dark shadows before i die – Page 24 – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 676: Scared of the funniest things

Chris Jennings turns into a werewolf when the moon is full, which it is about half the time in the universe of Dark Shadows. Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins has learned of Chris’ plight and decided to help him. As they make their way through an old cemetery to the hidden chamber where Barnabas will lock Chris up so that he doesn’t hurt anyone tonight, Barnabas asks Chris to confirm that he doesn’t remember anything he does in his lupine form. Chris does, saying that waking up and not knowing what he did the night before “is the most agonizing part of the whole thing.” You might think that he would find it even more agonizing to know that he has been killing one or two random human beings a month for the last seven years, but different things bother different people.

Chris asks how Barnabas knew that he didn’t remember what he did as the werewolf. Barnabas replies “Well, it’s obvious you’ve forgotten that you attacked me in this graveyard the night before last.” Chris says that “It’s a wonder you’re still alive.” To which Barnabas replies “No, it’s a wonder YOU’RE still alive!” For a moment we wonder how long this will go on, but Barnabas explains that werewolves can be killed by silver weapons. The head of the cane he carries is silver, and he struck him with it.

Barnabas shows Chris to the hidden room in the back of the old Collins family mausoleum. Barnabas himself was kept in a chained coffin in this room for over 170 years, when he was a vampire. He tells Chris that the room was originally constructed to hide ammunition from the British during the Revolution, which we have heard before. The coffin is still there; he tells him it is empty, and denies knowing anything about it. He says that the walls of the tomb are solid granite a foot thick; this is the first we’ve heard this detail. When Chris asks if anyone else knows about the room, Barnabas concedes that “A few” do. He assures him that none of them will be around tonight. Regular viewers will start making up a list of all the characters currently on the show who know about the room; Barnabas’s friend Julia Hoffman and his servant Willie Loomis know about it, as does strange and troubled boy David Collins. Barnabas can tell Julia and Willie to stay clear, and David has no reason to come to the cemetery tonight.

Barnabas explains that he will not show Chris the mechanism that unlocks the door from the inside, but promises to come back to release him after dawn. Chris urges Barnabas to leave at once; Barnabas insists on sticking around and asking more questions, saying that the moon isn’t up yet. Chris tells him that he first transformed shortly after he graduated from architecture school. “Oh, I was going to be an architect to be reckoned with, bold, imaginative, revolutionary. I thought nothing could stand in my way. Then something did.”

After Chris delivers a monologue about what a soulful and remorseful serial killer he is, Barnabas finally does close the secret panel. He sticks around until he hears the sounds of the werewolf snarling in the hidden room.

Chris’ nine year old sister Amy is staying at the great house of Collinwood. David finds her standing outside the front door, staring at the moon. She tells him that the moon scares her sometimes. His response is “Well, then don’t look at it,” which does seem logical. But she tells him that she can’t help it. David complains about how odd she is. We will hear more of this grumbling; it makes them seem like an old married couple, and is hilarious.

Amy and David are coming under the influence of the evil spirit of the late Quentin Collins. Quentin keeps trying to get them to set various members of the Collins family up for lethal traps; they haven’t succeeded yet in killing anyone, but housekeeper Mrs Johnson has caught on that there is something peculiar going on with the two of them, and she is frightened.

Mrs Johnson enters the drawing room to do some straightening up and finds the children playing a game with a deck of stage magician’s oversized cards. She and they stare silently at each other for a minute or two, and she protests. They say they were just watching her work, and she orders them to go to bed. They object that it isn’t bedtime yet. Of course it isn’t, Mrs Johnson doesn’t work around the clock. They get even more intensely on her nerves by bringing up a recent incident when she saw Quentin’s ghost, and in her exasperation she chases them out of the room.

