The only story that reliably worked in the first 38 weeks of Dark Shadows was the attempt of well-meaning governess Vicki Winters to befriend her charge, strange and troubled boy David Collins. Its success was less to do with the writers than with the actors. When we saw Vicki in David’s room giving him his lessons, her dialogue was as bad as anything else the actors found in the scripts, including one moment when she had to read a description of the coastline of Maine to him from a geography textbook. But Alexandra Moltke Isles and David Henesy used everything other than the words to show us a young woman and a hurting boy learning to trust each other. Their use of space, of body language, of facial expressions, of tones of voice, all showed us that process step by step, and it was fascinating to watch.
Vicki and David’s story reached its conclusion in #191, when David’s mother, undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, tried to lure David to his demise in a burning shack while Vicki tried to rescue him. At the end, David ran from the shack into Vicki’s arms. When he chose Vicki and life over his mother and death, there was nowhere left for their relationship to go. We saw a few more tutoring scenes in the spring and summer of 1967, when vampire Barnabas Collins was first on the show, but have seen none since. Mrs Isles left Dark Shadows in November, and the recast Vicki made her final appearance a week ago, in #665.
The new governess in the great house of Collinwood is Maggie Evans, who was introduced in #1 as a wisecracking waitress and a hardboiled representative of the working class of the village of Collinsport, but whom actress Kathryn Leigh Scott shortly afterward reinvented as The Nicest Girl in Town. The town barely exists anymore, so when Vicki disappeared into a rift in the fabric of time and space it was almost a foregone conclusion Maggie would move into Vicki’s room upstairs in the great house. After all, the room was first occupied in the 1790s by the gracious Josette, whom Miss Scott played in the parts of the show set in that period.
Today, we see our first tutoring scene in over a year and a half. David isn’t Maggie’s only charge; he has been joined by permanent houseguest Amy Jennings. Yesterday and the day before, we saw evidence that Maggie is a poor disciplinarian. We see further such evidence at the beginning of the tutoring scene, when the children complain about their lessons and Maggie quickly starts to explain herself and bargain with them. Amy and David are coming under the influence of the evil spirit of the late Quentin Collins. If the adult who is employed full-time to supervise David and Amy were up to her job, they wouldn’t be much help to him. So it’s no wonder the show three days in a row tells us that Maggie is a squish.
Maggie on the job.
To advance a plan of Quentin’s, Amy pretends to be ill and to faint during the lesson. David Collins is almost as subtle an actor as is David Henesy; when he is pretending to see signs of illness in Amy’s face, he looks at her with one eye and speaks with a most convincing note of concern. By contrast, Amy’s performance is exaggerated, showing none of the easy fluency Denise Nickerson brought to her roles. My wife, Mrs Acilius, chuckled at Amy’s fake faint and at some of the fussing she and David do when they are left alone together. She said it was refreshing to see that David and Amy are still kids. It certainly adds to the poignancy of what we are seeing Quentin do to them when we think of them as real children whose innocence he is exploiting for his evil project.
Amy’s fake faint convinces Maggie, and it leads to a lot of running around, ending with Maggie going to the cottage on the estate where Amy’s big brother Chris is staying as a guest of heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard. Chris is a werewolf and is about to transform, and Quentin’s goal was to get Carolyn to go to the cottage. David has been making terrible pronouncements to Amy about how Carolyn will never bother them again, and the two of them are distressed to hear that Maggie rather than Carolyn is going to see Chris. So we are supposed to take it that Quentin knows about Chris’ situation and wants him to attack Carolyn.
Hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell has been through a lot lately, and it is taking its toll. He was bitten and enslaved by a female vampire, with the result that he lost his job and his fiancée. He was still under her power when he realized that his cousin and close friend, Tom Jennings, was also a vampire. Now he has been attacked by a werewolf and has discovered that that werewolf is, on the few nights of the month when the moon is not full, Tom’s brother Chris. Last night he saw Chris transform in his lupine shape. He took Chris’ revolver and emptied it into the werewolf’s furry chest, but that only slowed him down. Joe escaped from the werewolf’s wrath, but we see today that he is never going to be right again.
