Tag: barnabas collins

Episode 660: Suppose I am from another century

A couple of weeks ago well-meaning governess Victoria Winters vanished into a rift in the fabric of space and time, traveling back to the 1790s to be with her husband, a loudmouthed idiot known variously as Peter and Jeff. Now evidence is accumulating that when Vicki and Peter/ Jeff were reunited, they were immediately put to death for their many crimes. Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins is determined to follow Vicki into the past and thwart the course of justice.

Barnabas and his best friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, call on occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes. Barnabas pleads with Stokes to work the same mumbo-jumbo for him that enabled Peter/ Jeff to go back to the 1790s. Stokes says that the procedure would have no effect on Barnabas. He explains that it transported Peter/ Jeff only because Peter/ Jeff properly belonged to that period. It would do nothing to a person who was already living in his own time. Barnabas then asks “Suppose I am from another century?” Stokes replies “Then it’s one of the best-kept secrets in Collinsport, isn’t it?” while Julia coughs and looks panic-stricken.

Julia and Stokes react to Barnabas’ invitation to suppose that he is from another century.

In fact, Barnabas is a native of the eighteenth century. He finds himself in the 1960s because he was, for 172 years, a vampire. This is indeed one of the best-kept secrets in town. If any part of it leaks out he and Julia will be spending the 1970s and 1980s in prison, so it is no wonder she tries to shut him down before he can make any indiscreet revelations to Stokes. But it is an exciting moment for longtime viewers. As it stands, Julia is the only character who knows Barnabas’ secret, and therefore the only one who can speak freely with him or interpret new information in the light of what the audience already knows. Stokes is a highly dynamic character; if he joins the inner circle, there is no telling how fast the action might move or in what direction. It is a bit of a letdown that Barnabas decides not to come out to him.

Stokes makes a little speech that puzzles many viewers. He says that he has reached the conclusion that Peter/ Jeff really was two people. The spirit of an eighteenth century man named Peter Bradford must have come to the year 1968 and taken possession of the body of a living man named Jeff Clark. Now that Peter has returned to the past, Jeff must have regained control of his physical being and is out there in the world someplace. This theory does not fit with anything we have seen over the last several months, and it won’t lead to any further story development.

Peter/ Jeff himself suggested the same idea a few weeks ago, but he had so little information about himself that we could discount it. Stokes, though, is one of the mouthpieces through which the show tells us what we are supposed to believe.

Many science fiction and fantasy fans like to take the world-building elements of their favorite franchises as seriously as they possibly can, and treat every apparent contradiction or dead end as a riddle to be solved. That kind of analysis doesn’t get you very far with Dark Shadows, a narrative universe whose structure star Joan Bennett summarized by saying “We ramble around.” It is tempting to go to the opposite extreme, and to assume that they didn’t do any advance planning at all. But we know from an interview that writer Violet Welles gave to the fanzine The World of Dark Shadows in 1991 that they did the same planning exercises that other daytime soaps did. They would make up six month story forecasts called “flimsies” and fill those out with more detailed plans covering periods of 13 weeks. Welles explains the resulting difficulty:

The difficult ones were — we were in 13-week segments, and there were sometimes characters that didn’t work, and because they didn’t work, they didn’t use them as much, they weren’t part of the plot. So at the end of the 13 weeks, toward the end of the cycle, you’d have characters who were really not a lot of interest who had to play scenes with other characters who really didn’t have a lot of interest, dealing with things that basically didn’t concern them. Those were hard to write. But you never felt particularly overwhelmed.

Violet Welles interviewed by Megan Powell-Nivling, The World of Dark Shadows, issue #59/60, June 1991. Preserved by Danny Horn on Dark Shadows Every Day, 30 August 2015.

In other words, while the writers definitely did long-range planning, those long-range plans come into the audience’s view not a source of secret message to decode, but in the residue left over from stories that didn’t work out. During his months on the show, Peter/ Jeff spent a lot of time getting violently angry when people called him “Peter,” responding in his grating whine “My na-a-ame is JEFF! CLARK!” That disagreeable habit made up about 90 percent of Peter/ Jeff’s personality, and the other 10 percent was no picnic either. Coupled with this Goes Nowhere/ Does Nothing story about Peter appropriating the body of Jeff Clark, I would guess that in some early stage of planning they kicked around the possibility of having two Peter/ Jeffs. But it has long since become clear that one Peter/ Jeff is already one too many. That leaves them to fill out some scenes that would otherwise run short with material that may have seemed like a good idea when they made up the flimsies six months ago, but that is pointless now.

Also in this episode, children Amy Jennings and David Collins visit Eagle Hill cemetery and have questions. Amy suggests they go see the caretaker, a suggestion David derides. He declares that the caretaker is as old as the tombstones, and that he won’t answer any of their questions. Amy insists, and they go looking for him.

The caretaker appeared on the show four times when David’s mother, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, was the chief supernatural menace. He then made five more appearances early in Barnabas’ time as a vampire. As played by veteran stage actor Daniel F. Keyes, he was a delight, a boundlessly befuddled old chap who seemed to have strayed in from the pages of EC Comics. Sadly, David and Amy don’t find the caretaker today.

Eagle Hill cemetery itself was introduced as one of several burial grounds in the Collinsport area. It is the old graveyard north of town, and Barnabas and his immediate family were the only Collinses buried there. The rest of the Collins ancestors were interred in a private family cemetery, and there was also a public cemetery somewhere in or around the village of Collinsport. They stuck with this geography longer than you might have expected. But today Amy explicitly says that Eagle Hill is on the grounds of the estate of Collinwood, just outside the front door of the main house. This contributes to the effect, growing very noticeable lately, that the imaginary space in which the drama takes place is collapsing in on itself. The occasional excursions the show took to the town of Bangor, Maine in its early days are long gone, and now we barely even see the village of Collinsport. It’s often said that Dark Shadows is Star Trek for agoraphobes; it is starting to feel as if it is retreating into a very small cocoon indeed.

