barnabas collins – Page 34 – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 284: The right name for something else

Vampire Barnabas Collins spends most of his time on screen doing a job of acting. He is playing the role of a present-day gentleman from the long-forgotten English branch of the ancient and esteemed Collins family of Collinsport, Maine. His performance has been convincing enough that the Collinses have entrusted him with the long-abandoned Old House on the great estate of Collinwood. He and his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie reside there and have restored it to the condition it was in when Barnabas was alive.

Today, another actor comes to Collinwood. She is mad scientist Julia Hoffman. By profession, Julia is a medical doctor with specialties in psychiatry and hematology. She is treating Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, who is in a state of complete mental collapse after months as Barnabas’ victim. After Maggie escaped from Barnabas, her family doctor, addled quack Dave Woodard, decided to tell everyone in town that she was dead and send her to Julia’s mental hospital so long as her captor was unknown and at large. So when Julia figures out that the person responsible for Maggie’s woes is an undead monster who dwells at Collinwood, she has to conceal her identity from everyone there and in Collinsport.

In the drawing room of the great house at Collinwood, Julia tells well-meaning governess Vicki and Vicki’s charge, strange and troubled boy David Collins, that she is an historian writing a book about the Collinses. David immediately exposes a fatal flaw in Woodard’s cockamamie plan when he mentions a girl named Sarah whom he has seen near the Old House. Julia knows that Maggie saw Sarah when she was imprisoned and that Sarah visited Maggie’s father Sam and told him where to find her. If that information had been made public, Vicki and David would have been able to connect Sarah with the Old House, and the police would have suspected Barnabas weeks ago. Returning viewers know that Sarah is the ghost of Barnabas’ sister, a fact onto which Julia cottoned yesterday and of which she finds corroboration today.

We also know that Barnabas wants Vicki to become his next victim, and that she is already under his influence to a substantial degree. When she and Julia are talking in the drawing room, Vicki waxes enthusiastic about how Barnabas has recreated a past world and committed himself to living in it, and says that this is a fine thing for him. “But not for you?” asks Julia. Vicki looks down, and with a troubled expression says that she supposes not.

When Julia asked “But not for you,” she drew a reaction from my wife, Mrs Acilius. Mrs Acilius said that while Julia may not seem like any kind of therapist in the sessions we’ve seen her have with Maggie, her delivery of that question sounds exactly like every therapist she’s ever had. With Maggie, the mad scientist is very much on the surface of Julia’s manner, but when she is playing the role of Miss Hoffman the historian she can draw on her profession to make herself appealing.

Vicki takes Julia to the Old House and shows her the restored bedroom of Josette Collins. Vicki says that she could stay in that room forever, which is as a matter of fact precisely what Barnabas has in mind for her. Julia feels a chill as the sun sets. Perhaps this is the result of Barnabas coming back to life and rising from his coffin in the basement of the house, or perhaps it is Sarah or another friendly ghost* trying to warn her to get out before the vampire finds her. Whatever its cause, Vicki doesn’t feel it. Again, we don’t know whether this is because Barnabas already has a strong enough hold on Vicki that she is insensitive to warnings about him, or if it is a message specifically for Julia.

Julia wants to leave the room, but Vicki insists on lighting a candle so that they can see it as Josette did. The candle burns long enough for Julia to make the appropriate comments, and then something we cannot see blows it out while Julia feels another chill. The cold still doesn’t reach Vicki.

Julia returns to Woodard’s home office,** where she has stashed Maggie. Maggie has the doll Sarah gave her when she visited her in Barnabas’ dungeon. Julia takes the doll from Maggie, much to Maggie’s displeasure. She holds the doll and says she wants her to listen for the doll’s name. Maggie furrows her brow and asks “Doll talk?” Maggie has been speaking in complete sentences lately, but apparently Julia’s latest antics have been too much for her and she has lost some ground.

Julia orders Maggie to listen and says the names of some of the people at Collinwood. Maggie doesn’t react until she gets to “Barnabas Collins,” at which point Maggie freaks out. Julia holds her and repeats “It is the wrong name” until Maggie stops crying and starts singing “London Bridge.” She then looks away and says “The wrong name for the doll… but the right name for… something else.”

*Sarah’s little cousin, Caspar Collins?

**An exact replica of his office in the hospital as we saw it in #242. Man knows how he likes to have things set up.

Episode 276: Into the room

For the first 54 weeks of Dark Shadows, reclusive matriarch Liz was paralyzed by the fear that someone would enter the locked room in the basement of the great house of Collinwood and find the murdered body of her husband Paul Stoddard buried there. For the last 16 of those weeks, seagoing con man Jason McGuire exploited that fear to blackmail Liz.

It turned out that Liz didn’t actually kill Stoddard and there never was a corpse hidden in the basement of the great house. There is, however, a corpse hidden in the basement of another house on the same estate. During the daytime, Liz’ distant cousin Barnabas Collins is a dead body resting in a coffin in the basement of the Old House. He gets up at night to feed on the blood of the living, lure the unwary to their damnation, and deliver rambling monologues about how sorry he feels for himself. Unlike Stoddard’s supposed grave in the great house, Barnabas’ coffin is not kept in a locked room, so the parallel has been incomplete.

Today, Barnabas decides to complete it. Trying to find and steal Barnabas’ jewels, Jason had broken into the Old House. He made his way to the basement, where he stumbled upon the coffin. He opened it, and Barnabas strangled him. Now, Barnabas orders his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie to help him carry Jason’s body to the secret room in the mausoleum where Barnabas himself was imprisoned and undiscovered for “nearly 200 years.”

