For its first 38 weeks, Dark Shadows was the story of well-meaning governess Vicki and her attempt to make her way through life on the great estate of Collinwood. One by one, Vicki’s problems were either solved or forgotten. From week 43 on, the show has focused on vampire Barnabas Collins. Barnabas has refused to involve Vicki in his life, leaving her confined to B plots at best.
The current B plot is about Vicki’s relationship with a man named Peter, who keeps trying her patience and ours by pretending to be named Jeff. Peter/ Jeff’s shouting voice, which he uses by default, makes him sound like he is suffering from severe gastrointestinal distress. He has a habit of manhandling people around him, causing them obvious discomfort. These bad habits, and several others, are less the product of the writing or direction than they are symptoms of the casting of Roger Davis as Peter/ Jeff. Alexandra Moltke Isles, like all the other actresses, is so ill at ease when she is in proximity to Mr Davis that it is impossible to believe that Vicki is in love with Peter/ Jeff.
Peter/ Jeff had been connected to the A plot through his boss, mad scientist Eric Lang. Peter/ Jeff has total amnesia. Lang released him from a mental hospital and told him that he was suspected of strangling two women by the waterfront in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. He used Peter/ Jeff as his assistant in an experiment that is supposed to free Barnabas from vampirism. Now Lang is dead, and Peter/ Jeff goes to his house to search for the file on his own background.
There, he meets Barnabas. The two of them display hostility to each other, but the scene fizzles out as it becomes clear that Barnabas has no motivation to oppose Peter/ Jeff’s goals and wouldn’t be in a position to stop him if he did. Peter/ Jeff finds a paper which proves that Lang was lying, and he is not a murderer after all. With that, he and Vicki both lose whatever reason they had to be on the show.
His file from the mental institution had those three magic words: “No homicidal tendencies.” As something to be proud of, that’s a pretty low bar, but he seems happy.
Unfortunately, that basically nerfs Jeff’s entire storyline. He’s not working for Dr. Lang anymore, and the secret that Lang was holding over him — the idea that he might be a murderer — has just dissolved.
This is just throwing a story point away, rather than advancing anything, and Jeff is left at a loose end. He has no job, no family, and no real connection to a story. Now he doesn’t even have homicidal tendencies. It wasn’t much, but it was all he had.
Danny Horn, “Episode 487: Precious Moments,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 24 September 2014
Peter/ Jeff goes to share this news with Vicki. It’s a tribute to Mrs Isles’ acting ability that she makes us believe Vicki is bewildered that Peter/ Jeff thought he had homicidal tendencies. Mr Davis usually seems angry enough to kill someone, as for example at various points in today’s episode when Peter/ Jeff’s joy leads him to wrap his hands around Vicki’s throat, plant a rather painful-looking kiss on her, pick her up, and point her underwear at the camera.
The highlight of this episode is a scene between Julia Hoffman and Timothy Eliot Stokes. Julia is Barnabas’ best friend. She has decided to take over the experiment after the death of her fellow mad scientist Lang. Wicked witch Angelique is trying to prevent her helping Barnabas, and so Julia turns to Stokes, a sage in the ways of the occult.
Stokes is the second such character on Dark Shadows, after the ill-fated Dr Peter Guthrie. Vicki recruited Guthrie into her battle against undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins in #160 and Laura killed him in #185. We haven’t heard about Guthrie since the end of the Laura story, but the show went out of its way to remind him of us when it showed Lang’s death yesterday. Like Guthrie, Lang died as the result of an indiscreet word from housekeeper Mrs Johnson to an undead witch in the drawing room at Collinwood. Also like Guthrie, Lang is a paranormal researcher who is deeply involved with a tape recorder.
While these similarities served to remind us of Guthrie, they also reminded us of the radical differences between him and Lang. Guthrie was as sane and law-abiding as Lang is crazed and lawless. Seeing Stokes today, we recognize him as Guthrie’s successor, and wonder if his fate will be any different.
Julia is deeply troubled because of a dream she had last night. She was so very upset by it that she was up all night chain smoking.* It was no ordinary nightmare, but part of “The Dream Curse,” a piece of mental malware Angelique has sent to infect one character’s mind after another. Julia recaps the Dream Curse to Stokes while looking into a convex mirror. It’s a striking visual.
It doesn’t look good for Stokes. Angelique is a supercharged force of destruction, and Julia withholds several crucial pieces of information while recruiting him to the fight against her. Julia does not identify Angelique as the witch. She can’t tell him about Barnabas’ vampirism or about Lang’s experiment without incriminating herself in many felonies, including murder. When Vicki was recruiting Guthrie to the fight against Laura, a far less formidable adversary than Angelique, she held nothing back and ensured that her friends gave him their full support. If Stokes is going to survive, he will need more backing than Julia can offer him.
*Fans of Dark Shadows wince when they see Julia smoking; Grayson Hall had asthma.
The more efficient a means of communication is, the sooner it is likely to be choked with unwanted messages, some of them harmful to recipients who engage with them. We describe this tendency by saying that eventually, everything turns into email.
One of the most potent means of communication on Dark Shadows have been dream visitations from supernatural beings. As early as #10, matriarch Liz, who in waking life resolutely denied that any paranormal phenomena could be found on the estate of Collinwood, writhed as she slept in her armchair, muttering about ghosts. Since then, we’ve seen undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins and the spirit of the benevolent Josette send competing dreams to influence strange and troubled boy David; the mysterious Widows have beckoned Liz to a watery grave; the ghost of little Sarah Collins visited David and told him all about her big brother, then-vampire Barnabas; revenant Jeremiah Collins and phantom Nathan Forbes have given important information to well-meaning governess Vicki; and several characters have had vivid dreams of unspecified, but obviously supernatural, provenance.
Today, wicked witch Angelique visits Barnabas in a dream and tells him that she is launching a malware attack on the dreamers of Collinsport. It’s going to be sequential; it will take over each user’s wetware in turn, compelling them to forward it to someone else. With each iteration, the worm will become more complex, until it reaches Barnabas in a dream of his own. When he accesses it, he will revert to vampirism.
On his Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn made a detailed comparison of Angelique’s explanation of the Dream Curse with the introduction to the 1931 film Frankenstein. He’s convinced me that the reference was intentional. Since there is a version of Frankenstein playing out on Dark Shadows right now, they are assuring us that the Dream Curse storyline will intersect with that one.
Angelique’s explanation only takes up the last act of the episode. There is a lot of other good stuff in the earlier parts, most revolving around Jerry Lacy’s character Tony Peterson. Tony was first introduced as a showcase for Mr Lacy’s famous Humphrey Bogart imitation; he has discarded that now. He still wears a brown suit and a tan overcoat, but sounds like Jerry Lacy.
