Tag: carolyn stoddard

Episode 577: I imagined we would discuss Freud

Heiress Carolyn came running when her mother, matriarch Liz, woke her with her screams. Liz was having a nightmare about being buried alive. She tries Carolyn’s patience and ours with her obsession that this will in fact happen to her.

Liz tries to call her lawyer, Richard Garner. Whoever answers the phone tells Liz that Garner is not available, hardly surprising since it is the middle of the night. She responds that if he doesn’t call back within the hour, he need never call again. Since we last saw Garner in #246, and his name hasn’t been mentioned since #271, it seems like he may as well get some sleep.

Liz then calls Tony, a young lawyer in town who used to date Carolyn. Tony comes over and Liz hires him to help with some changes to her will. She dictates excerpts from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Premature Burial” by way of a codicil protecting her from being buried alive, and he tells her he thinks she’s being weird.

The most prominent reference to Poe on Dark Shadows up to this point was in #442, when vampire Barnabas reenacted the plot of “The Cask of Amontillado” by bricking the fanatical Rev’d Mr Trask up in an alcove in his basement. Like Tony, Trask was played by Jerry Lacy, so it is possible that the writers hope the audience will recognize the connection.

Poe wrote punchy little short stories each of which leaves the reader with a single horrifying image. “The Cask of Amontillado” worked well as the basis for an episode, and the bricking up of Trask is one of the most enduring images in all of Dark Shadows. “The Premature Burial” could have made for the same kind of success, had Liz’ obsession begun and ended within one episode. But it has already gone on longer than that, and there is no end in sight. Each time we come back to it, the situation becomes more familiar and less urgent.

Meanwhile, Carolyn takes a glass of milk and a sandwich to Adam, a Frankenstein’s monster she is hiding in the long-deserted west wing of the house. Adam has little to do but read, and he has become quite intellectual. He is playing both sides of a game of chess when Carolyn arrives, pretending that she is his opponent. When she comes, he attempts a joke, pretending she has left him alone so long he does not remember her name. She is distressed about Liz’ obsessive fear of being buried alive, and so does not recognize that he is joking.

Carolyn looks at the chessboard and asks Adam who he is playing. He says that he is pretending to play her. He is smiling and relaxed when he admits this, and he starts joking again as he tells her about their imaginary games. Adam’s pretending that he did not remember Carolyn’s name was a weak joke, but he is actually pretty funny when he tells her that when he pretends they are playing, she doesn’t do as well as he does. She still does not realize that he is kidding, and reacts with horror. She says she doesn’t play chess; in #357, her uncle Roger mentioned that she does, but that she usually loses to him. Perhaps in the 44 weeks since then, she has given up the game altogether.

Adam wants Carolyn to play with him for real. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Adam shows Carolyn the book he has been reading, a volume of Sigmund Freud’s works, and is disappointed she has not already read it. When she tells him she is worried because of Liz’ condition, he invites her to sit down and says “Tell me about your mother,” suggesting that he is ready to set up shop as a psychoanalyst. Adam is being serious now, but this part of the exchange is hilarious.

Carolyn goes out to the terrace and looks at the night sky, wondering if Freud could help her understand what is happening with her mother. I live in the year 2024, and so I have difficulty imagining how people could ever have taken Freud seriously. But he was very very big in the 1960s, and in its first year Dark Shadows gave us a lot of heavy-handed Freudian symbolism and a number of storylines with obvious psychoanalytic themes. Longtime viewers will find it a reassuring sign of continuity that Freud is still around as the thinker “every twentieth century man should read.”

Tony joins Carolyn on the terrace. He greets her and sees that she has a book about Freud. “I don’t have to ask why you’re reading him,” he remarks. Carolyn asks if he is referring to her mother, and Tony’s response is so indiscreet he may as well spinning his finger around his temple and saying “Cuckoo, cuckoo!” It is clear enough that the concept of “confidential communication” is alien to the lawyers in Soap Opera Land, and now we see that “basic respect” is also very much on the optional list. Carolyn tells Tony to do whatever Liz asks, and starts crying.

I was startled by Carolyn’s crying turn, because it is the first time in the two hundred or so episodes she has appeared in thus far Nancy Barrett has given a subpar performance. The actors all had to work under virtually impossible conditions, so I rarely mention it when one of those who usually does well has a bad day at the office, but the 20 seconds or so she spends very obviously not crying in this scene mark the end of an extraordinary streak.

Tony embraces Carolyn and kisses her. Adam’s room in the west wing overlooks the terrace, and he spies on them while they kiss. After Carolyn excuses herself and goes back into the house, Adam comes up behind Tony, grabs him, forbids him to touch Carolyn, and throws him to the ground.

Episode 576: Enough to occupy your mind

Well-meaning governess Vicki is engaged to marry an unpleasant man named Peter who prefers to be called Jeff. Vicki knows that Peter/ Jeff has some kind of job that keeps him busy during the day. She does not know that he has been spending all night working at a second job. He is helping to build a Frankenstein’s monster. This second job is unpaid; his incentive is that if the monster is not built, an already existing Frankenstein’s monster named Adam has said that he will kill Vicki and everyone else in the great house of Collinwood.