Before they leave the basement, Barnabas tells Willie about his sister Sarah, who died when she was very young and innocent. After they leave, Sarah’s ghost appears and puts Jason’s sea cap on Barnabas’ coffin.

Sarah places Jason’s cap. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

Episodes #1-#274 had all opened with voiceover narrations delivered by Alexandra Moltke Isles in character as well-meaning governess Vicki. Starting Friday, they gave the opening monologues to one of the actresses who happened to be in the episode to deliver as an unnamed external narrator. Today, this spoils a surprise. We haven’t seen Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, for a while, and aren’t sure when we will see her again. When Kathryn Leigh Scott delivers today’s opening voiceover, we know we will see Maggie today.

Barnabas had held Maggie prisoner for several weeks. He had borrowed a plan from the 1932 Universal film The Mummy. He would erase Maggie’s personality and replace it with that of his long lost love Josette. Once he had done that, he would kill her and she would rise from the dead as a vampiric version of Josette. Maggie did not go along with the plan, and Sarah’s ghost helped her to escape. Barnabas managed to scramble Maggie’s memory before her father found her, and she is now in treatment at a sanitarium called Windcliff.

Maggie’s hometown doctor, addled quack Dave Woodard, is visiting the director of Windcliff, Dr Julia Hoffman. Woodard wants to show Maggie a sketch Maggie’s father, artist Sam Evans, made when the ghost of Sarah visited him to tell him where to look for Maggie. Julia resists, Woodard insists. While Julia delays, she feeds the fish in the aquarium in her office. We see enough of the aquarium to suggest that Julia is the keeper of a world within a world, a little enclosure with its own rules.

Woodard shows Maggie the sketch. After a moment, she says “Sarah.” She tells them that Sarah visited her in the room where she was confined, that she told her a riddle that showed her how to escape. She becomes too upset to talk. She starts miming her search for a loose brick in the wall of the cell, then sings a verse of Sarah’s signature tune, “London Bridge.” She is shouting words from “London Bridge” when the nurse drags her down the hall, back to her room. Julia declares that the whole thing was a waste of time, a judgment in which Woodard does not concur.

Sam’s sketch of Sarah. Apparently the drawing was done before Sharon Smyth was cast as Sarah, when they planned to give the part to Harvey Keitel in drag. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

Meanwhile, Barnabas and Willie take the body of Jason to the tomb of the Collinses and bury it in the secret room. They talk about the people buried in the part of the structure known to the public- Barnabas’ parents and his sister Sarah. Barnabas confirms that Sarah is the one he was telling Willie about in the basement, the friend he knew long before he met Josette. He reminisces about repairing a doll of hers the night before she died. We see the plaque giving her dates as 1786-1796, implying that Barnabas met Josette after 1796. They leave, and Sarah appears.

Liz had last seen Jason the night she thought she killed Stoddard; his reappearance would lead to the opening of the locked room and the exposure of its secret. Barnabas last saw Sarah in 1796; her reappearance, today’s events suggest, might lead to the opening of all the rooms Barnabas wants to keep closed and to the exposure of all his secrets.

Episode 275: To the end of the Earth

Part One. Her name is not Victoria Winters.

Each of the episodes of Dark Shadows from #1 to #274 began with a voiceover narration delivered by Alexandra Moltke Isles in character as well-meaning governess Victoria Winters. The implicit promise of these little bits of prose was that Vicki would eventually find out about whatever was happening in the episode we were about to see.

Now, vampire Barnabas Collins is a permanent addition to the cast of characters. If Vicki finds out what Barnabas is up to, she will work to destroy him as she worked to destroy the show’s previous undead menace, blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. If she succeeds, the show will lose the only ratings-maker it has ever had. If she fails, Barnabas will have to kill her and who knows how many other characters, requiring them to start all over with a new cast. So Vicki has to move off the center of the stage.

Today’s opening voiceover is delivered by Nancy Barrett, not in character as heiress Carolyn, but as an unnamed external narrator. The pattern will be that a female member of the day’s cast will play that role. Mrs Isles still does it when she is in the episode, but if she isn’t they give it to another woman. Eventually they will start letting the men do it, and down the line there will be episodes in which Mrs Isles appears but which she does not narrate. Sometimes they are careless and give the voiceover to an actress whose character’s presence in the episode was supposed to come as a big shock, spoiling it for us.

Part Two. “All those years… there was nothing there.”

Matriarch Liz spent the last eighteen years on the great estate of Collinwood. Ostensibly this was because she was afraid that if she left, someone might wander into the locked room in the basement where the remains of her ex-husband Paul Stoddard were buried, and once there would discover that she had killed him.

This never made much sense-the estate is supposed to stretch for miles in every direction, and she roams all over it. If she is spending a day in the gardens by the groundskeeper’s cottage, she is no more guarding the locked room than she would be if she were skiing in the Alps. It made even less sense when we learn, in #249, that nothing untoward can be seen in the room, which Liz has frequently visited over the years, because the tile flooring over Stoddard’s grave had been replaced and cleaned up. It made the least sense of all when we learned in #271 and #272 that Liz herself must have been the one who replaced and cleaned it.

