Today’s cast includes a vampire, a wicked witch, two mad scientists, a Frankenstein’s monster, and an irritable housekeeper. The deadly menace turns out to be the housekeeper.
In a laboratory in a house by the sea, mad scientists Eric Lang and Julia Hoffman are trying to transfer recovering vampire Barnabas Collins’ “life force” into the body of the creature Lang has built for the purpose, a creature Barnabas has named Adam. In the drawing room of the great house atop Widow’s Hill, wicked witch Angelique disrupts that attempt by sticking a pin into a clay figure that she addresses as “Dr Lang.” It is unclear how Angelique attached the clay figure to Lang, though since it has roughly the same acting ability as Addison Powell the pairing seems natural enough.
Lang gasps for air. Julia helps both him and Barnabas. Barnabas gets up from the operating table and declares he will go to the great house and stop Angelique. Lang tries to tell Julia how to carry on his work, but keeps breaking down. While Julia is out of the room getting some heart medicine, Angelique removes the pin from the clay figure. During that moment of relief, Lang is alone in the lab. He turns on his tape recorder and says that if both Barnabas and Adam live, Barnabas will be free of the vampire curse. Adam will drain it from him, but will not suffer from its symptoms. If Adam dies, Barnabas will revert to active vampirism.
Angelique resumes tormenting Lang as Julia returns to the laboratory. Lang cannot keep his breath long enough to tell Julia his message or make it clear that she should listen to the tape. Angelique says that Lang has suffered enough for tonight, and that she will put the pin away. As she is about to do so, the door to the drawing room opens and housekeeper Mrs Johnson comes in. Mrs Johnson startles Angelique, who inadvertently drives the pin through the clay figure, killing Lang.
This is the second death to which Mrs Johnson has contributed. The two cases are very similar. She unknowingly gave undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins the information she needed to cast the spell that killed parapsychologist Dr Peter Guthrie. Guthrie resembled Lang not only in holding a terminal degree, studying the uncanny, and doing battle with an undead witch, but also in his use of a tape recorder. In #170 and #171, Guthrie recorded the audio of a séance; in #172, Laura erased the recording and replaced it with the sound of fire; and in #185, he was on his way to get his tape recorder to use at another séance when Laura cast the spell that killed him. Mrs Johnson is a menace to a very specific kind of person.
Barnabas comes to the great house and threatens Angelique, calling her by the name “Cassandra,” the alias under which she has married sarcastic dandy Roger Collins and found a place in the house. At first he says he will burn her if Lang dies. She pretends not to know what he’s talking about, and says that she will expose him as a madman. He looks at her neck and leans in, a sign that his vampire urges are coming back. The telephone rings, and Mrs Johnson enters. Angelique/ Cassandra explains their compromising position by claiming that she was fainting; with that, she shows that her threat to air her complaints is a bluff, since she could easily have demanded Mrs Johnson call the police.
Mrs Johnson says the call is for Barnabas. It is Julia reporting Lang’s death. Barnabas makes some grim remarks to Angelique/ Cassandra, then goes back to the laboratory and talks with Julia. She is distraught, but agrees to pick up where Lang left off.
We end with a dream sequence. Angelique has loosed a “Dream Curse” on the people of Collinsport. One after another, they have the same basic dream, in each case beginning with an appearance by the next person to have the dream beckoning them into a haunted house attraction and ending with a door opening to expose something the previous dreamers didn’t see. Julia’s dream begins with Mrs Johnson, telling us she will be the next up. It proceeds with her walking through a foggy room, including a clear shot of the fog machine. It ends with the sight of a skeleton wearing a wedding dress and the sound of Angelique’s distinctive laugh, telling us that the position Angelique has gained by marrying Roger is particularly dangerous to Julia. Since Julia lives in the same house as Angelique and they know all about each other, this is not exactly a major revelation.
The dream involves the beckoner’s voice reciting a little bit of doggerel. As it goes on, some beckoners say “through endless corridors by trial and error,” others say “through endless corridors of trial and error.” I prefer “of trial and error.” That implies that the corridors are themselves made up of decisions people have made and of the consequences of those decisions. Saying that the characters are moving through the corridors “by trial and error” means that the corridors exist whether anyone engages with them or not. We saw Angelique start the curse, so we know it isn’t something that has been out there in reality all along, and it expresses itself in dreams, not in anything that persists when people stop paying attention to it. Besides, the whole idea of drama is to show decisions and their consequences, so “of trial and error” is better on every front.
Dr Julia Hoffman is in the front parlor of the house of her fellow mad scientist, Eric Lang. She is on the telephone, asking the operator to connect her with the police. Even though she has lived in the Collinsport area for months now, she is still surprised that the sheriff’s office doesn’t have an emergency number.
Julia locked the door to the parlor; Lang is outside it with a gun, and recovering vampire Barnabas Collins is knocking and calling her name. They want to stop her reporting to the police that Lang is building a Frankenstein’s monster with body parts retrieved from the cemetery, and that he was planning to cut a living man’s head off to use as the last piece of the creature. Lang plans to bring the body to life by draining Barnabas’ “life-force” into it. Barnabas hopes this will free him of the vampire curse once and for all, and is desperate to complete the experiment.
Barnabas shouts that Julia should remember “someone.” When he can’t come up with the name, Lang prompts him with a yell of “Dave Woodard!” Barnabas and Julia killed local physician Dave Woodard in #341; Julia hangs up the phone, realizing that if the operator ever does manage to find a police officer any investigation of Lang would likely expose her as a murderer.
Barnabas has told Lang a great deal about himself. For example, in #467, Lang was the first person Barnabas told that his vampirism was the result of a curse placed on him by wicked witch Angelique. So returning viewers can believe that Barnabas might have confided in Lang about the murder of Dr Woodard. But it would be strange for him to have done so off-screen. And just Friday, Barnabas explained to Lang that the reason he thinks Julia can be trusted with the secret of the experiment is that she has a crush on him.* He hasn’t had much time to share more information with Lang since then, and if Lang had already known that Julia couldn’t call the cops without exposing herself to a murder charge Barnabas wouldn’t have needed to mention her crush on him. The likeliest explanation is that the loud and clear exclamation of “Dave Woodard!” is not Lang prompting Barnabas at all; rather, it was Addison Powell prompting Jonathan Frid. The result is a blooper that seriously confuses the relationships among Lang, Barnabas, and Julia. It’s early enough in the episode that it really is odd they didn’t stop tape and start over.
