Time travelers Barnabas Collins and Julia Hoffman are doing battle with two distinct supernatural menaces. One of these is the ghost of Gerard Stiles, who, as they learned while visiting the far-off future year 1995, is destined to destroy the great house of Collinwood and the people who call it home before the end of the current year, 1970. The other is a vampire whom they have not identified, but who has been feeding on their friend and frequent victim, Maggie Evans.
In the drawing room, housekeeper Mrs Johnson sees Gerard. Gerard takes control of her, as he does when he meets people in that room. She goes upstairs, where Julia is keeping vigil over Maggie. Mrs Johnson says she woke up from a frightening nightmare in which Barnabas was suffering. She describes the setting of the nightmare. Julia recognizes it as Rose Cottage, the deserted mansion where Barnabas has gone to confront Gerard. Julia tells Mrs Johnson to take over for her in Maggie’s room, and rushes off to her friend’s side.
Julia bursts into the room where Barnabas is standing around, his confrontation with Gerard having come and gone without noticeable result. Barnabas is surprised to see her. As she explains what Mrs Johnson told her, the room bursts into flames. They try to escape, only to find that the door will not open. All seems lost, until the door opens from the other side. A woman named Roxanne Drew has come to their rescue.
Before their sojourn in 1995, Julia and Barnabas spent a while in an alternate universe which the show insists on calling “Parallel Time.” In Parallel Time, Barnabas met Roxanne’s counterpart while she was comatose. Charmed by her immobility and silence, he fell in love with her. Even after she came to and started moving around and speaking, Barnabas remained attached to that Roxanne. Barnabas and Julia escaped from Parallel Time through a room in a burning house; we learned in #1071 that Roxanne followed Barnabas and Julia into the burning room too late for them to rescue her. We can only assume she died in the fire. In the current universe, an inverted mirror image of that one, this other Roxanne is the one who rescues Julia and Barnabas from a burning room.
Roxanne separates from Barnabas and Julia in the woods, saying she has something else to do. They return to Collinwood. They find Mrs Johnson unconscious and Maggie missing. In the woods, Maggie approaches a shrouded figure, whom we assume to be the vampire and who appears to be Roxanne.
This episode marks the final appearance of the character Mrs Johnson and of the actress Clarice Blackburn. Blackburn had taken a writing job on another soap by this time and was not available for acting work on a regular basis. She was an outstanding performer; Nancy Barrett says that Blackburn was the single best actor in the entire cast of Dark Shadows. Since Miss Barrett herself is a serious contender for this title, that is not an opinion to be taken lightly.
In the 1995 segment, Mrs Johnson died in the episode broadcast on 23 July 1970. That would suggest a dramatic date of 23 July 1995, very close to Blackburn’s actual date of death, 5 August 1995. But it gets eerier than that. In #1071, when charming rogue Quentin Collins says that he looked into Parallel Time and saw Roxanne trapped in the burning room, he goes on to fix the date of Julia and Barnabas’ departure from Parallel Time as 3 August, two weeks after the broadcast date. That would be the date of their arrival in 1995, and would mean that the third night of their time in that year, the night when Mrs Johnson died, would have been 5 August 1995.
A disruption in the very nature of time and space has thrust vampire Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman into the year 1995, where the great house of Collinwood is in ruins and everyone is annoyed with them.
Yesterday, Julia and Barnabas were poking around inside the great house against the express instructions of its owner, Carolyn Fredericks, as conveyed earlier in the evening by the sheriff when he arrested them for trespassing. A heavy bust fell from the railing on the top of the foyer stairs, narrowly missing Julia. She and Barnabas fled the house. They looked back, and saw a young man in nineteenth century garb glaring at them from a window.
Today, Barnabas and Julia are in the parlor of the Old House on the estate. She tells him that when she saw the man in the window she was overcome by a powerful sensation. “It was the very essence of evil! I felt evil all around me. I was trapped by it!” Regular viewers may have thought Julia would be used to that by now, but apparently not. “It made me aware of something deep inside me that I don’t even understand — as though, with that one look, he could concentrate every grain of evil I have in my nature! Make it grow, and grow…” She asks Barnabas if he felt the same thing, and he says he didn’t, not at all. He concedes that he is an inhuman abomination from beyond the grave, so maybe he’s immune to that kind of thing.
Meanwhile, Carolyn is at home in the old shack by Finley’s Cove, accompanied by Mrs Johnson, who was the housekeeper at Collinwood in the late 1960s. Carolyn is brushing her hair and smiling. She reminisces about when she was a little girl and Mrs Johnson used to brush her hair. Mrs Johnson is not shy then or later about contradicting anything Carolyn says that is not so, but does not deny that she did that. So the audience is supposed to believe it. Some say this is a retcon, since Mrs Johnson did not join the staff at Collinwood until 1966, when Carolyn was fully grown. But in a comment on Danny Horn’s post about the episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day, I expounded a theory as to how it might be true:
In the early episodes, Carolyn talks about having gone to school in town. How did she get there?
She can’t have walked; it was miles away, much of it along a winding road with several blind curves. Her mother never left the grounds during those years, she couldn’t have driven her. Roger was living in Augusta with Laura.
(I should expand on this point. Roger says that when Carolyn was born, he was away at boarding school. So he would still have been in college when his niece first became a pupil at Collinsport Elementary. He then busied himself squandering his inheritance, a process which included the ten years between his marriage to Laura and his return to Collinwood. So that doesn’t leave any time for him to have looked after his “Kitten” when she was little.)
The only servant was Matthew. Matthew and Carolyn don’t seem at all close; it doesn’t seem likely that he drove her to school every morning. If a school bus came up the hill to Collinwood day after day, the kids who rode it couldn’t have maintained the attitude Carolyn describes, whispering behind her back about her living with the witch in the haunted house. Sooner or later they’d have started talking to her face to face about it.