Amy and David irritate Mrs Johnson. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

There isn’t anything about Quentin in the episode prior to that scene, so I cannot imagine what viewers would make of it. It’s late in the day, a domestic is tired, and a couple of kids are trying to annoy her. That is a relatable situation, but it doesn’t match with the heavy, melodramatic Dark Shadows music and the terrified affect with which Clarice Blackburn plays Mrs Johnson. I suppose that by January 1969, Dark Shadows was so widely known as a supernatural thriller that most people tuning in for the first time would assume that something paranormal was going on, but if they turned the television on after the opening titles and didn’t realize what show they were watching, they could only have concluded that they were witnessing an utterly ludicrous case of exaggerated seriousness. After David and Amy are out of Mrs Johnson’s sight, we see them go upstairs laughing, but that proves only that they are trying to upset her, not that they are connected to a malign power greater than themselves.

Barnabas enters and sees that Mrs Johnson is upset. She begins to tell him why, but interrupts herself to declare that he won’t believe her. He assures her that he will, and keeps asking her to go on. After she has told him everything she and the audience both know, he asks her to start over. The scene cuts out, suggesting that Barnabas is taking pains to get as much information from Mrs Johnson as he possibly can.

The children go to the little room in the long-deserted west wing of the house where they first met Quentin. Quentin is there when they arrive. This is the first time we have seen Quentin waiting for them; previously, they have had to summon him. Quentin does not speak; David can sense that he wants Amy to go back to the main part of the house so that they can talk privately.

Alone with Quentin, David asks where “the bottle” is. Quentin opens a rolltop desk, and David sees a bottle. He is shocked to find that the bottle is labeled “strychnine.” He declares that he won’t hurt Chris, and he runs out of the room.

Downstairs, Amy is in the drawing room, where she presses a few keys of the piano. We heard her play “London Bridge” in #656, but this doesn’t seem to be a part of any song. She is just idly pecking at the keyboard. When David comes, Amy complains about how long he was gone. He is distant, refusing to maintain eye contact or to answer any of her questions. He says they won’t be playing tonight.

We cut back upstairs, where Quentin is picking up the bottle of strychnine. Mrs Johnson saw Quentin in Chris’ cottage, so we know that he can go there. If David won’t poison Chris, perhaps Quentin will do it himself.

Episode 675: The best alibi you can have in this town

In #128, wisecracking waitress Maggie Evans opened a conversation in the diner at the Collinsport Inn with that old familiar ice-breaker, “Whaddaya hear from the morgue?” The show took us all the way to Phoenix, Arizona for a trip to that city’s morgue in #174, but it is only today we see the inside of Collinsport’s own morgue for the first time. Sheriff George Patterson brings heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard in to identify a body found on her property. Carolyn is shocked to find that it is her friend, Donna Friedlander.

Last night, Carolyn and Donna were in the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood with permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman and old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, who lives in the Old House on the same estate. Also in the room was Chris Jennings, a mysterious drifter who caught Carolyn’s fancy and who now lives in the caretaker’s cottage on the estate as her guest. Barnabas invited everyone to dinner at his house. The ladies delightedly accepted, but Chris begged off, saying he would have to leave immediately to keep an important business engagement in Bangor, Maine. Donna said that she was going home to Bangor and that she was ready to leave, and asked Chris for a ride. When he tried to squirm his way out of taking her, Barnabas looked on with smug self-satisfaction.

This morning in the morgue, Carolyn tells Sheriff Patterson that the last time she saw Donna, she was leaving with Chris. But she recoils from the implication. She cannot believe that Chris had anything to do with Donna’s death.

Carolyn does not know what Barnabas has figured out. Chris is a werewolf. When Barnabas told Julia that he had come to that conclusion, she was unconvinced. Barnabas’ dinner invitation was a ploy intended to elicit just the panicked reaction Chris did have. Barnabas’ look of triumph at Chris’ frantic attempts to ensure that he is alone on this night of the full Moon reflects his belief that he has been proved right.

Barnabas went to the cottage some time after the Moon rose, intending to use his silver-headed cane to take control of Chris in his werewolf form. But he delayed too long, and by the time he got there the cottage was vacant and Donna’s mangled corpse lay in the woods nearby.