At any rate, they never mention Woodard again. He was introduced early in the vampire storyline. He was the counterpart to Dr John Seward, the physician in Dracula who realizes that all the patients who are suddenly showing up with puncture wounds on their necks and massive blood loss need care he is not trained to provide, and calls in his old med professor, Dr Van Helsing. Julia was the Van Helsing analogue, but she wound up siding with the vampire and killing her onetime friend. It is appropriate that the last reference to Woodard comes in this, the second episode of Dark Shadows with no cast members introduced before Barnabas. From now on, the daylight world Woodard represented and tried to restore is no longer present even as a memory.
Julia lets Barnabas and Lang into the parlor, and asks Lang to promise that he won’t kill anyone. He gives such a promise. She is unconvinced, but agrees not to call the police. She also tells Lang she will continue to oppose the experiment.
On the terrace of the great house of Collinwood, Barnabas and Julia talk about Lang’s experiment. Angelique, wearing a black wig and calling herself Cassandra, lives in the house as the wife of sarcastic dandy Roger, and the terrace is surrounded by trees, fences, and other prime screens for eavesdroppers. Barnabas and Julia know this well, as each of them has eavesdropped on important conversations here themselves.
Of course Angelique/ Cassandra comes by and hears everything. Barnabas does catch her, grab her, call her by her right name, and vow that she won’t stop him. After he lets her go, he moans to Julia that it was foolish of them to discuss their plans there. That underlines the foolishness of an idea key to the plan, that after Lang’s creature has been animated Angelique will never realize that Barnabas is dwelling within it and place a fresh curse on it. Barnabas assumes that Angelique, who has transcended time itself to pursue him, will just give up and go away once she sees that his original body is dead, and won’t have any questions about the new guy living at his doctor’s house.
Angelique summons her new cat’s paw, lawyer Tony Peterson. Jerry Lacy plays Tony. From #365 to #461, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the 1790s. In that phase of the show, Mr Lacy played the Rev’d Mr Trask, a fanatical witchfinder who inadvertently gave Angelique a great deal of assistance in her campaign to destroy the Collins family and those close to them. Most of the characters in the 1790s segment represent a commentary of some kind on the characters the same actors play in the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s. Tony and Trask have seemed to be an exception. In 1967, Tony was introduced through his profession and served mainly as an instance of Mr Lacy’s famous Humphrey Bogart imitation. Trask did end up functioning as a lawyer in a witchcraft trial, and his lunatic shouting about “THE ALMIGHTY!!” and “THE DE-VILLLL!!!!” were occasionally suggestive of what Bogart might have ended up doing if Captain Queeg’s testimony before the court-martial in The Caine Mutiny had gone on for nineteen weeks. Otherwise, there didn’t seem to be any fruitful points of comparison between the two.
Angelique tells Tony that the reason she chose him as her servant was that he reminded her of Trask. She orders him to go to Lang’s and steal a talisman that can guard against witches. At that, Tony shouts “Against you!,” and he sounds very much like Trask. Perhaps we are to think that a secular education and a steady diet of Hollywood movies could have turned the farcically warped Trask into a basically reasonable fellow like Tony, but that there is no strength in those things to stand up to a force like Angelique.
The talisman was a gift to Lang from Barnabas. Lang refuses to keep it on his person, even though it saved his life to clutch it when Angelique was making his heart beat so fast it was about to burst. Lang shows up at Barnabas’ house, under the false impression he received a telephone call from Barnabas. Barnabas, who has no telephone in his house, explains to Lang that Angelique has lured him away. When he learns that Lang has left the talisman in his desk drawer at home, he insists on accompanying him back there.
It is too late. Tony has already stolen the talisman and delivered it to Angelique. She looks at it and says that Lang will not be able to save either Barnabas or himself. Presumably, not even by reminding him of his lines.
In #365, well-meaning governess Vicki came unstuck in time and found herself in the year 1795. Now, Vicki is about to be hanged for witchcraft, and the last of the story threads that have been playing out around her are about to be tied up.
Yesterday’s episode ended in the study at the great house of Collinwood, where naval officer/ sleazy operator Nathan Forbes shot a wooden bolt from a crossbow into the chest of vampire Barnabas Collins. At the top of today’s episode, Barnabas pulls the bolt out, telling Nathan that the bolt didn’t hit him. Barnabas’ voice is dubbed in over this, clarifying that Nathan missed his heart. We then switch to Nathan’s point of view and see Barnabas approaching for the kill.
After the opening title, we see that Barnabas is still in the study. Time has apparently passed. Barnabas’ father Joshua enters. Barnabas asks him if Nathan has been buried. Joshua says that he has, and lists the stories that he will tell to cover up all the deaths that Barnabas has been involved with over the last few months. Barnabas wants Joshua to shoot him through the heart with a silver bullet right now and destroy him forever. Joshua cannot do that, but he promises that he will put Barnabas out of his misery come daylight, when he is in his coffin. Barnabas asks two more favors of his father, that he free much put-upon servant Ben and that he prevent the execution of the wrongly convicted Vicki. Joshua promises to do these things as well.
Throughout this scene, actors Louis Edmonds and Jonathan Frid hold back tears. Patrick McCray remarks: “Crying is not the most powerful thing an actor can do on stage. Rather, it is the attempt not to cry that seizes audiences. In these moments, Frid and Edmonds seize. In a medium of love scenes, there is none more poignant.”
The performers have a powerful theme to work with, one that Danny Horn explicates when he considers the question of why Joshua is still alive at the end of this storyline. When she made Barnabas a vampire, wicked witch Angelique decreed that everyone who loved him would die. Yesterday, Joshua confessed that he feared he was incapable of love, and Barnabas told him that such a disability might save his life. But when we see Edmonds and Frid struggling against the urge to weep, we know that Joshua loves Barnabas very deeply indeed, as we have in recent weeks seen that he loved others he has lost. Danny explains:
The reason why Joshua is spared from the curse is that the love he feels for Barnabas isn’t the kind of love that Angelique recognizes, and so he slips under her radar.
Angelique’s love is selfish, and spiteful. She uses it as a convenient excuse for running over anyone who gets in her way. She doesn’t understand love that arises from respect, and strength of character. And she will never feel the kind of deep, honest love that Joshua now realizes for the first time that he is in fact capable of.
