The ghost of the evil Quentin has driven the living members of the Collins family from the great house on the estate of Collinwood. They have taken refuge in the Old House on the estate, home to their distant cousin, old world gentleman Barnabas. Quentin wants to take possession of children Amy and David. Knowing of his plans for them, David and Amy sneak into the great house to recover and destroy the antique telephone Quentin first used to communicate with them. The children do not find the telephone there, and governess Maggie comes to the house and takes them away. Later, Maggie goes to their rooms in Barnabas’ house. She discovers that the children are missing, and Quentin’s telephone has appeared in David’s room.
Dark Shadows first became a hit in the late spring and early summer of 1967, when Barnabas was a vampire and Maggie was his victim. That story was chiefly modeled on the 1932 film The Mummy. As Boris Karloff’s Imhotep saw Zita Johanns’ Helen as the reincarnation of his lost love Ankh-Esen-Amun, so Jonathan Frid’s Barnabas saw Kathryn Leigh Scott’s Maggie as the reincarnation of his lost love Josette. As Imhotep took Helen prisoner and tried to replace her personality with Ankh-Esen-Amun’s, so Barnabas took Maggie prisoner and tried to replace her personality with Josette’s. As the movie showed us flashbacks to Imhotep’s time as a living being with Zita Johanns playing Ankh-Esen-Amun, so from November 1967 to March 1968 Dark Shadows became a costume drama set in the 1790s and featuring Miss Scott as Josette. Even Frid’s acting style and mannerisms were strongly reminiscent of Boris Karloff’s.
Since those days, Maggie’s memory has been repeatedly erased and Barnabas has been cured of vampirism. More than once, there were stories suggesting Maggie’s memory might come back and blow the whole show up, but those always ended with yet another mind-wipe. Several times lately, the show has gone out of its way to emphasize that they will not be revisiting that theme. There are two such moments today. David complains that the Old House is “like a prison”; Maggie, who was for long weeks kept in the barred cell in the basement, doesn’t miss a beat before replying “For a very good reason!”
In 1967, Barnabas’ only interest was recreating the history of the Collins family. His attempted Josettification of Maggie was part of that antiquarian project. Today, we catch a glimpse of what he might have been hoping for in that period. He and Maggie are sitting in the parlor reading family histories, and she glances at him with a fond smile. Granted, if his original project had been successful Maggie would have forgotten her own name, they would both have been vampires, and no living human would be safe from their creeping terror, but between feedings the two of them would probably have sat around like this.
From #227 to #260, Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, was under the influence of vampire Barnabas Collins. As Barnabas tried to brainwash Maggie so that her personality would disappear and that of his lost love Josette would take its place, she began to rebel against him. From #251 until she escaped in #260, Barnabas kept Maggie locked up in a prison cell in his basement.
Throughout this whole period, Barnabas’ sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie Loomis tried to spare Maggie the worst. Willie anonymously telephoned Maggie’s friend Vicki in #230 so she and her friends could interrupt Barnabas’ first attempt to take Maggie into custody; while Maggie was Barnabas’ prisoner he several times pleaded with Barnabas to show her mercy; and when in #260 Barnabas had decided to kill Maggie with extreme cruelty, Willie brought a glass of poison to her cell so she could die painlessly.
Now, Barnabas’ vampirism is in remission. He has brought Willie back to work for him, arranging his release from the mental hospital where he was confined after Barnabas framed him for all of his crimes against Maggie. It is by no means clear what effect Barnabas’ loss of his vampire powers has had on Willie. At times he seems to be confused and childlike; at times, to be the dangerously unstable ruffian he was before he fell into Barnabas’ clutches. But he is still fascinated by Maggie, and still longs for her friendship. The very night Barnabas brought him home from the hospital, Willie sneaked off to visit Maggie and tell her he was innocent.
For her part, Maggie’s memories of her experience with Barnabas were excluded from her conscious mind when mad scientist Julia Hoffman hypnotized her. The other day, Maggie had a nightmare as part of the “Dream Curse,” and in the course of the nightmare she heard the sound of Josette’s music box, which Barnabas forced her to listen to while in captivity. She also saw a skull with eyes, suggesting that her deepest fear has to do with the dead watching her. Since Barnabas, as a vampire, was dead and yet kept Maggie under surveillance, this image combines with the music to suggest that Maggie’s memory might soon return.
Today, Willie is minding Adam, a Frankenstein’s monster whom Julia brought to life in a procedure meant to cure Barnabas of his vampirism once and for all. Barnabas and Julia have no idea what to do with Adam, and so they have chained him up in Maggie’s old cell. Barnabas’ jewel box is stashed behind the secret panel Maggie used to escape from the cell, and Willie shows Adam some of its shinier contents to calm him.
Among the shiniest are a pair of emerald earrings. Barnabas has been talking to Willie as if Willie remembers everything that happened when he was his blood thrall, yet Willie has not confirmed that this is so. When he sees the earrings, Willie gets very intense. He says that he saw Josette wearing them, then realizes that it was Maggie. Perhaps Barnabas, by modeling the conversations they used to have, is inadvertently providing the therapy Willie needs to recover his memory.
Willie decides to give the earrings to Maggie. He goes to Maggie’s house and peeks through the window. He sees her with her boyfriend Joe. When he came to the house the other day to tell Maggie he never meant to hurt her, she was terrified and Joe stated as a matter of fact that he would kill Willie if he ever came near Maggie again. Willie does not knock on the door to greet the two of them.
Instead, he slips into the house while they are out of the room. He plants the earrings in Maggie’s purse, and is gone by the time she and Joe come back. Maggie finds the earrings. The tinkling sound of Josette’s music box plays on the soundtrack while she looks at them. She is fascinated:
Maggie says that the earrings “remind me of something- something I’ve forgotten. I know they don’t belong to me yet. But somehow when I look at them, I seem to think they were meant for me- I mean from the start. They are lovely, a very beautiful and thoughtful gift. Only a man who has gazed into my eyes with deepest love would know they were meant for me.” As she delivers these lines, Kathryn Leigh Scott fades out of Maggie’s voice, into the tones she used while playing Josette from #370 to #430.
