Fake Shemp Burke Devlin is starting to suspect that there is something odd about old world gentleman Barnabas Collins. He suspects that Barnabas is not from England as he claims to be. More darkly, he is considering the possibility that Barnabas might be the one who abducted Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, and held her prisoner. As it happens, the audience knows that he is correct in both of these suspicions. We also know more- that Barnabas is a vampire.
Burke has hired investigators to probe into Barnabas’ past. Barnabas told him he lived near London with a cousin named Niall Bradford. Burke’s investigators have found that the last time a man of that name lived in London was 130 years previously. Dark Shadows has been going back and forth for months on whether Barnabas lived in the 1830s or in the eighteenth century. Yesterday they seemed to commit themselves to the earlier date, but now we’re back with the 1830s.
Burke asks Maggie’s doctor, addled quack Dave Woodard, to show him all of her medical records. Woodard protests that medical records are confidential. He then tells Burke everything he knows about Maggie’s case.
Burke calls on Maggie. She is back home, apparently well, but suffering from amnesia covering the entire period of her captivity. Unknown to any of the characters we see today, Maggie’s psychiatrist Julia Hoffman is a mad scientist in league with Barnabas, and she has wiped Maggie’s memory clean of any information that might threaten to expose him. Burke talks with Maggie and her boyfriend, hardworking young fisherman Joe, repeating everything Woodard told him a few minutes before.
Maggie and Joe tell Burke that she has had a few visitors since she came home. Maggie blithely mentions that Barnabas was one of those visitors. Burke is startled to hear this, and Maggie repeats that Barnabas dropped in to pay his respects.
During the fourteen weeks when Dark Shadows was driven by undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, Burke saw extensive evidence of supernatural doings. But he lately he has decided that he lives in the kind of world where the show took place in its first few months, where there might be hints of ghosts in the background, but all the action came from flesh and blood humans subject to the usual laws of nature. Since it doesn’t occur to him that a person might have powers like Julia’s, Maggie’s calmness when talking about a visit from Barnabas seems to prove that Barnabas is innocent.
Burke learns that Barnabas has been to see Maggie.
Maggie does say that there is just one memory she has that seems to be connected with her time in captivity. It is a bit of music- “a light, playful tune. A soft, tinkling sound.” She freely admits that it seems unlikely that this would have any connection with such an experience, and speculates that it may have been something she remembered from childhood.
In the great house of Collinwood, well-meaning governess Vicki is listening to the enchanted music box Barnabas gave her. Burke and Vicki are now engaged to be married. He comes to see her, and remarks on the music box. She accuses him of being jealous of Barnabas, and he keeps coming back to the music box. When she opens it for him, he remarks that it makes “a light, playful tune… a soft, tinkling sound.”
The episode ends with Burke listening to the music box and staring off into space. Barnabas gave the music box first to Maggie, then to Vicki, in each case hoping that she would listen to it until its magical quality caused her to believe that she was his lost love Josette. Seeing the look on Burke’s face as he listened, my wife, Mrs Acilius, said “Maybe Burke will start to think that he’s Josette.” Who knows, maybe he and Barnabas could be very happy together.
When new writers start working on Dark Shadows, they do some inventorying of ongoing and disused storylines. When Ron Sproat came aboard in November of 1966, he contrived a lot of scenes that served to mark storylines as “To be developed” or “To be discarded.” Now Gordon Russell has begun to be credited with scripts. He addresses continuity questions with brief lines of dialogue.
For example, for the last forty weeks the show has been equivocating about when it was that Barnabas Collins lived as a human being. Sometimes they say that he died and became a vampire in the 1830s. That fits with the original idea that Jeremiah Collins built the great house of Collinwood for his bride Josette in that decade, because Barnabas is supposed to have loved Josette and hated Jeremiah. At other times, they have pushed Barnabas, Josette, and Jeremiah back into the eighteenth century.
Now Barnabas has risen from the grave. Mad scientist Julia Hoffman has developed a series of injections to cure him of vampirism and turn him into a real boy. When Julia finds that Barnabas has heard the ghostly voice of his sister, nine year old Sarah, she declares that “The injection can wait!” and wants to talk all about Sarah. When Barnabas tries to avoid the subject, saying that Sarah has been dead for nearly 200 years, Julia replies “So have you.” That would seem to nail down that continuity question.
Julia speculates that Barnabas has subconsciously willed Sarah to return to the living, because she symbolizes the kindly side of his nature. There have been a bunch of possible explanations for why Sarah emerged shortly after Barnabas did; evidently this is the one we will be going with, at least for a while.
Barnabas has been looking through an album of family portraits, Sarah’s among them. He tells Julia that he is particularly intrigued by another portrait in the same volume, that of Jeremiah. He says that Burke Devlin, depressing boyfriend of well-meaning governess Vicki, bears a striking resemblance to Jeremiah. This point was first made in #280, when Burke came to a costume party at Barnabas’ in Jeremiah’s clothing and Barnabas was shocked by the resemblance. Barnabas says that he will be a happy man when Burke is as dead as Jeremiah. This tells us, not only that Barnabas is serious about his hostility to Burke, but also that we can expect some connection between Jeremiah and Burke to be developed.
Julia chases Barnabas around his living room until he hangs his head and mutters a promise not to hurt anyone, not even Burke, as long as there is a chance the injections will work. This helps both to explain why Barnabas has been so harmless lately and to reinforce the Bossy Big Sister/ Bratty Little Brother dynamic that is forming between him and Julia.
Julia goes to the great house. Matriarch Liz is under the impression that Julia is an historian writing a book about the old families of New England, and letting her stay in the mansion on the understanding that she is doing research into the Collinses. Liz asks about Julia’s previous books. Julia evades the question, saying that only scholars have ever heard of them. Liz mentions that she was a recluse for eighteen years, during which time she read so widely that she became aware of many scholarly books. Julia seizes on Liz’ reference to her time as a recluse, and asks a series of questions about it. Observing Julia’s facility at deflecting questions she doesn’t want to answer, Liz says that “If you are as nimble with the written word as you are with the spoken, you must be a very interesting writer.” This conversation not only marks Liz’ period of seclusion as an extinct topic, but also shows that Julia’s cover story is not going to be solid enough to cover her operations indefinitely. Moreover, it gives Joan Bennett a chance to show what Liz sounds like when she is smart.
Vicki meets Burke in the courtyard of the great house. She asks him why he’s late. He says he had a meeting with his lawyer, James Blair (a character we last saw in #95 and last heard mentioned in #133.) The reference to Blair tells regular viewers that Burke’s business interests may have something to do with an upcoming storyline.
Vicki asks what the meeting was about. Burke says it was to do with a message from London, then declares he didn’t come to talk about business. At the end of yesterday’s episode, Burke placed a call to London to initiate an investigation of Barnabas, so we know that he has already received some information about him. We also know that he is keeping the investigation secret from Vicki.
