burke devlin – Page 2 – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 311: Attached to children

Both Danny Horn and Patrick McCray wrote fine blog posts about this episode. I have a few things to add to what they’ve said.

When vampire Barnabas Collins and his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie approach the Tomb of the Collinses, strange and troubled boy David hears them talking about mysterious little girl Sarah. Since Sarah had made him promise to keep her connection to the place secret, he opens the panel to the concealed chamber she had shown him and hides there. To his horror, he hears Barnabas order Willie to open the panel. Still trying to keep Sarah’s secret, he hides in the coffin in the center of the chamber while Willie and Barnabas walk around it. He hears them talk about Barnabas’ relationship with Sarah and Willie’s discomfort with the chamber.

They don’t mention that Barnabas is a vampire, or that he was the one who imprisoned Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl In Town. But they say enough that David should be able to figure out all of Barnabas’ secrets. Once he has heard Barnabas say that he was left to comfort Sarah after their dog was put down, it isn’t much of a leap to conclude that Sarah is his little sister. And once he’s heard Barnabas ask Willie if he is frightened by the “contents” of the chamber, he should know that there is something in there more than can be seen at a first glance.

In episodes #301 and #306, we were reminded of Jason McGuire, whom Barnabas killed and forced Willie to bury in the floor of this chamber. We also saw the chamber itself in #306, so that regular viewers would be sure to think of Jason’s grave. If David should repeat Barnabas’ comment about the chamber’s “contents” at the right time, Jason might yet be exhumed. So Barnabas has created an extreme danger to himself with his big mouth. Since it does not seem that Dark Shadows could continue if either Barnabas or David were to destroy the other, we are in suspense as to how they will get out of this situation.

After Barnabas and Willie leave, David gets out of the coffin and finds he cannot open the panel from the inside. Willie had used a gadget hidden in the stairs to open it, the first time we have seen this device. As David starts to panic, he hears the strains of Sarah’s signature tune, “London Bridge.” He turns away from the panel, looks at the blank walls of the chamber, and starts calling on Sarah.

In his post, Danny Horn asks “Has David just figured out that Sarah’s a ghost?” I think it’s more complicated than that. In #288, David happily considered the possibility that Sarah might be a ghost, and throughout the series he has been on easy terms with several ghosts. So I think he has assumed she was a ghost all along, and was just too tactful to bring it up when he was talking with her.

Back in the great house of Collinwood, well-meaning governess Vicki is on the terrace, worried about David’s disappearance. Barnabas peeks at her through the gate, as he would do if he were not allowed to look at her. Then he just walks up and starts a conversation with her, leaving us to wonder what the whole peeping-Tom act was about.

Vicki is so concerned for David that she starts crying. Barnabas tells her to put her head on his shoulder, which she does. He seems to be trying to restrain himself, but she has such a long, pretty neck, and it’s right there, and he’s so very thirsty…

Snack time. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Patrick McCray says of this moment:

As Barnabas lunges in to bite her, my concern and sympathy is challenged as I ponder her almost athletic lack of awareness. Of course, I’ll inevitably side with the person getting her throat ripped out… but it won’t stop me from wondering why she’s practically painting a landing strip on her neck. Vicki? You have a generation of young people idolizing you.

Today, the discussion isn’t even a metaphor. No, she’s not asking for it. No one is. So, what is the message that we’re supposed to take away from a dangerous conversation like this? For a person constantly asking questions about everything — and never understanding what she hears — Vicki is the picture of unawareness. Evil is evil. An attack is an attack. And awareness is power. Ironic that her would-be attacker, Barnabas, is frequently even more unaware than is she. However, if anyone on a soap paid attention at all, the stories would last ten minutes. But that’s the point. The more the characters lack focus, the more we learn its value. David is the most aware character on the show, and in this episode, he learns the most he ever will in one night. Pity it’s from inside a coffin.

That part of the discussion is too much metaphor to ignore.
Patrick McCray, “The Dark Shadows Daybook: August 22,” The Collinsport Historical Society, 22 August 2018.

Again, I think it’s a more complicated. I think we have to analyze Vicki’s behavior at three levels of intentionality. First, there’s the in-universe level, the sort of analysis of her motives another character in the same story might give if they had the same information we do. If that character saw Vicki’s depressing fiancé Burke angrily telling her she was crazy for saying that she had seen and heard things that we have also seen and heard, refusing to give her even the most basic information about himself and airily dismissing her questions as a morbid preoccupation with “the past,” and telling other people that her imagination will “run wild” unless he monitors and controls her, they might very well think that Vicki is tired of Burke’s abusive ways. To that character, there would be nothing “athletic” about Vicki’s failure to suspect Barnabas- it is perfectly natural for her to want to think the best of a man who has always been pleasant and respectful to her, unlike the blatant villain she is supposed to marry.

The second level of intentionality is of Vicki’s usual function in the narrative. Up to this point, every storyline has come to its climax when Vicki found out what was going on. She is still the audience’s main point of view character, and as such she naturally tends towards the center of the action. All of the action lately has been in the vampire story, so we expect her to involve herself deeply in it. In the first weeks, when it was possible that Barnabas, as the second in a parade of supernatural nemeses, would be destroyed and make way for a third as undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins had made way for him, we expected Vicki to be the one who drive the stake into his heart. Now that it is clear he is on the show for the long haul, we are expecting Vicki to become his victim, and presumably to become a vampire herself. As the protagonist, she is actively working to get more deeply involved with Barnabas. She hasn’t yet resorted to “painting a landing strip on her neck,” but she did invite herself to spend the night at Barnabas’ house in #285 and #286, and it wasn’t her fault she left in the morning still having all her blood.

Vicki the unappreciated fiancée wants only a friend who will respect her; Vicki the protagonist wants to be part of the main story. The tension between the incompatible goals of these two aspects of Vicki is expressed in the third level of intentionality, which Alexandra Moltke Isles expresses in the choices that make up her performance. Mrs Isles takes every opportunity to show that Vicki is more strongly drawn to Barnabas than to anyone else, most definitely including Burke. That attraction brings the character back to life. After a few days when she was trying to submit to Burke’s abuse and ignore “the past,” Barnabas asks her to intercede with Burke on his behalf and she comes roaring back, an assertive character who will not give an inch even when Burke makes some good points.