Danny goes on to explain that, while others had love for Barnabas that included a selfless element, there was also something in their feelings that Angelique could recognize, while Joshua’s love for him comes entirely from this higher plane. The portion of Dark Shadows set in the years 1795-1796 turns out to be The Tragedy of Joshua Collins, not only because Joshua has the highest social status among the characters, makes the most important decisions, and is played by one of the best actors, but because he grows into the sort of person who is governed by this kind of love. When the world around him is being ground down into dishonesty and cheapness, largely due to the consequences of his own misguided actions, Joshua discovers a new kind of strength within himself. Even amid the ruins of a world he himself did as much as anyone to wreck, Joshua represents the hope that something better might yet come into being.
After daybreak, Joshua stands beside Barnabas’ coffin in the secret chamber hidden inside the Collins family mausoleum, the pistol in his hand. Joshua cannot bring himself to fire the silver bullets into his son’s heart. Ben enters. Joshua orders him to affix a silver crucifix to the inside of the coffin to immobilize Barnabas there, and then to chain the coffin shut. Joshua and Ben assure each other that Barnabas will never be released. Later, we see Ben in the chamber, alone with the chained coffin. He looks at it and says “Goodbye, Mr Barnabas, goodbye.” Thayer David delivers that line with an unforgettable simplicity.
Returning viewers know that Joshua’s plan to keep Barnabas confined will work only until April of 1967, when Barnabas will be freed to prey upon the living once more. That July, in #276, Barnabas will stand in the hidden chamber and say that, while in chaining the coffin rather than destroying him his father “thought he was being merciful, what he did was no act of mercy.” This remark, combined with a story he told Vicki in #214 about his conflict with Joshua, just may have been the germ from which the whole story of Joshua grew. At any rate, the promise ABC-TV made to its viewers when it aired this promotional spot in November 1967 has been fulfilled:
Back in the study, Joshua frees Ben and gives him a severance packet of $100, worth about $2500 in 2024 dollars. When Ben thanks him for his generosity, Joshua denies that he is being generous. I have to agree with Joshua there- that amount might get a fellow out of town, but he’d have to find a new job pretty fast if he wanted to stay in the habit of sleeping indoors.
Another servant brings a note while Joshua and Ben are in the study. The governor has refused Joshua’s plea that Vicki’s execution be stayed. She will be hanged tonight.
At the gaol, Vicki’s boyfriend, an unpleasant man named Peter, is brought to her cell. The gaoler tells them they have five minutes before Vicki will be taken to her death. It is little wonder Vicki’s last request was to have time with Peter. Spending five minutes with him is like living to a ripe old age. Peter vows to overcome death and reunite with her. The last time we heard that was when Barnabas died the first time. In #409, he used his dying breaths to ask gracious lady Josette to wait for him to return to her. Fool that she was, Josette did, leading to disaster for her. Returning viewers may well wince, not only at the ominous parallel with Josette’s grim fate, but also at the memory of the many tedious scenes in which Josette at first insisted that Barnabas was coming back and was then at a loss when asked to explain herself. Besides, we don’t want to see any more of Peter.
The scene of Vicki’s hanging is quite elaborate by Dark Shadows standards. They’ve built a fairly realistic gibbet, hired several extras, put hats on them, and given them burning torches to hold. They test the equipment with a heavy sack, slowly lead Vicki to the place of honor, ask her if she wants a mask, and command the Lord to have mercy on her unrepentant soul. The camera drifts up to the top of the rigging, leaving Vicki out of the shot. When the time comes, we hear the drop and see the rope tighten.
This marks the end of the 1795 flashback, but not necessarily of Dark Shadows 3.0. In #437, Vicki told Peter that she often had nightmares in her childhood, so often that she became a connoisseur of nightmares. She would stay asleep throughout the whole process, waking up only at the very moment she was about to be killed. That was a rather heavy-handed way of telling the audience that Vicki would ascend the gallows, put her head in the noose, and find herself back in the 1960s. Once she is back in her own time, what she has learned in the 1790s will have consequences for what she does next. So we can expect an epilogue of some kind before Dark Shadows 4.0 begins.
Haughty overlord Joshua Collins and good witch Bathia Mapes decide to take Joshua’s son Barnabas to the deserted Old House on the estate of Collinwood. Bathia has agreed to do battle with the ghost of wicked witch Angelique in hopes of lifting the curse whereby Angelique turned Barnabas into a vampire. Bathia warns Joshua that if she is interrupted, Angelique will defeat her. In that case, Barnabas will remain as he is, and Bathia will die. Joshua assures her that no one will come to the Old House.
Bathia, Joshua, and Barnabas before they go to the Old House. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
In the great house on the estate, Barnabas’ mother Naomi talks with fluttery heiress Millicent Collins and Millicent’s new husband, naval officer/ sleazy operator Nathan Forbes. Millicent’s mental health has always been fragile, and Nathan has been making a concerted effort to shatter it altogether so that he can get his hands on her share of the Collins fortune. Making matters worse, Barnabas bit Milllicent the other day. She has a beautiful mad scene today, one of several that Nancy Barrett knocks out of the park during this storyline. She insists on telling Naomi that she has seen Barnabas. This distresses Naomi, who knows that Barnabas is dead but does not know about the vampire curse.
Millicent gives Naomi enough details to stir her curiosity about what is going on at the Old House. She goes there, interrupting Bathia’s efforts. Joshua manages to hustle Naomi out of the house, but the damage is done. Bathia bursts into flames and dies. In keeping with his habit of covering up compromising information, Joshua has kept everything from Naomi. Once more, we see the cost of this habit. Had he leveled with her about Barnabas’ condition, Barnabas might have been freed.
There is a detailed comparison of the script for this episode with the finished product on a tumblelog called sights9. It is in five parts, the first of them here.
A very famous blooper occurs before Joshua and Bathia take Barnabas from the great house to the Old House. Bathia is supposed to be giving instructions, but falls silent, stares at the teleprompter, and squints helplessly for a long moment. Then we hear the line producer, Bob Costello, prompt her with “Then go to the house” and she picks back up.
For the first nine months it was on the air, Dark Shadows was the story of well-meaning governess Vicki Winters and her efforts to befriend her charge, strange and troubled boy David Collins. That phase of the show reached a climax with the story of David’s mother, blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, who was on from December 1966 until March 1967. Vicki rallied the regular characters in opposition to Laura’s evil plans for David, and when Laura went up in smoke David found refuge in Vicki’s arms. He had exchanged his destructive, death-oriented mother for the loving, life-affirming Vicki. At that moment, Dark Shadows version 1.0 ended.
