collinsport historical society – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 842: Some kind of an unnatural creature

Mad scientist Julia Hoffman has traveled back in time to the year 1897 to help her friend, vampire Barnabas Collins. Julia has fallen into the clutches of sorcerer Count Petofi and is bound and gagged in Petofi’s lair. A loaded revolver is tied to the doorknob, rigged to fire a round through her heart when the door opens.

Barnabas has learned where Julia is, but not about the death-trap in which she is ensconced. He storms into the building, turns the doorknob, and thereby discharges the gun. He sees Julia slumped over in her chair, and shouts at Petofi’s henchman that he will kill him. He then goes to Julia and finds that she is alive. There is a bullet-hole through the back of her chair, but she herself is unharmed.

Julia declares that there is only one explanation for this phenomenon that makes sense. Considering the kinds of stories that play out on Dark Shadows, we would think that an explanation that makes sense would be the one we could discard immediately, but Julia plows ahead. When she traveled back in time, only her “astral body” made the trip. Her physical body is still in 1969. For his part, Barnabas had a body in 1897, trapped in a sealed coffin. That body is hosting his personality, which is why he is subject to physical injury. But Julia is in no danger. When she later says that she can disregard Petofi’s threats, Barnabas says that if he finds out the truth, Petofi will just find another way to immobilize her, so she has to lie low.

Petofi is so powerful that Barnabas does not believe that he and Julia can fight him by themselves. So he tells Julia to summon wicked witch Angelique. Barnabas and Angelique have been enemies for centuries, but he thinks they have a common cause now. Angelique is determined to marry his cousin Quentin, whom he has befriended and Petofi has enslaved. So Barnabas expects she will agree to help fight Petofi.

Angelique does come in response to Julia’s message. She remembers Julia from time she herself spent in the 1960s, and is shocked to find her in 1897. Julia refuses to explain how she made her way back in time. She says that if Angelique can come to 1897 from 1968, she oughtn’t to be surprised she has come there from 1969. Angelique responds that Julia is not like herself and Barnabas. “I’m human,” says Julia. Since she is separated from her proper body, she isn’t fully human, not at the moment, but she still takes evident satisfaction in applying the label to herself. This marks a contrast with Angelique, who was offended earlier in the episode when Petofi laughed and taunted her for being “so human.” Julia and Angelique then snipe at each other about their respective relationships to Barnabas.

Julia says that it is essential Barnabas should “complete his mission” and solve the problems they were facing in 1969. Angelique responds that he will never be able to do that, because he has changed history too much in the time he has spent in 1897. This remark is intriguing for regular viewers. Barnabas’ six months of bungling around, picking fights, and committing murders must have had major consequences for what came after. That gives the show two ways forward. When Barnabas and Julia go back to a contemporary setting, they might meet an entirely different cast of characters and have to find a place for themselves in an alternate universe. Or they might do what they did when the show’s first time-travel story ended in March 1968, and dramatize the force of the Collins family’s propensity for denial. The head of the family in the 1790s decided to compel everyone in and around the village of Collinsport to pretend that none of the events we had seen had ever taken place, and when the costume drama segment ended we found that he had made that pretense stick ever since.

After Julia points out that it is to her advantage to emancipate Quentin from his bondage to Petofi, Angelique agrees to help. She still will not answer Julia’s questions. After she leaves the room, Julia looks in the mirror, sees an image of Angelique, and says that now she understands what she is going to do and believes it will work. That puts her one up on the audience.

Julia looks for an image of herself, and finds Angelique. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The scene pairs Julia and Angelique as two women whose lives have been shaped by their pursuit of Barnabas. Their bickering makes this similarity explicit. When Julia looks in the mirror and sees Angelique, they put very heavy emphasis on the similarity. In a brilliant, but now inaccessible, post on the great Collinsport Historical Society,* Wallace McBride wrote that “On Dark Shadows, your reflection always tells the truth.” He demonstrated that on the show, reflections are very strongly coded as true, so much so that they must be making a serious statement when they give us an image like this one. They are committing to the idea that Julia is, in some important way, the same as Angelique.

There are also a couple of scenes featuring the repulsive Roger Davis as artist Charles Delaware Tate. Mr Davis is especially hard to take in a scene with Donna McKechnie as the mysterious Amanda Harris. Miss McKechnie had already done outstanding work on Broadway as a singer and dancer by this time, but she felt herself to be a beginner as an actress, and she could not conceal her discomfort when Mr Davis shouted his lines. The 4:3 aspect ratio of old-time American television meant that the performers spent much of their time only a few inches from each other, and when Mr Davis yells in Miss McKechnie’s ear, she winces. He clutches at her arm, and she recoils; before she can relax from that invasion of her space, he slams down on a table, making a loud noise and causing her to jump.

Mr Davis’ incessant shouting will bring back memories for viewers who have been with the show from the beginning. The scene takes place on a set which is known in the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s as the Evans Cottage. The Evans Cottage was home to drunken sad-sack Sam Evans and his daughter Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town. Sam, like Tate, was an artist, and the artworks scattered around the set in the 1897 segment remind us of the cottage’s iconography.

The first seven times we saw Sam, between #5 and #22, he was played by an actor called Mark Allen. Like Mr Davis, Allen had considerable training as an actor and a long resume of stage and screen appearances. Also like him, he is just terrible. Mr Davis did have extensive skills and could on occasion give nuanced performances, though he rarely chose to do so. He much preferred spending his time roughing up the women and children in the cast.

