The opening voiceover complains about “a frightening and violent man.” We then see a fellow with a crazed look on his face trying to break into a coffin. Assuming that he is the frightening and violent man, a first time viewer might not be especially upset when a hand darts from the coffin and chokes him, even though something like that can’t be altogether a good sign.
At a mansion identified as the great house of Collinwood, an aristocratic lady is demanding that a man in a captain’s hat account for the whereabouts of someone called Willie. The man answers to the name of Jason and calls the lady Liz. Liz has had all she can take of Willie, whoever he might be, and is not at all happy that Willie’s things are still in her house. Jason does a lot of fast talking, but cannot satisfy Liz either that Willie is really leaving or that he himself does not know where Willie is.
Jason talks with the housekeeper, a woman named Mrs Johnson. He asks her a series of questions about what she knows about Willie and she asks why he wants to know. Even though Mrs Johnson was in the room when Liz was insisting that Jason find Willie and get rid of him, for some unaccountable reason he will not tell her that he is looking for Willie.
Despite Jason’s inexplicable reticence, Mrs Johnson does tell him that Willie was preoccupied with the portrait of an eighteenth century figure named Barnabas Collins, that he was also interested in a legend that another eighteenth century personage, someone named Naomi Collins, was buried with a fortune in jewels, that Naomi Collins is buried in a tomb in a cemetery five miles north of town, and that the night before she saw Willie hanging around the toolshed. Returning viewers will recall that in yesterday’s episode, well-meaning governess Vicki had also told Jason that she had seen Willie in the vicinity of the toolshed, carrying a bag. There doesn’t seem to be a television set in the house, so everyone spends the evenings looking out the windows at the toolshed.
We see a cemetery. It soon becomes clear that it is the same cemetery we saw in the opening teaser. The gate of the tomb in which the frightening and violent man did his sinister work is swinging in the breeze. An old man in a three piece suit and celluloid collar comes upon it. He shows alarm and mutters that he can feel evil in the air.
Jason arrives at the cemetery and meets the old man. Jason says that he is looking for a friend of his, a young man. The old man identifies himself as the caretaker of the cemetery and laments the fact that a young man meeting the description Jason gives was there last night and broke the lock on the gate to the tomb. A first-time viewer’s suspicion that Willie and the frightening and violent man from the teaser are one and the same finds confirmation.
The caretaker can’t believe that Jason is unable to sense the palpable evil that emanates from the tomb. Jason overcomes the caretaker’s attempts to keep him out and makes his way into the tomb. The caretaker keeps warning Jason of the perceptible evil and Jason keeps failing to perceive it. Jason does find a cigarette on the edge of a casket in the tomb, and in closeup gives a look that can only be his recognition of a trace of Willie’s presence.
Jason finds Willie’s cigarette
Jason returns to the great house. Liz is exasperated that he still can’t tell her where Willie is, and Mrs Johnson is irritated he doesn’t put his hat and coat where they belong. After Jason and Liz have left her alone in the foyer, Mrs Johnson takes Jason’s things to the coat closet.
We see Mrs Johnson fussing with the hat and coat from inside the coat closet, an unusual perspective that has in the past been used during shots when characters have stumbled onto important evidence about whatever mystery they were puzzling over at the moment. The shot goes on long enough to lead us to wonder if Mrs Johnson is about to find something important. My wife, Mrs Acilius, mentions that each time she has seen this shot she expected Mrs Johnson to find Willie’s cigarette in Jason’s pocket and to recognize it.
Mrs Johnson fussing with Jason’s coat
That expectation is thwarted when there comes a knock at the door. Mrs Johnson answers and greets the visitor.
The next shot is from the perspective of the visitor. We see a look of astonishment on Mrs Johnson’s face as a man in a fedora and an overcoat asks to be announced to “the mistress of this house, Mrs Elizabeth Collins Stoddard.” He identifies himself as Mrs Stoddard’s cousin from England. Mrs Johnson invites the man in. He hastens across the threshold.
We cut back to the interior, and see the man and Mrs Johnson facing each other. As she bustles up the stairs, the camera tracks around to show him standing next to the portrait of Barnabas Collins, a portrait he resembles strongly. He says, “Oh, madam! If you would, you may tell her that it is Barnabas Collins.”
For regular viewers, it is refreshing to see Jason on the defensive. Ten times in the first eight episodes where they appeared together, he and Liz had a conversation in which he made a demand of her, she resisted, he threatened to expose her terrible secret, and she capitulated. Today is the second episode in which they have interacted without reenacting this drab ritual. Liz is driving the action, Jason is thinking fast, and they are each in their element. For a first time viewer wondering about the hand that came out of the coffin, it’s a lot of filler, but for those of us who have been suffering through the tedium of the blackmail plot it is a fun change of pace.
Regular viewers will also be glad to see the return of the caretaker. He appeared four times* in the storyline of Laura Murdoch Collins, the humanoid Phoenix, and managed to be simultaneously eerie and funny. His catchphrases “Died by fire!” and “The dead must rest!” are all it takes to make Mrs Acilius laugh out loud. His return in #209 moved Patrick McCray to label him a refugee from the EC comics universe, and in my post about that episode I pointed to a shot that looks so much like a panel from an EC comic book that I wonder if the similarity might have been intentional.
