barnabas collins – Page 22 – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 534: Selfish fool

This was the second of five episodes credited to director John Weaver. One possible reason he wasn’t contracted to do more is seen in the first minute, when recovering vampire Barnabas crouches down to lift a paper from the floor. The camera lingers on the show’s biggest star in this ungainly posture.

The latest installment of our occasional series of photos, “Sex Symbols of the 1960s.”

The paper is a note in the handwriting of well-meaning governess Vicki. It says that Vicki wants to go away rather than tell Barnabas about a dream she had. It ends with the declaration that Vicki would “rather die” than hurt Barnabas; he jumps to the conclusion that this means she is about to commit suicide, and he rushes off to the great house of Collinwood to stop her.

Barnabas and Vicki know what regular viewers also know, that her dream was no ordinary nightmare, but was the penultimate event in the “Dream Curse” that the wicked witch known variously as Angelique and Cassandra has set as part of her quest to destroy Barnabas. Each of an appallingly long list of characters has the same dream and suffers terrible torment that can be relieved only by telling it to the next person in line, who repeats the process. Vicki knows that when the dream gets back to Barnabas, Angelique/ Cassandra’s goal is supposed to be complete. Vicki thinks that goal is Barnabas’ death; he and we know that it is his relapse into active vampirism.

Barnabas’ interpretation of “I’d rather die than do that” as Vicki saying she is going to kill herself may seem silly to first-time viewers, but those who have been watching Dark Shadows from the beginning will see some grounds for it. In #2, Vicki was standing on the cliff of Widows’ Hill when sarcastic dandy Roger startled her by asking if she was planning to jump; he went on to tell her that she wouldn’t be the first to end her life in that way. In #5, drunken artist Sam saw her in the same place and told her the story of gracious lady Josette, who apparently was the first to do so. In the months that followed, we several times heard of a legend that governesses kept jumping off the cliff. Throughout the first year, Vicki came to be deeply involved with the ghost of Josette. When Barnabas joined the show, Josette was retconned as his lost love, and her suicide as her response to his vampirism. So Vicki’s connection to Josette, her job as a governess, her affection for Barnabas, and her involvement in a crisis about his curse combine to prompt him to think of her as a likely suicide.

When Barnabas gets to the great house, Vicki tells him she did not write the note. They figure out that it was a forgery by Angelique/ Cassandra, meant to bring Barnabas into contact with Vicki so that she would have an opportunity to tell him the dream. Barnabas goes, and permanent houseguest Julia, who is Barnabas’ best friend and partner in crime, talks with Vicki about the dream.

Later, Julia goes to Barnabas’ house, and he tells her that he cannot let Vicki go on suffering for his sake. He says that he will make her tell him the dream to end her suffering. Julia points out that this will make him a vampire again, and he says he will just have to accept that.

Barnabas laments his own past selfishness throughout this scene, but his willingness to revert to vampirism suggests that he has learned nothing. He will not be the only one who suffers if that condition reoccurs. Vicki herself was his victim when his blood-lust went into remission, and there is no telling how many other people he will bite, enslave, and kill if he reverts. That he can strike a noble pose while claiming that he is going to sacrifice himself for Vicki creates an image of total narcissism.

Meanwhile, heiress Carolyn learns that a very tall man named Adam is still alive and is being hunted by the police. Adam abducted Carolyn and held her prisoner in an old shack in the woods some weeks before, but later saved her life. What she does not know is that Adam is a Frankenstein’s monster and that before she met him, he had spent virtually his whole conscious life chained to a wall in a prison cell in Barnabas’ basement. As far as he knew, holding each other captive was just how people behaved. In those days, Adam spoke only a few words, and could not explain this to Carolyn. But she did find a gentleness in him, and even while she was his prisoner she never hated him.

Now, Carolyn is very concerned about Adam’s well-being. She goes back to the old shack in the woods and finds him hiding there. She discovers that he has learned a great many words since she knew him; he confirms that Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes had been harboring him and teaching him. She goes off to get Stokes, promising to bring him back so that he and Adam can reconnect.

In the discussion following the recap of this episode on Dark Shadows Before I Die, Christine Scoleri remarks on Carolyn’s “Frankenfantasy date with Adam.” That was the first I’d seen the expression “Frankenfantasy,” or had thought that enough people harbored erotic feelings about Frankenstein’s monster that such a term would be necessary.

Amused as I am by the word “Frankenfantasy,” I really don’t think it applies to Carolyn. But since she is the only woman with whom Adam has ever had a conversation, it makes sense that he might interpret her behavior that way. As my wife, Mrs Acilius, pointed out, that would continue theme that has been developed among the other male and female characters who interact in the episode. Barnabas sees Julia as a close friend, and she wants him to be her lover. Barnabas and Vicki share a real affection, which he has a vague idea of converting into a romance, but there is zero erotic chemistry between them. If Adam mistakes Carolyn’s earnest friendship for sexual desire, he’ll fit right in.

