comic villain – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 509: Adam, last name unknown

Unloved Frankenstein’s monster Adam has survived a plunge from the cliff at Widow’s Hill and made his way into the home of blind ex-artist Sam Evans. Sam realizes that Adam is badly hurt and cannot speak much English; with great kindness, he tries to clean and bandage Adam’s wounds.

Sage Timothy Eliot Stokes comes in. Adam, who in his few weeks of life has had little but hostility from humans, is alarmed by the sight of another one, and flees. Stokes explains to Sam who Adam is, and Sam’s sympathy for the big guy only deepens. This retelling of the creature’s encounter with the blind hermit in The Bride of Frankenstein is affectingly done.

Wicked witch Angelique, calling herself Cassandra, has made her way into the apartment of local man Tony Peterson. Tony is agitated by the presence of Angelique/ Cassandra and keeps telling her he wants her to go home to her husband and leave him alone. She tells Tony he is “Quite a Puritan,” reminding us that when Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in New England in the 1790s, actor Jerry Lacy played the Rev’d Mr Trask, a fanatical but utterly inept witchfinder who inadvertently served Angelique’s darkest purposes. Mr Lacy plays Tony quite differently than he did Trask, but Angelique/ Cassandra told Tony in #481 that she chose him as her cat’s paw because he reminded her of Trask. She gets him to strike his cigarette lighter, sending him back into the trance in which he can deny Angelique/ Cassandra nothing.

Well-meaning governess Vicki has made her way to Stokes’ apartment. It was Vicki who took Dark Shadows back in time to the 1790s, when she came unstuck in time during a séance in #365. It seemed at the beginning of the costume drama segment that Vicki would regain the position she held in the first months of the show as our point of view character, that she would again provide the emotional anchor of the show in her scenes as governess alone with the young children of the house, and that she would drive the action as she had to think on her feet and come up with plausible lies to secure a place in an unfamiliar century. As it happened, she did none of those things. She was shut out of all the main action, was never seen giving a lesson to either of her charges, and when she was on camera spent her time telling everyone she met that they were played by an actor who had another part in the first 73 weeks of the show. Long before Vicki came back to the 1960s in #461, the character had become all but insupportable.

The action now revolves around recovering vampire Barnabas Collins, and Barnabas steadfastly refuses to include Vicki in his life. Faced with that blank wall, Vicki has spent some time hanging around with a man named Peter whose only story point is that he wants to be called Jeff. This does not make for much drama. Vicki learned a great deal in the 1790s, and recognized Angelique/ Cassandra as soon as she showed up in 1968. But she can’t fight her by herself, and so she has responded to Barnabas’ aloofness by trying to forget what she knows.

Stokes has called Vicki to his apartment to enlist her help against Angelique/ Cassandra. Longtime viewers will remember that Vicki led the fight against Dark Shadows’ first supernatural menace, undead blonde witch Laura Murdoch Collins, and that for support in that battle she was the one who recruited the services of the show’s first sage, parapsychologist Peter Guthrie. This much diminished Vicki is now subordinated to the sage. He calls her in, he commands her to tell her story, he tells her that her story is true, and he requires her services. He shows her a silhouette of Trask and insists she overcome her reluctance to look at it. When a knock comes at the door, he even sends her out the back way and tells her that his next visitor must not know of her connection with him, as if he were dismissing a prostitute.

Stokes tells Vicki he can’t afford to be seen with her.

Oddest of all, Stokes already seems to know everything Vicki does before they talk. In #507, he laid out a theory that would be plausible to someone who knew exactly what Vicki knows about the strange goings-on, but not to anyone who knows one thing more or less than she does. Yet today we see that he is talking with Vicki about them for the first time. It is unclear what he could learn from her, or what contribution she could make to his efforts.