Tony quarrels with heiress Carolyn about her relationship with Barnabas. She tells him that she and Barnabas have no romantic interest in each other, and tells him to go ask Barnabas if he doesn’t believe her. He goes to Barnabas’ house, and gives Jonathan Frid a rare opportunity to play intentional comedy.
Angelique, who, under the name Cassandra, has married sarcastic dandy Roger Collins and is living with him in the great house at Collinwood, steals Tony’s lighter and uses it to cast a spell on him. She needs a helper, and has decided to enslave Tony. Mr Lacy and Lara Parker are such fun together that, decades after the show, a company called Big Finish brought them back as Tony and Cassandra in a series of audio dramas. Called The Tony and Cassandra Mysteries, they were among the most popular of the Dark Shadows-themed plays Big Finish put out. I haven’t heard any of them- I’m too stingy to pay $37.41 to download an audio file- but if the scene the two of them play in the gazebo at Collinwood today is any indication, I’m sure they’re wonderful.
The very beginning of the episode is good too. Carolyn is coming back from a trip and has her hands full of luggage, so she knocks on the front door of the great house rather than look for her key. Angelique/ Cassandra answers. Carolyn has no idea who she is. When Angelique/ Cassandra identifies herself as Roger’s wife, Carolyn is shocked that Roger has remarried. She is even more shocked when Angelique/ Cassandra says that she and Roger had known each other only a day when they were married. Nancy Barrett is a high-energy actress, and a tightly-focused one. Her reactions to Angelique/ Cassandra’s successive announcements are like a laser light show on the theme of stunned disbelief.
Carolyn mentions that David decided to stay on in Boston for a few days. Since David is about ten years old, we might expect some explanation as to his lodging, but none is forthcoming. Some time ago we heard about an “Aunt Catherine” in Boston; I suppose he might be at her house, but hey, if the alternative is Collinwood he wouldn’t be any less safe if he were roughing it around Mass and Cass.
Recovering vampire Barnabas Collins receives a visitor in his home, Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes. Stokes agrees to lend Barnabas a twelfth century Sicilian talisman to ward off the power of a witch, and makes it clear he will not rest until he finds out why Barnabas needs it.
This scene is a tour de force for Thayer David as Stokes. I’ve already quoted Danny Horn’s remark in his post about it that David “plays to the balcony. Not this balcony, naturally; I mean the balcony in the theater next door.” David’s style works brilliantly in this context.
The rest of the episode is marred by some bad writing. When wicked witch Angelique, pretending her name is Cassandra, comes to call on Barnabas, he immediately calls her by her right name and tells her everything she could want to know in her campaign to restore his vampirism. This is a pattern of Barnabas’; he withholds information from people who would use it to help him, and blabs without inhibition to his deadliest enemies.
Barnabas takes the talisman to Dr Eric Lang, the mad scientist who has freed him of the symptoms of Angelique’s curse. Lang knows that Barnabas has been a vampire and knows that a curse made him one, but scoffs at the idea of witchcraft and refuses to touch the talisman. Jonathan Frid is a good enough actor that we can wonder if Barnabas has a reason for disclosing all his secrets to Angelique, but Addison Powell plays Lang so ineptly that there is nowhere to hide the fact that his skepticism makes no sense.
Angelique shows up in Lang’s office and casts a spell on him that is about to cause his heart to burst. He staggers to the desk, touches the talisman, and quickly recovers. He will not let her take it from him.
Barnabas comes back and asks Lang if he now believes that he must carry the talisman to protect himself from Angelique. He says he does not want to believe, and again walks off leaving the talisman on his desk.
Barnabas presses Lang for information on the final stage of the treatment that is supposed to end the curse once and for all. Lang takes him to the secret laboratory in his home. There, amid a lot of flashy equipment, is a partially assembled Frankenstein’s monster. Lang says that he will drain the “life-force” from Barnabas’ body and use it to animate the creature once it is completed. Barnabas’ old body will be dead, and Angelique will presumably believe that he no longer exists. But he will live in the new body.
Dark Shadows‘ first supernatural menace was undead blonde witch Laura Murdoch Collins, estranged wife of sarcastic dandy Roger. Laura was on the show from December 1966 to March of 1967. During that time, Laura tried to rebuild her relationship with her son by Roger, strange and troubled boy David. David’s well-meaning governess Vicki at first encouraged her charge to go to his mother, but eventually figured out that Laura posed a deadly threat to him. Vicki formed a coalition of characters to help her fight Laura, and eventually rescued David from his mother’s clutches at the last minute.
Now, Roger has come home to the great house of Collinwood after an unexplained absence that had Vicki, his sister Liz, and his distant cousin, old world gentleman Barnabas, terribly worried. Roger happily announces that he has taken a new wife, and presents her to the family.
As it turns out, Roger has a definite type. His new bride is also an undead blonde witch, though at the moment she is wearing a black wig that doubles as a physical representation of the concept “1968.” Her name is Angelique, although she pretends it is Cassandra.
Some critics say that the film 2001: A Space Odyssey would more aptly have been titled 1968: A Bad Year for Hats. As you can see, however, headwear in general was passing through a time of trial in that period. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Vicki and Barnabas recognize Angelique immediately. Vicki came unstuck in time in #365, finding herself in the year 1795, and didn’t make it back to the 1960s until #461. During her nineteen weeks in the late 1790s, Vicki got to know the people who lived at Collinwood in those days, among them Barnabas and Angelique. She saw many horrible things happen to them, and only after being blamed for those catastrophes herself would she realize that they were the consequences of spells cast by Angelique. Due to Angelique’s curse, Barnabas would be a vampire from 1796 until the week after Vicki came back to 1968. Vicki has decided to believe that Barnabas is not the same person she knew in that period, but rather that he is the descendant of that Barnabas Collins. He does not want her to know that he ever was a vampire, and she has resolved not to know that either, even though he used to bite her on the neck and suck her blood.
The battle against Laura was a fairly exciting story, at least in its latter stages. Angelique is a far more dynamic adversary than Laura, and Dark Shadows is much faster-paced and better written than it was then, so a reprise of the structure of that conflict in this new setting would likely be very exciting indeed.
To wage such a battle, Vicki and Barnabas can have no secrets from each other. Many who have been with Dark Shadows from the beginning have been hoping that its original protagonist will eventually become aware of the principal storylines, and this is one of the obvious ways to do it. Vicki can learn that Barnabas was a vampire, can find out that he was the one responsible for all the terrible crimes committed against the women and men and cows of Collinsport in 1967, and can still align herself with him, because she needs his support against Angelique, a more urgent threat. By the time they have vanquished her, not only will the idea of handing Barnabas over to the authorities have lost its salience, but Vicki will doubtless be facing another urgent threat requiring Barnabas’ assistance.