As we open today, Peter/ Jeff is bitten by vampire Angelique. After Peter/ Jeff regains consciousness, Angelique starts giving him orders. He ignores them, and she bites him again. After that, he seems dazed and agrees to do whatever she commands. She wants him to hook her up to the body under construction and to use her “life force” to animate it. He tells her that he doesn’t know how to do that, and that the body isn’t ready to come to life in any case. Turns out she needn’t have bothered.

Meanwhile, Vicki gets some news. Roger, brother of matriarch Liz, tells her that he wants to send Peter/ Jeff on a six-week training program along with two junior executives from the Collins family business, and that if he works out there will be a job for him at the end of it. Vicki is dazzled by the offer.

Peter/ Jeff comes by. Roger meets him alone in the drawing room to make the offer. Peter/ Jeff can neither leave the Frankenstein project nor tell Roger about it. He has to turn the offer down without explanation, leaving Roger offended. Vicki then asks Peter/ Jeff what he was thinking, and he can’t explain the situation to her, either. She is frustrated that she tells him everything about herself, but she can’t get any information from him. She says that the offer must have represented a “family decision” on the part of the Collinses, implying that Peter/ Jeff’s refusal will reflect badly on both of them in their eyes.

When Dark Shadows started in June 1966, Vicki was its chief protagonist, Roger its most menacing villain, and the Collinses’ business interests a major part of the story. Vicki receded to the margins after her most interesting storyline, her difficult relationship with her charge David, was resolved in March 1967, and by that time Roger had become harmless and the business had long since ceased to be a source of interest. When we hear Roger talking about a job for Peter/ Jeff, for a moment it seems that he and the business might once again be important, and that Vicki might again have something to do with the plot. Vicki’s disappointment in her beau reminds us that the character doesn’t really have a place on the show any more.

Upstairs, Liz is taking clothes out of her closet and talking about them with her daughter Carolyn. They jar longtime viewers when they look at a particular dress and reminisce that they bought it on a trip to Boston. For the first 55 weeks of the show, Liz was a recluse who hadn’t left home since Carolyn was an infant. I suspect Liz had worn that dress during that period, and wish I’d looked for it when we were on those episodes during this watch-through. There certainly hasn’t been enough time since then for the trip to Boston to evoke the nostalgic tone in which they describe it, or for the dress to have fallen so far out of fashion that the ladies agree it is time to throw it away.

The Liz-is-a-recluse story was never exciting, and once they ditched it the show was quick to give us scenes of Liz happily going out. It is sometimes said that Dark Shadows is what Star Trek would have been if they had replaced space travel with agoraphobia, and Liz’ seclusion was the first exploration of this topic. Following the deep cut into the early days of the show in Roger’s offer to Peter/ Jeff with a moment when such a prominent part of its first year is simply forgotten is so typical of this period’s episodes that I wonder if some of the dialogue was written by uncredited contributors who weren’t up to date on bygone story points.

Carolyn is glad that Liz, who just recently escaped from a mental hospital, is taking an interest in her wardrobe. Liz lets her down hard when she says that she wants to get rid of as many belongings as possible in the short time before her death. Carolyn tries to tell her that she isn’t dying, but Liz refuses to listen. She demands that Carolyn promise to have an open casket at her funeral.

Liz was in the mental hospital because of a psychological disturbance with which Angelique afflicted her some months ago. When she did that, Angelique was a witch. Since then, Angelique has been stripped of her witchly powers, killed, and brought back to the world as a vampire. You might think Angelique’s spells would all have been broken when she was de-witched; that has been the pattern on Dark Shadows previously. For example, when blonde fire witch Laura vanished in #191, the spell she had cast that caused Liz to mope around and be obsessed with death until she was sent off to a hospital was broken. Longtime viewers wonder if Liz’ continuing obsession with death and her paranoid fear of being buried alive are natural symptoms of the trauma Angelique put her through, and if she just needs better therapy than she was getting in the hospital.

Liz has a dream. It opens with Angelique looking directly into the camera. Angelique is wearing the same costume she wore in the scene with Peter/ Jeff and laughing. When Liz knew Angelique, she never dressed that way, she wore a black wig, and so far as the audience knows she never let Liz hear her signature evil laugh. So it seems that Liz’ current troubles are indeed a part of Angelique’s ongoing spell.