Episode 659: Changing of the guard

Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, in temporary charge of the great house of Collinwood, has decided to pack children David Collins and Amy Jennings off to boarding schools in Boston. They pretend to be happy about this, but in fact want to stay in the house, where they have come under the power of the evil ghost of Quentin Collins. Neither they nor Quentin can figure out a way to stop Barnabas’ plan. David takes a photo of Barnabas standing with heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard; when the photo is developed, a mysterious figure appears in the background, hanging by the neck. Barnabas believes that the figure represents vanished governess Victoria Winters, and that he must travel back in time to rescue her. He therefore has no time to go to Boston and put the children in schools, so the plan is off.

Hanging out. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Several characters see the photo, but only Barnabas recognizes the hanged woman as Vicki. No wonder- Vicki has been played by two actresses, and neither of them posed for it. The original Vicki was Alexandra Moltke Isles; the second was Betsy Durkin. This is Carolyn Groves, who will play Vicki in a couple of upcoming episodes. The usual rule of nomenclature when discussing recast parts is to give the performers numbers, and so Mrs Isles would be Vicki #1, Miss Durkin Vicki #2, and Miss Groves Vicki #3. But in deference to their first names, we might call them Vicki A, Vicki B, and Vicki C.

Craig Slocum appears on the show for the last time today. He plays Harry Johnson, a household servant. When Carolyn Stoddard orders Harry to fetch the children’s luggage, the camera lingers on the look of distaste she gives him. Carolyn and Harry had some unpleasant dealings several months ago, when she was hiding a Frankenstein’s monster named Adam in the long deserted west wing of the house and Harry tried to use this information to blackmail her. Carolyn kept control of that situation, but her facial expression as she looks at him today shows that she remembers Harry’s behavior and does not regard him as a man to be trusted.

Upstairs, Harry finds the children in David’s room. He catches them using an antique telephone through which they have been able to communicate with Quentin. He wants to know what they have been doing. David says that they might as well tell him, prompting an alarmed reaction from Amy. He gives a partly accurate account. The true parts are the ones Harry instantly disbelieves. This wouldn’t have worked with any of the other grownups at Collinwood; they have all had too much experience of the supernatural to disregard such a story. But Harry is relatively new to the house, and is too dim-witted to understand what he has seen. Their secret is safe with him.

Slocum ‘s performances were uneven in quality. He first appeared as Noah Gifford, a criminally inclined sailor who figured in five episodes from #439 to #455, a period when Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the 1790s. He was very bad in those five. He didn’t know what to do with his voice, so that he always sounded like he was reading words one at a time off a teleprompter that kept speeding up and slowing down on its own. Dark Shadows returned to contemporary dress a few weeks after Noah’s last appearance, and Slocum returned to the cast as Harry. He had the same trouble with his speech in his early stabs at that role, but he did eventually learn to relax. In #551, he amazed the world by doing a genuinely good job. He has been passable most of the time since, and he is all right today. Still, Harry doesn’t have much room to grow, and Slocum was so bad so many times that it’s a relief to see him go.

There is an intriguing little blooper near the beginning. Barnabas is supposed to say that he is on his way to see Carolyn. Jonathan Frid actually says that he is going to see “Barrah- Carolyn.” In a recent episode, a day player asked to see “Mister Jonathan” and was ushered to Barnabas, so perhaps he caught the bug and is going to call Carolyn “Barrett, Nancy.”

Episode 657: We will never leave this house

Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, temporarily in charge of the great estate of Collinwood, has decided to place children David Collins and Amy Jennings in boarding school in Boston. Under the influence of the evil ghost of Quentin Collins, Amy and David want to remain in the house. While they pretend to be enthusiastic about Barnabas’ plan, they try to thwart it by talking about when exactly certain clothes had been in or out of certain closets. As it plays out on screen, this plan is somehow even more tedious than you might expect. Eventually Barnabas sets aside the idea of Boston, not because of anything the children have done or know about, but because the ghost of their former governess, the well-meaning Victoria Winters, made its presence known. Barnabas is attached to Vicki and he doesn’t want to miss a visit from her.

David and Amy’s new governess is Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. For the first year of the show, Maggie was a waitress, her father Sam was a drunken artist, and their house was a counterpoint to Collinwood. As a working-class residence in the village of Collinsport, it represented all the homes affected by the crises the Collinses put themselves through, and scenes there suggested that there is a whole community of people whose futures hinge on what happens on top of the hill. In 1966, there were even stories about the Collins family business and its employees, and events at the Evans cottage were key to those.

When Barnabas joined the cast in April 1967, he was a vampire, and he soon took Maggie as his victim. In time, she escaped, her memory was erased, and he was cured of vampirism. Sam died in #518 and left the show in #530. Maggie’s engagement to hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell ended a while ago; there isn’t much left to happen in the Evans cottage. When Maggie was hired to replace Vicki in #652/653, she moved into the mansion. The show formally bade farewell to the Evans cottage as a place in its own right at the end of that episode and beginning of the next, when Joe went there to get Maggie’s things and was attacked by a werewolf. From now on our excursions out of Collinwood will be brief; we don’t have any place left to stay.

Maggie looks like she’s rethinking her decision to move into the mansion. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

For some time one of the cameras has been on its last legs. In this one, it is almost completely unusable. It is something of a peculiar effect to cut back and forth between two cameras, one of them up to the broadcast standards of the period, the other of which produces only ghostly green images. The episode was directed by Henry Kaplan, who was a poor visual artist under any circumstances. The only remotely ambitious composition he tries today is a shot from a point of view inside a fireplace. They did this several times between December 1966 and March 1967, when David’s mother, undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, was on the show, often to good effect. But this time it is done with the defective camera, and it is simply difficult to see what is going on.

Episode 656: Mister Jonathan

The residents of the estate of Collinwood are under the impression that the mistress of the great house, Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, is dead. Her brother, Roger Collins, is on a business trip to London, and cannot be reached, even by the executives of the business he is there to represent. Liz’ daughter Carolyn is her heir, but she is apparently too doped up on sedatives prescribed by permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, MD, to take any part in the action of today’s episode. So it falls to Barnabas Collins, Liz’ distant cousin and the master of the Old House on the estate, to move in and start making decisions.