In #259, Liz confided her terrible secret in Vicki. She told Vicki that she had to keep the secret at all costs, not because she feared prison, but because she feared that her daughter Carolyn would hate her if she found out she had killed her father. Now the secret has been revealed and Liz has discovered that she never actually killed anyone. Seagoing con man Jason McGuire helped Stoddard fake his death, buried an empty trunk in the basement, and told Liz she had killed him. Liz never had anything to hide from either the police or her daughter.

Today, Liz is in bed. She appears to be ill, but it turns out the doctor just overdid it a bit with a sedative, she’s fine.

Carolyn left the house before the truth came out, and thinks her mother killed her father. Liz is distraught. We hear her thoughts in a taped voiceover. She is horrified that Carolyn is under this impression and urgently wonders where she is. We fade to a location insert of Carolyn walking along the beach, she’s fine also.

Carolyn comes to Liz’ room and tells her that she was silly to run- she’s sure that whatever Liz did, she did because she had no choice. She vows to stand by her throughout the trial and what may come after, and mentions that after all, she never really knew her father. Liz then tells her there won’t be a trial, because she didn’t actually kill Stoddard.

On his Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn expresses his exasperation with this extreme anticlimax:

So, you know that blackmail storyline where Liz had to do everything that Jason said, because otherwise she’d go to prison and her daughter would hate her forever?

Well, guess what? Liz finally told everybody that she killed Paul, and now she’s going to prison, and her daughter hates her forever.

But not really. It turns out that Liz never killed Paul in the first place, and Carolyn would have forgiven her even if she had.

Carolyn spent the night wandering around outside, in clear violation of Collinsport’s recent curfew. She’s given it a lot of thought, and now she’s ready to stand by Liz through the trial. Except there won’t be a trial, because there was no murder, and the entire four-month storyline was a complete waste of time.
Danny Horn, “Episode 275: The Last Normal Day,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 29 November 2013

Liz then explains that Jason won’t stand trial either. She isn’t going to press charges for the blackmail because she just wants to forget the whole thing. An understandable desire, to be sure. Carolyn says she hopes Jason has gone a million miles away, two million miles away, even further. “I hope he’s gone to the end of the Earth.”

Part Three. He gets what he came for.

Carolyn gets her wish. As it happens, the end of the Earth is conveniently located right there on the grounds of Collinwood. It is the Old House, where Liz’ distant cousin Barnabas and his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie are in residence. Jason broke into the Old House at the end of yesterday’s episode, and is searching the front parlor for a box of jewels he had earlier seen through the window.

Willie catches him there. Willie was once Jason’s henchman, and still has friendly feelings towards him. Willie tries to warn Jason that he is in danger, and even after Jason hits him and twists his arm he resorts to the extreme expedient of telling him the truth- “Barnabas, he isn’t alive. He can walk at night, but he’s dead.” Jason doesn’t believe him.

Jason keeps telling Willie that he is determined to get enough money to start over. The way he expresses it is “I need a stake.” Little does he know how right he is!

Jason forces Willie to accompany him to the basement. He sees Barnabas’ coffin there, and is convinced it is full of treasure. Willie makes one more effort to save his former friend, taking a handful of jewels from a table near the coffin and offering them to Jason if he will leave at once. Jason scoffs at him, and Willie backs sadly away. Jason opens the coffin. A ringed hand shoots out and chokes him. So long, Jason! We can’t say it hasn’t been weird.

This is only the second on-screen killing we’ve seen on Dark Shadows, after Laura murdered Van Helsing-equivalent Dr Guthrie in #185. Moreover, it’s the first time Barnabas has killed anyone on the show. It’s kind of odd to have a vampire around for thirteen weeks before the first fatality is recorded. We might wonder if he will pick up the pace as he goes on.

Episode 264: In the shadows

In its first months, Dark Shadows spent a fair bit of time on the business interests of the ancient and esteemed Collins family. In those days, the Collinses were running out of money and their old nemesis, Burke Devlin, had come back to town with a plan to strip them of their remaining assets and drive them into poverty. The “Revenge of Burke Devlin” storyline never really took off, and was eventually subsumed into the tale of blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. Shortly after Laura disappeared, Burke formally gave up on his revenge. With that, the business stories ended, and there was no particular reason for Burke to stick around.

On Tuesday, Burke was recast. However little his character may have had to do on the show or however much he may have had to drink before he arrived at the studio, Mitch Ryan was always interesting to watch. Anthony George couldn’t match Ryan’s charisma, but by 1967 he had been a familiar face in feature films and primetime television for years. The original audience, even if they couldn’t remember George’s name, would have recognized him as a famous actor and assumed that his casting meant that something big was in store for Burke.

Today, we have two hints that business stories might be making a comeback as well. Seagoing con man Jason McGuire is blackmailing reclusive matriarch Liz into marrying him. Vampire Barnabas worries that the cozy little home he has made for himself in the Old House on the estate of Collinwood might be threatened if Jason takes control of the family’s holdings. He asks Liz’ brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger, to look at the original deeds for the Old House and the great house to see if there is some provision he might be able to use to defend his interests against Jason. That Barnabas asks about the deeds would suggest that he has acquired some form of ownership in the Old House. We’ve never seen him buy the house from Liz or receive it as a gift from her, but if both deeds are still in Liz’ name, he could hardly use their wording to claim a right to stay there. So when Roger goes off to look for the deeds, there is a chance he will come back with a story about real estate.

The second hint comes in Barnabas’ confrontation with Jason. Barnabas takes a very aggressive tone with Jason, who responds by asking Barnabas where he goes in the daytime and where his money comes from. “You have no accounts in the bank in town, and I know you don’t operate a business…” If Barnabas is going to be on the show for the long haul, as the ratings clearly indicate we should expect him to be, Jason will not be the last person to ask these questions. We might wonder how exactly he will forestall them.