But Allen never once did a good job of acting. In each of his episodes, he either shouted every line with the same ear-splitting bellow, or whined every line in the same putrid snivel. Allen didn’t assault his scene partners on camera, as Mr Davis routinely did, though Kathryn Leigh Scott, who played Maggie, has made it clear that she did not feel safe in scenes where they embraced. Moreover, in some corners of fandom there are persistent rumors about abusive behavior off-camera that led to Allen’s dismissal. People claim to have heard remarks cast members and others associated with the show let drop at Dark Shadows conventions over the years, and from those remarks they come to some alarming conclusions about what Allen did behind the scenes. Who knows if those conclusions are correct, or if the people who report the remarks even heard them clearly, but Allen was so unpleasant as a screen presence that it is tempting to believe the worst about him.

The point of Tate’s scene with Amanda is that she does not want to believe that she is an artificial being who came to life when he painted a portrait that looked like her. Tate’s success as an artist is the result of magic powers Petofi gave him; he just recently learned that he can make things pop into existence by drawing or painting them. To convince Amanda that he has this power, Tate sketches an imaginary man. She screams, and we see her looking at the man who has come into being.

This seems like a bad choice on Tate’s part. Why not draw an inanimate object instead? If he’d drawn a hat or a gold bar or a gemstone, he could just have given it to Amanda with his compliments. But now he has a 25 year old man whom he is obligated to help make his way in the world. If an inanimate object wasn’t a striking enough image to send the episode out with a dash of spectacle, then Tate could have created a farm animal, such as a donkey or a goat. If Amanda didn’t want such an animal, Tate could just shoo it outside and be confident someone would claim it- Collinsport is supposed to be a tiny town in the middle of a rural area, after all. But for all the irresponsible behavior we’ve come to accept from characters on Dark Shadows, we are not going to be able simply to forget about this human being. They are going to have to do something to account for him.

*A site which has now been taken over by a “crypto-based casino” outfit! You’d be safer at Collinwood.

Episode 758: Strangled on her stories

Undead blonde fire witches Laura and Angelique are trying to destroy each other, using Laura’s son Jamison and Jamison’s uncle Quentin as their cat’s paws. At the beginning of the episode, it looks like the spell Angelique and Quentin are casting is about to incinerate Laura; at the end, it looks like the spell Laura is casting is incinerating Angelique. In between, Quentin’s sister Judith notices that something is wrong with Jamison, and suspects that whatever Quentin and Angelique are up to is the cause.

Quentin and Laura get all religioused-up asking the gods of ancient Egypt to help them against Laura. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Laura is just about out of story, so we can see that she will be leaving the show soon. She has important relationships to all the characters on the show right now, so her departure will kick this segment of Dark Shadows, a costume drama set in the year 1897, into a new phase. Today’s episode is too deeply involved with the back and forth in the battle of the witches to give much indication as to what that next phase will be, but Judith’s perceptiveness suggests that whatever it is will keep up the rapid pace set in the first twelve weeks of the flashback, unencumbered by characters who slow things down by refusing to face facts.

Longtime viewers will be intrigued by variations on some familiar themes. Angelique orders Quentin to bring her a mirror and then leave the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood. Obviously she is going to use it to cast a spell that will protect her from Laura, but she refuses to tell Quentin the particulars. We know well how powerful reflections are in the universe of Dark Shadows; Wallace McBride of the Collinsport Historical Society made some very penetrating observations about how that motif was already in place in episode #1 in his 18 April 2020 post on that treasured, but now only intermittently available, site.

Later, Laura is in the drawing room at the great house on the estate about to tell Judith the secret of the mysterious Barnabas Collins, but Angelique enters, makes googly eyes at Laura, and thereby robs her of the power to speak. When the show had its first séance in #170 and #171, it was held in this room and another iteration of Laura was in attendance. It was that Laura who looked at the medium with bulging eyes when she began to speak, and that medium struggled to speak just as Laura does now. So today we see the tables turned on Laura.

Quentin and Angelique are alone for a moment in the foyer of the great house. He backs her against the portrait of Barnabas that hangs there and asks why she prefers Barnabas to him. That is a question that will have occurred to the audience. The two of them look great together and have a lot of fun together, while Barnabas hates Angelique. All she does is kill his family and friends to punish him for refusing to love her. She brushes Quentin off and orders him to go back to the Old House.

In the final scene, Quentin returns to the Old House and is baffled to find that Angelique not only got there before him, but that she has had time to play a long game of solitaire since returning from the great house. She dismisses his questions and tells him that she wants him to be with her when “it happens.” Before he can find the words to ask what she is expecting, she bursts into flames.

It seems that Angelique is in two places at once. More precisely, it seems that there are two of her, one that Quentin left in the great house, and another who was in the Old House all along waiting to be incinerated by Laura’s spells. Presumably the one in the Old House is a Doppelgänger that Angelique used the mirror to create. Nowadays, the idea of a home-made Doppelgänger fabricated to serve a specific purpose will remind many people of the 2017 season of Twin Peaks, with its concept of a “tulpa.” The Buddhist concept of the tulpa was indeed in circulation in the USA in the 1960s; Annie Besant had introduced it to the Theosophist movement, which had many followers in the Midwest, where writer Sam Hall was born. But Besant and her fans seem to have used the word in a sense closer to its original, in which people attaining Buddha-hood have the power to send copies of themselves back into the world to teach others pursuing enlightenment. Later heirs of Theosophy have tried to develop a non-Buddhist meaning for the word tulpa, but using it to refer to a lookalike that some practitioner of black magic can whip up to do a job appears to be the intellectual property of Lynch/ Frost Productions.

Be that as it may, we have seen ever since Laura was first on the show from December 1966 to March 1967 that each of the supernatural beings on Dark Shadows is a complex of related but independent phenomena, some of which may work at cross-purposes with each other. Angelique in particular seems to create another version of herself and send it out into the world each time she casts a spell. Since others of Angelique’s creatures have gone on to defy her, even trying to kill her, it must have come as a relief to know that this time the Doppelgänger would be going up in flames by nightfall.

Episode 665: Burn, witch, burn!

