cross – Acilius on Dark Shadows

In #365, well-meaning governess Vicki came unstuck in time and found herself in the year 1795. Now, Vicki is about to be hanged for witchcraft, and the last of the story threads that have been playing out around her are about to be tied up.

Yesterday’s episode ended in the study at the great house of Collinwood, where naval officer/ sleazy operator Nathan Forbes shot a wooden bolt from a crossbow into the chest of vampire Barnabas Collins. At the top of today’s episode, Barnabas pulls the bolt out, telling Nathan that the bolt didn’t hit him. Barnabas’ voice is dubbed in over this, clarifying that Nathan missed his heart. We then switch to Nathan’s point of view and see Barnabas approaching for the kill.

After the opening title, we see that Barnabas is still in the study. Time has apparently passed. Barnabas’ father Joshua enters. Barnabas asks him if Nathan has been buried. Joshua says that he has, and lists the stories that he will tell to cover up all the deaths that Barnabas has been involved with over the last few months. Barnabas wants Joshua to shoot him through the heart with a silver bullet right now and destroy him forever. Joshua cannot do that, but he promises that he will put Barnabas out of his misery come daylight, when he is in his coffin. Barnabas asks two more favors of his father, that he free much put-upon servant Ben and that he prevent the execution of the wrongly convicted Vicki. Joshua promises to do these things as well.

Joshua and Barnabas. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Throughout this scene, actors Louis Edmonds and Jonathan Frid hold back tears. Patrick McCray remarks: “Crying is not the most powerful thing an actor can do on stage. Rather, it is the attempt not to cry that seizes audiences. In these moments, Frid and Edmonds seize. In a medium of love scenes, there is none more poignant.”

The performers have a powerful theme to work with, one that Danny Horn explicates when he considers the question of why Joshua is still alive at the end of this storyline. When she made Barnabas a vampire, wicked witch Angelique decreed that everyone who loved him would die. Yesterday, Joshua confessed that he feared he was incapable of love, and Barnabas told him that such a disability might save his life. But when we see Edmonds and Frid struggling against the urge to weep, we know that Joshua loves Barnabas very deeply indeed, as we have in recent weeks seen that he loved others he has lost. Danny explains:

The reason why Joshua is spared from the curse is that the love he feels for Barnabas isn’t the kind of love that Angelique recognizes, and so he slips under her radar.

Angelique’s love is selfish, and spiteful. She uses it as a convenient excuse for running over anyone who gets in her way. She doesn’t understand love that arises from respect, and strength of character. And she will never feel the kind of deep, honest love that Joshua now realizes for the first time that he is in fact capable of.
Danny Horn, from “Eats, Shoots, and Leaves,” posted on Dark Shadows Every Day 16 August 2014

Danny goes on to explain that, while others had love for Barnabas that included a selfless element, there was also something in their feelings that Angelique could recognize, while Joshua’s love for him comes entirely from this higher plane. The portion of Dark Shadows set in the years 1795-1796 turns out to be The Tragedy of Joshua Collins, not only because Joshua has the highest social status among the characters, makes the most important decisions, and is played by one of the best actors, but because he grows into the sort of person who is governed by this kind of love. When the world around him is being ground down into dishonesty and cheapness, largely due to the consequences of his own misguided actions, Joshua discovers a new kind of strength within himself. Even amid the ruins of a world he himself did as much as anyone to wreck, Joshua represents the hope that something better might yet come into being.

After daybreak, Joshua stands beside Barnabas’ coffin in the secret chamber hidden inside the Collins family mausoleum, the pistol in his hand. Joshua cannot bring himself to fire the silver bullets into his son’s heart. Ben enters. Joshua orders him to affix a silver crucifix to the inside of the coffin to immobilize Barnabas there, and then to chain the coffin shut. Joshua and Ben assure each other that Barnabas will never be released. Later, we see Ben in the chamber, alone with the chained coffin. He looks at it and says “Goodbye, Mr Barnabas, goodbye.” Thayer David delivers that line with an unforgettable simplicity.