Now, Vicki has been thrust back in time to the year 1795. Vicki has managed to get another job as governess on the great estate of Collinwood, supervising the education of ten year old Sarah Collins and her second cousin once removed, the visiting (but so far unseen) Daniel Collins. There is a blonde fire witch here as well, the mysterious Angelique. Viewers who have been with the show from the beginning will remember Vicki’s leadership of the campaign against Laura, and are waiting to see how she will take charge of the effort to defeat Angelique.
It’s already been a long wait. Vicki has not adapted her thinking at all to her new surroundings. Angelique’s spells have wrought considerable havoc, and members of the Collins household have begun to wonder whether a witch might be at work among them. Angelique hasn’t lifted a finger to deflect suspicion to Vicki, but Vicki’s own behavior has been so bizarre that she is the obvious suspect. As we open today, she has been tied to a tree by the Rev’d Mr Trask, a visiting witch-hunter from Salem, Massachusetts.
Vicki’s ineptitude is particularly frustrating to watch because the major theme of Dark Shadows 2.0, which ran from Laura’s immolation in March to Vicki’s temporal displacement in November, had been a brilliantly successful deception by a different sort of time-traveler. Vampire Barnabas Collins presented himself to the Collinses and their neighbors, not as a blood-sucking ghoul native to another century, but as a distant cousin from contemporary England. Barnabas made plenty of slips and raised miscellaneous suspicions in the minds of various people, but he played his part well enough that the Collinses let him take possession of a house on their estate, the people of Collinsport accepted him as a member of the local aristocracy, and in one way or another he made himself indispensable to everyone around him. We began this version 3.0 expecting to see Vicki do in 1795 something like what Barnabas had done in 1967, and instead we see her as a tedious dingbat.
Barnabas is alive and benevolent in 1795. He and his friend, caddish naval officer Nathan Forbes, are men of the Enlightenment who are appalled that there are still people who believe in witchcraft. They hold Trask in contempt and are committed to saving Vicki from him. Barnabas and Nathan ask the Collins family’s house-guest, the Countess DuPrés, what Trask has done with Vicki. The countess had originally believed Vicki to be a witch, but after seeing Trask’s lunatic behavior while interrogating her came to regret her involvement in bringing him to Collinwood. She tells them that Trask tied Vicki up and took her out of the house, whither he would not say.
Outraged, the men head out of the house. They meet Trask coming in. He refuses to tell them where he has left Vicki. Barnabas thunders that “[I]t perhaps has escaped your memory that we have just fought a war recently-a war to establish certain rights. And I am defending the right of this girl to be judged innocent until she is proved innocent. I am sure that this idea is a little complicated for your mind to absorb.” He’s probably right about that, I certainly find it difficult to absorb.
Once Barnabas and Nathan are on their way to look for Vicki, Trask tells the countess he has tied her to a tree somewhere in the woods and that if she is a witch, the tree will be dead by morning. Angelique’s regular job is as the countess’ maid. She is in the room with a tea tray when Trask says this, and she smiles delightedly when she hears it. Later, she will sneak out of the house to go searching for Vicki herself.
Barnabas and Nathan find Vicki and untie her. They decide to hide her in the great house of Collinwood. The great house is Vicki’s home in the 1960s, and is under construction in 1795. They set off, and Angelique comes to the tree.
Once she is alone, Angelique takes a cutting from the tree and sets fire to it. This causes the tree itself to burn. It is not entirely clear why she doesn’t just set fire to the tree, since the cutting she has taken is the greenest and least flammable part of it, but witches gonna witch, I guess.
The next morning, Trask goes to the tree. The countess insists on accompanying him. They find that Vicki is gone and the tree is a hunk of scorched timber. Trask triumphantly silences the countess’ doubts.
In our time-band, the last witchcraft trial in the English-speaking world was held in Scotland in 1727. The Westminster Parliament finally abolished all laws against witchcraft in 1736, including those still on the books in Massachusetts* and some other British colonies in North America. Had they lived in our 1795, Barnabas and Nathan could have gone to the constable and reported that Trask had abducted Vicki, bound her, and left her outside. The constable would help them find her, arrest Trask, and that would be it. But of course Dark Shadows takes place in a world that differs from ours in many respects, not least in regard to the legal history of Massachusetts.
As the countess, Grayson Hall has been doing an excellent job establishing a character who is distinct from mad scientist Julia Hoffman, the role she plays in the segments of Dark Shadows set in the twentieth century. But as my wife, Mrs Acilius, points out, Hall does lapse into Julia a few times today. When she gasps in horror, she makes a little clicking noise in the back of her throat that is one of Julia’s most recognizable mannerisms. Julia is deeply entangled with Barnabas’ activities, and has developed an emotional attachment to go along with her inability to get away from him; shortly before Vicki took us with her to 1795, we heard Julia address him with a deeply felt “Barnabas, Barnabas.” The countess barely knows Barnabas, but in an anguished moment today, she says “Barnabas, Barnabas” to him. Hall does return to being the countess before the episode is over, but there is a weird little visit from Julia in the middle of it all.
Vicki went back to the past after Sarah’s ghost took possession of her at a séance and said she was going to “tell the story from the beginning.” Vicki has traded places with Sarah’s original governess, a woman named Phyllis Wick. Presumably Angelique chose Phyllis as a patsy, and she wound up as Trask’s target. Maybe Angelique did this simply because Phyllis was new to the house and had no old friends to object that she couldn’t possibly be a witch, but maybe it was because she had caught on to Angelique.
It would make it all the more exciting to see Vicki catch on to Angelique and do battle with her. We’ve already seen Smart Vicki defeat one blonde fire witch, so if we see her try to fight another, we will hope that she might win again. Only when we saw the attempt end in disaster would we realize that everything we’ve seen Vicki doing is what Phyllis Wick did the first time around, and that her intervention won’t have changed a thing. That would be a powerful twist ending to the whole 1795 flashback. Instead, we are subjected to Dumb Vicki doing things neither Phyllis nor anyone else who belonged in 1795 could possibly have done, and we end up wondering what she is doing in this story.
*Collinsport is in Maine, which until 1821 was part of Massachusetts.
It is 1795, and we are on the great estate of Collinwood. Under the influence of wicked witch Angelique, the kindly Jeremiah and the gracious Josette have eloped, breaking the heart of Josette’s fiancé, Jeremiah’s nephew and best friend Barnabas Collins. Barnabas, up to that point an idealistic man of the Enlightenment, responded by going against his beliefs and challenging Jeremiah to a duel.