It is the sight of this strong Vicki that introduces a conflict into the audience’s feelings. On the one hand, we don’t want to lose her, and if she does not become a vampire, it’s hard to see a future for her on the show. On the other, it would be a terrible betrayal for Barnabas to repay her trust in him by doing such a thing to her. All the more so because we’ve spent so much time seeing Vicki become close to David, and if she follows the pattern set in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, vampire Vicki will be a threat to all children.

Our sadness at that betrayal would be a deep emotion of exactly the kind soap operas are supposed to create. That so shocking a crime would lead to a more meaningful and more suspenseful story and a richer part for our favorite character would guarantee that we would surprise ourselves by forgiving Barnabas for it and cheering when he and Vicki become a couple. So, I think a savvy audience watching Dark Shadows up to this point would have to expect to see just that story play out.

Episode 309: The tougher the better

Over the years, nine writers were credited with scripts for Dark Shadows. This is the final episode attributed to Malcolm Marmorstein, who is not among the eight best of those writers.*

Well-meaning governess Vicki has told her depressing fiancé Burke that she will break off their engagement unless he ends his investigation of her friend, courtly gentleman Barnabas Collins. Burke comes to see her at home today, and she demonstrates her resolve. When Burke says something about how Barnabas can take care of himself, she replies “And I can’t?” Burke tells her that she can be unaware of the evil around her. She holds still, looking very much like the daughter of matriarch Liz. Burke eventually gives in, agreeing to apologize to Barnabas.

Barnabas comes by to give Vicki a book about the history of Collinsport. Burke asks to see him privately in the drawing room. When Burke apologizes to him, Barnabas offers to answer all of his questions. With obvious difficulty, Burke says that he doesn’t want any answers. Burke offers his hand, and Barnabas reluctantly shakes it.

Burke offers his hand while the portrait of Jeremiah Collins looks on. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Burke says he will leave Vicki and Barnabas alone to discuss the book. Barnabas asks Burke to join them, but he declines. They are all smiles.

Jeremiah watching over three pals. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Once he is alone with Vicki, Barnabas repeats his offer to answer any and all questions about himself. With no apparent difficulty, she says that the only questions she has are about chapter two.

“The only questions I have are about chapter two.” Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

So an investigation which might have uncovered Barnabas’ many secrets and triggered a crisis is over, and in its place we have two people sitting on a couch where they plan to talk about chapter two of an imaginary book. That’s an anticlimax, but Vicki is so appealing when she is in control of the situation that the scenes are pleasant to watch.

Meanwhile, mad scientist Julia Hoffman is hanging around Barnabas’ house catching up on her own reading. She senses the presence of a ghost. She believes it is the ghost of Barnabas’ nine year old sister Sarah. The strains of Sarah’s theme song “London Bridge” play on the soundtrack, telling the audience she is right. Julia goes out into the woods to look for Sarah, then comes back into the house and looks around there, but doesn’t find her.

Barnabas comes home. Julia tells him she thinks Sarah was around. Barnabas is jealous his darling little sister will visit other people but not him. Barnabas claims that Sarah has been visiting his enemies and speculates that she has come back to destroy him. This is unwarranted- no one Sarah has visited has any plans to harm Barnabas, and she has shown enough power that she could have done him in long since if that were her goal.

*In his post about this episode on Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn links to an October 2012 article in which Marmorstein nursed his wounds about getting fired off the show. Producer Bob Costello and writers Joe Caldwell and Sam Hall are all quoted disputing Marmorstein’s version of events.

Episode 304: Strange vibrations

Yesterday, fake Shemp Burke Devlin tested his hypothesis that old world gentleman Barnabas Collins abducted Maggie Evens, The Nicest Girl in Town, and held her prisoner during the period covered by her current amnesia. On the one hand, he found that Maggie was perfectly relaxed when Barnabas visited her recently, and that she regards him only as a mildly pleasant acquaintance. There would seem to be no way she could have this reaction to someone who had subjected her to such an ordeal. On the other hand, he found that a melody she seems to remember hearing during her captivity might have come from a music box that was in Barnabas’ possession at the time. Since he has also found that the only person Barnabas will admit to having known before his arrival in the town of Collinsport lived over 130 years ago, he seems to be willing to consider that the resolution to this paradox might require a supernatural element.

Since we know that Barnabas is a vampire and have been frustrated with Burke’s recent angry denials of the existence of supernatural phenomena he previously knew all about, that episode felt like a breakthrough. Lately Barnabas has been harmless and all the non-villain characters have been clueless, leaving the show adrift. Maybe Burke will restart the vampire story. Maybe he will again become the dashing action hero he was when the charismatic Mitch Ryan played him in the first year of Dark Shadows, and maybe his investigation will precipitate a crisis that will bring the Barnabas arc to an exciting climax.

That hope shrivels to nothing in the first minutes of today’s outing. We begin with Burke knocking on the door of Barnabas’ house. When sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie Loomis tells Burke that Barnabas isn’t in, Burke says that he knows he is. Willie asks why he thinks he knows this, and Burke says that he’s been hiding behind a tree for hours staring at the front door. Burke is supposed to be a rich guy- it would be one thing if he’d hired private detectives to hide behind trees, but that he chose to spend his time doing that himself makes him look ridiculous. He pushes past Willie and declares that he won’t let Willie keep him out of the house. So before the opening titles roll, we’ve seen Burke as an unstable man who alternately cowers in the dark and perpetrates home invasions.

After Burke shouts Barnabas’ name a couple of times, he tells Willie he knows Barnabas is there because he never saw him come out of the front door. Willie says he might have gone out the back door. Burke’s response to that is “Maybe.” With that, Burke blows his last shred of credibility as an action hero. He presses Willie with some questions about Barnabas’ business interests; usually when characters ask about that, I think a suitable send-off for Burke would be a story where Barnabas bites him, enslaves him, and uses his money and connections to put some substance behind his pretense to be an independently wealthy cousin from the Collins family’s long-lost English branch. But when we see Burke being such a total schmuck as he is in this sequence, it’s hard to imagine he could be of any use to anyone, or to care very much how they go about writing him off the show.

