Mad scientist Julia Hoffman and suave warlock Nicholas Blair each want to find Frankenstein’s monster Adam before the other does. Julia is sure that occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes knows where Adam is; while he sits at a chessboard and plays both sides of a game, she asks Stokes to tell her. He says he wants answers to some questions of his own, but the audience knows that the information he wants is just what Julia will never tell him.
Nicholas takes a less conventional approach. He raises the ghosts of a couple of the dead men whose corpses supplied the raw materials from which Adam’s body was constructed. One lacks a right arm, the other a head. He asks them where Adam is, and they turn in unison to point with their left arms at the great house of Collinwood. It’s such a smoothly coordinated move that it looks like they must be spending their time in the afterlife starting a boy band.
The Boneyard Boys showing off their signature move, the Postmortem Point. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
The arm donor is played by David Groh, who less than a decade later would become a star as Joe on the sitcom Rhoda. Groh was such a charismatic performer that it’s hard not to think of speaking parts on Dark Shadows that other actors played badly and wonder what would have happened had he played them instead. I went on about that in a comment I left on Danny Horn’s Dark Shadows Every Day in 2020; here, I will just mention that if Groh, instead of the lamentably unaccomplished Craig Slocum, had played ex-convict Harry Johnson, we would probably have seen a red-hot love triangle in which Harry vied with Adam for the affections of heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard.
Earlier in the episode, Adam had asked Stokes why it was not allowed for him to kiss Carolyn. Thayer David makes the most of this scene. Stokes freezes and looks up when Adam starts posing his questions, then seems genuinely shaken when he says that he is inadequate to the task of answering them, since he himself has never raised children. We can see that, in that moment, Stokes feels as incomplete as Adam. It’s touching to see Stokes’ usually supreme self-assurance give way to shamefaced uncertainty. When Stokes tells Adam to put away his budding sexual desires and to concentrate on his books, we catch a glimpse of the tragic side of Stokes’ own celibate, scholarly life.
But not even a father of twenty would be prepared for this situation. In the ten weeks he has been alive, Adam has become fluent in English and able to read with facility; he has the body of a grown man and moves with agility and force. Yet he knows absolutely nothing of human relationships beyond a basic understanding of the words “Friend” and “Kill!” It is hard to imagine that anyone has ever lived who needed the instruction Adam needs now.
The wicked witch known variously as Angelique and Cassandra is standing in the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood, thinking evil thoughts. The camera zooms out and we see that her stepson, strange and troubled boy David Collins, is standing next to her. She starts to speak her thoughts out loud, saying “You will pay!” David asks “Who will pay?” Angelique/ Cassandra is startled to discover that David is there, and is flustered when she tries to change the subject. She so often delivers incriminating soliloquys while standing out in the open that the comic effect of this scene must be intentional.
Angelique/ Cassandra oblivious to David’s presence.
David asks Angelique/ Cassandra to help him figure out the correct operation of a tape recorder he received some time ago as a present from permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman. After Angelique/ Cassandra refuses to help, he goes upstairs and finds his cousin, heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard, emerging from the long-deserted west wing of the house. He asks Carolyn what she was doing in the west wing. She asks him why he thinks she was in the west wing. When he says he saw her coming out of it, she drops her attempt to evade his question and tells him she was looking for some old family photos to show well-meaning governess Vicki. She has enough trouble remembering this story that it must be obvious to David that it is a lie, but he isn’t interested enough to follow it up. He just wants someone to help him figure out which buttons to push on the tape recorder.
On their Dark Shadows Before I Die, John and Christine Scoleri speak for longtime viewers of the show when they say that it is surprising David needs help with the tape recorder. When the show started, David was two years younger and had the mechanical skill to sabotage his father’s car in a very creditable attempt at patricide. All Carolyn has to do to get the tape going is read the label that identifies the play button. This apparent loss of cognitive function is of a piece with David’s massive loss of narrative function. For the first 39 weeks of Dark Shadows, David was the fulcrum on which every story turned, and actor David Henesy had abundant opportunities to show a level of professional skill that would be remarkable in a performer of any age. But he has been receding into the background for a long time now, and his extraordinary dim-wittedness today marks a low point for him.
Once the tape starts playing, Carolyn makes a hasty exit. David listens to a minute or so of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, hoping it will end and he will hear “something spooky.” His wish is granted when the music abruptly stops, giving way to a voice addressing itself to Julia. The voice rambles about David’s distant cousin Barnabas Collins, saying that if both he and “my creation” live, Barnabas will be all right, but that if “Adam” dies, “Barnabas will be as he was before.” The name “Adam” should mean something to David. He shared a confused and frightening moment with a mysterious man of that name in #495. That man subsequently abducted Carolyn, and is still the object of a police search.
What only Julia, Barnabas, and Barnabas’ servant Willie know is that Adam is a Frankenstein’s monster created in an experiment that freed Barnabas of the effects of the vampire curse that Angelique/ Cassandra placed on him in the 1790s. The voice on the tape is that of Eric Lang, the mad scientist who began the experiment. Minutes before he died of the effects of one of Angelique/ Cassandra’s spells, Lang recorded this message for Julia. The audience has heard this message approximately a gazillion bajillion times, but until now, the only character to have heard it was Adam, and he could make no sense of it.
Angelique/ Cassandra recently made an unsuccessful attempt to renew Barnabas’ curse, and is desperately searching for the obstacle that prevented it from working. Carolyn’s actual task in the west wing was showing Adam to a hiding place there. So Angelique/ Cassandra is now under the same roof with both the information she needs to identify her obstacle and the person she can remove that obstacle by killing. Things are looking bad for Barnabas and for Adam.
While David is upstairs with the tape recorder, Vicki is sobbing in the drawing room. Suave warlock Nicholas, who is staying in the house in the guise of Angelique/ Cassandra’s brother, enters and asks her what’s wrong. She says that she has just learned that Barnabas is dead. His back to her, Nicholas smiles brightly when he first hears this news, then puts on a sad face and turns to her with sympathetic words. In response, Vicki reveals that she knows all about Angelique/ Cassandra and that she has little patience for Nicholas’ pretensions. Carolyn enters and doubts Vicki’s news. Angelique/ Cassandra is the last to enter. She says that she saw Barnabas alive and well after the time when he is supposed to have been dead. Vicki and Carolyn look at each other, and do not see Nicholas’ look of disappointment. They go upstairs, and Nicholas and Angelique/ Cassandra go into the drawing room.