While first time viewers may be confused or impatient with the caretaker’s oft-repeated attempts to alert Jason to the nimbus of evil that hangs in the air around him, regular viewers know that the caretaker is the one who understands the show he is on. Jason thinks that he’s on a noir crime drama, and indeed there had been a period when Dark Shadows just about met that description.
But for months now, all the action has been pointing towards the supernatural back-world behind the visible setting. Jason’s own storyline was introduced the very day Laura’s ended, and it is a means for wrapping up all the non-supernatural narrative elements still lying around. Jason’s insensibility to the evil in the tomb is not only a sign that he is himself too corrupt to tell the difference between a wholesome space and a cursed one, but also that he doesn’t fit into the genre where Dark Shadows will be from now on. The audience in 1967 wouldn’t have known that actor Dennis Patrick always insisted on fixing a date for his departure when he joined the cast of a daytime soap, but this scene should give them a strong indication that Jason McGuire is not to be with us indefinitely.
Patrick McCray’s commentary on this episode includes an analysis of director John Sedwick’s visual strategy in the last two shots, those in which Jonathan Frid first appears as Barnabas Collins. McCray confines himself to the first thing photography students are usually taught, the “Rule of Thirds.” But that’s all it takes to get us to look closely at the imagery and to see how Sedwick tells his story with pictures:
Two clear and subtly clever images with a bridge. His introduction comes from his own perspective, rather than Mrs. Johnson’s. It’s an exterior shot of the entrance, looking in.
The grid helps us divide the image. People in the west read from left to right, and tend to circle in our gaze back to the left. Sedwick uses this model of composition in all three shots. In image 1, we see someone — him? — through the eyes of Mrs. Johnson as the camera hangs over his shoulder, minimizing her (1.1). Why is she so transfixed? We follow her gaze up to the towering figure (1.2). Following the slope of his collar, we come back to Mrs. Johnson… specifically, her throat (1.3). After that, we circle back up to her gaze, even more worried. For what reason?
Then he enters with purpose, and we next see him again from the back, divesting himself of his cane and hat, getting a glimpse of his strangely antique cloak. His voice is rich with a uniquely tentative sense of authority. We still don’t see his face, just bits of his profile. These moments tease us, and yet they put us in the position of a confidant of the vampire’s. The composition mirrors what we saw outside. Within, Mrs. Johnson (2.1) is minimized, and the turn in the figure shows him looming, ready to pounce. Again, we begin with her, following her gaze from left to right. The mystery of what bedevils her, bedevils us, as well. The man towers (2.2) in the right, blocking the exit. Instead of following a sloping collar, we follow its larger, expanding offspring in the cape, which takes us circling to the left again where we stop on the poor, miniscule shield of his hat and then, like a wolf pulling her away, his feral looking cane (2.3).
Situated so close to the predator, with his gaze elsewhere, we have a strange safety. We don’t see him from the eyes of his prey. Instead, we are a quietly unacknowledged friend. Finally, as Mrs. Johnson goes to summon Elizabeth, the figure turns to face the portrait, rotating upstage to let us see him from profile to profile. As she exits, and we are alone with him, the chiseled face comes into focus from the side. It is alien. It is familiar. We think we know why, but then we see why. They are only face to face for a moment before the camera takes us away from him and uncomfortably close to the painting from 1795, cold and haughty and haggard and sad. He then steps even uncomfortably closer to it and spins to give his inevitable name. We see the two men in mutual relief.
The painting of Barnabas is a prisoner in a four-sided frame on the wall, disapproving and distant as the first thing our eyes rest on (3.1). Is the painting gazing at the man? No. The more we look, the more the painting is gazing at us, as if we’ve been caught looking. It’s natural to avert our eyes from this, and by comparison, section 3.2 is practically benevolent. His impossible doppelganger is standing before it in three dimensions on our 2D screen. Liberated, he smiles, and there is something optimistic about it. He’s gazing upward to the landing, yes, but it’s also to the future. Gazing left, he’s anticipating the next image rather than look for one that has passed. Subtly, our eyes wander down to 3.3, his medal, a subtle reminder that, despite his strange warmth, he’s a soldier as well, and a force to be reckoned with.
Flighty heiress Carolyn tells her mother, reclusive matriarch Liz, that she has had a problem with one of Liz’ houseguests. Last night, dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis was about to rape Carolyn, who fended him off only by pointing a loaded pistol and telling him she would blow his brains out.
Liz confronts the person who insisted she take Willie into the house, seagoing con man Jason McGuire. She demands that Jason send Willie away at once. This leads to the eighth iteration of the only conversation Liz and Jason have. He makes a demand, she resists, he threatens to expose her terrible secret, she capitulates.
The script varies the ritual slightly this time. It is prefaced with Liz’ demand that Jason evict Willie, and Liz’ final capitulation is delayed by having her stand her ground until Jason says he will get Willie out soon. Later in the episode, Liz walks in on Willie grabbing at Carolyn, and even then settles for Jason’s promise that he will get his henchman out within the week.
The show has given us some scenes of friction between Carolyn and Liz, but has spent a lot more time on Carolyn talking about how strong her mother is. Now that Carolyn realizes that her mother will let an explosively violent hoodlum stay in their house indefinitely after he has twice assaulted her, we are primed to expect that sharper conflicts between Carolyn and Liz will feature in upcoming storylines.