That “Maybe” is such a preposterous anticlimax that I wonder if it is a sign of some politics behind the scenes. Long after the show was made, writer Malcolm Marmorstein remembered executive producer Dan Curtis wanting to end the vampire storyline around this time and to give the show over to an arc about Burke and well-meaning governess Vicki getting married and moving into a long-vacant “house by the sea.” There have been a few vague stabs at getting such a story off the ground- Burke and Vicki are engaged now, and he is in the process of buying such a house. But the vampire story was so much the biggest ratings draw the show has had that it is hard to imagine Curtis really wanted to scrap it- more likely he wanted to have more than one story going at a time, as soap operas usually do. In any case, the “house by the sea” bits have been so dull that it feels like the writers are simply refusing to develop the theme, and Ron Sproat’s script today could hardly fail to do lasting damage to Burke. So perhaps there is a sneaky kind of revolt in progress.

Meanwhile, visiting mad scientist Julia Hoffman and strange and troubled boy David Collins have left the great house of Collinwood to take a walk in the woods. They are looking for David’s friend, the ghost of nine year old Sarah Collins. Sarah leaves belongings of hers as tokens of her presence; these objects linger in physical existence until she reclaims them, after which they vanish when she vanishes. Some Dark Shadows fans put a lot of energy into saying that this aspect of Sarah “doesn’t make any sense!” To which I reply, she’s a ghost. All you can expect is that the story will tell you what the rules are and will follow them consistently. Not only does Sarah follow this rule consistently, but the ghosts of Bill Malloy and of Josette Collins had both previously left things lying around the house for people to find. Most recently, Sarah left her bonnet in the house, and now David and Julia are on a quest to return it to her.

David takes Julia to a clearing in the woods where he has encountered Sarah before. We hear “London Bridge” on the soundtrack, the musical cue telling us that Sarah is present, but she does not appear. David and Julia look around and don’t see her. David thinks he hears someone nearby to their left. They look that way, but don’t see anyone. They turn back, and find that the bonnet is gone.

This little scene captures some of the feeling of live theater that gave the early episodes of Dark Shadows such a special quality. I particularly like the low camera angle on David and Julia, as if we are looking up at a stage.

Later, Julia goes to Barnabas’ house. She and Willie talk about Burke’s visit. Julia muses about the need to provide Barnabas a more complete cover story to keep Burke at bay. This is the first staff meeting we see between Julia and Willie. Until this scene, the only conversations we’ve seen between two people who knew that Barnabas was a vampire were between Willie and Maggie during her captivity, and only a sharply limited number of things could happen during those conversations. Willie would tell Maggie to submit to Barnabas, either sorrowfully or angrily. Maggie would either express defiance openly, pretend to be cooperative, or give nonresponsive answers that suggested she was losing her mind. Combine those attitudes, and you have six possible interactions. Sometimes the characters would change attitudes in mid-scene, multiplying the number of possible interactions, but no matter how you mix and match you still end with Maggie in the same fix she was in at the beginning. But when both characters have some measure of personal autonomy and both are invested in helping Barnabas keep his secret, the number of possible interactions is very large and the number of possible outcomes is infinite. So this is an exciting scene.

We end in The Blue Whale tavern, where Burke asks Vicki to stay away from Barnabas for reasons he refuses to explain. The only interesting thing about this scene is that Bob O’Connell does not appear in the background as Bob the Bartender. Some other uncredited extra is pouring today.

Mystery man. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 303: Separate worlds

Fake Shemp Burke Devlin is starting to suspect that there is something odd about old world gentleman Barnabas Collins. He suspects that Barnabas is not from England as he claims to be. More darkly, he is considering the possibility that Barnabas might be the one who abducted Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, and held her prisoner. As it happens, the audience knows that he is correct in both of these suspicions. We also know more- that Barnabas is a vampire.

Burke has hired investigators to probe into Barnabas’ past. Barnabas told him he lived near London with a cousin named Niall Bradford. Burke’s investigators have found that the last time a man of that name lived in London was 130 years previously. Dark Shadows has been going back and forth for months on whether Barnabas lived in the 1830s or in the eighteenth century. Yesterday they seemed to commit themselves to the earlier date, but now we’re back with the 1830s.

Burke asks Maggie’s doctor, addled quack Dave Woodard, to show him all of her medical records. Woodard protests that medical records are confidential. He then tells Burke everything he knows about Maggie’s case.

Burke calls on Maggie. She is back home, apparently well, but suffering from amnesia covering the entire period of her captivity. Unknown to any of the characters we see today, Maggie’s psychiatrist Julia Hoffman is a mad scientist in league with Barnabas, and she has wiped Maggie’s memory clean of any information that might threaten to expose him. Burke talks with Maggie and her boyfriend, hardworking young fisherman Joe, repeating everything Woodard told him a few minutes before.

Maggie and Joe tell Burke that she has had a few visitors since she came home. Maggie blithely mentions that Barnabas was one of those visitors. Burke is startled to hear this, and Maggie repeats that Barnabas dropped in to pay his respects.

During the fourteen weeks when Dark Shadows was driven by undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, Burke saw extensive evidence of supernatural doings. But he lately he has decided that he lives in the kind of world where the show took place in its first few months, where there might be hints of ghosts in the background, but all the action came from flesh and blood humans subject to the usual laws of nature. Since it doesn’t occur to him that a person might have powers like Julia’s, Maggie’s calmness when talking about a visit from Barnabas seems to prove that Barnabas is innocent.

Burke learns that Barnabas has been to see Maggie.

Maggie does say that there is just one memory she has that seems to be connected with her time in captivity. It is a bit of music- “a light, playful tune. A soft, tinkling sound.” She freely admits that it seems unlikely that this would have any connection with such an experience, and speculates that it may have been something she remembered from childhood.

In the great house of Collinwood, well-meaning governess Vicki is listening to the enchanted music box Barnabas gave her. Burke and Vicki are now engaged to be married. He comes to see her, and remarks on the music box. She accuses him of being jealous of Barnabas, and he keeps coming back to the music box. When she opens it for him, he remarks that it makes “a light, playful tune… a soft, tinkling sound.”

The episode ends with Burke listening to the music box and staring off into space. Barnabas gave the music box first to Maggie, then to Vicki, in each case hoping that she would listen to it until its magical quality caused her to believe that she was his lost love Josette. Seeing the look on Burke’s face as he listened, my wife, Mrs Acilius, said “Maybe Burke will start to think that he’s Josette.” Who knows, maybe he and Barnabas could be very happy together.