We cut to the cottage, where we see a disheveled and bloodstained Chris come home. He has just had time to change his shirt and set some furniture right side up when Carolyn drops in. She has come to warn Chris that Sheriff Patterson is coming. The sheriff is right behind her. Carolyn leaves the two of them alone. Chris refuses to allow a search of the premises; when he spots Donna’s purse on his table, he throws a newspaper over it. The sheriff somehow fails to notice this, but takes Chris to his office for questioning.

In the drawing room, Barnabas and Julia are fretting over Donna’s death. Barnabas asks “Could we have stopped it?” He decides that they could not have, and that whatever sequence of events led to the killing must have been “Donna’s fault.” It is always fun to watch the scenes where Barnabas faces the horrific results his actions have on other people, strikes a noble pose while briefly considering the possibility that he may be partially responsible for them, and then agrees with Julia that it is pointless for him to blame himself. Julia and Barnabas’ self-exculpatory attitudes are so transparently absurd that you have to admire Grayson Hall and Jonathan Frid for keeping straight faces while delivering their dialogue.

Meanwhile, Carolyn has called the Collins family lawyer, Richard Garner. Garner agrees to help Chris. We saw Garner and his son Frank a number of times in the first months of 1967, but he hasn’t been on screen since #246. He has only been mentioned a handful of times since then, most recently in #577. This is the last time his name will come up.

Back in the drawing room, Barnabas tells Julia that he can see “So many possibilities” for dealing with Chris’ problem. Frid’s delivery of this line made my wife, Mrs Acilius, shudder. She could hear the evil in his voice as he shows us Barnabas playing God.

Chris is in an interrogation room, telling Sheriff Patterson a series of mutually contradictory lies about what he did last night. The sheriff says he’s going to leave him alone for a few minutes so that he can come up with a more plausible story. You might think this was a sarcastic remark, but in this context it seems it might actually be sincere. Sheriff Patterson’s failure to notice Donna’s purse on Chris’ table is of a piece with the complete nonfeasance he has shown all along, and Vince O’Brien delivers the line so warmly it doesn’t sound like a joke. Moreover, Sheriff Patterson’s predecessor as Collinsport’s chief representative of law enforcement, Constable/ Sheriff Jonas Carter, capitulated to the Collins family’s directions to cover up a crime in his final appearance on the show, back in #32. Longtime viewers may suspect that Sheriff Patterson is as averse to the tough parts of his job as was Constable/ Sheriff Carter.

While Chris is alone in the interrogation room, he decides to tell Sheriff Patterson the truth when he comes back. He does in fact open his mouth and get the first few words of a confession out when the sheriff cuts him short. He says that Barnabas Collins called the office to tell him Chris was with him last night, and that Barnabas is “about the best alibi you can have in this town.” He shakes Chris’ hand and sends him on his way. Law enforcement characters on Dark Shadows are symbols of helplessness, and after that moment Sheriff Patterson has reached the zenith of that quality, achieving a measure of futility that cannot be surpassed. We never see him again.

Sheriff Patterson completes his quest. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Chris goes home and finds Barnabas waiting for him. Chris expresses his gratitude for the alibi Barnabas gave him, but keeps trying to get him to leave before the Moon rises. Barnabas tells him that when he leaves, Chris will leave with him. Barnabas closes the episode by telling him that he knows that he is not only Chris Jennings, but that “You are also the werewolf.”

This episode marks the final appearance not only of Sheriff Patterson, but also of Vince O’Brien. O’Brien joined the show in #148 as the second actor to play Lieutenant Dan Riley of the Maine State Police. O’Brien’s stolid manner suited the role of that ineffective investigator, but he was much less fun to watch than was the man who originated the part, the charming John Connell.

O’Brien took over as the second Sheriff Patterson in #328. He was again a step down from his predecessor; the first Sheriff Patterson was Dana Elcar, an extraordinary performer who always found a way to give the audience hope that his character was only playing dumb. Other actors filled in for O’Brien a couple of times, Angus Cairns in #341 and #342 and Alfred Sandor in #615, leading some fans to refer to “the Patterson brothers” (whose parents named all of their sons George) and others to speculate that for a time Collinsport allowed any man to be sheriff who was willing to change his name to “George Patterson.” Like O’Brien, Cairns and Sandor were accomplished professionals, but none could match Elcar’s gift for overcoming bad writing and keeping our attention focused on the sheriff.