Vampire Barnabas Collins has traveled back in time to the year 1796 in order to save well-meaning governess Vicki Winters from being hanged. To his disappointment, she was hanged yesterday, and now appears to be dead. The audience knows that wicked witch Angelique intervened so that Vicki would survive the hanging and appear to be dead so that she can be buried alive. Angelique explains at the beginning of today’s episode that she will lift the spell once Vicki is in the ground so that she can die a slow, painful, terrifying death.

When Barnabas left 1969 on his mission of mercy, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard had been dealing with the effects of a curse Angelique cast on her in 1968 that caused her to be obsessed with a fear of being buried alive. In fact, Liz appeared to have died, and was in a coffin. That story was unexciting when it was introduced, and had been dragging on for months and months.

Regular viewers may sigh when they see that Angelique is still hung up on the idea of live burial, but this time the whole thing moves very swiftly. Angelique goes to Barnabas in the tower room of the great house of Collinwood. She tells him Vicki is still alive and that if he goes away with her she will save her. He disbelieves her, and signals his servant Ben to rush in with a burning torch and immolate Angelique. Lara Parker enjoys the part of the burning Angelique so hugely that I laughed out loud watching it, but that didn’t detract from the episode. On the contrary, the joy Parker took in performance was one of the most appealing things about her.

Angelique’s dying screams attract the attention of a long-term guest in the house, the Countess DuPrés. The countess goes to the tower room to investigate, and catches sight of Barnabas. The countess had seen Barnabas die, and is shocked that he appears to be alive. She talks with perpetually confused heiress Millicent Collins, who has also seen Barnabas and who has discussed him with her husband, roguish naval officer Nathan Forbes. The countess gathers from what Millicent says that Barnabas is a vampire. This doesn’t quite fit with the previously established continuity- Barnabas returned to a night sometime after the events of episodes 449-451, when the countess helped Barnabas’ father Joshua in an effort to free Barnabas of his curse. It seems rather unlikely that it would slip the countess’ mind that Barnabas is a vampire. At any rate, this time she vows to destroy him at the first opportunity.

When Angelique is destroyed, her spell is broken and Vicki revives. Barnabas goes to the drawing room of the great house and is astounded that Vicki is alive. We may wonder if he would have gone away with Angelique had he known she was telling the truth when she said Vicki was not really dead. He urges Vicki and her boyfriend, the irksome Peter Bradford, to go away as quickly as possible, as far as possible. Vicki asks for a few seconds alone with Barnabas; Peter leaves them, and she tells Barnabas that she will always feel close to him. She gives him a little kiss, and rushes off. Barnabas was hung up on Vicki for a long time; his facial expression as he watches her leave with another man suggests that he has for the first time managed to perform a selfless act. It’s a lovely moment. I only wish Vicki had been played by Alexandra Moltke Isles, who played the part for the first 126 weeks of Dark Shadows, instead of Carolyn Groves. Miss Groves wasn’t a bad actress, but if the goal is to give the character some kind of closure it is unsatisfying to see her as someone who only had the part for three episodes as opposed to the person who was there in 335.

Barnabas sees that the time has come to return to 1969. Ben does not know that Barnabas has traveled through time; as far as he knows, he was there all along. But when Barnabas announces he will be leaving, Ben insists on following him. Ben stands by and watches while Barnabas stands in a graveyard and calls out to his friend Julia. Ben does not know who Julia is, any more than he knows that Barnabas was standing on this same spot in #661 when he left 1969. Neither he nor Barnabas knows that the countess and Millicent are spying on them from the bushes.

Barnabas keeps calling out to Julia, but nothing happens. Barnabas decides that he will have to make the trip to the 1960s the same way he did before- as a vampire chained in a coffin hidden in the secret room of the Collins family mausoleum. He takes Ben to that room, and tells him to chain the coffin up after dawn. He tells him they will never see each other again. In its own way, this farewell is as poignant as the one Barnabas shared with Vicki. It is also shadowed with menace, as we see the countess and Millicent still watching.

The next morning, the countess comes to the mausoleum with Nathan. It is a bit puzzling to see Nathan. The night before, Barnabas bit Nathan and forced him to confess to many serious crimes; we last saw him in gaol. Yet here he is, not only free but wearing his federal coat with officer’s braid. The countess says that she got him out of gaol to stake Barnabas. Even in Soap Opera Land, this is a bit of a stretch. It’s an even bigger stretch that, having been under Barnabas’ power, Nathan is now able to stake him.

Nathan is holding the stake over Barnabas’ heart and raising the hammer when the lights go down. We hear a loud bang, and the episode ends.

In his post about this one at the Collinsport Historical Society, Patrick McCray outlines its slam-bang plot, full of sudden reversals and poignant farewells. Patrick does such a great job of capturing the verve and joy of this Genuinely Good Episode that I wondered whether I should even bother writing a post about it. At the opposite extreme, Danny Horn’s post on Dark Shadows Every Day was so full of irritable complaints about continuity problems and other imperfections in Ron Sproat’s script that I was inclined to write a long and impassioned defense.

But I will leave the debate to the two of them. I’ll just say that if anyone is curious about what Dark Shadows is like and wants to watch a single episode to get the flavor of the thing, this would be as good a choice as any.

Episode 662: The course of history

Vampire Barnabas Collins has traveled back in time to the year 1796, where he plans to change what happened on one crucial night.

Yesterday’s episode was a clip show excerpted from #456-#460, the last full week of a period when Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the 1790s. Today’s consists largely of reenactments of those scenes. It all pays off in the last minute, when a confrontation between Barnabas and roguish naval officer Nathan Forbes ends differently than it had the first time round. As before, Nathan loads a crossbow with a wooden bolt and waits for Barnabas to come to him, hoping that he will shoot the bolt through Barnabas’ heart and thereby achieve the same effect as a wooden stake. The first time, Nathan missed Barnabas’ heart and Barnabas killed him. Unlike the first time, Barnabas knows what Nathan is planning. So he opens the door, but does not enter the room. Nathan can hear Barnabas’ voice, but cannot see him. Finally Barnabas jumps Nathan from behind, evidently biting him.

