her childhood, when he used to bring gifts to her when he would come home from business trips. She tells him he was the only father she knew. This is a retcon- up to this point, they’ve taken pains to make it clear that Roger and David only moved into the house a few weeks before Vicki’s arrival in episode 1.

Vicki and Barnabas enter the great house. She introduces him to Carolyn and Roger. Roger quickly escorts Barnabas to the study where the two of them talk alone. Roger mentions that a vineyard in Spain that had been in the family in the eighteenth century was still theirs until shortly before World War Two. Barnabas does not react to the phrase “World War Two” at all. Whether this is because he has been studying history as well as geology, or because he was simply overwhelmed with so much new information, is not explained.

While Roger and Barnabas are in the study, Vicki tries to explain to Carolyn why she thinks Barnabas is a bit odd. Carolyn doesn’t want to hear it. She explains the basis of the Collins family’s attitude towards Barnabas when she says it’s a relief just to meet someone friendly after the rough time they’ve had lately. Viewers who have been watching from the beginning will understand how strong that sense of relief must be, and will know that Barnabas is in a position to ride it right into a permanent billet on the estate.

Barnabas leaves, and Roger shows Vicki and Carolyn the portrait. He points out that Barnabas is wearing the same ring as its subject. He does not point out that he is also carrying the even more distinctive wolf’s-head cane.

While those three talk about the wealthy and genial visitor from England Barnabas appears to be, we wonder what he really is. Barnabas first appeared as a hand darting out of a coffin, he has shown up only at night, he lived hundreds of years ago, and he is played by an actor who bears a noticeable resemblance to Bela Lugosi. So we assume that he is a vampire. But so far, there hasn’t been any direct evidence of blood-sucking. During the months Laura was on the show, they made a point of not assimilating her to any familiar mythology. So for all we know, he might be something we’ve never heard of.

The final shot before the credits roll is in the outdoors, where Barnabas is standing perfectly still, surrounded by shrubbery, and with a big smile on his face. Perhaps that shot is telling us that Barnabas is not the vampire we might assume he is, but that he is in fact an undead garden gnome.

Barnabas the lawn ornament. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

Episode 201: People like you

The first shot of the first episode of Dark Shadows featured well-meaning governess Vicki sitting on a train next to a window in which we saw the reflection of dashing action hero Burke Devlin. Vicki was on her way to the great estate of Collinwood, where she hoped to learn who her birth parents were. Burke was on his way to the village of Collinsport, where he hoped to exact revenge on high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins and other residents of Collinwood.

Vicki’s quest to learn her origins never took off, and hasn’t been mentioned for months. Burke’s pursuit of revenge drove a lot of action in the first twenty-one weeks of the show, but has been fading ever further into the background in the nineteen weeks since. Today, it fizzles out altogether.

In his original story bible for Dark Shadows, titled Shadows on the Wall, Art Wallace had proposed that Burke’s pressure on Roger would culminate in Roger’s death. Roger was to inadvertently reveal to Vicki that he was guilty of the crime that sent Burke to prison long ago. Roger would then try to push Vicki off the cliff at Widow’s Hill, but would miss her and go over the edge himself. The show discarded this resolution when Roger’s relationships with several other characters proved to be consistently interesting, particularly the Bossy Big Sister/ Bratty Little Brother dynamic between him and reclusive matriarch Liz. Besides, Louis Edmonds had such a gift for comic dialogue that he could get a laugh out of even the lines in which Malcolm Marmorstein attempted to be funny. So they couldn’t afford to kill Roger off.

Further, they have gone over Roger’s crime so frequently and made all the details so clear to everyone concerned that a trial wouldn’t give the audience any new information about what happened or show us any characters reacting to shocking news. It would be like a real trial, where all the evidence has gone through a discovery process and there are no surprise witnesses. No one is going to put that on commercial television in 1967.

So when Burke shows up at the great house of Collinwood with drunken artist Sam Evans, who has finally admitted that he saw what happened and took Roger’s bribe to keep quiet about it, the only real question is how Burke can leave the status quo in place.