Carolyn also talks about Bill Malloy being more like a father to her than any other man, and the two of them do have a cozy relationship. Carolyn is also very quick to fall in with Mrs Johnson when Burke pitches the idea of her joining the household staff at Collinwood. So I think we have to conclude that Bill Malloy and his housekeeper were in charge of getting Carolyn to school in the mornings. Malloy was on the fishing boats, so that would require an early start to the day. There were probably many days when little Carolyn was still in her pajamas when she got to the Malloy house. On those days, Mrs Johnson brushed her hair while the water came to a boil for breakfast.
Comment left by “Acilius,” 27 January 2021, on Danny Horn, “Episode 1064: Here Comes the Hotstepper,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 20 August 2017.
Carolyn seems to be a crazy lady these days. Yesterday, we saw that much of this is an act, but in her scene with Mrs Johnson we see that it is an act she puts on even when she is alone with someone she trusts. It allows her to smile and laugh and be happy even when she is surrounded by the residue of an unimaginable catastrophe.
Carolyn tells Mrs Johnson that she will be going to the great house of Collinwood to get ready to host a picnic at the gazebo, which she pronounces “ga-ZAY-bo” in a bit of Collinsport English that we’ve been hearing intermittently since Lara Parker invented it in the summer of 1968. Mrs Johnson reacts with horror, saying that no one can go to the devil-haunted wreckage of Collinwood, but Carolyn laughs off her objections. Carolyn shows a picture of a picnic they had at the ga-ZAY-bo in 1970, the last year Collinwood was habitable. Mrs Johnson spots a figure in the background and declares that was “the first time we saw him.” Carolyn gets upset and tears up the picture.
Barnabas had insisted to Julia that the man they saw at the window may not be the only supernatural entity operating within the great house, and Carolyn seems to confirm that he is right. She does not want to hear Mrs Johnson referring to him, nor does she want to have a picture of him. But she happily says that she is going to the great house tonight with a present, because it is his birthday. Apparently him and his refer to different beings, each of which inheres in the haunting. One wonders how much of supernaturalism would dissolve if people would just use proper names instead of pronouns.
Julia and Barnabas barge into Carolyn’s house. Carolyn tells them to get out, which they refuse to do. They badger her with the story of what happened when they were illegally roaming around in her other house, and Mrs Johnson runs out. Eventually Carolyn resumes her crazy lady demeanor. Barnabas and Julia give up and leave, and for a moment we wonder if they are on their way to let themselves into some other property of Carolyn’s.
Julia and Barnabas go back to the Old House. They find that Mrs Johnson is waiting for them there. They tell her that they are time travelers, and that if she will tell them what happened they might be able to go back and prevent it. She is dubious about this claim, but starts telling the story anyway. She casts her mind back to the summer of 1970. “It all began when the days were so beautiful, you couldn’t help but be happy. There was a spirit of joy at Collinwood; there was a feeling that hadn’t been there in a long time. There was so much love among all of us at that time…” This would be the period that began immediately after Barnabas and Julia left.
Mrs Johnson says that all of the beauty and joy and love and other things you might experience when you don’t have a vampire and a mad scientist around your estate came to an end one quiet night. She seems to be on the point of saying something important when she looks at the window of the parlor and sees the glaring young man. She breaks off, screams that she won’t tell, and runs out into the night. Julia tells Barnabas she felt the evil presence, and that the ghost was there. They go out to look for Mrs Johnson.
The ghost catches up to Mrs Johnson first. He touches her shoulder, and she dies. When Barnabas and Julia find Mrs Johnson, she is sitting on the ground, her back against a tree, her eyes open. This was the same posture in which Clarice Blackburn’s character Abigail Collins was found when we saw her corpse in #432. That image was a brief shocker in the last couple of seconds of the episode; this time the camera zooms in on Blackburn’s face and pans across it, allowing her to show that an outstanding actress can give a powerful performance even when she is altogether motionless.
Carolyn happens by. Julia and Barnabas hide. Carolyn thinks Mrs Johnson is alive and chatters to her. As the truth begins to dawn, Carolyn’s alarm mounts. Finally Barnabas and Julia emerge from the shadows. Carolyn accuses them of killing Mrs Johnson. They deny their guilt. Carolyn is unconvinced, and indeed we cannot help but think that since Mrs Johnson lived through the 25 years of their absence and turned up dead so shortly after they returned, Julia and Barnabas cannot be exactly innocent.
Barnabas and Julia follow Carolyn into the great house. Julia wonders what Mrs Johnson could have meant by “the children’s old room.” This is a blooper on Grayson Hall’s part- Mrs Johnson mentioned “the room the children called The Playroom.” Julia and Barnabas hear music playing, and follow it to a room upstairs. Barnabas looks at the doorway and remarks that the room was never there when he knew the house. The shot is framed at such a severe Dutch angle that we can tell something isn’t on the level.
They hear Carolyn inside, talking and laughing with at least one other person. Since their whole philosophy of life now seems to be making themselves as obnoxious as possible to Carolyn, they let themselves in.
The episode opens with a seldom seen still of the exterior of the mansion representing the great house of Collinwood, suggesting we are going to be seeing things from a new angle today.
This part of the place is in fairly good shape.
Vampire Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman have escaped an alternate universe where a fire was raging around them. They find themselves unsinged and in their own timeline, back in the room at the great house where they first passed through the aperture that connects the universes. Barnabas is plunged into self-pity, since he wasn’t able to bring a girl he met while he was in the other universe home with him. She was comatose when they first met, and he goes on about how much he loved that. “She’s the only woman who ever made me forget my dear lost Josette. The moment I saw her, so still, so helpless, I felt a love I haven’t felt since I first met Josette.” Barnabas himself is dead half the time, so necrophilia is not inappropriate or even kinky in his case, but this is still a pretty funny line.