Facing us, Angelique tells Liz that she will be plagued by her obsessions until she dies. This is enough to trigger PTSD flashbacks in regular viewers. Twenty weeks ago, in #477, Angelique was looking at us when she described “The Dream Curse,” an abysmally repetitious, ultimately pointless storyline that dragged on for months. Joan Bennett was a fine actress and a great star, but there was only so much even she could do with a character who just mopes around and talks about death, and Dark Shadows has already made her do it more than once. In a comment on Danny Horn’s post about this episode, I wondered if Angelique couldn’t have cast a spell on Liz that isn’t just a retread of one we’ve seen before, and suggested one that would give her “a compulsion to put on a top hat and tails and sing and dance.” Here’s an animated gif of a cartoon showing Joan Bennett’s sister Constance dancing with Jean Harlow and Joan Crawford; it has more entertainment value than did the entire Dream Curse, and might serve as a consolation to those of us left shaking by Angelique’s threat to clog up the story again:

Episode 551: Different like me

Craig Slocum tops many fans’ lists of Dark Shadows‘ worst actors, so I would be remiss in my duty as a commentator if I did not mention that he does a genuinely good job today as unlovely ex-convict Harry Johnson. Harry brings a tray of food to the very tall, very strong Adam, who is in a dusty room in the long deserted west wing of the great house of Collinwood, hiding from the police as the guest of heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard. Harry finds that Adam is trying to stab himself to death, and calmly talks him into giving up the effort and handing over his knife.

Harry goes to the drawing room in search of Carolyn, and finds the suave and mysterious Nicholas Blair. Nicholas tells him that Carolyn is out. He shocks Harry by asking if Adam is in trouble. Harry had no idea anyone but he and Carolyn knew Adam was in the house, and Carolyn has scared him out of his few wits with her orders to keep the secret.

Nicholas takes command of the situation. He insists Harry tell him what happened, and posts him in the foyer to wait for Carolyn to return while he goes up to talk to Adam. When Carolyn comes back, Harry tells her about Adam’s suicide attempt and about his encounter with Nicholas. She angrily reminds Harry that Collinwood is her house, not Nicholas’, and Harry had damn well better remember to take his orders from her and no one else. Harry is left with nothing to say but a meek “Yes, ma’am.”

Slocum is convincing as someone who is not intimidated by a physically imposing man with a knife, but who is entirely out of his league when confronted with people who outrank him in social class. So far as I can tell, none of the other fansites mentions his good work today. Dark Shadows fans are accustomed to ghosts and witches and vampires and Frankensteins and time travel, but a good performance by Craig Slocum is such an unexpected sight that they cannot bring themselves to admit that they have seen it.

Nicholas is a middle manager in Satan’s terrestrial operations, a member of Hell’s bourgeoisie.* He knows that Adam is a Frankenstein’s monster. The other day, he persuaded Adam to try to rape Carolyn. Adam’s attempt doesn’t seem to have got very far, but it has convinced Carolyn that she can no longer harbor Adam in her house. The audience knows that Nicholas has plans for Adam; presumably he knew that if Adam attacked Carolyn, she would want him to leave Collinwood, paving the way for him to take the big guy into his own house where he would have unlimited access to him. While Carolyn is downstairs chewing Harry out, Nicholas is up in Adam’s hiding place adding to the evil ideas he has planted in his impressionable mind.

Carolyn goes up to Adam’s room and finds Nicholas still there. Nicholas tells her that the crisis is past, then leaves the room. Carolyn finds that Adam is perfectly composed and looking forward to some improvement in his circumstances, but is unwilling to talk to her about anything substantial.

Carolyn goes down to the drawing room, where Nicholas is playing the piano. This is the first time we have seen anyone play the piano since #330, when sarcastic dandy Roger Collins banged out a few notes. Carolyn has been suspicious of Nicholas since she met him and was angry with him when she first learned he had gone into the west wing and found Adam, but can only thank him when she sees that he has talked the big guy out of suicidal despair.

Later, we see that Adam has left the great house of Collinwood and gone to the Old House on the same estate. The Old House is home to old world gentleman Barnabas Collins. Adam knows that Barnabas was present when he first awoke, in a laboratory, ten weeks ago, and that he spent the first weeks of his life as a prisoner in Barnabas’ dungeon. When he learned yesterday that he was an artificially constructed man, he jumped to the conclusion that it was Barnabas who created him.

Adam knocks on Barnabas’ door. Barnabas is astonished to see that Adam has returned. Adam announces that they will talk and walks in.

Barnabas marvels at Adam’s fluent speech. When last they saw each other, he could speak only a few words, such as “music!,” “food!,” “friend,” and, most importantly, “kill Barnabas!” Now, he tells Barnabas that he no longer plans to kill him, but says that he is right to be afraid of him. He has come for what he is entitled to. He wants Barnabas to make another creature like himself so that he will no longer be alone.

Barnabas asks questions Adam will not answer. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas tries to explain that he did not create Adam, that Dr Eric Lang did. Adam has never heard of Lang, and dismisses Barnabas’ statement as a lie. Barnabas goes on saying that he isn’t even a doctor, but Adam won’t listen. He will be provided with a mate, or he will take his revenge.

My wife, Mrs Acilius, pointed out that Adam’s demand for a woman who shares his nature should sound familiar to Barnabas. When Barnabas first came on the show in the spring and summer of 1967, he was a vampire, and was obsessed with turning a living woman into a vampiric replica of his lost love Josette. Adam, who came to life by an infusion of Barnabas’ “life force,” shares his longing for a female counterpart.

