We open on a new set, the bedroom of heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard in the great house of Collinwood. Dark Shadows has been in color since #295 in August. Though directors Lela Swift and John Sedwick were both ambitious visual artists, they haven’t been able to do much with color so far. With Carolyn’s bedroom, Swift and the staging team have accomplished one of their first real essays in color. It is composed mostly of shades of yellow, pink, and orange.
The color schemes of the other interiors we’ve seen up to this point run the gamut from sedate to subdued to drab to dank, so we already know we are in a unique space. The only other room in Collinwood that might have matched this one for brightness was the kitchen, but we haven’t seen that since #208.
Carolyn’s young cousin, strange and troubled boy David, lets himself into her room. He touches her, and she awakes with a scream. He explains that he just dropped in to make sure she wasn’t dead. When she turns on the light, the screen is so bright that I reflexively squinted, a reaction I’d never before had to an image on Dark Shadows.
David can’t quite explain why he was afraid Carolyn might be dead, but he does insist that she take an antique toy soldier, saying that she will be safe if she keeps it with her. Carolyn’s mother, matriarch Liz, comes into the room to investigate Carolyn’s scream. Liz wonders what David is doing there. Carolyn hastens to say that he was just making sure she was all right.
David goes, and Carolyn tells Liz she doesn’t think anything can be done for him at home. Liz is reluctant to send him away. Regular viewers will not be surprised by this. We know that Liz took David and his father, her ne’er-do-well brother Roger, into Collinwood at the beginning of the summer of 1966 and summoned her unacknowledged daughter, well-meaning governess Vicki, to come look after David starting with #1 on 27 June 1966, so that her conviction that the family ought to look after him got the whole show started. Nonetheless, Liz is so disturbed by David’s unusual statements and depressive affect that she agrees that he needs residential care.
We cut to the Old House on the estate. Vampire Barnabas Collins is sitting in a basement room where mad scientist Julia Hoffman maintains a laboratory. The room is full of electrical equipment, a bit odd since the Old House has no electricity; the laboratory itself is lit by flaming torches. But if we’ve ever seen a Universal Studios production from the 1930s, we know that where you find a mad scientist, you will find electrical currents, so naturally things start buzzing when Julia flips a switch.
Julia is trying to implement a medical cure for Barnabas’ vampirism. In the first shot of this scene, we see a visual metaphor for that project. Barnabas, an uncanny being, is confined to a small space in the middle of an elaborate collection of technology. If Julia succeeds, the supernatural will be vanquished altogether and scientific rationality will fill the whole world. The color scheme emphasizes the contrast between Julia’s optimistic goal and the terrain on which she operates. The walls and floor are dominated by the grays and browns of the basement, but the frames and tubing of her equipment are a bright metallic hue, light plays on the glass components, and the intense greens, reds, and blues of the potions are distributed in a slightly unbalanced, lively pattern. The irregular shapes of the frames and tubing emphasize this pattern, and contrast with the solid gray of the floor and the even grid of the brickwork on the walls.
This image not only represents Julia’s plans, but also one of the major themes the show is exploring at this period. Too many characters have encountered too much evidence of supernatural forces and beings for anyone to simply deny that such things exist. But even those who have been most heavily exposed to them keep reverting to a naturalistic frame of reference. Sure, Julia spends all her time hanging around with a vampire and has encountered a couple of ghosts, but she’s determined to ring all of those phenomena around with scientific explanations and technological interventions until they yield to rational control.
Julia’s project has hit its first major setback, as the latest treatment led Barnabas’ hands to age dramatically. He expresses the fear that time will catch up with him, and his apparent age will soon catch up with his actual age, something like 200 years. Julia’s hope that her experiment will not only free Barnabas of his curse, but found a new kind of medicine that will free everyone else of aging and death, will thus be defeated.
Barnabas gives a remarkable little speech about the situation he finds himself in:
I’ve been granted privileges given to few other men… For most men, time moves slowly, so very slowly. They don’t even realize it. But time has revealed itself to me in a very special way. Time is a rushing, howling wind raging past me, withering me in one relentless blast and then continues on. I have been sitting here passively, submissive to its rage, watching its work. Listen. Time, howling, withering.
Writer Joe Caldwell has a fine sense of what actors can do, and this odd little bit of purple prose is right in Jonathan Frid’s wheelhouse. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but the sound of his voice delivering it is so gorgeous it may as well be Shakespeare. Well, maybe not Shakespeare, but Ben Jonson at least.