Nothing we see today suggests that such a development is on the horizon. The episode began with Vicki, Barnabas, and Liz worrying about Roger. A couple of weeks ago, Vicki brought a portrait home from an antique store and it had bizarre effects on Roger. The other day, he took the portrait and disappeared.
We can tell that today is not going to be a win for the female characters when Barnabas reacts to Liz’ expression of concern by dismissing her from his presence and she leaves, even though he is in her house. Vicki can tell Barnabas knows more about the situation than she does, and each time he condescends to mete out a little information in response to one of her questions he ends by turning his back to her and explicitly refusing to share anything more.
When Liz first leaves him alone with Vicki, Barnabas sourly remarks “I try to remember… that I must not reproach you for the reasons you’ve given not to marry me.” As Danny Horn shows in a series of screenshots in his post on Dark Shadows Every Day, their body language does not at any point support the idea that Barnabas wants to be with Vicki and she does not want to be with him. Quite the contrary; he withdraws from her, turns from her, and puts physical objects as barriers before her, while she looks at him, follows him, and leans towards him.
This has been Barnabas and Vicki’s dynamic for a long time. By #285, she went so far as to invite herself to a sleepover at his house. Barnabas was a vampire then; he entered the bedroom while she slept and bared his fangs, but couldn’t bring himself to bite her. Time and again, Vicki would all but draw a circle on her neck with the words “Mr Vampire, Bite Here!,” and Barnabas would tremblingly open his mouth, then recoil at the last moment. In #462, he finally sampled her bloodstream. By the end of #466, Barnabas’ vampirism had gone into remission, and that little storyline had evaporated. Now Vicki is vague and confused about what happened between her and Barnabas, and he is afraid he will relapse and bite her again.
Vicki is trapped between two blank walls. On one side Barnabas is excluding her from his life and therefore from active participation in the A story. On the other, she keeps having scenes with her old boyfriend from the 1790s, an unpleasant man named Peter who keeps demanding, for no apparent reason, that she call him Jeff. That habit of his was dead on arrival as a story point, and now that Angelique will be trying our patience by insisting her name is Cassandra, it will become impossibly tedious to have a second character doing the same pointless schtick. As long as she is in this position, Vicki’s prospects for contributing interesting material to Dark Shadows belong to a very low order of probability.
Sarcastic dandy Roger, possessed by the spirit of wicked witch Angelique, visits mad scientist Dr Lang. The village of Collinsport was once a whaling center, and Lang is mindful enough of that long-ago history that he collects harpoons. Roger appears to be fascinated by Lang’s collection. He holds one of the finer pieces, admires it, fondles it, and tries to kill Lang with it. At the last moment, the murder is prevented by recovering vampire Barnabas and Julia, who is a scientist as mad as Lang but infinitely more interesting. As is typical of supernatural beings on Dark Shadows, Angelique projects her power through a portrait of herself; the portrait also has some adventures today.
There is a lot of great stuff in this one, as other bloggers have well explained. The 1960s were the heyday of Freudianism in the USA, and in the first year of the show the influence of that school of thought could often be traced in the scripts of Art Wallace and Francis Swann. Patrick McCray documents in his post on The Dark Shadows Daybook that this was an episode where writer Gordon Russell allowed himself to cut loose and have fun with the sillier side of the Freudian approach.
On his Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn focuses on the scene where Barnabas and Julia decide to go and stop Roger. He points out that it is the first conversation they have had about something other than themselves, the first time Barnabas shares with Julia the secret of how he became a vampire, the first time they take heroic action, and the first time they are recognizably friends. It is that friendship that will drive the action of the show from now on.
In their meticulously detailed summary of the action of the episode on their Dark Shadows Before I Die, John and Christine Scoleri capture the effect on the audience of the steady accumulation of one absurdity upon another as the episode goes on. Reading their unfailingly matter-of-fact description of the ever-mounting lunacies we witness in this half-hour is almost as exhilarating as it was watching them in the first place.
Barnabas calls Julia’s attention to the closing cliffhanger. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Well-meaning governess Vicki and mad scientist Julia have gone to the Collins family mausoleum in the old cemetery north of town. Vicki wants to see whether her memory is correct and there is a chamber hidden behind a secret panel in the mausoleum, and Julia is trying to limit what Vicki can find. As they enter the mausoleum, Vicki shines a flashlight directly into the camera, then sees a man lurking in a dark corner of the mausoleum.
Vicki assures us that, no matter how much the show might have changed since last summer, it’s still Dark Shadows.
The man is Peter, an unpleasant fellow with whom Vicki unaccountably fell in love when she met him on an unscheduled journey through time to the 1790s. For no reason that will ever be of interest to the audience, Peter keeps insisting that his name is Jeff and that he is not a time traveler. Yet he is the one who finds the mechanism to open the secret panel and expose the hidden chamber where Vicki and Peter once found refuge. Even after that he keeps wasting our time with his pointless denials of the obvious facts.
While they inspect the chamber, Vicki realizes that Julia knew it was there. She confronts her about it, and Julia feigns ignorance. Vicki points out that Julia tried everything she could to keep her from going to the mausoleum and that when those efforts failed she insisted on accompanying her there. Vicki is taking a breath, apparently about to list further evidence supporting the same conclusion, when she glances at Peter and changes the subject.
Vicki remarks that the only way the room has changed since she was there in the late eighteenth century is that there is now a coffin in the middle of it. Julia knows that it is the coffin in which vampire Barnabas Collins was confined from the 1790s until 1967. Barnabas bit Vicki several days ago, but it didn’t really take, and he has since been cured of vampirism. So Vicki probably doesn’t know that Barnabas ever was a vampire, and certainly doesn’t know that it is his coffin. Peter opens the coffin. The empty interior of the coffin dissolves to Barnabas in his hospital bed.
Mid-dissolve.
Barnabas sits up by bending from the waist, showing that old habits die hard. He cries out for the doctor who rehumanized him, Eric Lang. A look of panic spreads across his face.
Terrified Barnabas
He is alarmed to hear hounds baying outside his window. He goes out on the terrace of his hospital room and touches its stone balustrade.
What, your hospital room doesn’t have a terrace with a stone balustrade?
Barnabas goes back inside and continues crying for Lang. When Lang shows up, he explains that the cure isn’t quite complete. There will be occasional relapses of varying intensity, and further treatments are necessary. Barnabas throws a tantrum in response to this news, pouting that if he has to keep taking medicine he may as well go back to being an undead abomination who preys upon the living. Lang talks him down, telling him that he is confident he will be able to effect permanent remission.