Burke demands that Roger and Liz meet with him and Sam in the drawing room. Burke demonstrates his mastery by closing the drawing room doors, something that Liz, the mistress of Collinwood, usually does, and that Vicki did several times during the weeks when Liz was away and she was effectively in charge of the place.*

Roger of course tries out a series of lies in his attempts to deny Burke and Sam’s charges, but Liz is convinced. When she picks up the telephone and calls the sheriff, Burke reaches in and disconnects her. He says that she doesn’t have to turn Roger in- it is enough for him to know that she really would do it. She declares that she won’t let Burke keep coming back and using Roger’s guilt to blackmail the family, apparently intending to place another call. Burke says that he will never bring it up again, provided Roger confesses here and now in front of the three of them. He does. Burke tells Roger that he used to want to see him rot in jail but that now he realizes that “People like you rot wherever they are.” Burke and Sam leave, and that’s that as far as they are concerned.

During a few scenes scattered throughout the first forty weeks of Dark Shadows, Burke had considered relenting from his quest for vengeance. Those scenes hadn’t been developed in any great depth, and hadn’t been connected to each other. Only in the climactic week of the “Phoenix” storyline, when Burke and Roger briefly joined forces to save Roger’s young son David from death at the hands of his mother, blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, did we have a sustained glimpse of something other than all-consuming enmity between the two men. That was such an extreme situation, and was followed so quickly by a renewal of their hostilities, that Burke’s decision to peace out cannot be said to have any foundation in what we have seen the characters do so far. It is simply a convenient way of discarding a story element that has outlived its usefulness.

Most episodes of Dark Shadows have a cast of five actors. The rest are almost evenly divided between casts of six and casts of four. Today is a rarity with eight on screen. Six of these eight have been deeply involved in the Revenge of Burke Devlin storyline, and are at loose ends now that it has reached its abrupt conclusion. Burke, Roger, and Sam suddenly find themselves with nothing in particular to do. Also, flighty heiress Carolyn had a mad crush on Burke that alarmed her mother Liz and terrified her uncle Roger; that ended months ago, and she’s been a utility player ever since. Vicki is starting to date Burke; if Burke is no longer a threat to the family, there’s no obvious drama in that relationship, and she doesn’t have much else going on. David was as fascinated by Burke as Carolyn was; now that Laura is gone and he is happy with Vicki as his substitute mother, he’s pretty well settled in too.

We don’t see wildly indiscreet housekeeper Mrs Johnson today. She had come to Collinwood as Burke’s secret agent. Now that Burke is satisfied, presumably that’s over. Nor does Sam’s daughter Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town, appear. She’s been dating hardworking young fisherman Joe, rebuffing his suggestions that they think about marriage because she is worried about what is going on with her Pop. Now that Sam’s conflict with Roger has come to its conclusion, there isn’t any reason the two of them shouldn’t get married, or stay unmarried, or whatever. So today’s episode leaves nine of the eleven major characters with no specific connection to any unresolved storyline.

Indeed, there is only one ongoing narrative arc. Long before he wrote Shadows on the Wall, Art Wallace wrote “The House,” a 1954 episode of The Web, an anthology series produced for CBS by Mark Goodson and Bill Todman.** Wallace recycled the story of “The House” for a 1957 installment of an hourlong anthology, Goodyear Playhouse, on NBC. Alternating with Alcoa Theatre in a window known collectively as A Turn of Fate, Goodyear Playhouse featured many pilots. The only one that seems to have been picked up was My World and Welcome to It, which went to series after an interval of more than a decade. I haven’t seen Wallace’s Goodyear Playhouse episode, but the 1954 version is too thin to fill a half hour, so I can’t see that an hourlong reworking would have been likely to catch the eyes of networks that passed on so many other pilots presented in that series, including teleplays by Rod Serling and Paddy Chayefsky. Wallace incorporated the story of “The House” in Shadows on the Wall, and a couple of weeks ago Dark Shadows dredged it up.