Barnabas originally killed Nathan as revenge for Nathan’s role in his mother’s death. This time he is willing to let Nathan live. He wants to take control of him and force him to tell the authorities that he lied when he testified against governess Victoria Winters and her boyfriend, an unpleasant man named Peter. Victoria is herself a time-traveler, and Barnabas got to be quite fond of her in her original period, the 1960s. She is scheduled to be hanged tonight for her many crimes, and Peter is also condemned to the gallows. Barnabas has come to rescue them.

During the opening title sequence, Thayer David announces that “Today the part of Victoria Winters will be played by Carolyn Groves.” When we first see her, Victoria is asleep in her cell at the Collinsport gaol, and her face looks very much like that of Alexandra Moltke Isles, the original Victoria.

A rude awakening for Vicki C. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas wakes Victoria. She is puzzled to see him. He has never told her that he was a vampire; even when he was biting her on the neck and sucking her blood for a week in March 1968, she didn’t seem to catch on. She just seemed to think he had a particularly aggressive make-out technique. She thinks that the Barnabas she knew in the 1960s was a descendant of the one she knew in the 1790s, and that the one from the 1790s is dead. Barnabas would rather not get into the weeds about his personal history, such as the countless murders he has committed, and gives Victoria a truncated account of how he, the man from the 1790s, is laboring under a curse that made it seem that he was dead. He doesn’t explain how he got into her cell, how he knows who Peter is, or how he plans to free the two of them from their death sentences. He asks her to take all of that on faith.

Miss Groves plays Victoria as so happy to see Barnabas she smiles all through her account of her imminent and, she believes, inevitable execution. That’s odd to see, but it fits so perfectly with the delight Victoria always took in Barnabas’ company that it shouldn’t bother longtime viewers.

Mrs Isles was cast as the original Victoria in large part because she looked so much like Joan Bennett that Bennett famously mistook her for her daughter when she first saw her. In the Collinsport Historical Society’s 30 December 2017 post for this episode, Patrick McCray not only tells us that Miss Groves appeared in a play with Joan Bennett in 1960, but provides a still of the cast in which the two women look like they could be mother and daughter:

Screenshot from The Collinsport Historical Society, 30 December 2017.

The show spent much of its first year hinting heavily that Victoria was the unacknowledged daughter of Bennett’s character, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. They never collected those hints and built them into a story, and the question of Victoria’s parentage was left as one of Dark Shadows’ most annoying loose ends. Perhaps Miss Groves’ casting is a sign that the failure to resolve that question bothered the makers of the show as much as it did the audience.

Episode 568: The unchaperoned

In May 1967, seagoing con man Jason had for long months been blackmailing matriarch Liz into letting him stay at the great house of Collinwood. He told Liz that people in the village of Collinsport were starting to talk about the presence of an unmarried man in her house. He informed Liz that they would solve this problem by getting married. She laughed in his face, but he pressed his threats to expose her terrible secret, and they were in the middle of a wedding ceremony when Liz broke down and announced her secret to everyone. It then turned out that there never really was a secret- the whole thing was a sort of misunderstanding. A few days later, Jason was dead, and he hasn’t been mentioned since March 1968.

Today, Liz’ brother Roger shows up at the Old House on the estate, home of their distant cousin Barnabas. He is looking for Julia, a permanent houseguest who settled in at the great house a few weeks after Jason disappeared. Barnabas, a bachelor, tells him that Julia is staying with him for a few days. Roger’s startled response makes it clear that the mores Jason mentioned in #243 have not changed. But Roger is not in a position to insist on propriety, and he has come on an urgent matter. Liz has escaped from Windcliff, the mental hospital of which Julia is the nominal director, and he wants her to come back with him at once to the great house so that she can consult with her staff on the telephone.

Roger is momentarily stunned to learn that Julia is sleeping at Barnabas’ house.

Barnabas tells Roger that Julia is ill and cannot help him. He insists, so Barnabas goes up to her bedroom. Not only does he tell her about Roger and his news, but he also informs her that he earlier found an unpleasant man named Peter who prefers to be called Jeff in the basement. Since the basement houses a lot of technical equipment and a stolen corpse which they are planning to use as material for a Frankenstein’s monster, Julia finds this alarming. But Barnabas has talked Peter/ Jeff into helping them with their little arts & crafts project, and he assures her that he has Peter/ Jeff under control.

Julia is in fact ill, and she tells Barnabas she cannot see Roger. Julia has been bitten by a vampire named Tom. Barnabas, a recovering vampire himself, plans to use her as bait to lure Tom into the bedroom tonight so that he can shoot him with a silver bullet. He explains to her that he took a candlestick to the local silversmith earlier this morning and that the silversmith melted it down and forged five silver bullets. No wonder people are reluctant to leave Collinsport, even much bigger places don’t have same-day service like that.

We cut to the basement, where Julia is wearing her lab coat. Barnabas tells her it is 5 PM. There is no sign they have been working on the project; for all we can tell, they waited around her bedroom all day and decided to get to work shortly before sundown. Peter/ Jeff enters and reports for work. They tell him to work on a particular piece of equipment. Barnabas takes Julia back up to her bedroom, leaving Peter/ Jeff alone with the corpse. Since he was just recruited for the project, this shows a remarkable degree of confidence in his loyalty.