We get another preview at the end of the episode. Strange and troubled boy David Collins shows Willie a couple of portraits of Collins ancestors and talks about the history of the family. One of these portraits is new to us, having made its debut during the closing credits of yesterday’s episode. David identifies it as someone called Barnabas Collins. David has been pivotal to each of the major plot developments on Dark Shadows so far, so when he is the first character to speak a name on screen, we might expect to hear that name again.
The portrait of Barnabas has such a strong effect on Willie that he adds an element to the show’s format. For the first time on Dark Shadows, a character’s internal monologue plays as a voiceover. While we watch Willie study the portrait, we hear his recorded voice going on about the wealth it suggests. Willie walks off. The portrait fills the screen, its eyes start to glow, and we hear a heartbeat.
The portrait of Josette Collins that hangs at the long-abandoned Old House glows when Josette’s ghost is active, and the eyes of a portrait of Laura Murdoch Collins glowed on several occasions when Laura was on the show. So regular viewers are used to seeing the visual effects that accompany Barnabas’ portrait. But the heartbeat is new. Josette’s portrait and Laura’s are silent pictures, Barnabas’ is the first talkie.
This is the last episode in which we will see James Hall as Willie. These episodes were shot out of sequence, so this one was made on 23 March 1967 and yesterday’s was made on 24 March. Most episodes were shot in a single take, as is obvious from the bloopers and production faults that run through them. Yesterday’s- the one produced on Friday, 24 March- was the first since #1 that went to three takes. That evening they called actor John Karlen and asked him to come in on Monday the 27th and take over the part of Willie. So, while Hall may never have been told why he was let go and to this day doesn’t seem to know what happened, it’s hard not to suspect that the producers blamed him for that third take.
Karlen would bring so much to the show that I can’t really regret losing Hall, excellent as he was. Years ago, I was chatting with an old friend of mine about ways that the original Star Trek might have been improved. We agreed that we couldn’t give up the actual show, and that what we were really wishing for was access to an alternate universe where they had made those changes. So that’s how I feel about Dark Shadows. I still want all of John Karlen’s performances, but would like an antenna that I could tune to receive broadcasts from a parallel timeband where he and James Hall swapped careers.
Dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis is staying at the great house of Collinwood, much to everyone’s dismay. Yesterday’s episode ended with a scene in which he appeared to be trying to rape well-meaning governess Vicki in the study. She resisted him pretty vigorously, especially after he trapped her in front of some furniture. When reclusive matriarch Liz interrupted the confrontation and demanded Willie leave the house, Vicki ultimately let Willie off the hook, saying that he didn’t really do anything.
Today, Vicki sees flighty heiress Carolyn in the kitchen and warns her about Willie’s violent ways. After Willie has insulted everyone in the house, Vicki and dashing action hero Burke Devlin run into him while on a date at Collinsport’s night spot, The Blue Whale. Willie enrages Burke, and the two men are about to fight. Vicki urges Burke not to fight, leading him to pause. She shouts at Willie, demanding that he go away. He does. This leads me to wonder if the reason Vicki didn’t back Liz up is that she wants to fight her own battles.
Willie returns to Collinwood. He finds Carolyn alone in the drawing room. He blocks her exit from the room. He grabs at her hair, and tells her that she is, unknown to herself, attracted to him. When she says she wants to leave the room, he orders her to stay until he dismisses her. He closes the doors and approaches her, responding to her protests by saying that he can’t hear her. If they had cut away at this moment, it would have been a fully realized rape scene. There is nothing left to show by putting the actual assault on screen.
But they don’t end it there. Carolyn reaches into the desk drawer and pulls a loaded gun on Willie. Willie does stand there and keeps talking for a moment, but eventually he takes “If you don’t leave me alone I’ll blow your head off” for an answer. He backs out of the room and goes upstairs. Evidently Carolyn doesn’t need rescuing either.
The closing credits run over an image including the spot on the wall to the left of the main doors to Collinwood. That spot has alternately been decorated with a mirror and a metallic device resembling a miniature suit of armor. Lately it has been the mirror; when Jason first entered the house, that mirror reflected a portrait. Now, the spot is decorated with a portrait. It is one we haven’t seen before.
We also see something that hasn’t happened since episode #1. The production slate tells us that this episode went to a Take 3. Considering what they left in for broadcast, it always boggles the mind what might have led them to stop tape.
In 281 of the posts that follow, I link to comments I made on Danny Horn’s blog, “Dark Shadows Every Day.”
I added most of these comments in the months between the shutdown of live theater in March of 2020 and the completion of the blog in April of 2021. But I have added some since.
In the last few days, I’ve added four. They all discuss on the way the show shifts its focus, once the vampire story becomes a hit, in the direction that will come to define it as the months and years go on. The first three of these comments are on posts discussing episodes where Barnabas the vampire is holding Maggie the lovable girl prisoner and trying to brainwash her into becoming his late love Josette, so that he can kill her and turn her into a vampire. This comment is on the post for episode 253, in which the boy David has broken into Barnabas’ house and had a shouting match with Barnabas’ servant Willie:
The scene between David and Willie marks a definitive break from the pre-Barnabas show. David’s great concern is that Barnabas and Willie are “hurting Josette.” By which he means that he can no longer sense the presence of the ghost of Josette. On the contrary, the name “Josette” now refers to something horrible and that horrible thing is a part of Barnabas’ story.