Seagoing con man Jason McGuire presented himself at Collinwood, to Liz’ great dismay. So far, they have had five conversations, two of them in Friday’s episode. All have followed the same pattern. Jason and Liz meet in the drawing room; he makes a demand of her; she resists; he threatens to expose her terrible secret; she capitulates. It’s true that on Friday they varied this a bit. Roger was with them during the first session, so that they had to veil their meanings, and in the second session Jason finds that Liz is unable to meet his initial demand, so that he shifts to a second one. In the first scene, they have a lot to show us as Liz and Jason manage to communicate their usual messages without letting Roger in on anything, and in the second they show us that Jason puts a higher priority on keeping Liz under his control than on any particular item he might want her to give him, so they managed to be interesting that day.

Today, Jason and Liz have their sixth conversation. It isn’t in the drawing room this time, but in the basement. While looking for David, Vicki had caught Jason listening at the doors of the drawing room at the moment when Liz was talking about going to the police, and he had rushed up to his room and telephoned*** his associate Willie, telling him they should be ready to get out of town fast. This conversation lets the audience know that Jason’s threat to Liz is a bluff. David had then caught Jason trying to get into the locked room in the basement. David told Liz what he saw Jason doing. Liz then goes down to the basement herself and shines a flashlight directly into the camera. We can see her in the halo, but Jason cannot. He seems helpless while she shines the light at him.

Jason scrambles a bit to regain control of the situation. Liz tells him he must leave the house immediately. He finally puts into words what the audience has long since figured out is on Liz’ mind, that she killed her husband Paul Stoddard eighteen years ago, that Jason buried him in the room, and that Jason will take this information to the police if she does not comply with his demands. She yields.

Liz’ reaction is interesting in the light of her scenes with Roger. When Burke was in the room, she explained her determination to call the police by saying that blackmail is no life for anyone to live. After Burke and Sam have gone, Roger starts begging Liz to let him and David keep living in her house. She doesn’t seem to know what he is talking about. She says that “Everyone does terrible things,” a remark she had also made to Burke and that is certainly true of characters who last on soap operas. He wants to go on pleading with her, but she just walks off, deep in thought about something else.

Remembering those scenes, we see Liz not simply giving in to Jason, but making a decision to keep going along with him. That makes today’s iteration of Jason Threatens Liz a bit more worthwhile than were the first three, if not quite as lively as the two we saw Friday. We can see something going on in her mind that raises the possibility she might do something different next time.

Two actors have bad trouble with lines today. When Burke is supposed to be saying something very dramatic and powerful about “hypocrites,” Mitch Ryan is actually blabbering about “hippie-crippie… er… hippie-crizz.” And when David Collins meets his Aunt Liz on the stairs and tells her he saw Jason in the basement, David Henesy stumbles over so many lines he falls out of character. Eventually he gets enough of the words out that you can tell what he’s trying to say, but he never really recaptures David Collins’ rhythm and intonations.

This latter slip-up leads to a reminder that there are always people in the audience checking in to a series for the first time with any given episode, so that actors are subject to judgments that don’t take into account what they have done before. At the bottom of their post on this episode, John and Christine Scoleri transcribe a conversation with a friend of theirs who hadn’t seen any of the episodes before this one. He says “Those who think the kid playing David went to any kind of acting school, raise your hand. Now leave the auditorium, please.”