Julia has given up everything in her life for Barnabas’ sake, and she is so deeply implicated in his countless crimes that there is no way she can build a meaningful relationship with anyone else. She has decided to make the best of this, and has fallen in love with him. He does not requite this love in the slightest. When Julia first let Barnabas see how she felt, in 1967, he ridiculed her for it and reveled in showing her that nothing could ever develop between them. Now he is friendlier, most of the time, but still keeps expecting her to assist him while he chases after other women. When he rants about how he has lost his one chance at love, she looks up at him adoringly. She chokes back tears while she says “We forget how rare a life of love can be. You’re not the only one who’s had so little hope. It’s something one learns to live with. We can get used to anything if we have to.”
Barnabas reacts to this anguished little speech with a flash of outrage. He then turns from Julia and resumes lamenting his fate. He seems deeply offended that she started talking about trivial stuff like her feelings when the topic was supposed to be the most important thing in the world, his feelings. Barnabas and Julia’s exchange is not an example of anything that you will ever see described as good scene construction, but between the two of them, as we know them to be, it is magnificently constructed. It’s exactly the kind of non-conversation you would expect to take place between a colossal narcissist and someone who can’t even hope to get free of him.
Barnabas is appalled at Julia’s interruption.
Julia and Barnabas realize that the room is damp and musty, not at all like it was when last they were there. They find that the house is in a state of collapse. The foyer and drawing room is the only permanent set on Dark Shadows; it is extremely impressive by the standards of 1960s daytime TV, and has always looked very solid. Longtime viewers will find the images of it in ruins unforgettable.
Julia left for the other universe only five weeks ago; she and Barnabas cannot imagine what could have caused the destruction they see in such a short period. Julia wonders if a hurricane or a war is responsible for the damage. When they find some note paper that has yellowed and begun to crumble, Barnabas speculates that some kind of radiation may have accelerated its decay. Barnabas grew up in the eighteenth century and takes only a desultory interest in anything more recent than the Washington administration, so it is rather jarring for regular viewers to hear him talking about radiation and wondering if a thermonuclear exchange has taken place.
Barnabas and Julia go to the cemetery to find a coffin for him to spend his days in. They see a freshly dug grave with a marker giving the current year as 1995. That explains how the decay at Collinwood could have happened in the time after Julia followed Barnabas into the alternate universe in 1970. The aperture returned them to their own universe, but to a later period of time. They also find a grave marked as that of strange and troubled teen David Collins, whose date of death is given as 1970.
A gray-haired woman cries out to Julia and Barnabas to leave David’s grave alone. They recognize her as Mrs Johnson, housekeeper at Collinwood from 1966 to 1970. Mrs Johnson recognizes them too, and sees that they have not changed since last she saw them. She takes them to be ghosts, and demands they stop haunting David’s place of rest.
Barnabas and Julia deny that they are ghosts and ask Mrs Johnson what happened after they left. She starts telling transparent lies, claiming that the adult members of the Collins family are alive and well and living overseas. She rushes off, but as she goes she says the name “Fredericks” and “The old shack at Finley’s Cove.” Clarice Blackburn was always excellent, and this scene is one of her very finest turns.
Julia and Barnabas let themselves into a small house at Finley’s Cove. Julia remarks that the house was always vacant when she knew the area. Barnabas says that in the other universe, it was his comatose girlfriend’s house. They notice that the place is chock-a-block with objets d’art from Collinwood. Julia is excited that whoever lives there knew the place; Barnabas surmises that they may have been its destroyers, and that they might have looted the stuff from it. The doorknob turns, and Julia says that they will soon know who lives in the house.
The evil Gregory Trask orchestrated a plot to murder his first wife, Minerva, and has married wealthy spinster Judith Collins. Now he and his accomplice, lawyer/ Satanist Evan Hanley, have conjured up a simulacrum of Minerva to hang around Judith and drive her insane. Once Judith is safely confined to the nearest high-class asylum, Trask will enjoy Judith’s riches, minus only whatever percentage Evan squeezes out of him.
Today, Judith stands in her bedroom in the great house on the estate of Collinwood. She isn’t ready to go to bed, and the simulacrum of Minerva is sitting in the rocking chair, sewing. Trask pretends he cannot see the simulacrum, and forbids Judith to leave the room. When Judith becomes upset, he slaps her. This slap occurs on the soundtrack and in our imaginations. What we see on screen some time before the slapping sound effect plays is Jerry Lacy waving his hand a considerable distance short of Joan Bennett’s face. The two of them do such a good job of acting that this failure of blocking does nothing to undercut the oppressive atmosphere. For her part, Clarice Blackburn plays the pseudo-Minerva with just enough animation that we cannot predict what she will do. These performances take a sequence which may not have seemed like much on the page and make it into one of the most frightening scenes on Dark Shadows. When Judith lies to Trask and says that she does not see Minerva, it’s enough to produce a shudder.
Downstairs, Trask answers a knock at the door and broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi enters. Regular viewers know that Judith despises Magda and Magda hates her, and so it is surprising when we hear that Judith has sent for Magda. Trask blocks her way upstairs. Magda is defiant towards Trask; she knows what he did to Minerva, and is using that knowledge to force him to let her and her husband stay in the Old House on the grounds of Collinwood. But Trask has a new threat to make.
Trask knows that Magda is the sister of the late Jenny, who married Judith’s brother Quentin. He also knows something that not even Quentin knows, that Jenny bore twin children to Quentin after he left her. He threatens to send Jenny’s children away from the village of Collinsport. Evidently Magda wants the children to stay where they are, in the care of a woman named Mrs Fillmore. It is unclear why this would matter to her; we have had no indication that she has met Mrs Fillmore, much less visited the children at her house. But it is important enough to her that they not be moved that Magda responds to Trask’s threat with “What do you want me to do to her?”