In the first 42 weeks, the ghost of Josette had been the principal supernatural element in the show. Serene, mysterious, uncanny, the ghost fit perfectly into that series, which was something like 99% atmosphere and 1% story. And Josette came out of the background at two key moments, leading the rescue of Vicki from Matthew in 126 and informing the family of the danger Laura represents to David in 149 and 170. And of course when Barnabas first meets David in 212, David tells him that Josette protects the family.
So when Barnabas starts his rampage, regular viewers would at first be waiting for the ghost of Josette to make its move and stop him. By the time David sees the Josette-ified Maggie in 240 and 241, we know that the imperturbable Josette of the first 42 weeks is not coming back. If we do see Josette’s ghost again after we’ve seen Maggie in her wedding dress, it could not have the lightly amused smile in its voice with which it told Vicki not to be afraid of Matthew; it could return only as a terrifying spirit of vengeance. By the time David and Willie finish their confrontation in this episode, the show has told us that the protecting ghost won’t return at all.
This one is on the post for 255, in response to a comment from someone wondering what Barnabas was planning to do if he had succeeded in his evil plan for Maggie. How could he have gone on presenting himself to the rich Collinses as their long-lost cousin from England?:
I think we have to assume that all the “cousin from England” stuff would have gone by the boards if Barnabas had succeeded with Maggie. When they revisited Barnabas’ Josettifying project in HOUSE OF DARK SHADOWS, they had to ask what would come next, and the answer was “He kills everyone and turns the estate into an impenetrable outpost of Hell.”
Some time after they came back from making that movie, the show would send Barnabas and Julia on a two-week visit to the future, to the far-off year 1995, where they find that most of the family is dead, the rest of them are hopelessly insane, and no one dares go to the estate, all because of hideous supernatural doings that took place there a quarter century before. Those two weeks are sensational, the last genuinely great phase of the show, and part of what makes them so great is that they are a logical sequel to the part of the show everyone remembers most clearly.
This one is on the post for 256. In that episode, the hapless Maggie has seen a mysterious little girl playing outside the cell in which Barnabas keeps her. The girl’s name turns out to be Sarah:
I’d say Sarah’s introduction is the single most important moment in the whole show, more important than Barnabas coming out of the box, more important even than Barnabas’ first decision not to kill Julia.
From the beginning they’d been playing with the idea that there was another cast of characters hidden behind the characters we’ve been watching, supernatural characters who can make their influence felt at certain moments. The most prominent of these was the ghost of Josette…
So the show has discarded the old supernatural realm of Josette and the widows, a realm that was, as you say, never more than slightly accessible. With Sarah’s appearance, we are introduced to an entirely new part of the show. Once again we have a set of characters hidden in the supernatural background, but they can interact with the characters from the main continuity more directly and at greater length than Josette and the widows ever could.
The puzzle of Sarah’s connection to Barnabas, and her talk about looking for the members of her family, indicates that this new order of supernatural beings have complex and unsettled relationships with each other, and that characters from the main continuity can have an influence on those relationships. We will have to figure those relationships out in the weeks and months to come, but as soon as Sarah demands Maggie not tell her big brother that she saw her, we know that they might come to enmesh the living beings. Every scene with Sarah, then, is a step leading directly to the time-travel and parallel universe storylines that will come to define the show.
This one, on the post for 279, sums up the major points of the three comments above. It regards an episode in which Barnabas and Willie are planning to host a costume party in which members of the present-day Collins family will come dressed as their forebears from Barnabas’ time, the late eighteenth century. Barnabas has rather surprisingly claimed that this party will be “the most important night of [his] life”:
‘Dude… you rose from the dead. I think the prize for “most important night of my life” is pretty much taken.’
I think he has a point, though. While it is undoubtedly true that the writers, producers, and other creatives never had an elaborate plan that they had agreed on and that they would stick to regarding the future storylines of the show, they did have some memory of the storylines they had already developed. They spent the first 25 weeks building up the ghosts of Josette and of The Widows as presences in the show, a whole second cast of characters existing in a back-world behind the one in which the events we see take place…
Once the vampire story gets going, Josette and the Widows can’t come back. Their distant, mysterious, impassive qualities suited the slow, atmospheric early months of the show, but once you have a ghoul rampaging about sucking people’s blood there’s no place for remote and uncanny presences. To hold the stage while that’s going on, you need to be a dynamic character…
So the old supernatural order of Josette and the Widows is gone. But the idea of a second cast of characters, mostly invisible to us, properly associated with the distant past, but still wielding powerful influence over the events on screen. is stronger than ever. Barnabas had been hidden away, he belongs dead, yet he has irrupted into the present and taken over the story. Sarah is a denizen of the same back-world, she has broken through with Barnabas, and is steadily pulling aside the curtain that conceals their realm from that in which the established characters live and which the audience sees. The audience is going to have to be introduced to more characters from Barnabas and Sarah’s world, and the party is going to serve that function.
Once we’ve learned their names and how they relate to each other, the back-world characters and their time will have to become a concrete part of the show in a way that Josette and the Widows never could. In retrospect, the only way that could end is with an extended flashback. So the party does turn out to be a solid candidate for ‘the most important night of Barnabas’ life’, in that it is a major step towards the time-travel and parallel-universe stories that would come to define the show.