We see Julia standing in the rain beside a sign for the Collinsport Hospital, looking up at Barnabas’ silhouette in the window behind his balustrade. She walks away. We then see Lang at a desk in a large wood-paneled room. There is a knock. Lang gives a self-satisfied smirk as he looks at his watch, then opens the door to let Julia in. We see that the wood paneling continues in the corridor behind her. In later episodes we will learn this is in Lang’s house. In that case, the paneling in the corridor behind Julia makes it clear someone has already let her in. At this point, a viewer would naturally assume that it is Lang’s office in the hospital. Wood paneling may not be standard for doctors’ offices in hospitals, but neither are terraces with stone balustrades standard for patient rooms.
Julia looking innocent.
Julia had been treating Barnabas’ vampirism in 1967, and wants to reclaim the case. She and Lang sit across from each other and engage in a verbal fencing match. Lang uses many of the ploys we have seen Julia use to keep control of the situation. On his great blog Dark Shadows Every Day,Danny Horn speculates that the audience’s revulsion at the prospect of Lang replacing Julia was the intended reaction. It cements our sympathy for Julia as a trickster figure and as the de facto protagonist of the chief storylines.
I agree with Danny’s assessment of the scene’s effect, but I doubt it was fully intentional. When I imagine the scene played with Howard da Silva instead of Addison Powell as Lang, I see the audience conflicted and in suspense. We are invested in Julia and her relationship with Barnabas, and so we don’t want Lang to push her aside. But an actor like da Silva would be so intriguing that we couldn’t help but be curious how it would play out if he did. It is only the severity of Powell’s professional deficiencies that causes us to see Lang as nothing but a threat. Compared with the more complex reaction a da Silva could have generated, this scene falls flat.
As Julia is leaving Lang’s office, Peter barges in. Julia’s eyes widen when she sees that the two are connected. Lang realizes that she is likely to make good use of this information, and is furious with Peter for exposing it to her.
It becomes clear that Peter has been implicated in a homicide, that he is suffering from amnesia, and that Lang is blackmailing him into stealing body parts from a nearby cemetery. When Peter says he will no longer help Lang, Lang threatens to send him back to the institution for the criminally insane where he found him. He also forbids Peter to see Vicki again, telling him that Barnabas Collins wants to marry Vicki and that Barnabas’ happiness is important to his plans.
In yesterday’s episode, Peter talked to Lang about his hope that he might be able to learn something about himself from Vicki. This reminds longtime viewers of the first year of Dark Shadows, when Vicki’s motivation for staying in the great house of Collinwood was her hope that she would learn who her biological parents were and why she was left as a newborn at the Hammond Foundling Home. Peter even uses the same phrases Vicki had used in expressing the desire to learn more about himself. Moreover, Vicki, like Peter, has an important gap in her memory, having forgotten key details of her time in the eighteenth century.
That Lang has plans for Vicki was strongly suggested last time, when he told her that he expected her to have an extremely significant future. When we see what future he has decreed for a character who is in a position so similar to Vicki’s, and that the future he has in mind for her includes marriage to Barnabas, we can have little doubt that his plans for her are most evil.
The scene between Lang and Peter is a very efficient piece of exposition, but it is poorly executed as drama. Addison Powell keeps pulling funny faces for no apparent reason, does not appear to have any control over the volume of his voice, and alternately drifts off his mark and stands unnaturally still. Roger Davis is a highly trained professional actor, but he must have skipped the day when his acting teachers covered means of shouting without sounding constipated. The two of them together are not very easy to watch. I get through their scenes with a further bit of imaginary recasting, picturing a onetime Dark Shadows extra like Harvey Keitel as Peter opposite da Silva’s Lang.
In a room at the Collinsport Hospital, very loud physician Eric Lang (Addison Powell) opens the curtains to show his patient, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, that it is a sunny afternoon. It takes Barnabas a moment to realize that this is Lang’s way of showing him that he has cured him of his longstanding affliction, vampirism. Once he figures it out, Barnabas is very happy to be human again.
Barnabas talks with Lang about the origins of his vampirism. At one point Lang says “Ah, so a curse was responsible.” You know how doctors are, always coming out with the same cliches. Lang does say something novel when he remarks on Barnabas’ “pulsebeat.” That specimen of Collinsport English will be back.
In the great house of Collinwood, Barnabas’ distant cousins Roger and Liz are at odds. Roger keeps having conversations with a portrait, in the course of which he loses track of the time. The correct time is 1968, and he keeps thinking it is 1795. When he does that, he mistakes himself for his collateral ancestor Joshua Collins and his sister Liz for Joshua’s wife Naomi. Today, Liz has to slap Roger to get him back to himself. Louis Edmonds’ alternation between Joshua and Roger is masterful, one of the outstanding moments of acting in the whole series.
The portrait is of Angelique, the wicked witch who made Barnabas into a vampire in the first place. At the hospital, it becomes clear that Angelique’s spirit is controlling Roger through it. He is cold and distant, staring out the window when Barnabas tells Liz he wants to take up gardening, refusing to say a word when Lang enters the room. When he takes his leave, Roger looks at Barnabas and declares “It’s not this easy.” We realize that he is a puppet for Angelique. Roger steals Lang’s cartoonish mirror-bearing headpiece.
We cut back and forth between Barnabas’ hospital room and the drawing room at Collinwood. At Collinwood, Roger shows the headpiece to the portrait and explains that it was Lang’s. He starts to twist it. In the hospital, Lang suddenly leaps up with a splitting headache. Roger stops twisting, and Lang says he’s better. He resumes twisting, and Lang resumes suffering. Roger tells the portrait he cannot obey its command to put the headpiece in the fire, and throws it across the room. In the hospital, Lang suddenly recovers from his headache. Barnabas tells him it was Angelique’s doing, and says that he will have to become a vampire again to spare Lang her attentions.
On his blog Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn identified Addison Powell as “THE WORST ACTOR EVER TO APPEAR ON DARK SHADOWS.” I don’t agree with that. In yesterday’s episode, for example, Powell attained a level that could fairly be described as “competent,” a label that forever eluded figures like Mark Allen (Sam Evans #1,) Michael Currie (Constable/ Sheriff Carter,) and Craig Slocum (Noah Gifford and, later, Harry Johnson.) And there will be times when his ludicrous overacting lends just the note of camp that turns a scene from a tedious misfire to an occasion for chuckling. But he is pretty bad today. When an actor gets to be depressing to watch, I sometimes make his scenes bearable by trying to imagine what it might have been like if, instead of casting him, they had chosen someone else who might have been available.
So many members of the original Broadway cast of the musical 1776 appeared on Dark Shadows at one time or another that I tend to assume that any of them would have accepted any part on the show. Howard da Silva played Benjamin Franklin in 1776, and he is my imaginary Dr Lang.