Nicholas scolds Angelique/ Cassandra for her failure. He addresses her as “dear sister.” He suggests she may not hate Barnabas sufficiently to impose a curse on him. When she denies this, he leans to her ear and teasingly asks if she loves him. He threatens to send her back where she came from if she doesn’t re-vamp Barnabas by midnight, and to focus her mind replaces her arm with a fleshless bone.
Director John Weaver was not much of a visual artist, and in his post about the episode on Dark Shadows Every Day Danny Horn analyzes the dismally inept blocking of the scene between Vicki and Nicholas. Danny also has some unkind words for writer Ron Sproat, but I think those are unfair. It’s true the opening scene between Adam and Carolyn goes on too long, David’s helplessness with the tape recorder is dismal, and Vicki and Carolyn’s reaction to Angelique/ Cassandra’s report that Barnabas is still alive doesn’t make sense. That’s a long enough list of flaws that we might fairly classify Weaver and Sproat as the B-team, not on a par with director Lela Swift and writers Sam Hall and Gordon Russell.
But it is genuinely funny when we first see David standing next to Angelique/ Cassandra, David’s questioning of Carolyn is intelligently written, Lang’s message is for once an actual source of suspense, Vicki’s lines to Nicholas as Alexandra Moltke Isles delivers them show the character’s strength, Nicholas’ teasing Angelique/ Cassandra with her alleged love of Barnabas raises a laugh as it makes them sound like a couple of kids, and the final gag with the arm bone is at once goofy enough to keep up the humor in the episode and startling enough to be effective as a touch of horror. All in all, it’s an enjoyable episode, if not one that fans would be tempted to use to turn their friends on to the show.
Recovering vampire Barnabas Collins is dead, and this time it seems like he might stay that way. At least it seems so to his friend Julia Hoffman, MD, and his servant Willie Loomis; they’ve buried him, and are talking about what to do next. Julia decides they should tell people Barnabas went on a long trip, and that they themselves should leave the area before dawn. They will go to a sanitarium called Windcliff. Julia will resume her duties as its chief, while Willie will take a job there doing whatever he can handle.
Julia orders Willie to pack his things; he asks if he should pack Barnabas’ things also. Julia is impressed that Willie thinks of this. Perhaps he is remembering his onetime friend Jason McGuire, whom Barnabas killed in #275. Jason was hated by all and was under orders from the sheriff to leave town when he fell afoul of Barnabas, and so it was easy for everyone to assume he had simply gone away. Still, in #277, sarcastic dandy Roger wondered why Jason hadn’t taken his clothes or his shaving kit. No one ever tried to tie up that loose end, but perhaps Willie learned of the problem and made a note of it for the next time he had to conspire to conceal a death.
Willie goes directly from Barnabas’ freshly dug grave to Maggie Evans’ house. Willie has an unwholesome preoccupation with Maggie. Longtime viewers will remember Willie’s menacing approach to her in #202 and #207, before Barnabas got hold of him and turned him from a dangerously unstable ruffian into a sorely bedraggled blood thrall; those who are mindful of the period when Dark Shadows first became a hit will remember May and June of 1967, when Maggie was Barnabas’ prisoner and Willie tried desperately to lessen her suffering; and first time viewers will be startled by the beginning of the scene, when we see Willie peeking through the window at Maggie. When Barnabas’ vampirism went into remission, his former victims tended to return to the personalities they had before he bit them. Willie has not quite become the rapey goon he was in his first two weeks on the show, but neither is he the first man a woman would choose to be alone with.
Willie!
Since she is The Nicest Girl in Town, Maggie has long since forgiven Willie what he did when he first came to Collinsport. And Julia used a magical version of hypnosis on Maggie to induce amnesia covering the whole period of her involvement with Barnabas and to leave her with warm feelings of goodwill for him. But it’s late at night, so when Willie knocks, she is reluctant to let him in. He insists, and she relents.
Willie tells her he will be going away soon to take an exciting new job. Maggie says that she is sure everyone will miss him. At first he repeats the story that Barnabas is going away on a long trip, but then he starts crying. When Maggie asks why, he tells her Barnabas has died. He asks her to keep this secret, but the most she will agree to do is to wait until he leaves town to start talking about it.
Meanwhile, Julia has gone to the great house of Collinwood, where she has been a houseguest for about a year. Before she goes upstairs to pack, she stops and tells Roger’s wife Cassandra that Barnabas is dead.
Julia knows that Cassandra is actually Angelique, the wicked witch responsible for Barnabas’ woes. It would seem that the whole point of covering up Barnabas’ death would be to keep Angelique/ Cassandra from finding out about it. Yet Julia not only goes out of her way to tell her, she also declares to her that she will continue to fight against her.
Angelique/ Cassandra spits out that Julia is in love with Barnabas, to which Julia replies “Not nearly as much as you are.” For some time, the show has been developing the theme that Julia would like Barnabas to be her lover. In their post about the episode on Dark Shadows Before I Die, John Scoleri said “So Julia’s true feelings are finally on the table.” To which Christine Scoleri replied, “Where have you been? Julia’s feelings have been on the table, the wall, the floor…pretty much everywhere for a long time.”
Willie’s visit to Maggie and Julia’s to Angelique/ Cassandra mark a difference between the first year of Dark Shadows and its later phases. When the show started, the characters were too good at keeping secrets, with the result that very little happened. They took this to such an extreme that one of the two principal storylines with which the show began- well-meaning governess Vicki’s attempt to find out who her parents were- died out altogether because reclusive matriarch Liz and her lawyers, the only characters who knew anything about it, would never talk.
Now, the characters involved in the action don’t keep secrets from each other at all, with the result that events comes thick and fast, but it is hard to build complex alliances or to explore nuanced relationships. They still conceal information from Vicki, Liz, Roger, and other characters left over from the early days, rendering them background figures with little to contribute to the story. Video game enthusiasts might call them “NPCs”- non-player characters.
Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, occult expert, enters. Stokes tells Julia that a man named Adam appears to be dead. Julia goes with him to an abandoned shack in the woods where she examines Adam’s body and pronounces him dead. When Stokes tells her that Adam exhibited sharp pains in his neck starting at about 11 PM, that he called out for Barnabas, that his strength appeared to ebb for no apparent reason, and that he then died, Julia’s eyes widen. Suddenly Adam comes back to life. He starts gasping for air and miming a struggle against an invisible barrier just above his face. Julia tells Stokes she will have to go. He protests that she must stay with her patient. What she says next doesn’t mean much to Stokes, and would mean less to a first-time viewer:
JULIA: He is suffocating- I may know why. No, it’s impossible! But it may be that they are the same. Experiment- perhaps Adam is why-
STOKES: What are you talking about?
JULIA: Barnabas- I buried him- alive!
Regular viewers know that Adam is a Frankenstein’s monster created in an experiment begun by mad scientist Eric Lang. Shortly before he died of wounds inflicted by Angelique/ Cassandra, Lang recorded an audiotape in which he explained that as long as Adam lives, Barnabas’ vampirism will remain in remission. Julia has not heard that tape, but the audience has, time without number. We also know that when Barnabas was sealed up in a wall from #512 to #516, Adam experienced the pains that Barnabas suffered. In these lines, we see Julia for the first time beginning to understand the true nature of the connection between Adam and Barnabas.
Stokes’ approach to Julia is as indiscreet in its own way as were Willie’s to Maggie and Julia’s to Angelique/ Cassandra. Adam hates Julia and Barnabas, because they abused him shockingly in his first weeks of life, and forbade Stokes to bring her. Julia’s closing outburst is also an extreme indiscretion, as Stokes is basically a law-abiding person who could not be expected to help Julia and Willie cover up their many crimes. Again, we have come a long way from the days when the show would drop a major story rather than have a recurring character breach attorney-client privilege.
Like the Scoleris, Danny Horn was in good form when blogging about this part of the show. His post on Dark Shadows Every Day about this episode makes a number of penetrating observations about the connections between Julia and Willie’s opening scene at the grave and absurdist plays like Waiting for Godot and Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
Three months ago, the wicked witch known variously as Angelique and Cassandra cast a spell that has kept the story going in tight little circles ever since. It is “The Dream Curse.” A character has a nightmare, is compelled to tell it to another person, that person has the same nightmare, and the process repeats. When the nightmare makes its way to well-meaning governess Vicki Winters, she is compelled to tell it to old world gentleman Barnabas Collins. She and Barnabas both know that he is Angelique/ Cassandra’s real target. Vicki thinks the dream will kill Barnabas; he knows that it is meant to turn him back into what he was for 172 years, a vampire.
Vicki is struggling against the urge to tell Barnabas the dream. He knows that she is suffering mightily, and is resigned to his fate. So he shows up at the great house of Collinwood and insists that she tell him the dream. When she resists, he says that “I haven’t loved many things in my lifetime, but, Vicki, I love you.” The last time we heard Barnabas say “I love you” was in #415, when his little sister Sarah died in his arms. We have reason to believe that Vicki knows a lot more about Barnabas than she seems to; for example, she officially believes Barnabas’ story that he is the descendant of Sarah’s brother, but in this conversation she mentions that “the original Barnabas” died before he could have had any children. We also know that her feelings about him are complicated; when she looks at him after his “I love you” we see that she has something she very much wants to say. What that might be, we can only imagine.
Vicki has something to say
Vicki tells Barnabas the dream. After he leaves, permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, MD, sits with Vicki. Julia is Barnabas’ best friend and partner in crime, and she usually has trouble concealing her impatience with the ingenuous Vicki. But today the two women are united in their grief. They share a touching scene that ends when Angelique/ Cassandra enters. Julia slaps Angelique/ Cassandra’s face and storms off. Vicki tells Angelique/ Cassandra she deserves far more than a slap, then walks out as well.
Back in his house, Barnabas takes an evil looking pill. Julia comes in with her medical bag and offers to give him something to stave off the dream. He says that he has already taken a pill to bring sleep on. Further, he tells her that he has ordered his servant Willie Loomis to sharpen a wooden stake. When he has the dream and passes into apparent death, she is to drive the stake through his heart.
In moments of despair, Barnabas has often presented his resignation to reverting to vampirism as his noble self-sacrifice. But this is the first time he has presented a plan to ensure that he will not resume preying on the living. It suggests that there really is something in him other than narcissism. Maybe he knew what the words meant when he told Vicki he loved her.
Barnabas has the dream. It stops short of the climactic moment, and he awakens. He jumps to the conclusion that Angelique/ Cassandra botched her curse and it’s all over. He sends Julia to get Willie. As soon as he is alone, a knock comes at the door. He opens it and goes outside. A bat lowers on him, and he falls to the ground screaming.
This was the last episode of Dark Shadows ABC-TV asked its affiliates to broadcast at 3:30 PM. Starting Monday, it moved to the 4:00 timeslot, suitable for viewing by kids running home from school. In his delightful post about the episode, Danny Horn envisions the show as a patient on a therapist’s couch, talking about its need to leave its tedious recurring dream behind before it makes its big move.
Yesterday, recovering vampire Barnabas opened the door to his closet. Hardworking young fisherman Joe fell out, and Barnabas saw Frankenstein’s monster Adam at the window, laughing menacingly. Adam has many reasons to hate Barnabas, and Barnabas concludes that Adam wants to frame him for the murder of Joe.
A commenter on John and Christine Scoleri’s Dark Shadows Before I Die, posting under the name “Grant,” pointed out that in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s novel Frankenstein the Creature kills someone and frames one of Frankenstein’s closest friends for the crime. The reference seems to be pretty obvious.
Barnabas’ friend, mad scientist Julia, shows up. She finds that Joe is not dead. She says that he has, in a bit of Collinsport English we have heard once or twice before, “a pulsebeat.” She and Barnabas have a long conversation about a variety of topics, several of them highly incriminating, while Joe lies on the floor. Julia goes off to attend to another matter, and Barnabas’ servant Willie comes. Joe is still on the floor while Willie argues against Barnabas’ orders to take Joe to the hospital. Barnabas, who had told Julia that Adam must have “wanted Joe to be found here,” dismisses Willie as “absurd” when he says that Adam is trying to frame them.