The time-travel and parallel-universe stories put the back-worlds into the foreground and the usual continuity into the background. Those reversal may not have been the only way to resolve the crisis they created by introducing Barnabas and Sarah, but certainly some kind of radical change in the relationship of back-world and usual continuity was unavoidable.
I’d like to say one more thing about a point I make in that final comment. “While it is undoubtedly true that the writers, producers, and other creatives never had an elaborate plan that they had agreed on and that they would stick to regarding the future storylines of the show, they did have some memory of the storylines they had already developed.” Throughout the blog, Danny repeatedly claims never to have seen most of the episodes from the first 42 weeks of the show. At times this claim seems like it must be an exaggeration- for example, at one point he catalogs all 21 episodes (between #42 and #108) which revolve around the questions of what kind of physical contact had with Burke Devlin’s pen and where Burke’s pen is, a catalog that could only have been made by someone who had seen all of those episodes and all those between. Be that as it may, he does vociferously disclaim any interest in the show as it was before the vampire comes along. Which is his privilege, Dark Shadows was a very different show pre-Barnabas and post-Barnabas and there is no reason to assume that a person who likes one of those shows will like the other.
He also stresses the point that there was no advance planning in the writing of the show, that they were making it all up from week to week, often dropping one story abruptly and expanding another just as abruptly as soon as the ratings came in. That should be obvious to anyone who watches the show for any length of time.
However, it can be misleading to stress the impromptu nature of the stories while ignoring the first 42 weeks, especially when you’re considering the period of the show immediately after those weeks. No one knew what was coming, but the producers, the directors, most of the writers, and many of the actors had been with the show from the beginning and knew exactly where they had been. So the idea of a ghostly back-world and the difficulties that come when you have to define the relationship of back-world to main world were very familiar to them, and it would have been clear that redefining that relationship would have major implications for the future of the show.
Another weakness of Danny’s is a tendency to both emphasize intentionality (a fine thing in itself!) and to reduce intentionality to what “the writers” had in mind. In my comments I usually play along with the focus on intentions, even though I don’t tend to favor that myself. -If it were just me, I wouldn’t be so concerned with proving that anyone associated with the show was thinking about the relationship of back-world to main-world in the summer of 1967- it would be enough that the logic of the show leaves them nowhere else to go. But Dark Shadows Every Day is Danny’s blog, so when I’m there I want to play his game as much as possible.
Where I can’t follow is with his tendency to reduce “intentionality” to “the writers.” A TV series has lots of creators- in addition to writers, there are producers, directors, actors, set designers, costumers, camera people, executives representing networks, executives representing studios, etc, etc. Each of those people has to make contributions, and each has a whole bunch of things to think about at any given time. So there’s always a multitude of intentions, and many levels of intentionality, to be considered.
In 281 of the posts that follow, I link to comments I made on Danny Horn’s blog, “Dark Shadows Every Day.”
Not all of these comments were absolutely unique. Several times it occurred to me that a Dark Shadows features a number of older sisters who clean up messes that their misbehaving younger brothers make, and that a variety of male-female relationships on the show take on the dynamic of a bossy big sister and her bratty little brother. Danny doesn’t cover the first 209 episodes of the show, when we learn that Roger Collins has managed to squander his entire inheritance, half of the family fortune, and that his older sister Elizabeth Collins Stoddard has gone deeply into debt to contain the damage that his irresponsibility has done to the family business. Elizabeth takes Roger into her house, and alternates between demanding that he reform his ways and enabling his ongoing bad conduct. She takes charge of the raising of Roger’s son David and puts Roger to work in the family business, setting bounds to Roger’s crapulence but also insulating him from its consequences.
Watching this episode, I just realized the main relationship in DARK SHADOWS- Bossy Big Sister/ Bratty Little Brother. Liz and Roger are literally that, and each one’s struggle to safeguard their relationship by keeping the other in the dark about their shameful secrets is the background of every storyline in the first 209 episodes. Carolyn and David become the functional equivalent of a Bossy Big Sister and a Bratty Little Brother, and that’s the development that makes Carolyn a relatable character.
In Julia and Barnabas, we have the supreme example of such a relationship. They fall into it naturally; Julia is used to giving orders, and Barnabas is used to disobeying them. From the moment Julia lit her cigarette on the candles in the old house, she’s been Barnabas’ Bossy Big Sister, pursuing one plan after another meant for his own good. He’s been alternately pouting at her, raging against her, and clinging to her, at once resenting her demands on him and craving her validation for his narcissism. The climax of the episode, when they both know that a he-vampire is roaming about in search of a victim but it occurs to neither Julia nor Barnabas that Julia might be in danger, shows how deeply they have embedded themselves in these roles. Barnabas won’t even let Vicki walk to her car alone, and Julia, hearing the dognoise, understands why. But when Julia tells Barnabas that she will close up the lab and leave shortly after he goes out to join Willie, implying that she’s going to walk all the way back to the Great House by herself, he just leaves. Of course nothing will happen to Big Sis, she’ll always be OK.
That’s also why I don’t see how slashfic positing a sexual relationship between Barnabas and Julia can work. They are so much Bossy Big Sister and Bratty Little Brother that no matter how much time they spent telling themselves that they aren’t actually related, it would still be impossibly weird to try to be something else to each other.