Barnabas’ attempt to turn Maggie into Josette would have reminded many viewers at the time of the 1932 film The Mummy, in which the undead Imhotep (played by Boris Karloff, whose voice Jonathan Frid often seems to be imitating as Barnabas) abducts the beautiful young Helen Grosvenor, whom he believes to be the reincarnation of his lost love, the Princes Ankh-esen-amun. In that movie, Helen and the Princess were both played by Zita Johanns, suggesting that Imhotep was onto something. From November 1967 to March 1968, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the 1790s and we saw that Maggie and Josette are both played by Kathryn Leigh Scott, suggesting the same about Barnabas. The bleakness and horror of Barnabas’ treatment of Maggie in the summer of 1967 makes this suggestion a daring one, and that Maggie makes a speech blissfully describing the one who looked at her and saw Josette as a “man who gazed into my eyes with deepest love” in the middle of an episode that begins and ends in the cell where he confined her and planned to torture her to death is more daring still.
I don’t think the risk pays off. Miss Scott was usually one of the most reliable performers on Dark Shadows. She found Maggie in her relationship to her father Sam, whose drinking problem was a major story point for the first 40 weeks of the show, and articulates the character as a series of very intelligent answers to the question “How would an Adult Child of an Alcoholic respond to this situation?” This scene presents her with a very complex challenge, as she is supposed to show that the earrings have jarred loose some fragment of a memory but to keep us guessing just what that fragment is. Joel Crothers plays Joe’s disquiet at the appearance of the earrings with a simplicity that sets Miss Scott up for a star turn. But she doesn’t seem to have any idea what to make of her lines. For the first time on the show, she is physically stiff and vocally overbearing. As a result of her atypical overacting, the scene does not deliver the sense of mystery and foreboding it requires. It just leaves the audience confused.
On Wednesday, we met a new arrival from Paris by way of the island of Martinique. She is Angelique, maidservant to the Countess DuPrés and onetime bedfellow of rich young gentleman Barnabas Collins. Barnabas is engaged to marry the countess’ niece Josette, and is anxious to keep Angelique in the background. Angelique does not share either of Barnabas’ goals.
At rise, Angelique meets Barnabas’ uncle Jeremiah in the front parlor of the manor house of Collinwood. She has found a toy soldier and asks Jeremiah about it. When he identifies it as one of the toys Barnabas was most fond of in his boyhood, he volunteers to take it to the playroom himself. She asks to keep it for a while, so that she can study its workmanship. He doesn’t object, and exits. Once she is alone in the parlor, Angelique starts talking to herself. She says that she will use it to cause Barnabas unimaginable pain. This is the first direct suggestion we have seen that Angelique is involved in witchcraft.
Time-traveling governess Vicki enters. She tells Angelique that they should be friends, because they are both servants in the house, and it is a foreign setting to both of them. Angelique asks what Vicki means by describing herself as foreign, since she is an American. Vicki realizes that she can’t tell someone she has just met that she is a time traveler thrust here from 1967 by the ghost of the little girl she is supposed to be educating, and so she mutters something about how Angelique wouldn’t understand. After they part, we hear Angelique musing that Vicki has no idea what she understands. At no point does Angelique show any interest whatever in becoming friends with Vicki.
Later, we see Angelique alone in her room with the toy soldier and Barnabas’ handkerchief. She is talking to herself about her evil plans again when she is interrupted by a knock at the door. She hides the things and answers it. Barnabas enters.
Barnabas renews the effort he made at the end of Wednesday’s episode to friendzone Angelique. Again, she isn’t having it. After he leaves, she takes the soldier and the handkerchief back out and tells them that she has decided to wait for Josette’s arrival to enact her revenge on Barnabas.
She won’t have to wait long. Josette’s father, André, is entering the parlor, grumbling about the lack of servants at Collinwood. He beckons his daughter, and she follows him into the house. She is played by Kathryn Leigh Scott.
A major cast member of the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s as Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, Miss Scott has played Josette’s ghost more than once. She created the part in #70, when she was the shimmery figure who emerged from Josette’s portrait in the very house we are in today and danced among its pillars. She reprised the part in #126, again in this house, when Josette led the other ghosts in rescuing Vicki from crazed handyman Matthew Morgan. For some months Barnabas, who is in 1967 a vampire, held Maggie prisoner here and tried to replace her personality with that of Josette. Barnabas often seemed convinced that Maggie really was Josette, and when strange and troubled boy David saw Maggie wearing Josette’s dress in #240 he said that her face was “exactly the same” as it was on the many occasions when he had seen Josette’s ghost.
Barnabas’ plan to Josettify Maggie is drawn from the 1932 film The Mummy, in which the undead Imhotep (Boris Karloff) is released from his tomb, holds Helen Grosvenor (Zita Johanns) prisoner, and tries to replace Helen’s personality with that of his lost love Princess Ankh-Esen-Amun. In that movie, there is a flashback to ancient Egypt, where we see that Zita Johanns also plays Ankh-Esen-Amun and we realize that Imhotep’s crazy plan was rooted in some supernatural connection between the two women. The connection between Josette and Maggie has been equivocal until now- Miss Scott was always veiled when she played Josette’s ghost, and stand-in Dorrie Kavanuagh was the one wearing the dress in #240. Moreover, after Maggie got away in #260, Barnabas soon turned his attentions to Vicki, and decided he would try the same gimmick with her. But now we see that Barnabas really was onto something with regard to Maggie, and we wonder where it will lead. I remember the first time we watched the show, my wife, Mrs Acilius, reacted with great excitement to Josette’s entrance in this episode and exclaimed “Of course! Maggie is Josette!”
Vicki spent the first three days of this week telling the actors what parts they played in the first 73 weeks of Dark Shadows, an annoying habit. But there is a reason for it. She knew Barnabas and Sarah as supernatural beings in 1967, so she will recognize them as the same people here. And Josette’s looks reveal her connection to Vicki’s friend Maggie, so she will recognize that. Since only Angelique, of the characters we have met so far in 1795, is played by someone who did not appear previously, the writers are in a difficult position with regard to all of the other members of the company.
I wish they had solved that problem by having Vicki show up in 1795 unable to speak. The suggestion I made in my post about #366 is that she could have materialized in the midst of the accident that upset the carriage bringing the original governess, Phyllis Wick.* Vicki could have sustained a slight injury that left her mute for a week or so, could have had voiceover monologues registering her recognitions of Barnabas, Sarah, and Josette/ Maggie, and would not have had audible monologues when she saw the others. By the time she could talk again, Vicki would know that she was supposed to pretend to be Phyllis Wick.