Chris’ nine year old sister Amy is staying at the great house of Collinwood as the guest of matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. As we open, Liz’ daughter Carolyn is in the drawing room, recently returned from a trip. She is terribly distraught to hear a recap of the last couple of weeks from permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, MD. While they talk, Joe slips into the house, crazy-eyed and bent-backed.
Joe makes his way up to the bedroom where Amy is asleep. He dwells on what her brothers became, then approaches her bed with his hands in strangling position. After a commercial break, he says “Save her!,” then agrees with himself that he ought to save Amy.
Joe wakes Amy, urges her to be silent, and starts packing her clothes. She asks if they are going to join Chris, and Joe becomes violently agitated. Amy grows frightened. Joe grabs her, puts his hand over her mouth, and carries her out of the house, leaving her half-packed bag behind.
In the woods, Joe hears sounds which he believes to be the werewolf. He starts shouting that he won’t let it have Amy. He is so absorbed in this that Amy gets loose and runs from him.
Joe’s derangement is entirely explainable as a natural response to the horrible and incomprehensible traumas he has undergone. The same could be said of the other mentally ill character in today’s episode, Liz, and in Monday’s episode Julia very nearly said it. Today, however, the show raises the possibility that Liz’ trouble might be the result of ongoing persecution by the spiritual forces of darkness.
Months ago, Liz fell afoul of her brother Roger’s wife. She called herself Cassandra, but was really an evil sorceress named Angelique wearing a black wig. This wiggéd witch cast a spell that caused Liz to sink into a deep depression, obsessed with the idea she would be buried alive. Twice before, Liz has sunk into similar depressions. The first was the result of a spell cast by Roger’s previous wife, Laura Murdoch Collins, who like Angelique/ Cassandra was an undead blonde fire witch. (Roger has a type.) The second was a response to a long blackmail to which a seagoing con man named Jason McGuire subjected her. For the last several weeks it has seemed that this third bout might be lifting, but it came back with a vengeance last week when well-meaning governess Victoria Winters dematerialized before Liz’ eyes.Vicki’s departure was as much a shock to Liz, in its own way, as Chris’ transformation was to Joe. Even before any spells were cast on her, Liz had shut herself up in the house and refused to leave for eighteen years. So we know that Liz is given to depression.
Today Liz has a nightmare. The dream sequence begins with a melody that for all the world sounds like “Rock-a-bye Baby” played on a kazoo, but which turns out to be a distorted recording of Amy singing that lullaby. Liz sees Amy atop the cliff on Widows Hill, a place associated with death and peril. In the past, several women have fallen to their deaths from Widows’ Hill; we have seen Liz and Vicki attempt suicide there. Amy’s image is as distorted as is the sound of her voice. She is swaying from side to side, perhaps dancing the hula; the visual effects exaggerate this sway.
Liz is trying to get Amy away from the cliff when she sees Angelique/ Cassandra. The witch tells her that she will fulfill her curse and see that Liz is buried alive. Liz finds that she can no longer communicate with Amy, for which Angelique/ Cassandra taunts her.
Shortly after Liz wakes up from her dream, Carolyn and Julia come to her room. They hear her crying out that “she” is a danger to her, but a moment later Liz cannot remember who that was. Julia mentions to Carolyn today that multiple psychiatrists have reported that Liz cannot remember how her depression started; that she sees Angelique/ Cassandra in the nightmare but cannot remember who she was so shortly after suggests that the nightmare is part of the depression. If Angelique/ Cassandra’s continued activity is causing the one, it must therefore be causing the other.
Liz says that she is afraid for Amy and asks Carolyn to check on her. When she finds Amy missing, she asks Julia what to tell her mother. Without missing a beat, Julia says “Lie to her!” This is perfectly fitting- Julia is the show’s most fluent and most accomplished liar. Julia and Carolyn begin a search. Julia is on the phone asking for the sheriff when Amy comes in the front door, followed by Joe.
Julia is at first relieved to see Amy with good ol’ Joe. But Amy is terrified of Joe, and when she runs upstairs Julia blocks the staircase to keep him from following. Joe says that he must take Amy far away from Collinsport at once. Julia says that if he can explain why, she will let him. Nothing he can put into words makes much sense to her, and he is so obviously unhinged that there is no way anyone would think he was the right person to assume responsibility for a child. Julia tells Joe that whatever he may have encountered in the village poses no threat to Amy in the mansion. He laughs, shakes his head, and mutters “You don’t know… you don’t know…”
Julia’s attempt to reassure Joe is interrupted by a blood-curdling scream from upstairs. She hurries up to see what is happening. Joe goes on laughing and muttering, wandering out of the house. That the scream coming from upstairs, where Amy is, does not catch his attention when he is so determined to protect Amy from imminent danger shows that he is truly lost, never to recover.