The visitor from whom Stokes wants to hide Vicki is Tony, giving his name as “Arthur Hailey,” perhaps in honor of the novelist whose Airport was topping the bestseller lists when the episode was made. Stokes is quite relaxed around Tony, offering him first brandy and then cheese. Tony accepts both. He exclaims “I like cheese!” in an awkward voice that makes it clear we are listening, not to Jerry Lacy’s acting, but to Tony’s. While Stokes is out of the room fetching the cheese, Tony sprinkles a powder Angelique/ Cassandra gave him into Stokes’ glass. Tony looks away from the table before they take their drinks. When they do, it is Tony who chokes and collapses, not Stokes.

This is the second time we’ve seen that staple of farce, “The Old Switcheroo.” In #402, Barnabas tried to poison Angelique, and had to think fast when she passed her glass to his mother. That use of the trope confirmed that, while Barnabas is undeniably a villain, he is a comic villain who endears himself to us as we watch him scramble through one failed scheme after another, while Angelique is a menace to be taken seriously. Now, Angelique has settled in for the long term, and the show will quickly run out of characters if she maintains the kill rate she had in the eighteenth century. They have to dial her threat level down considerably. One way of doing that is to give her a henchman who is, most of the time, unaware of her power over him, and who is consistently luckless when she activates him; another is for her to use comically unreliable means to pursue her evil ends. She does not yet cut the Wile E. Coyote-esque figure that Barnabas does, but neither is she in imminent danger of vaporizing the whole story and leaving ABC with thirty minutes of dead air on weekday afternoons.

This was the first episode directed by John Weaver. Except for one week in March 1968 when executive producer Dan Curtis took the helm, directing duties for the first 497 episodes of Dark Shadows alternated between Lela Swift and John Sedwick. Now Sedwick is about to leave the show. Associate director Jack Sullivan stepped up to direct #504 and will direct dozens more; Weaver, an associate director on some early episode, will only be credited as director four times before leaving in July. Several more directors will have similarly brief stints as fill-ins before Henry Kaplan joins the show as Swift’s alternate in December.

Episode 402: Name the witch

Well-meaning governess Vicki is in jail, about to be tried on a capital charge of witchcraft. That couldn’t happen in the New England that existed in 1795 in our timeband, but many things were possible in the world of Dark Shadows that we don’t see in ours.

Gallant gentleman Barnabas Collins has figured out that Vicki is innocent and that the real witch is his new wife, Angelique. Rather than go to the authorities with his evidence, he decides to take a more direct approach and murder Angelique. That won’t be much use to Vicki, but Barnabas can’t be bothered with details.

The longest sequence of the episode is a farce in which Barnabas pours two glasses of sherry, puts poison in the one he then gives Angelique, and tries to get her to drink. They don’t do “the old switcheroo” and mix up the glasses, but instead go with an equally hoary device of having Barnabas’ mother show up and take Angelique’s glass. Barnabas has to claim the glass is cracked and knock it from her hand.

After the failure of his attempt to poison Angelique, Barnabas opens a hidden compartment of his desk and takes out a dagger. If it weren’t for Robert Cobert’s solemn musical score, the effect would be that of seeing Wile E. Coyote open yet another crate from the Acme Corporation. He goes up to Angelique’s bedroom and lifts the dagger. Since there has been no indication that she has got into her bed, and all we see on it are a lump of covers, the audience has no reason to suppose she is in there. We end with the distinct impression that Barnabas, having barely avoided matricide, is stabbing a mattress.

We first knew Barnabas in the year 1967, when he will be a vampire and will develop from a profoundly bleak presence and an urgent threat to our favorite characters into a comic villain for whom we can’t help but feel a kind of affection as we watch him fail again and again in his elaborate schemes. In that way, his maladroit attempts on Angelique’s life today are entirely typical of the Barnabas we had met before Vicki traveled back in time in November.

In another way, this episode represents one of the biggest retcons in the whole series. Throughout his first eight months on the show, Barnabas nursed a bitter hatred for his uncle Jeremiah Collins. In the first weeks of the 1795 segment, we saw that Jeremiah eloped with Barnabas’ beloved fiancée, the gracious Josette, and that Barnabas responded to this betrayal by killing Jeremiah in a duel. When Barnabas is talking today about Angelique’s black magic, he realizes that Jeremiah and Josette ran off together only because they were under a spell, and that neither was responsible for betraying him. He has no hostility left for Jeremiah.