Barnabas is the show’s chief protagonist and its main attraction, and he ran out of story three and a half weeks ago. The ongoing plot-lines both involve Amy Jennings, a nine year old girl who is staying at the great house as Liz’ guest. Amy’s brother Chris is a werewolf, and she and strange and troubled boy David Collins are under the power of the evil ghost of Quentin Collins. The urgent thing is to make Barnabas responsible for Amy so that he can take the lead in addressing both Chris’ lycanthropy and Quentin’s haunting. To that end, it is key that he should be in charge of the great house for a while.

A stranger comes to the door and asks housekeeper Mrs Johnson if he can speak to “Mister Jonathan.” Without batting an eye, she leads him to Barnabas. This proves that Barnabas has become such a breakout hit that even the other characters know that he is played by Jonathan Frid. Perhaps we are to imagine them reading about him in the fan magazines.

The stranger is a mortician who received a telephone call about Liz’ death. Barnabas informs him that they have made other arrangements, and his services will not be needed. Barnabas and Mrs Johnson are puzzled as to who made the call. It turns out that David did it at Quentin’s bidding; how this advances Quentin’s purposes is not clear.

Amy and David’s governess, the well-meaning Victoria Winters, vanished into a gap in the space-time continuum the other day and is not expected to return. Liz hired Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, to replace her. Barnabas sticks up for Maggie when Mrs Johnson makes an unflattering comparison of her with Vicki, but he has evidently decided to eliminate her position almost immediately. He wants her to accompany him and the children on a trip to Boston where he will choose boarding schools for them to attend.

Barnabas has not spoken with Roger, who is David’s father. It is not clear who Amy’s legal guardian is. Her parents are dead, and her brother Tom was taking care of her before he died (the first time- he became a vampire and kept coming back.) Chris was away spending the nights of the full moon in the woods at that time, so Amy was sent to Windcliff, a sanitarium a hundred miles north of town. Julia is the nominal head of Windcliff and is Amy’s doctor, so it is possible she is Amy’s legal guardian. Julia is also Barnabas’ closest friend and most frequent accomplice, so it is possible she has agreed to his plan.

Even though Maggie’s job may not last for more than another week, she still needs a place to stay. So she, Mrs Johnson, and Barnabas clear Vicki’s stuff out of her room. Barnabas was hung up on the idea that he and Vicki might someday fall in love, an idea he did remarkably little to put into practice, and so he finds it distressing to be around her clothes. He demands that Mrs Johnson destroy them all. This shocks her. She finds an antique music box, and asks what to do with that. Barnabas orders her to destroy that too. Maggie takes the music box, listens to it for a second, grows wide-eyed, then hurriedly hands it to Mrs Johnson.

I can name that tune in three tinkles. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

This moment amounts to a programmatic statement. In May and June of 1967, Barnabas was a vampire and Maggie was his victim. He forced her to listen to the music box for hours on end, believing that it had a hypnotic power that would erase her personality and replace it with that of his lost love Josette. Several times it has seemed that her memory of what Barnabas was and what he did to her would come back, only for her to be subjected to one magical mind-wipe after another. That she is so quick to give Mrs Johnson the box when Barnabas has ordered her to destroy it, and that her relaxed and friendly attitude towards Barnabas does not change for one second, is a sign that the question “Will Maggie’s memory come back?” will not be coming up in Dark Shadows version 5.0.

Maggie looks for David and Amy and finds them in the drawing room. Amy is playing “London Bridge” on the piano. We have seen David interact with only one other child, the ghost of Barnabas’ nine year old sister Sarah. Sarah sang and played the recorder, and the only song she seemed to know was “London Bridge.” Evidently, David has a type.

Mrs Johnson can’t bring herself to destroy Vicki’s clothes. She tells Maggie she has closed them up in a storeroom in the basement. The only room we have heard referred to this way is the one that was kept locked for the first 54 weeks of the show because Liz was under the mistaken impression that the corpse of her husband Paul was buried there, so that must be the room she means. Longtime viewers will appreciate the reference; Vicki herself was intrigued by the room in the early days of the show, and now her things have found a home there.

They don’t stay there for long. Maggie goes to hang up her own clothes, only to find that Vicki’s are back in the closet. She asks Mrs Johnson what could have happened. In #69, her second appearance, Mrs Johnson declared that “I believe in signs and omens!” Ever since, she has shown an attitude that might be called superstitious in our world, but that in the universe of Dark Shadows is just plain common sense. She ends the episode with a monologue about how “no human hand” had moved the clothes, that it must have been some supernatural force announcing that Vicki will be coming back.

This is disappointing for a couple of reasons. First, the character of Vicki was played out at the end of #192, and the show refused to find anything interesting for her to do for the 90 weeks that followed. Alexandra Moltke Isles finally gave up and used her pregnancy as grounds to get out of her contract early, but they recast the part to continue wasting screen time on this exhausted figure. The second Vicki, Betsy Durkin, was condemned to be a fake Shemp, moping her way through utterly pointless activities unconnected with anything the audience could care about. It was a great relief when she finally vanished.

Second, the show has a poor record of using objects to evoke its themes. The music box was an exception, but most have been pretty bad. The most famous example is Burke Devlin’s filigreed fountain pen, which was the main focus of 21 episodes spread from August through November of 1966. It was supposed to be evidence in a homicide investigation and to suggest a number of things about Roger’s feelings towards his friend-turned-nemesis Burke, but at the end it was just a bunch of people looking for a pen. The most recent at this point was a wristwatch that fake Vicki gave to her husband shortly before his disappearance. It turned up after he was gone and would occasionally start ticking when his spirit was near. Miss Durkin had to play scene after scene with that watch as her main partner, and it is no reflection on her acting ability that the results were so uniformly dismal. There’s a definite sinking feeling when we see Vicki’s wardrobe presented as another symbolic object.

Episode 654: After you see what happens, you will never be the same again

One of the duller storylines in the first several months of Dark Shadows was the relationship between hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell and flighty heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard. Carolyn and Joe were thoroughly bored with each other before we ever saw them, and we were treated to scene after scene of them having nothing to say while they were out on dates. They only kept going out to humor reclusive matriarch Liz, who was both Carolyn’s mother and Joe’s employer.