Angelique is a lady’s maid. She was introduced as maid to Josette’s aunt, the Countess DuPrés, but today it seems she is Josette’s maid. She comes to Barnabas’ room. He demands to know why her mistress has sent her, meaning Josette, to which she replies she has come on her own account.
Angelique asks Barnabas why he has challenged Jeremiah to a duel, since he has never fought a duel or even seen one before. He explains that he could not stand being an object of pity- “I couldn’t be poor Barnabas.” In 1967, Barnabas will be a vampire. We saw him in that year, in #345, telling his sometime associate mad scientist Julia Hoffman the story of his relationship with Josette. The story he told was different from other versions he had told previously, for example in #233 and #236, and radically different from what we have seen play out in this extended flashback. In the story he told Julia, as in all other versions we had heard before coming to 1795, Josette was originally Jeremiah’s fiancée. One theme developed that resonates here was that all he could be to Josette was a faithful friend, and that he found that role humiliating. He was “poor Barnabas” in that version of the story, and he implies that it was to escape from that identity that he did whatever it was that made him the undead monster he became.
Angelique cast her spell on Josette and Jeremiah because she wanted Barnabas for herself. Now that she sees that he is likely to get himself killed before she can make her play for him, she asks him to wear a medallion of hers, one which she says will bring good luck. In the 1960s, a portrait of Barnabas hangs in the foyer of the great house of Collinwood. He is wearing a medallion in that portrait. Is Angelique’s medallion the one in the portrait? We can’t be sure.
Josette and Jeremiah have a conversation. They try to figure out what came over them. They don’t love each other, and regret hurting Barnabas. As their conversation goes on, Josette realizes that Jeremiah regrets it so deeply that he is planning to let Barnabas kill him in the upcoming duel. She is horrified by this. She doesn’t want anyone to die, and has accepted the fact that Jeremiah is the only husband she’s got. Nevertheless, she cannot dissuade him.
Josette’s father arranges for Jeremiah to have a final talk with Barnabas. Barnabas accuses Jeremiah of lusting for Josette all along, saying that “you wanted her the moment you saw her.” This is not true of Jeremiah, but in #345 it is exactly what Barnabas tells Julia he himself did. In that version, he conceived a wild passion for Jeremiah’s bride-to-be the moment he first saw her.
Barnabas tells Jeremiah “You must have hated me all your life.” As we have seen over these last few weeks, Jeremiah and Barnabas have been dear friends all their lives. But from his early days on the show in the spring of 1967 until we left for our voyage to the past in #365, Barnabas consistently said that he hated Jeremiah from his earliest days. The overall effect of comparing Barnabas’ various accounts of the past with each other and with what we are seeing in this flashback is something like reading the accounts of the patient’s memories in a case study by Freud. Not only does the order of the events jumble as retcon follows retcon, but guilt floats from one person to another and back again.
When Jeremiah tries to explain how he and Josette found themselves stricken with intermittent attacks of intense desire for each other and how they struggled against those attacks during the intervals between them, Barnabas asks “Why didn’t you come to me then?” That’s a good question, and it suggests another, equally good question. Angelique is casting spells because she and Barnabas had a brief affair before he became engaged to Josette. Why hasn’t he come clean to Josette about his past? If he had, Josette would not have put herself so completely in Angelique’s hands that she could bind her with her spells at leisure.
Jeremiah and Barnabas have their duel. We see them back to back, getting ready to pace off the prescribed distance. On Jeremiah’s face, we see his resolution to let Barnabas kill him.
The men are in place when Josette comes running up, pleading with them to stop. She arrives just in time to see Barnabas shoot Jeremiah. Some say they hear only one shot, but I hear two. I think Jeremiah deloped.
Josette goes to Jeremiah’s crumpled body and shouts at Barnabas. “You monster! You madman! You killed the only man I ever loved!” She claims that she and Jeremiah were happy together, and that in his pride Barnabas could not let them be happy. She refuses Barnabas’ offer to help move Jeremiah and get a doctor for him.
Angelique had rubbed Josette’s forehead with some of the rose water in which she had put her love potion not long before this, so Josette’s declarations that Jeremiah is “the only man [she] ever loved” and that they were happy together could be a sign of that influence. It could also be rooted in Josette’s realistic assessment of her situation. Earlier, she had told Jeremiah that she would never again allow herself to say that she loved Barnabas, and when Jeremiah said that his own death would make her a free woman she rejected the idea. Whatever the circumstances that led to the marriage, she is Jeremiah’s wife, and if she becomes his widow she will have an obligation to keep up certain appearances.
This was Anthony George’s last episode. George was woefully miscast when he first joined the show in #262 as the second actor to play Burke Devlin. Writers Ron Sproat and Malcolm Marmorstein kept writing Burke as if he were still being played by the explosively exuberant Mitch Ryan. George’s style was the exact opposite of Ryan’s. He was a cold actor whose characters keep us guessing as to their motives and intentions. He was utterly lost as the hot-headed Burke.
When Gordon Russell joined the writing staff in #292, things looked up for George. Russell understood what actors could do, and gave George some scenes he played very well indeed. In Jeremiah Collins, Russell and Sam Hall created a character who was perfect for George. It’s fascinating to watch Josette scrutinize Jeremiah until she gradually realizes that he has decided to throw his life away to do penance for the offense he and she have committed against Barnabas. It is also credible that, while we can see what Jeremiah is doing, Barnabas, who has known him all his life, would not catch on. George was so bad as Burke in the Sproat/ Marmorstein era that it seemed anything that got him off the show would be welcome. But Russell and Hall know so well how to take advantage of his strengths that it is sad to see him go.
All of the actors have trouble with their dialogue today, even the usually reliable Kathryn Leigh Scott and Lara Parker. Jonathan Frid always struggles, but is especially rough this time, and as for David Ford, what can we say. He mangles virtually every line. His character is supposed to be French; he doesn’t sound French, but doesn’t exactly speak English, either. Danny Horn transcribes many of Ford’s flubs in his post about the episode on Dark Shadows Before I Die, but you really have to hear it for yourself to absorb the sheer bizarreness of the speechlike sounds that come out of Ford’s mouth. I always enjoy watching Ford, and I think he made a major contribution to Dark Shadows‘ acting style when he first came on the show, but when he is off he is way, way off.