We cut to Judith’s room. Magda enters. Judith tells her that the ghost of Mrs Trask vanished a few minutes ago, after sitting in the rocking chair for hours. Judith asks if she thinks she sounds mad, to which Magda replies there is nothing so strange about a simple ghost. The simulacrum reappears, and Judith asks Magda if she sees it. Magda says she does not.
Back downstairs, Magda tells Trask that he is a swine. She spits on the floor next to him and stalks off. Much as Magda hates Judith and many as are the crimes in which she is implicated, she is a warm-hearted sort, and Trask’s bloodless cruelty is not to her liking. Indeed, it is strange she did not tell Judith of Trask’s attempt to extort her complicity and make an alliance with her against him.
Meanwhile, Quentin is being held in the jail. When Magda realized that he murdered Jenny, she turned Quentin into a werewolf. She did not then know about the twins, and so she made the curse hereditary. Once she found out that her own kin were in line to become monsters, she started looking for a way to undo the curse.
The police captured Quentin the night before, while he was in his lupine form. As a result of Magda’s latest futile attempt to cure him, Quentin emerged from his bout of lycanthropy with his face disfigured and his memory a blank. Though his clothing and his hairstyle are so highly distinctive that virtually everyone who has seen the show before can tell that the man in the cell is Quentin, the Collinses suffer from a peculiar form of blindness that keeps them from recognizing people with globs of makeup on their faces, so his brother Edward is at a loss as to who he could be.
Magda is working with time-traveling vampire Barnabas Collins, distant cousin of Quentin, Edward, and Judith, who has set out on a mission to set the events of the year 1897 right so that Quentin will not become a malign ghost ruining things for everyone at Collinwood in 1969. Unfortunately, vampires are not problem-solvers; their function in a story is to create problems. Since coming to 1897, Barnabas has been responsible for at least six homicides. He has wrought a great deal of havoc even beyond those killings. For example, it was as a direct result of his actions that Judith and Trask got together in the first place. Today, Magda goes to Quentin’s cell and tries to tell him that Barnabas will come to him after nightfall and take him to the Old House.
We do not see Barnabas. We are watching Quentin in his cell when we hear a bat squeaking outside the jail. Barnabas can materialize wherever he chooses; he does not choose to materialize in the cell, where Quentin is alone and unattended, but goes into the outer office in his bat form. We hear a deputy in that office talking to the bat affectionately, asking him where he came from. We haven’t seen the deputy before this episode, but one suspects that a fellow who sees a bat in his office and strikes up a friendly conversation with it must have an extremely sweet personality. We then hear the deputy make a horrified exclamation, and the doors to Quentin’s cell and to the world outside open by themselves. As Quentin walks out, we see the deputy slumped at his desk, two bleeding wounds on his neck.
We cut to the darkened interior of the great house at Collinwood. Quentin comes ambling in. Biting the deputy was certainly not part of any plan Barnabas made with Magda, but it isn’t completely surprising- he hadn’t had a square meal for quite a while. But even for Barnabas, it shows an unusually low degree of operational competence to let Quentin wander off by himself when the whole idea is to get him to the Old House.
In the drawing room, we hear Quentin’s thoughts as he dwells on his amnesia. He does not know who he is, where he is, or why he has come. He sees his gramophone, and starts playing his only record. That brings him back to himself.
Judith enters. Quentin is not only wearing his usual suit and his distinctive hairstyle, he is listening to the music he has been playing obsessively for months and reciting the lyrics to it. As if that weren’t enough, his voice is quite outstanding- he must be the only senior member of an aristocratic Maine family with a West Virginia accent. Yet Judith not only fails to recognize her brother, she refuses to believe him when he identifies himself to her by name.
The simulacrum of Minerva enters, holding a letter opener above her head. Earlier this week, Minerva’s actual spirit had possessed Judith, and under her power Judith had held that same letter opener in that same position as she confronted Evan and accused him of her murder. Judith does not remember that, and she screams at the sight.
In #762, the Rev’d Mr Gregory Trask walked in on lawyer Evan Hanley and handsome rake Quentin Collins as they were performing a Satanic rite. Trask’s response was to blackmail Evan. Trask wanted his wife Minerva out of the way so that he could marry rich spinster Judith Collins, Quentin’s sister. Threatened with exposure, Evan cast a spell on an unfortunate young man named Tim Shaw. He brainwashed Tim into reenacting the plot of The Manchurian Candidate, with Trask in the Angela Lansbury role and Evan as the People’s Republic of China. As Evan and Trask planned, Tim killed Minerva. Shortly after, Trask married Judith.
On their wedding day, Judith saw Minerva’s ghost in the corner of the drawing room in the great house of Collinwood. In yesterday’s episode, Minerva’s ghost took possession of Judith, and the closing cliffhanger showed the possessed Judith about to stab Evan with a letter opener to avenge Minerva’s death. As we open today, Judith’s brother Edward enters and prevents the stabbing, and Judith is released from possession. She can remember nothing that happened while she was under Minerva’s power, and Edward is convinced that she has gone mad.
Edward takes Judith to her room, and Trask enters. Evan tells him that Minerva’s ghost has been in touch with Judith. The ghost knows what they did, and if the contact continues Judith will know as well. Trask demands that Evan do something to prevent that, and Evan says that he can cast a spell that may turn the haunting to their advantage and neutralize Judith permanently.
The plan turns out to be the creation of a “black ghost.” The only Black actor to have had a speaking part on Dark Shadows was Beverley Hope Atkinson, who played an unnamed nurse in one scene in #563, almost a year ago. Humbert Allen Astredo, who plays Evan, was also in that scene, playing suave warlock Nicholas Blair. Atkinson was terrific, and it would be great to see her again, but it turns out that the “black ghost” is not actually black. Nor is it a ghost. This misnamed entity is a simulacrum of Minerva, a kind of supernatural hologram that Evan will fabricate and that will appear when Judith is around. This will lead Judith to believe that she is insane, thereby causing her actually to become insane and to cease to be an obstacle to Trask’s enjoyment of her wealth.