Episode 532/533: Your dream will end with me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vicki has had it with Angelique/ Cassandra.

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

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

Episode 531: A blazing light

Yesterday, recovering vampire Barnabas opened the door to his closet. Hardworking young fisherman Joe fell out, and Barnabas saw Frankenstein’s monster Adam at the window, laughing menacingly. Adam has many reasons to hate Barnabas, and Barnabas concludes that Adam wants to frame him for the murder of Joe.

A commenter on John and Christine Scoleri’s Dark Shadows Before I Die, posting under the name “Grant,” pointed out that in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s novel Frankenstein the Creature kills someone and frames one of Frankenstein’s closest friends for the crime. The reference seems to be pretty obvious.

Barnabas’ friend, mad scientist Julia, shows up. She finds that Joe is not dead. She says that he has, in a bit of Collinsport English we have heard once or twice before, “a pulsebeat.” She and Barnabas have a long conversation about a variety of topics, several of them highly incriminating, while Joe lies on the floor. Julia goes off to attend to another matter, and Barnabas’ servant Willie comes. Joe is still on the floor while Willie argues against Barnabas’ orders to take Joe to the hospital. Barnabas, who had told Julia that Adam must have “wanted Joe to be found here,” dismisses Willie as “absurd” when he says that Adam is trying to frame them.

When Willie was first on the show, he was a dangerously unstable ruffian who was determined to rape all the young women and beat up their boyfriends. In #210, he accidentally released Barnabas, who enslaved him and turned him into a nice guy. Now that Barnabas’ vampirism has gone into remission, Willie has taken several steps back to his old ways. He whines that if Joe dies, his fiancée Maggie might turn to him. Barnabas finds this idea “insane,” and Willie tells him that Maggie has recently stopped by the house and talked to him more than once. This is true, and Barnabas’ reaction makes it clear that it is the first time he has heard it. He responds that he is not interested in discussing Willie’s “mental aberrations,” and tells him that if Joe dies he will tell the police about Willie’s interest in Maggie. That leaves Willie no choice but to help get Joe to the hospital.

Julia has gone off to see well-meaning governess Vicki. Vicki is about to have a nightmare that is part of the “Dream Curse.” Three months ago, wicked witch Angelique decreed that one person after another would have the same dream. After Vicki has it, the dream will pass to Barnabas, and Angelique means for it to reactivate his vampirism. Vicki doesn’t seem to know that Barnabas was a vampire, though she has had many clues, as for example when he kept biting her and sucking her blood. I suppose she just thought he had a really aggressive make-out technique. But she does know that Barnabas is supposed to die if he has the dream.

Julia urges Vicki to come with her to Windcliff, a sanitarium she runs, and promises that she will get the best of care there. But she finds that Vicki is resigned to having the dream. Julia reports this to Barnabas, and tells him that she wants to go away with him, far away from Vicki. Vicki can’t pass the dream to Barnabas unless she describes it to him after she has it, and she won’t be able to do that if she can’t find him. Barnabas refuses to go, reminding Julia that those who have the dream suffer terribly until they pass it on to the next person. When he says “You know how I feel about Vicki,” Julia gets a brief closeup, and her reaction reminds us that she is supposed to be harboring an unrequited love for Barnabas. This is rather an easy point to forget. Barnabas and Julia spend all their time together and tell each other all their secrets. Since there doesn’t seem to be any such thing as sexual contact in the world of Dark Shadows, it’s hard to see how her feelings could be much more requited.

Julia urges Barnabas to run away with her.

Vampires are metaphors for extreme selfishness, and Barnabas usually plays to type. It is startling that he tells Julia that any part of his motivation for sticking around is his wish to spare Vicki suffering. But he also talks about his long vain struggle against Angelique in terms that immediately make it clear that whatever goodwill he might have for Vicki is a distant third behind his usual ruling passions, self-pity and laziness, but still, her well-being is among his considerations. That sets him apart from her ostensible boyfriend, a man variously known as Peter and Jeff. As Christine Scoleri points out on Dark Shadows Before I Die, Vicki might never have had the dream at all if Peter/ Jeff hadn’t refused to listen to her explanation of the curse and insisted that she stay where he could visit her easily, yet now that she is suffering from the dream and its effects he is nowhere to be seen. Christine speaks for all of us with her summary of Peter/ Jeff’s character- “What a louse!”