Episode 673: Urgent business

This episode rests squarely on the shoulders of eleven year old Denise Nickerson, playing the role of nine year old Amy Jennings. A performer of any age could take pride in the results.

We first see Amy in the predawn hours of a night when a werewolf is prowling the grounds of the great estate of Collinwood. The werewolf has attacked heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard; old world gentleman Barnabas Collins is out hunting him. In the opening sequence, Barnabas fired a shotgun at the werewolf without result, then hit him with his silver-headed cane and drove him off. Barnabas is still outside, still tracking the werewolf. Barnabas’ friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, is nervously pacing in the drawing room of the great house.

Amy comes downstairs. Julia sees her and demands to know why she is up and dressed at such an hour. Amy says she must go to the caretaker’s cottage on the estate, where her grownup brother Chris lives. Julia forbids her to go out. Julia saw the werewolf attack Carolyn, but says nothing about the incident. She tells Amy only that it is dangerous in the woods at night. Amy says that she had a dream from which she drew the conclusion that “Something is happening to [Chris,] and it’s happening now!” Neither Amy nor Julia knows that Chris is the werewolf, but they both know that Amy has a paranormal sensitivity to whatever is going on with Chris. Julia offers to go to the cottage if Amy will stay in the house. Amy gladly agrees, and Julia gets a gun and goes.

This quarrel could have been quite annoying. Julia is withholding vital information from Amy, who is in her turn insistent on doing something she could not possibly expect to be permitted. The actresses make it interesting. Amy stands very still, locks her eyes on Julia’s, and enunciates each word carefully, showing every sign of an earnest attempt to persuade her. When she cannot, she does not display anger or frustration or irritation. The only emotion she projects is a sense of urgency. Unlike children throwing tantrums, who make conflicting demands because they are in the grip of conflicting feelings, Nickerson leads us to believe that Amy is pursuing a single coherent objective. We expect her to be part of action that will advance the story.

Grayson Hall emphasizes Julia’s attentive response to Amy’s words and her reluctance to physically restrain her. It is still inexplicable that Julia fails to tell Amy about the attack on Carolyn and about the fact that Barnabas is walking around with a gun ready to shoot at figures moving in the darkness, but those failures don’t bother us as much as we might expect them to do. We see her taking seriously information which we know to be accurate, and this gives us grounds to hope that she will do something intelligent.

Julia gets to Chris’ cottage and back without being eaten by the werewolf or shot by Barnabas. At the cottage, she finds that the furniture has all been overturned and Chris is not in. Back home, she smiles and tells Amy that she saw Chris and he was fine. Julia’s lies convince Amy. She brightens immediately and happily goes back to bed. This really is an amazing moment of acting on Nickerson’s part; Amy’s mood switches in a second from dread and gloom to a big glowing smile. Executing that lift on command is the equivalent of faking a loud laugh and having the result sound natural.

The next morning, Amy mentions to Julia that she and Carolyn have plans to go into town. That leaves Julia no choice but to level with Amy about the werewolf attack. Amy is shocked that Carolyn was hurt, and even more shocked that she might have been killed. Julia assures her that the wounds Carolyn did suffer were minor and that she will be all right after some rest, but Amy is deeply affected. She looks directly into the camera and tells the audience that she did not want Carolyn to be harmed.

Amy tells us she is sorry that Carolyn was hurt. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

In the first months of Dark Shadows, strange and troubled boy David Collins was the only character who looked directly into the camera. He did it several times in those days, and actor David Henesy’s talent for the role of Creepy Little Kid always made it pay dividends. He stopped looking into the camera in the autumn of 1966 when David Collins stopped being a menace, and various other actors have been called on to break the fourth wall from time to time since. Since Amy joined the show, eye contact with the audience has become her province, and Nickerson manages to deliver a jolt every time they have her do it.