Julia finds a distraught Carolyn standing over an immobile Liz. She gives Liz a quick look, and tells Carolyn that she is dead. You might think Julia would be more careful about this. She has several times made erroneous death pronouncements, most recently when she pronounced Liz herself dead in #604. That incident led Julia to conclude that Liz had an unusual disorder that could cause her to appear to be dead. Especially since Julia knows about Liz’ overwhelming fear that she will be mistakenly thought dead and be buried alive, this hasty diagnosis is bizarre. Of course we end with a shot of Liz on the floor and hear her voice on the soundtrack saying “I’m not dead! I’m not dead!”
Liz had collapsed after she had a vision of Angelique/ Cassandra appearing in her room and touching her. This would seem to be a strong suggestion that the show wants us to think that Liz is still actively hag-ridden, and that her depression is therefore among Dark Shadows‘ supernatural storylines. On the other hand, the vision might have been an hallucination on Liz’ part, and her apparent death might be the result of a psychological syndrome. There may not be any mental process in our world that can induce a seizure so complete that it would fool doctors into thinking that a patient was dead, but in the world of Dark Shadows Julia, whose abilities are all supposed to be strictly the result of her scientific training, can use hypnosis to erase and rewrite people’s memories at will. If the power of suggestion is that great in this fictional universe, it is easy to suppose that self-hypnosis could conceal anyone’s vital signs from the most sophisticated examination.
This was the first episode directed by Henry Kaplan. Lela Swift directed the first twenty episodes of the show, and half of the rest. From #21, she shared directing duties with John Sedwick, usually trading off from one week to the next. Sedwick left the show in June, and several other men have taken turns as Swift’s relief. Kaplan will occupy that spot until the end of the series.
Swift and Sedwick were both ambitious and accomplished visual artists, and the others have more or less lived up to the standard they set. Today’s episode doesn’t look particularly bad, but a great many of the hundreds of segments Kaplan would go on to direct would be made up of one closeup after another, most of them badly out of focus. Swift will continue to work at her usual high level, but the sludge Kaplan dumps on our screens day after day will go a long way towards breaking people of the habit of watching Dark Shadows and discrediting it in the eyes of critics and television professionals.
Moreover, Kaplan did not work well with actors. Many of the cast hated Kaplan for his habit of using a stick, not only to point to their marks, but often to prod them physically. Others hated him for the verbal abuse he casually heaped on them. In a recent panel discussion, Marie Wallace and Donna Wandrey share stories about the difficulties of working with this disagreeable hack. The performances in this one do not show Kaplan’s malign influence. Joel Crothers does a marvelous job as Joe. While the actresses step on each others’ lines so often that it is clear they are nervous, that is not so very unusual.
Frankenstein’s monster Adam has threatened to go on a murder spree unless old world gentleman Barnabas and mad scientist Julia build him a mate. He has further demanded that heiress Carolyn donate the “life force” that will animate his bride. We open today with a reprise of yesterday’s ending in which the experiment begins and immediately goes wrong. Julia announces that unless the mate comes to life in the next sixty seconds, Carolyn will die. They show us a clock. Sixty seconds pass, and the mate doesn’t come to life. So I guess Carolyn is dead now.
When we return from the opening titles, Adam insists on taking Carolyn from the laboratory. Julia says that Carolyn is in a bad way. Using a bit of Collinsport English, she says that Carolyn’s “pulsebeat” is decreasing. Alarmed, Barnabas asks if she might die. Julia reluctantly admits that it is possible. Evidently the opening titles wiped their memories clean of her earlier statement about the sixty seconds that would determine Carolyn’s fate.