Vicki has the dream. Barnabas beckons her into the haunted house attraction where the bulk of it has always taken place before. She keeps telling him that she doesn’t want to have the dream, not for her sake, but for his. She opens three doors that show Halloween gimmicks we’ve seen before, then opens a fourth behind which she sees the Sun. The Sun shrinks into the distance, and she walks through the door, following it. Her face dissolves into an image of the Sun; the Sun dissolves to the exterior of Barnabas’ house. We cut to the interior, looking at the doors. A small dot of Sun appears there. It expands until it fills most of the screen. The doors open, and the Sun gives way to Vicki. She enters, and sees Barnabas lying on the floor by his desk. He is bleeding from two small wounds on his neck.

Part of the dream is a bit of doggerel that has never made much sense. The last lines are “Ahead a blazing light does burn, And one door leads to the point of return.” These lines are almost explained today. Each door exposes a symbol of something that is frightening either to the dreamer or to Barnabas or to both. Vicki isn’t afraid of the Sun, but she knows that Barnabas has a strange and intense relationship with it. In #277, he harangued her about his hatred for the Sun; in #347, he made plans with her to watch the Sun rise, plans which he had to break under very strange circumstances in #349. So now we know that the “blazing light” is the Sun, which vampires cannot withstand.

Of the ten characters who had the dream before Vicki, only strange and troubled boy David, her charge and dear friend, was able to walk through any of the doorways. In his case, he walked into a gigantic spider web and was caught there, just a few feet beyond the entry. But Vicki is on the path that “leads to the point of return,” and she goes to a different set altogether.

Had Barnabas’ introduction not brought a new audience to the show, Dark Shadows would probably have been canceled in June 1967. In that case, the final episode would have been #260, and it surely would have ended with Vicki, who was in those days the show’s main character, driving a stake through Barnabas’ heart. That she and the Sun overlap in the same space on the screen suggests that by passing the dream to Barnabas she will fulfill her original destiny and become his destroyer.

When Vicki looks into the parlor and sees Barnabas bloodied and lying on the floor by his desk, we are reminded of #405. In that episode, we saw that Angelique originally turned Barnabas into a vampire by sending a bat to bite him in this room. At that time, he fell, not by his desk, but by the staircase. That’s very close to where Joe was lying for the first half of the episode, so they have to do some rearranging to avoid suggesting an identity between them. Barnabas’ vampirism is so much the foundation of the show’s success that virtually everyone in the audience expects him to relapse sooner or later, but they are being careful not to raise the question of whether Joe will also join the ranks of the undead.

Until the dream, the episode is made up of long scenes with a great deal of dialogue. That isn’t unusual for Dark Shadows. It is unusual that the scenes play out with very little background music. I wonder if director Jack Sullivan decided that a spare sound design would set the right mood for the very ambitious dream sequence. I think it paid off- the dialogue scenes felt slow, but Vicki’s dream achieves the surrealistic quality it needs.

One of the main themes Danny Horn developed on his blog Dark Shadows Every Day was his ridiculously exaggerated impatience with the character of Vicki and his severe bias against Alexandra Moltke Isles’ acting. That gave me something to talk about in his comments section, and was part of the reason I started this blog. Danny’s post about this episode very nearly makes up for his incessant Vickiphobia. He alternates stills of Vicki with epigrams written in her voice, and the result is just magnificent, worth anyone’s while to read.

Episode 530: A fine line between love and hate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 522: Brother devil

A stranger comes to the great house on the estate of Collinwood and introduces himself as Nicholas Blair, brother of Cassandra Blair Collins. Cassandra’s husband Roger Collins is shocked; Cassandra had never mentioned that she had a brother. Moreover, she has been missing for the last 24 hours, and Roger is convinced something terrible has happened to her. Roger’s distant cousin Barnabas Collins and Dr Julia Hoffman are also shocked, but for a different reason. They know that Cassandra is actually Angelique, a wicked witch who, in the 1790s, turned Barnabas into a vampire. She recently returned to the world of the living when Barnabas’ vampirism went into remission, and she tried to implement a plan to bring it back in full force. When Angelique/ Cassandra went missing, they hoped it meant that she had been defeated. Nicholas’ arrival replaces their hopes with the fear of new battles.

Nicholas at first assumed that Barnabas was Angelique/ Cassandra’s husband, and told him “I should have recognized you anywhere!” This is a sure sign of trouble- Barnabas, who was in fact briefly married to Angelique in 1796, has not been out of the state of Maine since 1795, and has never been photographed. Nicholas says that he has recently been on Martinique, where Barnabas first met Angelique in the eighteenth century, and that he is a “citizen of the world” with no fixed address. He assures Roger that it is Cassandra’s way to disappear abruptly, and that she is sure to return.

Roger, Julia, Barnabas, and Nicholas in the drawing room.