Julia is sitting in a chair and Barnabas is hiding in the closet when Tom materializes. Julia puts herself between Barnabas and Tom, and Tom vanishes. Julia apologizes; Barnabas knows enough about the compulsions that afflict the vampire’s victim that he does not seem to be really upset with her. He frets that they will never have such a good shot at Tom again now that he knows to be on his guard. He looks out the window and thinks he sees Tom on the lawn. He turns, and finds that Julia, too, is gone. He realizes that she must now be alone with Tom.

In his Dark Shadows Daybook post about this episode, Patrick McCray makes some apt remarks about the acting. As Barnabas, Jonathan Frid starts the episode with an unusually self-assured tone in his confrontation with Peter/ Jeff. That’s what the scene calls for, since we need to believe that Barnabas’ force of personality is sufficient to overpower Peter/ Jeff’s aversion to the gruesome project. But it all falls apart about halfway through, when Frid has some line trouble, and as a result we wind up listening to the arguments with which Barnabas defends his position. Patrick doesn’t say anything about those arguments, but on Dark Shadows Every Day Danny Horn does a fine job explaining how utterly unconvincing they are.

Playing Julia as an addict needing a fix, Grayson Hall falls far short of her usual standard, but Patrick doesn’t blame her: “These are the heavy blinking, o-mouthed, head vacillating performances that critics of Hall use against her. I don’t call it bad acting… there’s only so much you can do with a cartoon. But seeing Julia like that is always evidence of a questionable match.” I like the tenderness Barnabas and Julia show each other in their scenes yesterday and today; for me, Barnabas’ earnest concern for Julia and her quiet trust in him outweigh the deficiencies in Frid’s memory for dialogue and Hall’s attempt to show Julia’s weakness. But those deficiencies are impossible to overlook, unfortunately.

Episode 557: Unannounced visitors

Act One consists of recovering vampire Barnabas and mad scientist Julia standing around Barnabas’ front parlor recapping various ongoing storylines.

Danny Horn devotes his post about this episode to a detailed analysis of this scene. He shows that Jonathan Frid’s performance and Grayson Hall’s are open to many objections. They fall short in such technical categories as “knowing their lines” and “standing on their marks” and “having the slightest idea what is going on.” But they are fascinating to watch nonetheless. Danny declares that “[t]he point of these scenes is to see how long two adults can stand around in a room saying preposterous things to each other.” Frid and Hall operate at such a high level of tension that the prospect of either of them breaking character generates enough suspense to keep us on the edge of our seats.

Patrick McCray wrote two separate posts about this episode. In the one that went live 13 September 2017, he too focuses on the performances in Act One. He writes:

Poor Jonathan Frid. He must have had a rough night. I am usually oblivious to his infamous (and completely understandable) line trouble, but in this one, it is so palpable that I totally understand why he retired from TV after DARK SHADOWS left the air. In his early dialogue with Grayson Hall, you can see sheer terror in the eyes of both performers as Barnabas haltingly recalls a trip to the hospital. This is followed by the “Frid Surge,” where Barnabas becomes far more committed and energetic when he turns to face the teleprompter. Of course, this gives him that great sense of vulnerability that was the secret to Barnabas’ success.
Patrick McCray, “The Dark Shadows Daybook: August 13,” posted on the Collinsport Historical Society, 13 September 2017.

This is the only post on the Collinsport Historical Society tagged “Frid Surge”; that’s too bad, I’d like to see that phenomenon tracked throughout the series. I should also mention that Patrick goes on in this post to express his “confidence that Frid could have acted the doors off the collected ensemble had the poor guy just been given another frickin day to study his sides.”

Barnabas and Julia’s recap scene ends when an unexpected visitor barges in. He is an unpleasant man named Peter, who prefers to be called Jeff. Peter/ Jeff is fiancé to well-meaning governess Vicki, whom Barnabas and Julia know to have been abducted by Frankenstein’s monster Adam. Adam came to Barnabas’ house yesterday and threatened to kill Vicki unless Barnabas and Julia created a mate for him.

Peter/ Jeff was assistant to Eric Lang, the mad scientist who created Adam, and he knows that Barnabas and Julia were connected to the experiment. He does not know for sure that Adam is Lang’s creation, that Barnabas and Julia brought Adam to life after Lang’s death, or that Adam has abducted Vicki. He does, however, have grounds to suspect that each of these things might be true. In this scene, he announces his suspicions to Barnabas and Julia. They huddle in one corner of the room while he shouts his lines in his singularly irritating voice. They deny all three of his points. One of the commenters on Danny’s post, “Straker,” summed up their reaction admirably:

Frid and Hall were too professional to show it but I sensed they were both annoyed when Roger Davis marched in and started yelling. It’s kind of like how you feel when you’re at a party and the host’s five year old son throws a tantrum. Sort of an embarrassed tolerance.
Comment left by “Straker” at 6:21 am Pacific time 31 July 2020 on “Episode 557: A Race of Monsters,” by Danny Horn, Dark Shadows Every Day, 1 January 2015

Roger Davis as Peter/ Jeff, in one of the most subtle moments of his performance. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

After Peter/ Jeff’s scene, it is Barnabas’ turn to be an unwelcome guest. He calls on occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes. Barnabas and Julia suspect that Stokes may be the evil mastermind who has turned the previously gentle Adam toward evil plans. When Stokes hears Barnabas knocking on his door, he looks up and rasps to himself “Go away… No one is home…” This is one of my favorite lines in the whole series. Stokes was quite cheerful when he first involved himself in the strange goings-on, but as he has found himself drawn deeper and deeper into the unholy world of Collinsport he has come to regret his decisions.

Stokes is quite impatient with Barnabas’ demands that he tell him what he knows and his refusal to reciprocate with information about himself. It is only because Vicki is in danger that Stokes tells Barnabas anything at all.