In fact, David Henesy had been working steadily as a professional actor for four years before joining the cast of Dark Shadows at the age of nine. During that time, he had studied under many teachers, among them Uta Hagen. Usually, that background shows through, even when a particular script gives him problems. For example, he had a lot of difficulty with his lines in #191, and I rated that one as one of his weaker efforts. But here’s what Patrick McCray said about it on his Dark Shadows Daybook:

The success of this installment rests on the narrow shoulders of David Henesy. At the end of a big Henesy episode or scene, it’s common to announce that the kid nailed it, and this episode is no exception. His scene partners have it easy. They have straightforward, high stakes objectives to pursue. Either David goes into the fire or he doesn’t. There are only so many ways that people can implore the kid to come to them. On the other hand, Henesy has to stretch out indecision and keep it fresh for twenty minutes… with the help of an “ancient legend” that he recites. Not only does he succeed like a champ, but he concludes one of his better Hagen Days with a tearful catharsis that reads as properly-uncomfortably authentic.
Patrick McCray, Dark Shadows Daybook, 7 March 2018

I disagree with McCray overall about #191- I think Henesy’s line troubles in that one are bad enough that he doesn’t “succeed like a champ,” but I do agree that there are also some good things in his performance, particularly the way he uses his eyes and his posture. And there is no doubt that the last two minutes are very good.

Not even McCray comes to Henesy’s defense regarding #201, though the scene in the basement is all right. David Collins has a pleasant little conversation with Jason, and David Henesy gives sufficient support to Dennis Patrick that we can see just how badly wasted that talented actor is in all of those scenes where Jason repeats his threat to Liz.

*When we were watching the episode, my wife, Mrs Acilius, noticed the significance of Burke’s closing the drawing room doors. She had a lot to say about it, I wish she could remember her WordPress password and write her observations here.

**Later to become game show specialists, Goodson and Todman would be the producers of Match Game, which in the 1960s was on CBS 4:00-4:30 PM Monday through Friday opposite Dark Shadows, and of Password, a version of which would replace Dark Shadows on ABC in that timeslot when the show was canceled in April 1971.

***Just a few weeks ago, Laura nearly succeeded in killing David because there were no telephones upstairs. Apparently that has led Liz to have some new lines installed.

Episode 196: How long will it take him to say goodbye?

Seagoing con man Jason McGuire has talked his way into the drawing room of the great house at Collinwood. Reclusive matriarch Liz is dismayed to see him. Their conversation builds to his threat that the secret they share about something that happened one night eighteen years ago will not be safe unless she lets him stay at the house. She capitulates to this threat.

Liz’ husband, the never-seen Paul Stoddard, disappeared eighteen years ago, and she hasn’t left Collinwood since. Jason makes it clear to more than one character that he knew Stoddard, and implies to Liz that the terrible secret they share explains Stoddard’s absence. She is very uncomfortable any time anyone goes into the basement of the house. After Jason goes to get his luggage today, Liz tells well-meaning governess Vicki that it is more important than ever that no one know she saw her coming out of the locked room in the basement the other night. The obvious conclusion would seem to be that Liz and Jason killed Stoddard and hid his corpse in the locked room, though perhaps there might be some twist coming up that will lead us to a different conclusion.

Looking at today’s episode, I think we can see several routes they might take to add interest to the tale. Vicki is eager to help Liz in any way she can, and both Liz’ daughter Carolyn and her brother Roger show themselves more than ready to stand with her against Jason. If she accepts their help and tells them any part of the truth, their reactions to what she tells them and their attempts to work together against Jason might change the relationships among them in exciting ways.

Carolyn wonders if Jason is an old flame of Liz’. If there is an attraction between Liz and Jason, then we might see that Carolyn inherited her tendency to fall for the worst possible man from her mother, and there might be conflict between mother and daughter mirroring the tension when Carolyn was chasing after the family’s nemesis, dashing action hero Burke Devlin. Jason is mysterious enough, and actor Dennis Patrick is charismatic enough, that a romance that begins with Liz disregarding her better judgment and falling for Jason in spite of everything could lead to any number of interesting places.

Jason’s threat to Liz today, and indeed all of his talk when they are alone in the drawing room, is in terms of a single incident- “the most important incident of your life,” as Jason describes it to Liz. If his only leverage over her comes from one isolated event, then all he can do is repeat the same threat every time he wants her to make another concession. That would get to be unbearably monotonous very quickly. On the other hand, Liz’ reaction to him shows that when she and Stoddard knew him eighteen years ago, he was just as smooth-talking and untrustworthy as he is now. So it might be that Liz and Stoddard involved themselves in a series of his scams, and that she has a long list of secrets she is afraid he will expose. If that turns out to be the case, there might be a long list of pressure points where he can place his finger depending on just how outrageous his demand might be.