In 1973, Dark Shadows creator Dan Curtis produced an adaptation of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein for ABC-TV. The second half of that long movie was devoted to the creature’s demand that Frankenstein build him a mate, and the terrible vengeance he exacted when the scientist refused to comply. The original audience of this episode can’t have known that that production was in the future, but they would have been aware of the 1935 Universal film Bride of Frankenstein and Hammer’s 1967 Frankenstein Created Woman. It seems likely they had assumed that Adam would sooner or later set aside his bachelor ways, and were waiting for a development such as this.

*Mrs Acilius has an advanced degree in sociology, and she coined the phrase “Hell’s bourgeoisie.”

Episode 550: Much given to melodrama

Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes is just the person to consult if you need to know what kind of amulet will ward off the spells of the nearest wicked witch, but as a committed bachelor and a workaholic, he does not have a very sensitive touch when called upon to give advice in matters of the heart. We saw this in #544. Stokes’ friend Adam had questions for him. Adam is a mysterious man who has no memories prior to ten weeks ago and no conception of human relationships beyond a vague happiness associated with the word “Friend!” and an intense rage associated with the word”Kill!” He wanted Stokes to explain what was wrong with his attempts to kiss his patroness, heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard. Stokes, usually the most self-assured of men, reacted with a sudden display of insecurity, squirming a bit before admitting that his solitary lifestyle left him at a loss for answers to Adam’s questions.

Yesterday, Adam took the advice of suave warlock Nicholas Blair and assaulted Carolyn. He forcibly kissed her and pushed her to the floor of the room where she is hiding him from the police. We ended the episode unsure how far Adam took his attack. As we open today, we see Carolyn in the main part of her house looking shaken and with her hair mussed, but with her clothes intact. Perhaps she managed to stop Adam before he went beyond what we saw, or perhaps he didn’t try to go further. Not since the references to strange and troubled boy David Collins’ uncertain paternity in #32 and #147 has it been clear that sexual intercourse even exists in the universe of Dark Shadows, and it doesn’t seem that anyone would have told Adam about it. So he may have stopped with kissing because he doesn’t know there is anything more involved in a rape.

Carolyn telephones Stokes and asks him to come to the house at once. By the time he gets there, she is unavailable. Well-meaning governess Vicki greets him, explaining that Carolyn is in the kitchen mediating a dispute between housekeeper Mrs Johnson and Mrs Johnson’s son Harry. Vicki smiles, laughs a little, and describes this dispute sarcastically as a potential tragedy, suggesting a condescending attitude towards the Johnsons that doesn’t really fit with her character as it has been developed up to this point. Stokes flatly tells Vicki that he is not interested in her, and she turns to go. He apologizes, and she comes back. They talk a little about some recent plot points. When Carolyn comes in, she and Stokes dismiss Vicki.

Carolyn tells Stokes what Adam did, and he goes to the big guy’s room in the long deserted west wing of the house. Stokes decides that the time has come for a birds-and-bees talk. This is not the standard version. Adam does not have parents; he is a Frankenstein’s monster. When Stokes tells him what he knows of the circumstances of his creation, Adam is horrified. He tells Stokes they are no longer friends and orders him out of the room. Once he is alone, Adam looks in the mirror, focuses on the scars where he was stitched together, and pronounces himself ugly. He smashes the mirror, picks up a knife, and declares that because no one will ever love him, he must die.

Broken Adam. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

In 2020, Wallace McBride wrote that “On Dark Shadows, your reflection always tells the truth.” But the characters do not always interpret their reflections correctly, so that they sometimes miss the truth. When Dark Shadows began, Vicki was on a quest to find out who her parents were. As Wallace McBride points out, that story was hobbled from its beginning. In episode #1, reclusive matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard opens the doors to Vicki, and the resemblance between Joan Bennett and Alexandra Moltke Isles is so strong that it looks like the two women are reflections of each other. Indeed, Mrs Isles was cast as Vicki largely because she looked so much like Joan Bennett, and Bennett famously mistook Mrs Isles for her daughter when she first saw her. As the show went on Liz came to treat Vicki so much like a daughter that it would have been hard to find a point in a story confirming that she really was, and so the whole question of Vicki’s parentage fizzled out.

As Vicki failed to interpret the reflection that told her the truth about her origins, so Adam misinterprets what his reflection means about someone who came into the world as he did. It’s true he has conspicuous scars and some odd coloring, but you get used to that pretty quickly, and aside from those he is movie star handsome. So “I am ugly!” is a misinterpretation. Stokes told Adam in so many words that at the rate he has been learning he will soon be indistinguishable from people who were born and grew to maturity; regular viewers have seen him acquire so many skills so rapidly that we cannot doubt this is true. His attempt at suicide, like his decision to take Nicholas’ advice and try to rape Carolyn, is the result of his underestimation of his own capacity to develop. That underestimation, in turn, is the result of his failure to fully absorb the information about himself his surroundings are reflecting back to him.