You can see da Silva’s Franklin in the 1972 movie version of 1776, where he plays the Sage of Philadelphia with frequent chortles that suggest a mad scientist gleefully working to release a murderous nightmare on the world, which is more or less the show’s vision of the founding of the USA. That isn’t Franklin’s only note- he has occasion to speak earnestly about the British Empire’s mismanagement of its North American possessions, and sorrowfully about the need to leave slavery alone while concentrating on the fight for independence. Those who have seen da Silva play subtle and powerfully compassionate men in his other work, for example as the psychiatrist in the 1962 film David and Lisa and as the defense attorney in the 1964 Outer Limits episode adapting Isaac Asimov’s story “I, Robot,” will hardly be surprised that he could be effective in those moments.
So when Powell overdoes the shouting, I imagine da Silva in his place, going through his bag of tricks to show us a man who might be taking a maniacal satisfaction in his blasphemous labors, who might be profoundly devoted to the relief of suffering, and who might be both at once. Sometimes I get a pretty clear image of what that would have been like, and when that happens the show in my head is hard to beat.
At the end of Friday’s episode, the well-meaning Vicki Winters was driving her car and bickering irritably with her passenger, Barnabas Collins the vampire. Barnabas wants to elope with her, which she doesn’t object to doing. But first she insists on running an errand in his old neighborhood, the deserted cemetery north of town, and he hates that idea.
A pedestrian wandered into the middle of the road. To keep from hitting him, Vicki had to slam the brakes so hard she lost control of the car and crashed. At least she learned the lesson of the cowardly Roger, who ran over a pedestrian years before the show even started and as punishment was condemned to spend months looking for some guy’s fountain pen.
Today, Vicki and Barnabas are in the hospital. We see Barnabas in bed, moaning alternately for Vicki and his long-lost love, the late Josette. It doesn’t bode well for the planned elopement that in his delirium Barnabas gives Vicki only equal time to Josette. We then see Vicki in her bed, moaning for Peter, an unpleasant young man she got to know recently while visiting the late eighteenth century. She doesn’t mention Barnabas’ name at all.
Vicki comes to and finds Peter at her bedside. He denies that he is Peter, claiming merely to be a strange man who let himself into her room to watch her sleep. She recognizes him not only as her boyfriend from the 1790s, but also as the wayward pedestrian involved in the crash. He admits to this, but will not answer any of her questions.
A nurse enters and finally gets Peter to leave Vicki’s room. Perhaps he will let himself into other girls’ rooms and stare at them while they sleep. The doctor, a man named Lang, comes in.
Dr Lang asks Vicki if she knows Barnabas well. This is an interesting question. Before he bit her on Tuesday, Vicki definitely did not know that Barnabas was a vampire. Her behavior towards him since has been so blasé, not only by contrast with the behavior of his other victims but also by contrast with the eager friendliness and habitual deference she had always shown him in the many months they have known each other, that we can’t tell if she has learned that he is one even now. Indeed, we have no idea what Vicki thinks is going on between her and Barnabas, and as a result their scenes together have been pure comedy.
Vicki nibbles on her index finger and thinks for a moment about Lang’s question. Since they were going off to spend the rest of eternity together, it would be pretty embarrassing for her to admit that she doesn’t really have much understanding of Barnabas, so she says that she does know him well. As she does so, she glances away for a moment, and the light flashes off her eye, emphasizing her unease.
Vicki talking through her hand
Lang asks about Barnabas’ health before the crash. Vicki puts her hands down and stutters slightly as she says “He was in excellent health.” A note of uncertainty gives her voice a childlike quality. When Lang replies with “Really?,” her voice sounds even more childlike when she answers “Y-yes, have you discovered something Mr Collins didn’t know about?” Lang says that he thinks Barnabas knew about it.
Lang looks at Vicki’s neck and finds the marks of Barnabas’ bite. They are just two dark dots, not conspicuously different from the last stages of an ordinary hickey.
The bite marks.
When Lang asks about the marks, Vicki’s grogginess suddenly vanishes and she becomes hyper-alert. Since Vicki has been so bland about her experience with Barnabas, returning viewers might well expect her to answer Lang’s questions about the bite marks by saying that Barnabas gave them to her when they were making out. Instead, she gets defensive, at first denying that she remembers how she got the marks and then asking “What’s wrong with them? Why are they so bad, please tell me?” Alexandra Moltke Isles reads that line brilliantly. There is a touch of defiance in her voice, but also a sincere question- she genuinely does not see any reason she should have to hide the marks or explain them to anyone.
Early in the episode, the telephone rang at the great house of Collinwood, and long-term houseguest Julia Hoffman answered. It was the nurse, reporting that Vicki and Barnabas had been brought in after a traffic accident and that “Mr Collins is on the critical list.” Now Julia is in Barnabas’ room trying to arrange transport to his house. Lang comes in and is astounded at the thought of taking an unconscious patient, who is in critical condition, out of the hospital.
Lang and Julia have a showdown. Lang makes it clear that he knows that Barnabas is a vampire, and has deduced that Julia, who is a doctor doubly qualified to practice as a psychiatrist and a blood specialist, has been trying to cure him. Lang marvels that Julia has been treating “a legendary condition.” He asks to examine her neck; she never removes her scarf, surprising returning viewers who know that Barnabas has not bitten her. He continues to pose direct, well-informed questions, which she continues to parry with lies and evasions. She grits her teeth when he refers to Barnabas as “our patient.” At the last, she agrees to go, and he agrees to keep the room dark.
Barnabas awakens and sees Lang. He becomes agitated and demands to be released. Lang refuses. Lang tells him the time is nearly four o’clock. Dawn broke in central Maine at 4:33 on the morning of 8 April 1968, so Barnabas has little more than a half hour to get back home to his coffin. It is no wonder that Barnabas puts on his murdering face when Lang will not let him go. Lang backs away and says he must explain something Barnabas does not understand. Lang reaches the window. As he opens the heavy curtains, he intones, “Yes, it is four o’clock! But it is FOUR O’CLOCK- IN THE AFTERNOON!!” The sunlight floods the room. Barnabas screams and covers his eyes with his hands. But he does not turn to dust- he is no longer a vampire.
This marks the end of the epilogue to the 1795 segment, and with that the end of Dark Shadows 3.0. Unlike version 1.0, which ended with no unresolved story threads of any interest, and version 2.0, which ended at a moment when the only way forward was the annihilation of all the characters, they have cued up at least three major storylines. Eventually Peter will stop pretending to be someone else and something will happen between him and Vicki; Roger will bring wicked witch Angelique home with him; Lang and Julia will work together to manage Barnabas’ aftercare. There are several other characters available for story-building. We have met kindly eccentric Professor Stokes and expect him to contribute to some or all of these storylines. We do not know how Barnabas’ cure will affect his blood thralls Vicki and Carolyn. Carolyn’s relationship with Humphrey Bogart-esque lawyer Tony is in an awkward spot, and Tony is in a position to trigger a major storyline if he starts telling people what he thinks he knows about Carolyn and Barnabas.