When Willie was first on the show, he was a dangerously unstable ruffian who was determined to rape all the young women and beat up their boyfriends. In #210, he accidentally released Barnabas, who enslaved him and turned him into a nice guy. Now that Barnabas’ vampirism has gone into remission, Willie has taken several steps back to his old ways. He whines that if Joe dies, his fiancée Maggie might turn to him. Barnabas finds this idea “insane,” and Willie tells him that Maggie has recently stopped by the house and talked to him more than once. This is true, and Barnabas’ reaction makes it clear that it is the first time he has heard it. He responds that he is not interested in discussing Willie’s “mental aberrations,” and tells him that if Joe dies he will tell the police about Willie’s interest in Maggie. That leaves Willie no choice but to help get Joe to the hospital.
Julia has gone off to see well-meaning governess Vicki. Vicki is about to have a nightmare that is part of the “Dream Curse.” Three months ago, wicked witch Angelique decreed that one person after another would have the same dream. After Vicki has it, the dream will pass to Barnabas, and Angelique means for it to reactivate his vampirism. Vicki doesn’t seem to know that Barnabas was a vampire, though she has had many clues, as for example when he kept biting her and sucking her blood. I suppose she just thought he had a really aggressive make-out technique. But she does know that Barnabas is supposed to die if he has the dream.
Julia urges Vicki to come with her to Windcliff, a sanitarium she runs, and promises that she will get the best of care there. But she finds that Vicki is resigned to having the dream. Julia reports this to Barnabas, and tells him that she wants to go away with him, far away from Vicki. Vicki can’t pass the dream to Barnabas unless she describes it to him after she has it, and she won’t be able to do that if she can’t find him. Barnabas refuses to go, reminding Julia that those who have the dream suffer terribly until they pass it on to the next person. When he says “You know how I feel about Vicki,” Julia gets a brief closeup, and her reaction reminds us that she is supposed to be harboring an unrequited love for Barnabas. This is rather an easy point to forget. Barnabas and Julia spend all their time together and tell each other all their secrets. Since there doesn’t seem to be any such thing as sexual contact in the world of Dark Shadows, it’s hard to see how her feelings could be much more requited.
Julia urges Barnabas to run away with her.“You know how I feel about Vicki.”
Vampires are metaphors for extreme selfishness, and Barnabas usually plays to type. It is startling that he tells Julia that any part of his motivation for sticking around is his wish to spare Vicki suffering. But he also talks about his long vain struggle against Angelique in terms that immediately make it clear that whatever goodwill he might have for Vicki is a distant third behind his usual ruling passions, self-pity and laziness, but still, her well-being is among his considerations. That sets him apart from her ostensible boyfriend, a man variously known as Peter and Jeff. As Christine Scoleri points out on Dark Shadows Before I Die, Vicki might never have had the dream at all if Peter/ Jeff hadn’t refused to listen to her explanation of the curse and insisted that she stay where he could visit her easily, yet now that she is suffering from the dream and its effects he is nowhere to be seen. Christine speaks for all of us with her summary of Peter/ Jeff’s character- “What a louse!”
Vicki has the dream. Barnabas beckons her into the haunted house attraction where the bulk of it has always taken place before. She keeps telling him that she doesn’t want to have the dream, not for her sake, but for his. She opens three doors that show Halloween gimmicks we’ve seen before, then opens a fourth behind which she sees the Sun. The Sun shrinks into the distance, and she walks through the door, following it. Her face dissolves into an image of the Sun; the Sun dissolves to the exterior of Barnabas’ house. We cut to the interior, looking at the doors. A small dot of Sun appears there. It expands until it fills most of the screen. The doors open, and the Sun gives way to Vicki. She enters, and sees Barnabas lying on the floor by his desk. He is bleeding from two small wounds on his neck.
Part of the dream is a bit of doggerel that has never made much sense. The last lines are “Ahead a blazing light does burn, And one door leads to the point of return.” These lines are almost explained today. Each door exposes a symbol of something that is frightening either to the dreamer or to Barnabas or to both. Vicki isn’t afraid of the Sun, but she knows that Barnabas has a strange and intense relationship with it. In #277, he harangued her about his hatred for the Sun; in #347, he made plans with her to watch the Sun rise, plans which he had to break under very strange circumstances in #349. So now we know that the “blazing light” is the Sun, which vampires cannot withstand.
Of the ten characters who had the dream before Vicki, only strange and troubled boy David, her charge and dear friend, was able to walk through any of the doorways. In his case, he walked into a gigantic spider web and was caught there, just a few feet beyond the entry. But Vicki is on the path that “leads to the point of return,” and she goes to a different set altogether.
Had Barnabas’ introduction not brought a new audience to the show, Dark Shadows would probably have been canceled in June 1967. In that case, the final episode would have been #260, and it surely would have ended with Vicki, who was in those days the show’s main character, driving a stake through Barnabas’ heart. That she and the Sun overlap in the same space on the screen suggests that by passing the dream to Barnabas she will fulfill her original destiny and become his destroyer.
When Vicki looks into the parlor and sees Barnabas bloodied and lying on the floor by his desk, we are reminded of #405. In that episode, we saw that Angelique originally turned Barnabas into a vampire by sending a bat to bite him in this room. At that time, he fell, not by his desk, but by the staircase. That’s very close to where Joe was lying for the first half of the episode, so they have to do some rearranging to avoid suggesting an identity between them. Barnabas’ vampirism is so much the foundation of the show’s success that virtually everyone in the audience expects him to relapse sooner or later, but they are being careful not to raise the question of whether Joe will also join the ranks of the undead.
Until the dream, the episode is made up of long scenes with a great deal of dialogue. That isn’t unusual for Dark Shadows. It is unusual that the scenes play out with very little background music. I wonder if director Jack Sullivan decided that a spare sound design would set the right mood for the very ambitious dream sequence. I think it paid off- the dialogue scenes felt slow, but Vicki’s dream achieves the surrealistic quality it needs.
One of the main themes Danny Horn developed on his blog Dark Shadows Every Day was his ridiculously exaggerated impatience with the character of Vicki and his severe bias against Alexandra Moltke Isles’ acting. That gave me something to talk about in his comments section, and was part of the reason I started this blog. Danny’s post about this episode very nearly makes up for his incessant Vickiphobia. He alternates stills of Vicki with epigrams written in her voice, and the result is just magnificent, worth anyone’s while to read.