Episode 302: As dead as Jeremiah Collins

When new writers start working on Dark Shadows, they do some inventorying of ongoing and disused storylines. When Ron Sproat came aboard in November of 1966, he contrived a lot of scenes that served to mark storylines as “To be developed” or “To be discarded.” Now Gordon Russell has begun to be credited with scripts. He addresses continuity questions with brief lines of dialogue.

For example, for the last forty weeks the show has been equivocating about when it was that Barnabas Collins lived as a human being. Sometimes they say that he died and became a vampire in the 1830s. That fits with the original idea that Jeremiah Collins built the great house of Collinwood for his bride Josette in that decade, because Barnabas is supposed to have loved Josette and hated Jeremiah. At other times, they have pushed Barnabas, Josette, and Jeremiah back into the eighteenth century.

Now Barnabas has risen from the grave. Mad scientist Julia Hoffman has developed a series of injections to cure him of vampirism and turn him into a real boy. When Julia finds that Barnabas has heard the ghostly voice of his sister, nine year old Sarah, she declares that “The injection can wait!” and wants to talk all about Sarah. When Barnabas tries to avoid the subject, saying that Sarah has been dead for nearly 200 years, Julia replies “So have you.” That would seem to nail down that continuity question.

Julia speculates that Barnabas has subconsciously willed Sarah to return to the living, because she symbolizes the kindly side of his nature. There have been a bunch of possible explanations for why Sarah emerged shortly after Barnabas did; evidently this is the one we will be going with, at least for a while.

Barnabas has been looking through an album of family portraits, Sarah’s among them. He tells Julia that he is particularly intrigued by another portrait in the same volume, that of Jeremiah. He says that Burke Devlin, depressing boyfriend of well-meaning governess Vicki, bears a striking resemblance to Jeremiah. This point was first made in #280, when Burke came to a costume party at Barnabas’ in Jeremiah’s clothing and Barnabas was shocked by the resemblance. Barnabas says that he will be a happy man when Burke is as dead as Jeremiah. This tells us, not only that Barnabas is serious about his hostility to Burke, but also that we can expect some connection between Jeremiah and Burke to be developed.

Julia chases Barnabas around his living room until he hangs his head and mutters a promise not to hurt anyone, not even Burke, as long as there is a chance the injections will work. This helps both to explain why Barnabas has been so harmless lately and to reinforce the Bossy Big Sister/ Bratty Little Brother dynamic that is forming between him and Julia.

Julia goes to the great house. Matriarch Liz is under the impression that Julia is an historian writing a book about the old families of New England, and letting her stay in the mansion on the understanding that she is doing research into the Collinses. Liz asks about Julia’s previous books. Julia evades the question, saying that only scholars have ever heard of them. Liz mentions that she was a recluse for eighteen years, during which time she read so widely that she became aware of many scholarly books. Julia seizes on Liz’ reference to her time as a recluse, and asks a series of questions about it. Observing Julia’s facility at deflecting questions she doesn’t want to answer, Liz says that “If you are as nimble with the written word as you are with the spoken, you must be a very interesting writer.” This conversation not only marks Liz’ period of seclusion as an extinct topic, but also shows that Julia’s cover story is not going to be solid enough to cover her operations indefinitely. Moreover, it gives Joan Bennett a chance to show what Liz sounds like when she is smart.

Vicki meets Burke in the courtyard of the great house. She asks him why he’s late. He says he had a meeting with his lawyer, James Blair (a character we last saw in #95 and last heard mentioned in #133.) The reference to Blair tells regular viewers that Burke’s business interests may have something to do with an upcoming storyline.

Vicki asks what the meeting was about. Burke says it was to do with a message from London, then declares he didn’t come to talk about business. At the end of yesterday’s episode, Burke placed a call to London to initiate an investigation of Barnabas, so we know that he has already received some information about him. We also know that he is keeping the investigation secret from Vicki.

Burke brings up the marriage proposal he made to Vicki when last they saw each other. She says that she doesn’t know enough about him to be comfortable making a decision. In particular, she doesn’t know how he made his money or who his business associates are. In response to that, he launches into a speech dismissing those concerns as matters of “the past,” saying that he wants her to think only about “the future.” Considering that Burke won’t even tell Vicki what business he was conducting twenty minutes ago, “the past” that is off limits to her stretches right up to the present. This tells even first time viewers that Burke is a secretive and untrustworthy man likely to drag a wife into some shady enterprises.

It rings even louder warning bells for regular viewers. At this point in Dark Shadows, “the past” is how the characters refer to the vampire arc, which is the only ongoing storyline. Several times, Burke has angrily demanded Vicki renounce interest in “the past,” by which he means her attempts to stay relevant to the plot. As he has made those demands, he has accused her of being crazy when she told him that she saw and heard phenomena that we also saw and heard, in some cases phenomena that Burke himself is in a position to know are real. On Thursday, Burke enlisted Julia’s support in his effort to gaslight Vicki; in that conversation, Julia asked Burke if, when he said Vicki must “live in the present,” he meant that she must live with him, and he confirmed that he did. So Burke’s evasiveness in this scene shows that he is likely to be an abusive husband who will devote himself to controlling Vicki and stifling her contributions to the story.

The show is making something of an effort to launch a storyline in which Vicki and Burke will get married and move into a long-vacant “house by the sea” that has some kind of association with Barnabas and therefore with the supernatural. So the parade of red flags that Burke sends marching in front of his proposal may tell us to expect a story in which Vicki, the long-suffering wife confined to a haunted house, loses contact with the world of the living.

Perhaps that is where we will see Burke’s connection to Jeremiah. Maybe Burke will be possessed by the spirit of Jeremiah, and under that possession his abuse of Vicki will intensify. It is also possible that Burke will be revealed as a descendant of Jeremiah. On Friday, the story of Burke’s childhood was retconned, introducing the idea that his father left the family when Burke was nine. Perhaps it will turn out that he did this after he found out that Burke was the product of an extramarital dalliance with a Collins. That in turn might revive another paternity question concerning a nine year old boy. For months, the show hinted that Burke, not Liz’ brother Roger, was the father of strange and troubled boy David Collins. If Burke is a Collins bar sinister, then David can be his natural son and still retain his symbolic importance as the last in the male line of the family.