The simulacrum first shows up in a transparent form in Judith’s bedroom. Judith screams. In the drawing room, Trask and Edward hear her scream and break off a conversation in which Edward has been urging Trask to agree to annul his marriage to the obviously disturbed Judith. Judith comes downstairs. She is reluctant to explain why she screamed, and tells Edward and Trask that nothing is wrong. She and Trask go to the drawing room and talk privately. He has to prod her a bit before she will admit she saw Minerva. He tells her it was just her imagination. She considers this; after all, she was in bed when she saw the image, so it may have been a dream. But then the simulacrum appears in the drawing room, near the spot where she saw Minerva’s ghost on her wedding day. Judith sees Minerva sitting quietly and sewing. Trask pretends he does not see anything; after a bit, Judith pretends she can’t see the image either. Trask leaves Judith alone with the simulacrum. Judith goes upstairs, and the simulacrum follows her. When they reach the top of the staircase, Judith cries out in fear and tells the simulacrum to stay away from her.
Though it is disappointing to be reminded that Beverley Hope Atkinson isn’t coming back, it is always good to see Clarice Blackburn. In her interviews with the authors of the book Barnabas and Company, Nancy Barrett said that Blackburn was the best performer in the entire cast of Dark Shadows. She doesn’t have a lot to do today- she delivers the opening voiceover, we see a snapshot of her, and as the simulacrum she stands motionless in a corner, sews placidly, then is seen from behind as she follows Judith up the stairs. But if there ever was a case to prove the old cliche that no part is small when a big enough actor plays it, Blackburn makes each of these little turns into a moment viewers will remember.
Screenshots by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
As Judith, Joan Bennett also deserves a great deal of credit for getting the gaslighting plot off to a good start. For example, there is an embarrassingly ill-written scene when Judith is in her room, pacing back and forth while some vibes play on the soundtrack. A knock comes at the door, and the music stops. Judith opens the door, and no one is there. The music resumes, and she starts pacing again. There is another knock. Again the music stops, again Judith opens the door, and again no one is there. The music resumes, and she’s back to pacing. The knock comes a third time. A third time the music stops, and a third time Judith turns to the door. This time she asks who’s there. It’s Trask. She lets him in, and he denies having knocked before. Knocking on doors and running away is a pretty crude tactic even on a show with an audience consisting largely of kids aged twelve and under, and the apparent complicity of the music in Trask’s plot is the kind of thing they ridiculed in Looney Tunes cartoons. But Bennett’s soulful performance holds our attention throughout.
This is the second time Dark Shadows has shown us an adventurer trying to gaslight his new wife so that she will go away and give him unfettered access to her fortune. The first time was in March 1968, when the show was set in 1796. Naval officer/ sleazy operator Nathan Forbes had married fluttery heiress Millicent Collins. Nathan discovered that Millicent had transferred all her assets to her little brother Daniel. Nathan then set about driving Millicent out of her mind so that he could take her place as Daniel’s legal guardian. That plot also featured some weak writing, but Joel Crothers and Nancy Barrett were so irresistible as Nathan and Millicent that it hardly mattered. Perhaps the writers wanted to revisit the gaslighting theme to show that this time they could consistently write scripts worthy of their outstanding cast.
A little over two weeks ago, Dark Shadows started an homage to The Manchurian Candidate, with some touches added from Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades. The overwhelmingly evil Rev’d Gregory Trask, keeper of a sadistic cult disguised as a boarding school, coerced Satanist Evan Hanley into casting a spell on Tim Shaw, one of the teachers at the school. When Tim sees the Queen of Spades, he will be prompted to poison Trask’s wife Minerva.
The whole point of employing an assassin is to give yourself an unbreakable alibi. Since Tim will not remember Evan or the spell once he has killed Minerva, the logical thing would seem to be to arrange it so that Tim poisons Minerva in front of several witnesses and that he still has the vial of poison on him when he is caught. But instead, Evan himself turns up as Minerva is in her death throes, and he is the only witness. After Evan erases Tim’s memory, Tim defeats Evan in a sword fight, then runs away, taking the poison with him. Tim flees to his only friend, fellow teacher Rachel Drummond, and tells her that if it is a matter of Evan’s word against his, he will have no chance in court. Later, Evan confronts Rachel and roughs her up, trying to intimidate her out of helping Tim in any way.
Absent witnesses to accuse Tim on his behalf or an alibi for himself, Evan may as well have skipped the whole brainwashing bit. Had he simply strangled Minerva and claimed he saw Tim do it, he would be in exactly the position he is in now.
The problem for Evan’s plan is that it is taking place at this point in the series. The segment of Dark Shadows set in the year 1897 is stuffed to bursting with vivid characters, each of them involved in at least one dynamic storyline. That makes it, from most points of view, the best part of the show, but it also makes it very difficult to get a bunch of people together. Any two characters you put in the same scene are likely to join plot threads together in new and consequential ways. That makes for a lot of excitement, but it makes it very difficult to do just one thing at a time.
For example, say Tim had insisted on bringing Minerva the poisoned tea while in the drawing room at the great house of Collinwood with rich spinster Judith Collins, Judith’s brother Edward, and Minerva’s daughter Charity, while maidservant Beth waits on the company. Trask is apparently scheming to marry Judith and get her money once Minerva is out of the way. Put her in Minerva’s death scene, and you accelerate that part of the story, perhaps beyond the pace you are prepared to follow up. Edward is starting to suspect that his distant cousin, recently arrived Barnabas Collins, might be a vampire. Those suspicions are the result of two qualities in which Edward is no more than average, his ability to notice the obvious and his concern for his son. But if you make him a participant in another story about a crime, any remarks he might make that would display any brainpower whatever would transform him into the show’s resident sleuth. Beth and Charity are both blood thralls of Barnabas’; if either of them were in the room while the poisoning took place, we would therefore expect them to go directly to him and start wondering how he would react to the news. That would shift our focus to him, subordinating the Tim and Minerva story to the Barnabas story. Virtually every other character is disqualified from serving as a witness for similar reasons, leaving Evan to do the honors himself.