If we have been watching from the beginning, the likeliest answer would involve Burke. When was a major character, Burke was presented as an inexhaustibly rich man who knew his way around some of the shadiest places in the world. If Burke happens upon Barnabas’ secret, we could expect Barnabas to bite him and thereby bring him under his power. With his money, Burke could set up plenty of bank accounts and businesses in Barnabas’ name. With his contacts in the demimonde, he could secure whatever papers Barnabas needs to establish his identity. Even a photo ID- Burke could easily hire a Barnabas lookalike to pose for a British passport.*

During the “Revenge of Burke Devlin” arc, Burke bought up a lot of Liz’ debts. In particular, he held enough notes payable on demand that she feared he might be able to put her out of business at any time. That hasn’t been mentioned for a long while, but if Barnabas takes control of Burke he could take those notes and exchange some of them for outright ownership of the Old House.

Barnabas could also compel Burke to fabricate some fraudulent papers that would make it look as if he were deeply in debt to Barnabas. When Barnabas got around to killing Burke, those papers would come to light. Liz and Roger would be grateful to Barnabas for taming their old adversary and clearing out some debts that posed a danger to their financial position, while well-meaning governess Vicki would be grateful to him for helping her boyfriend save his face after his business went south. As a result, his position at Collinwood would be unassailable.

Closing Miscellany

There is a location insert of Roger walking to the Old House, a flashlight in hand. I don’t think we have seen this footage before.

Until today, Barnabas has tried to be very suave with everyone who doesn’t know that he is a vampire. Since he has nothing to say to Jason that will intimidate him, he might as well continue that approach in his scene with him, or at least play dumb. But instead, he is openly, and self-defeatingly, hostile. This will become a pattern in future episodes. Time and again, Barnabas will greet a potential adversary with an immediate declaration of war, often before the adversary even knows who he is, thereby forfeiting whatever element of surprise he might have on his side.

Barnabas catches a glimpse of the ghost of his sister Sarah. He only sees her as a figure moving in the distance as he is looking out the window, and has no idea who she is. But it does confirm that he is able to see her, something we had not known he could do.

*I laid all this out two years ago in a comment on Danny Horn’s Dark Shadows Every Day.

Episode 227: The nature of her illness

Vampire Barnabas Collins enters the bedroom of Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. We see a closeup of him in profile, his mouth open to expose his fangs. This shot might have been effective if it had flashed on the screen for a fifth of a second or less and been followed by some kind of action, but we linger on it for a couple of seconds and cut to the opening credits. The result is laugh-out-loud funny. It makes him look like he’s pretending to be a dog in a cartoon. It’s bad enough when Barnabas reminds us of a Scooby-Doo villain without pushing him over the line into imitating Scooby-Doo.

Ruh-roh!
Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

The rest of the episode is composed of scenes that go on too long, though none quite as disastrously as this. In the morning, Maggie’s father, artist and former alcoholic Sam, wakes her. She is ill and moody. Kathryn Leigh Scott maintains just the right level of intensity, and David Ford plays Sam quietly enough to stay out of her way. But they make all their points in the first minute or two, and it just keeps going.

Later, Maggie is sitting at the counter at her place of employment in the restaurant at the Collinsport Inn.* She’s wearing a scarf and feeling awful. Her boyfriend, hardworking young fisherman Joe, comes in. He teasingly asks her how a paying customer can get a cup of coffee. She tells him to pour it himself. He’s about to do it when she drags herself to her feet. She drops the cup. He makes a little joke about seeing her use a broom and she says she’ll sweep it up later. He is shocked, and she snaps at him.

She continues to have trouble with basic tasks, and Joe grows concerned. Sam comes in and reminds her that he told her she shouldn’t have gone to work. He says he’ll call the doctor, and she yells at him. Then, she faints.

That’s probably the best scene in the episode. Miss Scott holds on at the level she had established in the previous scene, while Joel Crothers matches Ford’s steady, understated support. With three actors, there’s enough action to keep us interested. My wife, Mrs Acilius, praised the choreography that allowed Miss Scott to make such a memorable turn unencumbered by Malcolm Marmorstein’s dialogue. Still, they could have done all that in about half the time and we wouldn’t have missed a thing.

Then Maggie’s back in her room, this time with Joe sitting on the side of the bed while she lies in it. The body language between them is affectionate, but after about a minute and a half you can’t help but notice them complying with the requirements of the Standards and Practices office. Sick as Maggie is, it is jarring to see Joe keep his distance from her quite so scrupulously.

Night falls, and we see Barnabas in his house. He peers out his window, and we cut to Maggie. She’s still in her room, but now she is out of bed, brushing her hair, and grinning. Sam enters and is surprised at the change in her.

Maggie’s up.
Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

After a meandering conversation, Maggie volunteers to drive Sam to Barnabas’ house where Sam will be working on a portrait of Barnabas. Evidently Sam agrees, because the two of them enter there together.

Maggie and Barnabas exchange looks and conversation loaded with double meanings while Sam sets up. Jonathan Frid plays Barnabas’ part in this so heavily that it is laughable Sam doesn’t notice something is going on between him and Maggie.