Burke brings up the marriage proposal he made to Vicki when last they saw each other. She says that she doesn’t know enough about him to be comfortable making a decision. In particular, she doesn’t know how he made his money or who his business associates are. In response to that, he launches into a speech dismissing those concerns as matters of “the past,” saying that he wants her to think only about “the future.” Considering that Burke won’t even tell Vicki what business he was conducting twenty minutes ago, “the past” that is off limits to her stretches right up to the present. This tells even first time viewers that Burke is a secretive and untrustworthy man likely to drag a wife into some shady enterprises.
It rings even louder warning bells for regular viewers. At this point in Dark Shadows, “the past” is how the characters refer to the vampire arc, which is the only ongoing storyline. Several times, Burke has angrily demanded Vicki renounce interest in “the past,” by which he means her attempts to stay relevant to the plot. As he has made those demands, he has accused her of being crazy when she told him that she saw and heard phenomena that we also saw and heard, in some cases phenomena that Burke himself is in a position to know are real. On Thursday, Burke enlisted Julia’s support in his effort to gaslight Vicki; in that conversation, Julia asked Burke if, when he said Vicki must “live in the present,” he meant that she must live with him, and he confirmed that he did. So Burke’s evasiveness in this scene shows that he is likely to be an abusive husband who will devote himself to controlling Vicki and stifling her contributions to the story.
The show is making something of an effort to launch a storyline in which Vicki and Burke will get married and move into a long-vacant “house by the sea” that has some kind of association with Barnabas and therefore with the supernatural. So the parade of red flags that Burke sends marching in front of his proposal may tell us to expect a story in which Vicki, the long-suffering wife confined to a haunted house, loses contact with the world of the living.
Perhaps that is where we will see Burke’s connection to Jeremiah. Maybe Burke will be possessed by the spirit of Jeremiah, and under that possession his abuse of Vicki will intensify. It is also possible that Burke will be revealed as a descendant of Jeremiah. On Friday, the story of Burke’s childhood was retconned, introducing the idea that his father left the family when Burke was nine. Perhaps it will turn out that he did this after he found out that Burke was the product of an extramarital dalliance with a Collins. That in turn might revive another paternity question concerning a nine year old boy. For months, the show hinted that Burke, not Liz’ brother Roger, was the father of strange and troubled boy David Collins. If Burke is a Collins bar sinister, then David can be his natural son and still retain his symbolic importance as the last in the male line of the family.
Whatever the nature of Burke’s connection to Jeremiah, Vicki’s eventual flight from him might lead her into the vampire story. Since Barnabas thinks he wants Vicki to be his next victim, he has been solicitous towards her, and she regards him warmly. My wife, Mrs Acilius, points out a sort of visual pun implicit in the prospect of Vicki choosing Barnabas over Burke. As played by Anthony George, Burke is an astonishingly poor kisser. As a vampire, Barnabas gives what might be called “the kiss of death.” A woman might prefer a single kiss of death to a lifetime of the impossibly awkward kisses of George.
Vicki caves in and agrees to marry Burke, even though he won’t answer any of her questions. They go into the drawing room and announce this ominous news to Liz, Barnabas, and Julia. Barnabas responds by looking off into space and exclaiming “Jeremiah!” Again, whatever relationship develops between Burke and Jeremiah, we know that Barnabas is committed to resisting its influence on Vicki.
Barnabas cannot conceal his dismay. He and Julia leave, explaining that they had planned to spend the evening together in town. Liz remarks that Barnabas was happy when he came, and sad when he left. Still, the idea that he and Julia might be going on a date is enough to keep Burke smiling.
In the courtyard, Barnabas tells Julia that he will give her his full cooperation as she tries to cure him of vampirism. He explains he wants to become human again so that he can prevent Vicki from marrying Burke.
This is rather alarming for the viewers. Dark Shadows became a hit when a vampire joined the cast. If the Burke/ Vicki/ Barnabas story is going to be just another daytime soap love triangle among humans, you may as well watch The Guiding Light. The foreboding dun dun DUNN! that ends each episode has rarely seemed more apt than it does coming on the heels of this grim prospect.
Four and a half weeks ago, Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, escaped from vampire Barnabas Collins. Barnabas managed to scramble Maggie’s brains sufficiently that she has amnesia covering her time as his victim and much of the rest of her life as well. She is now a patient at a mental hospital called Windcliff, where her care is supervised by Dr Julia Hoffman.
Maggie’s family doctor, addled quack Dave Woodard, is an old friend of Julia’s. He had recommended Maggie be sent to Windcliff. He had also come up with a cockamamie scheme to protect her from her captor by hiding her there and telling everyone in and around the town of Collinsport that she was dead. If he had known that the captor was a vampire, this might have made some kind of sense- no character on Dark Shadows has ever heard of Dracula, so they don’t know how to fight against vampires. But he doesn’t know that, so his plan is just a way for the writers to stall while they try to come up with more plot points.
Today we open with Woodard in Julia’s office, complaining that she isn’t communicating with him about Maggie’s case. She tells him that there have been no developments worth reporting. Returning viewers know that this is a lie, because in a session we saw yesterday Maggie remembered a lot of sense impressions from her time of captivity and Julia told her that they represented tremendous progress. Woodard tells Julia that a lack of new information is no excuse for her failure to return any of his last six phone calls. He says that she seems to be intent on hoarding any information she may glean from Maggie as her own private possession, an impression he describes as frightening.
Julia responds to this characterization with a display of offense, and Woodard apologizes. She then brings up an idea that occurred to her at the end of yesterday’s episode. She says that Maggie’s memory might improve if she takes her to visit Eagle Hill Cemetery, where she was found wandering early in her illness. Woodard objects strongly that Maggie’s condition, as Julia has described it, is so delicate that such a visit might do her permanent harm. Julia retreats and promises she won’t actually take Maggie to the cemetery. This is such a flagrant lie that the camera momentarily goes haywire, focusing on Woodard’s chair rather than his face.
Woodard leaves, and Julia calls Maggie in. She’s already wearing her coat. She asks where Julia is going to take her, and she tells her not to worry about that.
On the great estate of Collinwood, well-meaning governess Vicki is staring vacantly into space while listening to an antique music box Barnabas gave her as part of his plan to subject her to the same treatment he inflicted on Maggie. A knock comes at the door. Vicki closes the music box and goes to answer it. It is her boyfriend, fake Shemp Burke Devlin.
Burke is waging a determined battle against the story, and he is fighting dirty. He doesn’t want Vicki to have anything to do with Barnabas, or with the ghost of Josette Collins. When Vicki says she wants to lay flowers on Josette’s grave in the cemetery, where we know she will cross paths with Maggie and Julia, he resists furiously. When she reminds him that she has had dealings with Josette’s ghost, he says “Or you think you have.” In previous episodes, including yesterday’s and Monday’s, he knew she had, and in an earlier period of the show he knew that several other characters, including some of the most level-headed ones, had also encountered Josette’s ghost. When he starts belittling Vicki for believing in “the spooks of Collinwood,” it therefore comes off as an especially crude instance of gaslighting. The Mrs and I aren’t much for profanity, but we both cussed at the screen when Burke was disgracing himself this way.