Two of the things that make THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE work so well are that we don’t see any of Raymond Shaw’s training, and that when he sees the Queen of Diamonds he goes into a trance that strips him of all personality.
The training scenes here show why the first of those was so important. Not only are the scenes tedious, they force us to realize that the very idea we most have to take seriously is in fact preposterous. Whatever power you might imagine hypnosis or drugs or other conditioning techniques to have, they obviously couldn’t turn a human brain into a digital computer.
And Tim’s talkativeness while in his trance shows why the second element is essential. Raymond might do absolutely anything when he’s in his hyper-suggestible state. A bartender mentions the phrase “Go jump in a lake” and Raymond jumps in the nearest lake. That’s terrifying, because it is terrifying to think of what people might do who had no mind or will controlling their actions from moment to moment. But Tim’s endless chit-chat doesn’t suggest a soulless automaton. There seems to be a mind in there, it just isn’t a very nice or very interesting mind.
Don Briscoe’s performance doesn’t add much to this unpromising material. I can’t think of anything he might have done to make it work, and neither could he. Anyway, I’m glad it’s over.
Comment left 8 November 2020 by Acilius on “Episode 773: The Persecution and Assassination of Minerva Trask as Performed by Tim Shaw under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade,” Danny Horn, Dark Shadows Every Day, 21 November 2015
The opening voiceover plays over this image, a type of visual effect we have not seen before at the beginning of an episode:
A transparent sticker of Barnabas superimposed on the exterior of the Old House. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Barnabas Collins has bitten dimwitted servant Dirk Wilkins, turning Dirk into a vampire like himself. Barnabas has been out all night, searching for Dirk’s hiding place. He hopes to expose Dirk and frame him for his own crimes.
Barnabas comes home to the Old House on the estate of Collinwood to find that Dirk seems to be trying to do the same thing to him. There is a blood-drained corpse in an armchair in his front parlor. It is that of Miss Pansy Faye, Cockney showgirl and Dirk’s first victim.
Barnabas’ distant cousins live in the great house on the estate. One of them, prankster Carl Collins, brought Pansy home with the intention of making her his bride. No sooner does Barnabas discover Pansy’s remains than Carl starts banging on the front door, shouting that he wants to speak with her.
Barnabas hides what’s left of Pansy in a secret chamber behind a bookcase, then lets Carl in. Grisly as the circumstances are, one person lying to another about the presence of a third nearby is a stock situation from farce, and John Karlen and Jonathan Frid play the scene with the particular brand of desperate seriousness that only works in farce. Barnabas persuades Carl to go away and search the grounds of the estate.
That takes a few minutes, starting from what the opening voiceover told us in so many words was “an hour before dawn.” In what remains of that hour, Barnabas takes Pansy’s body to a cemetery and buries her in a shallow grave between tombstones, telling her to “rest in peace.”
Barnabas comes home, and finds Carl, who has in the interval not only gone to the great house, the groundskeeper’s cottage, and a house on the estate which is currently occupied by a school, but has also gone into the village of Collinsport and made inquiries about Pansy. A speedy bunch, the Collinses.
Before Barnabas returned to the house, Carl had heard Pansy’s disembodied voice singing the song she had so memorably performed for Barnabas in yesterday’s episode. He had spoken to Pansy’s voice telling her that his grandmother’s will gave him a house to live in and that she could live there with him. This is puzzling for returning viewers. In #714, it was made perfectly clear that the will did not mention Carl at all. Edith Collins left her entire estate to Carl’s sister Judith, and the only one of the brothers who was mentioned was Quentin, who received no money or negotiable assets of any kind but who was guaranteed the right to stay at Collinwood as long as he pleased. Perhaps they are retconning that away, perhaps Carl is lying to Pansy, or perhaps Carl is losing his grip on reality.
Whether or not we are supposed to doubt Carl’s sanity, Barnabas talks Carl into suspecting that he might have hallucinated Pansy’s voice. Carl leaves, and Barnabas has time to return to his coffin before dawn.
The rest of the episode is taken up with doings at the school Carl had visited. We saw Carl questioning Charity Trask, daughter of the school’s master, the overwhelmingly evil Gregory Trask. The prim Charity was exasperated that Carl kept asking about Pansy after she had already denied having seen her. The scene is an interesting one- Charity and Pansy are such total opposites that it is a shame they never met. It would be amusing to see them juxtaposed.
Charity is engaged to marry Tim Shaw, a teacher at the school. Neither of them is happy about this situation. Tim was in love with Rachel Drummond, another of the teachers, and Charity is Barnabas’ blood thrall. But Gregory blackmailed Tim and bullied Charity into accepting the arrangement.
Charity’s mother, prudish Minerva Trask, does not like Tim or want him as a son-in-law. She urges Charity to set her sights on Carl. Charity says that she would rather marry Barnabas; Minerva says that her instincts are sound, but that she ought not to settle for a cousin of the rich Collinses when one of the brothers is available. Even if they have retconned Carl into owning a house, he is clearly not a rich man, so this reveals that Minerva knows as little about his financial position as she does about the curse under which Barnabas labors.
Charity tries to engage Tim in conversation, and is baffled that he is not willing to talk to her. Indeed, he does not seem like himself at all. Not only is he dismissive with Charity, but when Minerva confronts him he is bold and insolent, a far cry from the broken man we have seen interacting with the Trasks previously. When Charity tells him their engagement is off, he does not express the relief that she and we expect, but puts on a stagey voice we have not heard him use before and marches off to apologize to her mother.