First-time viewers won’t know why Amy is so eager for us to know that she did not wish Carolyn ill, but the way she addresses herself to us leaves no doubt that Julia is missing the point when she makes conventional remarks about how no one wanted anything bad to happen to Carolyn, no one could have prevented it, etc etc. The camera stays on Amy as Julia burbles through these lines, and the particular sadness on her face confirms what she indicated by looking at us, that she knows more about the incident that Julia imagines.

Returning viewers know that Amy and David are falling under the power of the evil spirit of the late Quentin Collins, and that Quentin ordered them to send Carolyn out the night before so that she would no longer obstruct his plans. We also know that Quentin, who had for many weeks been confined to the little room in the long-deserted west wing of Collinwood where David and Amy first saw him several weeks ago, was the other day able to manifest himself in Chris’ cottage. He is gaining strength, and Amy and Chris’ presence on the estate is part of the reason.

Amy talks Julia into letting her go outside. Again, this could be an annoying scene. As Julia points out, the animal that attacked Carolyn has not been captured, and Barnabas has not returned. Further, regular viewers know that Amy’s promise to stay within sight of the front door is worthless, since she and David have often broken similar promises. But Julia knows that Amy has an extraordinary awareness of the situation, and she knows also that in #639 the werewolf ran away when he saw Amy. So all Grayson Hall has to do is look at Amy with a searching gaze and talk to her in a hushed voice, and we get the idea that she has come to the conclusion that the child will be able to take care of herself.

Amy wanders deep into the woods, and comes to a spot where we earlier saw the werewolf transform back into Chris. When that happened, the camera caught the hem of a white dress and panned up to show the face of the woman wearing it. At first it was a puzzle who that might be. Wicked witch Angelique often wore white dresses, but she is not connected to the ongoing stories, and the last time we saw her she was killed in a way that suggests she won’t come back to life at least until this thirteen week cycle is over. The ghost of the gracious Josette was known in the first year of the show as “the woman in white,” but we saw her quite recently, and she doesn’t have anything to do with Chris and Amy.

The figure turned out to be the ghost of someone named Beth. We have seen her only once before, in #646. She was with Quentin, and like him could exist only in a little room in the long-deserted west wing of the great house. But now she, too, is able to roam about the estate. When Amy comes to the spot where Chris transformed, Beth appears to her. She begins crying. Amy sounds like any other sweet little girl when she urges Beth not to cry, and then suddenly becomes quite a different person. Her face goes blank, and she declares in a flat voice that she knows what she must do. This isn’t such a tricky transition as the one Nickerson achieved when Amy cheered up in response to Julia’s lie, but it certainly is effective.

Amy goes to Chris’ cottage. He is out. She finds his bloodstained shirt, puts it in the fireplace, and sets it alight. Chris comes in and sees her. She embraces him, and tells him she must be going. He asks why, and she seems genuinely surprised by the question. “Can’t you hear her?” Chris says he can’t, Amy says she can, and she hurries away.

Chris looks at the fireplace. One sleeve of his shirt is hanging out, a fire hazard; he puts it into the center of the hearth. He examines it, and with dismay exclaims “My shirt!” Don Briscoe delivers that line with the timing and inflection of Jack Benny, and it is hilarious. Mrs Acilius and I laughed long and loud at it; we are convinced that the humor must have been intentional, at least on the part of actor Don Briscoe, probably on that of director Lela Swift, and possibly on that of writer Ron Sproat as well. The episode belongs to Nickerson, but that final line leaves us with a strong memory and a deep fondness for Briscoe as well.

Episode 672: And it was my mother’s voice

Today, everyone has the memory of a goldfish. Heiress Carolyn receives a telepathic message from her mother, the apparently-dead Liz, urging her to go home to the great house of Collinwood and stay inside in order to escape a terrible danger. A few minutes later, she has apparently forgotten the content of this message, as she goes back outside to check on Liz in her coffin.

During her brief stay in Collinwood, Carolyn talked with permanent houseguest Julia. Julia keeps telling her that Liz is dead and that the dead cannot communicate with the living, suggesting that she too has become a goldfish. Julia is a doctor, and Liz is entombed because she mistakenly declared her dead. She had made the same mistake about her several weeks before, and learned nothing from that experience. But she has also attended several séances, built two Frankenstein’s monsters, seen a number of ghosts, and spent a year and a half carrying on a one-sided romance with recovering vampire Barnabas. She also knows that in #592 and #593, Carolyn herself died and came back to life. So it is bizarre that she goes on about the finality of death and the impossibility of communication between the living and the dead.