Adam and Carolyn share a scene in the upstairs bedroom. Robert Rodan and Nancy Barrett do a wonderful job of acting, enough to save the episode from the “Stinkers” label. As Carolyn describes what she saw while she was unconscious during the experiment, images of sculpted pieces depicting body parts are superimposed on the screen over her face. She says she “saw something in the fog… hazy forms, floating in the air. They began to take shape. A collection of dead things, disconnected, coming toward me, wanting something from me-wanting life. My life!” The superimposed images don’t lead to anything, anymore than anything else in the episode does. But they are typical of the bold visual artistry of director Lela Swift, and evocative of the sort of thing you would see in the more ambitious low-budget films of the period.
Carolyn loses consciousness just before Julia comes in with her medical bag. Julia pronounces Carolyn dead. Adam goes to the basement, where he tells Barnabas he is ready to start his murder spree. Barnabas tries to stop him, and Adam easily beats him down. Adam storms out of the house, passing Julia in the foyer on his way to the great house of Collinwood. Barnabas staggers upstairs and tells Julia what happened. She goes upstairs to retrieve her bag so she can treat his wounds, and finds that Carolyn’s body has vanished from the bed.
When suave warlock Nicholas learned that a tall man named Adam was a Frankenstein’s monster, he decided to use him to found a new race of people who would owe their creation to the spiritual forces of darkness. Nicholas wormed his way into Adam’s confidence and persuaded him to demand that a mate be created for him. Adam put this demand to old world gentleman Barnabas. Barnabas donated the “life force” that animated Adam, and mad scientist Julia performed the experiment. When Adam tells Barnabas that he will kill everyone he cares about if he does not provide him with an artificially constructed woman, he and Julia acquiesce.
The Bride of Frankenstein story has been stalled for several days. The body has been built, the equipment is ready, and heiress Carolyn has volunteered to serve as “life force” donor. Today, Barnabas and Julia tell Adam, Carolyn, and each other that they would rather not perform the experiment. Adam talks with Carolyn, whom he loves and who cannot deny that she loves him; he tells her that there is no need for the experiment, that the two of them can simply go away together. Carolyn insists on doing the experiment, for reasons she does not explain. She doesn’t really want it, either- Nicholas has put a spell on her to compel her to volunteer.
Adam and Carolyn share a tender moment in front of the portrait of Josette. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Nicholas is the only character who wants the experiment. It makes little sense that he would want it. Assuming that Adam and his mate are both fertile, assuming that they in fact produce children, and assuming that those children are any more subject to sin than are the descendants of the first Adam, it would take years for them to grow up. Even if they all developed severe cases of Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome, it would be many years before they would be ready to supplant H. Sap. The show can’t very well expect us to wait that long for the next story point.
There is one fresh thing in today’s episode, and that is the scene between Adam and Carolyn. Robert Rodan projects an overwhelming warmth and gentleness, and Nancy Barrett shows us every twist of Carolyn’s torment and confusion.
Vampire Angelique wants to take part in an experiment. The experiment is modeled on one in Hammer Studios’ 1967 film Frankenstein Created Woman. A mate will be created for patchwork man Adam by a process that involves draining the “life force” from a person into a female body made up of parts salvaged from several cadavers. Angelique wants to be the “life force” donor.
Angelique knows that when Barnabas Collins donated his “life force” to Adam, he not only survived the process but emerged cured of the vampire curse she had herself placed on him 172 years before, when she was a wicked witch. She is hoping that if she follows his lead, she too will be freed to walk in the daylight.
Angelique has been snacking on an unpleasant man named Peter who prefers to be called Jeff. Peter/ Jeff is working on the experiment as a lab tech. She keeps demanding that he run the experiment with her as the “life force” donor. He keeps explaining that he’s just there to set up the equipment and has no idea how to operate it. The only person qualified to do that is mad scientist Julia Hoffman. Angelique says that no one else must be involved, and gives Peter/ Jeff 24 hours to become an expert on the process.
Meanwhile, Adam visits heiress Carolyn in her bedroom. He describes their relationship in terms that show a far greater maturity than she has seen from him before, and she calls him an “amazing creature.” The word “creature” wounds him. We hear his thoughts in a voiceover monologue, the first time Dark Shadows has used this device in mid-conversation. It is quite unnecessary; Robert Rodan’s face tells us everything we need to know about Adam’s feelings. Carolyn certainly sees that she has hurt Adam, and scrambles to make up for it.