In his post about this episode on Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn remarks on the recapping that permeates the dialogue and reckons it as writer Sam Hall’s critique of the ongoing storylines. That assessment will be familiar to those who, unlike Danny, have been watching the show from the beginning. When Ron Sproat joined the writing staff in October 1966, his first several scripts featured a systematic inventory of the available narrative material, with each plot very explicitly marked as suitable or unsuitable for further development.
In its first year, very little happened on Dark Shadows; now, it has swung to the opposite extreme, and there is a climax at every commercial break. But the result is oddly similar. They don’t take the time to explore the overall situation, so that little seems to be at stake even when a spectacular event takes place. No matter how much happens per minute of screen time, it feels like the pace is slow. We see suave warlock Nicholas in the gazebo on the grounds of the estate of Collinwood summoning his subordinate, the wicked witch known variously as Angelique and Cassandra, and hear him complain that she has spent weeks attempting to do what she should have accomplished in minutes. Thus Hall assures us that the pace will be picking up.
Angelique/ Cassandra comes to the gazebo, to which Nicholas refers as a “ga-ZAY-bo” in a bit of Collinsport English Angelique/ Cassandra herself introduced in #489. There, the two of them quarrel about her dilatory approach. They stand behind columns and look like debaters at podiums.
Maybe I’m reading too much into the set design, but in one of the photos Angelique and Nicholas are sperated by a statue of a Goddess (I assumed Venus). Wouldn’t it be awesome if it was Venus and that statue between them was to represent Angelique’s love for Barnabas blocking her efforts at villainy? More likely that the shot just looked better composed with the statue in the middle but how awesome if it was meant to be subtle symbolism! 🙂
“lakeplacidskater,” posted 25 February 2015 on Danny Horn, “Episode 528: This Tawdry Affair,” 21 November 2014.*
The statue appears to me to represent not Venus, but a harvest goddess. She is fully clothed, and there is a sack at her feet which seems to be full of grain. That makes a lot less sense than does the suggestion “lakeplacidskater” made. The Collinses derive their wealth from fishing and shipping, not from farming, so it is surprising that they would put a symbol of agriculture in such a prominent place. Perhaps she stands for wealth in general, but not for so much wealth that the family could afford to commission a statue of a sea goddess. And neither a bountiful harvest in particular nor wealth in general is any sort of obstacle between Nicholas and Angelique/ Cassandra. I suppose the visual metaphor might be emphasizing the image of the two of them as debaters, with the goddess serving as moderator.
Nicholas dominates Angelique/ Cassandra thoroughly and rather cruelly. Viewers who remember her from the portion of Dark Shadows set in the late eighteenth century may be taken aback by this. In those days, her power often seemed to be limited only by her own carelessness. That made for something of a shapeless narrative, since no one could oppose her effectively. Not only does Nicholas reduce her to a lowly state today, but he himself bungles a simple task when he sets out to do something nasty to well-meaning governess Vicki. Thus we see that the villains will have their work cut out for them.
Later, Vicki is in bed at her friend Maggie’s house. She has gone there to escape a curse Angelique/ Cassandra has placed that has caused several people to have the same nightmare. Since Maggie was at home when she was the first person to have the nightmare, and Vicki’s boyfriend Peter was sleeping there when he had it, it is hard to understand why Vicki thinks it is a place of safety.
We have several closeups of the face of the clock while Vicki goes to sleep. It’s an Ingraham eight day clock, apparently they wanted to make sure we knew that. When Vicki finally nods off, Angelique/ Cassandra materializes in the room with a jar of rose water that is supposed to make Vicki have the nightmare. Ever since the days when humanoid Phoenix Laura Murdoch Collins was on the show, we’ve been seeing undead witches materialize in people’s bedrooms while they sleep. This time, Maggie walks in and sees Angelique/ Cassandra. She screams at the sight. All of the women in the cast were required to scream frequently, so frequently that fans become connoisseurs of screaming. Kathryn Leigh Scott was one of the better screamers, not far behind Clarice Blackburn, so that makes for a satisfying ending.
*I can’t help but point that when “lakeplacidskater” left her post, all the members of the cast were still alive. Humbert Allen Astredo would die in 2016 and Lara Parker in 2023; Alexandra Moltke Isles, Roger Davis, and Kathryn Leigh Scott are still with us.
Beginning in #365, well-meaning governess Vicki Winters spent nineteen weeks in the 1790s. Ever since Vicki brought Dark Shadows back to a contemporary setting in March 1968, the show has been dealing with the consequences of her journey.
Today, we open with a dream sequence. The boyfriend who followed Vicki from the 1790s, a man named Peter, came to the twentieth century with total amnesia and a belligerent personality that kept him from listening when Vicki tried to explain who he was. His dream is about people and events from 1796, and it finally breaks down his insistence that he is someone else. That insistence was never at all interesting- it wasn’t as if his name were Watt Iduno Hu, in which case he and Vicki could at least have done a version of Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First?” But now that it is over, there are no obstacles at all between Peter and Vicki, and no reason for either of them to be on the show.
Meanwhile, suave warlock Nicholas Blair has carried a portrait of wicked witch Angelique from the bedroom where he is staying in the great house on the estate of Collinwood down to the drawing room. He makes a tremendous display of effort as he concentrates on the portrait, talks to it in an urgent voice, and makes many movements with his hands, all in an attempt to make contact with Angelique’s spirit so that he can reconstitute her body. Vicki walks in on him as he is doing this, and he breaks off, embarrassed. He finds out that Vicki owns the portrait, and she refuses him permission to borrow it.
Nicholas caught in the act.
Later, Nicholas finds out about Vicki’s visit to the 1790s. He is intrigued that in those days the same witchfinder who has disincorporated Angelique mistook Vicki for a witch and tried to perform an exorcism on her. He decides that the spot on which this rite took place must be the same as that where Angelique’s ashes are now deposited. So he casts a spell on Vicki, causing her to lead him to the place.
Other fansites feature complaints that Nicholas could just have cast a spell on Vicki during their first scene together. In his post about the episode on Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn writes of their first scene that “Nicholas actually has the power to mesmerize Vicki and get her to do whatever he wants, so technically he could just put the whammy on her right now, and tell her to clear the room.” And on Dark Shadows Before I Die, Christine Scoleri wonders “If Blair could make Vicki ‘listen and obey’ so easily, then why didn’t he just make her give him the portrait instead of getting all pissy when she refused to loan it to him?”