Roger takes Nicholas to the bedroom he and Angelique/ Cassandra share. He shows Nicholas a portrait of Angelique which returning viewers know to have a mysterious connection with Angelique/ Cassandra’s physical being. Roger leaves the room, and Nicholas talks to the portrait. He asks Angelique if she can hear him, and a musical cue associated with her plays on the soundtrack. The cue cuts out, and Nicholas follows up with another question. Dark Shadows stood out from the daytime soaps of the period in having an orchestral score instead of an organ accompanying the action. The meta-theatrical touch of a character who can hear that score is a major departure. It is something people at the time would have seen in animated shorts from Warner Brothers, but likely not anywhere else. Since the biggest and fastest-growing share of Dark Shadows’ audience at this point was children under the age of 13, there was a risk that adult viewers might take that association with cartoons as a sign that it was time for them to find something else to do with their mid-afternoons.

Back in his own house on the same estate, Barnabas finds his servant Willie Loomis holding a rifle. Willie says that he is afraid that man named Adam will come to the house. Barnabas dismisses that fear and orders Willie to put the rifle away. Willie objects. Barnabas repeats the command and leaves. Willie grumbles, but does as he was told. We see a face peering in at the window.

The face belongs to hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell. Returning viewers know that Barnabas held Joe’s fiancée Maggie prisoner from May to June of 1967 and was extremely cruel to her. When the case was being investigated, Barnabas framed Willie for those crimes. Willie was sent to a mental hospital, and Barnabas had Willie released and brought him back to work for him some weeks ago. Joe thinks that Willie is the perpetrator, and has no patience with him. He knocks on the door and demands Willie let him in.

Joe insists that Willie tell him what he knows about Adam. Willie tries to evade his questions. When Willie says that Adam dislikes him, Joe responds”that means he knows you.” Joe twists Willie’s arm while repeating his questions. Once Joe releases him, Willie runs off and comes back with the rifle. He points it at Joe and orders him out of the house. Joe complies, but says that he will be back, and that he will be having words with Barnabas.

Later, Willie is in the basement. Some bricks are missing from a wall, exposing a skeleton hanging from the ceiling. Viewers who have been with Dark Shadows all along will recognize the basement of Barnabas’ house as a redress of the set that represented the basement of the main house in the first year of the show. The spot with the missing bricks was where a door stood that was always locked in those days. For the first 54 weeks of Dark Shadows, matriarch Liz thought that her husband’s corpse was buried behind that door. That belief turned out to be mistaken, but now we see that there are indeed human remains in the most similar possible spot. We might wonder what else Liz might have been less wrong about than at first sight appeared.

We watch Willie preparing to fill in the missing bricks, leaving the skeleton in place. After all, judging by Liz’ old way of thinking, that’s what ought to be in a space like that. We hear Willie’s interior monologue. He is making himself laugh with a pun on his own name when a stagehand wanders into the shot.

That moment of unintentional humor gives way to a scene rich in intentional comedy. Willie goes upstairs and finds that Nicholas has let himself into the house. Nicholas entrances him and extracts information from him. Willie tells him about a meeting with a ghost- “the one downstairs,” he specifies. Nicholas directs Willie to sit down, to remain in a blissed-out state until he leaves, and then to forget all about their encounter.

Nicholas goes to the basement, looks at the skeleton, and calls it “Reverend Trask!” Willie hadn’t given him this name; evidently he recognizes Trask the same way he recognized Barnabas.

Episode 520: What is it about this family?

Permanent house-guest Julia Hoffman walks into the great house of Collinwood and greets Roger Collins with a chipper “Good morning, Rodgie!” This is the second time we have heard Roger addressed as “Rodgie.” The first time was in #103, when he called to well-meaning governess Victoria Winters with “Oh, Vicki!” and she responded with “Oh, Rodgie!” That was a disastrous blooper; at that point, Roger was the show’s chief villain and Vicki was supposed to be terrified that he was about to murder her. Roger has long since been rendered harmless, and Julia is in a breezy mood, so “Rodgie” seems appropriate.

Roger’s own mood is anything but cheerful. His wife Cassandra hasn’t been seen since last night, and there is no indication where she might be. He is convinced something must have happened to her, and he calls the police.

Julia knows that Cassandra is actually Angelique, a wicked witch who in the 1790s turned Barnabas Collins into a vampire. Now Barnabas’ vampirism has gone into remission, and Angelique/ Cassandra is determined to revive her curse on him. The other day, Julia and some other people conjured up another personage from the 1790s, the Rev’d Mr Trask, a fanatical but wildly inept witchfinder. Julia hopes that Angelique/ Cassandra’s absence means that Trask has destroyed her.