In the various accounts the vampire Barnabas gave in 1967 of his last years as a living being, he never mentioned Angelique. Nor did he ever say that he, Josette, or Jeremiah had been the victim of witchcraft. Instead, he had indicated that he himself had gotten involved in black magic. In #345, he told his sometime friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, that he became a vampire after trying to gain eternal youth, and that Josette killed herself when he offered her that eternal youth. In #358, he uses “the secret magic number of the universe,” which he had learned while studying witchcraft under a warlock on Barbados, to torment Julia. The Barnabas we met when we came to 1795 hadn’t done any of that. Until he learned the truth about Angelique, Barnabas was a man of the Enlightenment and didn’t believe that witches even existed.

Perhaps this is a change Vicki’s arrival and her bizarre behavior have wrought. The stories Barnabas tells in #345 and #358 both took place years after Josette and Jeremiah were married. So perhaps in the original timeline, with no one around yammering about what the first 73 weeks of the show were like, events moved much more slowly. The change of loves took place gradually enough that Barnabas did not feel he had to challenge Jeremiah to a duel, but he was still full of hatred and resentment. Angelique was able to cover her tracks so that no one suspected witchcraft was underway. She gradually lured Barnabas into the occult arts, perhaps giving up the idea of marrying him at some point, certainly losing his attention. By the time he brought the vampire curse on himself, the version of Barnabas in that timeline would have forgotten Angelique and would have come to be consumed by his grievance against Jeremiah. That fits far better with the April-November 1967 Barnabas than does the character we have seen so far in 1795.

Barnabas asks a key question in this episode. When Angelique says that she will always love him, he asks her what she thinks love is. She answers “Why of course I do!,” which probably means that the script called for him to ask if she knew what love was, but “What do you think love is, Angelique?” is a better question. She’s been destroying every relationship that makes him the man he is in order to have him all to herself, suggesting that if Barnabas pressed Angelique to explain what love is, she would wind up saying that it means having total control over someone. As a vampire, that’s going to be Barnabas’ working definition too, suggesting that he will be more like Angelique then than he already is now.

In this episode, the portrait of Josette is delivered to Barnabas’ home, the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. This portrait, haunted by Josette’s ghost, was the dominant presence in the Old House from its first appearance in #70 until Barnabas moved back in there in #221, and was important as a symbol of Barnabas’ obsession with Josette thereafter. The makers of the show left it on the wall of Josette’s bedroom at the beginning of the 1795 segment; we see it there in #374, but they replace it with a different portrait in #377. It’s hard to understand why it would already have been there before Josette formally became a member of the family- perhaps it was just a slip-up that it was there in #374, and they’d always planned to show its arrival at Collinwood.

The portrait of Josette arrives at the Old House. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 312: Find the boy

Well-meaning governess Vicki and vampire Barnabas are on the terrace of the great house of Collinwood. Vicki’s charge, strange and troubled boy David, is missing, and she is upset. Vicki is weeping on Barnabas’ shoulder.

Heiress Carolyn and hardworking young fisherman Joe show up in the nick of time to prevent Barnabas biting Vicki and giving her a role in the main storyline. They report on their fruitless search for David. When they mention that David had been looking for mysterious girl Sarah, Barnabas becomes alarmed.

In recent episodes, many characters have been trying to find Sarah, in hopes that she will be able to tell them who abducted Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. In two conversations about Sarah, Vicki has kept quiet about the fact that she saw a girl matching her description in Barnabas’ house. She is sure her friend Barnabas is innocent of any wrongdoing, and does not want anyone to suspect him in connection with what happened to Maggie. But her concern for David drives that thought out of her mind, and she tells Joe and Carolyn what she saw.