That didn’t bother me. When Vicki walked in on Nicholas in the drawing room, he was straining himself to make contact with the spirit of Angelique. He again puts himself deeply into his mumbo-jumbo when he casts his spell on Vicki. So it seemed perfectly reasonable to me that he couldn’t just drop what he was doing with the portrait and go directly into another spell.
The obvious sexual symbolism of the scene in the drawing room reinforces that point. On the Dark Shadows Daybook, Patrick McCray describes the display Nicholas makes while interacting with the painting depicting his putative sister as suggestive of incestuous feelings;* and the awkwardness Humbert Allen Astredo and Alexandra Moltke Isles bring out when Vicki walks in on Nicholas getting all worked up as he stares at a woman’s picture and puts all his energy into imagining her physical presence will likely seem familiar to anyone who has ever had a room-mate. Since Nicholas’ mind is so intensely engaged with the idea of Angelique, it isn’t hard to imagine that he would need time to redirect his attention to Vicki.
*His actual words were “uncomfortably Kentuckian,” but Mrs Acilius was born in Kentucky and is tired of incest jokes about her onetime neighbors. [UPDATE: Patrick points out his own Kentuckian heritage, and protests that his little joke was an irony fondly intended.]
We open in a hospital room where Sam Evans is in bed, wearing dark glasses. This would tell a first time viewer that Sam is blind, and also that he’s reckless about his glasses.
Sam is begging his daughter Maggie to bring her friend Vicki around so he can tell her about a dream he just had. Vicki shows up and invites Sam to tell her the dream. This leads to a dramatic musical sting and a cut to the opening title. The first time viewer, still worried that Sam might nod off and break his glasses, will be unlikely to see why Vicki’s willingness to listen to Sam’s dream should be a concerning development.
Sam starts to describe his dream. A knock on the door interrupts him. It is Timothy Eliot Stokes. Stokes orders Vicki out of the room. Stokes is wearing a suit, not a white coat, and is addressed as “Professor.” So it should be clear to the first-time viewer that he is not a medical doctor, has no authority in the hospital, and is not particularly close to Vicki, Maggie, or Sam. The women resist his commands, but when it becomes clear he won’t back down they humor him.
In the corridor outside Sam’s room, Vicki tells Stokes “I hope you have some explanation.” He replies “The situation required drastic action.” “Is that all you have to say?” “No, I might add you should be grateful to me.” Thus the first-time viewer learns that Stokes does not feel obligated to be polite to young, pretty women.
Stokes tells Vicki that “Your recent experience in the past has taught you some rather frightening things about witchcraft.” Vicki agrees with this statement. Maggie turns away and looks out into space, wondering what the heck these lunatics are talking about. At last the first-time viewer has an on-screen representative.
Stokes describes a “Dream Curse,” in which a series of people all have the same nightmare. Each dreamer is compelled to tell the nightmare to a particular person who appeared in it. That person then has the nightmare, featuring a third person, and awakens with the same compulsion to tell the nightmare to that person, keeping the cycle going. Vicki declares that she doesn’t know what Stokes is talking about, but Maggie seems to. Vicki grudgingly agrees not to go into Sam’s room, but refuses to leave the corridor.
Maggie reacts to Stokes’ explanation.
Returning viewers know that Maggie was the first to have the nightmare. It will also stretch their credulity that Vicki hasn’t heard about it. Maggie is one of Vicki’s dearest friends, and the nightmare was a terrifying experience that weighed on her for quite some time. The person Maggie passed the nightmare to was Vicki’s boyfriend Peter, who prefers to be called Jeff. Not only has neither Maggie nor Peter/ Jeff told Vicki about the nightmare, neither has any of the three people who have already had the nightmare and who live with her in the great house of Collinwood. These are heiress Carolyn, whom Vicki has addressed as “my best friend”; strange and troubled boy David, who is Vicki’s charge in her job as governess and who feels very close to her; and housekeeper Mrs Johnson, who habitually tells everyone everything she knows.
It will also be strange to those who have been watching the show that Stokes does not tell Vicki the key thing about the Dream Curse, that it is aimed at old world gentleman Barnabas Collins. Vicki is extremely fond of Barnabas; Stokes knows this, because in #509, he told her that he was doing battle with a witch whose goal was to kill Barnabas, and she was most eager to help him. If he told her that by listening to Sam’s account of the dream she would be bringing Barnabas one step closer to death, surely he would have persuaded her to go home. But, as my wife Mrs Acilius pointed out while we were watching the episode, that would let Vicki back into the story. Stokes, like Barnabas and several other major characters, is working to keep Vicki from becoming relevant to any ongoing plot.
Stokes has to leave the hospital to attend to another matter. While Maggie was leading the way out of the hospital room, he looked out the window and saw a man looking in. The man is Adam, a very tall, phenomenally strong, peculiarly inarticulate fellow whom Stokes met at Sam and Maggie’s cottage a few days ago. Stokes is eager to get to know Adam. He lets himself into the cottage and waits there until Adam comes by. Adam is confused to find him there, but Stokes quickly persuades him to come home with him. Stokes promises to give him food and become his friend. The two of them are quite cheerful as they walk out the front door.
The camera repeatedly focuses on a stickpin Stokes dropped on the rug, suggesting that he will get in trouble for having let himself into the cottage without Maggie’s permission. That suggestion is clearer to the first-time viewer than to those who know what’s been happening. Stokes had been in the cottage with Sam not long before, and could easily claim to have dropped the stickpin on that occasion.
Back in the hospital corridor, Vicki hears Sam crying out in agony. She goes to his room. Maggie joins her there, and Sam starts describing the nightmare. Maggie recognizes it as the one that caused her such distress when she had it, and her eyes dart to Vicki. She tells Vicki she doesn’t have to stay. Vicki insists, and a look of panic starts to form on Maggie’s face. Sam doesn’t get far into the nightmare before he dies.
Returning viewers will remember that the luckless Willie Loomis was interrupted in his attempt to tell Carolyn the nightmare in #506, and that when she next went to sleep she could have only the part of the nightmare he had described. So we wonder if Vicki will have the same problem.
We may wonder about something else. Stokes, as an expert on witchcraft, has several times said that a Dream Curse is designed to “end with a death.” We may wonder if Sam’s death will end it before it gets to Barnabas.