Eventually Joe and Carolyn went their separate ways, and Joe struck up a much happier romance with Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. There were too few obstacles between Joe and Maggie to make for exciting drama. There were long stretches when the show had established that they wanted to get married and couldn’t give us a single reason why they didn’t. Occasionally one of them would be caught up in the strange goings-on, and then we would see the other being all anguished and determined to get to the bottom of all this. As Dark Shadows‘ principal representatives of the working class of the village of Collinsport, Maggie and Joe were appealing when they went into that mode, suggesting a whole community of people who struggle to make sense of the inexplicable disasters that continually emanate from the big house on the hill.

Joe is on his way out of the show now. Actor Joel Crothers has taken a part on another soap, and will be leaving any day. In recent months, supernatural beings have cast spells on Joe and Maggie that have caused each to think the other had fallen out of love. Yesterday they met at her house. He told her he would be leaving town soon, probably never to return. They agreed to part as friends.

This scene of parting was cut short when a telephone call came summoning Maggie to the great house of Collinwood. Joe drove her there, and was downstairs when Liz offered Maggie a job as governess to the two children living there, strange and troubled boy David Collins and Joe’s orphaned cousin Amy Jennings. Maggie accepted the job, which Liz stipulated would start immediately. Joe drove back to her house to get the things she would need to stay the night.

Joe had only been in the Evans cottage a moment when a window burst open and a werewolf entered in a shower of broken glass. We open today with Joe fighting the werewolf. He manages to stab the werewolf with a pair of scissors. The werewolf does not appear to be gravely wounded, but he does run away.

The werewolf drops in on Joe. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Back at Collinwood, Maggie is worried that it is taking Joe so long to get her things. Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins suggests that Joe might be having trouble finding the items on the list she made; she rules that out, saying that it was a very short list. She calls home. Joe picks up the telephone and immediately passes out. This alarms Maggie. She stays at Collinwood while Barnabas goes to the cottage to investigate.

Barnabas finds an unconscious, bloodied Joe in the midst of the wreckage strewn throughout the Evans cottage. Joe comes to, and resists Barnabas’ offer to call a doctor.

Shortly after, Barnabas enters Collinwood, Joe leaning heavily on his shoulder. Barnabas went to the Evans cottage alone, and he cannot possibly have carried Joe all the way back. Later, it will come up that Joe’s car is still at the cottage. So Barnabas must have learned to drive and acquired a car at some point in the last several months.

In the drawing room, Joe receives medical attention from permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, MD. When Julia asks if he is ready to talk to the police, she is surprised to find that he hasn’t called them, isn’t going to call them, and doesn’t want anyone else to call them. She and Barnabas try to reason with him. When Julia points out that the werewolf might attack someone else tonight, Joe asks if it did any good when Liz saw the werewolf and called the sheriff. Julia looks down and, sounding like a chastened child, says “No.” Regular viewers know that calling the sheriff’s office never does any good in Collinsport, and Julia’s reaction is so much that of a person who is aware of this fact that I suspect the humor is intentional.

Barnabas and Julia reluctantly agree not to call the sheriff. They leave Joe alone with Maggie, who says she feels guilty that this terrible thing happened to him while he was doing her a favor. He says he’s just glad it didn’t happen to her. She says “We keep on hurting each other, and it just isn’t right!,” apparently expecting to finish the parting-of-the-ways scene that was interrupted yesterday. He is not interested. She notices that he is clutching a strip of fabric, and asks him what it is. He says that it is “nothing at all.”

The next day, we see mysterious drifter Chris Jennings in his apartment. We hear his thoughts in voiceover as he worries that he may have killed his cousin Joe the night before, when he was the werewolf. This does not imply that Chris remembers what he did in his lupine form; he knew that a pentagram had been seen on Joe’s face, and that this marks the werewolf’s next victim.

Chris goes to Collinwood to see Julia. He had hoped she would give him a sedative powerful enough to make him sleep through his time as the werewolf. Had he told her his real problem, she would likely have been very helpful, since she specializes in treating patients who are based on monsters from Universal Studios movies of the 1930s, but all she knew when he came to her was that he was a hobo demanding narcotics. It’s against Julia’s nature to deny anyone sedatives, so she did give him a few pills, but they didn’t help.

Chris sees Maggie. She tells Chris that she just left his sister Amy playing at Barnabas’ house. She explains that she is the governess now, a fact in which Chris feigns interest for almost five seconds. “Oh, that’s… that’s really great, that’ll be great for her” he says. He then tells Maggie he has been looking for Joe. When she indicates that Joe was attacked the night before, he grabs her by the arms so hard he hurts her and shouts his questions in her face.

As it happens, Joe is also looking for Chris. At nightfall, Chris returns home to find Joe waiting for him. Joe had brought the strip of fabric that Maggie had seen him holding at Collinwood and matched it to a gap torn in Chris’ shirt. He confronts Chris, who tries desperately to get him to leave. When he realizes he cannot get rid of Joe, he tells Joe where he keeps his gun, and tells him to use it “when it happens.” Joe sees Chris turn into the werewolf and does empty the revolver into his chest, but it only slows him down. As the episode ends, the werewolf is closing in on Joe.

In his posts about this episode and the preceding one, Danny Horn remarks on Maggie and Joe’s inability to have an extended breakup scene as a sign that Dark Shadows is very different from other soap operas, and on Maggie’s inability to get anyone interested in her new job as a sign that Dark Shadows has changed- “This is not that kind of show anymore,” her writes. I would go further, and say that they amount to a programmatic statement. The first 38 weeks of the show were all about the well-meaning Victoria Winters’ attempt to find her place as a governess; Maggie can’t get us to pay attention to her thoughts about the position for 38 seconds. Carolyn and Joe’s months-long relationship amounted to about one-fifth of a breakup scene, the part where the former lovers realize they’ve said everything they had to say but neither wants to be the first to leave the room. But Joe and Maggie no sooner start talking about the end of their far more substantial relationship than it is time to rush off and do battle with a werewolf. That’s what Dark Shadows is about now, and they want us to know it.