Adam’s plight is thrown into stark relief for us by a scene that took place before Stokes’ visit to him. He looks out the window of his room and sees the terrace, where Vicki is with her boyfriend, an unpleasant man named Peter who prefers to be called Jeff. Peter/ Jeff proposes marriage to Vicki, and she receives the offer warmly. Peter/ Jeff, like Adam, has memories that go back only a few months. As Stokes has told Adam of his unusual origin and elicited a deeply hostile response from him, so Vicki has told Peter/ Jeff that she has reason to believe he has a supernatural origin, and he reacted just as bitterly. Peter/ Jeff is surprised that Vicki would marry someone with his background, but she makes it clear it doesn’t bother her at all. If Peter/ Jeff could find love with Vicki, then there must be a woman somewhere who would love Adam.

Episode 549: Grabbing, demanding, lying, cheating- it’s the only way!

Heiress Carolyn has been keeping Frankenstein’s monster Adam cooped up all by himself in a dusty room in the long-deserted west wing of the great house of Collinwood, and he is sick of it. Suave warlock Nicholas drops in on Adam and talks to him about the situation. He encourages Adam to rape Carolyn next time she visits, and later he gives it a try.

On his Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn praised Nancy Barrett for her approach to the rape scene: “She’s fully committed to the idea that this is not sexy.” In response to this observation, I left a comment in which I said that Robert Rodan’s acting choices were directed towards the same goal:

Robert Rodan does a lot to make the scene unsexy- notice when [Adam] grabs Carolyn’s face, he strokes her cheek with his thumb so as to distort her eyelids. Looks alarming!

Comment by “Acilius,” left 11 September 2020 at 2:32 PM Pacific time, on Danny Horn, Dark Shadows Every Day, “Episode 549: Take What You Want” (19 December 2014)

Here’s the shot. I can’t speak to your tastes, reader, but to me it is a clear example of “not sexy”:

Episode 545: Another living soul

Suave warlock Nicholas Blair has learned that Frankenstein’s monster Adam is hiding in a room in the long-deserted west wing of the great house of Collinwood. He materializes there and talks as if he’s trying to recruit Adam into a self-esteem cult. He says “You mustn’t worry about what other people think, Adam. And you needn’t always do what other people want you to do. You must learn to be a strong-willed individual.” In response, Adam carefully articulates the new vocabulary item: “In-di-vi-du-al.” It sounds like the big guy will be signing up for courses at the Nathaniel Branden Institute in no time.

Nicholas recruits Adam. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Later, we see Adam in the main part of the house. He has let himself into the bedroom where his patroness Carolyn Collins Stoddard, the acting mistress of Collinwood, is sleeping. He wakes her and tells her of Nicholas’ visit. Carolyn tells him to wait there while she goes to the drawing room and scolds Nicholas for wandering into parts of the house he had no permission to explore. Nicholas apologizes, and tells Carolyn her secret is safe with him.

In the final part of the episode, the wicked witch known variously as Angelique and Cassandra makes her way to Adam’s room in the west wing. She finds his door locked, and makes a graceful little hand gesture to magically open it. Standing over Adam while he sleeps, she decides that she cannot use magic to kill him, since Nicholas wants Adam to live and she would like him to believe that a human committed the murder. Therefore, she lifts an ax and is ready to chop into him when the episode ends. The ax wasn’t there earlier and she didn’t conjure it up; presumably she found it in “hammerspace,” the dimension where fans of animated cartoon say characters find whatever tools they need to do whatever the script calls for them to do at any given moment.

Adam’s residence in the west wing is a drab storyline, but longtime viewers will notice that it marks a change in the geography of Collinwood. The west wing was introduced as an area separated from the rest of the house, not only by a locked door, but some kind of metaphysical rift. In #14, well-meaning governess Vicki Winters saw the locked door inexplicably open and close itself; that was the clearest indication up to that point that in Collinwood, the word “ghost” referred to something more than unresolved conflicts among people. A reminiscence of that moment in #27 reinforced the suggestion that there was something supernatural about breaching the barrier between that wing and the main part of the house.

From #84 to #87, Vicki’s charge, strange and troubled boy David Collins, locked her up in a room in the wing; that was such an isolated place that it seemed Vicki might die before the family found her. Again, the distance was not only physical- while in captivity there she saw a full fledged ghost, a glowing figure dripping seaweed and singing to her. When sarcastic dandy Roger went to look for Vicki in #87, we saw him open the first of Dark Shadows‘ secret panels, a bit of the wall in the drawing room that opens to a long, dusty passage leading to the west wing. That was startling to see then, and we haven’t had a look at it since. Viewers who remember it have been looking at that spot on the wall ever since, wondering what worlds lie behind it.

Adam’s presence in the west wing fits in with its unearthly character, as do Nicholas and Angelique/ Cassandra’s activities there. But since those two witches live at Collinwood, the rest of the house has taken on that character as well. The separation of the west wing from the main part thus comes to lose its significance. Why shouldn’t Adam be able to visit the rest of the house, and why shouldn’t he know his way around well enough that he goes directly to Carolyn’s bedroom? Why shouldn’t unlovely ex-convict Harry Johnson, the most mundane character on the show now, have adventures in the west wing?