Barnabas stops by. Julia tells him of her theory. He can’t believe Angelique/ Cassandra is really gone. They go to Barnabas’ house and look in the alcove in the basement where, in 1796, Barnabas murdered Trask by hanging him from the ceiling and bricking him up. Trask’s bones had disappeared when Julia and the others brought him back to life, but are there again now. Julia takes this to mean that he is at peace, not a condition usually associated with hanging from a ceiling in a bricked-up little space, and that Angelique/ Cassandra must therefore have been defeated once and for all. At no point does it occur to them to take Trask’s bones down and give him a more respectful resting place. Apparently they consider human remains a standard part of household decor.

Back in the great house, Julia finds evidence that Angelique/ Cassandra’s powers are still at work. Matriarch Liz is still under a spell Angelique/ Cassandra cast and believes herself to be Naomi Collins, mother of Barnabas. She believes her brother Roger to be Naomi’s husband Joshua and Julia to be houseguest the Countess DuPrés. Most alarming, Liz has all the knowledge Naomi had in the hour before her suicide. She even mentions to Roger and Julia that Barnabas is “the living dead.” Roger and Liz don’t know that Barnabas was a vampire, and Julia doesn’t want them finding out.

Julia goes back to Barnabas’ house and confers with him about the situation. Barnabas says that Roger knows more about the family history than Liz does, and that if he starts hearing the actual facts there is a great danger he will figure everything out. This is a change- previously the show had always indicated that while Liz took some interest in the Collinses of years gone by, Roger took none.

We cut back to the great house and see Liz sitting at the desk in the drawing room. She is putting a note in an envelope addressed to “Joshua.” Regular viewers saw Naomi sit at this same desk and put a note in just such an envelope in #458. As Naomi did then, Liz pours a snifter of brandy, takes a container from the desk drawer, pours a powder from the container into the brandy, then drinks it. She again follows Naomi’s lead when she goes upstairs.

Barnabas and Julia enter. Julia asks exactly what Naomi did before she died. He starts telling the story, and she finds the note. Barnabas says Naomi died in the tower room; they go there, and find Liz. She talks to Barnabas as if she were Naomi and he were her accursed son. She collapses in his arms, as Naomi did in 1796.

Episode 516: Man of God

We open with a reprise of yesterday’s close, with mad scientist Julia Hoffman and servant Willie Loomis in the basement of the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. They hear a sobbing in the air; Julia knows it is the sound of the ghost of gracious lady Josette. Yesterday, the sobbing sounded like Kathryn Leigh Scott, who played Josette in the part of Dark Shadows set in the 1790s; today, it is a recording used in the early months of the series when a mysterious sobbing was heard coming from the basement of the great house on the estate. That sobbing was implied at that time to be Josette also, but in #272 it turned out to be matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Using the same recording for Josette, and playing it on a redress of the set used for the basement at the great house, would seem to be a way of admitting to longtime viewers that it was a mistake to resolve the Mystery of the Sobbing Woman that way.

The performer on the old recording is Florence Stanley. Stanley would become nationally famous in the 1970s as Bernice, wife of Sergeant Fish on Barney Miller and later on a spinoff series titled Fish. Fish was played by Abe Vigoda, who will later appear in a couple of episodes of Dark Shadows. I doubt very much Stanley and Vigoda ever talked with each other about their experiences on the show, but it makes me happy that they were both alums.

Abe Vigoda and Florence Stanley as Phil and Bernice Fish.

Julia figures out that recovering vampire Barnabas Collins has been bricked up behind a wall in the basement by the vengeful spirit of eighteenth century witchfinder the Rev’d Mr Trask. She orders Willie to chisel away the bricks and rescue Barnabas. Willie is confused and frightened by what Julia has told him, and resists her command. As he chips away, he is interrupted first by a strange, sudden chill and then by the feeling of a hand on his shoulder. Julia conjured Trask up at a séance held on this spot a few days ago. But she at first refuses to acknowledge that he can be a real obstacle to Willie’s compliance with her commands, so she tells Willie to “shut up!” and get back to work. When Trask becomes visible to them both, Julia has no choice but to address herself to him.

Trask strikes a characteristic pose. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Julia tells Trask that, as a man of God, he must know that murder is wrong. This changes nothing; evidently Trask’s moral theology has evolved considerably since his physical death. Then she tells him that if he wants to correct a terrible mistake he made in life, he should forget about Barnabas and turn to the witch he hunted then, who now calls herself Cassandra Collins and lives at the great house on the estate. Again, no change. When Julia says that Cassandra is the one who ultimately caused Trask’s own misfortunes and that if he is going to take revenge on someone, it should be her, he disappears and the cold, clammy feeling of a ghostly presence goes with him. Willie gets back to work, and they get Barnabas out of his predicament in the nick of time.