Carolyn goes back to her mother’s crypt and is attacked by a werewolf. Liz knew she would be buried alive, and so insisted her coffin be equipped with a button that would ring bells everyone at Collinwood could hear. While Carolyn is confronting the werewolf, Liz overcomes her paralysis sufficiently to push this button. That brings Barnabas and Julia.

The werewolf paused in his attack on Carolyn when he saw her silver bracelet; that gave Julia and Barnabas time to arrive while Carolyn was still alive. Barnabas strikes him with the silver head of his cane, causing him to run off. When Carolyn tells of the werewolf’s fascination with the bracelet, Barnabas mentions that the head of the cane is also silver; he grows very thoughtful, apparently realizing that silver has a power over the werewolf. Yet later, when he goes to hunt for the werewolf, he takes a gun but nearly leaves the cane behind. He finally takes it, but his long hesitation shows that he, too, is suffering from goldfishism.

While still in the crypt, Julia had looked at Liz’ body and insisted she was dead. She wrote off the ringing of the bells as a coincidence, perhaps caused by some jostling during Carolyn’s encounter with the werewolf. Later, Liz gets out of the coffin and goes home to Collinwood. There, Julia, Barnabas, and Carolyn are astonished to see her. Julia examines her. After she finds that Liz has what is in Collinsport English called a “pulsebeat,” she seems willing to concede that she might be alive. She then starts giving orders which everyone willingly follows, because she is such a good doctor.

Liz remembers. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Liz is the one character whose brain seems to be in working order today. She can remember that her trouble started when her brother Roger’s wife Cassandra cast a spell on her. Barnabas and Julia know that Cassandra was in fact a wicked witch named Angelique, and that Barnabas has just returned from a trip back in time during which he destroyed Angelique. They assure her that Cassandra will never return. They can’t tell her why they are sure of this, because they, like the producers of Dark Shadows, have decided that Liz must never know what is really happening around her, lest she become an active participant in the plot. So all they can say is that they just know, and she is of course unconvinced.

It is a relief to wrap up the “Liz will be buried alive” storyline; that was dull from the beginning, and just got duller as it went. It didn’t help that we have seen Liz immobilized by depression twice before. This isn’t even the first time she has been rendered catatonic as the result of a curse placed by an undead blonde fire witch.

It’s also encouraging that Julia and Barnabas have met the werewolf and are engaged with him. They are the show’s chief protagonists, and nothing can really move without their involvement. Now that they are involved with the werewolf, we can stop spinning our wheels.

Episode 669: Hide and seek

Governess Maggie Evans forbids her charges, David Collins and Amy Jennings, from going outside. They ask her to play hide and seek. She agrees, and accepts the role of It. She searches for them for a long time, ultimately finding them outdoors. She points out that she had told them to stay indoors, and they pretend not to have understood that this applied to their hiding places.

Maggie does not punish Amy and David for this obvious insubordination. This establishes that Maggie is a squish who will not maintain discipline. That point had already been made in yesterday’s episode, when Maggie caught Amy hiding in David’s room, in defiance of orders from heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard. At that time, Maggie lied to housekeeper Mrs Johnson to cover up what the children had done. Maggie’s irresolution bears repeated exposure, though, since the children are coming under the influence of the evil spirit of the late Quentin Collins and would not be very effective as his helpers if they were subject to even moderately competent adult supervision.