Angelique, the camera in front of her, the secret panel to the west wing behind her. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 543: Adam must live

Unlovely ex-convict Harry stumbles upon Frankenstein’s monster Adam hiding in the long-deserted west wing of the great house of Collinwood. He pulls a knife on Adam and demands he accompany him to the sheriff’s office, where Harry hopes to collect the reward outstanding for his capture. Adam’s arms are longer than Harry’s, and he is extremely strong and agile. So he disarms Harry easily. Adam is about to kill Harry when heiress Carolyn enters and orders him to stop.

Carolyn has been looking after Adam, and he regards her as his one and only friend. Adam obeys her, with some reluctance. While Harry waits outside the room, she explains to Adam that killing is wrong. Adam is less than ten weeks old and spent the first several of those weeks under the supervision of recovering vampire Barnabas and mad scientist Julia, so this comes as news to him.

In the corridor, Carolyn has a private talk with Harry. He threatens to tell the police that she is harboring a fugitive unless she pays him $5000. Returning viewers will remember that in yesterday’s episode, Harry’s mother, housekeeper Mrs Johnson, was terrified he would try to hide some of his criminal associates in the house. From that it would seem that if the police found out a wanted man was staying at Collinwood, it would be hard to convince them Harry wasn’t to blame. It would be especially difficult to get them to suspect Carolyn, a senior member of the family that owns the town. If Harry told them the wanted man was Adam, they would remember that Adam abducted Carolyn several weeks ago, and would probably charge him as part of a kidnapping plot.

Carolyn doesn’t bring any of that up, but she does dispose of Harry’s attempt at blackmail quickly enough. He agrees to help her look after Adam in return for a weekly wage.

Carolyn tells Adam Harry will be bringing him food sometimes. Adam is distraught. Though his language skills have developed at a fantastic rate in his short life, he has very little understanding of social relationships. Carolyn struggles to explain that she can’t be with him all the time. Before she goes, he shows her a picture that he found of a man and a woman kissing and asks her to explain what it shows. She tells him that it’s something people do when they love each other. He then tries to kiss her. She resists.

Carolyn tells Adam what kissing is. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Carolyn has trouble explaining to Adam what he did wrong. He doesn’t know that there are different kinds of affection, and she doesn’t seem to be quite sure what she wants her friendship with Adam to become. After she leaves him, he says to himself “Carolyn hates Adam!” Regular viewers have seen Adam take so much abuse from Julia, Barnabas, and Barnabas’ servant Willie that it’s heartbreaking to think of the big guy failing to recognize a true friend now that he has one.

Episode 542: Henceforward in thy shadow

When Dark Shadows began, Carolyn Collins Stoddard was capricious, vain, and perverse. When her mother, reclusive matriarch Liz, was hospitalized in February and March of 1967, Carolyn had to take on responsibility for the family’s businesses and for the great house of Collinwood. With that, she matured dramatically, and she’s never been the flighty heiress since.

Now, Liz is back in the hospital. The show has long since stopped paying attention to the Collinses’ business interests, so we don’t know who’s running those, and the house just sort of takes care of itself while various hell-spawned abominations drop by and take up residence. So Carolyn is keeping herself busy by hiding the latest arrival, Frankenstein’s monster Adam, in the long-deserted west wing.

Carolyn and Adam in the west wing. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

This is the first we’ve seen the west wing in color. Strange and troubled boy David trapped well-meaning governess Vicki in a room there from #84 to #87, and Adam appears to be staying in the same room.

Adam, who didn’t know a single word of any language when he was brought to life in #490, has in nine and a half weeks acquired the ability to speak fluent, if grammatically unorthodox, English. He is also able to read. When he is alone, he whiles away the hours with the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. He asks Carolyn for an explication of Barrett Browning’s “Sonnet VI”:

Go from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand
Henceforward in thy shadow. Nevermore
Alone upon the threshold of my door
Of individual life, I shall command
The uses of my soul, nor lift my hand
Serenely in the sunshine as before,
Without the sense of that which I forbore—
Thy touch upon the palm. The widest land
Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine
With pulses that beat double. What I do
And what I dream include thee, as the wine
Must taste of its own grapes. And when I sue
God for myself, He hears that name of thine,
And sees within my eyes the tears of two.

Carolyn does not give the poem anything like the dramatic interpretation we would have expected had Nancy Barrett read it in her own person. Carolyn hastens through it, stumbling a bit over the enjambments, and gives only the most cursory explanations. Since Carolyn has to leave Adam alone so much of the time in order to keep the other residents of the house from suspecting that she is harboring him, it makes sense that she finds a piece about loneliness and separation upsetting. When she mentions that the poem is about a woman’s love for a man, Adam caresses her face, which she finds even more upsetting. He asks if she hates him, she tells him she does not, and she leaves as quickly as she can.