Julia and Maggie are in the cemetery. I believe it is the first time we’ve seen the set in a daylight scene. You can see the shadows of the foliage on the soundstage walls, and the corners where the walls meet. I can’t believe the director meant for us to see those things, but I kind of like it- the situation needs a touch of unreality, and the obvious falsity gives it the feeling of a black box theater.
Some of the shadows on the wall that Art Wallace spoke ofCorner of the soundstage
Maggie is agitated. Julia tells her to calm down and that everything is all right. I’m no expert, but I kind of doubt that talk therapy involves a lot of “Calm down!” and “Everything is all right!” It reminded me of this Saturday Night Live sketch from the 90s, in which Patrick Stewart plays “Phil McCracken, Scottish Therapist,” a psychologist who won’t stand for any emotionalism from his patients.
Vicki and Burke see Julia and Maggie in the distance. When Maggie turns to face them, Vicki recognizes her. Julia whisks her away before Burke can see her. When Vicki tells Burke she saw Maggie, he immediately unloads on her with the same garbage he handed her at Collinwood. He declares that Maggie is dead, that Vicki knows she’s dead, that she can’t possibly have seen her, that “there is a resemblance, THAT’S! ALL!” When he asks “What’s wrong with you?” I stopped the streaming and shouted at the screen “She’s wasting her time with you, you ******* ********, that’s what’s wrong with her!” To that, Mrs Acilius said that we should just restart the show and get through the scene.
Part of what makes Burke’s behavior so infuriating is the writer’s fault. A first-time viewer, unaware that what Burke is telling Vicki are delusions that suggest she is crazy are in fact things he knows to be true, might think that he is being reasonable in dismissing ideas about ghosts and the like. But even that viewer will realize that a person ought to be nicer about it. When Vicki says she saw Maggie, Burke could easily have suggested that they go up to the woman and introduce themselves, thinking that a closer look will disabuse her of the notion. But actor Anthony George must also bear part of the blame.
George C. Scott famously told Gene Siskel that there are three things to consider in evaluating an actor’s performance: first is to make the audience believe that the person they are looking at is the sort of person who might do the things the character does. This is in turn dependent on casting- put the wrong person in the part, and all is lost. Second are the choices the actor makes in the key emotional moments. Performers have any number of options as to how they will use their faces, voices, and limbs to show a character’s feelings, and those who make a lasting impression are those who make choices that are at once totally unexpected and perfectly logical. Third is the zest of performance, the actor’s joy in the opportunity to create a character. If that doesn’t come through, nothing else is worth much.
As Burke, Anthony George fails all three of these tests. Burke would have been a difficult part for anyone to take over, both because the originator of the role, Mitch Ryan, was so memorable, and because the character had lost all connection to any ongoing storylines by the time Ryan left. And by his own admission, George knew nothing about soap operas and had no idea how to play a romantic interest on one when he joined Dark Shadows. That’s where he fails the casting part of the believability test.
As for the skill part, George has something going for him. He is always mindful of his physicality, moving only those parts of his body he needs to show us who he is and keeping the rest of himself admirably still. He also keeps his voice remarkably consistent, both by holding a steady level of volume and maintaining a simple, precise pitch. In these and other ways, he shows impressive levels of technical proficiency as an actor, but the result is a mannered, unconvincing performance. His Burke doesn’t seem to be a real person. As a cardboard figure, he becomes an abstract symbol of whatever he’s doing, and when he’s doing something bad he’s hard not to hate.
Since he makes one choice for each resource available to him and sticks with it unvaryingly throughout the episode, he doesn’t give the audience any surprises. Nor does he yield anything to his scene-mates. They always know exactly what’s coming from him. George’s eyes are always watching another actor intently, as he watches Alexandra Moltke Isles intently today, but nothing in her performance can divert him from his plan, not in the smallest particular. When Burke isn’t listening to the other character, as he isn’t listening to Vicki, George’s disconnection from the other actors makes Burke seem like an irredeemable jackass.
Nor does George show any zest for the part. He covers his discomfort with soap acting by plastering on a smile whenever the script allows it, but he is stiff when Burke ought to be loose, cool when he ought to be warm, and loud when he ought to speak with a quiet, nuanced voice. The result is just sad and awkward. When Burke is being pleasant, we can feel sorry for George, but when he has to play the scenes like the ones Burke gets today we just want him to get off the screen and leave us alone.
Compare George’s Burke with Grayson Hall’s Julia, and you will see how an actor can determine an audience’s reaction to a character. Julia is a terrible therapist. She lies repeatedly to Woodard in the beginning, denying the severe breach of ethics and disturbing disregard of public safety involved in covering up what she knows and suspects about Maggie’s experiences and running an unconscionable risk with Maggie’s mental health by taking her to the cemetery. She lies again to Maggie at the end, promising that they will duck into the Tomb of the Collinses only for a moment and then refusing to let her leave there when she starts to show a violent emotional reaction. Her methods are so unorthodox and so harsh that we suspect she is not interested in helping Maggie at all. Because we have known Maggie since episode #1, and Kathryn Leigh Scott’s performance as Maggie renews our fondness for her every time she appears, we ought to feel deep hostility towards Julia.
But we don’t. In fact, Julia quickly becomes (almost) every Dark Shadows fan’s favorite character. The George C. Scott tests tell us why. Hall’s manner is so intense that we can believe her as a mad scientist; her uninhibited use of every facial muscle, of the full range of her vocal output, and of subtle tricks of movement she learned from choreographers when she appeared in musicals may have produced a style that no acting teacher could recommend as a model, but they do mean that every moment she is on screen she is doing something we wouldn’t have predicted; and she’s clearly having a blast. She can do things vastly worse than what makes us hate Burke today, and we will still want her to come back again and again.
Closing Miscellany
The opening voiceovers aren’t usually the best-written parts of the show, but there is a particularly bad bit in today’s: “Hidden deep in the cliffs of Collinwood, the majestic, ancient rocks that separate the Earth from the sea, there is a tiny cove carved by a long-ago sea. No one at Collinwood has seen it, and no one will ever see it.” If no one ever will see it, why bother telling us about it? The narrator tells us that it is because “the Earth knows how to hide its secrets well. Sometimes men, too, must hide secrets.” Does this mean that “no one ever will” discover the secrets the characters are hiding from each other? That isn’t a very promising thing to tell the audience of a soap opera, a genre which is all about unsuccessful attempts to keep secrets and their aftermath.
Maggie tells Julia that she doesn’t recognize the name Collins. She has lived her whole life in the town of Collinsport, where most people are employed by Collins Enterprises, which is owned by the Collins family who live at Collinwood. That’s some pretty widespread amnesia she has.
The show has been going back and forth on the dates when Barnabas and Josette Collins originally lived and died. Today we get a long look at Josette’s tombstone, giving her dates as 1800-1822, and another at the plaque on Barnabas’ little sister Sarah’s resting place in the mausoleum, with the dates 1786-1796. Those dates fit with a remark Barnabas made to his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie in #271, that Sarah lived long before he met Josette, but not with his remark in #281 that Josette had been dead for “almost 200 years,” much less with a book we saw in #52 that gave her dates as 1810-1834.