Barnabas and Maggie murmuring to each other.
Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

I’m always reluctant to complain about Frid’s acting. It’s so hard to explain just what it was that made Barnabas such an enormous hit that you can never rule out the possibility that any given thing might have been indispensable to it. Still, seeing him ham it up so shamelessly today, especially after the other three members of the cast have shown such strict discipline, I did have to wonder what he was thinking. It’s hard to imagine anyone would have directed him to play the part that way.

I can see one advantage to Frid’s overacting. Maggie sticks around his house a couple of minutes after the point of the sequence has been made, and the time is filled with repetitious dialogue about her illness. When Barnabas says that the house is an unhealthy place for someone in her condition, Frid leans so hard on the line and makes himself look so silly that you don’t really notice that there is no reason for the scene still to be going on.

After Maggie has gone home and got back into bed, Sam tells Barnabas he’s tired and thinks it’s time to stop for the night.** Barnabas wants him to keep going for a while and to take the next night off. They discuss this fascinating topic at length. Sam decides to spend an hour working on the background. Their conversation has already taken so long that we fear they might show that hour of painting in real time, and it is a relief when Barnabas says he will go outside while Sam paints. We can assume he’s going to pop into Maggie’s room for a snack.

*The last appearance of this set, alas.

**Barnabas’ sorely bedraggled blood-thrall, Willie Loomis, will be driving Sam home. At this point they’ve settled on the idea that Willie has a car.

Episode 221: A new Collins in Collinsport

Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, is closing up shop in the restaurant at the Collinsport Inn. A stranger startles her. He is the mysterious Barnabas Collins. Barnabas recently left his long-time residence in the cemetery five miles north of town and has been hanging around the great estate of Collinwood, but this is the first time we’ve seen him in Collinsport proper.

In the opening months of Dark Shadows, the restaurant, like the rest of the inn, was coded as the base from which dashing action hero Burke Devlin mounted his campaign to avenge himself on the ancient and esteemed Collins family. As the Revenge of Burke Devlin storyline ran out of steam, the restaurant emerged as a neutral space where new characters could be introduced without defining their relationships to the established cast all at once. In that period, Maggie was Collinsport’s one-woman welcoming committee.

Now, even Burke has given up on his storyline. The only narrative element of the show with an open-ended future is Barnabas, and once the audience has figured out that he is a vampire there’s no such thing as a neutral space where he is concerned. So it is not clear what, if any, role the restaurant will have from now on.

Barnabas asks if it is too late to get a cup of coffee. Maggie tells him it is, but relents after about a minute and reopens to serve him. She is charmed by his old-world manners and excited to learn that “there is a new Collins in Collinsport.” He tells her he is staying at the long-abandoned Old House on the grounds of Collinwood, prompting her to marvel at the idea of someone living in a dilapidated ruin that is probably haunted. When she admires his cane, he explains that it is not only quite valuable, but is also a family heirloom and on that account his most prized possession.

Barnabas appears to drink the coffee, as he appeared to drink the sherry his distant cousin Roger served him when he visited Collinwood in #214. Usually vampires are supposed to limit their diet strictly to human blood, but just a few weeks ago Dark Shadows wrapped up a long story about Laura Murdoch Collins, a humanoid Phoenix, who raised everyone’s suspicions by never being seen to eat or drink. So they may have thought that it would be repetitious to follow the Laura arc so closely with another undead menace who betrays himself with the same sign.

Barnabas kisses Maggie’s hand in farewell

Maggie’s boyfriend, hardworking young fisherman Joe, comes bustling into the restaurant seconds after Barnabas leaves. Maggie is surprised that Joe and Barnabas didn’t pass each other, and puzzled when Joe tells her there was no one in sight anywhere near the inn. Neither of them had heard of Barnabas before.

Joe tells Maggie that a woman named Jane Ackerman had an unpleasant run-in with a man she couldn’t see earlier in the night. The fellow retreated before doing her any serious harm, but Joe seems fairly sure that whoever it was is a real threat to the women of Collinsport. So he wants to keep Maggie company. Maggie doesn’t seem worried, either for her own sake or for Jane’s. She’s just happy to see Joe, and gladly agrees when Joe suggests they go to the local tavern, the Blue Whale.

As Dark Shadows’ principal representatives of Collinsport’s working class, Maggie and Joe illustrate the point the opening voiceover made when it said that people “far away from the great house” of Collinwood would soon be “aware of” Barnabas and of “the mystery that surrounds him.” As a name we have never heard before and are unlikely to hear again, “Jane Ackerman” reminds us that there is a whole community of people for Barnabas to snack on.

As Joe and Maggie are heading out of the restaurant, she notices that Barnabas left his precious cane behind. She wants to go straight to the Old House to return it to him. Joe would rather wait until morning, but Maggie explains that she doesn’t want to be responsible for it overnight. This is a bit odd- they are in a hotel, after all, a business that specializes in keeping valuable property safe while its owners sleep.

Perhaps Maggie wants to see the Old House. Joe has been there many times. When we saw him there with Burke, searching for well-meaning governess Vicki in #118, he mentioned that when he and flighty heiress Carolyn were children, they would occasionally play there. He returned there during the Laura storyline. Even Maggie’s father has visited the Old House, participating in a séance there in #186 and #187. Maggie has never been there at all. So perhaps she just feels left out.

Maggie and Joe knock on the doors of the Old House. No one comes. As they turn to go, there is a closeup of the door knobs turning. Maggie and Joe hear a door open, and go in. They don’t see anyone, but candles are burning and Joe remarks that the front parlor has been fixed up. Joe goes upstairs and leaves Maggie behind, explaining that he knows his way around the place and it isn’t safe up there for someone who doesn’t.