Returning viewers know that Joshua’s plan to keep Barnabas confined will work only until April of 1967, when Barnabas will be freed to prey upon the living once more. That July, in #276, Barnabas will stand in the hidden chamber and say that, while in chaining the coffin rather than destroying him his father “thought he was being merciful, what he did was no act of mercy.” This remark, combined with a story he told Vicki in #214 about his conflict with Joshua, just may have been the germ from which the whole story of Joshua grew. At any rate, the promise ABC-TV made to its viewers when it aired this promotional spot in November 1967 has been fulfilled:

Back in the study, Joshua frees Ben and gives him a severance packet of $100, worth about $2500 in 2024 dollars. When Ben thanks him for his generosity, Joshua denies that he is being generous. I have to agree with Joshua there- that amount might get a fellow out of town, but he’d have to find a new job pretty fast if he wanted to stay in the habit of sleeping indoors.

Another servant brings a note while Joshua and Ben are in the study. The governor has refused Joshua’s plea that Vicki’s execution be stayed. She will be hanged tonight.

At the gaol, Vicki’s boyfriend, an unpleasant man named Peter, is brought to her cell. The gaoler tells them they have five minutes before Vicki will be taken to her death. It is little wonder Vicki’s last request was to have time with Peter. Spending five minutes with him is like living to a ripe old age. Peter vows to overcome death and reunite with her. The last time we heard that was when Barnabas died the first time. In #409, he used his dying breaths to ask gracious lady Josette to wait for him to return to her. Fool that she was, Josette did, leading to disaster for her. Returning viewers may well wince, not only at the ominous parallel with Josette’s grim fate, but also at the memory of the many tedious scenes in which Josette at first insisted that Barnabas was coming back and was then at a loss when asked to explain herself. Besides, we don’t want to see any more of Peter.

The scene of Vicki’s hanging is quite elaborate by Dark Shadows standards. They’ve built a fairly realistic gibbet, hired several extras, put hats on them, and given them burning torches to hold. They test the equipment with a heavy sack, slowly lead Vicki to the place of honor, ask her if she wants a mask, and command the Lord to have mercy on her unrepentant soul. The camera drifts up to the top of the rigging, leaving Vicki out of the shot. When the time comes, we hear the drop and see the rope tighten.

Swing time for Vicki. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

This marks the end of the 1795 flashback, but not necessarily of Dark Shadows 3.0. In #437, Vicki told Peter that she often had nightmares in her childhood, so often that she became a connoisseur of nightmares. She would stay asleep throughout the whole process, waking up only at the very moment she was about to be killed. That was a rather heavy-handed way of telling the audience that Vicki would ascend the gallows, put her head in the noose, and find herself back in the 1960s. Once she is back in her own time, what she has learned in the 1790s will have consequences for what she does next. So we can expect an epilogue of some kind before Dark Shadows 4.0 begins.

Haughty overlord Joshua Collins and his long-term house-guest the Countess DuPrés have summoned good witch Bathia Mapes to lift the curse that has made Joshua’s son Barnabas a vampire. Meanwhile, Barnabas has bitten his second cousin Millicent and gone to the waterfront to find another victim. Bloggers Danny Horn, Patrick McCray, and John and Christine Scoleri have said so much so well about this episode that I have only a few points to add.

Millicent tells Joshua that it is wrong of him to have “that man who says he is Barnabas” in the house when he does such frightful things. Nancy Barrett’s performance as a woman made insane by her encounter with the undead is achingly beautiful. And her idea that Barnabas is an impostor is an intriguing one. Should Bathia succeed, Barnabas will need a story to account for the several sightings people made of him when he was cursed. That success seems unlikely- if Barnabas is freed from the curse now, what will we find when Dark Shadows stops being a costume drama set in the 1790s and returns to a contemporary setting? But it is something to file away for future use…

Bathia summons Barnabas away from the docks, where he is about to kill a prostitute, by sending the flame from a candle to him. The movement of the flame is an interesting effect, but what most held my attention was the scene between Barnabas and the woman he almost victimizes. Jonathan Frid and day player Rebecca Shaw play this scene in silence, with exaggerated movements, against a heavy musical score. The resulting balletic interlude is a striking departure from Dark Shadows’ previous form.