Vampire Barnabas Collins is giving a costume party in his home at the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood. His distant relatives, the living members of the Collins family, are dressed as their ancestors from Barnabas’ own time as a living being. The whole thing was impossibly dull until the mischievous and witty Roger Collins suggested they have a séance. Now well-meaning governess Vicki is in a trance, channeling the spirit of Josette Collins.
The last time Josette took possession of Vicki at a séance was in #170 and #171. At that time, Josette delivered her message in French. Since Vicki could not speak French (but Alexandra Moltke speaks it fluently,) that was evidence enough to convince even the most skeptical that something was going on. Today Josette speaks English. The characters are all sure that she is the one speaking, but it doesn’t have the same effect on the audience as did that earlier irruption of a language we had not expected to hear.
I do wonder if the decision not to use French came at the last moment. Even though Vicki/ Josette’s voice is loud and clear, the others make a show of struggling to understand what she is saying and seize on a word here and there (“Something about ‘run!'”,) as people do when they are listening to someone speak a language they don’t quite understand. Perhaps writer Joe Caldwell wasn’t quite up to writing in French, and the Writer’s Guild wouldn’t let Alexandra Moltke Isles or any other Francophones on set make a translation. Or maybe they thought that the switch to French wouldn’t be as effective the second time as it was the first.
Josette is telling the story of her death. A man was chasing her, and fleeing him she threw herself off the peak of Widow’s Hill to the rocks below. Barnabas interrupts and breaks Vicki’s trance.
When the others scold him for stopping Josette before she could reveal the name of the man who ran her off the cliff, Barnabas says that the name could not have been of any importance, since whoever it was who drove Josette to kill herself must have been dead for “almost 200 years.” The others do not suspect that he was that man. They do not know that he is a reanimated corpse; they think he’s just English.
When Dark Shadows started, the stories of the tragic death of Josette and of the building of the great house of Collinwood were set in the 1830s. In the weeks before Barnabas’ introduction in April of 1967, they implied that Josette’s dates were much earlier, sometime in the 18th century. Last week, they plumped for the 1830s again. But Barnabas’ line about “almost 200 years ago” puts us back to the 1700s.
After the séance ends, we have evidence that this bit of background continuity might start to matter. Vicki looks at the landing on top of the staircase and sees the ghost of Barnabas’ 9 year old sister Sarah watching the party.
It seems that when Barnabas was freed to prey upon the living, he unknowingly brought Sarah with him. Sarah has been popping in and out quite a bit the last few weeks, and she has already made some important plot points happen. We’re starting to wonder just how many more beings will emerge from the supernatural back-world into the main action of the show. The opening voiceover today tells us that “the mists that have protected the present from the past are lifting,” so perhaps they will have to nail these dates down sooner rather than later.
The whole party had accepted instantly that Vicki was channeling the spirit of Josette and none of them ever comes to doubt it. But when she says that she saw a little girl at the head of the stairs, they get all incredulous. By the end of the episode, Vicki will have encountered so much disbelief on this point that she herself will decide that she must have been hallucinating.
Back in the great house, Roger is still overjoyed that the séance turned out to be so exciting. His sister Liz and Liz’ daughter Carolyn consider this to be in terrible taste. But Roger won’t give an inch. He has some great lines, exiting with “I think that all of the unhappiness of all of my ancestors is my rightful heritage, and you shouldn’t try to keep it from me. Good night, ladies.” Both Patrick McCray, in his Dark Shadows Daybook post about this episode, and Danny Horn, in his Dark Shadows Every Day post, make insightful remarks as they analyze the fun Louis Edmonds has playing Roger.
Carolyn approaches Vicki to speak privately. She tells her that she isn’t bothered that fake Shemp Burke Devlin is dating Vicki. Vicki’s response to this is “What?” Carolyn reminds Vicki that she used to be interested in Burke and was initially jealous of Burke’s interest in her. But she assures her she doesn’t feel that way any longer. Vicki smiles, nods, and looks away. Carolyn then says “He’s really very nice!” Vicki answers “Who?” “Burke!” says Carolyn. Again, Vicki smiles, nods, and looks away.
This is probably supposed to tell us that Vicki is coming under some kind of spell associated with Barnabas, but in fact it is likely to suggest something quite different to the audience. Burke was originally a dashing action hero played by Mitch Ryan. Dark Shadows never really came up with very much for a dashing action hero to do, but Ryan’s skills as an actor and his charismatic personality always made it seem that he was about to do something interesting. Several weeks ago, Ryan was fired off the show after he came to the set too drunk to work.
Since then, the part of Burke has been played by Anthony George. George was a well-trained actor with an impressive resume, and by all accounts was a nice guy. But he cannot dig anything interesting out of the character of Burke as he stands at this point in the series. The only scene in which George has shown any energy so far was in #267, when Burke had lost a dime in a pay phone. The rest of the time, he has blended so completely into the scenery that it is no wonder Vicki can’t remember him from one line to the next.
Back in the Old House, Barnabas talks to Josette’s portrait. In the months from #70 to #192, it was established that Josette can hear you if you do this. Several times she manifested herself either as a light glowing from the surface of the portrait or as a figure emerging from it. In #102, we saw strange and troubled boy David Collins having a conversation with the portrait- we could hear only his side of it, but it was clear that Josette was answering him.
The first time we saw Barnabas in the Old House, in #212, he spoke to the portrait. At that point, Josette was not yet his lost love. It seemed that she was his grandmother, and that she had sided against him in some terrible fight with his father Joshua. He ordered Josette and Joshua to leave the house to him. The next time David tried to talk to the portrait, in #240, it seemed that they had complied- David could no longer sense Josette’s presence in it.
Barnabas had spoken briefly to the portrait the other day, but today he makes his first substantial address to it since banishing Josette and Joshua in #212. Again he entreats her to go, but for a very different reason. Now he says that she is lost to him forever, and must allow him to live in the present. Since he has been scheming to capture a woman, erase her personality, replace it with Josette’s, and then kill her so that she will rise from the grave as a vampiric Josette, this sounds like he has decided to make a big change in his relations to the other characters.
It turns out that he hasn’t, but the writers have decided to change their relationship to their source material. Barnabas’ original plan was identical to that which Imhotep, the title character in the 1932 film The Mummy, had pursued in his attempt to replicate his relationship with his long-dead love Princess Ankh-esen-amun. Imhotep met Helen Grosvenor, whom he regarded as the reincarnation of Ankh-esen-amun because they were both played by Zita Johanns, and subjected her to the same treatment Barnabas first inflicted on Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, and now plans to try on Vicki.
Maggie is played by Kathryn Leigh Scott. The audience in 1967 would not have known that Miss Scott also played the ghost of Josette in some of her most important appearances. However, they would have noticed when David saw Maggie dressed as Josette in #240 he assumed it was the ghost, because her face was “exactly the same” as it had been when she manifested herself to him previously. So we have the same reason to believe that Maggie is the reincarnation of Josette that Imhotep had to believe that Helen was the reincarnation of the princess, and we therefore assume that Barnabas, like Imhotep, was trying to take possession of both the ghost and the living woman.