Dark Shadows became a hit after vampire Barnabas Collins joined the cast in April of 1967. Displaced from a previous era, Barnabas spent most of his time trying to con people into believing that he was a native of the twentieth century. The difficulties Barnabas encountered in his performance in the role of modern man dovetailed so neatly with those actor Jonathan Frid encountered in his characterization of a vampire that his every scene was fascinating to watch.
The audience’s main point-of-view character for the first year of the show or more was well-meaning governess Vicki. Now Vicki finds herself in a situation like that which made Barnabas a pop culture phenomenon. The ghost of Barnabas’ ten year old sister Sarah has sent Vicki back in time to 1795, when Barnabas and Sarah are both living beings and the vampire curse has not yet manifested on the estate of Collinwood. Vicki and Barnabas have traded places- she is now the time-traveler who must trick everyone into thinking she belongs in their period, while he is her warm-hearted, if uncomprehending, friend.
Unfortunately, the show has not chosen to write 1795 Vicki as a fast-thinking con artist. By the time the Collins family of 1967 met Barnabas, he was wearing contemporary clothing and telling them a story about being their cousin from England. Vicki shows up in her 1967 clothes and carrying a copy of a Collins family history printed in the 1950s. She goes around blurting out information she learned from reading that book and introduces herself to each character by telling them that they are played by actors who had other parts in the first 73 weeks of the show. Vicki’s natterings have convinced two ladies in the manor house, repressed spinster Abigail Collins and visiting aristocrat Countess DuPrés, that she is a witch.
Today, we open with the countess setting a trap to expose Vicki. Haughty overlord Joshua Collins vanished from the front parlor yesterday, in the middle of an argument with his brother Jeremiah. Jeremiah looked away from Joshua for a moment, and when he looked back his brother was gone and there was a small house cat in his place. The countess insists Vicki come into the parlor and reenact Joshua and Jeremiah’s argument. Vicki keeps protesting that the whole idea is silly, but the countess will not be stopped.
The countess imitates Joshua. This is the first time we have seen Grayson Hall play one character mimicking another, and it is hilarious. I suppose it would have ruined the laugh if Vicki had shown that she was in on the joke, but at least it would have provided evidence that Vicki hasn’t left her entire brain in 1967.
The countess tries to get Vicki to speculate on what goes on behind closed doors between Joshua and his wife Naomi. Vicki says that “It’s not my place to judge their marriage,” managing to sound like a dutiful servant, if not like an eighteenth century English speaker. The countess goes on testing Vicki with provocations that seem unconnected with each other, and she tries not to say anything wrong. That goes on until the cat reappears.
Barnabas is Joshua’s son. He enters and sees the cat. Vicki leaves, and Barnabas tells the countess he doesn’t think he has ever seen the cat before. Caddish naval officer Nathan Forbes enters to confer with Barnabas about the search for Joshua. Nathan overhears the countess suggesting to Barnabas that Vicki is a witch and is responsible for making his father disappear.
Nathan finds Vicki. He tries to warn her that the countess suspects her of being a witch. This is the second time we have seen someone explicitly tell Vicki that she will have to do a better job of faking her way through her current situation, after a scene in #367 where the kindly Jeremiah told her in so many words that she would have to make up a better story to tell people about herself. No one had needed to do that for Barnabas when he was lying his way through 1967, and if they had he would have had a stake in his heart before he’d been on the show a week.
At least Vicki tried to absorb what Jeremiah told her in #367. When Nathan tells her today how bad she has made things for herself, she just gets uptight. There have always been times when the writers solved plotting problems by having Vicki do something inexplicable, but now it seems Dumb Vicki is the only side of the character we will be allowed to see.
The countess confronts Vicki again, inviting her to take a lesson in tarot card reading. As the countess probes Vicki for information, we hear Vicki’s voice in a recorded monologue, wondering if she could tell the countess the truth. She may as well- she has pretty well blown any chance she ever had at establishing a false identity for herself.
When the countess asks Vicki where she was trained to be a governess, she says that she was raised in a foundling home in Boston and was trained there. The only false part of this account is that the foundling home was in New York. Changing the location to Boston only makes it that much easier for people based in Maine to check her story and prove it false. When the countess asks when she was born, she says “March 4, 19-” and catches herself. The countess remarks on the strangeness of the slip, and Vicki is conscious enough not to fall into her trap when she invites her to put the wrong digits after “17.”
By the end of their encounter, it should be obvious even to Vicki that the countess suspects her of witchcraft. The countess presses Vicki about her knowledge of the supernatural, telling her that Barnabas regards her as clairvoyant. Vicki tries to dismiss that as “his joke.” When Vicki protests that she does not know why the countess keeps asking her questions about the supernatural, the countess impatiently tells her that she certainly does know. She declares that something terrible is happening in the house, and that she is determined to find out what it is.
Having made it clear that she thinks Vicki is a witch, the countess leaves her alone in the room with the layout of tarot cards she had been studying. Vicki decides to rearrange the cards. She thinks to herself that she will thereby warn the countess of the upcoming tragedies. But the countess will know that the cards are not where she dealt them, and it will be obvious that it was Vicki who moved them. She will know that she is receiving a message, not from whatever realm tarot cards are supposed to access, but from Vicki. If that message foretells disasters that in fact occur, she will only be confirmed in her suspicions. It is difficult to imagine a stupider act Vicki could have committed.
Difficult, but for a writer as imaginative as Sam Hall it is not impossible. In the next scene, Vicki is talking to Barnabas while the countess stands nearby. Vicki tells Barnabas that Joshua will return. She speaks with such assurance that Barnabas takes it as another sign of her clairvoyance, and the countess reacts with horror, hearing the witch declare that she is about to lift her spell.
The moment when Mrs Acilius shouted at the screen, “Vicki, SHUT! UP!” Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Alone with the countess, Barnabas admits that he is starting to think that she may have a point about witchcraft. The countess answers that he is becoming wise.
Closing Miscellany
The asthmatic Grayson Hall has a coughing fit during her scene with Vicki and the tarot cards. It is one of the less amusing bloopers, she really sounds like she’s suffering.
I chuckled a little when Vicki stops at “19-” in giving her birthdate. Alexandra Moltke Isles’ year of birth is given on various websites as early as 1943 and as late as 1949. I think it is only fitting that someone so central to a show like Dark Shadows should be a little mysterious, so I’m glad that all we really know about Mrs Isles’ birth is that it took place on 11 February 194-.