Meanwhile, Barnabas goes home and tells his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie that they must find David. Barnabas knows that Sarah is the ghost of his little sister, and he is afraid she may have told David that he is a vampire. When Willie asks what Barnabas will do if he finds David, Barnabas makes it clear that he plans to kill him.

David is about ten years old, and he is the last bearer of the Collins name. Dark Shadows fans sometimes ask what would happen if any of Barnabas’ plans had ever succeeded. I think his fell design for David answers that question- he would annihilate the Collins family and turn their estate into a hellscape cut off from the world of the living. In July of 1970, the show will give us an extended vision of what would happen were another supernatural menace to achieve that result. We will also get a glimpse of an alternate version of Barnabas driving towards the same objective when House of Dark Shadows hits theaters in October of 1970.

That was a possible outcome for a feature film, but a continuing series could hardly go down that road. And lately, Barnabas has seemed too harmless to bring it about. Even first-time viewers have already seen him fail to bite someone who was actively pressing her neck towards his fangs. So it doesn’t really seem that David is in all that much danger. Indeed, Barnabas is well on his way to becoming a comic villain. We see the action through his eyes as he scrambles to keep his lies in place, and see him devise one cockamamie scheme after another, all of which fall apart. He is something like Wile E. Coyote operating in extreme slow motion.

Before Barnabas and Willie can leave in search of David, there comes a knock at the front door. It is Joe and the sheriff asking to go through the place looking for David and Sarah. The episode becomes pure comedy from that point on. On his Dark Shadows Daybook, Patrick McCray analyzes it as situation comedy; on Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn analyzes it as farce.

The sheriff asks to search Barnabas’ house. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

While Joe searches upstairs and the sheriff searches the main floor, Willie keeps jabbering about how awful it would be if they went into the basement, where they might discover Barnabas’ coffin. Barnabas keeps shushing him. Both Barnabas and Willie panic a little more visibly each time the rooster crows, reminding them that Barnabas is running out of time to get back into his coffin.

When Joe and the sheriff do ask Barnabas to unlock the basement door so they can search there, Barnabas is cornered into claiming that he lost the key. They are openly incredulous, and he squirms as he elaborates on his assertion. He gives even lamer excuses when Joe offers to break the door down and then repair it. Finally, Carolyn lets Barnabas off the hook when she comes running with word that a boy meeting David’s description has been seen on the beach. Joe and the sheriff rush out, just in time for Barnabas to find shelter from the sunrise.

Episode 282: Sense memories

We cut back and forth between an opulent estate called Collinwood and a mental hospital called Windcliff.

At Collinwood, we spend our time with well-meaning governess Vicki. From the beginning of Dark Shadows, Vicki has been the audience’s main point of view character. The audience is now made up chiefly of people who want to see how they are going to fit vampire Barnabas Collins into an ongoing series, and Barnabas’ principal concern is getting hold of a woman, erasing her personality, and replacing it with that of his lost love Josette. So of course Vicki is fascinated with Barnabas and fantasizes about being Josette.

Matriarch Liz has functioned as a blocking figure. Her goal has been to keep her secrets. Her actions in pursuit of that goal have slowed story development in a largely futile attempt to create suspense. She’s fresh out of secrets, but is still trying to put the brakes on. She keeps complaining that Vicki’s interest in Josette is unwholesome.

Liz has a point. Barnabas has settled on Vicki as the next subject of his experiment. To that end, he has given Vicki Josette’s music box. When he was trying his lunatic plan on Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, he had given Maggie the music box. Evidently the music box has some kind of magical power over the women to whom Barnabas gives it. When she opens it, Vicki sits for hours staring vacantly into space listening to its simple tune.

The previous night, Vicki had worn Josette’s dress at a costume party Barnabas hosted in his house on the estate. The party ended in a séance in which Josette spoke through Vicki. Liz mentions this possession as a sign that Vicki is becoming too involved with Josette. Vicki doesn’t see anything out of the ordinary. She blandly exclaims “It’s happened before!” Indeed, the show’s first séance, in #170 and #171, climaxed with Vicki channeling a message from Josette. Liz points out that this doesn’t make it better.