That would represent a stinging defeat for the witch. Sam was once a fairly important character, but long ago receded to the margins of the show. He made his debut in #5, and has been played by David Ford since #35. Originally he was a tormented alcoholic, driven to drink by his part in the injustice done long ago to dashing action hero Burke Devlin. Burke’s storyline fizzled out completely in #201, and since then Sam has made only intermittent appearances, mostly as support for Maggie, who is herself usually a secondary character. To launch an attack on the show’s breakout star and hit a tertiary player would be quite embarrassing to any villain. Maybe the witch’s next plan will wind up falling on Bob the Bartender, and the one after that will hit one of the sheriff’s feeble-minded deputies.
Kathryn Leigh Scott tells some stories about Sam’s death scene that do not fit with what is on the tape. In her 1986 book My Scrapbook Memories of Dark Shadows, she writes about the teleprompter falling over and making a loud noise and Ford shouting “Where is it!?” In appearances at Dark Shadows conventions, she has said that the lines Ford improvised to replace the ones he couldn’t read ran over time, and that in her desperation to get to the next break she pushed a pillow on his face and nearly smothered him while saying “Don’t die, Pop!” In his post on Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn says that Miss Scott’s “anecdote was entirely made up. None of that happened.”
I reserve judgment. Maybe the episode we have is a second take. It runs unusually smoothly up to Sam’s death scene, as if the cast had had more practice with its parts than usual. We know that, in spite of all the spectacular bloopers and other production errors they left in, they did sometimes start over, and the incidents Miss Scott described might well have been enough to warrant that.
Hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell is engaged to marry Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. Early in their relationship, Maggie warned Joe that they might never be able to get married, because her father Sam was an alcoholic and would always need her to come rescue him. Joe liked Sam, drunk or sober, and was always quick to lend him a hand. He didn’t seem to understand Maggie’s worries.
Now, it’s Joe who is worried, and Maggie who doesn’t understand why. Sam’s drinking doesn’t seem to be as much of a problem as it was then. But he has been struck blind, ending his career as a painter. Joe still wants to marry Maggie, and is still glad to help Sam. But Sam has befriended a very tall, phenomenally strong man named Adam, who is wanted by the police because he abducted heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard several days ago. Sam doesn’t consider the abduction to be a strike against Adam, whose ignorance of social customs he considers to be a disability equal to his own blindness. Joe is convinced that Adam is a violent felon and is alarmed that Sam insists on inviting him to the Evans cottage. Maggie has been out of town and doesn’t know about Adam.
Today, Joe finds a reason to be as alarmed about Maggie’s judgment of men as he is about Sam’s. Maggie was missing for some weeks in May and June of 1967, and when she was found she was so severely traumatized that she could barely talk. She spent months in a mental hospital called Windcliff after that, during which time she had regressed to childhood and developed a tendency to become wildly agitated. She seems to be her old self now, but she still has amnesia covering the whole period from her disappearance through her time at Windcliff.
Like the rest of the village of Collinsport, Joe believes that Maggie was abducted and brutalized by Willie Loomis, servant to old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, and that Willie was trying to kill Maggie when the police shot him in #322 and #323. When he survived his gunshot wounds, Willie was sent to Windcliff. In #483, Joe was appalled to find that Barnabas had arranged Willie’s release and brought him back to work for him. Joe informed Barnabas that he intended to kill Willie if he ever again saw him near Maggie.
Joe is on his way to the Evans cottage when he sees Willie heading for the front door. He confronts him and reminds him of what he told Barnabas. Willie tells him Maggie is no longer afraid of him, that they are friends now, that she visited him at Barnabas’ house earlier that evening, and that it wasn’t the first time she had gone there. Willie is going on about himself as Joe’s “competition” for Maggie’s attention when Joe hits him a couple of times and knocks him out.
Joe goes into the house and tells Maggie what happened. She admits that she did go to Barnabas’ house earlier, that she talked to Willie, and that it wasn’t the first time. Joe reacts with incredulity and says that Willie tried to kill her. Maggie insists that Willie is innocent. Joe asks why she believes that; she can’t explain. He asks why she went to Barnabas’ house. Again, she can’t explain. She says that she does not know why she went there, but that she is sure it wasn’t to see Willie. Joe is shocked that Maggie can’t explain something she did just an hour or two before. He keeps asking, but she insists that she does not know why she went to the Old House.
Joe becomes more and more alarmed. Maggie turns away from him, and he grabs her arm. All the fansites remark on the roughness of this move; it looks like an act of domestic violence. It certainly is not what we would expect of Nice Guy Joe, who was Carolyn’s doormat in the early months of the show and has been a Perfect Gentleman in his relationship with Maggie since then. The 1960s were a particularly bad time for intimate partner violence on screen, so it speaks relatively well of actors Joel Crothers and Kathryn Leigh Scott, and especially of director John Sedwick, that this moment passes briefly. Joe doesn’t follow it up with any further violence, and Maggie seems to forget about it instantly, as if it were an accident. In those days, it might just easily have been highlighted as a proof of Joe’s manliness.
The arm-grab is not defensible, but Joe’s intense feelings in response to Maggie’s inability to explain her behavior are. Joe and Sam visited Maggie at Windcliff in #265. She didn’t recognize them and started shrieking lyrics to “London Bridge” in what I think is the single most frightening scene in the whole of Dark Shadows. Maggie’s amnesia blotted that out, but Joe can hardly have forgotten it. He also remembers Willie as he was in his first weeks on the show, when he seemed determined to rape all the young women and beat up their boyfriends. The idea of Maggie’s mental health regressing to such a low point that she would wander off with a man like that must terrify Joe.
#1. Sam recently went blind; that’s why Joe has to pick him up at the bar.
#2. “Cassandra” is really Angelique, who’s cast a complicated Dream Curse spell that will eventually lead to Barnabas’ death. The gift that she brought was pipe tobacco, laced with a magic powder that would make Sam have the dream.
#3. Professor Stokes is fighting Cassandra, and trying to stop the Dream Curse. He stole the pipe tobacco, because he doesn’t want Sam to have the dream.
#4. Willie has a crush on Maggie, so he stole a pair of Josette’s earrings from Barnabas, and left them in Maggie’s purse while she wasn’t looking. When she puts the earrings on, she has a flashback to the period when Barnabas held her captive, and tried to convince her that she was Josette — a period that should be blocked from her memory.