Maggie’s brief remark to Chris that she left Amy playing at Barnabas’ house will also strike longtime viewers as a programmatic statement. That house, the Old House on the estate, was introduced in #70 as a haunted ruin. David’s habit of sneaking into it caused the adults no end of concern, especially after Barnabas moved into it in #220. Barnabas was a vampire then. That was a secret, but everyone could understand that he did not want to look up and find David in his house. In those days, the governess would never have dreamed of leaving her charge to play in Barnabas’ house.

That Maggie is now the governess adds an extra charge to this moment. In May and June of 1967, Maggie was Barnabas’ victim and he held her prisoner in the Old House. Julia used her preternatural powers of hypnosis to erase Maggie’s recollection of that ordeal, but several times since the show has teased the idea that her memory might come back. When Maggie so blithely mentions that she left Amy at Barnabas’ house, it is clear to use that Dark Shadows has no further plans for its previous storylines about the place.

I was puzzled as to why Joe suspected that the strip he tore from the werewolf’s shirt would match Chris’. There is nothing at all distinctive about Chris’ clothing even in the full light of day, and in a few moments of pitched battle in a dimly lit room there is no way anyone would have recognized the werewolf’s clothes as the ones Joe had seen Chris wearing earlier that evening. I think it would have been better if, when Joe saw Chris in his room in yesterday’s episode, Chris had spilled some brightly colored fluid or powder on his shirt. He could easily have done that, it is a small room and the two of them were both very upset. Joe could then have recognized the smudge during the fight, and that would have explained why he thought that it was his cousin under the fur.

Episode 652/653: Someone to take care of them immediately

Well-meaning governess Victoria Winters has vanished into the past, sarcastic dandy Roger Collins is on a long business trip overseas, and matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard is in the grips of a paralyzing depression. That leaves a shortage of adults in the great house of Collinwood, and old world gentleman Barnabas Collins has left his own house on the estate to be of assistance. He is fussing over Liz and insisting that she take the sedatives permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, MD, prescribed for her. Liz says that all she cares about is that someone take Vicki’s place in the lives of the children in the house, Roger’s son David Collins and houseguest Amy Jennings. To address that concern she orders Barnabas to telephone Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, and ask her to replace Vicki starting tonight.

Maggie is in her house talking with her ex-boyfriend Joe Haskell about his plan to move out of town soon when the telephone rings. Soon the two of them are in the drawing room at the great house, where Barnabas fills them in about recent developments.

Joe is Amy’s cousin. He has been doing what he can to fill the void left in her life by the deaths of her parents and her brother Tom, and more particularly by the puzzling refusal of her brother Chris to settle down and live with her. Amy comes downstairs and sees Joe; she is delighted to spend time with him while Maggie is upstairs with Liz, accepting the offer.

Amy’s delight gives way to alarm when she sees a pentagram superimposed on Joe’s face. She does not know what the returning viewers do, that Chris is a werewolf and the pentagram is the mark of his next victim, but she does know that it is a sign that Joe is in great danger. She pleads with him not to go to Maggie’s house and collect her things; she tells him that if he stays at Collinwood tonight, he will be safe. Joe dismisses her concerns as the result of staying up past her bedtime.

Joe enters the Evans cottage. While he is looking over the list Maggie gave him, he hears growling noises outside the window. He turns to look, and sees the window shatter and the werewolf jump through the glass.

The episode has a definite high point and an equally definite low point. The high point comes when Amy is staring at the full moon, which she senses is associated with something very bad. She cries as she does so. That is a powerful enough image that the following scene, when Barnabas sees her tears, asks her what is wrong, and she hugs him, is quite effective.

The low point comes when we see the werewolf sleeping on his bed. A werewolf can be terrifying if you catch only brief glimpses of him, and then only when he is in the middle of attacking someone. But this furry little fella isn’t scary at all. You keep expecting him to start flopping his legs because he’s dreaming about chasing a bunny. It generates a bad laugh that undercuts the final scene of the attack on Joe.

Whooooo‘s the goodest boy? Are you the goodest boy? I bet you are! Screenshot by Dark Shadows Every Day.

Amy has a couple of great one-word lines, too. Barnabas asks, “Amy, what are you doing with the door open?” To which she replies, “Nothing.” Later, Joe asks “Well what was all that you two were talking about?” To which she replies, “Nothing.” She really is a kid!

Episode 651: The tomb is ready, and I am ready

Mysterious drifter Chris Jennings telephones the great house of Collinwood. Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins answers. Chris asks to speak to permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, MD. Barnabas tells him Julia is busy with a patient, and Chris says that it is extremely urgent Julia call him back the moment she is free.

Julia comes downstairs. She had been tending to matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Liz is mentally ill. She is deeply depressed and fixated on the idea that she will soon be buried alive. Barnabas starts talking about the witch whose spell started Liz’ illness; Julia points out that the origin doesn’t really matter. Indeed it does not. Liz’ condition is quite logical when we realize that she has been exposed to a long series of traumatic events of supernatural character. Of course she feels helpless- her world really does not make rational sense, and there really are forces beyond her control that are determined to bring misery to her and those she loves. And of course she is preoccupied with death- she is surrounded, not only by people in mortal jeopardy, but also by figures who are at once dead and alive. Unknown to her, Barnabas is one of these- he died in the 1790s, became a vampire, and was restored to humanity less than a year ago. The story of Liz’ depression is not really a tale of the supernatural, but of a person responding to her environment in a perfectly natural way.

Liz’ depression is not exactly a fun story, and the show hadn’t done anything with it for months. We might have hoped it was all over. What has brought it back is the disappearance of well-meaning governess Victoria Winters. The other day, Vicki embraced her husband, an unpleasant man known variously as Peter and Jeff, and vanished into thin air as Barnabas and Liz watched. She and Peter/ Jeff were traveling back in time to the 1790s, never to return. Liz was very close to Vicki; the show spent its first year hinting heavily that she was Vicki’s biological mother, though they never got round to saying so explicitly or telling us anything about Vicki’s father. Now that Vicki is gone, Liz is inconsolable.