Vicki goes to Barnabas’ house to return the dress. She and Barnabas’ sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie take it to Josette’s restored bedroom upstairs. There, she blissfully tells Willie she wishes she could wear Josette’s clothes all the time. Remembering what Barnabas did to Maggie and knowing his plans for Vicki, Willie winces. He hates the things Barnabas does, but is too far under his power to actively oppose him. Vicki goes on about how close she is coming to feel to Josette, and Willie winces harder. She tells him that she has been listening to the music box for hours at a time, and he shouts “You shouldn’t do that!” When she asks why not, he takes a second to come up with something that he can say. He tells her she might damage the mechanism. Still blissful, she says, “Oh, I’ll be careful.”

Willie tells Vicki that tomorrow is Josette’s birthday. Vicki is delighted with this information. She resolves to go to the cemetery and lay flowers on Josette’s grave. When she tells Liz of this plan, Liz objects to it. Because of Liz’ function as a blocking figure, her opposition implies that it will advance the plot. To appease Liz, Vicki agrees not to go alone, but to take Liz’ fellow narrative speed-bump Burke Devlin.

At Windcliff, Maggie is in session with her therapist, Dr Julia Hoffman. As a result of her time as Barnabas’ prisoner, Maggie has amnesia and can speak only with difficulty. In his effort to Josettify Maggie, Barnabas combined his own supernatural powers with sensory stimuli like the music box that were supposed to elicit the responses he had in mind. Now Julia is trying to recreate those stimuli in her effort to recover Maggie’s memories and restore her personality.

At one point, Maggie tells Julia about a sweet scent that regular viewers know to be that of Josette’s jasmine perfume. As she does so, music starts playing on the soundtrack that we have heard when Josette’s ghost has appeared. When this happened, my wife, Mrs Acilius, said “Josette is there.” Later in the episode, when Vicki is in Josette’s room with Willie, Vicki takes a whiff of the perfume. The music strikes up then too. Josette’s ghost hasn’t manifested since March- maybe the ghost’s musical cue is now the perfume’s.

Their use of sensory stimuli is not the only way in which Julia is a reverse-image reflection of Barnabas. Barnabas is a vampire, so we expect to hate him and oppose his plans. But he is also the character who makes the show fun to watch, so we find ourselves wanting to see more of him. Further, he evolves into a comic villain, with whom we identify as we see him scramble to keep his madcap schemes from backfiring. And the longer we see him, the more of actor Jonathan Frid’s personality comes through, and Frid seems to have been adorable.

Julia is a doctor trying to help a patient we know and care about, so we expect to like her and cheer her on. Yet she always seems more than a little sinister. She takes a stern, occasionally impatient tone with Maggie today, which we might think is part of her therapeutic technique. But in her previous appearance, in #265, she took the same tone with Maggie’s father, boyfriend, and family doctor, none of whom is her patient. More than once in that episode, she made remarks suggesting that she suspected that Maggie’s condition was the result of an encounter with an undead monster, then refused to explain what she meant. We wonder why she would withhold such information. At the end of today’s installment, she insists that Maggie return to a place where something terrible happened to her. When Maggie begs her not to make her go back there, we see a closeup of Julia’s face with a look of satisfaction that led Mrs Acilius to say “Julia can do ‘evil face’ as well as Barnabas can.”*

Julia’s grim satisfaction mirrors ours. Ever since Liz gave her great show of reluctance at Vicki’s plan to lay flowers at Josette’s grave, we’ve been wondering what kind of progress a stop at the cemetery could possibly represent for the story. Julia has unwittingly answered that question for us. The place she is going to take Maggie is, of course, that very cemetery.

*Mrs Acilius had a lot to say about Julia as Barnabas in reverse, this whole section is derived from her insights.