Once Maggie is alone, Barnabas appears next to her. She is startled and cannot see how he could have got there without her knowing. He apologizes for once more catching her unawares. He seems surprised that she is not alone. When Joe comes downstairs, he is exceedingly polite to both of them.

After Maggie and Joe excuse themselves, Barnabas’ blood-thrall, the sorely bedraggled Willie Loomis, appears. With obvious difficulty, Willie forces out one word after another, and manages to ask Barnabas what he plans to do to Maggie. Barnabas is displeased with Willie’s presence and with his presumption that he has the right to question him. He climbs the stairs and looks down at Willie, full of menace and demanding that he go out and do the work Barnabas has ordered him to do. Willie tries to refuse, but cannot stand the look Barnabas is giving him.

During this staring contest, Barnabas and Willie are standing on the spots where strange and troubled boy David Collins and Barnabas had stood when we first saw Barnabas in the Old House in #212. In that scene, David and Barnabas were more or less eye-to-eye, and for a moment it seemed that Barnabas was contemplating violence against David. In this scene, Barnabas shows how committed he is to violence. He has a power over Willie that he gained by the extreme violence of drinking Willie’s blood, and Willie’s inability to resist Barnabas’ stare shows that power in use. Willie’s horror at the task Barnabas has assigned suggests that it also is violent.

My wife, Mrs Acilius, believes that the confrontation between Willie and Barnabas solves one of the behind-the-scenes mysteries about Dark Shadows. Why was James Hall replaced by John Karlen in the role of Willie? She points out that Hall, while he is a fine actor, had a lot of trouble with Willie’s lines, particularly in the long he shared with Dennis Patrick’s Jason McGuire. By the time Willie was recast, Jonathan Frid had been attached to the role of Barnabas for some days, and Frid never made it a secret that he was a slow study. So if there were going to be a lot of long conversations between Willie and Barnabas, Willie had to be played by an actor who could get his dialogue letter perfect day after day. That was John Karlen.

After Willie scurries off to do whatever evil chore Barnabas has ordained for him, Barnabas wanders over to the window. On his way, we see that the portrait of Josette Collins is no longer hanging in the spot over the mantle where we have seen it since our first look at the Old House in #70. At the end of that episode, Josette’s ghost emanated from the portrait and danced around the outside of the house. From that point, the Old House was chiefly a setting for Josette. Crazed handyman Matthew Morgan learned that to his cost when he tried to hold Vicki prisoner there and Josette and other ghosts ganged up on him and scared him to death in #126. Laura knew that she was entering the territory of a powerful enemy when her son David took her to the Old House in #141, and when Vicki had formed a group to oppose Laura’s evil plans she and parapsychologist Dr Guthrie went there to contact Josette. In #212, Barnabas addressed the portrait and told Josette that her power was ended and he was now the master of the house. Removing the portrait tells us that Barnabas is confident that he is not only a new Collins in Collinsport, but that he is now the Collins at Collinwood.

Barnabas then does something Laura did several times- he stares intently out his window. When Laura stared out her window, David would be violently disturbed, no matter how far away he was or how many obstacles were between him and his mother. These incidents were a big enough part of Laura’s story that regular viewers, seeing Barnabas stare out the window, will expect someone at a distance from him to react intensely.

We cut from Barnabas to Joe and Maggie at her house. Joe asks what time he should pick Maggie up tomorrow, and Maggie suddenly becomes disoriented. Kathryn Leigh Scott has a sensational turn playing that moment of lightheadedness, creating the impression that she is having a scene with Barnabas. As she recovers, she explains to Joe that she has the feeling she is being stared at. Then we dissolve to Barnabas in his window. Barnabas may not be Maggie’s mother, but apparently there is some kind of link between them. Perhaps kissing Maggie’s hand in the restaurant was enough to give Barnabas the power to creep her out even when he is miles away from her.

Episode 220: He belongs to the house

Dark Shadows began with no happy couples. When the show started, reclusive matriarch Liz was legally married to a man named Paul Stoddard, whom neither she nor anyone else had seen in eighteen years. Liz’ brother, high-born ne’er do-well Roger Collins, was married to Laura Murdoch. Roger hadn’t seen Laura in years, and was quite happy with the idea he would never see her again. When she did show up, everyone learned that she was a murderous fire witch from beyond the grave, not at all the sort of person you can settle down with. Liz’ daughter, flighty heiress Carolyn, was dating hardworking young fisherman Joe, and the two of them were sick to death of each other. Everyone else was single.

Now, we’ve learned that the reason Liz hasn’t left the house since 1948 is that she’s afraid someone will dig up the basement and find Stoddard’s corpse. Laura is dead, more or less, and Roger has taken up life as a Confirmed Bachelor. Joe and Carolyn have gone their separate ways, and he is in a relationship with Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. There are no obstacles to their happiness, so no reason for them to be on screen in a soap opera, and we’ve barely seen them. Except for Joe and Maggie, everyone is single.

When the narrative found seagoing con man Jason McGuire the day after Laura finally disappeared, we would occasionally glimpse him talking urgently on the telephone to someone whose name turned out to be “Willie.” The original plan had been that Jason would call this person “Chris,” leading the audience to suspect that he was trying to reassure a woman named Christine or Christabel or whatever of her part in his plans.