On his blog Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn often identified Addison Powell, who plays Lang, as “THE WORST ACTOR EVER TO APPEAR ON DARK SHADOWS.” I don’t think he deserves that title. In fact, he isn’t even the worst actor in this episode. I’m sure the Nurse was written to be pretentious and silly, but Katharine Balfour’s stiffness and relentlessly exaggerated vocal mannerisms are simply excruciating. Powell isn’t great, and will get much, much worse, but he is basically competent today. Mrs Isles, Jonathan Frid, and Grayson Hall all do excellent work in their scenes with him, and he never once gets in their way. But when Balfour is on stage, the others can do nothing but stop and wait for her to leave. She had an extensive stage career, so I suppose she must have played many parts well, but she is stupefyingly bad today.
After Lang’s big “FOUR O’CLOCK- IN THE AFTERNOON!!,” we cut to the closing credits. Under them is a set where a clock’s hands indicate four. From April 1967 to July 1968, ABC suggested its affiliates run Dark Shadows from 3:30 to 4:00 PM. There were a great many stations which insisted on showing it at 10:30 AM. While it was a hit by this point in the 3:30 slot, its ratings were always rock bottom where it was shown in the mornings, so the great majority of viewers would have seen the correct time as they read the names of the people who worked on the show.
The other day, vampire Barnabas Collins added well-meaning governess Vicki to his diet. Barnabas has bitten several people in the year he has been on Dark Shadows, and his victims have reacted to the experience in a wide variety of ways. Vicki’s post-bite syndrome is unique on the show, and as far as I know unique in vampire stories. Her reaction could most succinctly be summarized as “not feelin’ it.”
Barnabas had hoped to enslave Vicki with his bite, as he had enslaved others, and attributes her blasé response to the unseen presence of wicked witch Angelique. But it may be that Barnabas has himself to blame. Several times in 1967, Vicki went out of her way to make herself available to Barnabas for biting. She invited herself to his house for a sleepover in #285, pressed her neck towards his teeth while embracing him in #311, and has rarely missed a chance to be alone with him. There is a hilarious meta-fictional element to this theme, as Vicki tries to secure a place for herself in the main storyline by becoming the vampire’s thrall.
For his part, Barnabas has time and again looked at Vicki’s neck, shown his fangs to the camera, and then backed off. Even when he finally did bite Vicki in #462, he spent so much time and energy displaying his internal struggle that my wife, Mrs Acilius, commented “Barnabas is about to make himself sick.” Indeed, he took so long making that display that the episode ended before he sank his teeth into Vicki, and we had to wait until the next day to be sure he’d actually gone through with it. You hardly expect Vicki to be excited that such a reluctant suitor has at long last deigned to attach himself to her.
Vicki has recently returned from a long visit to the year 1795,* when the human Barnabas died and the vampire began his career. Barnabas fears she may have discovered his secret while in that period, a fear that deepens as her scattered memories return.
In fact, Vicki never discovered that Barnabas was a vampire. She does have some information that, coupled with what she and others have already found out, could lead to his exposure, but she isn’t thinking about that at all. Instead, her main focus is on an unpleasant man named Peter, whom she met and with whom she fell in love in the 1790s. On Wednesday, she learned that shortly after she left the eighteenth century Peter had been hanged for a killing she committed,** and she is frantic with guilt about it.
At the top of today’s episode, Barnabas sends Vicki a telepathic message that they will be eloping tonight. She accepts this without any visible emotion. Then her friend, hardworking young fisherman Joe (Joel Crothers,) comes to the door. In the 1790s segment, Crothers played naval officer/ sleazy operator Nathan Forbes, a villain who was responsible for many terrible crimes against Vicki and people she cared about. This is the first time we’ve seen Joe since the show returned to contemporary dress, and Vicki takes a while to adjust to the fact that it is her trusty old pal before her, not the detestable schemer who did so much to blight her time in the eighteenth century.
Joe has come to bring Vicki a charm bracelet that his girlfriend Maggie had given her. The charm bracelet turned up in the old courthouse in the village of Collinsport. The courthouse has been disused for years and is about to be torn down. Joe wonders when Vicki was there; she makes many cryptic remarks in reply, but can’t bring herself to tell such a sensible fellow that she was tried there for witchcraft and sentenced to death 172 years before, much less that his counterpart gave the testimony that condemned her to the gallows.
After Joe has gone, Vicki still isn’t motivated to do anything to prepare for her departure with Barnabas. Instead, she takes a nap in the drawing room. She has a dream in which she sees Peter in his gaol cell. She promises him that she will prove his innocence, and marches off. She finds Nathan dozing at a desk. She tells Nathan that he could prevent Peter’s execution if he were to tell the judges that he lied when he told them he saw Peter kill the man whom Vicki actually killed. Nathan cheerfully explains that he cannot tell the judges anything, since he is dead. He tells Vicki that she is dead, too- he was strangled, she was hanged.
Nathan, having a wonderful time in the afterlife, proposes a toast “to Death- the best of all possible worlds!” Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Nathan’s statement is proof that the dream is not simply a product of Vicki’s psychology, but a communication with Nathan’s spirit. Barnabas strangled Nathan, but his father Joshua Collins hid that fact from the world, and neither Vicki nor anyone else alive in 1968 has any way of knowing about it. Vicki wasn’t hanged, but she was about to be when she was whisked back to her own time, and Nathan would have no way of knowing she survived.
Vicki goes back to Peter’s cell and finds it empty. She turns and sees the gallows, on which Peter is hanged before her eyes. She wakes up calling out Peter’s name.
Vicki opens her eyes to see Barnabas standing in front of her. He asks her who Peter was; she says he was someone she knew long ago, and that it will be hard for her to forget him. He asks if she knew he was coming; she affirms that she did. If he knew about the contents of the very elaborate dream she just had, he would have all the more reason to ask such a question. The only action of Barnabas’ mentioned in it was Nathan’s murder, and Nathan doesn’t bother to tell Vicki by whom he was strangled. There are four speaking roles and a background player in the dream, and not only is Barnabas not one of them, no one mentions in it his name, sees his image, or comes into contact with any of his belongings. Barnabas has been dominating the show since he was first named in #205, and Vicki, whom he was under the impression he had enthralled, has lost all interest in him.
Barnabas tells Vicki it’s time to go. She says she has to do something else first. She wants to go to the old Collins mausoleum and see if there is a secret room hidden there. If there is, she will know she really did travel back in time.