But after Barnabas tells Josette to go away, he declares that if he is to have her, she must be someone from the present. This sequence of words is nonsensical in itself, but harks back to a theory he had laid out to his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie in #274: “Take the right individual, place her under the proper conditions and circumstances, apply the required pressure, and a new personality is created.” Jonathan Frid would always sound and move like Boris Karloff, but now his project of Josettery is inspired less by Imhotep than by the various “mad doctors” Karloff played in the 1940s. Of course, in the 1960s real-life mad scientists such as Stanley Milgram and John Money were performing experiments on human subjects for which Barnabas’ statement might have served as a motto. So Barnabas is coming to be less a merger of Dracula and Imhotep than of Dracula and Dr Frankenstein.
One of the devices by which Barnabas tries to place women “under the proper conditions and circumstances” for Josettification is a music box which he bought for the original Josette and may or may not have given her.* He gives this to Vicki. To his satisfaction, she is reduced to a complete stupor when she hears it play. She is in that state when the episode ends.
* In #236, he says he never had the chance to give it to her. In subsequent episodes, he implies the opposite.
The living members of the ancient and esteemed Collins family have been invited to a party hosted by their not-so-living cousin, Barnabas Collins the vampire.* It will be a costume party, in which each adult Collins will dress as a counterpart from the era when Barnabas was human.
The show has been hinting from episode #1 that well-meaning governess Vicki is the illegitimate daughter of matriarch Liz, and today Liz’ daughter Carolyn tells her she “deserves to be a Collins.” From what we’ve seen of the Collinses, that’s hardly a compliment, but she is going to the party dressed as the legendary Josette Collins, to whom she refers as one of “our ancestors.”
Vicki and Carolyn confide in each other that they feel strange wearing the dresses. Vicki gets a strong sense of déjàvu when she wears Josette’s dress, and when Carolyn puts on Millicent’s she feels like an intruder.
Vicki’s boyfriend, fake Shemp Burke Devlin, shows up. Vicki tells him about the party. He expresses unease at the idea of her dressing as Josette. He brings up the séance in #170, when Josette spoke through Vicki. That was one of a great many contacts Vicki had with Josette’s ghost between episodes #126 and #192, but Vicki seems startled when Burke brings the matter up.
Vicki suggests that she might go to Barnabas and wangle an invitation to the party for him. He jovially responds that he would be out of place at a Collins family party. He makes it clear that he is not at all bothered to be left out, but Vicki insists. He drives her across the estate to Barnabas’ house and waits in his car while she goes inside.
Vicki lies to Barnabas, claiming she had a previous commitment to go out with Burke. This is only the second time Vicki has successfully told a lie. The first time, in #228, she told Liz something she so desperately wanted to believe that she ignored the fact that Vicki couldn’t look at her, or stand still, or maintain a normal conversational tone of voice. Now, she tells her lie smoothly and easily. Perhaps Carolyn was right, and Vicki has indeed earned the right to be a Collins.
Barnabas is initially disappointed that Vicki wants to bring a date, but brightens when he thinks of a role for Burke to play. Burke can wear the clothing of Jeremiah Collins. After Vicki leaves, Barnabas tells sorely-bedraggled blood thrall Willie that he hated Jeremiah and wanted to “destroy him.” He smiles and says that perhaps he will have that opportunity at the party. My wife, Mrs Acilius, was impressed with Jonathan Frid’s expression as he delivers that line. “Man, he knows how to do evil-face!”
Barnabas had told Willie that he expected the party to be “the most important night of [his] life,” and now he thinks it might present him with opportunities to “destroy” the guests. I’ll admit that there have been times when I had unrealistic hopes for a party I was planning, but I can’t say I’ve ever raised my expectations quite to that level.
On his blog Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn pokes fun at Barnabas for setting the bar so high. In a long comment, I tried to figure out what the writers might have been getting at by giving Barnabas these lines. I won’t copy it here, in part because it goes over material I’ve discussed repeatedly in earlier posts and in part includes spoilers for people who haven’t seen the rest of the series.
Closing Miscellany
Carolyn talks about the ancestors they will be impersonating as people who lived “over 130 years ago” and talks about “nineteenth century” styles. That fits with some references in the early months of the show to Josette having lived in the 1830s, and to the great house of Collinwood having been built in that decade by Josette’s husband Jeremiah Collins. The other day Barnabas said that his sister Sarah, whose ghost we have seen a number of times, lived long before he met Josette, and her dates have been established as 1786-1796. Apparently Barnabas and Sarah were both children when she died, and Barnabas was in his 40s when he knew Josette. Actor Jonathan Frid was in his early 40s when Dark Shadows was in production, so that would be plausible as the age at which Barnabas is frozen. Also, today a portrait of a man wearing a suit from the 1840s is identified as Joshua Collins, Barnabas’ father and a contemporary of Josette and Jeremiah.
This portrait usually hangs in the foyer, and I usually think of it as James K. Polk Collins. In #59, it was identified as Benjamin Collins, but today Vicki says it is Joshua. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die
At other times Jeremiah and Josette have been placed earlier, in the eighteenth century. It is unclear whether they have decided to stick with the 1830s as the time when Barnabas originally became a vampire, or if the date will shift again.
Burke asks Carolyn if her interest in motorcycling is a thing of the past. She says it is. This is the last reference we will hear to her onetime fiancé, biker dude Buzz. Buzz was hilariously out of place on Dark Shadows, and he will be missed as a source of comic relief.
When Burke was introduced in #1, he was a self-made millionaire planning to use his great wealth to take revenge on the Collinses. He gave up on his revenge in #201, and we haven’t seen much sign of his wealth lately. The last time a financial question was attached to him was in #267, when he was heartbroken because he had lost a dime in a pay phone. Today he shows up wearing a jacket that we’ve seen working class characters like Willie and hardworking young fisherman Joe wear. It might make the audience wonder if they are thinking of retconning his wealth away for some reason.
*They have no idea Barnabas is a vampire. They chalk his eccentricities up to being English.
Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, has solved a riddle posed by the ghost of nine year old Sarah Collins. The solution led Maggie to a secret panel through which she has escaped from the cell in which she has been imprisoned by Sarah’s big brother, vampire Barnabas Collins. Barnabas is chasing Maggie through the corridors on the other side of the panel.
Maggie has reached two doors, both of which appear to be locked. The other day, Sarah had visited Maggie in the cell and played “London Bridge” on her recorder. Maggie hears a few notes of that same tune, and one of the doors opens. She runs through the door, closing it behind her. She finds herself in another maze of corridors. She hears the music again, and follows it to a stairway. A moment later, we cut to Barnabas going through the other door and heading in Maggie’s direction.
Maggie finds herself on the beach. She staggers about and collapses. Apparently her escape took more strength than she had left after her long imprisonment. Barnabas makes his way to the beach and stands over Maggie, declaring that he has defeated her. She screams.