Failing any of those twists, the Jason storyline could be pretty dreary. Art Wallace, who was the sole credited writer for the first 40 episodes of Dark Shadows and stayed with show until #85, wrote a 30 minute episode of a CBS anthology series called The Web in 1954 under the title “The House.” You can see the whole thing here:

That version features a retired sailor coming to a coastal town. He finds out that a local woman whom he knew years before hasn’t left her house since he was around, which was at the same time her husband disappeared. He goes to her house and threatens that he will expose the hideous secret in her basement unless she lets him stay with her. His demands mount. When he insists that she marry him, she finally admits that she killed her husband and the sailor hid his body in the basement. The basement is dug up, revealing that there never was a body there. Indeed, she never killed anyone. The husband tricked her into thinking she had killed him, and the sailor tricked her into thinking he had buried him. When this truth comes out, the sailor flees and the woman lives happily ever after.

That may sound like enough story to fill a 30 minute time-slot, but The House has a number of slow parts. That thinness bodes ill for the narrative arc now starting. This is already Jason’s third episode, and the themes of Stoddard’s absence, Liz’ seclusion, and the locked room in the basement were dealt with over and again in the first weeks of Dark Shadows. Art Wallace’s original story bible for the series, Shadows on the Wall, included a straight retelling of the plot of The House, with no fresh complications until the very end. Today, when Jason tells Liz that as a houseguest he won’t require much entertaining, she replies “I don’t intend to entertain you at all!” If they stick to Wallace’s idea, the same might be the epigram for Jason’s whole storyline.

Episode 142: Firelight is not for looking closely

A few times in the early months of Dark Shadows, writers Art Wallace and Francis Swann found themselves in a corner. The story could move forward only if a character took a particular action, but they couldn’t come up with a reason to explain why any character would take that action. So they had the character do whatever it was simply because it was in the script, and hoped the actors or director or somebody would come up with sleight of hand to conceal their desperation.

Since well-meaning governess Vicki was on screen more than anyone else, she was the one most often required to behave without motivation. Sometimes, Alexandra Moltke Isles finds a way to make Vicki’s behavior intelligible in spite of the writers. The scenes in which Vicki tries to befriend her charge, strange and troubled boy David Collins, are Dark Shadows‘ premier example of good acting trumping bad writing, and there are smaller examples as well. But there are three times in the Wallace/ Swann era- in episodes 26, 38, and 83– when Vicki simply looks like an idiot. This “Dumb Vicki” will appear more and more often as the series goes on, and will eventually ruin the character and do grave damage to the show.

Some weeks ago, Wallace and Swann were succeeded as the principal writers of the show by Ron Sproat and Malcolm Marmorstein. Sproat was a cut below Wallace and Swann, and Marmorstein was far less talented even than Sproat. Today, we get a succession of Dumb Vicki moments resulting from basic incompetence on Marmorstein’s part.

Vicki is visiting her friend Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. Maggie has shown her a canvas that her father, drunken artist Sam, was possessed by an unexplained force to paint. Sam hates the painting and is surprised as he watches it take shape under his brush, but is powerless to stop working on it. It depicts Laura Collins, mother of David. Laura is shown as a winged figure, nude and engulfed in flames.

Sam has had several scenes in which he was shown in closeup delivering speeches about his hatred for the painting and going through convulsions while spooky music plays on the soundtrack. He has also had scenes with Maggie and with Laura’s husband, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins, in which he tries to explain what is going on with him and the painting. Yesterday, Maggie recapped much of this to Vicki, sharing the suspicion that Laura is somehow responsible for Sam’s compulsion to paint the picture. Since the show has also given us loads of hints that Laura is connected to the supernatural, this all adds up to a very heavy-handed way of telling the audience that Sam is possessed.