Barnabas was trapped in his coffin in that secret room from the 1790s until 1967, and is anxious that no one should discover its existence. He is also eager to get going with whatever plan he has made for Vicki. But he finds himself powerless to oppose her. Not only is he not her dark and irresistible master, as he had been of his other blood thralls, he isn’t getting nearly as much deference from her as she had always shown him before he bit her.
We cut to a car, in which Vicki is driving Barnabas to the cemetery. Apparently it is Vicki’s car. This is the first time we have seen Vicki driving, and it brings up a bit of a riddle for viewers who have been paying close attention to Dark Shadows from the beginning. In the first 46 weeks of Dark Shadows, Vicki was continually asking to borrow heiress Carolyn’s car, getting rides from people, walking longer distances than others thought reasonable, trying to catch the bus, and wishing she had a bicycle. In #232, #233, and #259, it was implied that Vicki had a car of her own. They never explained how or when she came into possession of such a thing, but they stopped all the business of her trying to find a way to get around. As we watch Barnabas squirming in the passenger seat, we can believe he would rather be standing with her at a bus stop.
Barnabas keeps telling Vicki that he doesn’t think they ought to go to the mausoleum. She snaps at him that he was originally enthusiastic about going. The statement is entirely false, and the line is entirely convincing. We saw that Barnabas was appalled at Vicki’s interest in the mausoleum, and we saw that she was too absorbed in her own thoughts to notice his feelings. The two of them bicker about the need to get settled before sunrise, and they sound for all the world like an old married couple. Barnabas exercises exactly zero control over Vicki, and the result is hilarious.
The show so often puts Vicki in the role of Designated Dum-Dum, requiring her to facilitate the mechanics of the plot by doing things she would have no reason to do, that the show’s original protagonist is eventually swallowed up by Dumb Vicki. It’s always refreshing to see Smart Vicki put in an appearance. I don’t know if the woman we see today is a perfect example of Smart Vicki, but she certainly is Smart Alexandra Moltke Isles. Mrs Isles’ performance is so good that even a hater like Danny Horn had to admit in his post about the episode on Dark Shadows Every Daythat she is fun to watch. And the character is Strong Vicki, taking action in pursuit of her own objectives, making use of the information available to her, and bending Barnabas to her will.
The scene in the car will have an amusing echo for longtime viewers. From November 1966 to March 1967, instantly forgettable young lawyer Frank Garner kept telling Vicki how interested he was in her. Vicki went on some dates with him and accepted him as her sidekick in her struggle against undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, but all in all was almost as cool towards him as she has been to Barnabas post-bite. In #153, Vicki was Frank’s passenger in his car. He thought they were going out for a glamorous evening, but she abruptly insisted that they go to the old cemetery north of town and visit an old crypt. Frank was about as pleased then as Barnabas is now. I suppose a fellow ought to know what he’s getting into when he and Vicki get into a car together.
Barnabas sees a figure ahead and asks Vicki what it is. She looks and slows down. A man in contemporary dress who looks like Peter lopes into the road, smiles a big goofy grin, and waves. Even though Vicki’s movements and the sound effects told us she took her foot off the accelerator as soon as Barnabas said he saw something, the man is so close to the car that she slams on the brakes, the tires squeal, and she loses control of the vehicle. He must have wandered right in front of the car. That confirms for returning viewers that the man must be Peter. He always did the least intelligent and most dangerous thing, usually while grabbing at people and shouting in a petulant voice. Poor Vicki. Barnabas is a vampire and a cold fish, but she’s managed to get herself stuck with a guy who makes those shortcomings look minor by comparison.
*It was 1795 in #365, and in #413 they explicitly told us the new year 1796 had come. But after Vicki returns to the 1960s in #461, the only year they talk about is 1795.
**With justification- she shot a man who was trying to strangle a young boy.
High-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins was Dark Shadows‘ first villain. Through the first 40 weeks of the show, dashing action hero Burke Devlin was determined to prove that Roger, not he, had been driving when his car hit and killed a pedestrian ten years before, and Roger would stop at nothing to keep Burke from succeeding. The Revenge of Burke Devlin storyline was never particularly exciting. By the time Burke formally gave up on his quest for vindication in #201, it had been running on fumes for some time. Roger hasn’t been central to a plot since then. The show has capitalized on actor Louis Edmonds’ unrivaled gift for sarcasm by having him deliver the occasional zinger, and otherwise has used him as a symbol of the inability of the Collins family to use its wealth and connections to solve any of its problems.
For nineteen weeks ending this past Monday, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the late eighteenth century and Edmonds played haughty overlord Joshua Collins. That performance was a triumph, and the entire segment turned out to be The Tragedy of Joshua Collins. So returning viewers will have an appetite to see more of what Edmonds can do, and will be excited when we come back from the opening title sequence to a scene focusing on Roger.
Roger spends this scene staring at a portrait and reciting poetry to it while various people enter the room and try to get his attention. That may not sound like a promise of thrills, but it is on this show. For example, Roger’s son, strange and troubled boy David, had a lively if somewhat one-sided conversation with the portrait of Josette Collins that hangs in the Old House on the estate in #102, and that conversation presaged danger for David and an important role for Josette’s ghost. The show’s first supernatural menace was Roger’s estranged wife, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, and several characters had important relationships with portraits of Laura during the four months she was in the cast. And dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis once spent a week staring at the portrait of the late Barnabas Collins that hangs in the foyer of Collinwood. As a result, Willie wound up opening Barnabas’ coffin, finding that he was a vampire, and turning Dark Shadows into an entirely different kind of show.
Roger talks to the portrait of Angelique.
The portrait that has captured Roger’s attention is of Angelique, the wicked witch who turned Barnabas into a vampire in the first place. Well-meaning governess Vicki found this portrait in an antique store and brought it home yesterday. It was Vicki who took us to the 1790s when she became unstuck in time. While there, she met Angelique and the living Barnabas. Shortly after her return to the 1960s, Vicki found that her memory of her time in the past had become spotty. She can’t explain why she wanted the painting, but it does make sense to her that Barnabas reacts to it with violent dislike.
We first saw the portrait in #449, when it was clear that Vicki would be returning to the 1960s soon but unclear whether Angelique would follow her. Showing us that they had commissioned a portrait of Lara Parker was their way of telling us she would be back. Having Roger become obsessed with the portrait is their way of telling us that he will be the instrument of her arrival, as Willie was the instrument of Barnabas’.
We learn that Roger’s obsession will blur the distinction between him and Joshua when long-term houseguest Julia Hoffman approaches him and he speaks to her in Joshua’s voice, addressing her as the Countess DuPrés, who was a houseguest at Collinwood in Joshua’s time. Julia and the countess are both played by Grayson Hall. Vicki mistook the countess for Julia when she first met her in 1795, and since her return to 1968 has kept mistaking Julia for the countess. Now that Roger has made the same mistake, Julia must be trying to figure out what’s going on.