I returned to the theme in a remark about episode 572, where Jonathan Frid gives a line-reading so pouty that I wonder if he was consciously trying to depict Barnabas as a bratty little brother to Julia:
I love the way Jonathan Frid pouts the line “I was afraid your visit would be pointless.” He’s every inch the bratty little brother upset that his big sister went out when he didn’t want her to go.
Cavada Humphrey looks quite a bit like Jonathan Frid. I wonder what 1795 would have been like if Barnabas had had an older sister who bossed him around, stood around during his ridiculously childish fits of petulance, occasionally acted as his conscience, and time and again serve as his enabler and protector. It would have been funny to see Grayson Hall’s Countess express disapproval of such a relationship.
Heck, that older sister could have been Sarah. Just because she’s a child in her ghost form doesn’t mean she has to have died at that age. Maybe she comes back in the form in which her relationship to her brother took its permanent shape, when she was about nine and he was about seven. Of course, that possibility is foreclosed at Sarah’s first appearance, when she tells Maggie not to let her “big brother” know she saw her, but I suppose they could have retconned that away with a phony flashback where she says “little brother.”
I revisited these points a few times- Danny’s blog consists of over a thousand posts, one each for episodes 210-1245, plus a few dozen about properties related to Dark Shadows, and each post has its own discussion thread. So it isn’t bad netiquette to repeat yourself a bit from one thread to another- there is always a chance someone who didn’t see a comment previously posted elsewhere will take an interest when you post a similar one. But I did try to keep from making a bore of myself to those who read everything.
I could have mentioned some other bossy big sister/ bratty little brother combos. In a comment on the 1897 storyline, I alluded to the relationship between Judith Collins Trask and her feckless younger brothers. Judith’s arc doesn’t really allow her to be a bossy big sister to any of her three bratty little brothers. But each of them does find himself attached to at least one woman who is stronger than he is, and who might well treat him as Elizabeth does Roger and as Julia does Barnabas.
It’s a shame Terry Crawford wasn’t a more accomplished actress in the 1960s- in the scripts Beth fluctuates between indulging Quentin in his every vice and insisting that he clean up his act. That’s the bossy big sister/ bratty little brother dynamic we’ve seen so many times, but unlike any previous pair who have enacted it Beth and Quentin are lovers and are not social equals. It would be interesting to explore the dynamic in that context, but Ms Crawford’s performance is so wooden that you sometimes have to think about her scenes after it is over and call to memory the dialogue and the visual composition before it strikes you what the point was.
Pansy Faye isn’t on the show very long, unfortunately but she’s clearly in the driver’s seat in her relationship with her thoroughly clownish husband Carl Collins. And Edward Collins is much the weaker personality in his connections with both his estranged wife Laura and with Kitty Soames. So each of those men was looking for a woman who was forceful enough to take charge of him, but indulgent enough to allow him to continue in all his established habits.
I did not refer to the theme in my comments on posts about “The Haunting of Collinwood” by the ghost of Quentin, and I made only a single reference to it in my comments on posts about the “Re-Haunting of Collinwood” by the ghost of mini-Quentin Gerard. Indeed, that single reference is to Julia’s failure to focus her bossiness on Barnabas. I dropped the ball there, I think- the relationship between David and Amy in the original “Haunting of Collinwood” is at its most interesting when it mixes elements of the bossy big sister/ bratty little brother dynamic with other types of interaction, while the bland, lifeless relationships between David and Hallie on the one hand and between Tad and Carrie on the other in the “Re-Haunting of Collinwood” could benefit from some kind of structure.
I also left the theme unmentioned in my comments regarding the show’s dying days, the 1841 Parallel Time storyline of episodes 1199-1245. That’s understandable- the show did not develop any bossy big sister/ bratty little brother relationships in that period. But there was an implicit one- Miss Julia Collins was the sister of Justin Collins, and she had functioned as head of the household during his years of madness. Justin dies a few episodes into the story, without sharing a scene with Julia, and she is left as a bossy big sister with no bratty brother to whom she can attach herself. Meanwhile, Bramwell is a thoroughly bratty man with no big sister. It’s rather sad for the loyal audience, having enjoyed so many scenes in which Grayson Hall and Jonathan Frid had enormous fun with the bossy big sister/ bratty little brother pattern, seeing them drift separately through these dreary episodes.
The closest we get to a bossy big sister/ bratty little brother scene in the dying days of the show is also the one genuinely irresistible moment of that segment. In episode 1215, Flora Collins (Joan Bennett) and her son Morgan (Keith Prentice) are walking through the woods on their way to Biddleford’s Creek. He whines about the pointlessness of the trip, she scolds him, and we get a brilliant little glimpse of what their relationship must have been like since he first learned to talk. That authoritative mother/ whiny son moment left me, not only wanting more such scenes between them, but also wishing it had been presented in contrast with a bossy big sister/ bratty little brother relationship elsewhere in the show.
In 281 of the posts that follow, I link to comments I made on Danny Horn’s blog, “Dark Shadows Every Day.”
Not all of these comments were absolutely unique. Several times, I picked up on one of Danny’s favorite topics, gay subtext in Dark Shadows. Usually I claimed that there was even more of this in the show than he identified.