The Countess DuPrés meets her brother, André DuPrés, Josette’s father, in the gazebo on the grounds of the great estate of Collinwood. She starts talking to André about evil powers at work in the house, and he tells her to stop wasting his time with her mumbo-jumbo. She tells him that she is not talking about something she learned by studying her tarot cards. She was hiding in the bushes next to the gazebo the night before, where she saw and heard a tryst between Josette and Jeremiah Collins, uncle of Josette’s fiancé Barnabas.
Since Josette is apparently in love with Barnabas, barely knows Jeremiah, and has always been a good girl, André finds this difficult to believe. The countess assures him it is so, and says that there is no sensible explanation but that Josette and Jeremiah are under a spell. André says that that isn’t a sensible explanation, either.
André goes back to the manor house. He confronts Jeremiah. The two of them do something virtually unprecedented on Dark Shadows– they address a problem directly in candid, rational conversation. In this narrative universe, that qualifies as a plan “so crazy that it just might work!” And, apparently, it does- Jeremiah apologizes for his behavior, admits that he himself is unable to explain what came over him, and promises that he and Josette will never again be alone together. That satisfies André.
The first and last intelligent conversation ever to take place on Dark Shadows. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Later, the countess is in the front parlor with the lady of the house, the alcoholic Naomi Collins. The countess tries to interest Naomi in the tarot. She deals a twelve card layout, and is horrified by what she sees. She tells Naomi that the card signifying the Lovers is inverted, that Death is near them, etc. She talks about a force of evil at work in the house, and asks about well-meaning governess Vicki. We can see why a sensible adult like André was reluctant to listen to his sister in the opening scene, but we also know that Dark Shadows is the sort of show where things like this are reliable guides to upcoming story beats.
After dealing with the countess, Naomi needs some sleep. She doesn’t get much, though. She dreams of a giant tarot card floating up from the foot of her bed. It is unclear whether she is awake or still dreaming when she rises from bed and follows the card. She sees Jeremiah walking past in the corridor outside her room. She follows him to the front parlor, and sees him locked in an embrace with a woman. She can see the woman’s arms caressing Jeremiah’s back and can hear her voice, but cannot see her face. She sees a simple trident shape on the woman’s hand. Jeremiah orders Naomi out of the room. Rather than comply, she grabs the woman’s arm. It comes off in Naomi’s hand, prompting her to scream.
The arm is so obviously made of plastic that we laughed out loud when it came off. I’m sure it looked less bad on the average TV set in 1967, at least in areas where ABC was on a station that didn’t come in particularly well, which was most of them.
The woman’s voice Naomi hears sounds like that of Kathryn Leigh Scott, who plays Josette; it also sounds like it is playing on a record. The woman Jeremiah is kissing is Dorrie Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh stood in for Miss Scott in #224, #225/226, #238, and #240, and had a speaking part as Phyllis Wick in #365. Sad to say, this is Kavanaugh’s last appearance on Dark Shadows; her brief turn as Phyllis was sensational, I was disappointed not to see her again. Even sadder, she would die of cancer in 1983, at the age of 38.
In Dark Shadows #3, man of mystery Burke Devlin mentioned that he started on the path to riches when he was in a bar in South America. Since then, he has mentioned his business interests on that continent several times, and the old standard “Brazil” has emerged as his informal theme song. Yesterday’s episode, one of the finest in the series, called back to the early days of the show several times, and today they close the loop on Burke’s connection to Brazil. His plane crashes in that country, and he dies there.
We learn of Burke’s fatal accident when housekeeper Mrs Johnson tells her employer, Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, that she has heard a radio report of an aviation disaster in Brazil. Mrs Johnson first came to work in Liz’ home, the great house of Collinwood, in #81. At that time Burke had sworn to wreak a terrible vengeance on the Collinses and Mrs Johnson was his secret agent. Burke renounced his quest for vengeance in #201, which was just as well, since it was never very interesting anyway. But they never told us that he had stopped paying Mrs Johnson or that she had stopped funneling information to him. So viewers who have been watching all along may wonder if she really did just happen to be listening when the radio announced that a Varig flight had gone down outside Belém. Maybe she was in touch with some associate of Burke’s who told her more than she could repeat to Liz. Or maybe not, but in any case it is satisfying to be reminded of the connection.
Burke was engaged to marry one of Collinwood’s residents, well-meaning governess Vicki. When she is told that Burke is missing and presumed dead, Vicki declares that she is certain he will come back. Vicki was originally the audience’s point of view character, an outsider to whom everything we did not know had to be explained. We now know many things she does not, but in this declaration she once more seems to be closer to us than to the other characters in her knowledge. She knows, as we do, that she lives in a soap opera and no major character is likely to stay dead permanently, especially not when his death is supposed to be the result of a plane crash in a faraway jungle.
On the other hand, Burke has been fading in importance for a long time. After his revenge story fizzled, he never really found a new reason to be on the show. His relationship with Vicki might have made things happen when he was still in conflict with the Collinses. She would then have found herself torn between her lover and the family that had all but adopted her. But once Burke and the Collinses patched things up, there was no obstacle between him and Vicki. In the last few days, it has seemed that she might even be able to stay in the house and keep her job after marrying him. There has been a theme where Burke tried to gaslight Vicki out of believing in supernatural phenomena that he himself had plenty of evidence to suppose were real, but that was less a storyline than a speed bump. Burke’s part was recast after the charismatic Mitch Ryan showed up for #252 too drunk to work; since then he has been played by the woefully miscast Anthony George, and it has been obvious that the character needed to be written out of the show before he did permanent damage to George’s career. So maybe Burke won’t come back after all.
Meanwhile, in the Old House on the same estate, vampire Barnabas Collins is moping around while mad scientist Julia Hoffman works on her notes about her attempt to turn him into a real boy. When she asks if there is anything she can do to lighten his mood, he sarcastically suggests that they play a game of cards or of cribbage. She’s up for either one, but he says that he won’t be happy until Vicki comes to him. He doesn’t know about Burke’s accident, but has somehow convinced himself that Vicki’s personality will eventually disappear and be replaced with that of his long-lost love Josette, and that as Josette she will be his bride. Barnabas goes on so long about how wonderful it will be when the Josettified Vicki is in the house that we start to wonder just how the two of them will pass the time. The day may come when Barnabas is glad of a cribbage board.