Today Mrs Johnson and her son Harry are under orders from Carolyn to fix up the caretaker’s cottage on the estate. Carolyn has invited mysterious drifter Chris Jennings, Amy’s big brother, to live in the cottage. In the opening, Mrs Johnson tells Maggie she objects to this idea on the grounds that the cottage is cursed. Maggie dismisses Mrs Johnson’s belief in such a curse, but she really shouldn’t. Mrs Johnson keeps calling it “Matthew Morgan’s cottage” after the crazed handyman who lived there for eighteen years. Matthew killed Mrs Johnson’s beloved employer Bill Malloy, then tried to kill Maggie’s dear friend and predecessor as governess at Collinwood, Vicki Winters. Maggie knows all about those incidents. Mrs Johnson also says that no good happened at the cottage after Matthew; the only resident of the cottage since Matthew’s death was David’s mother, undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. Maggie knows plenty about Laura as well, since her father Sam was deeply involved in the strange goings-on concerning Laura and Vicki led the fight against her.

Under orders from Quentin, the children contrive to trap Mrs Johnson in the cottage by herself. Quentin appears to her there. She is terrified. This is quite a surprise to regular viewers. Quentin has appeared on screen only once before, in #646. Moreover, the children have made it very clear that Quentin is confined to the little room hidden in the long-deserted west wing of Collinwood where they found him. We are left to wonder how he gained the ability to manifest himself in the cottage and even to walk outside it when no one is looking.

Quentin terrifies Mrs Johnson. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Perhaps we are to think that Quentin is in some way connected with the curse on the cottage, and with Chris. When the children first contacted Quentin, Amy could communicate with him before David could. This left David miffed, since “Quentin Collins is my ancestor.” That line of David’s led us to expect that we would learn that Quentin is also Amy and Chris’ ancestor. Tomorrow, David will tell Amy that Quentin is “quite pleased” that Chris is living in the cottage. Maybe it was Amy’s presence in the room in the west wing that activated the ghost of Quentin there, and Chris’ impending arrival in the cottage that activates it in that space.

This episode marks the last appearance of Harry. Until today, he was played by Craig Slocum. Edward Marshall takes Harry over the horizon. Mr Marshall must have been watching the show; he does a flawless imitation of Slocum’s very peculiar line delivery. His Harry is just as petulant and resentful as Slocum’s was, but he is so much more physically relaxed and so much more responsive to his scene partners that he is enjoyable to watch in a way Slocum never was. I can’t help but wonder if Harry would have caught on and become a bigger part of the show had Mr Marshall taken the part earlier. Harry’s personality made it impossible for him to figure in a romance of any kind, limiting his usefulness on a soap, but there’s plenty of room on Dark Shadows for comic relief in the form of an inept, grumbly, dishonest servant.

Episode 667: The idea of leaving Collinwood

Time-traveling fussbudget Barnabas Collins has completed the task he set for himself when he went to the year 1796, and has to find a way to return to 1969. He decides to deliberately subject himself to the process by which he was originally transferred from the 1790s to the 1960s. He is, at the moment, a vampire. He orders his servant Ben to chain him in a coffin hidden in the secret room in the back of the Collins family mausoleum, and hopes that he will be released from it in a period when he is human again.

On a sunny morning in 1969, Barnabas’ former blood thrall Willie and his best friend Julia have figured out his plan and gone to the secret room. Julia is a medical doctor; she is at once the best physician in the world, capable of assembling a human body from dead parts, bringing it to life, and thereby lifting the effects of the vampire curse from Barnabas, but simultaneously very unsteady on the question of whether any given patient she is examining is alive or dead. For example, matriarch Liz is entombed at the moment because Julia mistakenly declared her dead twice in a couple of months. Once he has opened the coffin, Willie demands Julia examine Barnabas’ body and tell him whether he is alive, and therefore human, or dead, and therefore condemned to rise at nightfall and prey upon the living. Before she can answer Willie’s question, Julia has to spend quite a bit of time going over Barnabas with a stethoscope, during which time we see his eyelids flutter and his chest move.

While Julia is trying to determine Barnabas if is alive, he sits up and starts talking. Julia and Willie urge him to lie back down, apparently concerned that if he is too active Julia won’t be able to arrive at a clear result. After a break, we see him out of the coffin, telling them about his experience in 1796. After quite a bit of back and forth, they arrive at the collective decision to continue the conversation back home, in the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood.