Clearly Vicki is supposed to get into some kind of trouble in 1795; she is still the heroine, and the first rule of all soap operas is that the heroine must always be in danger. But she is supposed to be seeing the events that started the phase of the Collins family curse that involves Barnabas’ vampirism, and those events did not involve a governess who went around calling people by the wrong names and blurting out information she learned from reading the Collins family history. The logic of the plot requires that whatever trouble Vicki gets into is more or less the same trouble Phyllis Wick would have got into, and the appeal of the character requires that the audience watch to see what kind of con artist Vicki might turn out to be. Both of those imperatives demand that she try to masquerade as Phyllis.
Vicki does manage to keep herself from telling André and Josette that they are being played by the actors who took the parts of Sam and Maggie Evans in other parts of Dark Shadows. She can’t help staring at Josette, however. Josette is quite cheerful when she asks Vicki why she is staring; André, a more conventional aristocrat than his relaxed daughter, is visibly annoyed with Vicki’s impertinence.
There was an opportunity here for Vicki to show some quick thinking. She could have told Josette that Barnabas has gone on at length about her appearance, and that she is amazed at the accuracy of his descriptions. That would have endeared her to Josette as the bearer of the message that her fiancé is very much in love with her, and would have reassured her that, while Vicki is an attractive young woman who lives under Barnabas’ roof, she is not a rival for his affections. As it is, Vicki just mumbles something about not having known she was staring.
Angelique enters. She and Josette rush into each other’s arms and speak French. Miss Scott tells a funny story about that moment. She and Lara Parker had talked about the script and agreed that two Frenchwomen excited to see each other after a long separation ought to greet each other in French, and they persuaded the producer of their point. Only when they got the revised script with the dialogue in French did it dawn on them that neither of them could speak the language. Fortunately, several other members of the cast were fluent in it, and coached them through.
We can see that Josette really regards Angelique as a friend. Viewers who have been with the show from the beginning will remember Josette’s ghost as a powerful and stalwart force for good, and will also know that Maggie is The Nicest Girl in Town. So whatever grievance Angelique may have against Barnabas, and however unjust may be the social system that has exalted Josette and subordinated Angelique, when we see Angelique faking friendship for Josette while planning to make her watch her lover suffer, we know that she is really evil.
Barnabas enters. Josette tells him that her long, difficult journey was worthwhile now that she is with him. This is a very sharp retcon. In #345, mad scientist Julia Hoffman asked Barnabas if Josette ever came to him of her own free will, and he responded with a silent grimace that left no doubt as to the answer. Now, we see that she has gladly sailed from Martinique to central Maine in late autumn to be with him.
Barnabas and Josette are alone, and he wants to kiss her. She is bashful and says that their parents might be upset if they don’t wait for the wedding. He says they might pretend to be, but that in reality it is expected. That is a sweet little conversation, and it ends in a sweet little kiss.
Angelique is back in her room. She twists Barnabas’ handkerchief around the neck of his toy soldier.
The episode ends with Barnabas on the floor, apparently asphyxiating, while Josette looks on in horror.
Wednesday, Barnabas made it clear that he had his affair with Angelique because he didn’t think Josette could love him. That gives Angelique a perfectly understandable motive for seeking revenge on him. A rich man exploited his position to trifle with her, a servant, giving no thought to her feelings or interests.
The selfishness and entitlement Barnabas exhibited thereby is jarring in the mild-mannered, apparently egalitarian fellow we have seen so far this week, but it fits perfectly with his behavior as a vampire in 1967. Seen from another angle, his behavior is consistent with everything the Collinses have done to get themselves in trouble since we first met them. He was tempted to take advantage of Angelique because he had underestimated his own lovability and despaired of making a real connection with Josette.
Barnabas is still underestimating himself and Josette now. Never once does it occur to him to come clean to her about what he did with Angelique. While Josette would no doubt be saddened to learn that her beloved fiancé had dallied with her pet servant, as a rich French girl from Martinique she has after all lived her whole life among wealthy men surrounded by enslaved women, and so could hardly have been shocked by what Barnabas had done. Surely she would have decided to go ahead with the wedding, and she would have known to be wary of Angelique.
By failing to trust Josette with the truth about his misdeeds, Barnabas puts her and himself at Angelique’s mercy. We think of 1966, when matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard and her brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins, were both prisoners of shameful secrets they dared not share even with each other. In 1967, when those secrets were finally laid bare to the whole world, Liz and Roger found they were free to go on about their business as if nothing had happened. In Barnabas’ petrified silence, we see all of the shadows that have kept his relatives in darkness for so long.
*Whom Dorrie Kavanaugh played in her brief appearance at the end of #365.
Vampire Barnabas Collins is giving a costume party in his home at the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood. His distant relatives, the living members of the Collins family, are dressed as their ancestors from Barnabas’ own time as a living being. The whole thing was impossibly dull until the mischievous and witty Roger Collins suggested they have a séance. Now well-meaning governess Vicki is in a trance, channeling the spirit of Josette Collins.
The last time Josette took possession of Vicki at a séance was in #170 and #171. At that time, Josette delivered her message in French. Since Vicki could not speak French (but Alexandra Moltke speaks it fluently,) that was evidence enough to convince even the most skeptical that something was going on. Today Josette speaks English. The characters are all sure that she is the one speaking, but it doesn’t have the same effect on the audience as did that earlier irruption of a language we had not expected to hear.
I do wonder if the decision not to use French came at the last moment. Even though Vicki/ Josette’s voice is loud and clear, the others make a show of struggling to understand what she is saying and seize on a word here and there (“Something about ‘run!'”,) as people do when they are listening to someone speak a language they don’t quite understand. Perhaps writer Joe Caldwell wasn’t quite up to writing in French, and the Writer’s Guild wouldn’t let Alexandra Moltke Isles or any other Francophones on set make a translation. Or maybe they thought that the switch to French wouldn’t be as effective the second time as it was the first.
Josette is telling the story of her death. A man was chasing her, and fleeing him she threw herself off the peak of Widow’s Hill to the rocks below. Barnabas interrupts and breaks Vicki’s trance.
When the others scold him for stopping Josette before she could reveal the name of the man who ran her off the cliff, Barnabas says that the name could not have been of any importance, since whoever it was who drove Josette to kill herself must have been dead for “almost 200 years.” The others do not suspect that he was that man. They do not know that he is a reanimated corpse; they think he’s just English.