Whatever the nature of Burke’s connection to Jeremiah, Vicki’s eventual flight from him might lead her into the vampire story. Since Barnabas thinks he wants Vicki to be his next victim, he has been solicitous towards her, and she regards him warmly. My wife, Mrs Acilius, points out a sort of visual pun implicit in the prospect of Vicki choosing Barnabas over Burke. As played by Anthony George, Burke is an astonishingly poor kisser. As a vampire, Barnabas gives what might be called “the kiss of death.” A woman might prefer a single kiss of death to a lifetime of the impossibly awkward kisses of George.

Vicki caves in and agrees to marry Burke, even though he won’t answer any of her questions. They go into the drawing room and announce this ominous news to Liz, Barnabas, and Julia. Barnabas responds by looking off into space and exclaiming “Jeremiah!” Again, whatever relationship develops between Burke and Jeremiah, we know that Barnabas is committed to resisting its influence on Vicki.

“Jeremiah!” Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas cannot conceal his dismay. He and Julia leave, explaining that they had planned to spend the evening together in town. Liz remarks that Barnabas was happy when he came, and sad when he left. Still, the idea that he and Julia might be going on a date is enough to keep Burke smiling.

In the courtyard, Barnabas tells Julia that he will give her his full cooperation as she tries to cure him of vampirism. He explains he wants to become human again so that he can prevent Vicki from marrying Burke.

This is rather alarming for the viewers. Dark Shadows became a hit when a vampire joined the cast. If the Burke/ Vicki/ Barnabas story is going to be just another daytime soap love triangle among humans, you may as well watch The Guiding Light. The foreboding dun dun DUNN! that ends each episode has rarely seemed more apt than it does coming on the heels of this grim prospect.

Episode 301: Devlin is an obstacle

Vampire Barnabas Collins has an idea that well-meaning governess Vicki Winters ought to be his next victim. Vicki has given him one opportunity after another to advance this goal, and he has failed to take advantage of any of them. Now Vicki’s depressing boyfriend Burke Devlin has proposed marriage to her, and she is considering it seriously.

As we open today, Barnabas is telling his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie that he plans to kill Burke immediately. Willie talks him out of this plan, explaining the many difficulties of getting away with that particular crime. I was hoping he would bring up one of my favorite fanfic ideas, that Barnabas could bite Burke and enslave him. That would not only allow Barnabas to use Burke’s money and shady connections to establish his identity more securely, but would also give Burke, who after all used to be a very important character, a memorable storyline before he is written out of the show.

Barnabas says that “Devlin is an obstacle” who “must be destroyed.” Burke is indeed an obstacle to narrative development. Even in the first year of Dark Shadows, when Burke was a dashing action hero played by the charismatic Mitch Ryan, none of his storylines really worked. The show gave up on the last of those storylines forty weeks ago, when Burke formally renounced his pursuit of revenge against the Collinses in #201. Since then he’s been altogether surplus to requirements, and when the woefully miscast Anthony George took over the part in #262 he went from dashing action hero to hopeless schlub.

In recent months, Burke has been unpleasantly sullen whenever Vicki tries to connect herself to the vampire story, gaslighting her with angry demands that she deny the existence of supernatural phenomena he himself formerly knew to be real and infantilizing her with assertions that her imagination will run wild if he doesn’t control her. He is a blocking figure in a plot that is already moving too slowly. As an abusive partner to Vicki, who is still our main point of view character, he is quickly earning the audience’s hatred. So Barnabas is mistaken in saying that Burke “must be destroyed”- the character Ryan created has already been destroyed.

Barnabas goes to the Blue Whale tavern, where Burke is buying drinks for two old drunks who are laughing at his jokes. He and Burke sit at a table and have a conversation in which they compare their relationship to a contest. Burke compares it to a card game played for high stakes, Barnabas to a saber duel.

In later years, Jonathan Frid cited this as his favorite scene in all of Dark Shadows. I always like to see The Blue Whale, I like the moment when Barnabas objects that “You make me sound so evil,” and I’m glad Frid had a good time. But George is too bland for the scene to have a real impact. He was a cold actor who could excel when his character was driving the scene and knew more than he was telling. That ability doesn’t help him here. Burke simply reacts to Barnabas with bewilderment, and George had no real flair for reacting to his scene-mates.

Thrust, parry, look at the teleprompter. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The old drunks leave, and Bob the bartender starts setting chairs up on tables. Burke observes that it’s closing time. Barnabas goes, but Burke stays behind. Apparently he lives in the tavern now. He picks up the pay phone and asks for the international operator. He wants to talk to an agent of his in London. He is going to check on Barnabas’ “cousin from England” story.

Episode 300: Burke Devlin must die

Sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie Loomis tries to tell his master, vampire Barnabas Collins, that his plans for well-meaning governess Vicki Winters are unlikely to come to fruition. Barnabas wants Vicki to volunteer to become his vampire bride, a goal he has done remarkably little to advance. Even when Vicki invited herself to spend the night in his house, he couldn’t be bothered to bite her. Now she’s getting serious about her depressing boyfriend, Burke Devlin, and Willie thinks Barnabas has missed his chance.

Barnabas responds to Willie’s opinion as we might expect- he grabs him by the throat and threatens to kill him. He sends him away with orders to follow Vicki and Burke on their date and to report on every detail of their conversations.

Mad scientist Julia Hoffman is trying to cure Barnabas of his vampirism, and she brings him substantially the same message, along with a command to leave Vicki alone. Barnabas has enough hope that Julia’s experiments will succeed that he can’t treat her as he does Willie. So he evades her questions, pouts at her orders, and sulks when he finds himself having to go along with her.

Barnabas agrees to do as Julia says. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The scene looks very much like the interactions we saw in the early months of the show between matriarch Liz and her brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger. Those were sometimes echoed in the interactions Vicki had with her charge, Roger’s son strange and troubled boy David. The bossy big sister/ bratty little brother pattern is on its way to becoming the signature relationship of Dark Shadows.

Meanwhile, Willie has been following his orders. He saw Burke and Vicki make several laughably awkward attempts to kiss each other, then heard Burke propose marriage to Vicki. Vicki asked for time to think it over.