In the great house, Cassandra plays a scene with Elizabeth. Cassandra has caused Elizabeth to be obsessed with death, and now causes her to believe she is one of her own collateral ancestors, Naomi Collins, who died in 1796. Cassandra leads Elizabeth to Naomi’s tomb and shows her the stone wall plates inscribed with the dates of the people buried there.

Cassandra does some more spellcasting to deepen Elizabeth’s misery and confusion. Elizabeth resists and runs out; Cassandra laughs gleefully. Her laughter stops when Trask appears to her, a torch glowing in his hand. He tells her that she is the witch, and that he has come to burn her. He commands “Burn, witch, burn!” and she bursts into flames.

The scene in the basement is great fun, as is Cassandra’s confrontation with Trask. But the parts with Cassandra and Elizabeth drag. This is the second time Elizabeth has moped around hopelessly and thought of nothing but death; the first time was a year ago, in late June and early July 1967. It was deadly dull then, and is no better now. The show simply does not know what to do with Elizabeth, and usually wastes the great talents of Joan Bennett.

There are a couple of famous production faults at the tomb. When they get there, the plate over Naomi’s casket still reads “born, 1761; died, 1821,” as it did before the show settled on the 1790s as the decisive period. When Cassandra causes Elizabeth to see the tomb as incomplete and still awaiting Naomi’s interment, the inscription is covered by a piece of cardboard painted to match the stone and clumsily pasted on it.

Episode 512: A jury of the dead!

For nineteen weeks from November 1967 to March 1968, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the late eighteenth century. Among the more interesting characters introduced in that period were fanatical witchfinder the Rev’d Mr Trask; roguish naval officer Nathan Forbes; fast-talking con artist Suki Forbes; and streetwalkers Ruby Tate and Maude Browning. All five of these characters were murdered by vampire Barnabas Collins, and all five of them are among those who return today for an impromptu trial of Barnabas.

Barnabas killed Trask by luring him to his basement and bricking him up in an alcove, as Montresor did to Fortunato in Edgar Allan Poe’s 1846 story “The Cask of Amontillado.” Some other characters invited themselves to the basement yesterday and held a séance there. As a result of the séance, the bricks fell away and Trask came back to life. Now, Trask has confined Barnabas to the same alcove. He declares that he will give him a trial before he bricks him up.

In the eighteenth century, Trask was the prosecutor in the trial of time traveling governess Vicki Winters. Victoria was convicted of witchcraft and sentenced to death. Vicki’s trip from the 1960s to the 1790s inverted Barnabas’ displacement in time; as Vicki’s witchcraft trial was so chaotic it did not seem to follow rules of any kind, neither does the murder trial Trask improvises for Barnabas fit any conceivable model of procedure. Vicki’s trial stretched over two weeks, from #427 to #437; Barnabas’ begins and ends today, during the second half of the episode.

Trask conjures up Nathan, Suki, Ruby, Maude, and Barnabas’ first homicide victim, his uncle Jeremiah, to serve as a jury; he conjures up a man named Ezra Simpson, of whom we have never previously heard, to act as judge. Trask is the prosecutor, and Nathan is his sole witness. This court of “the damned!,” as Trask calls them, recalls the rogues who confront Jabez Stone as jurors and judge in Stephen Vincent Benét’s 1936 story “The Devil and Daniel Webster.” Unlike Jabez Stone, however, Barnabas does not have a right to counsel.

Court is in session. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Trask asks Nathan how he died. After Nathan says that Barnabas strangled him, Trask asks him how Suki died. Barnabas objects that Nathan shouldn’t be allowed to speak for others; regular viewers sympathize with this, since Suki, played today as she was originally by Jane Draper, was sensational every second she was on screen, and when we saw Miss Draper again we were happy to think that she would have another chance to show what she could do. Barnabas also shouts at one point that he is innocent; this is less likely to attract the audience’s sympathy. Mrs Acilius and I certainly got a good laugh from it.

Barnabas asks to be allowed to present a defense. Trask invites him to question Nathan. He is about to do so when Nathan smiles at him, turns around, and vanishes. Trask explains that Nathan has already said all that needs to be said. Later, Trask looks at the recompleted wall and laughs with vicious glee, delighted at what is behind it.

Barnabas has neither the powers nor the limitations of a vampire now. The effects of the curse went into remission when mad scientists Eric Lang and Julia Hoffman created a man from parts scavenged from the cemetery and connected Barnabas to him as they electrified him and brought him to life. Barnabas named this man Adam.

Now Adam has escaped from the horribly abusive home Barnabas and Julia provided for him. He has found a friend in Sam Evans, an artist who was blinded when Barnabas enlisted him in one of his hare-brained schemes. Sam is teaching Adam to speak, and is so impressed with his ability to learn that he wonders aloud if he will be able to teach him to paint professionally.