There is a reason for Tim’s behavior. Gregory enlisted warlock Evan Hanley to brainwash Tim so that he would kill Minerva. There is some business with the Queen of Spades, first when Tim mutters the phrase “Queen of Spades,” then when Evan sends him a note on which is scrawled “Queen of Spades,” and lastly when he walks in on Minerva playing solitaire and sees her turn up the Queen of Spades. Many viewers in 1969 would have remembered Richard Condon’s 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate and its 1962 film version. In Condon’s novel, Raymond Shaw became a robot capable of murder when he saw the Queen of Hearts; in the film, the card was the Queen of Diamonds. Many first time viewers, seeing Tim Shaw’s reaction to the Queen of Spades, would have made the connection and understood why he ends the episode by poisoning Minerva’s tea.
Tim Shaw differs from Raymond Shaw in that he is under a spell for a long while, including the whole time we see him today, and he can talk and act independently while it operates on him. Raymond simply became catatonic when he saw the card and remained that way until he heard a command. He then executed the command and came back to himself once he was finished. Tim’s behavior may suggest a nod to another literary work, Pushkin’s story “The Queen of Spades.” That tale, which Tchaikovsky turned into an opera and which in 1949 was made into a feature film, is about a timid man who inadvertently kills a powerful woman and loses control of himself as a consequence. Like Tim, Captain Herman is coerced into marrying a woman he does not love. Presented with an opportunity to get out of the marriage, he finds himself making extraordinary efforts to go through with it, efforts which bring about his ultimate downfall.
A lot of business about a magical urn that belongs to undead blonde fire witch Laura Collins. This is Laura’s second tour on Dark Shadows; she didn’t have an urn the first time around, but the plot is much busier these days and she needs a MacGuffin for her enemies to chase after if she’s going to stay afloat.
There are also a couple of moments when characters deride spinster Judith Collins as “plain Judith,” envious of the “pretty wives your brothers brought home.” This is ridiculous. Judith isn’t even Hollywood ugly; she’s played by Joan Bennett, one of the great beauties of the screen in her youth and still, in her late 50s, a remarkably attractive woman.
But all in all, the episode is quite good. The highlight is a confrontation between governess Rachel Drummond and a villain who makes her first appearance today, Minerva Trask. Minerva is the wife of the loathsome Rev’d Gregory Trask, and with him she runs a boarding school called Worthington Hall. Rachel grew up at Worthington Hall, and like all other children there she was subjected to continual abuse at the hands of the Trasks. We haven’t seen Gregory for several days; as played by Jerry Lacy, he is so overwhelmingly evil a presence that the makers of the show wisely decided to use him sparingly. It looks like Rachel will soon be forced to go back to Worthington Hall as a teacher.
Minerva is played by Clarice Blackburn, whom many consider to be the single best actor in the whole series. For example, Nancy Barrett gave her that title in her interviews with the authors of the book Barnabas and Company. Blackburn is absolutely believable as the sanctimonious Minerva, so much so that I found her scenes as difficult to watch as are those featuring Mr Lacy as Gregory. Kathryn Leigh Scott plays the terror and misery Minerva inspires in Rachel quite effectively, but to be honest I felt those emotions very intensely myself just watching the episode on TV. I suspect that when you have a scene partner like Blackburn, all you need is to learn your lines and remember your training and you’ll connect with the audience.
Rachel tells her troubles to broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi, who volunteers to help her escape the Trasks. Magda’s plan requires Rachel to do three extraordinary things. She must give her garnet-encrusted broach, the only keepsake her late mother gave her, to Magda to sell to raise money for a coach ride to Boston. She must spend the night in a secret room hidden in an old mausoleum. And once in Boston, she will have to find employment without having recourse to any credentials or references that would make it possible for her to find a situation agreeable to a neurotic intellectual such as herself. We could never believe Rachel would do any of these things if she were facing a less gruesome threat than return to Worthington Hall.
Longtime viewers may wonder just how far Rachel’s fears will drive her. In #9, broadcast and set in the year 1966, flighty heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard told well-meaning governess Victoria Winters that over the years, two governesses had leapt to their deaths from the precipice atop Widow’s Hill, and that legend had it that a third governess would someday follow their lead. In other episodes, before and after, that story was rephrased as “two women” rather than “two governesses.”
So far, we have only seen one woman take the plunge, and she wasn’t a governess. She was the gracious Josette, also played by Miss Scott. Josette jumped in 1796 because she saw that she was about to be made into a vampire. Now, the dramatic date is 1897. The prospect of turning into a member of the teaching faculty of Worthington Hall is scarcely less horrifying than is the prospect of becoming a vampire, so perhaps it will turn out that Rachel was one of those whom Carolyn had in mind after all.
Housekeeper Mrs Johnson saw old world gentleman Barnabas Collins last night, and he was in a frightful state. Her son, unsightly ex-convict Harry, had come upon Barnabas unconscious in the woods in the small hours of the morning, and brought him back to the great house of Collinwood. Barnabas was pale and weak, barely able to stand. Mrs Johnson wanted to call a doctor, but Barnabas refused any help and insisted on returning to his own home elsewhere on the grounds of the estate. This morning, Mrs Johnson drops in on Barnabas to see how he is doing, and to her horror finds that he is in an armchair in his front parlor, a rope being pulled tight around his neck by local man Joe Haskell. She fights Joe, and he runs off, leaving Barnabas alive.
Had Joe succeeded in killing Barnabas, it would have been oddly appropriate for Mrs Johnson to be present. She was the first character we saw Barnabas speak to. He knocked on the door of the great house in #211 and she opened it, inviting him in when he identified himself as the Collins family’s cousin from England. They might have brought things full circle by having her also be the last person to speak to him.