A man comes to the front door. Vicki answers it and sees a familiar face. It belongs to Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes. She hasn’t met him before, but she met his ancestor, much put-upon servant Ben Stokes, in the 1790s.
Like Ben and crazed handyman Matthew Morgan from 1966, Professor Stokes is played by Thayer David. Matthew and Ben were both major characters, so we can assume that Stokes will be as well. Matthew was a bad guy, Ben a good guy. When Ben was on the show, the contrast between him and Matthew was drawn very heavily to make the point that Matthew’s crimes are what Ben’s virtues would have led him to do had his personality been warped by the environment in which Matthew grew up. That environment was the consequence of the curse that Angelique placed on the Collinses in the 1790s. Burke expressed this idea in #64 when he said of Matthew that “Collinwood breeds murderers,” but he was understating the effect. Matthew grew up, not on the estate, but in the nearby village of Collinsport, and the curse leaves its mark on everyone who comes from there. Since Stokes is an out-of-towner, he is likely to be unaffected by the consequences of the curse, and so we do not know what we will find under his worldly and self-possessed exterior.
Stokes is researching his ancestor Ben, and wanted to buy the portrait because he thought it might depict a woman Ben knew. Stokes says that Ben wrote a memoir. Barnabas is in the room; in the 1790s, Ben was his closest friend, and knew all about his vampirism. So he is alarmed by the idea of a volume of memoirs by Ben. He can take some comfort when Stokes tells him that most of the manuscript was lost in a fire a few years ago.
The idea of a servant writing memoirs that might expose Barnabas’ secret first came up in #326. At that point, Willie was out of his control, and Barnabas told Julia, who is a mad scientist and his confederate, that he was afraid Willie might start “writing his memoirs!” That phrasing was meant to raise a laugh, since Willie is conspicuously not burdened with literary ambitions. But it planted a seed that flowers for the first time here, and that will flower again later.
Stokes offers Vicki $200 for the painting. Barnabas is eager to get the thing out of the house and urges her to take Stokes’ money, but before she can Roger bids $500. Stokes can’t afford that, and so it stays at Collinwood.
Stokes’ interest in family history establishes a contrast between him and Roger. Stokes, like Roger, appears to be a confirmed bachelor. But while Roger’s lack of interest in the responsibilities of marriage is of a piece with his indifference to all family ties, so that he was eager to divorce Laura and palm David off on her even after it had become clear to other characters that she was a danger to the boy, Stokes is an avid genealogist. He has renounced the prospect of marriage because he has other ways to be of service, not simply because he wants to wallow in his own crapulence as Roger does.
Suddenly Vicki remembers that the woman in the portrait is named Angelique, that Angelique was a witch, and that her spells caused all the misfortune that began at Collinwood in 1795. We hear all of this while Barnabas is in closeup, squirming gloriously. Stokes leaves with Barnabas and tells him he knew that the woman’s name was Angelique, but that it’s news to him that she was a witch. He is impressed by Vicki’s knowledge, and says that he can sense that she is attuned to paranormal phenomena. He wants to get to know her better.
Most characters we have met spend a long time slowing the story down by scoffing at the idea of the supernatural. That Stokes is a self-identified student of the occult and immediately receptive to Vicki’s identification of Angelique as a wicked witch tells us that he will serve to speed up the pace of events.
This again makes a stark contrast with Roger. When Vicki managed to get Roger away from the painting for a moment in Act One, he told her that he refused to believe that she traveled to the past and returned to the present. When she lists some of the abundant evidence he and everyone else saw that can be explained no other way, he says he attributes all of that to mass hallucination.
In his Dark Shadows Every Day post about this episode, Danny Horn at one point refers to Stokes as a character whose function is “to backfill Dr. Woodard’s spot in the cast,” referring to a stolid medico whom Barnabas and Julia murdered several months back. But in this contrast, we see that the character whose place Stokes is actually taking is Roger. When the show started, the Collinses of Collinwood were the central frame of reference for the action. But Roger and his sister, matriarch Liz, are for various reasons locked out of the supernatural storylines. Since those are the only storylines they have, the show needs to build another family to anchor the action, and that family is going to be defined, not by marriage and genealogy, but by a shared commitment to getting as deep as possible into the weirdest shit going.
Stokes tells Barnabas that there was a series of unsolved murders in Collinsport in the 1790s, and wonders if it might be possible to prove that Angelique was responsible for them. Barnabas suggests that it is too late to do justice in such an old case, to which Stokes replies that it is never too late to do justice to history. Not only does this reply deepen the contrast between Stokes and the amoral Roger, it has, by happenstance, a deep resonance for many who might see the episode today. It originally aired on 4 April 1968, just a few hours before the Rev’d Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, was assassinated. Millions are still unsatisfied with the official answers about who killed Dr King and why; they might cheer the idea that there is a species of justice that is still possible even after 56 years or more have gone by.
Barnabas bit Vicki the other day in an attempt to control her and keep her from revealing any information about him she may have acquired during her sojourn in the past. Disquieted by his conversation with Stokes, Barnabas stares out his window and summons Vicki to his house. In her bedroom, an enchanted music box Barnabas gave her as part of an earlier brainwashing attempt opens itself and begins to play. She rises from bed and goes to him listening to the music box all the way.
At Barnabas’ house, Vicki gives him the music box. He tells her that the next time he calls her, they will go away together forever. He bites her neck.
We cut to Vicki’s bedroom. The music box is back in its place and she is back in bed, asleep. Julia comes in to check on her. Vicki says she’d had a bad dream, and Julia finds the bite marks on her neck.
In the weeks leading up to Vicki’s visit to the past, Julia had alienated Barnabas by opposing his efforts to seduce Vicki. Now she marches over to Barnabas’ house and renews her opposition. She accuses him of having been in Vicki’s bedroom. He answers that he brought her to his house. This might seem to be a trivial distinction, but perhaps not to viewers who have been with the show from the beginning. Today’s focus on Roger might remind us of #4, when Roger tried to let himself into Vicki’s room while she was sleeping, obviously in search of some kind of sexual thrill that would not be preceded by her consent. Barnabas can’t deny that he is the moral equivalent of a rapist, but he isn’t going to miss an opportunity to differentiate himself from Roger.
Barnabas doesn’t seem very interested in anything Julia is saying. Even when she gives him an ultimatum, threatening to expose him if he doesn’t back off by tomorrow night, he reacts with a mild irritation. Regular viewers, remembering the displays of jeering contempt and seething rage which are typically the options from which Barnabas chooses his response to this sort of thing, will be startled by his relative blandness. Julia should be unnerved by it.
Acilius on Dark Shadows 