Stokes already knows how Adam came into being, and Barnabas tells him about Adam’s conversation with him. This brings up a question about the scene with Peter/ Jeff. Why couldn’t Barnabas and Julia have trusted Peter/ Jeff with as much information as Barnabas here gives Stokes? Peter/ Jeff can no more go to the police than Stokes can, he will not tell Vicki anything about Lang’s experiment, and Barnabas and Julia have no reason to suspect him of being behind Adam’s turn to evil. These questions don’t come to mind during the scene with Peter/ Jeff, partly because he is so disagreeable a presence that we want him off screen as soon as possible, and partly because it has long been Barnabas’ habit to tell his enemies everything he knows while he zealously guards his secrets from potential helpers.

Patrick McCray’s second post about this episode, published 30 July 2018, includes an analysis of Thayer David’s portrayal of Stokes:

Professor Eliot Stokes gains fascinating dimension in 557. Normally, jovial and helpful, we see his protectiveness of Adam reveal an irascible and sternly just man within. Anton LaVey extolled “responsibility to the responsible,” and there are few other places where Barnabas gets both barrels of that. Stokes is perhaps the most inherently good man in Collinsport since his fellow freemason, Bill Malloy, took his last diving lesson. (Ironically, at the hands of Thayer David’s first character.) Stokes’ prime reason for siding with Adam and not Barnabas? The former vampire and Julia have withheld vital information for months. Yes, they have necessary trust issues, but this is Stokes we’re talking about. Adam may be a wildly unpredictable man-beast, capable of leveling Collinsport to sand before breakfast, but he’s also (until later in the episode) a prime graduate of Rousseau’s Finishing School for Noble Savages. He’s nursed greedily on the milk of morality that spurts abundantly from the ripe and straining teat of of Eliot Stokes’ moral tutelage. It takes a Nicholas Blair — so often Stokes’ foil — to teach him the less savory lessons in humanity. Stokes knows that there’s only so much danger in which Adam can find himself… Victoria Winters is another matter.
Patrick McCray, “The Dark Shadows Daybook: Episode 557,” published on The Collinsport Historical Society, 30 July 2018

Barnabas passes the baton to Stokes, who becomes the third character in the episode to pay an unwelcome visit. He goes to Adam. He asks the big guy who has taught him to be cruel and amoral, and gets nothing but lies in return. He tries to persuade him that he must not hurt an innocent person, and Adam angrily declares that it is “fair” for him to make Barnabas watch him kill Vicki if Barnabas will not make a mate for him.

In Patrick McCray’s 2017 post, he praises Robert Rodan’s performance as Adam:

Robert Rodan issues a highly cerebral, emotionally packed performance. Rodan never receives the credit he deserves. Much of Adam’s stint on the show finds him equipped with an eloquent, even sesquipedalian command of the language. His inner conflict is as existential as it gets… Where do you turn? Rodan balances this absurd chimera of conflicts with effortless aplomb that makes Cirque du Soleil look as clumsy as a Matt Helm fight scene.
Patrick McCray, “The Dark Shadows Daybook: August 13,” posted on the Collinsport Historical Society, 13 September 2017.

Patrick amplifies that praise in his 2018 post:

Robert Rodan is an unsung hero of an actor, delivering his existential angst with passion and truth. It’s a shame that his identification with an eventually unpopular character was probably a factor in Rodan not being recycled by Dan Curtis, despite being the dark-haired, blue-eyed “type” that typified the ruggedly handsome, DS norm (such as Selby, Lacy, Crothers, George, Ryan, Prentice, Storm, Bain, etc.)
Patrick McCray, “The Dark Shadows Daybook: Episode 557,” published on The Collinsport Historical Society, 30 July 2018

While I always found the sight of Conrad Bain a guarantee of a fine performance, I can’t say it ever occurred to me to class him as “ruggedly handsome” in the way that one might class the other men Patrick lists. There’s no accounting for taste, I suppose.

Episode 550: Much given to melodrama

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

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

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

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

Broken Adam. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

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

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

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

Episode 525: Tree in the forest

Beginning in #365, well-meaning governess Vicki Winters spent nineteen weeks in the 1790s. Ever since Vicki brought Dark Shadows back to a contemporary setting in March 1968, the show has been dealing with the consequences of her journey.

Today, we open with a dream sequence. The boyfriend who followed Vicki from the 1790s, a man named Peter, came to the twentieth century with total amnesia and a belligerent personality that kept him from listening when Vicki tried to explain who he was. His dream is about people and events from 1796, and it finally breaks down his insistence that he is someone else. That insistence was never at all interesting- it wasn’t as if his name were Watt Iduno Hu, in which case he and Vicki could at least have done a version of Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First?” But now that it is over, there are no obstacles at all between Peter and Vicki, and no reason for either of them to be on the show.

Meanwhile, suave warlock Nicholas Blair has carried a portrait of wicked witch Angelique from the bedroom where he is staying in the great house on the estate of Collinwood down to the drawing room. He makes a tremendous display of effort as he concentrates on the portrait, talks to it in an urgent voice, and makes many movements with his hands, all in an attempt to make contact with Angelique’s spirit so that he can reconstitute her body. Vicki walks in on him as he is doing this, and he breaks off, embarrassed. He finds out that Vicki owns the portrait, and she refuses him permission to borrow it.

Later, Nicholas finds out about Vicki’s visit to the 1790s. He is intrigued that in those days the same witchfinder who has disincorporated Angelique mistook Vicki for a witch and tried to perform an exorcism on her. He decides that the spot on which this rite took place must be the same as that where Angelique’s ashes are now deposited. So he casts a spell on Vicki, causing her to lead him to the place.

Other fansites feature complaints that Nicholas could just have cast a spell on Vicki during their first scene together. In his post about the episode on Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn writes of their first scene that “Nicholas actually has the power to mesmerize Vicki and get her to do whatever he wants, so technically he could just put the whammy on her right now, and tell her to clear the room.” And on Dark Shadows Before I Die, Christine Scoleri wonders “If Blair could make Vicki ‘listen and obey’ so easily, then why didn’t he just make her give him the portrait instead of getting all pissy when she refused to loan it to him?”