Episode 278: If you become Josette

The first major villain on Dark Shadows was high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins, played by Louis Edmonds. Edmonds was a master of the sarcastic remark, so that Roger was often funny. But no matter how often he made the audience laugh, Roger was never a comic villain. That requires a character we can empathize with as we watch them scheme and plot, scramble and improvise, in pursuit of goals that could not be achieved without ruining all the fun. We laugh when we recognize our own foibles in an outlandish character, and laugh again when we realize that our ability to feel with others encompasses even those whose feelings have led them to do dastardly deeds.

Roger’s personality was too cold, his motives too contemptible for us to empathize with him. Where a comic villain thinks fast and puts himself in ridiculous situations, Roger stuck with his fixed ideas, using the same tactics time and again to bully his unwilling co-conspirator Sam to stick with their plan. Even when he bumbled about with a damning piece of evidence, a fountain pen left at a crime scene, he was never the coyote caught in his own over-elaborate trap, but a criminal in a police procedural. He was a melodramatic villain who was only incidentally funny.

The first supernatural menace on the show was Roger’s ex-wife, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, played by Diana Millay. Millay was hilarious, every bit as funny as Louis Edmonds. It was a shame the two of them didn’t play a married couple in a long-running comedy. They could have raised sarcasm to heights previously unknown to humankind. But while Millay gets laughs every time the script gives her the least chance, Laura was even less of a comic villain than Roger.

It is clear that Laura is a malign presence from beyond the grave and that, if she is not stopped, she will burn her young son David to death. But everything else about her is an impenetrable mystery. She is not part of a familiar mythology, and even the most basic questions about her remain unanswered. We cannot empathize with her motives, since we cannot begin to guess what her motives are or even be sure if she has motives.

The first comic villain on Dark Shadows was seagoing con man Jason McGuire, played by Dennis Patrick. Jason had his first comic turns only after he had been on the show for weeks, during which time we had been subjected to many iterations of a dreary ritual in which he made a demand of reclusive matriarch Liz, Liz resisted, he threatened to expose her terrible secret, and she capitulated. When his henchman Willie slips out of Jason’s control and he starts scrambling to contain the damage Willie is doing to his plan, Patrick finally gets a chance to play Jason as a comic villain, and the result is very engaging. But those scenes are scattered too thinly through Jason’s long-running, relentlessly monotonous storyline to make him a success as a comic villain.

Now, the show has struck gold. Vampire Barnabas Collins is becoming a pop culture phenomenon and bringing the show the first good ratings it has ever had. They have to keep Barnabas on the show indefinitely, and he has to be the most important character. That presents a practical difficulty. Vampires usually figure in folklore and fiction as unstoppable killing machines. Daytime soap operas explore the shifting relationships among large casts of characters. It’s going to be hard to maintain that cast if Barnabas sets about murdering everyone. To square the circle, they try to redefine Barnabas as a comic villain.

Barnabas is giving a costume party for his distant cousins, the living members of the Collins family. He has invited well-meaning governess Vicki to attend and to wear the dress of the legendary Josette Collins. In the first 39 weeks of Dark Shadows, Vicki had developed a close friendship with Josette’s ghost, so she is excited about this. For his part, Barnabas has borrowed an evil scheme from the 1932 film The Mummy. He will erase Vicki’s personality and replace it with Josette’s, then kill her so that she will rise as a vampiric Josette. So he is glad she likes the dress.

Barnabas asks Vicki to come to his house and help him pick out the antique clothes that the family will wear at the party. She enthusiastically agrees, saying that she loves to go through trunks full of old clothes. The clothes are in a trunk in Josette’s old room, which Barnabas has restored.

In the room, we see the ghost of Barnabas’ 9 year old sister Sarah sitting on the trunk. She vanishes a second before Barnabas and Vicki enter. Both of them have a strong feeling that someone just left the room. Barnabas tries to dismiss the sensation as nervousness, but Vicki has had too much experience with ghosts to be put off so easily.