Julia only recently committed her first murder. She and Barnabas killed her old medical school classmate Dave Woodard a week ago, and she is still reeling from the shock of it. One thing she has settled on is the fact that she is going to be linked to Barnabas for the rest of her life. It doesn’t seem likely that she will ever be able to tell anyone else about Woodard, and being a murderer is, like it or not, an important part of her identity. So no one other than Barnabas can ever really know her. She’s making the best of this by trying to fall in love with him, but his sick obsession with reenacting the plot of the 1932 film The Mummy with himself in the Boris Karloff role and a woman in her early twenties in Zita Johanns’ double role as the dead princess and her reincarnation would seem to leave her at an impasse.
Julia presses Barnabas about his relationship with Josette. When he keeps insisting that the Josettified Vicki will come to him of her own free will, she asks if the original Josette ever did that. Barnabas’ silent grimace answers her question. She goes on to ask why Josette is so important to him if he was never very important to her. He says he will explain it all to her, but that they must have the proper setting. He leads her to the place of Josette’s death, the cliff at Widows’ Hill.
Barnabas has given us at least two versions of his relationship with Josette. In #212, he gave a speech to her portrait which implied that she was his grandmother, and that she sided with his father her son when he and Barnabas had a fateful clash. Soon after, Josette was retconned into Barnabas’ lost love. In #236, Barnabas was trying to brainwash Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, into thinking that she was Josette. He told her then that he had sailed with Josette from her home in the French West Indies to Collinwood, where she was to marry his uncle Jeremiah Collins. It was his task to teach her English on the voyage. Aboard ship, they fell in love. This reenactment of the tale of Tristan and Isolde ended as sadly as did the original, though the particulars of the story were not the same.
Now, Barnabas tells Julia that he met Josette for the first time when she arrived at Collinwood. He had taken no interest in his uncle’s betrothed until he saw her, but was stunned by her beauty and quickly fell in love with her. He found himself compelled to be “her good and faithful friend Barnabas,” a position he found humiliating. As a vampire, Barnabas is a metaphor for selfishness and cruelty, and so it is hardly surprising that he confines Julia to the same position with regard to himself and that he openly delights in her humiliation. It is a bit dizzying that she expresses so much sympathy for him, telling him in this scene that he never seems more human than when he talks about Josette.
In telling this latest version of the story, Barnabas says that as Josette came to feel that her youth was wasted on the elderly Jeremiah, it dawned on him that there was a way he could offer her eternal youth. This harks back to #233, when Barnabas told Vicki and Liz’ daughter Carolyn the story of Josette’s death, that she leapt off the cliff because she was being pursued by her lover. So we are to assume that Josette killed herself rather than let Barnabas turn her into a vampire. But it might suggest more than that. Whenever Barnabas met Josette, and whether it was aboard ship or on her arrival, he was not yet a vampire. We have not heard how he turned into one. Perhaps he involved himself in some kind of black magic in an attempt to keep himself and Josette young forever, and as a result he became a vampire and she fled from him to her death.
Vicki shows up and tells Barnabas and Julia about Burke. They are stunned. Julia’s reflex is to lean in and touch Vicki’s arm, Barnabas’ is to stagger back.
Shocked.
Barnabas quickly senses opportunity, and he shoos Julia away. He says that she was complaining of the cold and that for the sake of her health she ought not to stay. She is so obviously humiliated that only Vicki’s absorption in her own distress keeps her from noticing.
Barnabas plays the “good and faithful friend,” and Vicki looks over the edge of the cliff. She talks about the widows who have thrown themselves to their deaths from it over the years. She says that she had at first assumed that they were just “make-believe creatures,” but that if she thought Burke were really gone she would throw herself after them. Barnabas grabs her and urges her to stop such talk.
As this goes on, we hear the “Widows’ Wail,” a sound effect prominent in the early months of the show that the uninitiated mistake for wind, but that indicates something terrible is about to happen. When Vicki and Burke had their final conversation yesterday, they heard it, and he refused to admit its meaning. Vicki and Barnabas hear it now. The Widows bewail upcoming disasters, and Burke is already dead. Barnabas tells Vicki that she will be a bride very soon, and she nods and repeats, “A bride… very soon.” As she does, the Wail sounds louder than before.
“A bride… very soon.”
Closing Miscellany
This episode includes one of the most famous bloopers in the entire series. When Liz is on the telephone getting the news about Burke’s plane crash, she refers to “That place in Brazil… (long pause)… (separate, equally long pause)… (fidget)… (different kind of pause)… Belém!” It is a wonder to behold.
This episode was taped on 16 October 1967. On the 28th of that month, Alexandra Moltke married Philip Isles. So, whether or not Vicki was going to become “a bride very soon,” her player was. The wedding announcement in The New York Timesdoesn’t mention Dark Shadows; it does mention that “Mrs David Ford” was part of the bridal party. That Mrs David Ford was Nancy Barrett, who played Carolyn, and her Mr Ford played Maggie’s father Sam.
From The New York Times, 29 October 1967
Neither Mrs Isles’ marriage to Philip nor Miss Barrett’s to David Ford lasted very long. Mrs Isles is still known as Mrs Isles, even though she was married to a doctor named Alfred Jaretzki for 33 years, ending with his death in 2014. By the time she met Jaretzki, she was a nationally known documentary filmmaker, and there is her son Adam Isles, the father of her three grandchildren and a former high official of the US government. So I suppose it made sense to stick with that name. In any case, I doubt very much that the widows were wailing for her.
My wife, Mrs Acilius, mentioned that even though we have seen the whole series before, she fully expected Barnabas to push Julia off the cliff. The episode pulled her in so completely that she didn’t stop to tell herself that she would have remembered if he’d done that.
Word spreads that local physician Dave Woodard has died. Several people fear that he may have been murdered. At the end of the episode, artist Sam Evans and his daughter Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town, get a phone call from the sheriff. An autopsy has been conducted, and Woodard’s death has been ruled a heart attack.
Relieved, Maggie smiles and says that Woodard’s death was the result of natural causes. She is repeating the word “natural” when a sound like that of flatulence is heard. She breaks off at “natur-” and looks wonderingly at Sam.
Her look asks “Did you just…”
If Kathryn Leigh Scott had played the scene straight through, we could have thought that the sound came from a piece of equipment turning at a joint that hadn’t had enough oil or something like that. Her reaction leaves little doubt that David Ford had made a little television history.
Considering that the show was done essentially live-to-tape, I guess it was just a matter of time before an actor audibly broke wind on camera. At least the perpetrator wasn’t someone who is supposed to seem sexy.
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