It is possible to read this speech as a programmatic statement. Daytime soap operas of the 1960s were famously slow-paced; the old joke was that a viewer saw an episode that ended with a character hearing a telephone ring, missed four months of the show, and tuned back in to see the episode that started with the same character saying “Hello.” Even by the standards of the period, the first months of Dark Shadows were notoriously leisurely, with action often as not playing out in real time. When we are watching the 21 episodes centering on Roger’s attempts to find a fountain pen he misplaced, it is indeed the case that “time moves slowly, so very slowly.” But those days are behind us. The show is whipping through plot points at a pace that many prime time series contemporary with it would have had a hard time matching.
If the speech is programmatic, it is also autobiographical on the part of the screenwriter. A fast pace promises excitement for the viewers, but makes life hard for a writing staff that never numbered more than three. Indeed, this is the last episode Joe Caldwell will write for two and a half years. Perhaps he felt the demands of the new pace as “a relentless blast” withering his talents, and had to bow out.
We return to Carolyn’s room. She is in front of her mirror, contemplating the toy soldier. She hears the strains of “London Bridge” playing on a wooden flute, which she has learned is a sign that the ghost of ten year old Sarah Collins is present. Carolyn grew up in this haunted house, so it may not be entirely surprising that her response is to lean back and enjoy the music. But she sits up when Sarah manifests herself in visible form.
Sarah speaks, and Carolyn sees her reflected in her mirror. The following scene is so extraordinary I’m going to transcribe all of the dialogue:
Sarah: David must have given you that.
Carolyn: Sarah!
Sarah: He told you my name.
Carolyn: Sarah, how did you get in here?
Sarah: Didn’t David tell you?
Carolyn: Tell me what?
Sarah: All about me.
Carolyn: I’m not sure I understand.
Sarah: I think I’m a ghost. Matter of fact, I’m sure I am.
This is the first time Sarah has described herself in any terms, certainly the first time she has called herself a ghost. Her coyness about herself had left David confused about what she was; it was not until #325 that he finally concluded that she was a ghost. After that, she became more forthright with him. When he wasn’t sure what she was, she would wait until she was out of his line of sight to appear and disappear. But in #327, she fades away while he’s looking right at her.
Coming out to David not only allowed Sarah to relax around him, but has led her to discard her coyness altogether. She is startlingly blunt with Carolyn as this conversation goes on:
Carolyn: B-but- I don’t believe in-
Sarah: Yes you do. Or I wouldn’t have been able to come here. You’re not afraid of me, are you?
Carolyn: No…
Sarah: If you are, I understand.
This is the first confirmation that Sarah can appear only to those who are prepared to believe in her. It’s true that most of the people who have seen and heard her- David; Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town; Maggie’s father Sam; Vicki; Barnabas; Julia; Barnabas’ sometime blood thrall Willie; and local physician Dave Woodard- have either had extensive contact with the supernatural or had reasoned their way to the conclusion that she existed. But she also showed herself to Maggie’s nurse at the mental hospital Julia runs, and we don’t know anything about her background or beliefs. And local man Burke Devlin heard Sarah when she and David were talking in #327. While Burke has had plenty of contact with supernatural beings and in the early days of Dark Shadows, when he was fun, was willing to believe in them, he was at that point tearing around bellowing that there were no such things as ghosts. So this is new and unexpected information.
Carolyn’s denial that Sarah frightens her is given in a trembling voice that shows it to be a lie. Still, she isn’t as frightened as she might be. The other day, in #344, Carolyn was in David’s room when Sarah manifested there, not in the visible form of a little girl, but as the sound of “London Bridge” and as information appearing in David’s mind about Burke’s imminent death. Carolyn was terrified of Sarah when she came that way.
Carolyn: Well, what do you want?
Sarah: Don’t send David away.
Carolyn: How do you know about that?
Sarah: I don’t know, I just do.
At this point, we see Carolyn’s fear fading. She is starting to react to Sarah as if she really were a ten year old girl.
Carolyn: But Sarah, we have to send David away. It’s the only way we can help him.
Sarah: But if you send David away, I won’t have anyone to play with.
Carolyn: Well, maybe it isn’t good for David to play with you.
Sarah: Why do you say that?
Carolyn: Because it leads him into believing all sorts of things that aren’t true.
Sarah: How do you know they’re not true?
Carolyn: Well, they’re just not, they couldn’t be.