Adam develops a sudden pain in his wrists. He moans “Barnabas! Hurt!” A shot of Barnabas hanging by his wrists in the basement alcove is laid over a closeup of Adam. Evidently the bond between them is such that Adam can sense Barnabas’ pain, even though they are miles apart. Apparently it is mid-1840s day on Dark Shadows; the scene in Barnabas’ house recalls “The Cask of Amontillado,” and the scene at Sam’s house is based on Alexandre Dumas’ 1846 novella The Corsican Brothers. “The Devil and Daniel Webster” was set in that decade or a bit earlier, and while Frankenstein was written in 1818 many adaptations of it, including the one Dark Shadows creator Dan Curtis would make in 1973, are set in the 1840s.

Adam becomes agitated. He cannot explain what is happening to him, no matter how patiently Sam asks. Sam’s son-in-law-to-be Joe Haskell comes in; Adam brushes against Joe as he runs out the door. Though Joe is a tall and sturdy man, Adam is so tremendously strong that this casual contact sends him flying.

It dawns on Joe that Adam is the man who abducted heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard and then fell from the cliff on Widows’ Hill. Sam calmly replies that he had already figured that out. Joe is shocked that Sam hasn’t called the police; Sam replies that Adam is as disabled as he is, and that he means no one any harm. Joe is not at all convinced of the second of these points, and worries that “Barnabas! Hurt!” might not have reflected a fear that Barnabas is hurt, as Sam thinks it does, but might rather express Adam’s resolution to hurt Barnabas. Joel Crothers and David Ford bring out the full comic value of this scene; Mrs Acilius laughed at the blandness with which Ford’s Sam confirms that he knows who Adam is.

Joe goes to Barnabas’ house to warn him, but finds it locked and apparently empty. Later, Julia goes there too. She has a key, and lets herself in. She doesn’t see any evidence that Barnabas is or has been home; she goes downstairs, and is mystified to see that the alcove wall, which was broken when she was there for the séance, is now bricked up again.

Several times, Dark Shadows has contrasted Barnabas’ home, the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood, with the Evans cottage, a working class residence in the village of Collinsport. Today they draw this contrast in sharp relief. The basement of the Old House is always dark, but even the upstairs is lit by candles today; the scenes in the Evans cottage, taking place at the same time, are sunlit. The basement is the most haunted part of the most haunted house on the haunted estate, and eight characters in costume dress materialize from thin air there; the Evans cottage is a part of the modern world where Sam and Joe can use reason to arrive at agreement about facts, even if they make different judgments about the significance of those facts. When Julia and Joe go to the Old House, each wanders about alone, finding no one to talk to; at the Evans cottage, even Adam is able to have a conversation, and while there he can receive a message from Barnabas by some mysterious means. Trask seizes control of the basement of the Old House to make a parody of the criminal justice system and enact his vengeance on Barnabas; in the Evans cottage, Sam refuses to call the sheriff because he wants to shield Adam from punishment for the crimes he inadvertently committed.

Episode 511: It’s not fair to come into someone’s house

In the first months of Dark Shadows, the audience’s point of view was represented by well-meaning governess Vicki, who needed to have explained to her everything we might want to know and who reacted to all the strange goings-on with the mixture of disquiet and curiosity that the makers of the show hope we will feel.

Vicki has long since been replaced as our representative by mad scientist Julia. We no longer want characters to tell us what has been going on, nor are we making up our minds about our moral evaluation of the events in the stories. We find ourselves in the middle of a whole clutch of fast-moving plots, trying to keep up with them all and hoping that nothing will stop the thrills. Julia’s loyalty to her best friend, sometime vampire Barnabas, and her supremely well-developed capacity for lying put her in the same position, and her vestigial conscience is no obstacle to any juicy storyline.

When Vicki was our on-screen counterpart, her charge, strange and troubled boy David, was the show’s most powerful chaos agent. David precipitated a series of crises that seemed likely to expose the secrets of the ancient and esteemed Collins family, to kill one or more of the major characters, or both. In #70, David led Vicki to his favorite playground, the long-vacant Old House on the estate of Collinwood. David would keep sneaking into the Old House even after Barnabas took up residence there in #218.

Today, David again lets himself into the Old House. He is caught there by Julia and a man he has not seen before. Julia is stern with him for entering the house without Barnabas’ permission; he defends his presence there, reminding Julia that she promised him he could play with the tape recorder on Barnabas’ desk. He asks who the man is.

The man introduces himself to David as “Timothy Eliot Stokes.” This is the first time time we have heard his middle name. Soon, the show will phase “Timothy” out, and his friends will address Stokes as “Eliot.” I suppose that’s because he’s a professor, and “Eliot” suggests Harvard.