Maggie’s father, Sam Evans, is on the beach. Sarah had visited him at home and told him he might find Maggie if he went there that night. Sam hears Maggie’s scream and calls out. Barnabas retreats while Sam runs to Maggie.
Barnabas hides behind a rock and stares hard at Maggie. When he first sucked Maggie’s blood, Barnabas gained great power over her mind. She has shaken free from that to the point where she can try to kill him and run away from him, but maybe he still thinks he can put some kind of zap on her.
Evil eye
In the hospital, Sam, addled quack Dr Woodard, and Maggie’s boyfriend Joe discover that Maggie has amnesia and thinks she’s ten years old. She greets Sam as “Papa,” a title Sam says she hasn’t used in “a long time.” She did call him that in #200, but that was an ultra-dramatic moment, so maybe he means it has been a long time since she used it when she was calm and cheerful. Sam tells Woodard about Sarah. Maggie reacts to Sarah’s name, which is surprising since Sarah never gave it to her. Maggie has Sarah’s doll, which the men find puzzling but don’t ask her about.
Woodard has an idea. The three of them will tell everyone that Maggie is dead, and she will go to Windcliff, a nursing home a hundred miles north of town, which would put it someplace near Mount Katahdin. There, she will be in the hands of Dr Woodard’s colleague Julia Hoffman.
After Sam and Joe have agreed to this, we see Barnabas enter the hospital. A clock prominently featured on the wall shows that it is 3:30 AM. Barnabas asks to see Maggie. Dr Woodard asks him how he knew she was in the hospital. He claims that he has heard a rumor to that effect from everyone in town. Woodard says he isn’t surprised. Collinsport must be rather an odd place if everyone is up and exchanging rumors at that hour.
Woodard tells Barnabas that Maggie is dead. She never recovered consciousness, so she wasn’t able to tell anyone what happened to her. Barnabas manages to keep from smiling until after he turns his face away from the doctor.
Barnabas’ obvious relief when Woodard tells him that Maggie is dead makes an interesting contrast with the shot of him behind the rock on the beach. Maggie’s amnesia is such a stark change from her mental state in the last couple of weeks that it seems Barnabas must have made a successful attempt to project psychic power against her. But those transmissions go in only one direction- he can’t sense that Maggie is still alive.
This is the first time we hear the name “Julia Hoffman.” Woodard first mentioned Dr Hoffman in #242, when she was a blood specialist and a man. Julia still has expert knowledge about blood, but is now primarily a psychiatrist.
There is a legend among fans of Dark Shadows that Julia transitioned from male to female as the result of a typographical error. Ron Sproat is supposed to have put the name “Julian Hoffman” in the script, but a typist left the “n” off the end of the first name. Executive Producer Dan Curtis liked the idea of a female Dr Hoffman, and they ran with it.
The Dark Shadows wiki explains that the evidence does not support this charming tale. Various members of cast and production staff told various stories over the years to explain the switch, and no surviving paperwork can settle the question for us. It certainly is true that the storylines sometimes took wild U-turns based on last-minute decisions by Curtis and others, and some of those decisions were so whimsical that they may as well have been based on typographical errors. But it is also true that we’ve never heard the name “Julian,” and the near-rhyme of “Julian Hoffman” would be the first awkward-sounding name on Dark Shadows. Further, Woodard stopped mentioning Hoffman weeks ago, likely before ABC had decided to renew the show beyond #260.
If they are going to make another 13 weeks of Dark Shadows, they are going to need new characters and new storylines. They must have responded to the renewal with some story conferences during which the producers, the writing staff, and others tried to flesh out some possibilities.
The writers appear to have decided there would be a secret passage from the Old House to the beach by #238, when well-meaning governess Vicki mentions that the Old House is very close to the sea. That was a retcon that would startle viewers who remembered previous episodes that suggested it was deep in the woods. But it wasn’t clear then that Maggie would be the one escaping by that passage. She was ranging freely through the house at that point, and wasn’t locked up in the cell until #251. Until that point, it was possible Maggie would become a vampire and be destroyed like Lucy in Dracula, leaving Vicki to be the Final Girl who escapes from Barnabas’ clutches and defeats him.
Months ago, they brought parapsychologist Dr Peter Guthrie on the show to help fight undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. In #183 and #184, Guthrie offered to help Laura if she would renounce evil and participate in his research. That suggested the possibility that a complex relationship might arise between the male visiting expert and the undead female menace. Laura was a one-shot monster, on a mission to burn her son David to death and bound to vanish after the attempt, and so could not stay on the show indefinitely. She could respond to Guthrie’s offer only by killing him the night after he made it. But now an undead male menace is here for the duration, so a female visiting expert might be able to pick up the marker Guthrie laid down.
There are a lot of jokes in Dark Shadows fandom about Julia’s two specialties. Psychiatry and hematology don’t usually go hand in hand. I’ve dreamed up a little fanfic that satisfies me about this. I shared it in a comment on Danny Horn’s Dark Shadows Every Day:
The story I made up for myself is that Julia started out as a blood specialist but switched to psychiatry. She was interested in rare diseases, the rarer the better. She found that in hematology, there’s so much money to be made from developing treatments for the most widespread disorders that a researcher with an emphasis in the exotic is constantly fighting an uphill battle for funding and recognition.* Even those colleagues who had an abstract appreciation of the importance of studying rare disorders had to work within a system where all the institutions push them towards the biggest projects possible.
Psychiatry, on the other hand, always had room for the unusual.** In fact, Julia discovered that high-strung rich people would pay a great deal of money to be told that whatever happens to be bothering them at the moment is not the same kind of problem that one of their servants might have, but is a mental aberration hitherto unattested in the annals of psychiatry.*** So she switched to that field and quickly made enough money to open her own, hugely profitable, mental hospital. But she never stopped working in rare blood diseases, and the experiments she was able to finance by flattering the vanity of her wealthier patients earned her such a reputation in a male-dominated field that even her old acquaintance Dave Woodard would commit sexist slips of the tongue and say of “Hoffman” that “he” is “the top man in the field” of rare blood diseases.
Lucrative as Windcliff was, Julia’s true love was never money, or even science per se, but the exotic. When she found herself as the best friend/ frequent accomplice/ bossy big sister of an honest-to-wickedness vampire, surrounded by ghosts and witches and werewolves and Frankensteins and time travelers and interdimensional anomalies and who knows what else, there was never any question of her going back to the office.
*I have no reason to believe this was true in the real world in the middle decades of the twentieth century, or that it is true today. It’s simply part of the fictional world in which I see Julia. **(Same note) ***(Same note)
For the first months of Dark Shadows, the ancient and esteemed Collins family of Collinsport, Maine was deeply in debt and running out of money. Their nemesis, dashing action hero Burke Devlin, had become a corporate raider and was back in town, determined to strip them of their assets and leave them in poverty.
Now, the “Revenge of Burke Devlin” arc has fizzled to nothing. Burke himself formally gave up on it in #201. So we don’t hear any more about the Collinses’ financial insecurity. Indeed, they are being retconned as terribly rich.