Vicki has been our point of view character for most of the series. At first, that was because she was a newcomer to the great estate of Collinwood and the nearby town of Collinsport, and so we would learn everything we needed to know as we listened to people explain things to her. Later, it was because she was the key protagonist in the stories, so that the action got going once she knew what was going on. So when Barnabas equals Vicki’s sensitivity to Sarah’s presence, he is presented to us as another possible point of view character.

Barnabas keeps talking about the Collinses’ eighteenth century ancestors in terms that make it obvious that he knew them, so that he more than once has to clean up after himself with remarks like “I would imagine.” He does alarm Vicki when he blurts out something about what will happen to her should she “become Josette.” He hastens to say that he means that Vicki will become her for the duration of the party.

Vicki goes back to the great house and talks with Liz about the party. Liz smiles happily, the first time we’ve seen this expression on her face in the whole run of the series.

Vicki goes on about Barnabas’ connection to the past, saying that he gives the impression of someone who really is misplaced in time. She has the feeling that he needs to recreate a bygone era, and that he is doomed to be unhappy because of the impossibility of traveling backward in time. Vicki does not know what Barnabas’ plans for her are, but she understands his motives perfectly and empathizes with him deeply. That Vicki, Barnabas’ intended victim, can feel this way suggests that we can, too.

Back in Barnabas’ house, Sarah reappears in Josette’s room and sees her blue dress. She is excited to find it. She looks at her reflection in the mirror and smiles. Her good cheer is emphasized when her musical cue, an excerpt from “London Bridge,” is for the first time played in a major key.

Sarah’s reflection looks like it has never seen a ghost before

The minor key was appropriate during Sarah’s previous appearances. The first several times we saw her, Sarah was associated with Barnabas’ imprisonment of Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. Maggie was the victim of Barnabas’ first mad attempt at Josettery, and Sarah intervened just in time to keep Barnabas from killing her. The other day, Barnabas killed Jason, and we saw Sarah when Barnabas was forcing Willie to help him hide his old friend’s corpse. Barnabas isn’t killing anyone today, so Sarah can be a bit more cheerful.

Sarah helps to establish Barnabas as a comic villain. As the ghostly sister who returned to the upper world when Barnabas was loosed to prey upon the living, Sarah and he are part of the same eruption from Dark Shadows‘ supernatural back-world into its main continuity. Perhaps she personifies his conscience, certainly she gives him an occasion to make schmaltzy speeches about his days as a human. More important than either of these, when we see that Barnabas’ 9 year old sister is his most powerful adversary, we begin to wonder just how seriously we should take him.

Closing Miscellany

Yesterday and today, Alexandra Moltke Isles delivered the recorded voiceover monologue at the beginning of the episode. The first 270 times she did this, it was in character as Vicki. Now, they’ve given up the idea that Vicki or any other one character will eventually find out about everything that we see on screen, so the openings are delivered by whatever actress is available as a nameless external narrator.

In those first 270 outings, Mrs Isles sounded like Vicki. She adopted Vicki’s distinctive way of speaking, carefully articulating one word at a time and often ending sentences with surprising little inflections- a curl of uncertainty here, a touch of breathy optimism there, a falling note of despair in another place. The voiceovers were usually remarks about the weather or the sea that were supposed to involve some vague metaphor for events in the story, so that it is open to question whether it was really worth Mrs Isles’ time to put so much effort into creating a character with them. But I guess a pro is a pro, and it was a matter of course that she would do her best no matter how little she had to work with.

In these last two, she has used a relatively flat voice, with none of Vicki’s particular vocal traits. The pacing has been structured, not around sentences, but around an attempt to convey an overall sense of urgency. They sound very much like The Narrator. I wonder what Mrs Isles would have made of The Narrator if the voiceover passages had extended beyond the opening moments and run through the episodes.

There is a famous production error under the closing credits, when a stagehand shows up in the window, realizes he’s on camera, and makes himself all the more conspicuous when he tries to escape from his predicament.