That didn’t bother me. When Vicki walked in on Nicholas in the drawing room, he was straining himself to make contact with the spirit of Angelique. He again puts himself deeply into his mumbo-jumbo when he casts his spell on Vicki. So it seemed perfectly reasonable to me that he couldn’t just drop what he was doing with the portrait and go directly into another spell.

The obvious sexual symbolism of the scene in the drawing room reinforces that point. On the Dark Shadows Daybook, Patrick McCray describes the display Nicholas makes while interacting with the painting depicting his putative sister as suggestive of incestuous feelings;* and the awkwardness Humbert Allen Astredo and Alexandra Moltke Isles bring out when Vicki walks in on Nicholas getting all worked up as he stares at a woman’s picture and puts all his energy into imagining her physical presence will likely seem familiar to anyone who has ever had a room-mate. Since Nicholas’ mind is so intensely engaged with the idea of Angelique, it isn’t hard to imagine that he would need time to redirect his attention to Vicki.

*His actual words were “uncomfortably Kentuckian,” but Mrs Acilius was born in Kentucky and is tired of incest jokes about her onetime neighbors. [UPDATE: Patrick points out his own Kentuckian heritage, and protests that his little joke was an irony fondly intended.]

Episode 472: Witches, curses, spirits!

Sarcastic dandy Roger, possessed by the spirit of wicked witch Angelique, visits mad scientist Dr Lang. The village of Collinsport was once a whaling center, and Lang is mindful enough of that long-ago history that he collects harpoons. Roger appears to be fascinated by Lang’s collection. He holds one of the finer pieces, admires it, fondles it, and tries to kill Lang with it. At the last moment, the murder is prevented by recovering vampire Barnabas and Julia, who is a scientist as mad as Lang but infinitely more interesting. As is typical of supernatural beings on Dark Shadows, Angelique projects her power through a portrait of herself; the portrait also has some adventures today.

There is a lot of great stuff in this one, as other bloggers have well explained. The 1960s were the heyday of Freudianism in the USA, and in the first year of the show the influence of that school of thought could often be traced in the scripts of Art Wallace and Francis Swann. Patrick McCray documents in his post on The Dark Shadows Daybook that this was an episode where writer Gordon Russell allowed himself to cut loose and have fun with the sillier side of the Freudian approach.

Roger caresses Lang’s harpoon. Screen capture by Dark Shadows Daybook.

On his Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn focuses on the scene where Barnabas and Julia decide to go and stop Roger. He points out that it is the first conversation they have had about something other than themselves, the first time Barnabas shares with Julia the secret of how he became a vampire, the first time they take heroic action, and the first time they are recognizably friends. It is that friendship that will drive the action of the show from now on.

Barnabas takes his friend Julia by the arm. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Every Day.

In their meticulously detailed summary of the action of the episode on their Dark Shadows Before I Die, John and Christine Scoleri capture the effect on the audience of the steady accumulation of one absurdity upon another as the episode goes on. Reading their unfailingly matter-of-fact description of the ever-mounting lunacies we witness in this half-hour is almost as exhilarating as it was watching them in the first place.

Barnabas calls Julia’s attention to the closing cliffhanger. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 470: Nonsense about names

Part One. Roger/ Joshua

Much to her surprise, well-meaning governess Vicki Winters came unstuck in time in #365 and found herself in the year 1795. She spent the first few weeks of her sojourn in the past telling all the characters she met about the other roles that their actors played in the first 73 weeks of Dark Shadows, thereby puzzling them and irritating the audience. After a few months, the people of Collinsport had decided to try Vicki on a capital charge of witchcraft. There were no laws against witchcraft in Massachusetts or anywhere else in the English speaking world in the 1790s, but Vicki had got on so many people’s nerves by that point that they were willing to overlook that technicality and sentence her to hang. She was whisked back to 1968 in #461, with so little time to spare before she died on the gallows that she came back with rope burns on her neck.

Throughout the first year of Dark Shadows, the writers used Vicki more than any other character to move the action. Unfortunately, they sometimes moved it by having her do things that served the plot, but that the character had no reason to do. That gave rise to “Dumb Vicki,” and Dumb Vicki was very much on display throughout the whole segment set in 1795-1796.

Now, emigrés from the late eighteenth century are starting to join Vicki in her time. We open today as the clock chimes midnight. Vicki, wearing her nightgown, is coming down the grand staircase in the foyer of the great house of Collinwood, roused by the sound of an unexpected voice in the drawing room. It is the voice of haughty overlord Joshua Collins, master of Collinwood in 1795. Vicki enters the room to find sarcastic dandy Roger Collins carrying on a lively, albeit one-sided, conversation with a portrait. Roger is convinced that he is Joshua, and deals with Vicki in just the lofty way Joshua dealt with her during the costume drama segment. He even brings up Vicki’s frequent confusion with names, something Roger could not possibly have known about. This, therefore, is no mere delusion of Roger’s- Joshua’s ghost really is taking possession of him, manipulated by a force with its own malign intentions.

It is no secret from the audience what that force is. Roger has become obsessed with a portrait depicting wicked witch Angelique, who in the 1795 segment wrought terrible harm to the Collins family. Angelique was responsible, in one way or another, for the deaths of both of Joshua’s siblings, both of his children, his wife, and many other people. Too late, Vicki learned that Angelique was the witch for whose crimes she was being condemned to hang. As we have seen other supernatural beings do on Dark Shadows before, Angelique is using her portrait as a means of projecting her powers into the world of the living.