Seagoing con man Jason McGuire showed up in #193 and set about blackmailing reclusive matriarch Liz out of the Collinses’ great wealth. He threatens to tell the police that one night, eighteen years ago, Liz killed her husband, Paul Stoddard, and that he helped her bury Stoddard’s body in a locked room in the basement of the mansion. Liz hasn’t left home since that night, and she gives in to all of Jason’s demands. Now, he is demanding that she marry him, and it appears she is giving in even to that.
Jason is an in-betweener meant to sweep away the few non-paranormal storylines left since Burke’s peace-out. They have waited rather too long to introduce him. When the Collinses had a great name but little money, we could believe that Liz would be immobilized with fear of disgrace. But now, when we hear that she inadvertently hit Stoddard so hard he died, we just wonder why she didn’t immediately call a lawyer. People as rich as the Collinses are coming to seem call lawyers as often as the rest of us brush our teeth, and they get away with far worse deeds than one Jason is using to control Liz.
A lawyer does show up at the house today, but Liz isn’t telling him what happened that long ago night or what Jason has been doing for the last ten weeks. Instead, she asks to be formally divorced from Stoddard. Her brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger, realizes that this is a preliminary to marrying Jason, a prospect that horrifies him.
When Roger passes the news on to Liz’ daughter Carolyn, Carolyn confronts Liz and Jason in the drawing room. She tells Liz that she knows Jason is blackmailing her and that it is obvious that whatever secret he is threatening to expose has to do with something in the locked room. She demands Liz give her the key. Liz denies everything and flees. Jason tells Carolyn that he will try to persuade Liz to give her the key, to which Carolyn replies with contemptuous disbelief.
Closing Miscellany
There are a few moments when characters allude to other storylines, past and present. Roger, Carolyn, and well-meaning governess Vicki all talk about missing local girl Maggie Evans and the vampire attacks in Collinsport. When Liz first tells Roger she is getting a divorce, Roger says that neither of them was cut out for marriage. Roger does not mention the name of his ex-wife, blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, but regular viewers remember her well as the principal antagonist on Dark Shadows from #126-#191.
When people take off their coats in the foyer of Collinwood, they usually lay them on a polished table. Several weeks ago they introduced a coat closet, but not everyone has made the switch. Today, Liz’ lawyer puts his coat neither on the table nor in the closet, but flings it at Carolyn so that it lands on her shoulder. This is presented so blandly that I wonder if they are telling us that this is an accepted custom in-universe.
Yesterday, the group trying to keep blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins from immolating her son, strange and troubled boy David Collins, agreed on a plan. Dashing action hero Burke Devlin would take David away very early in the morning on a trip to a fishing cabin far to the north, near the border between Maine and Canada. David’s father, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins, would evict Laura from the cabin where she has been staying on the great estate of Collinwood. This plan was unsatisfactory to well-meaning governess Vicki, who believed that the time of greatest danger to David was before dawn. So she sat in David’s room overnight and watched him sleep.
Today, David wakes up after dawn and Vicki urges him to go back to sleep. When he stays up, they spend the morning on lessons. When Burke finally shows up around lunchtime, he announces that come evening he will be taking Vicki to dinner at the local tavern, the Blue Whale. Apparently the fishing trip to the cabin far to the north has somehow morphed into a couple of hours in the afternoon on a boat nearby. This is such a jarring break in continuity that Mrs Acilius and I wondered if the writer of today’s episode, Ron Sproat, just hasn’t been watching the show.
Vicki agrees to go out with Burke on condition that the housekeeper, the wildly indiscreet Mrs Johnson, keep David in her sight at all times. When Mrs Johnson was hired, David took it for granted she would be his “jailer.” He used that word with his aunt, reclusive matriarch Liz, in #77, and again with Burke in #79. Today, it turns out he was right. At one point, Mrs Johnson picks up a chair, sets it between David and the door, and plants herself in it to keep him from getting out. Sproat may not know what happened in yesterday’s script, but he does manage to set up an echo with what was going on five months ago.
Jailer
The scenes between David and Mrs Johnson start off with some chuckles. David Henesy and Clarice Blackburn were both talented comic actors, and while they establish themselves as a restless boy and his irritable babysitter they seem like they are about to be funny. But they just don’t have the lines to keep us laughing. By the time Mrs Johnson tells David that she’s tired of watching him “doodling around,” we know the feeling- doodling around is all Sproat has to offer today.
At the Blue Whale, Vicki is too worried about David to keep her mind on Burke. Burke keeps trying to calm her fears. He saw Laura get on a bus out of town in the morning, and according to Vicki’s analysis it was last night that David was in the greatest danger. She still isn’t convinced.
Hardworking young fisherman Joe shows up. He tells them that he had looked at the nineteenth-century newspaper clipping that led Vicki to believe it was last night that Laura would make her move. Laura Murdoch Radcliffe, whom Vicki believes to have been an earlier incarnation of Laura Murdoch Collins, burned herself and her son David to death one hundred years before. Re-reading it, Joe realized that it was ambiguous whether last night was the anniversary of that event or tonight will be. So he went to the hall of records, and found that it was in fact one hundred years ago tonight that the Radcliffes burned.
Vicki wants to rush back to Collinwood at once to check on David. Burke suggests she telephone first and ask Mrs Johnson if he is all right. Vicki agrees.
This is one of the “Dumb Vicki” moments the writers make a disastrous habit of falling back on. When they can’t think of an interesting or even plausible way to get from one story point to the next, they have a character do something inexplicably stupid. Since Vicki is on screen more than anyone else, she is usually the Designated Dum-Dum.
At this point in the series, the only telephones in the great house of Collinwood are downstairs, one in the foyer, the other in the drawing room. Vicki has been living in the house since June, so she ought to know where the telephones are by now. Since David’s room is upstairs, the only way Mrs Johnson can answer a call is by leaving him unattended. Vicki knows that Laura’s power is so strong that she can do all sorts of bizarre things given a few seconds; it makes no sense at all that she accedes to Burke’s suggestion and gives Laura those seconds.
Mrs Johnson is reluctant to leave David alone, but he seems to be getting ready for bed. So she rushes down to get the phone. When Vicki asks her about David, she rushes back upstairs and finds that he has gone missing.
There are a couple of firsts in this episode. Burke has been trying to take Vicki out to dinner since the beginning of the series. They’ve had several near-misses, but this is the first time he buys a meal that she actually eats.
Burke first met Joe in #3, and within minutes he’d alienated him with an offer of a bribe. Joe found further reasons to dislike Burke as time went on. Those reasons have dissipated, and so today is the first time Joe greets cheerfully Burke and calls him by his first name. Joe and Burke were never particularly important to each other and there is no reason to expect they will become so now, but earlier this week we did see Burke and Roger, whose mutual hatred is a major theme in the show, act like friends for a little while. If Burke and Joe can make up, we might wonder if Burke and Roger’s brief détente might also point the way to some kind of reconciliation.