When Willie reports this to Barnabas, he says he is sure she will say yes. Barnabas says that there will be no marriage, and proclaims “Burke Devlin must die!”

Episode 299: When darkness falls

Vampire Barnabas Collins creeps up on well-meaning governess Vicki from behind. He touches her neck, and she is startled.

This scene plays twice. First, before the opening title sequence, then again immediately after. The first time around, Vicki stifles a giggle when she sees Barnabas. The second, she seems frightened.

Barnabas does not bite Vicki. He apologizes for startling her. She says that no apology is needed, and she stands very close to him. They talk about the Moon and the night and about what incredible romantics they both are.

In #285 and #286, Vicki contrived to get Barnabas to invite her to spend the night in his house. In #293, she invited Barnabas to tag along on a date she was having with her depressing boyfriend Burke, and while Burke stood there she had eyes only for Barnabas. In this conversation, Vicki reluctantly turns down an invitation from Barnabas so she can go on some more dismal dates with Burke.

Mad scientist Julia Hoffman interrupts Barnabas and Vicki. After Vicki excuses herself to get ready for her date, Julia demands that Barnabas leave her alone. Barnabas says that he means her no harm. This is all too believable- twice before today, we have seen Barnabas enter a room where Vicki was sleeping and leave without biting her. It’s starting to seem unlikely that she will ever have a place in the vampire story. Since the vampire story is the only plot going on Dark Shadows, that leads us to wonder why she is still on the show.

This scene takes place on a new set, a courtyard with a terrace and a fountain. It looks very much like a set in the 1965 film The Sound of Music, the one where the Countess who is supposed to marry Captain von Trapp has the conversations that remove her from the love triangle and leave the path open for von Trapp to marry Maria. That movie was such a big hit that it seems likely that they had it in mind when they designed this set for scenes concerned with the love triangle involving Vicki, Burke, and Barnabas.

Julia’s intervention leads some to believe that there is another love triangle budding in which she will vie for Barnabas’ affections, but I don’t see any trace of that in Julia’s stern manner today. She simply seems to be concerned that Barnabas stop preying on people while she performs the experiments that are supposed to cure him of vampirism.

In later years, Grayson Hall would claim that she decided on her own initiative to play Julia as if she were in love with Barnabas. She said that by the time the writers and directors caught on to what she was doing, they had received so much enthusiastic fan mail that they had to let her go on doing it. In response to this story, Danny Horn makes some uncharacteristic remarks in his post about this episode on Dark Shadows Every Day:

It’s a great story, especially because it appeals to the audience’s secret belief that the actors really are the characters that they play. We love to believe that, especially for daytime soap opera characters, who we spend time with every day.

But really, everybody who watches television believes that the characters are real. That’s why we love to hear about unscripted moments that were invented during rehearsal. As intelligent adults, we understand that writers and directors and producers create the characters, and then the actors show up and say the words. But there’s a little child inside of us, who wants to be told that Julia Hoffman is real, and she lives inside Grayson Hall.
Danny Horn, “A Human Life,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 2 Jaunary 2014.

As the blog went on, Danny put more and more emphasis on the chaotic process by which Dark Shadows was created. I suspect this passage was something he wrote in haste. Even at this early stage, he had made it clear that he knew that it was not true that “writers and directors and producers create the characters, and then the actors show up and say the words.” By the time he finished in 2021, his main theme had long been that the real subject of Dark Shadows was “a team of under-resourced lunatics desperately struggling every day to make the most surprising possible show.” That team most definitely included actors padding their parts in ways they could do only because the show was done live to tape, with edits never done if not absolutely necessary, and often not done even when they were.

Julia visits Vicki’s room and helps her choose an outfit for her date with Burke. Julia urges Vicki to avoid Barnabas, because he has a crush on her and it would hurt him to encourage him in it. Vicki says that she has never seen any sign of such a crush. Nor have we- he has talked with his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie about a plan to take Vicki as his next victim. Aside from giving her an enchanted music box that is supposed to brainwash her, he has been remarkably leisurely about the whole thing. If anything, she is the one who has been pursuing him.

Vicki and Burke are out by the fountain. He remarks that she has been very quiet, and she refers to having a lot on her mind. This raises our hopes that she is thinking about what Julia told her and is going to ditch Burke and go to Barnabas. They start talking about their wretched childhoods. Previously, we had heard that Burke’s mother died when he was young and that his alcoholic father supported the family by making lobster pots; now Burke tells us that when he was nine his father left the family. It’s hard to see much point in this retcon; most likely the writers had just forgotten about the earlier story.

Vicki mentions that there was one nurse at the Hammond Foundling Home whom she liked. In the early days of the Dark Shadows, she would often reminisce about her ridiculously bleak experiences growing up in this fictional orphanage. Usually she would get a faraway look in her eyes and smile, then tell some story that started with an appalling horror and got worse and worse as it went. This time, she again stares off into the distance and smiles, so that viewers who have been watching from the beginning brace themselves to hear that the nurse turned out to be the worst abuser of all, or that she was murdered in front of Vicki while the other children laughed, or that she ran the kitchen the winter they ran out of food and had to resort to cannibalism. But no, Vicki is just sharing a pleasant little memory. The show is a lot less hard-edged now that it’s about a vampire.

Not that they’ve stopped presenting horrible images altogether. No, they show us Burke kissing Vicki.

When Burke was played by Mitch Ryan, he was a great kisser, a talent he displayed with Vicki among others. But Anthony George does not appear to have seen anyone kiss before he attempts it. As he points his lips at Alexandra Moltke Isles, she stiffens her neck, a move that may have suggested excitement if her partner were doing something recognizable as a sign of affection, but that in this context looks like she’s suffering from whiplash. After his first failed effort, he rests his head on her shoulder and looks miserable.

We pull back from Burke’s fumbling and see Barnabas at the gate to the courtyard, looking forlorn. I’m sure the writer and director wanted us to take this image as a sign that Barnabas is feeling sorry for himself, but the scene he’s been watching with us is so dreary that we would all have the same look on our faces.