#5. Adam, the newborn Frankenstein, has befriended Sam, and is now looking for him…
[#6.] Barnabas… was chained up a couple episodes ago and trapped behind this wall. Now he’s kicking at the wall, desperate for someone to come and rescue him.
[#7. A] man… abducted Carolyn a few weeks ago.
[#8.] Cassandra putting a curse on Liz, and making her think about death all the time.
Danny might have mentioned several other stories that don’t come up today, but of which regular viewers are aware and on which the ones that do come up depend. For example, Barnabas’ vampirism has gone into remission, and as a result his sometime victims were freed of the effects of his bites. It is unclear what this means for them, particularly for Willie, who often seems to have become once more the dangerously unstable ruffian whom Joe and the others knew when he first came to Collinsport. Also, a man named Peter is dating well-meaning governess Vicki, and Vicki has trouble remembering that Peter would prefer to be called Jeff. That may not be too exciting, but it’s no duller than Liz moaning endlessly about death. We could also bring up strange and troubled boy David, who has come into possession of a tape recorder with a message that has been played for the audience approximately umpteen billion gazillion times, but that no character other than Adam has heard, and if anyone else does there will be consequences. And Harry, the ex-convict son of housekeeper Mrs Johnson, is staying at Collinwood, and may someday be mentioned again. If he is, there is a danger that the audience will once more have to watch Craig Slocum try to act, truly a grim prospect.
Danny argues that the dense packing of so many storylines into the show makes watching it a stimulating cognitive exercise that “actually teaches people how to process information more efficiently.” As this blog makes obvious, I enjoy this kind of complexity very much. Not only do I keep talking about how ongoing storylines relate to each other, I reach back and find echoes of plot elements from months or years before and consider the significance of the common themes they develop; I look at the way the show borrows stories from books and plays and movies and folklore and notice how they put those source materials in dialogue with each other; and sometimes, my dissatisfaction with stories that didn’t work leads me to think up other stories that might have turned out better, adding yet another layer of narrative accretion to the already extremely intricate existing dramatic text.
I think Danny goes overboard, though, in his presentation of his case. He suggests that an increase in the number of storylines per minute of airtime is equivalent to an increase in the intellectual power of the show. But analysis and collation of plot elements is only one of many kinds of mental activities audiences engage in, and is far from the most important one. If that was all you wanted, you wouldn’t need actors. When an actor creates a character, s/he transforms the story points into the experiences of a person and the audience into witnesses of those experiences. When the drama is well executed, those experiences, even if they can be assigned to some category that is familiar to us, strike us as fresh and unique. When that happens, you don’t need a large number of interlocking storylines to generate complexity- your responses, emotionally and intellectually, will be as complex as your own background can support.
The audience’s background matters. There’s an old saying that when you engage with a literary work, it isn’t just you who read the book, but the book reads you. I often see how true this is in my job as a faculty member in ancient Greek and Latin at a state university in the interior of the USA. When I teach courses on ancient Mediterranean literature in translation, students aged 18-25 have an entirely different reaction than do the “non-traditional” students, those coming back to school after some years doing something else. Most of the students who are in the traditional college age group make interesting connections with a wide variety of topics, while others in that group get bored and can’t see a point in reading old books. But of the dozens of students I’ve taught when they were over the age of 40, every single one has found the reading to be a deeply rewarding experience. The literature that we have from the ancient world was written for adults, and the average American post-adolescent is only going to get so much out of it.
At this point in 1968, Dark Shadows is very much a show for children. The biggest and fastest-growing share of the audience is under 13 years old. So if it is going to be a smart show, it’s going to be smart in the sense that IQ tests measure, transmitting large amounts of information and giving the audience a short period of time to absorb, analyze, and recombine that information before it is followed by another close-packed message. It’s no wonder that an actor like Joel Crothers would become discontented with the show and go away complaining that the cast was being crowded out. He has ever less basis for the hope that he will be able to present the audience with a recognizable human feeling and leave them with hard thinking to do about what that feeling means.
Sheriff Patterson, leading his deputies through the woods in search of a very tall man named Adam who has escaped from gaol, finds a scrap of Adam’s clothing on a tree. He looks ahead and sees the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. He remarks “That’s the old Collins house. Every time anything goes wrong around here, that’s where all roads seem to lead.” He takes his party toward the house. Once they are gone, Adam comes out from behind a tree, and goes in another direction. Unknown to the sheriff and his men, Adam is a Frankenstein’s monster. He is four weeks old and has a vocabulary of fewer than a dozen words, but he easily outwits Collinsport’s entire law enforcement community.
The Old House is home to Barnabas Collins, whom the audience knows to be a recovering vampire. The sheriff calls on Barnabas and recaps the story for his benefit. In his post about the episode, Danny Horn ridicules every part of this preposterous scene, getting half a dozen genuine laughs. I won’t compete with him, but I do want to point out that while in both Wednesday’s episode and yesterday’s, the sheriff said it took twenty men to subdue Adam and take him into custody, today he says it took six. Maybe by next week it will be down to one deputy and a mynah bird.
Adam has abducted heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard. When he eludes the police, he goes to the abandoned structure where he has cooped her up. He had left her there to go look for food. That mission was interrupted by his arrest. Now, she asks to go home. He is carrying her back there when they meet the sheriff, his deputies, and Barnabas at the top of Widows’ Hill. From the second episode, we have known that people plunge to their deaths from this hill. We’ve heard stories about several such incidents, have seen a number of characters come close to falling from it, and in #425 we saw gracious lady Josette make the fatal leap. Carolyn slips from Adam’s arms to the edge of the cliff; the deputies see him pull her up. She runs into Barnabas’ arms, and Adam falls.
After Adam’s fall, we hear a message that is very familiar to us, but that Barnabas and his friends have never heard. Adam was created in an experimental procedure that was meant to relieve Barnabas of his vampirism. His creator, mad scientist Eric Lang, died shortly after recording an audiotape explaining that as long as Adam lives, Barnabas will be human, but that he will become a vampire again if he outlives Adam. This message plays out over images of the waves crashing into the rocks of the shore. It’s an effective visual complement to the message, a metaphor for the overwhelming power that will engulf Barnabas and the rest of them if Adam is in fact dead.
Dark Shadows Commentary 