That is the in-universe explanation for Liz’ trouble. There are two real-world reasons. First, Joan Bennett was going away for a few weeks to do a play in Chicago, and the show needed to explain why Liz wasn’t going to be around when so much of the action was taking place in her house. Second, the key figure in both of the ongoing storylines is Chris’ eleven year old sister Amy, who is staying at Collinwood. Barnabas is the show’s chief protagonist, and so far he does not have any particular connection to either of those stories. Plunging Liz into a paralyzing depression completes the task they started by sending her brother Roger on a business trip overseas. It means that Barnabas has a reason to camp out in the main house and act as a father figure to Amy.

Barnabas had a vague notion about a romance with Vicki, though he did almost nothing to develop such a relationship. His basic feeling towards her seems to have been that he might want her someday, and so he reacted with petulant anger to any person or event that made her unavailable to him. Thinking about Vicki’s departure with Peter/ Jeff, he spends several minutes pouting while Julia tries gently to reason with him.

Barnabas is very upset that Vicki was so inconsiderate as to move on with her life when he might someday have wanted her. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

At the end of his tantrum, Barnabas declares that he and Julia should go back upstairs and talk with Liz. As they are going, he sees the telephone and says “Oh. By the way, Chris Jennings called. He said it was urgent.” It’s even funnier that Barnabas remembers this call so late in the scene than it would be if he had forgotten it altogether. Chris may use words like “emergency” and “extremely urgent,” but in Barnabas’ world there is only one truly urgent matter, and that is whatever his feelings are at the moment.

Vampires are metaphors for extreme selfishness. Barnabas may not be a vampire anymore, but he is still very selfish. But perhaps is attitude towards Vicki is not so unsympathetic as I have made it out to be. When he was still under his curse, he thought he might be able to remake Vicki as an eighteenth century woman, then turn her into a vampire and take her as his bride. Vicki did indeed have an attachment to that era, so much so that she traveled back in time to the 1790s. And when he became human again, Barnabas was immediately embroiled with a succession of witches and monsters, to none of whom did he want to expose Vicki. He wanted to clear them out of the way so his life could start, and once it did he would be free to approach her. But her life was already underway, and of course his was too. The nemeses Barnabas and Julia fought together throughout 1968 are gone now, but so is Vicki, and it is the two of them who are alone together.

The other day, Chris dropped by to ask Julia for sedatives. She was unimpressed with his drug-seeking behavior, and so when Barnabas tells her about Chris’ call she says that he can wait. What she does not know is that Chris is a werewolf, and he was hoping that strong enough pills could knock him out throughout the night of the full moon.

Chris and Amy’s cousin Joe Haskell has been trying to fill in for Chris in the big brother role. He and Amy have gone to the movies, and we see them on their way back to the great house, looking at the moon. Amy tells Joe that she is terribly afraid of the moon, for reasons she can’t explain. Joe asks if she really saw a pentagram on his face in #648; she confirms that she did. Joe knows that someone else saw it too, visiting medium Janet Findley. He also knows that when he told Chris about it he was terribly upset. Neither Joe nor Amy knows what Chris and Madame Findley knew, that it is the sign that he will be the werewolf’s next victim.

Amy is alone in the foyer of the great house when Liz comes down the stairs, apparently in a trance. She does not respond when Amy calls out to her, but walks out into the night. Amy is standing in the open doorway, watching her, when Barnabas comes and asks what she is doing. She tells Barnabas what happened. He tells her to go to bed; she refuses. He then decides it will be good enough if she waits in the drawing room until he brings Liz back. She goes to the drawing room, but when he goes off to tell Julia what has happened she slips out to look for Liz. Barnabas learns that she has left when Julia, whom he has sent to sit with her, reports that she is not in the drawing room.

Barnabas is out looking for Liz and Amy when Chris comes to Collinwood. He is upset that Julia did not call him back; she is skeptical of him. He tries to give a reasonable-sounding explanation; if only he knew of her background treating vampires and Frankensteins, he would realize that he has everything to gain by telling her the truth. She finally gives him a bottle of sleeping pills, along with a wary look and an injunction to use the pills only as directed.

Liz goes to the old Collins family mausoleum. Barnabas’ parents and sister are buried there, and he was himself trapped there for 172 years when he was a vampire. She thinks of it now as her tomb, and tells herself that she is ready to be buried there now. She collapses. Amy finds her, fears that she is dead, and cries out. Her voice brings Barnabas, who tells Amy that Liz is alive. He also says that they must get her back to the house at once. Barnabas puts his arms under Liz’ left side, Amy puts hers under her right, and they lift her. This brief glimpse of the two of them working together goes a long way towards establishing Barnabas’ closeness to Amy.

I’ve altered the saturation and exposure a bit in this still. Though the original is darker and the fog machine was working overtime, in the moving image you can see what Amy is doing clearly enough.

Joe pays another visit to Chris’ room. Chris has taken a bunch of sleeping pills from the bottle Julia gave him. Joe scolds Chris for his failure to visit Amy. Chris knows that he could transform at any time, and is desperate to get Joe to leave. Joe does leave. Chris goes to bed. He falls asleep. The camera pans to his hand, which has already become a werewolf’s paw.

Episode 650: I must see to my luggage

Version 4.0 of Dark Shadows began in #466 when old world gentleman Barnabas Collins was cured of vampirism and ended in #637 when Barnabas and his friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, found that witch-turned-vampire Angelique had departed the scene. That version was a Monster Mash in which the main attractions of all Universal Studios horror hits of the 1930s found their counterparts. Version 5.0 is focused on just two monsters, a werewolf and a ghost. The werewolf is Chris Jennings, brother of nine year old Amy. The ghost is Quentin Collins, who is obsessing Amy and her friend, strange and troubled boy David Collins.

Today is taken up with two problems of plot mechanics. First, Barnabas is the undisputed star of the show, and he does not have any particular connection to either of the ongoing stories. Second, well-meaning governess Vicki is too familiar with the supernatural, too secure in her place in the great house of Collinwood, and too familiar to the audience to permit Amy and David to figure in a story based on Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, even if that story is inverted so that it is the children who see the ghosts and the governess who doubts them.