Housekeeper Mrs Johnson notices that someone has been stealing food from the kitchen. She suspects her son, ex-convict Harry. In fact, the culprit is Carolyn, who is gathering provisions for Adam. This harks back to #120, when David stole food from the kitchen to give to the fugitive Matthew Morgan. David was about nine years old, so it made sense that he could not get supplies for his friend any other way. But Carolyn is a grown woman, with money and a car. Even if she would be too conspicuous to go to the grocery store in the village of Collinsport without having to answer questions, she could easily drive to some town where she would not be so well-known and buy food for Adam there. In the last two episodes David seemed far less intelligent and capable than he was when the show began; when we hear that she has been sneaking food from the kitchen, it seems that Carolyn has lost a lot of ground as well.

This is the first we have seen Harry since he was introduced in #471. He stumbles upon Carolyn returning to the main part of the house from the west wing; she reacts by scolding him for being upstairs. When he tells his mother about it, she is frightened. She is still frightened when she talks with Carolyn about the incident. That will remind longtime viewers that in Liz’ absence, Carolyn is in charge of the house. Clarice Blackburn does such a fine job of acting that even first time viewers will understand that Carolyn has the power to fire Mrs Johnson if she wishes.

Craig Slocum is one of the least-loved actors in all of Dark Shadows; in truth, his performances usually are pretty painful to watch. He’s reasonably competent today, but since he shares his scenes with two actresses who would hold an audience’s attention even if they were playing opposite a hat-rack it takes a lot more than reasonable competence make Harry linger in our minds.

Episode 539: Child’s play

The wicked witch known variously as Angelique and Cassandra is standing in the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood, thinking evil thoughts. The camera zooms out and we see that her stepson, strange and troubled boy David Collins, is standing next to her. She starts to speak her thoughts out loud, saying “You will pay!” David asks “Who will pay?” Angelique/ Cassandra is startled to discover that David is there, and is flustered when she tries to change the subject. She so often delivers incriminating soliloquys while standing out in the open that the comic effect of this scene must be intentional.

Angelique/ Cassandra oblivious to David’s presence.

David asks Angelique/ Cassandra to help him figure out the correct operation of a tape recorder he received some time ago as a present from permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman. After Angelique/ Cassandra refuses to help, he goes upstairs and finds his cousin, heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard, emerging from the long-deserted west wing of the house. He asks Carolyn what she was doing in the west wing. She asks him why he thinks she was in the west wing. When he says he saw her coming out of it, she drops her attempt to evade his question and tells him she was looking for some old family photos to show well-meaning governess Vicki. She has enough trouble remembering this story that it must be obvious to David that it is a lie, but he isn’t interested enough to follow it up. He just wants someone to help him figure out which buttons to push on the tape recorder.

On their Dark Shadows Before I Die, John and Christine Scoleri speak for longtime viewers of the show when they say that it is surprising David needs help with the tape recorder. When the show started, David was two years younger and had the mechanical skill to sabotage his father’s car in a very creditable attempt at patricide. All Carolyn has to do to get the tape going is read the label that identifies the play button. This apparent loss of cognitive function is of a piece with David’s massive loss of narrative function. For the first 39 weeks of Dark Shadows, David was the fulcrum on which every story turned, and actor David Henesy had abundant opportunities to show a level of professional skill that would be remarkable in a performer of any age. But he has been receding into the background for a long time now, and his extraordinary dim-wittedness today marks a low point for him.

Once the tape starts playing, Carolyn makes a hasty exit. David listens to a minute or so of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, hoping it will end and he will hear “something spooky.” His wish is granted when the music abruptly stops, giving way to a voice addressing itself to Julia. The voice rambles about David’s distant cousin Barnabas Collins, saying that if both he and “my creation” live, Barnabas will be all right, but that if “Adam” dies, “Barnabas will be as he was before.” The name “Adam” should mean something to David. He shared a confused and frightening moment with a mysterious man of that name in #495. That man subsequently abducted Carolyn, and is still the object of a police search.

What only Julia, Barnabas, and Barnabas’ servant Willie know is that Adam is a Frankenstein’s monster created in an experiment that freed Barnabas of the effects of the vampire curse that Angelique/ Cassandra placed on him in the 1790s. The voice on the tape is that of Eric Lang, the mad scientist who began the experiment. Minutes before he died of the effects of one of Angelique/ Cassandra’s spells, Lang recorded this message for Julia. The audience has heard this message approximately a gazillion bajillion times, but until now, the only character to have heard it was Adam, and he could make no sense of it.

Angelique/ Cassandra recently made an unsuccessful attempt to renew Barnabas’ curse, and is desperately searching for the obstacle that prevented it from working. Carolyn’s actual task in the west wing was showing Adam to a hiding place there. So Angelique/ Cassandra is now under the same roof with both the information she needs to identify her obstacle and the person she can remove that obstacle by killing. Things are looking bad for Barnabas and for Adam.