When Dark Shadows started, the stories of the tragic death of Josette and of the building of the great house of Collinwood were set in the 1830s. In the weeks before Barnabas’ introduction in April of 1967, they implied that Josette’s dates were much earlier, sometime in the 18th century. Last week, they plumped for the 1830s again. But Barnabas’ line about “almost 200 years ago” puts us back to the 1700s.
After the séance ends, we have evidence that this bit of background continuity might start to matter. Vicki looks at the landing on top of the staircase and sees the ghost of Barnabas’ 9 year old sister Sarah watching the party.
It seems that when Barnabas was freed to prey upon the living, he unknowingly brought Sarah with him. Sarah has been popping in and out quite a bit the last few weeks, and she has already made some important plot points happen. We’re starting to wonder just how many more beings will emerge from the supernatural back-world into the main action of the show. The opening voiceover today tells us that “the mists that have protected the present from the past are lifting,” so perhaps they will have to nail these dates down sooner rather than later.
The whole party had accepted instantly that Vicki was channeling the spirit of Josette and none of them ever comes to doubt it. But when she says that she saw a little girl at the head of the stairs, they get all incredulous. By the end of the episode, Vicki will have encountered so much disbelief on this point that she herself will decide that she must have been hallucinating.
Back in the great house, Roger is still overjoyed that the séance turned out to be so exciting. His sister Liz and Liz’ daughter Carolyn consider this to be in terrible taste. But Roger won’t give an inch. He has some great lines, exiting with “I think that all of the unhappiness of all of my ancestors is my rightful heritage, and you shouldn’t try to keep it from me. Good night, ladies.” Both Patrick McCray, in his Dark Shadows Daybook post about this episode, and Danny Horn, in his Dark Shadows Every Day post, make insightful remarks as they analyze the fun Louis Edmonds has playing Roger.
Carolyn approaches Vicki to speak privately. She tells her that she isn’t bothered that fake Shemp Burke Devlin is dating Vicki. Vicki’s response to this is “What?” Carolyn reminds Vicki that she used to be interested in Burke and was initially jealous of Burke’s interest in her. But she assures her she doesn’t feel that way any longer. Vicki smiles, nods, and looks away. Carolyn then says “He’s really very nice!” Vicki answers “Who?” “Burke!” says Carolyn. Again, Vicki smiles, nods, and looks away.
This is probably supposed to tell us that Vicki is coming under some kind of spell associated with Barnabas, but in fact it is likely to suggest something quite different to the audience. Burke was originally a dashing action hero played by Mitch Ryan. Dark Shadows never really came up with very much for a dashing action hero to do, but Ryan’s skills as an actor and his charismatic personality always made it seem that he was about to do something interesting. Several weeks ago, Ryan was fired off the show after he came to the set too drunk to work.
Since then, the part of Burke has been played by Anthony George. George was a well-trained actor with an impressive resume, and by all accounts was a nice guy. But he cannot dig anything interesting out of the character of Burke as he stands at this point in the series. The only scene in which George has shown any energy so far was in #267, when Burke had lost a dime in a pay phone. The rest of the time, he has blended so completely into the scenery that it is no wonder Vicki can’t remember him from one line to the next.
Back in the Old House, Barnabas talks to Josette’s portrait. In the months from #70 to #192, it was established that Josette can hear you if you do this. Several times she manifested herself either as a light glowing from the surface of the portrait or as a figure emerging from it. In #102, we saw strange and troubled boy David Collins having a conversation with the portrait- we could hear only his side of it, but it was clear that Josette was answering him.
The first time we saw Barnabas in the Old House, in #212, he spoke to the portrait. At that point, Josette was not yet his lost love. It seemed that she was his grandmother, and that she had sided against him in some terrible fight with his father Joshua. He ordered Josette and Joshua to leave the house to him. The next time David tried to talk to the portrait, in #240, it seemed that they had complied- David could no longer sense Josette’s presence in it.
Barnabas had spoken briefly to the portrait the other day, but today he makes his first substantial address to it since banishing Josette and Joshua in #212. Again he entreats her to go, but for a very different reason. Now he says that she is lost to him forever, and must allow him to live in the present. Since he has been scheming to capture a woman, erase her personality, replace it with Josette’s, and then kill her so that she will rise from the grave as a vampiric Josette, this sounds like he has decided to make a big change in his relations to the other characters.
It turns out that he hasn’t, but the writers have decided to change their relationship to their source material. Barnabas’ original plan was identical to that which Imhotep, the title character in the 1932 film The Mummy, had pursued in his attempt to replicate his relationship with his long-dead love Princess Ankh-esen-amun. Imhotep met Helen Grosvenor, whom he regarded as the reincarnation of Ankh-esen-amun because they were both played by Zita Johanns, and subjected her to the same treatment Barnabas first inflicted on Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, and now plans to try on Vicki.
Maggie is played by Kathryn Leigh Scott. The audience in 1967 would not have known that Miss Scott also played the ghost of Josette in some of her most important appearances. However, they would have noticed when David saw Maggie dressed as Josette in #240 he assumed it was the ghost, because her face was “exactly the same” as it had been when she manifested herself to him previously. So we have the same reason to believe that Maggie is the reincarnation of Josette that Imhotep had to believe that Helen was the reincarnation of the princess, and we therefore assume that Barnabas, like Imhotep, was trying to take possession of both the ghost and the living woman.
But after Barnabas tells Josette to go away, he declares that if he is to have her, she must be someone from the present. This sequence of words is nonsensical in itself, but harks back to a theory he had laid out to his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie in #274: “Take the right individual, place her under the proper conditions and circumstances, apply the required pressure, and a new personality is created.” Jonathan Frid would always sound and move like Boris Karloff, but now his project of Josettery is inspired less by Imhotep than by the various “mad doctors” Karloff played in the 1940s. Of course, in the 1960s real-life mad scientists such as Stanley Milgram and John Money were performing experiments on human subjects for which Barnabas’ statement might have served as a motto. So Barnabas is coming to be less a merger of Dracula and Imhotep than of Dracula and Dr Frankenstein.
One of the devices by which Barnabas tries to place women “under the proper conditions and circumstances” for Josettification is a music box which he bought for the original Josette and may or may not have given her.* He gives this to Vicki. To his satisfaction, she is reduced to a complete stupor when she hears it play. She is in that state when the episode ends.
* In #236, he says he never had the chance to give it to her. In subsequent episodes, he implies the opposite.
We reprise the final scene of Friday’s episode, in which vampire Barnabas Collins catches his prisoner Maggie Evans trying to stab him. He flashes his fangs at her.