Some attribute George’s phenomenally bad kissing to his sexuality. I don’t buy it. Joel Crothers was also gay, and we’ve seen Joe Haskell give convincingly sultry kisses to two actresses. Louis Edmonds was gay too, and when Dark Shadows finally gives him an on-screen kiss two years from now he will do just as well. And the actresses unanimously testified that Jonathan Frid was the best kisser in the cast. Furthermore, the other conspicuously inept kisser on the show was the emphatically heterosexual Roger Davis (whom we have yet to see.) So George’s failures in this department are his alone, and do not reflect on any demographic group of which he was a member.

In the house, Vicki and Burke continue their vain struggle to kiss. Julia walks in and apologizes for intruding. She does not leave, nor does she take her eyes off Vicki and Burke. That makes sense- after all, she is still an MD, and it would appear that whatever is wrong with Burke might require some kind of medical intervention.

Vicki excuses herself to go to bed, and Burke asks Julia to join him in the drawing room. There, he denounces Vicki for her “vivid imagination,” a terrible quality that must be stamped out. He tells Julia that Vicki has experienced two hallucinations recently. We know that these were not hallucinations at all, but actual visitations from the ghost of Sarah Collins. Burke doesn’t know that. However, he does know of another sighting which led him to angrily accuse Vicki of being insane, when she saw Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, walking in a cemetery. At the time, everyone thought Maggie was dead, but now that it has been revealed she is alive, he removes the incident from his bill of particulars against Vicki.

Burke is furious with Vicki for having an imagination and wanting to be part of the story

Burke and Vicki, like most of the other characters, believe Julia’s cover story that she is an historian researching the Collinses for a book about the old families of New England. He asserts that helping Julia with her project is having a bad effect on Vicki, because she must “live in the present.” Julia asks if this means that she must live with him. Burke agrees that it does.

To Burke’s surprise, Julia agrees that Vicki should stop helping her and stay away from anything suggestive of past centuries. The two of them talk about how Vicki must be watched and controlled lest her imagination “run wild.” Julia is a mad scientist in league with a vampire, so this sort of talk is to be expected from her, but Burke is supposed to be on Vicki’s side. His frank intention to crush her imagination, expressed alternately with undisguised rage and airy paternalism, is as repulsive as anything we have seen from Barnabas.

Upstairs, Vicki is asleep. Barnabas opens the door and walks into the room. Again he thinks about biting her, again he doesn’t. He opens the enchanted music box, looks at her a bit longer, and leaves the way he came. If Barnabas doesn’t get off the dime soon, Vicki may marry Burke and become useless forever.

Episode 294: The same way I got out

Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, is a patient in a mental hospital run by a mad scientist who is in league with the vampire who kept her prisoner. So there are bars on the windows of her room, and a lock on the outside of the door. The vampire, Barnabas Collins, scrambled her memories before she escaped from him, and the mad scientist, Julia Hoffman, intends to keep her in her amnesiac state.

We see Maggie at the barred window, begging for someone to help her go home. At that, her friend, the ghost of nine year old Sarah Collins, materializes in the room. Maggie hugs Sarah, and Sarah apologizes for taking so long to find her. Sarah assures Maggie that she can help her get home, but tells her she will have to do what she says.

Sarah apologizes for taking so long to come

At Sarah’s direction, Maggie stands in the corner behind the door and calls the nurse while Sarah sits on the bed. The nurse opens the door and sees Sarah, but not Maggie. Maggie slips out and closes the door behind her, locking Sarah and the nurse in the room. The nurse tries the door, looks back, and sees that Sarah is nowhere to be found. The camera stays with her for a long moment as she looks around in bewilderment. As Nurse Jackson, Alice Drummond does a great job with this stage business.

Meanwhile, back in Collinsport, there is a misdemeanor in progress. Well-meaning governess Vicki, her depressing boyfriend Burke, and Barnabas are sneaking into an old vacant house that has captured Vicki’s fancy. Barnabas astounds Burke with his ability to see in the dark as he describes the “No Trespassing” sign, and refers to the same ability as he volunteers to explore the upper storey of the house while Burke and Vicki stand around on the ground floor.

Burke has taken Vicki’s interest in the house as a marriage proposal, and keeps talking about how they should furnish it when they live there together. The only thing he says that gets much of a reaction from her is a disparaging remark about Barnabas, which elicits flash of anger. Yesterday’s episode included a couple of clues that Vicki’s infatuation with “the house by the sea” might lead her, not to Burke and irrelevance, but to Barnabas and the center of the action. Her forceful response to Burke’s Barnabas-bashing renews those hopes.

Barnabas comes back from the upstairs with a handkerchief bearing the initials “F. McA. C.” He makes a present of it to Vicki. When she objects to this act of theft, he assures her that whoever it belonged to would want her to have it. That too picks up on hints from yesterday, when Barnabas indicated by his typical slips of the tongue that he had a connection to the house that he didn’t want the other characters to know about. We haven’t yet heard of anyone living or dead with the initials “F. McA. C.,” so presumably we are supposed to start waiting to hear a fresh story about Barnabas’ earlier existence.

Somewhere to the north, Maggie and Sarah are sitting in the woods. In recent days, we have heard several times that the mental hospital is a hundred miles from Maggie’s home in Collinsport, so if they are going to walk the whole way and take breaks it will be a while before they get back.

Maggie asks Sarah how she got into her room. “Do you really want to know?” Maggie says she does. “The same way I got out.” How did she get out? “The same way I got in!” At that, Maggie laughs. Sarah first met Maggie when she was Barnabas’ prisoner, and she remarks that this is the first time she has heard her laugh. She tells her she ought to do it all the time.

Apparently, an early draft of the script called for a truck driver to pick Maggie up and take her back to town. But that couldn’t be. How will Sarah get Maggie to Collinsport from the hospital? The same way she got to the hospital from Collinsport, of course.

In Collinsport, Vicki, Burke, and Barnabas are sitting at a table in the Blue Whale tavern. While Barnabas gets the drinks, Vicki tells Burke that he and Barnabas are extraordinarily unalike. Burke says he takes that as a compliment, a remark to which Vicki reacts with displeasure.

We can sympathize- sure, Barnabas is a vampire, and that is sub-optimal in a potential husband. But it doesn’t make him the opposite of Burke, who has been draining the life out of Vicki lately with his demands that she steer clear of anything that might be interesting to the audience and become as dull as he is. The real difference between Burke and Barnabas is that Barnabas drives one exciting plot point after another, while Burke makes nothing happen.