Once you can say that your characters are possessed by unseen spirits, you get a lot of extra latitude as to what constitutes motivation. Once they have shown us that he is possessed, all we need to know about Sam for his actions to make sense is that he has some kind of connection to Laura and that Laura has some connection to the supernatural. The results of the possession hold our interest as we compare them with other events in the story and look for a pattern we can fit them into.

As far as the supernatural beings responsible for the possession go, we don’t need much information at all about their motivation. Far less than for human characters. Most audiences have more or less definite ideas as to what human beings are and what makes them do the things they do. We’re more flexible as to what supernatural beings are, and are willing to spend a long time searching for coherence hidden in story elements that don’t seem to have a logical connection once we have seen that there are uncanny forces in operation.

To get the benefit of that audience participation, a writer does have to show that supernatural forces are at work. Today, Vicki seems to be possessed, but there is no scene showing us that this has happened. Vicki looks at the painting and says she wants it. Asked why, she says she doesn’t know. Nothing she says makes much sense, or much impression.

Three seconds of Vicki staring at the painting while we hear a theremin cue on the soundtrack would have sufficed to tell us that she was falling under a spell. Not only don’t we get that, Mrs Isles never gets a chance to show us what is happening to Vicki. When Vicki first looked at the painting, she was partially obscured, standing behind Maggie; examining it later, she has her back to the camera. During her dialogue with the loudly agitated Sam, only a few brief shots focus on her. Sam gives Vicki the painting. When Maggie says she wonders how Laura will react when Vicki brings the painting into the house, Vicki mumbles that she doesn’t know.

Vicki struck dumb. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

Had we seen Vicki falling under the spell, the result could have been a powerful moment. As a supernatural storyline goes on, the mysterious forces behind it spread their influence from one character to another. The first moment in this one when we could see that sort of contagion at work is when the powers that have been controlling Sam take hold of Vicki. To hide that moment from us is to hide the whole development of the narrative arc.

Moreover, that this particular development takes place on this set among these characters is quite significant. When Vicki and Maggie first met, Maggie told her that she was a jerk for taking a job at the great house of Collinwood. She told Vicki that Collinwood was a source of trouble for the town of Collinsport. As the weeks went on, Maggie and other Collinsport natives made it clear that a big part of that trouble comes from the ghosts and ghoulies that are housed in Collinwood and that threaten to break out and take over the town. This will indeed become the major theme of the show in the years ahead.

Now Vicki has lived in Collinwood for over six months, and the only ghosts she has seen are the friendly, protective spirits of Josette Collins and beloved local man Bill Malloy. The first time a supernatural being does something frightening to Vicki is in the town of Collinsport, in Maggie’s own house.

Indeed, the Phoenix storyline is the only one in the whole series to invert the usual pattern of Collinwood as hell-mouth and Collinsport as a beleaguered outpost of normality. There are other storylines where evil powers came from far away, from across the sea or from another dimension, and settled in Collinwood before spreading out to threaten Collinsport, but in this story the source of the disturbance is Laura. While she may tell David in episode 140 that she comes from one of the realms described in the legends of the Holy Grail, that origin applies only to her uncanny side. When Laura first came to town, she had told Maggie that she was originally from Collinsport, and in episode 130, Laura’s estranged husband Roger, and Roger’s sister, reclusive matriarch Liz, had mentioned that Laura’s family had moved away from town.

The episode also leaves us on our own trying to figure out what Vicki is thinking. Regular viewers might take some time during the commercial break to puzzle it out, put it in the context of what we’ve seen previously, and wonder if Vicki is in a stupor because she too is possessed. That might help us to get through the rest of the episode, but if we are to feel a live connection to the character we have to understand what she is feeling while we are watching her. A theory we come up with after the fact is no substitute for empathy we experience during the scene. And of course people tuning in to Dark Shadows for the first time will simply think that Vicki is some kind of idiot.