Doctor Teeth and the Electric Mayhem
The first time around, this had been the climax of a number of powerfully realized scenes, so it still carried a punch despite the silliness of the fangs. From a standing start, though, the result is a bad laugh.
In the 45 seconds following the first commercial, ABC staff announcer Bill Rice* summarizes the action of the previous week’s episodes.** This recap comes so close to exhausting every event we saw in those 110 minutes of scripted drama that regular viewers will have another unintended laugh.
The recap was inserted because many ABC stations preempted Dark Shadows to cover a United Nations debate about the Vietnam War. The show was about as resolutely disengaged from contemporary politics as it was possible to be, but conjoining US policy in Vietnam with a character like Barnabas, who combines a vast capacity for killing with a desperate need to be loved, does bring certain thoughts to mind.
Barnabas and Maggie have a conversation about his inclination to kill her. Barnabas’ sorely bedraggled blood-thrall Willie Loomis joins in, saying that Barnabas will have to kill him first. This would not seem to present Barnabas with any difficulty at all. Willie wouldn’t be missed- everyone else on the show remembers Willie from the days before he met Barnabas, when he was dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis, and has been urging Barnabas to get rid of him. Nor would it be especially difficult for Barnabas to replace Willie- he just has to bite someone else, and that other person will become his new slave. But Barnabas stands around arguing with Willie and Maggie. When someone knocks on the front door, he scolds Willie for failing to keep it locked, such a humdrum complaint under the circumstances as to bring another bad laugh. Barnabas leaves Willie and Maggie in the basement while he answers the door. Before he goes, he sticks out his lower lip, a facial expression known as “pouting.”
Barnabas pouts
The visitor is well-meaning governess Vicki, who tells Barnabas that the sheriff has ordered that no woman go out alone at night. Some think it strange to send a woman out alone at night to carry this message to a man who is indoors, but considering what we’ve seen of the sheriff, doing the exact opposite of what he commands would seem always to be the wisest course.
Vicki notices an antique music box on a table in Barnabas’ front parlor. Vicki admires its tune and makes a few not-very-coherent remarks about “the past” while it is playing. Barnabas has been using this music box as a tool to hypnotize Maggie into believing that she is his long-lost love Josette. After Vicki leaves, he opens it again, then looks at the door through which she left. He turns his head and smiles, looking very much like someone who has just had an exciting new idea.
Lightbulb moment
Meanwhile, Maggie and Willie talk to each other in the basement. The two of them had one of the most electrifying scenes of the entire series down there Friday. The last traces of that energy have been piddled away by the time Barnabas comes back downstairs and resumes his conversation with them.
Willie urges Barnabas to look at Maggie and see how beautiful she is. Barnabas says “No” and looks away. Coming at a moment of high dramatic tension, this might have been powerful. When we sit down as an audience, we enter into a sort of agreement that if the show includes something worth seeing, we will look at it. So when we see a character refusing to look at a sight as well worth contemplating as was the young Kathryn Leigh Scott,*** we might be shocked. But there has been too much idle chatter, and the memory of Barnabas’ pout is so fresh, that all we can think of is a petulant child saying “I don’t wanna look at her!”
Barnabas announces that he will not kill Maggie right away. He tells her that he will make her suffer torments worse than anyone has ever known so that death will finally come as a blessed relief, then locks her up in the prison cell in the basement of the house. What, your house doesn’t have a prison cell in its basement? It’s a standard feature of homes in Collinsport, as we will come to see in future episodes.
Barnabas goes to the great house of Collinwood and talks to Vicki. He brings a handkerchief that, legend has it, was a gift from the queen of France to Josette. They babble about “the past” and Barnabas invites her to drop in at his house “some day.” He says “day,” even though he’s busy being dead every day until sunset. And doesn’t specify when- any old time, if she hears screams coming from the basement she’ll probably just ignore them.
Evidently Barnabas is thinking of Vicki as a backup Josette in case Maggie doesn’t come around. This marks a retreat from #240 and #241, when strange and troubled boy David Collins, who has seen Josette’s ghost many times, saw Maggie in the gown Barnabas gave her and said that she must have been Josette because she looked “exactly the same” as he had seen her before. That suggested, not only that Barnabas chose Maggie because of her looks, but also that he might be right in thinking that she is Josette’s reincarnation. This storyline is modeled on the 1932 Universal film The Mummy, in which Imhotep’s idea that Helen Grosvenor is the reincarnation of his lost love Princess Ankh-esen-amun is substantiated when Zita Johann plays both roles. If Vicki and Maggie are interchangeable, then all of that goes by the boards.
*Presumably no relation to the main character of Gene Roddenberry’s 1963-4 CBS TV series The Lieutenant, one episode of which was written by Art Wallace.
For those who have missed the last few episodes of Dark Shadows: Elizabeth Collins [Stoddard,] at Jason McGuire’s insistence, has taken Vicki, Carolyn, and Roger into the basement room and convinces them that it holds no mystery. They don’t realize that beneath the flagstones on the floor is concealed the room’s secret—the body of Elizabeth’s husband, Paul. Elizabeth, now realizing that the secret can never be told, announces to the family that she and Jason will be married. Maggie Evans escaped from Barnabas and attempted to get to her father, but was recaptured and told by Barnabas that unless she assumes the identity of Josette Collins, she will die. Realizing that she can never escape, Maggie attempts to destroy Barnabas.
The title card shown during the recap
***Or for that matter as is the not-so-young Miss Scott of today, she’s one of the best looking octogenarians around.
Artist Sam Evans can think of nothing but his daughter Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town. Maggie disappeared from the hospital weeks ago, and the police haven’t found a clue as to how she got out or where she is. Sam’s friend, dashing action hero Burke Devlin, drops by Sam’s house and offers to take him to dinner. Sam isn’t hungry. Burke urges Sam to work on a painting; he says he can’t concentrate.
Burke brings up the idea of Sam painting a portrait of him. Burke did commission Sam to paint him in #22, and for weeks and weeks afterward Sam vacillated about doing so. That was part of the since-abandoned “Revenge of Burke Devlin” storyline. In the notes about this episode on the Dark Shadows wiki, we read that “the episode’s writer seems unaware of the portrait-painting history between Sam and Burke, the fact that it was a sore subject, and even of the general animosity between the two.” I don’t think that is necessarily so. Burke gave up on his revenge in #201, and everyone was thoroughly bored by the topic well before then. So I suspect this conversation is telling us that Burke and Sam have turned the page on all that.