Carolyn gives Adam a bright green sweater, and he bursts into tears. He says that no one has ever given him a gift before. Carolyn does not know about Adam’s origin, and is puzzled by this remark. He tells her no one is as nice as she is, that he wants to be her friend forever and never to hurt her, and rushes out of the room, overwhelmed by his emotions.
The experiment to build a female Frankenstein’s monster began after Adam told Barnabas that if he were not given a mate, he would murder everyone in the great house of Collinwood, including Carolyn. The scene in Carolyn’s room shows that this threat is a hollow one. On Friday, Adam dropped in on suave warlock Nicholas, who put him up to extorting Barnabas and Julia, and told him he loved only Carolyn and was ready to tell Barnabas to forget about the experiment. Nicholas talked him out of that, promising him that he would make it possible for him to have both his mate and Carolyn if only he would do everything he told him to do.
Angelique returns to the lab. Peter/ Jeff isn’t there, but Adam is. She tells Adam that he is breaking his word to Nicholas. Nicholas did not in fact tell Adam to stay away from the lab, but he did give Angelique that command. Adam is skeptical of Angelique, but he has no reason to stay in the lab or to throw her out. So he leaves her there.
Soon Peter/ Jeff is back. He keeps trying to explain to Angelique that he has no idea what he is doing, but she puts herself on the table and insists he start right away. While he throws switches, she moans.
Danny Horn’s post about this episode on Dark Shadows Every Day details the similarities between this scene and the way TV variety shows of the period presented “psychedelic” rock and roll acts such as The Doors. Danny’s commenter “PrisoneroftheNight” (a.k.a. Marc Masse of the intermittently available blog Dark Shadows from the Beginning) points out that The Doors themselves were likely aware of the similarity, as witness a voice that can be heard at the eight second mark of track 11, disc 2, of the CD release of The Doors in Concert calling similar visual effects “Dark Shadows time!”
Danny doesn’t say anything about Lara Parker’s rendering of Angelique’s experience on the table. On Dark Shadows Before I Die, John Scoleri says that Angelique “seemingly enjoys the experiment (because we’ve seen her shriek in pain, and this definitely was not the same),” to which his sister Christine adds that Peter/ Jeff “seemed to be pressing all the right buttons.” When we were watching the episode, Mrs Acilius noticed Peter/ Jeff’s uncomprehending reaction to Angelique’s moans and remarked “Yeah, yeah, we know you’ve never heard a woman make those sounds.”
Two of the four actors in this episode, Nancy Barrett and Roger Davis, are still alive as of this writing. I believe it is the first episode to have a cast that all survived as late as 2021. Robert Rodan died in that year, and Lara Parker in 2023. I don’t know if there are any episodes that still have all-surviving casts. (UPDATED: #751 does!)
Nancy Barrett was taken ill not long before shooting began for this episode, and she was replaced in the role of Carolyn Stoddard by Diana Walker. Miss Walker had her sides letter perfect; her only flub comes when she delivers a line in a level conversational tone, and a moment later has to apologize for shouting. She doesn’t seem to have much idea of what was going on in the story, though. Her Carolyn is a calm, practical-minded homemaker of the sort you might find on another daytime soap of the period, not someone who is keeping a stray Frankenstein’s monster in the spare room. Besides, Miss Barrett is probably Dark Shadows’ most reliably entertaining performer, an impossible act for anyone to follow.
Aside from the two actors who at various times filled in for Vince O’Brien in the famously disposable role of Sheriff Patterson, I believe Miss Walker is the only person to have served as a substitute for a temporarily unavailable cast member. Many times, the makers of the show went out of their way to rearrange the shooting schedule or rewrite scripts to avoid substitutions. Many of the show’s fans were extremely young and extremely intense, so I suspect Miss Walker’s mail after this appearance would have included some ugly items that would have confirmed the producers in their reluctance to call up the reserves.
Today is the last time we see Jerry Lacy as lawyer Tony Peterson. Mr Lacy will be back in other roles. In 1969 and 1970, he and Diana Walker were reunited in the original Broadway cast of Play It Again, Sam, in which Mr Lacy scored a triumph with the same Humphrey Bogart imitation that is the basis of Tony’s character, while Miss Walker played Sharon and understudied Nancy.
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 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.
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:
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 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.”
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.
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.
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