While David is upstairs with the tape recorder, Vicki is sobbing in the drawing room. Suave warlock Nicholas, who is staying in the house in the guise of Angelique/ Cassandra’s brother, enters and asks her what’s wrong. She says that she has just learned that Barnabas is dead. His back to her, Nicholas smiles brightly when he first hears this news, then puts on a sad face and turns to her with sympathetic words. In response, Vicki reveals that she knows all about Angelique/ Cassandra and that she has little patience for Nicholas’ pretensions. Carolyn enters and doubts Vicki’s news. Angelique/ Cassandra is the last to enter. She says that she saw Barnabas alive and well after the time when he is supposed to have been dead. Vicki and Carolyn look at each other, and do not see Nicholas’ look of disappointment. They go upstairs, and Nicholas and Angelique/ Cassandra go into the drawing room.

Nicholas scolds Angelique/ Cassandra for her failure. He addresses her as “dear sister.” He suggests she may not hate Barnabas sufficiently to impose a curse on him. When she denies this, he leans to her ear and teasingly asks if she loves him. He threatens to send her back where she came from if she doesn’t re-vamp Barnabas by midnight, and to focus her mind replaces her arm with a fleshless bone.

Director John Weaver was not much of a visual artist, and in his post about the episode on Dark Shadows Every Day Danny Horn analyzes the dismally inept blocking of the scene between Vicki and Nicholas. Danny also has some unkind words for writer Ron Sproat, but I think those are unfair. It’s true the opening scene between Adam and Carolyn goes on too long, David’s helplessness with the tape recorder is dismal, and Vicki and Carolyn’s reaction to Angelique/ Cassandra’s report that Barnabas is still alive doesn’t make sense. That’s a long enough list of flaws that we might fairly classify Weaver and Sproat as the B-team, not on a par with director Lela Swift and writers Sam Hall and Gordon Russell.

But it is genuinely funny when we first see David standing next to Angelique/ Cassandra, David’s questioning of Carolyn is intelligently written, Lang’s message is for once an actual source of suspense, Vicki’s lines to Nicholas as Alexandra Moltke Isles delivers them show the character’s strength, Nicholas’ teasing Angelique/ Cassandra with her alleged love of Barnabas raises a laugh as it makes them sound like a couple of kids, and the final gag with the arm bone is at once goofy enough to keep up the humor in the episode and startling enough to be effective as a touch of horror. All in all, it’s an enjoyable episode, if not one that fans would be tempted to use to turn their friends on to the show.

Episode 538: Usually without reason

Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, expert on the occult, finds himself laboring under the direction of Julia Hoffman, MD. Stokes does not understand why Julia insisted on leaving the long abandoned shack where a very tall, very mysterious man named Adam seemed to be suffocating, he does not understand why Julia has buried her friend Barnabas Collins in an unmarked grave in the woods, and does not understand why Julia has concluded that Barnabas is alive and they must dig him up. Julia tells Stokes she will answer his questions when the exhumation is complete. Stokes keeps digging. They reach a coffin. They open it to find Barnabas. Julia detects a faint “pulsebeat” in his wrist. Before Stokes can raise his questions, Julia says she wants to be alone with Barnabas and reminds Stokes that Adam needs attention.

Gravedigger in a three piece suit. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Back in the shack, Stokes finds heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard with Adam. Earlier, Carolyn was distraught, unable to find a “pulsebeat” in Adam’s wrist, but now he is up and moving, apparently quite well. Stokes says that Julia is on her way, and Adam becomes agitated. He hates Julia and Barnabas, but has never explained to Stokes or Carolyn why. Carolyn decides to hide him in the long-deserted west wing of her family’s home, the great house of Collinwood. Stokes sees many drawbacks to this plan, but can suggest no alternative.

Only Stokes is still in the shack when Julia comes. He will not tell her where Adam has gone, and she will not answer any of his questions. With a smile, he tells her that he looks forward to understanding Barnabas’ secret. At this, she looks uneasy, clearly not welcoming that prospect.

Barnabas was, for 172 years, a vampire. His curse went into remission earlier in 1968, and he has been virtually human since #490, when he took part in an experiment that brought Adam to life as a Frankenstein’s monster. Julia ordered Barnabas’ servant Willie to bury him the other day, because she was afraid he was about to become a vampire again, but yesterday she figured out that Adam’s existence was keeping that from happening.

When Barnabas is unearthed, he is afraid that he has reverted to vampirism. Julia shows him his reflection in her compact mirror, proving to him that he is still human. The first time they did the vampire/ mirror bit was in #288, when Julia saw that Barnabas did not cast a reflection in a compact mirror and thereby confirmed her suspicion that Barnabas was a vampire. That led him to try to kill her. Now they are fast friends, and the same gimmick, with the opposite result, brings them a moment of shared joy.

Barnabas goes to the great house, and sees wicked witch Angelique/ Cassandra standing on the terrace. She was the one who cast the spell that prompted Julia and Willie to think they ought to bury him, and Julia had told her that he was dead. She is rather surprised when he shows up. He taunts her with the failure of her attack on him, she pretends not to know what he is talking about, and he goes along his merry way. Alone, she vows that she will soon regain her power over Barnabas.