As it is, Barnabas is not seriously hurt. He has no telephone in his house, so Mrs Johnson says she will go back to the great house to call the sheriff. Barnabas becomes agitated and forbids her to do this, saying that what has happened must remain between him and Joe. She doesn’t work for Barnabas, and even if she did he would have neither the legal authority to stop her reporting a crime to the police nor the power to silence a character whose function has long been to distribute information to anyone who might use it to advance the story.
Back in the great house, Mrs Johnson finds Harry in the foyer. She asks him what he is doing in the front part of the house, and he claims to be on an errand for one of the ladies. She mentions that Barnabas is in a bad way, and Harry expresses surprise she was at his house. He blurts out a reference to Joe, and his mother questions him sharply. She realizes that he knows far more than he is telling, and she wants to know what he is doing and who else is mixed up in it. He doesn’t give her any answers. She picks up the telephone to call the sheriff, and Harry puts his finger on the hook to hang it up.
The front door opens. The lady of the house, matriarch Liz, is there with her brother Roger. Joe is leaning on Roger’s shoulder. Liz and Roger found Joe in the Collins family mausoleum in the old cemetery north of town, which they were visiting because Roger wants to remodel it. Mrs Johnson is horrified to see Joe, and tells Liz and Roger what she saw at Barnabas’ house. They can’t believe that Joe, who has always been a decent and honest person and is now very ill, could have done such a thing. Roger and Harry help Joe to the sofa, where Roger asks him if Mrs Johnson is telling the truth. Joe responds by saying that he has to kill Barnabas before Barnabas kills him, and Roger calls the police.
Joe Haskell has become a victim of vampire Angelique. That cost him his job, his fiancée, and everything else that gave him an identity. In #607, he went to visit Angelique and found that she had moved on to a new victim and didn’t want him anymore. Having lost even the source of his troubles, Joe stabbed himself.
Angelique shared Joe’s desire that he should die, but did not want her master, suave warlock Nicholas, to come home and find him bleeding to death on the carpet. So in #608 she called her new victim, recovering vampire Barnabas Collins, to take Joe away and leave him to die in the woods. Unable to be a party to Joe’s death, Barnabas took him back to his own house. He asked his friend, Julia Hoffman MD, to treat Joe there. Julia discovered the bite marks on Joe’s neck and figured out that he was a blood thrall and Angelique was the vampire, but she did not realize Barnabas was also in Angelique’s power.
Nicholas has for his own reasons joined Joe and Angelique in wanting Joe to die. Yesterday, he summoned a man he brought under his power in #601, unsightly ex-convict Harry Johnson, and ordered him to sneak into Barnabas’ house and pour a vial of poison into Joe’s medicine. In #528, Nicholas had scolded Angelique when she asked him to slip a potion into someone’s beverage, saying “I am much too talented to spend my time drugging drinks.” However talented Nicholas may be, the writing staff is taxed to the limit, so by #555 he was himself devising a plan to do just that. This time it doesn’t even seem to be a magical potion, just something colorless and toxic.
Nicholas isn’t the only evil genius who is failing to meet his own standards. Barnabas and Julia go on and on about the importance of not leaving Joe alone in the upstairs bedroom for a minute. Barnabas takes the first watch, but Angelique calls him away. Julia is asleep while Harry enters the house and poisons Joe’s medicine. She wakes up, goes to Joe’s room, finds that Barnabas is gone, then goes back downstairs, leaving Joe alone. When Barnabas returns, Julia is still downstairs, and she tells him he has been away for “hours.” Apparently she has left Joe unattended that whole time.
In the interval, Angelique bit Barnabas and left him unconscious in the woods. Harry found him there and took him to the great house of Collinwood, where his mother, housekeeper Mrs Johnson, was appalled by Barnabas’ pale color and evident weakness. She kept insisting on helping Barnabas, at first wanting to call a doctor, then saying Harry would walk him home, but Barnabas refused all assistance and left alone.
This is the first time we have seen Mrs Johnson in over eight weeks. It is also the first time we have ever seen her out of her working clothes. She is in a robe and has her hair down. Clarice Blackburn walks with exaggerated care, suggesting arthritis, and talks as if she were mindful of dentures that might come loose. With these tricks and in her usual costume, she does manage to seem somewhat older than her 47 years. But en déshabillé, she cannot conceal that she is younger than the character, and only 13 years older than the actor playing her son.
Mrs Johnson tries to reason with Barnabas while Harry looks on. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Early in the episode, Harry watched the clock in the foyer of the great house while we heard his voice in a recorded monologue thinking about Nicholas’ command and his reluctance to obey it. That was the first time Craig Slocum was entrusted with a simultaneous dual performance as voice actor and silent actor. The monologue is an efficiently written bit of exposition, and as a voice actor he delivers it competently enough. As a silent actor, he stares lifelessly forward throughout it, adding nothing to the words. Slocum wasn’t reliably interesting as a performer, but he could do well on occasion, and there would have been some grounds for hoping that Nicholas’ command to kill Joe would have provided him with an occasion to which he could rise. Slocum first appeared on Dark Shadows as Noah Gifford, another hopeless schlub who found himself ordered to commit a murder. The person giving that order was the unscrupulous Nathan Forbes, who like Joe was played by Joel Crothers. You’d think that the second time around, Slocum would find a way to invest the role of reluctant murderer with something subtle and compelling.
At the end of the episode, Jonathan Frid has a voiceover monologue while Barnabas wrestles with Angelique’s command to give the poisoned medicine to Joe. This monologue is entirely superfluous; we know exactly what Barnabas is thinking. Frid goes to the opposite extreme from Slocum, and makes faces and gestures emphasizing every point he hears his voice make. Without the voiceover, Frid’s dumbshow might at least have been nostalgic for people who remembered the silent movies. With the voiceover, it’s just embarrassing, a bad ending to a mediocre installment.