Sarah: He wasn’t lying about me, was he?
Carolyn: No.
Sarah: Well.. then maybe David is acting the way he is because no one will believe him.
Carolyn: But… it isn’t possible.
Sarah: People say I’m not possible, but I am. Why doesn’t that make the rest possible?
Carolyn: Sarah, maybe you don’t know the stories David’s been telling!
Sarah: Why do you think that?
Carolyn: Because they’re too fantastic! And besides, they’ve all been proved false.
Sarah: How do you know they’ve been proved false?
Carolyn: Sarah, are you trying to tell me that Barnabas actually slee-
This exchange is the ultimate example of a character accepting the existence of a particular supernatural being and then snapping back into a frame of reference that does not allow for supernatural beings. Carolyn knows that Sarah is a ghost, and starts arguing with her about how fantastic the world is permitted to be.
There comes a knock at the door. Carolyn turns away from Sarah to look at the door, and when she looks back, Sarah has vanished. Regular viewers know that Sarah was Barnabas’ little sister, that she wants to keep him from doing horrible things to people she likes, but that she will not say anything against him. So when Carolyn says Barnabas’ name, we know that Sarah is about to vanish.
Sarah’s part is an outstanding example of writing to an actor’s abilities, even more so than was Barnabas’ speech. Caldwell knew that Jonathan Frid had a flair for making flowery gibberish appealing, because that is what he has been doing the whole time he’s been on Dark Shadows. What Sharon Smyth has been doing well as Sarah is being a cutie pie and creating a vague and mysterious impression. When she has more than a few lines to deliver, things tend to get very wobbly. Today, she has to maintain a commanding tone and an adult demeanor throughout an extended patch of rapid-fire dialogue. Absolutely nothing we have seen on screen would suggest that she could handle that. But she pulls it off, more than competently. There are a few glances at the teleprompter, but at no point does she break out of the patient and authoritative manner she has to adopt. It is an impressive job of acting by any standard.
The person at Carolyn’s door is Liz. Liz is Dark Shadows‘ queen of denial. Viewers who have been with the show from the beginning have seen a few cracks in her facade of disbelief in the supernatural. In #10, she dozed off in the drawing room and started talking in her sleep about ghosts. When Vicki insisted to her in #127 that she had seen a ghost, Liz said she believed her. And in #280 and #281, Liz reluctantly agreed to participate in a séance, and afterward agreed that Vicki had been possessed by a spirit. But even in those moments Liz was fighting to keep the topic of ghosts at bay, and the rest of the time she has presented a blank wall to any attempt to face facts about the strange goings-on. So it is not surprising that Carolyn tells her mother she was talking to herself while tidying up her room.
Having talked Liz into sending David away, she now has to talk her back out of it. She manages to get her to agree to wait a few days. “London Bridge” plays. Carolyn reacts to it, Liz does not.
In his room, a distraught David is looking at a mobile. Its whimsical black and white markings suggest a puzzle and make a stark contrast with the vivid colors around them.*
Carolyn comes in. She brings the toy soldier and tells David she doesn’t think she will need it. He insists that she will, but she explains that Sarah visited her and now she believes him and knows how to help him. David is horrified by this. He says that Sarah visited Dr Woodard, that Woodard believed him, and that led to his death. He begs Carolyn not to believe him and claims to have been lying. He sobs and clutches her.
Back in the Old House, Julia prepares to give Barnabas another treatment. He snaps at her. She tells him that whatever happens, she wants him to know that she always wished him well. That prompts him to unload a further stream of sour remarks about her competence and intentions. Julia carries out the treatments, only to find that the aged appearance of Barnabas’ hands has spread to his head.
In his post about this episode on Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn puts it well when he says that “This is just good soap opera construction. People that we care about, facing terrible danger, and desperate to help each other.” He’s referring specifically to the scenes between David and Carolyn and Liz, but it applies to everyone. We care not only about the good people in the great house (well, they’ve been relatively good, lately,) but also about Barnabas and Julia, evil people who are the terrible danger David and Carolyn and Liz are facing, but who make the show fun to watch. We care about Sarah too, and she’s desperately trying to accomplish exactly the result we most want to see, an outcome in which David, Barnabas, and everyone else we enjoy watching stays on the show.
*Evidently this mobile was a commercially produced item. One of the commenters on Danny Horn’s Dark Shadows Every Day reports having had one like it as a child.
Acilius on Dark Shadows 