In 281 of the posts that follow, I link to comments I made on Danny Horn’s blog, “Dark Shadows Every Day.”
Not all of these comments were absolutely unique. A number of times I argued that the show was not so discontinuous as people were making it out to be. To be sure, the creative process is very close to the surface, so that viewers have to do a lot of re-writing in their heads to make sense of what they’re watching. Sometimes the writers just lost track of the story and contradicted themselves from one episode to the next, and other times they changed their minds abruptly. But there were other times when alleged contradictions can be reconciled without having to invent anything drastic.
For example, Danny and many of his regular commenters from time to time mock the depiction of Dr Julia Hoffman as sometimes a blood specialist, sometimes a psychiatrist. I think that’s a pretty easy one to resolve. In this comment, I added some fanfic of my own to sell the idea that she started as a hematologist and retained an interest in that field after switching to psychiatry:
The story I made up for myself is that Julia started out as a blood specialist but switched to psychiatry. She was interested in rare diseases, the rarer the better. She found that in hematology, there’s so much money to be made from developing treatments for the most widespread disorders that a researcher with an emphasis in the exotic is constantly fighting an uphill battle for funding and recognition.* Even those colleagues who had an abstract appreciation of the importance of studying rare disorders had to work within a system where all the institutions push them towards the biggest projects possible.
Psychiatry, on the other hand, always had room for the unusual.** In fact, Julia discovered that high-strung rich people would pay a great deal of money to be told that whatever happens to be bothering them at the moment is not the same kind of problem that one of their servants might have, but is a mental aberration hitherto unattested in the annals of psychiatry.*** So she switched to that field and quickly made enough money to open her own, hugely profitable, mental hospital. But she never stopped working in rare blood diseases, and the experiments she was able to finance by flattering the vanity of her wealthier patients earned her such a reputation in a male-dominated field that even her old acquaintance Dave Woodard would commit sexist slips of the tongue and say of “Hoffman” that “he” is “the top man in the field” of rare blood diseases.
Lucrative as Windcliff was, Julia’s true love was never money, or even science per se, but the exotic. When she found herself as the best friend/ frequent accomplice/ bossy big sister of an honest-to-wickedness vampire, surrounded by ghosts and witches and werewolves and Frankensteins and time travelers and interdimensional anomalies and who knows what else, there was never any question of her going back to the office.
*I have no reason to believe this was true in the real world in the middle decades of the twentieth century, or that it is true today. It’s simply part of the fictional world in which I see Julia. **(Same note) ***(Same note)
In this comment, I devised a much more modest bit of fanfic to answer a simpler question. Quentin has a girlfriend named Tessie, and at some point in the night he had, in his werewolf form, attacked her in the woods. Why was she in the woods? Danny and his commenters had proposed various awkward scenarios to answer this question, but I suggest she just followed Quentin after she saw him in town looking for booze.
In the “1995” segment, Mrs Johnson and Carolyn talk about how Mrs Johnson brushed Carolyn’s hair for her when she was a little girl. Some say this was a continuity error, because Mrs Johnson didn’t come to work at Collinwood until episode 81. Before that, she’d been housekeeper to Collins family retainer Bill Malloy. However, I say that she still could have brushed little Carolyn’s hair while working for Malloy:
I have a theory that could explain Mrs Johnson brushing Carolyn’s hair when she was little.
In the early episodes, Carolyn talks about having gone to school in town. How did she get there?
She can’t have walked; it was miles away, much of it along a winding road with several blind curves. Her mother never left the grounds during those years, she couldn’t have driven her. Roger was living in Augusta with Laura. The only servant was Matthew. Matthew and Carolyn don’t seem at all close; it doesn’t seem likely that he drove her to school every morning. If a school bus came up the hill to Collinwood day after day, the kids who rode it couldn’t have maintained the attitude Carolyn describes, whispering behind her back about her living with the witch in the haunted house. Sooner or later they’d have started talking to her face to face about it.
Carolyn also talks about Bill Malloy being more like a father to her than any other man, and the two of them do have a cozy relationship. Carolyn is also very quick to fall in with Mrs Johnson when Burke pitches the idea of her joining the household staff at Collinwood. So I think we have to conclude that Bill Malloy and his housekeeper were in charge of getting Carolyn to school in the mornings. Malloy was on the fishing boats, so that would require an early start to the day. There were probably many days when little Carolyn was still in her pajamas when she got to the Malloy house. On those days, Mrs Johnson brushed her hair while the water came to a boil for breakfast.
Several times I explained my theory about how the “Meet Gerard” segment (episodes 1061-1198, including “1995,” “The Re-Haunting of Collinwood,” and “1840”) fits together. This iteration also suggests ways to resolve a couple of puzzles about Angelique:
For me, a lot can be explained by the smile of satisfaction Gerard gives when he sees Julia and Barnabas take the staircase from 1995 to 1970. The dark power he represents called them to 1995 from Parallel 1970, and is now sending them back in time, first to 1970, then to 1840 to make it possible for the future they see in 1995 to exist.
This is analogous to what the Leviathans did at the end of 1897. First Quentin’s ghost, then Barnabas and Julia’s I Ching trips, had created a rift in the order of things that made it possible for the Leviathans to erupt from the underworld into the human world, and to send Barnabas to 1969 as their agent. So too have the journeys Barnabas and Julia took into Parallel Time torn open the fabric of time and space, and made it possible for Judah Zachery to bring a Frankenstein maker back to his time.
Attributing to Zachery the same power to exploit disruptions in time to shuttle people between past and future and thereby to rewrite his own history that the Leviathans had shown, we also have a way to resolve the Angelique/ Miranda paradox. Perhaps Angelique really was relatively new to witchcraft in 1795. Perhaps also, in her early naive attempts, she stumbled into the same kind of trouble Barnabas stumbled into with his time-travel. That’s what Zachery had in mind when he shouted at her during his trial that she ought to tell the truth, that she had come to him of her own accord- it was only because she had already worked in the black arts that he could call her to him, from the days after she first left Collinwood in 1796 to a nearby town 104 years before. And perhaps, with the first beheading of Zachery, his spell broke returning her to a time shortly after the “Burn Witch Burn!” moment in the tower room.
Come to think of it, that might also put sense into Angelique’s remark that she is “consigned to this century forever.” There were a few days after Zachery calls her to 1692 and before she returns from 1692, and until Barnabas and Ben torched her, she was sentenced to relive those few days over and over again, Bill Murray-style.
The logic that counts the most in the show isn’t so much the kind of sequential reasoning that I’ve done in these posts as it is the associational logic of a dream. An image or situation or word reminds a dreamer of something, and suddenly the dreamer is in the middle of that something. You dream about polishing your Ford with Turtle Wax, and the next thing you know Polish turtles are whacking away at a shallow spot in a river. You tell a story about rich, selfish people who obsessively keep secrets and set a dreary tone for their town, and the next thing you know your main character is a vampire. I left an unreasonably long comment where I natter on about the concept of dream logic.
Dark Shadows Commentary 