Danny writes intricate, deeply considered analyses of episodes 210 through 1245 of Dark Shadows. He does not cover episodes 1-209, and frequently claims that there are many episodes among them he has never seen. He does refer several times to a plot point that stretched across many episodes in those 42 weeks, the story of Roger Collins and his obsessive interest in where Burke Devlin’s pen is. Burke has sworn to expose the nature of his former relationship with Roger, exposure which Roger fears will lead to his disgrace and imprisonment.
Driven by that fear, Roger alternately takes and loses Burke’s pen. He keeps returning to where the pen is, and his obsessive attention to the pen, moving it from one hiding place to another, holding it in his hands, staring at it, shifting it between his coat pocket and his pants pocket, dropping it out of his clothes to a place where people can see it, putting it in darkened corners of his house, burying it in the soil of the grounds of his home, digging it up again to put it in yet another place, leads directly to his arrest. Danny does not appear to find any gay subtext in this, even in the post in which he gives synopses of 21 episodes where Burke’s pen is the main theme. Instead, Burke’s pen is, for him, a symbol of the dangerous boring-ness of the first 42 weeks of the show. For an audience in 1966, watching what was at that point a rather ambitiously literate show and living in a country where Freudianism was enormously influential, I suspect a man obsessed with where another man’s pen is would have seemed likely to be dealing with psychological issues concerning male genitalia, even if he weren’t played by Louis Edmonds.
Though there may not be any posts about the first 209 episodes, the comment threads range over the whole series and over topics far beyond it. So, the Burke/ Roger relationship came up in a thread responding to Danny’s post on episode 1008. In response to that discussion, I wrote the following:
There is a dispute among the characters as to whether Burke or Roger was driving when the car hit Hanson. This hardly matters. It was Burke’s car, and even if he gave the keys to Roger, he would have done so knowing that Roger was as drunk and as unfit to drive as he was. A fact like that wouldn’t necessarily have kept Burke out of jail even if it were known at the time, and ten years later, after witnesses’ memories had faded, physical evidence had been lost, and statutes of limitations had expired, the whole basis of the “Revenge of Burke Devlin” storyline is sheer nonsense.
But let’s look at another question about the identities of the people in that car. The public story is that the three people in it were a pair of lovers and their friend, and that after the collision the lovers broke up and one of them ended up married to the friend. Maybe that’s true- but maybe the lovers were Roger and Burke, and Laura was the friend who was along for the ride. That’s the secret Roger is so desperate to cover up when Burke comes back to town.
It also explains why Burke “investigates” the matter personally, rather than handing it over to the high-priced private investigating firms the show goes out of its way to tell us he is in the habit of retaining. He isn’t trying to uncover established facts about the past- he’s trying to fabricate a new past, in which will stand a different sort of relationship than the one he and Roger actually shared. Perhaps, as a deeply closeted 1960s guy, Devlin has it in mind to remake the past so that he and Roger did not have a sexual relationship at all; by rewriting his history with Roger, he may hope to free himself of his same-sex desires and the threat they pose to his macho identity. Perhaps, at another level of his mind, he wants to free himself, not of his desires, but of that macho identity, and of the social norms and personal inhibitions that keep him from living openly as a gay man. In that way, Burke is the first of Dark Shadows’ would-be time travelers, embarking on a quest to erase a past he cannot tolerate and to replace it with one that will enable him to have a sustainable set of intimate relationships.
This would also explain Burke’s attitude towards other major characters. Carolyn and Laura are nothing to him but weapons to use against Roger and instruments to use in inscribing a new past. His relationship with Vicki doesn’t really get started until there’s no reason for either of them to be on the show anymore; it’s boring for that reason, but if we think of Burke using Vicki as a beard we can find an interest in its very lifelessness.
Moreover, we can connect Burke’s closeted homosexuality to his weirdly feckless efforts against Barnabas. He never figures out what Barnabas is, but he immediately sees what Barnabas is not- that is, he is not trying to be a perfect example of Heterosexual Male, 1960s edition. He responds to Barnabas with undisguised loathing, but not with any real jealousy about his attentions to Vicki. It’s Barnabas’ freedom from convention that he envies. Once we postulate a B/R sexual relationship before the crash that killed Hanson, we can draw a direct line from Burke’s return to town in episode 1 to the night he spent hiding behind a tree near the Old House waiting to see Barnabas come and go in episode 304.
I suppose there might be a reason they chose the name “Burke Devlin” for the character- not only was the actor who played “Burke Devlin” in the film “The Tarnished Angels” Rock Hudson, but that Burke Devlin is involved in a love triangle in which his strongest feelings seem to be for the husband of the woman with whom he is ostensibly involved. That Devlin is at first fascinated by the husband, has a falling-out with him, then turns his attentions to the wife.
So far, this has been the gayest storyline the show has taken on yet.
In 899, the sailor offers to buy Paul a drink, and Paul shouts “I buy my own drinks!” This isn’t subtext- any man getting that reaction in a bar will know that the other fellow has interpreted his offer as including more than the drink. Paul apologizes and becomes friendly, indicating that he is willing to abandon that interpretation and set aside the hostility that accompanied it.
In this episode, we’re back in the same bar. Barnabas beckons Paul to his table with his index finger. I invite any man who doesn’t think we are intended to read this as a reference to a sexual come-on to try that move on a homophobic tough guy in a bar.