Today, Vicki’s husband, a repellent man known variously as Peter and Jeff, returns from the dead and takes her with him. He materializes in her bedroom, takes her by the hands, and they both vanish while Barnabas and matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard look on. That solves the second problem.

Peter/ Jeff and Fake Vicki vanish as Barnabas and Liz look on. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Liz’ brother Roger solves the first problem when he asks Barnabas to hang around the house while he is away on a business trip to London. Barnabas will therefore be on the spot while the children cope with “The Haunting of Collinwood.”

The opening narration is delivered by Roger Davis, who plays Peter/ Jeff. This not only produces a sinking feeling in regular viewers who recognize Mr Davis’ voice and realize that his absence these last few weeks was only a temporary reprieve, it also spoils the surprise when Peter/ Jeff shows up.

This is the last of Betsy Durkin’s 10 appearances as Vicki. The part originated in #1 as the audience’s main point of view character; then and for the next 126 weeks, she was played by Alexandra Moltke Isles. By the time Mrs Isles left the show, Vicki had long since run out of story, and was saddled with the hopelessly unappealing Mr Davis as her primary scene partner. Inheriting those difficulties, Miss Durkin never had a chance to establish herself as part of the show.

Episode 648: Her name is Madame

This is the second of three episodes featuring Cavada Humphrey as Madame Janet Findley, a medium called in to investigate the strange goings-on at the great house of Collinwood. Humphrey’s performance so utterly dominates the segment, and I have so little to add to what I said about her style in yesterday’s post, that all I can do is make a series of more or less miscellaneous observations about its other aspects.

Today Madame Findley meets children David Collins and Amy Jennings. Amy and David are coming under the influence of evil spirit Quentin Collins. She questions them in the drawing room, and finds a hidden panel that leads to the long-abandoned west wing of the house. Over the children’s objections, she enters the secret passage. As soon as she is in, they hurriedly close the panel, locking her in. Evidently their objections were part of a ruse designed to lead her to Quentin’s stronghold. All too often on Dark Shadows, the audience knows too much about what characters are trying to do. This scene stands out, because they really do keep us guessing whether the children want Madame Findley to go into the secret passage. We don’t really know what their goals are until we see them shut her in.

Madame Findley goes into the darkness. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Earlier in the episode, Amy’s brother Chris dropped in. He was very eager to see permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, MD. Amy mentioned to Chris that there was another visitor in the house. When Chris asked who it was, Amy replied, “Her name is Madame- Madame something- at least that’s what they call her.”

I heard these lines in the voice of T. S. Eliot. The rhythm is reminiscent of a section of his poem The Waste Land, which in 1968 was an extremely familiar text to people with literary ambitions:

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,

Had a bad cold, nevertheless

Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,

With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,

Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,

(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)

Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,

The lady of situations.

Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,

And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,

Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,

Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find

The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.

I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.

Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,

Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:

One must be so careful these days.

It was indeed a mysterious Tarot card that prompted matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard to call for help, and that call brought Madame Findley to the house. The card she interprets is the Tower of Destruction, which unlike the cards Eliot’s Madame Sostris describes actually appears in existing Tarot decks. She doesn’t have a cold, and she isn’t in the business of selling horoscopes door to door. On the contrary, as Humphrey plays her she is a dazzling presence.

Liz did not call Madame Findley directly. She telephoned occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes, who introduced her to La Findley. At first sight, Stokes appears to be a stuffy academic with an impossible Anglophile manner, but as we get to know him he turns out to be very much at home in the bizarre netherworld in which the show takes place, so much so that his supernatural adversaries fear that he may have powers surpassing theirs. T(homas) St(earn)s Eliot was so much like T(imothy) Eliot St(oke)s in the first impression he made, so highly regarded by the sort of people who wrote Dark Shadows, and so generally famous in the 1960s that it is very likely that Stokes’ name was at least partly inspired by him.

It’s true that Madame Findley’s name lacks the exotic glamour Eliot gave his character. I suppose if you have all of Europe to choose from, you can take your stray Tarot cards to someone named “Madame Sosostris,” but if you are limited to central Maine, you have to settle for “Janet Findley.”

I made a remark about Madame Findley’s name in the comments on Danny Horn’s post about episode #647 on his great Dark Shadows Every Day:

It’s just delightful that they introduce an otherworldly, mystical character, played with an actress who brings a genuinely eerie note to her performance, and her name is… “Janet Findley.” It’s like Monty Python and the Holy Grail, when they meet the wizard who is known as “Tim.”

I wonder if there’s any connection between the name “Janet Findley” and the name “Janet Fisher,” whom Carolyn mentioned as a friend once of twice in the first season. Seems like a lot of Janet Fs. For that matter, I wonder if there’s a connection between Tim the Wizard from Monty Python and Tim(othy Eliot) Stokes, who a couple of episodes back had to tell Vicki that he isn’t a wizard.

–Comment left by Acilius, 8 October 2020, on Danny Horn, “Episode 647: The Wire,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 12 May 2015

That remark drew a response from a commenter who posts as “Mary”:

Findley is a popular name on Dark Shadows. In addition to Janet, Margaret Findley is one of the ghostly widows, Thomas Findley is one of Jeb’s zombies in the Leviathan storyline and Findley’s cove is the location of Carolyn’s cottage in 1995.

Comment left by “Mary,” 18 February 2021, on Danny Horn, “Episode 647: The Wire,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 12 May 2015

When Madame Findley asks about the closed-off parts of the house, Liz tells her about both the west wing and an east wing. The phrase “east wing” had come up a couple of times in the first year of the show, but it always seemed to be either a case of the writers not having made up their minds which side of the house the deserted wing was on or a slip of the tongue by the actors. This is the first time the show makes it clear that the house really does have two deserted wings.

Humphrey was too perfect for Dark Shadows to play only one role. In a comment on Danny’s post about this episode, I indulged in a little fanfic about another part that would have been right for her:

Cavada Humphrey looks quite a bit like Jonathan Frid. I wonder what 1795 would have been like if Barnabas had had an older sister who bossed him around, stood around during his ridiculously childish fits of petulance, occasionally acted as his conscience, and time and again serve as his enabler and protector. It would have been funny to see Grayson Hall’s Countess express disapproval of such a relationship.