Many fans of Dark Shadows, especially those who haven’t seen the first 42 weeks of the show or who didn’t see them until later episodes had given them fixed impressions, blame Alexandra Moltke Isles’ acting for Dumb Vicki. But today’s scene in the Evans cottage shows how deeply unfair that is. If an actor doesn’t have lines to deliver, she can’t use her voice to create a character. If the camera isn’t pointed at her, her body language is no use. And if the director is telling her to play the scene quietly while the others are going over the top, she’s likely to fade into the background. Without even a musical sting on the soundtrack to support her, there is nothing Mrs Isles could have done to communicate to the audience what Vicki is going through in this scene.

It is easy for me to denounce Malcolm Marmorstein, since his scripts are so often so bad. I am reluctant to place a share of the blame on director John Sedwick, since I am always impressed with Sedwick’s visual style and usually with his deployment of actors. But I can’t believe anyone would have stopped him pointing a camera at Mrs Isles at the appropriate moment, giving her a chance to play her part.

Back at the great house of Collinwood, David and Laura are sitting by the fire. David asks his mother about her old boyfriends. He wants to know if she ever dated dashing action hero Burke Devlin. She admits that she did. When David lets on that he wishes Burke, rather than Roger, were his father, Laura squirms. We’ve had a number of indications that Burke might in fact be David’s biological father, and Laura is alarmed that David is raising the topic.

The front door opens, and David and Laura are glad to see their friend Vicki. They are intrigued by the package Vicki is carrying. David begs to see what’s inside. Laura, in a light and cheerful voice, tells him that if Vicki wanted him to see it, she would have shown it to them. He continues to beg. Vicki says “All right!,” and unveils it. When we were watching the episode, Mrs Acilius exclaimed “All right!?,” appalled at Vicki’s nonsensical decision to yield to David’s pleas despite the cover Laura was giving her. Again, the idea that Vicki’s weird decisions and vague, distracted manner might be symptoms of possession was somewhere in our minds, but since nothing had been shown to give direct support to that idea our emotional reaction suited a Dumb Vicki moment.

As Maggie had suggested she might be, Laura is horrified to see herself depicted in this fiery image. David is thrilled- he had been plagued by a recurring nightmare, one he had described in detail to the deeply concerned Vicki, in which his mother stood in a sea of flames and beckoned him to join her. He asks how Sam knew about his dream- did he have the same dream? Vicki mumbles that he didn’t, that he didn’t know anything about the dream or even why he was painting the picture. The audience may have wondered why Vicki didn’t remember the dream until now- the explanation that fits best with the story is that she has been possessed by the same spirit that possessed Sam, but with so little attention given to Vicki as she was reacting to the painting some very insightful critics have taken it as another Dumb Vicki moment.

David points to a white space in the painting, one the shape of his own head, and asks what goes there. Vicki mumbles that she doesn’t know, and that Sam himself didn’t know. David is delighted with the painting and wants to hang it in his room. He asks Vicki to give it to him. Vicki tells him that his mother will have to rule on that question. Laura hates the painting and tries to talk David out of hanging it, but he is nothing deterred. She finally caves in.

While David goes upstairs with the painting, Laura asks Vicki what she was thinking bringing such a terrible thing into the house. Vicki says she doesn’t know- something just came over her. That goes to show that the writer wanted us to think that Vicki was possessed, which in turn makes it all the more exasperating that he didn’t let us in on it at the appropriate time. The fact that we know the writer wants us to have a reaction doesn’t mean that we actually have it. Confusion pushes people away from a story, and merely intellectual explanations offered after the fact don’t draw us back in.

Vicki, seeming to regain some of her brainpower, goes to David’s room and tries to talk him out of keeping the painting. He dismisses her concerns immediately, without even changing his delighted manner, and hangs it on his wall. Looking at it, Vicki admits that it looks like it belongs there.