Willie would eventually show up. His chaotic behavior outraged most people and jeopardized Jason’s evil plans. No one had enough information to figure out the nature of Jason’s connection to Willie, certainly not the audience, but it was clear that they had known each other for years and were rarely apart for long in that time. Jason insisted that Liz keep Willie around the great house of Collinwood even when Willie was a grave inconvenience to him.

Now, their association is at an end. Unknown to Jason, a third party has disrupted their relationship. Willie has wakened a vampire and become his blood-thrall.

Today, Willie is getting out of bed, and he and Jason have a quarrel. Jason complains that he has asked Willie every question he can ask, and hasn’t got a single answer. He laments that they are “splitting up,” but he can’t see any alternative. Willie, dreading what the night holds, doesn’t protest.

If they had stuck with the name “Chris,” the audience might have reacted differently to these scenes. When we first saw that Chris was Christopher, we would have set aside the idea that Jason might be bringing a lover to town. But as the weeks pass and it never becomes any clearer what Jason wants from Willie, that thought might have come back to our minds as one of the possibilities we can’t quite exclude. Seeing how comfortable Jason is in and around Willie’s bed and hearing his lines about “splitting up” with him, we might wonder if the show is trying to tell us something.

Jason takes Willie downstairs to tell Liz that he is now leaving her house not to return. Willie wants to tell Liz something, but she doesn’t want to hear anything he has to say. He pleads that it is important, but she refuses to listen. He goes away sadly, and the audience assumes that he just lost the last moment of freedom when he could have spoken out against the vampire.

The vampire himself then comes to pay a call on Liz. He is her recently arrived cousin Barnabas Collins, ostensibly from England. He presents himself to Liz as a courtly, rather diffident gentleman. He has asked to live in the long-abandoned Old House on the grounds of the estate. She has thought it over, and is delighted to give him the keys.

Barnabas enters the Old House, leaving the door open behind him. He looks around. He turns to the door and says “What are you waiting for? Come in.” A defeated Willie enters.

Barnabas summons Willie into the Old House

Barnabas tells Willie that this will be their new home, and that he will have much work to do in the days to come. Willie says that is all right. He tells Willie that he knows what he has to do tonight. Willie reacts with horror and protests that he can’t do it. Barnabas tells him there is no longer any connection between what he wants and what he will do, and orders him to go forth.

We saw Barnabas’ hand clutch Willie’s throat at the end of #210 (reprised at the beginning of #211.) We’ve seen Barnabas communicate with Willie several times through his portrait in the foyer at Collinwood. This is the first scene the two actors have together, and is also the first time we see Barnabas without his “cousin from England” shtick. After he made some remarks to well-meaning governess Vicki at the great house that sounded harmless to her and sinister to the audience (for example, “You cannot put a price on what I intend to do” in the Old House,) the sight of him without his mask carries a punch.

Episode 218: Crime encouraged

Three locations on the great estate of Collinwood have featured prominently in two or more storylines on Dark Shadows: the great house, the long-abandoned Old House, and the cottage. The great house is the only permanent set, and is the site of most of the action. The cottage has been vacant since blonde fire witch Laura left the show in March, and came to be so strongly associated with her that it will likely remain vacant until the audience doesn’t expect her to come back. As the abode of ghosts and ghouls, the Old House is likely to become central to the show as it takes its turn to the paranormal. And indeed, in his first full episode, the mysterious Barnabas Collins had gone to the Old House and announced to its invisible occupants that he was claiming it as his own.

The physical condition of the Old House evokes an extinct storyline. When the series began, the Collinses were running out of money, and their vengeful foe Burke Devlin had vowed to use his own great wealth to ruin them completely. Now Burke has lost interest in vengeance, and the business stories have vanished altogether. If we aren’t going to be hearing about the Collinses’ precarious financial position, we won’t be able to explain why they have let a huge mansion on their property go completely to ruin. Even if the locals are too afraid of the place to do any work there, a family rich enough to have a secure grip on the assets we hear about would be rich enough to hire an out-of-town crew to fix the place up, or tear it down, or at least clear it out and seal it off. So the Old House is going to have to be transformed to get the last of the narrative clutter left over from the first 39 weeks out of the way.

Today, Barnabas asks reclusive matriarch Liz and her brother, high-born ne-er-do-well Roger, if they will let him live in the Old House and use his own funds to rehabilitate it. Liz is stunned by the idea and doesn’t know what to say. When Barnabas offers to pay whatever rent they might wish to charge, Roger exclaims that they wouldn’t dream of charging him anything at all. At that, they cut to a startled reaction shot from Liz. Regular viewers will find this reaction hilarious. Liz owns the place; Roger owns nothing and is staying there as her guest. Liz is quite surprised at Roger’s generosity with her property.

Liz reacts to Roger’s generosity with her property

Jonathan Frid is excellent in this scene. Barnabas is at once faultlessly well-mannered and entirely relaxed, gentle with Liz’ unease and warm to Roger’s enthusiasm. Everything they can see suggests to Liz and Roger that Barnabas would be a valuable addition to any household.

We, of course, know that Barnabas is an undead creature released from a coffin to prey upon the living. Watching the scene with that knowledge, we are in suspense as to Barnabas’ intentions. It seems clear that he wants Liz and Roger to like him now and to voluntarily give him what he wants. We do not know if he will go on wanting that for any length of time, nor do we know how he will respond if they oppose him in any substantial way. Because Barnabas stays entirely in character as the human he is pretending to be, we have no clue as to how far the act he is putting on diverges from his true motives. For all we know, Liz and Roger’s oh-so-courtly, oh-so-amiable cousin may be planning their deaths at this very moment.