Barnabas disappoints his partner at the end of the ballet sequence. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Bathia keeps Barnabas in place by showing him a cross from which he recoils. This is the first time we have seen this reaction. Barnabas routinely comes and goes through a cemetery where many of the grave markers are in the shape of the cross, and they don’t bother him a bit.

Not only is it the first time this particular symbol has been a problem for Barnabas, it is the first time Dark Shadows has suggested there might be something to Christianity. The representatives of the faith we have seen so far in the 1790s have been Barnabas’ Aunt Abigail, a disastrously repressed spinster; the Rev’d Mr Bland, of whom the best that could be said was said by the doomed Ruby Tate when she described him to Barnabas as the preacher who looked like a duck; and the Rev’d Mr Trask, a fanatical witchfinder who inadvertently became the handiest tool wicked witch Angelique had at her disposal. The 1960s characters, aside from one fleeting mention of the word “Christmas” in 1966, have not betrayed any awareness that there is such a thing as Christianity.

Bathia commands the spirit of Angelique to speak to them through Barnabas. When Angelique was first on the show, she very conspicuously kept doing many of the weirdest things Barnabas was in the habit of doing in 1967. So Barnabas exasperated his henchmen by fixating on well-meaning governess Vicki but refusing to bite her, insisting that Vicki would eventually come to him “of her own will.” Angelique exasperates her thrall, much put-upon servant Ben, by casting spells on everyone but Barnabas when her goal is to win Barnabas’ love, insisting that Barnabas would eventually come to her “of his own will.” When in 1967 Barnabas sends his thrall Carolyn to steal an incriminating document and she asks what will happen if she is caught, he replies “See that you don’t get caught.” When Angelique sends Ben to steal a hair ribbon from Abigail and he speaks of what will happen if he is caught, she replies “See that you don’t get caught.” Moments like these suggest that the vampire Barnabas is not simply cursed by Angelique, but possessed by her. Perhaps it was Angelique, wearing Barnabas’ body as a suit, that we saw in 1967, not the son of Joshua and Naomi at all.

Jonathan Frid as Angelique . Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

This fits with the general idea of the supernatural developed in the first 73 weeks of Dark Shadows. The first supernatural menace on the show was undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, who was on from December 1966 to March 1967. Laura was a complex of beings, made up of at least two material bodies and an indeterminate number of spirits, some of which seemed to be unaware of the other parts of the system and pursuing goals incompatible with theirs. From June to November of 1967, the ghost of Barnabas’ little sister Sarah kept trying to contain the damage her big brother was doing to the living characters. Sarah too turned out to be a complicated sort of phenomenon, and the form in which she visited people when they were awake was unaware of and at odds with the form in which she visited them in their dreams. If we go by Laura and Sarah, we would have to assume that supernatural beings are multifarious and fissiparous. So perhaps each time Angelique casts a spell, she splits a bit off of herself and the fragment springs up as another version of her, functioning independently of the rest. In that case, the vampire Barnabas is an avatar of Angelique. When Bathia compels Angelique to speak, she is compelling one of the Angeliques to drop a mask.

The given name “Bathia” is rare; the only person with it who ranks higher in Google search than Bathia Mapes is a musicologist named Bathia Churgin. Professor Churgin was born in New York in 1928, went to Harvard, and taught in the USA until she moved to Israel in 1970. So it is possible that someone connected with Dark Shadows may have heard of Professor Churgin and named Bathia Mapes after her, either as a tribute or just because the name stuck in their mind.

The surname “Mapes” is somewhat less rare; apparently “it is borne by around one in 903,601 people.” In 1963 and 1965, Frank Herbert published two novels that were later issued together under the title Dune; there is an elderly woman with a mystical bent named The Shadout Mapes in those. I’ve never taken much interest in Dune, and owe my awareness of this to comments on Danny Horn’s blog (from Park Cooper here and from “Straker” here.) There doesn’t seem to be much doubt that Bathia’s family name is a nod to The Shadout Mapes; whether it was Sam Hall or another of the writers or someone else who worked on Dark Shadows or one of their kids who had read Dune, I cannot say.

Tag: cross

Episode 450: That man who says he is Barnabas