Laura enters, and tells David she has changed her mind. She thinks it would be bad for him to have such an image on display, and asks him to get rid of the painting. David responds by threatening never to speak to her again. Laura has just been reunited with David after years of separation, and his initial reaction to her return was confused and traumatic. So it is understandable that she capitulates to this extortion.

It is more surprising that Vicki responds by turning away and wringing her hands after Laura leaves. Usually Vicki scolds David after he is nasty to people, and she has been on a particular mission to break down the barriers between him and his mother. If it were clear that Vicki was under the influence of a spirit and was not herself, this uncharacteristically diffident response might have carried a dramatic punch, at least for regular viewers. As it is, it slides past as yet another Dumb Vicki moment.

Back in the Evans cottage, Sam comes back from his usual night of drinking at the local tavern. Maggie is infinitely weary of her father’s alcoholism, but does smile to hear him reciting poetry and talking about a seascape he is planning to paint. At least he’s happy. Sam goes to his easel to start that seascape, only to recoil as he realizes that he is in fact painting another version of the picture of Laura in flames.

David is asleep in his room. The painting starts to glow. Then Laura’s painted likeness is replaced with a video insert of her face. The insert grows and grows, and David screams for it to stay away.

Night-time visitor. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

Maggie’s suspicion that Laura is behind the portrait fits with the many signs the show has given us of Laura’s uncanny nature. Laura’s reaction when Vicki brings the painting home, though, shows us that what has been happening to Sam does not serve Laura’s interests, any more than David’s nightmare did.

I think there are three possible explanations for the origin of the compulsion Sam had to paint the picture, the compulsion Vicki had to claim it, and David’s nocturnal disturbances. It could be that by exposing David time and again to the image of him following her into flames, Laura is gradually wearing down David’s resistance to a horrible idea that will lead to his destruction. In support of this interpretation, we remember the first night Laura was at Collinwood. She was calling David’s name in a quiet voice at the window of her cottage, far from the great house. Yet the sound of her voice penetrated David’s mind as he slept. He writhed on his bed, and went into the nightmare. Laura’s objection to the painting militates against this explanation.

When we were watching the episode, Mrs Acilius suggested a second reading. There might be a lot to Laura. Maybe in addition to the physical presence in the house that wants David to come away with her, there is also a ghostly presence that wants to warn him and everyone else of the danger that implies. That interpretation would fit with David’s sighting, the night Laura first came to the house, of a flickering image on the lawn that looked like Laura. David longed for that Laura to come to him, but reacted with terror when he saw the fleshly Laura in the drawing room. Perhaps there are two of her, and one is trying to protect David from the other. It is also possible that the two Lauras are not aware of each other, or even fully aware of themselves. So this interpretation is easier to reconcile with apparently contradictory evidence.

Vicki’s involvement suggests a third possibility. The ghost of Josette Collins appeared to her and comforted her in episode 126, and an eerie glow had emanated from the portrait of Josette when David left Laura alone in the Old House yesterday. Laura was alarmed to hear that David was interested in the ghosts of Collinwood, had not wanted to go to the Old House, and lies to David when he asks if he saw any sign of Josette’s presence. Perhaps Josette is intervening to thwart Laura’s plans, and it is her power that is benumbing Vicki today. Josette’s previous interventions have been intermittent and subtle, suggesting that it is difficult for her to reach the world of the living. So if she is preparing for a showdown with Laura, we might it expect it to take her some time to recruit her strength.

Again, this is the kind of search for patterns that an audience will gladly go into once you’ve let them know that there are supernatural forces at work in your story. Since Josette has been in the background of the show from week one, has appeared repeatedly, has a set devoted to her in the Old House, and has established connections with both Vicki and David, we might expect her to be the first of the uncanny presences we think of when we enter a supernatural storyline. That she is a tutelary spirit presiding over Collinwood brings it into sharp focus that the estate is under assault from a supernatural force emanating from the town of Collinsport. Today’s failure with Vicki kicks Josette’s ghost out of the spotlight, and that is one of the major faults with the episode.