In 1966, Thayer David played crazed groundskeeper Matthew. Suspected of murder, Matthew hid out in the Old House and kept Vicki prisoner there until some ghosts scared him to death in #126. David didn’t believe Matthew was a killer and didn’t know he was holding Vicki, so when he stumbled upon him in the Old House he brought him food and cigarettes. Even after he found Vicki bound and gagged behind a hidden panel, he kept Matthew’s secret. When David meets another character played by the same actor on the same set, longtime viewers can see that Stokes is as genteel and urbane as Matthew was rough-hewn and paranoid. For her part, Julia recalls Vicki when she scolds David for sneaking into the Old House, but where Vicki was doing her job as David’s governess and trying to enforce the rules of the household as a governess might, Julia is scrambling to keep David from finding out about her own secret activities.

Julia tells David to take the tape recorder and go home to the great house on the estate. As he makes his way to the front door, Stokes takes Julia aside and tells her that it will not be well if it is known in the great house that David has seen him. Julia hurries to David and tells him to keep quiet about the fact that he has seen Stokes. She says that she hates to ask him to lie; at this, I mimicked Julia and said “I know you share my devotion to the truth,” prompting Mrs Acilius to laugh out loud. Later, Julia will go to the great house, where she lives as a permanent guest, and David will cheerfully assure her that he kept her secret. The two of them seem quite relaxed together, leading us to believe that he will continue to do so.

There is a bit of irony in Julia’s harshness with David for entering Barnabas’ house without his permission. She and Stokes didn’t have Barnabas’ permission to be there, either. Indeed, if he had known what they were up to he would likely have objected most strenuously. Along with a man named Tony, they held a séance in the part of the basement where Barnabas kept his coffin when he was under the full effect of the vampire curse. They were trying to contact the Rev’d Mr Trask, a Puritan divine whom Barnabas bricked up to die in the eighteenth century. The séance was so successful that the bricks crumbled, exposing Trask’s bones, still held together somehow in the shape of a skeleton hanging from the ceiling. At the end of the episode, Trask has resumed his corporeal form and set about taking revenge on Barnabas by walling him up in the same spot.

Odd that Trask’s skeleton holds together after all the ligaments and tendons have rotted away, odder that there is a straight cleavage separating the top of the skull from the rest, oddest of all that the section is attached to the rest of the skull by a piece of Scotch tape.

Episode 505: Prepare yourself for an ordeal

Sheriff Patterson, leading his deputies through the woods in search of a very tall man named Adam who has escaped from gaol, finds a scrap of Adam’s clothing on a tree. He looks ahead and sees the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. He remarks “That’s the old Collins house. Every time anything goes wrong around here, that’s where all roads seem to lead.” He takes his party toward the house. Once they are gone, Adam comes out from behind a tree, and goes in another direction. Unknown to the sheriff and his men, Adam is a Frankenstein’s monster. He is four weeks old and has a vocabulary of fewer than a dozen words, but he easily outwits Collinsport’s entire law enforcement community.

The Old House is home to Barnabas Collins, whom the audience knows to be a recovering vampire. The sheriff calls on Barnabas and recaps the story for his benefit. In his post about the episode, Danny Horn ridicules every part of this preposterous scene, getting half a dozen genuine laughs. I won’t compete with him, but I do want to point out that while in both Wednesday’s episode and yesterday’s, the sheriff said it took twenty men to subdue Adam and take him into custody, today he says it took six. Maybe by next week it will be down to one deputy and a mynah bird.

Adam has abducted heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard. When he eludes the police, he goes to the abandoned structure where he has cooped her up. He had left her there to go look for food. That mission was interrupted by his arrest. Now, she asks to go home. He is carrying her back there when they meet the sheriff, his deputies, and Barnabas at the top of Widows’ Hill. From the second episode, we have known that people plunge to their deaths from this hill. We’ve heard stories about several such incidents, have seen a number of characters come close to falling from it, and in #425 we saw gracious lady Josette make the fatal leap. Carolyn slips from Adam’s arms to the edge of the cliff; the deputies see him pull her up. She runs into Barnabas’ arms, and Adam falls.

After Adam’s fall, we hear a message that is very familiar to us, but that Barnabas and his friends have never heard. Adam was created in an experimental procedure that was meant to relieve Barnabas of his vampirism. His creator, mad scientist Eric Lang, died shortly after recording an audiotape explaining that as long as Adam lives, Barnabas will be human, but that he will become a vampire again if he outlives Adam. This message plays out over images of the waves crashing into the rocks of the shore. It’s an effective visual complement to the message, a metaphor for the overwhelming power that will engulf Barnabas and the rest of them if Adam is in fact dead.