Roger/ Joshua’s remark about the name trouble reminds us of Dumb Vicki, but that is not the version of the character we see today. Instead, we have a visit from Smart Vicki. When Roger keeps insisting that he is Joshua Collins, Vicki picks up a telephone and shows it to him, declaring that it is something that did not exist in Joshua’s time. Roger looks at the receiver in silence for a moment, then groggily asks “Is it for me?”

Vicki says that she will take the portrait back to the antique store where she bought it so that it can be sold to Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes. This is a bit jarring for returning viewers- in #464, Stokes offered Vicki $200 for the painting, and Roger countered with a bid of $50o. Evidently Roger didn’t actually pay Vicki the money, because he doesn’t say that it is his when he urges her to leave it in the house.

Vicki and Roger leave the drawing room. Roger slips back in, takes the painting, and marches out of the house with it. While he does so, a nice little bit of music featuring the harp plays on the soundtrack. I don’t know that it is new, but I didn’t recognize it.

Part Two. Peter/ Jeff

Angelique not only killed Joshua’s son Barnabas, but cursed him to rise at night as a vampire. Barnabas returned to the great estate of Collinwood in 1967. He has been passing himself off to the living Collinses as their distant cousin from England. When Barnabas found that Vicki had visited his native period of history, he bit her in an attempt to keep her from revealing his secret.

Vicki and Barnabas were on their way to spend eternity together when she crashed her car to avoid hitting a pedestrian. In the hospital, the physician on duty when Vicki and Barnabas were brought in, Dr Eric Lang, turned out to be exactly the right sort of mad scientist. He has apparently cured Barnabas of vampirism. It is unclear whether Vicki remembers that Barnabas bit her and sucked her blood, and quite clear that she doesn’t think of him as a monster.

In the 1790s, Vicki met and somehow fell in love with an unpleasant man named Peter. Peter has returned to the present with her; in fact, he was the pedestrian Vicki had to crash her car to avoid hitting. They have seen each other several times since, and for no worthwhile reason Peter keeps insisting he is named Jeff. Peter/ Jeff shows up at Collinwood today. Vicki ushers him into what she alone calls “the living room,” and everyone else calls “the drawing room.” Peter/ Jeff asks Vicki if she loves Barnabas and plans to marry him. She tells him she does not. She says that she doesn’t want to hurt Barnabas’ feelings, but that she will have to break the news to him as soon as possible.

Part Three. Barnabas, Barnabas

Barnabas is still in the hospital. We see him in his room, in the daylight, looking at himself in the mirror. He can’t resist touching his reflection. It is a genuinely beautiful little moment, and an eloquent image. In the contrast between the solidity and familiarity of Barnabas’ standard right profile shot and the fragile little image slightly distorted in the mirror, we see a point of decision. The ghoul has not been destroyed, but a new and very vulnerable human life now co-exists with him in the same body. Wallace McBride says that “On Dark Shadows, your reflection always tells the truth“; this reflection tells a deep enough truth to keep the show going for years.

Barnabas meets Barnabas. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Vicki visits Barnabas in his hospital room to tell him that she cannot marry him. She thinks that she and Peter might be meant for each other. She also tells Barnabas that there are signs Angelique is making her influence felt at Collinwood again.

Vicki knows that her news about Peter will hurt Barnabas, but she understands that if they are to fight against Angelique, there can be no secrets between them. Barnabas understands this as well. Therefore, he decides to surrender immediately. Right after his scene with Vicki, we see him telling Lang he has decided to revert to vampirism.

That reaction is absurd, but it goes to the heart of the character as we came to understand him in the part of Dark Shadows set in the years 1795 and 1796. He did not believe that gracious lady Josette could love him, so he had a casual fling with her maid, Angelique. He did not believe Angelique cared very deeply about him, so he cast her aside once it became clear Josette was willing to marry him. He did not believe Josette could forgive him for having come to her from a dalliance with Angelique, so he did not tell Josette when Angelique vowed vengeance on them both. At each point, Barnabas’ underestimation of his own lovableness led to disaster. If only Barnabas could have read Jonathan Frid’s fan mail, he and Josette would have had a happy, quiet life and died in obscurity in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Part Four. Vicki

For her part, Vicki spent the first 38 weeks of Dark Shadows growing close to strange and troubled boy David Collins, who tried to kill her more than once, tried to kill his father Roger and frame her for it, who talks to ghosts, and whose mother is an undead fire witch. In the same time, she fell in love with a man named Burke, who spent years in prison for a killing in which Roger had a part but for which he was also very much responsible. While in the 1790s she fell in love with Peter, who committed many crimes and would doubtless have become a killer had Vicki not killed his man before he got to him. So Barnabas’ weird nature and career of homicide hardly guarantee that Vicki will spurn him.

I often wonder what might have been had the show decided to initiate Vicki into Barnabas’ secret. Alexandra Moltke Isles and David Henesy triumphed over some stunningly bad writing to make the story of Vicki’s bonding with David the one consistently interesting thread of the first year of Dark Shadows. Now that there are good writers and other stories that are working, I can only suppose she and Jonathan Frid would have given us something for the ages if they had been allowed to show Vicki coming to accept the true Barnabas.

There are several ways they could have done that. Maybe she gradually learns the horrible truth, can’t go to the authorities right away because she needs Barnabas as an ally against a more immediate threat, and by the time that threat passes decides he’s a good risk. Or maybe she becomes a vampire herself and finds out about his past in the process of being cured.

Or, most daring of all, maybe it turns out Vicki knew that Barnabas was a vampire all along. Sure, she was upset when she thought he’d killed her friend Maggie- why do you think she invited herself to spend the night at his house during that period? She had the guilts because she had failed to save Maggie and wanted him to bite her as punishment. Sure, there were some sleepless nights when it looked like he might be planning to kill David in order to silence him- why do you think she kept making herself available to Barnabas in that period as well, if she wasn’t offering herself as a tool he could use to keep the boy quiet without hurting him?