Paul’s face shows his inner struggle as he tries to resist Barnabas’ advances, but he can’t. Barnabas coaxes him into reminiscing about yet another night in the same bar, when a casual encounter with yet another guy led to something that seemed at the time like a little harmless tomfoolery, but that has now grown into a threat to his relationship with his family, his standing in the community, his physical well-being, and everything else.
Every time Barnabas addresses Philip as “Philip,” I see a little twinkle in Jonathan Frid’s eyes. By 1969, female impersonators had been imitating Bette Davis’ commands to Leslie Howard in OF HUMAN BONDAGE, where his character’s name is “Philip,” for thirty years. I knew gay men who were still making each other laugh as late as the 1980s by quoting lines beginning “Philip!” If Bernau hadn’t stayed so perfectly in character, I doubt Frid would have been able to keep from a giggling fit that would have brought the house down.
Christopher Bernau’s decision to play an antique dealer using a voice and mannerisms derived from a Jack Benny imitation led many of Danny’s commenters to bring up Bernau’s own sexuality and wonder whether he was simply incapable of staying in the closet. As it sometimes does in discussions of obviously gay actors playing men partnered with women on American TV in this period, The Paul Lynde Show (1972-1973) came up. I had altogether too much to say about this:
The reference to Paul Lynde in the original post reminds me of THE PAUL LYNDE SHOW, a sitcom which aired on ABC in the 1972-1973 season. It’s a fascinating artifact. Lynde’s character has a wife and two daughters. The opening sequence sets the tone- it flashes through several readily identifiable scenario (falling off a bicycle, etc) which end with Lynde falling into one or another kind of trap. Lynde plays each of those little vignettes with the same series of expressions on his face, the first a grim look of deep-seated misery, the last an explosion of panic. Each episode focuses on Lynde’s character stumbling into some kind of excruciatingly awkward situation, suffering through a rapidly escalating series of embarrassments, and finally escaping from it with his dignity annihilated but his wife and daughters feeling sorry for him.
It’s routine for people to cite that show as an example of how clueless the entertainment industry and the public who consumed its products were about gay people in the old days, but it is so plausible a version of what it might have been like for Paul Lynde to have married a woman that can’t imagine it wasn’t intentional on some level. You can read it as an exploration of a gay man and a woman who’ve ended up married to each other for whatever reason, and who have resolved to do what they can to make a marriage work. After all, they like each other, they want their daughters to know where home is, and they have a position to maintain within the community. They show the result as something that’s pretty nearly tolerable for all concerned, but at no point does it look like something great. Lynde’s daily frustrations, confusions, and humiliations are the basis of the comedy, but they could just as easily have been explored in a drama that makes their source explicit. It certainly gives academics interested in Queer Theory a lot to write about.
If the public wasn’t in fact as oblivious to gayness as is sometimes suggested, it would have been even more daring- or more clueless- to cast Christopher Bernau as a married man than you suggest. Especially so considering that he’s supposed to be an antique dealer, an occupation often stereotyped as a province of gay men. His performance in this episode is not as obviously gay as was his performance in episode 890- even if you were in an all-male porn video, it would be a challenge to be as obviously gay as Bernau is in episode 890- but it’s pretty darned flamboyant.
Maybe they had seen so many other gay actors play heterosexual characters convincingly enough that it didn’t occur to them that he would have a problem. Joel Crothers has been mentioned several times, but I would also bring up Louis Edmonds. As Edward Collins, he is perfectly credible in his scenes with Kathryn Leigh Scott’s Kitty Soames. And as Roger in 1966, he was credible both as a slimy guy coming on to Vicki and as the estranged husband of Laura.
The Leviathans storyline was followed by the 1970 Parallel Time storyline, to which I usually refer as “Meet Another Angelique.” The A-story throughout that segment is an adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca. I engaged in a bit of imaginary recasting concerning that story:
Daphne du Maurier was bisexual, and a lot of people have written a lot of criticism of REBECCA based on the idea that what drove de Winter to kill his wife was that she was sleeping with women as well as with other men.
I’m skeptical about that interpretation. Maybe du Maurier had planned to put that in the book, but once the story turned out to be about the second Mrs de Winter’s struggle with feelings of inadequacy, the events that actually took place between Rebecca and Maxim during their marriage are relegated to a secondary importance. As for Mrs Danvers, the most important thing about her in the novel is her ambiguity. The second Mrs de Winter is terrified of her, but she would be terrified of anyone. Since she is the narrator, we have no way of knowing what Mrs Danvers is actually thinking or doing.
Of course, Hitchcock and Judith Anderson made Mrs Danvers’ erotic attachment to Rebecca the central theme of the movie. The second Mrs de Winter finds that Maxim has become unavailable to her as soon as they arrived at Manderley. The only powerful emotion she encounters anywhere in her new environment is Mrs Danvers’ passionate attachment to Rebecca. That passion is just one more thing she can’t understand.
Grayson Hall is good as Hoffman, but I wish Clarice Blackburn had played the housekeeper. First, because she joined the cast thinking that Mrs Johnson would be based on Mrs Danvers, so that she had spent a few years preparing for the role. Second, she was in real life partnered with a woman, so it would have been good to see an actual lesbian play a homoerotic-inflected role.
In which I remark on the sad degeneration of Burke Devlin from a dark and dashing action hero to a disposable buffoon, and wonder what might have been.
Dark Shadows Commentary 