Barnabas comes back to the table, and the conversation returns to the “house by the sea.” Burke is about to propose marriage to Vicki. Suddenly, the jukebox stops playing and everyone falls silent. It is as if something has entered the room that everyone can feel but no one can see. The door opens, and in walks Maggie.

Vicki is the first to see her. She calls her name. Barnabas reacts with alarm. Maggie walks slowly towards their table. She approaches Barnabas, who tries to remain very still. She takes a long look at him, walking around to get the best angle. She touches her head, calls out “No!,” and faints. And that is what you call a “cliffhanger ending.”

Closing Miscellany

In a long comment on Danny Horn’s post about this episode on his Dark Shadows Every Day, I connected Sarah’s doings today with her overall development up to her final appearance. I won’t reproduce it here, it’s full of spoilers.

It was in that post of Danny’s that I learned about the draft including the truck driver. He read about it in a self-published book by Jim Pierson.

This is the final episode of Dark Shadows shot in black and white. Maggie’s collapse sends the first part of the series out on a bang.

Episode 293: A better story next time

Well-meaning governess Vicki was the main character of Dark Shadows in its first 39 weeks, and themost interesting storyline was her relationship to her charge, strange and troubled boy David Collins. That story came to its climax when David chose life with Vicki over death with his mother, blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, in #191, and Vicki hasn’t had much to do since.

Yesterday, Vicki told her depressing boyfriend, fake Shemp Burke Devlin, about an old vacant house that excites her. Since Vicki’s work with David is compensated mainly with room and board, the only way her interest in an empty house could lead to anything happening on the show would be if she quit her job, married Burke, and moved there with him. Since Burke has even less connection to the ongoing narrative arc than Vicki does, and has been spending his time lately demanding that she stop trying to attach herself to the story and settle in with him in his dead end far away from the plot, that is a dismal prospect.

All the action on the show is centered on vampire Barnabas Collins. In the opening scene, Barnabas talked with his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie Loomis about two women. One was Vicki. Willie was agitated that Barnabas is planning to bite Vicki. This is an odd thing to worry about- Vicki has gone out of her way to make herself available to Barnabas for biting, even contriving to spend the night in his house. But she still has all her blood, and no foothold in the vampire story. When Barnabas tells Willie that he does not intend to harm Vicki in any way, those of us who hope she will stay relevant to Dark Shadows have a sinking feeling that he might be telling the truth.

The other woman Barnabas and Willie discuss is mad scientist Julia Hoffman. In contrast to his assurances that he means no harm to Vicki, Barnabas muses openly that he might have to kill Julia at any moment. Observing Willie’s reactions, Barnabas comments that it is interesting that Willie is so concerned about Vicki, but utterly indifferent to Julia. If we remember Willie as he was before Barnabas enslaved him, this may not be so odd.

Before he became sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie Loomis, he was dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis, menace to womankind. Willie tried to rape Vicki, among others, and his guilt over the use he made of his freedom when he had it is reflected in his solicitousness towards those whom he once used so ill. By the time he met Julia, he had been under Barnabas’ power for months, so he has made no choices concerning her that he can regret.

Barnabas shows up as Vicki and Burke are getting ready to visit “the house by the sea.” Barnabas slips a couple of times as he talks with them about it, revealing to the audience that he is familiar with the house. This raises our hopes- perhaps Vicki’s fascination with the house will lead her to Barnabas and relevance, not to Burke and oblivion. Vicki invites Barnabas to come along with her and Burke as they tour the house, and he agrees.

While Vicki is upstairs changing her clothes, Barnabas and Burke talk in the drawing room. Barnabas points out that little is known of how Burke became so rich so quickly in the years before he came back to Collinsport. Burke responds that far less is known of Barnabas than of him, that his entire life before this year is perfectly obscure to everyone. As Barnabas, Jonathan Frid plays this scene with more variety and subtlety of expression than any previous one, and as Burke, Anthony George gives a tight, forceful performance. It is the first time Dark Shadows viewers have glimpsed the reason George had such a long and busy career as an actor.

George was a cold actor who excelled at characters whose intelligence and determination were obvious, but whose feelings and intentions the audience could only guess at. That would have made him a fine choice for the part of Burke in the early months of the show, but these days he spends most of his time giving big reactions to bewildering news and the rest in passionate love scenes with Vicki. George was just awful at both of those. But in today’s duel with Barnabas, Burke is choosing his every word and gesture with care, putting him right in the center of George’s wheelhouse. Opposite the much warmer Jonathan Frid, the effect is electric.

It leaves me wondering what might have been. Mitch Ryan was compelling as Burke #1, but his hot style of acting pushed Burke’s emotions to the surface and took away some of the mystery that would have been needed to make the “Revenge of Burke Devlin” storyline a success. With George in the part, that story would probably still have fizzled, but it might have taken a bit longer to do so. And of course the part George has been struggling with, until this scene in vain, was written for Ryan. If the two had just traded places and the scripts had stayed the same, Burke #1 and Burke #2 might both have been strong characters.

Of course, they wouldn’t have stayed entirely the same. The writers watch the show and are influenced by what they see the actors doing. But they may not have changed as much as you might expect. Neither Ron Sproat nor Malcolm Marmorstein seemed to have much sense of what actors could do. It’s no wonder that George’s first good scene comes in the second episode credited to Gordon Russell. Perhaps if Russell had been with the show earlier, Burke #2 might have been more of a success.

The scene also brings up one of my favorite fanfic ideas. People are going to wonder about Barnabas’ background, and Burke needs to be written off the show. Why not solve both of those problems by having Barnabas enslave Burke, make Burke set up businesses in Barnabas’ name and use his shadier contacts to get Barnabas false identification papers, then kill Burke off once he has exhausted his resources? You could do that in such a way that the other characters would think Barnabas was a nice guy who was using his wealth to prop Burke up, consolidating his position in their eyes. You could also use it to connect Barnabas to the wider world beyond the estate, suggesting that he poses a menace not only to one family but to a whole community.

At length, Vicki comes back downstairs. Burke greets her first, but she barely acknowledges him. She has eyes only for Barnabas. Barnabas may not be in any hurry to bite Vicki, but she is bursting with readiness to get into the vampire story and back into the main action of the show.