Before Maggie disappeared, Sam had been painting a portrait of mysterious eccentric Barnabas Collins. Barnabas insisted on working only at night and on doing all the painting at his place, the Old House on the estate of Collinwood, which does not have electricity. Since Maggie vanished, Sam has offered to take the canvas home and work on it there, but Barnabas would not let it leave his house. Tonight, Sam decides to go to Barnabas’ and do some painting by candlelight.
Sam knocks on Barnabas’ door. Barnabas’ servant, Willie Loomis, answers. Before he met Barnabas, Willie was a dangerously unstable ruffian. Willie menaced Sam and Maggie in the local tavern so severely that Burke had to beat him to a pulp, and Sam came away from the experience hating Willie. But in his time working on the portrait, Sam has come to believe that Willie is a changed man.
Willie explains that Barnabas is away, that he doesn’t know when he will be back, and that he isn’t supposed to let anyone in the house in his absence. Sam protests that he is no stranger, and that he is sure Barnabas will want the portrait finished. Willie finally suggests that he take the canvas home and work on it there. That’s what Sam has wanted to do all along, so he is delighted to hear it. He carries the painting to his station wagon while Willie carries the easel. The two are in a jolly mood as they leave the house, seeming very much like good friends.
Sam leaves his pipe on a table in the front parlor of Barnabas’ house. In the first months of the show he went back and forth between smoking this pipe with its white bowl carved into a likeness of George Washington and puffing on cigarettes. We haven’t seen the pipe in a long while, but today we get a number of closeups of it. The first comes before Sam leaves home to go visit Barnabas, and the second when he and Willie are on their way to the station wagon.
The pipe in the Evans cottageThe pipe at Barnabas’ house
As soon as Sam and Willie are outside, a figure draped in white comes down the stairs into the parlor. It is Maggie. It turns out Barnabas is the one who is holding Maggie. He has taken his cue from the 1932 film The Mummy, in which Boris Karloff is an undead creature who tries to convince a woman that she is the reincarnation of his lost love so that he can kill her and bring her back to life as that other person. Barnabas, it turns out, is a vampire. He wants to erase Maggie’s personality, replace it with that of his long-lost Josette, and then turn her into a vampire.
Maggie is sufficiently under Barnabas’ sway that doesn’t know who she is, but she is not fully convinced that she is Josette. When she picks up her father’s pipe she seems to remember something. She doesn’t sniff it, but a pipe is a highly aromatic object, and scents are powerful drivers of memory.
Maggie reaches for the pipeSomething comes back to Maggie’s mind
Maggie wanders back upstairs, keeping the pipe with her. Sam and Willie come in, and Sam is mystified that his pipe has vanished. When Willie says he must have left it outside, Sam starts to argue. Seeing that the pipe isn’t in the room and believing there is no one else in the house, Sam laughingly calls himself absent minded and asks Willie to keep an eye out for it.
Maggie wanders back downstairs after her father has gone. She and Willie argue about whether she ought to leave her room and who she is. She doesn’t let on that she knows anything about the pipe. She goes upstairs again, and Willie goes to the basement.
This is the first time we have seen the basement, and we get a long look at it. There is a metal door with a barred window, big cobwebs, a stone staircase, big candelabra, and a coffin. The coffin lid opens, and we see Barnabas inside. This is the first time we’ve seen him there.
Barnabas asks Willie why he has come. When Willie tells him he has news, Barnabas beckons him closer. When Willie obeys, he grabs him by the throat. When Willie has delivered his report, he flings him to the floor, apparently on general principles. He stands over Willie’s crumpled form and gives a lecture about the importance of keeping visitors out of the house during the day. Notably, he does not object to sending the canvas home with Sam.
Maggie wanders downstairs a third time. We see her face and hear her recorded voice on the soundtrack. This is the third instance of interior monologue on Dark Shadows, after we heard Willie thinking at the portrait of Barnabas in #205 and #208. As Willie did not know who Barnabas was or why he was drawn towards him when we heard his thoughts, so today Maggie does not know who she is or what Barnabas is doing to her. She looks at the pipe in her hand, concludes that there is someone she must take it to, and walks out the front door.
In the Evans cottage, Sam is working on the portrait of Barnabas when Burke comes in with a sandwich to share. They chat about the painting. Sam explains that he can’t get the eyes right- they keep looking cold and forbidding, while he and Burke agree that Barnabas doesn’t seem that way at all.
We cut back to the Old House, where Barnabas is sitting in his armchair, giving Willie some orders. He may not seem cold and forbidding to Sam, but he couldn’t be more blatantly malevolent than he is with Willie. When they discover that Maggie is gone, Barnabas and Willie run out the front door.
This is the first episode in which Barnabas is just a total bastard the entire time. When he is with people who don’t know that he is a vampire, he plays the role of the Collins family’s mild-mannered cousin from England; Barnabas is so committed to that performance that we wonder to what extent he is a monster pretending to be a nice guy, and to what extent he is a nice guy forced to function as a monster. When we’ve seen him alone with Maggie, he has obviously been a crazy person, but a twisted sweetness comes peeping out as he talks about his longing for Josette. Even in his previous scenes alone with Willie, scenes that have more than once ended with him beating Willie unmercifully, Barnabas has allowed Willie to go on talking about his feelings much longer than he would have to if he were entirely sincere when he tells Willie that his inner life is of no consequence. But there isn’t the least flicker of warmth in either of Barnabas’ scenes today.
In the Evans cottage, Sam is puzzling over the portrait while Burke is in the kitchen. Maggie comes drifting into view in the window behind Sam. The Evans cottage has been a prominent feature of the show from its early days, and the foliage visible through the window has changed often enough from episode to episode that regular viewers know there is an actual space behind it, but this is the first time we have seen a person there. In her white dress, with her dazed expression and her wafting movements, Maggie looks like a ghost. Sam sees her and is startled. He calls her name. She disappears. Sam and Burke run out of the house to look for her.
Maggie entersMaggie comes into viewMaggie sees SamSam sees MaggieSam moves in for a look
There are some significant flaws in the episode. The opening scene between Sam and Burke goes on too long, the repeated closeups on the pipe are embarrassingly heavy-handed, and Maggie’s three trips downstairs are one too many. There are also some badly framed shots, surprisingly so for director Lela Swift. For example, I cropped the fifth image above to zoom in on Sam and Maggie. Here is what actually appears in the show, cluttered with distracting junk on all sides and devoting more screen space to David Ford’s butt than anyone wanted to see:
Moon over Collinsport
Still, there is a lot of good stuff in the episode, and the ending is very effective. It is far from a gem by any reasonable standard, but it may be the best script Malcolm Marmorstein ever wrote.
Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, has vanished from her hospital bed. We start with a long succession of characters talking about this fact with Maggie’s father Sam. Had David Ford played Sam as effectively as he did in his first weeks on the show, one such exchange might have made for a good scene. But Ford is overacting today, and the first part of the episode drags on and on.
We cut to the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood, where Maggie’s boyfriend Joe and dashing action hero Burke Devlin have gone. Vampire Barnabas Collins resides in the Old House along with his sorely bedraggled blood thrall, Willie Loomis. Joe and Burke have no clue there is anything odd about Barnabas, but they don’t like Willie and suspect he may know what happened to Maggie.
Barnabas lets Joe and Burke in the house and explains that he sent Willie to run some errands for him out of town. When they tell him about the evidence that has led them to think Willie might be connected with Maggie’s disappearance, he persuades them that there is nothing to their suspicions. Once they are gone, he calls out “It’s all right, they’ve gone. You’re safe here- safe here with me.” Maggie walks into the room.
Barnabas talking to Burke
This scene is very good. Barnabas is made up to look much more like The Vampire than he has been in previous encounters with characters he was trying to fool into thinking he was a harmless eccentric recently arrived from overseas. He is polite enough to Joe and Burke that they can chalk his appearance up to the lateness of the hour, but as the audience watches him extract information from them point by point, until he knows exactly what they do and don’t know, we can see him calculating when and how he will have to kill them. It is as good a scene as Jonathan Frid has had since he debuted as Barnabas.
Frid’s performance in this scene benefits from his flawless line delivery. Not so, unfortunately, the scene that follows. His bobbles are not especially bad by Dark Shadows standards, but his task is far more fragile than any he has taken on before. We’ve seen him pretending to be the Collins family’s mild-mannered cousin from England; in those moments, Barnabas himself is taking on a challenging acting job, and Frid’s difficulties sometimes dovetail with troubles we might expect Barnabas to have in his performance. We’ve seen him abusing Willie; in those moments, we might expect him to sputter a bit, and Frid can hide some of his memory lapses in that mannerism. But now, he is telling Maggie what his plans are for her. As he does so, we realize he is a crazy man spilling out his deepest and sickest obsession. That context leaves nowhere to conceal even the slightest flub. As a sign of triumphant psychosis, the lines have to flow without interruption. Every time Frid stumbles for a fraction of a second, he breaks character.
Nor can Kathryn Leigh Scott bail him out. As Maggie, her part is to wander around in a stupor and occasionally repeat the last word or two of whatever is said to her. She makes that a lot more interesting to watch than you might expect, but there’s only so far it can take you.
Barnabas’ plan takes us outside the themes we are familiar with from vampire fiction. He wants to brainwash Maggie into thinking that she is Josette Collins, who has now been retconned into the woman Barnabas loved in his human days. His goal is that Maggie Evans will cease to exist, and that in her body Josette will live again.
Dracula never wanted to do anything like that, though after Dark Shadows has a hit with this storyline it will become part of vampire lore. Prince Mamuwalde, the menace in the 1972 film Blacula, kidnapped the heroine and tried to turn her into his long-dead love. Another undead fictional man from Africa had tried the same thing in 1932, when Imhotep, played by Boris Karloff, had spent the bulk of The Mummytrying to turn the heroine into a revived form of his adored Princess Ankh-esen-amun. Frid’s face and coloring were somewhat similar to those of Bela Lugosi, a fact often remarked in connection with his casting as a vampire. But his voice and movements are strongly reminiscent of Boris Karloff, and as a mashup of Dracula and Imhotep he is a synthesis of these two actors.
Barnabas gives Maggie a music box that he had intended to give Josette. He says that he bought it for Josette in his travels in “the Orient,” intending to give it to her “on a very special day,” and “this is that day.” This leaves us wondering why the day never came when he could give it to Josette. Did he become a vampire before he returned from his travels? Did he come back from his travels to find that she was no longer available to him? Or was it supposed to be a present at their wedding, a wedding that never occurred?
Barnabas also produces Josette’s wedding dress and tells Maggie that she, as the new Josette, will wear it. When Imhotep produces Ankh-esen-amun’s clothing and jewelry, we remember that royal personages in ancient Egypt were buried with their possessions and assume that he has retrieved them from her tomb. The show did lead us to wonder if the Collinses once had a similar practice. Willie released Barnabas because he had heard a story that some of the Collinses were buried with expensive jewelry and so was trying to rob a grave. The story of the buried jewels was framed as an echo of the Gothic romances that inspired the first weeks of Dark Shadows, but has now become an anticipation of the show’s journey into Universal Pictures’ back catalogue of horror movies.
If Barnabas does manage to somehow erase Maggie and bring Josette back to life in her body, it won’t be the first time Miss Scott has played Josette. In #70, Miss Scott was the ghost who emerged from Josette’s portrait and danced outside the Old House. Miss Scott put Josette’s veil on again in #126 when she led the ghosts who scared maniacal handyman Matthew Morgan to death before he could murder well-meaning governess Vicki. In that one, she delivered a few lines as Josette. Miss Scott’s name did not appear in the credits as Josette in either of those episodes, and the only time we caught a glimpse of Josette’s face was in #149, when she was played by stand-in Rosemary McNamara. But if by any odd chance a viewer does know that Miss Scott has played Josette before, the final dissolve from a closeup of Miss Scott to one of Josette’s portrait suggests a definite possibility that Barnabas’ plan, nonsensical though it seems, will somehow succeed.
Danny Horn’s post about this episode on his Dark Shadows Every Dayis particularly good. He compares its visual strategy to that of the one surviving contemporary segment of General Hospital, and praises the ambitious approach director Lela Swift took to composing images. I should also mention Patrick McCray’s Dark Shadows Daybook post, in which he analyzes the way the story alienates us from our rooting interest in Maggie’s safety by promising a more exciting story if Barnabas has his way with her for an extended period.
Well-meaning governess Vicki and flighty heiress Carolyn are in the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood talking about how nervous the electrical storm outside is making them. Vicki describes her reactions while driving a car a few moments before. This deepens a mystery that opened yesterday- what car? They’ve so often made a point of having Vicki ask to borrow Carolyn’s car, or accepting rides from people, or catching the bus, or walking much further than people thought was sensible that you’d expect them to have mentioned something if she got a car of her own.