Heck, that older sister could have been Sarah. Just because she’s a child in her ghost form doesn’t mean she has to have died at that age. Maybe she comes back in the form in which her relationship to her brother took its permanent shape, when she was about nine and he was about seven. Of course, that possibility is foreclosed at Sarah’s first appearance, when she tells Maggie not to let her “big brother” know she saw her, but I suppose they could have retconned that away with a phony flashback where she says “little brother.”

Comment left by Acilius, 8 October 2020, on Danny Horn, “Episode 648: Astral Disturbances,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 14 May 2015.

I’m very fond of Sharon Smyth, and Sarah’s last appearance in the 1795 segment was so poignant it would have been a substantial loss for her not to have been in it. On the other hand, she had so much less to do when she was playing a living being than she did in the preceding months when Sarah was a ghost, and so much of what she did get to do was outside her rather sharply limited range, that it is not difficult to imagine a different kind of Sarah making the eighteenth century insert a more compelling drama.

Episode 645: We’ll go downstairs and be ourselves again

The ghost of the mysterious Quentin Collins has trapped children David Collins and Amy Jennings in a storeroom in the long-deserted west wing of the great house of Collinwood. Unable to open the door to the corridor, David and Amy have found another room hidden behind a panel in the storeroom. A room inside another room is often referred to as a “closet,” and this is the perfect soap opera closet- there is literally a skeleton in it.

On Dark Shadows, a fashion-conscious skeleton is never seen without a wig. This one is no exception. It is seated in a chair that swivels towards the children, revealing its face. This swivel reminds us of one of the most famous reveals of a bewigged skeleton in cinema, that of Norman Bates’ mother in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.

Amy and David conclude that the skeleton in the closet must be Quentin’s. The skeleton sits beside an antique gramophone that plays a sickly old waltz over and over; Amy wonders how it started playing. David has been living in the house for two and a half years, so his experience with ghosts is already very extensive, and the gramophone is the least of his concerns.

The adults in the great house have noticed David and Amy’s absence and have gone looking for them. Matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard calls at the other residence on the estate, the home of her distant cousin Barnabas Collins. She tells Barnabas that she wonders if they may have slipped in while he was sleeping. Barnabas tells Liz that he locked all the doors before going to bed, to which she responds “Barnabas, a locked door never kept David Collins out.” In 1967, Barnabas was a vampire and David kept endangering himself by sneaking into his house. In those days, David’s father Roger once made a similar remark. Barnabas isn’t a vampire anymore, but everyone other than Dark Shadows‘ hardcore fans will always think of him as one. David’s inability to get out of the room where Quentin kept him and Amy would suggest that he too has changed, and is now at a loss before locked doors. But for Liz, her nephew will always be a master burglar.

Barnabas searches his house and does not find the children. He and Liz leave for the great house. Hiding nearby, the children see them go and sneak in. As per Quentin’s orders, they go upstairs and take a wooden cradle. Later, we will see them put the cradle in the room with the skeleton and interact with Quentin’s ghost there. Their activities in the room don’t make any sense to the audience; they clearly are not meant to. They come after Amy and David have agreed to “play the game,” using a phrase we hear for the first time today. Those familiar with the mysterious atmosphere of ghost stories can assume it will be some time before we will get enough information even to guess what sort of game it is.

For longtime viewers, the highlight of today’s episode comes when Amy meets Barnabas and gives him a hug. Amy has dominated the show since her first appearance in #632; Barnabas has been its undisputed star since he joined the cast in #211. It turns out that the two of them became friends when they were both patients at Windcliff, a mental hospital a hundred miles north of town.

Amy hugs Barnabas while Liz and David look on.

The director of Windcliff is Julia Hoffman, MD. For almost a year and a half, Julia has been a permanent houseguest at Collinwood; as 1968 has gone on, she has become Barnabas’ inseparable friend. She hugged Barnabas for the first time in #635, to his evident discomfort. But as we saw when he interacted with the ghost of his little sister Sarah in #364 and again when we saw him with the living Sarah in the extended flashback to the 1790s that ran from November 1967 to March 1968, Barnabas gets along well with little girls, so it isn’t such a surprise that he returns Amy’s embrace.

In #629, Liz told Julia that Barnabas was miserable at Windcliff. If Barnabas were still a vampire, it would be easy to imagine his evil overwhelming the scientific rationality at the heart of a psychiatric facility, as it has long since overwhelmed Julia’s professional ethics. But his curse is in abeyance now. They’ve had to work to keep us thinking that he is exotic and uncanny and dangerous; one look at him in a group therapy session would undo all that work so abruptly that we would never stop laughing. Of course we never see him as a patient there. It was daring of them even to include Liz’ line, inviting us to imagine him in such a mundane setting.

In a comment on Danny Horn’s great Dark Shadows Every Day, Stephen E. Robinson wonders about the image Amy conjures up when she says that she and Barnabas spent time together as patients at Windcliff:

There’s an implication that Barnabas and Amy hung out at Windcliff, because apparently exposing small children, in shock over the deaths of family members, to middle-aged mental patients is part of the healing process. The Barnabas/Amy scene makes me laugh at loud because it’s as if the writers think Windcliff is a vacation resort and Barnabas and Amy met by the pool.

Stephen E. Robinson, comment left 11 May 2015 at 6:59 AM Pacific time, on Danny Horn, “Episode 645: Spirited Away,” 10 May 2015, Dark Shadows Every Day.

Stephen is being generous- Barnabas was in the hospital because he had himself been the victim of a vampire, and Amy was there because her brother Tom had died. She did not know, but Julia did, that Tom had also come back as a vampire, and it was Barnabas who destroyed him, first by driving a stake through his heart, later by forcing him into the sunlight. I’m no psychiatrist, but with that history of closely related but non-discussable traumas I wouldn’t think the two of them ought to spend much time together.

But of course none of that matters. Barnabas and Julia are the show’s principal protagonists, and they ran out of story two weeks ago. Ever since Amy took over, we’ve been waiting to see how she will connect with them. Now that we know she is Barnabas’ substitute sister and Julia’s sometime patient, they are ready to rejoin the action.