Before he leaves the house, Barnabas has a conversation with seagoing con man Jason McGuire. Jason is blackmailing Liz, and has forced her to accept him as her house-guest. He is a throwback to an earlier period of the show, an in-betweener brought on the day after Laura left to clear away the last non-paranormal plot elements and to help introduce Barnabas.

Jason is clueless that the show changed its genre from the noirish crime drama it more or less was in the fall of 1966 to the supernatural thriller/ horror story it has been since. That cluelessness was illustrated in the opening of the episode, when he has followed his friend and sometime henchman, the sorely bedraggled Willie Loomis, to the Tomb of the Collinses. He has figured out that Willie tried to rob the graves in the tomb, but cannot imagine what he actually found there. Today, Jason looks around the interior of the tomb, baffled that Willie seems to have disappeared, and wanders off helplessly. Barnabas then appears and watches him go, the future of the show seeing off an emissary from its past.

Jason wants to know more about the legends that Barnabas’ relatives were buried with their jewels, the legends that gave Willie the idea of robbing their graves and thereby led to Barnabas’ release from his coffin. Barnabas tells Jason those legends are false, and rehearses his whole “cousin from England” bit. Not much happens. Still, the conversation is fun to watch, because the actors are both on top of their game and the characters represent different directions Dark Shadows might have taken at different points in its development.

Episode 215: Play the mystery man

In episode 1 of Dark Shadows, dashing action hero Burke Devlin returned to his home town, the isolated fishing village of Collinsport, Maine. He’d left Collinsport in poverty and disgrace, and returned as a millionaire many times over, the master of a financial empire. He had vowed to use his great wealth to exact vengeance on the ancient and esteemed Collins family. In #201, he gave up his quest for revenge, which had never been very interesting to watch anyway, and now is unconnected to any storyline. He’s still in town though, spending his evenings in The Blue Whale, a waterfront tavern where he has appointed himself to act as bouncer.

In #207, dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis was rude to some other patrons at the Blue Whale. Burke defeated Willie in a fight and ordered him to leave town. Today, Burke comes back to the tavern. No one has seen Willie for a week or so, but neither is it clear that he has left Collinsport for good. Burke is looking for Willie, planning to beat him up again if he finds him.

When Burke enters, he sees Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, sitting alone at a table. While she waits for her boyfriend, hardworking young fisherman Joe, Maggie talks with Burke about not knowing where Willie is.

Willie’s associate, seagoing con man Jason McGuire, comes into the tavern. Burke goes up to him. They also talk about not knowing where Willie is.

Joe shows up. He’s been helping his uncle search, not for Willie, but for a missing calf. They found remains of the little guy, far from the farm and completely drained of blood by some mysterious process. They are baffled by this development.

Willie drifts in. He sits down at the bar and starts drinking. Burke goes up to confront him, but is confounded by Willie’s broken demeanor. After a few moments, his hostility gives way to compassion, and he speaks gently to Willie.

Burke puzzled by Willie’s meekness. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

Jason returns, and Burke tells him he’s worried that Willie seems to be very ill. Jason then confronts Willie, and is astounded when Willie tells him he doesn’t want the $500 in cash Jason is holding for him. Jason also notices that Willie has some bloodstains on his sleeve.

Everything I have to say about the acting in this episode I said in a long comment I left on Danny Horn’s Dark Shadows Every Day in December 2021. Here it is:

I like this one. Sure, the writing has its flaws, and there are a couple of shots where it’s hard to tell what the visual composition was supposed to be. And Mitch Ryan is obviously drunk. But they rise beyond all that.

Kathryn Leigh Scott plays Maggie throughout as an understated version of her original wised-up conception, very apt for the barroom setting and a fine offset to the intensity all the male characters have to show this time. She doesn’t have many lines, but she has everything she needs to keep the show on track.

Dennis Patrick’s face and voice show at least two emotions in every shot, and he and Mitch Ryan do a terrific job as two men who don’t like each other but can’t help getting absorbed in a puzzle that fascinates them both. The music that builds throughout that scene and reaches its crescendo as Jason leaves the bar matches the complex emotional palette with which the actors are working; it doesn’t sound anything like the usual Dark Shadows music, and I don’t think we ever hear it again.

Joel Crothers’ turn as the messenger announcing the tragedy of the calves is as tense as the dialogue between Patrick and Ryan, but his studiousness and deliberation change the pace sufficiently to keep the scenes from blurring together. Ryan and Scott deliver their responses to him with a calm intelligence that emphasizes those qualities and makes Willie’s stumbling entrance a real surprise.

Ryan’s scene with John Karlen is a turning point in the series. Burke’s shift from a menacing demand that Willie leave town to an alarmed concern for his well-being marks the end of Scary Violent Willie and the arrival of Wretched Broken Willie, and his conference with Jason confirms that change. Everything Karlen does on the show from this point on, right up to his performance as Kendrick, begins with this scene.

If that looks familiar, it may be because I linked to it on tumblr.

I should also link to a characteristically insightful post in which Patrick McCray explains how this episode, in which Barnabas Collins is neither seen nor mentioned, contributes substantially to the sense of danger surrounding him. The story Joe tells about his uncle’s calf is the show’s first reference to blood-sucking, and it comes after we’ve started to wonder whether Barnabas really is a vampire, or is some less familiar type of hobgoblin.

Episode 214: Nothing lasts forever

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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