The lights go out, and the women get even more nervous. A figure appears in the doorway and frightens them. They are relieved to discover that it’s just cousin Barnabas. Barnabas is getting to be such a familiar presence that one suspects they might have been relieved to see him even if they knew he is a vampire.
Barnabas looks out the window at the storm and talks about how fierce the storms are on the hilltop Collinwood occupies. He mentions something we haven’t heard about for months, the “Widows’ Wail.” The wind makes a peculiar sound as it blows over Widows’ Hill, and there is a legend that it is really the disembodied voices of the widows whose menfolk died on the fishing boats of the cruel Collins family. We heard the sound effect several times in the first ten weeks of the show, and the legend often came up in those days.
Barnabas then goes on at great length about a woman who leapt to her death from the cliff on Widow’s Hill well over a century before. He makes it clear that the woman was alone with her lover, then describes particular words and gestures in such detail and with such feeling that only the lover himself could provide them. He assures the women that “every word” of his account is true, including the parts about the woman unable to face a future in which she would be transformed into something she found intolerable, the lover putting his lips on the woman’s neck, her growing faint as a result, her finding a last burst of energy to fling herself to death on the rocks below, and her body found bloodless, but with a look of serenity on her face.*
Carolyn was on edge to start with, and the story deepens her anxiety. She excuses herself to go to bed. Vicki was even more anxious than Carolyn before Barnabas started his tale, but as he goes on her fear vanishes. She tells Barnabas that she wonders if there is a connection between the “bloodless” body and the recent incidents of blood loss involving cows, Barnabas’ servant Willie, and Maggie Evans, the Nicest Girl in Town. Barnabas reminds her that his story took place in an earlier century. She says she knows that, but that she is thinking that the ordinary logic of the natural world may not be enough to solve the ongoing mysteries. Regular viewers will remember that Vicki has had extensive experience with the paranormal, and have been expecting her to be the first to consider the possibility that Willie, Maggie, and the cows have encountered something that is not subject to the same laws that describe ordinary phenomena.
Barnabas squirms, and at one point drops his “cousin from England” mask altogether. As Vicki is explaining her thinking, he says in a bland voice that she is a “very clever girl” and should be careful lest the same thing happen to her that happened to Willie, Maggie, and the cows. Then he looks up and starts to walk away from her, leading to an ominous music sting and a commercial break.
After the break, we see that Barnabas is still in the drawing room with Vicki. She looks startled, and asks him what he meant by his remark. He says that he merely meant that whatever happened to them might happen to anyone. If that is intended to retroactively veil his unveiled threat, it fails miserably- it sounds even more menacing.
Among the representatives of the show’s supernatural back-world whom Vicki has already met, none is more important than the ghost of Josette Collins. The woman Barnabas is describing threw herself to her death off Widow’s Hill in a previous century while wearing a white dress, as Josette did. Other women have jumped from there in the years since, but Josette is still the most famous. When Maggie’s father, artist Sam Evans, saw the portrait of Josette in #185, he asked if she was the lady who went over the cliff. Vicki’s excited reaction to the story suggests that she thinks Barnabas might be talking about Josette.
If he is, it is a major retcon. When we first saw Barnabas in the Old House in #212, he told strange and troubled boy David Collins that she was “our ancestor,” meaning a forebear both of David’s branch of the family and of “the original Barnabas Collins,” that is, himself. After David left, he told the portrait that the house was his now, and that the spirits of his father Joshua and of Josette have no more power there. When he refers to Josette as his ancestor and brackets her with his father, he implies that she sided with his father against him. Since we know that Joshua’s wife, Barnabas’ mother, was named Naomi, and that Josette’s husband was named Jeremiah Collins, the likeliest explanation of these lines would be that Josette was Barnabas’ grandmother. Just a few weeks later, they seem to have reinvented her as his lover.
Barnabas’ story is also a bit of a departure from the usual depiction of vampires. Bram Stoker’s Dracula may have been a revenant form of Vlad III of Wallachia, but he doesn’t mope around obsessing over the good old days in the fifteenth century when he could stay up all day impaling people to his heart’s content. He is entirely focused on the task before him. Dracula’s colleagues in film and on stage had likewise tended to be killing machines, not given to nostalgia or introspection.
Barnabas’ claims to be a devotee of the late eighteenth century have so far been a technique for shifting the conversation from current events, of which he is after all comprehensively ignorant, to the deep past, in discussion of which he can show that he knows so much about the Collins family that he must be a member of it. Even when he gets carried away, as in #214 when he was telling Vicki about the construction of the Old House and started laughing maniacally about the word “death,” it’s a reminder that the events he is talking about seem quite recent to him, since he emerged from his coffin not long ago. But today, he seems to be brooding over the past in a way that has less to do with previous vampires than it does with the character Boris Karloff played in The Mummy (1932). Indeed, Jonathan Frid’s voice and movements are so strongly reminiscent of Karloff that one wonders if Barnabas will turn out to be a merger of Dracula with Imhotep.
Seagoing con man Jason McGuire enters. Vicki hates Jason, who is flagrantly blackmailing reclusive matriarch Liz. She likes Barnabas, but the encounter with him is getting extremely awkward. She quickly excuses herself to go to bed. When Barnabas says that he too must be going, Jason insists that he stay.
Barnabas’ reaction to Jason is pretty funny. When Jason says he wants to discuss something with him, Barnabas tenses and rolls his eyes. Suddenly the drawing room is the scene of a drawing room comedy, and Barnabas is the classic snob forced to deal with an uncouth bounder. For regular viewers, their scene is not just a well-played, if not particularly well-written, specimen of this genre. Barnabas is the latest of the supernatural beings who have been driving the action of the show for six months, while Jason is a throwback to the days when Dark Shadows was a noir-ish crime drama centered on the search for Burke Devlin’s fountain pen. Barnabas’ disdain for Jason mirrors our lack of interest in reviving that phase of the show.
Jason reveals to Barnabas that he had seen Willie earlier that night, that he suspects Willie is involved somehow in the troubles afflicting Maggie, and that he knows Willie has been visiting Eagle Hill cemetery. All of this is unsettling to Barnabas. He goes home to the Old House on the estate, shouts “Willie!,” and raises the cane he had earlier used to give Willie a severe beating.
Dark Shadows Commentary 