Barnabas, Julia, and Willie have emerged from the secret room into the publicly known part of the mausoleum and are starting to close the panel behind them when they hear the voices of people approaching. One might expect them to finish closing the panel and to greet whoever is coming as fellow pilgrims paying homage at the graves of Joshua and Naomi Collins and their daughter Sarah. After all, everyone knows that Barnabas is a direct descendant of Joshua and Naomi, that Julia has a lively interest in the past of the Collins family, and that Willie is Barnabas’ servant. They have as much right to be there as anyone.

Instead, they scurry back into the secret room and shut themselves in. They are a bit too slow. Entering are heiress Carolyn and child Amy. Amy sees the panel swinging shut. Carolyn, behind her, did not see this happen, and dismisses Amy’s claim that she did. They tap on the panel, and Amy decides that it is so solid that she may have been mistaken. The mausoleum is so dim that one can imagine a trick of the light causing a person to believe that the wall had moved, so this reaction of hers is plausible enough.

Dimness is not an exclusive property of the outer part of the mausoleum. The trio hiding in the secret panel embody dimness as they do an outstanding imitation of the Three Stooges. Willie is Larry, the universal victim; Julia is Moe, the self-appointed leader who is as lost as either of the followers; and Barnabas is Curly, the chaos agent. Willie left his bag of tools perched precariously on the steps immediately behind the panel; after Amy and Carolyn tap, the bag falls and makes a sound. Julia does not address Willie as “ya porky-pine!” and poke him in both eyes, but it would fit with the flow of the action if she did.

Carolyn and Amy both hear the sound. They puzzle over it. Carolyn suggests that the wind must be blowing a limb from a nearby tree against the outer wall. Amy can’t think of anything else it could be, and accepts the suggestion. They leave, having placed flowers on the sarcophagi.

The flowers are themselves interesting to longtime viewers. Early in the episode, we saw Carolyn arranging them on the writing table in the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood. The last time we saw someone handling flowers over that table was in #346. Barnabas grabbed those flowers out of Julia’s hand. In those days he was still a vampire, and they were enemies. After a few seconds in his grip, the flowers died. When Julia and well-meaning governess Vicki saw this, Barnabas looked embarrassed, for all the world as if he had broken wind. The analogy tends to raise a laugh, but it is apt- when he was a vampire, it was a natural function of Barnabas’ body to do things like that, and he would be expected to control that function so that others would not be aware of it. So when they show us flowers on this spot, they are telling us we ought to be in suspense as to whether Barnabas will be a vampire again.

Carolyn and Amy go back to the great house, where strange and troubled boy David is sulking. Again, longtime viewers might find this suspenseful. David found his way into the secret room in #311 and in #334 tried to show it to some adults. Barnabas had locked the panel, so they disbelieved him. If Amy tells David what she saw, he may well put two and two together and revive the stories that were in progress in those days.

But Amy doesn’t breathe a word of it, and David isn’t interested. He is preoccupied with the evil spirit of the evil Quentin Collins, who is gradually and evilly taking possession of him and Amy and, evil as he is, driving them to do something or other that has not yet been explained, but which will undoubtedly turn out to be evil. Quentin is still confined to a small room hidden in the long-deserted west wing of the house, and can only take full control of one child at a time. Today it is David who is acting as his agent; Amy flatly refuses when David tells her that Quentin wants them to “play the game.” In response, he twists her arm. Carolyn walks in on that act of violence, and orders David to go to his room and stay there for the rest of the day.

Amy speaks up for David and even asks to go to his room with him, but Carolyn stands her ground. She does leave the children alone together while she goes to tell housekeeper Mrs Johnson to take David’s meals to him on a tray.

David fumes and tells Amy that it is her fault that they won’t be able to “play the game” today. He is declaring his intention to “get even with Carolyn!” when Barnabas appears in the doorway.

Evidently David’s declaration did not bother Barnabas, because his only response is “Why so serious?” Barnabas has been pushing a plan to send David and Amy to boarding schools in Boston. Under Quentin’s influence, they have tried to thwart this plan by pretending to be all for it but secretly hanging clothes in the wrong closets. This apparently foolproof method has somehow failed, so they resort to another expedient. They tell Barnabas they would rather not go. He says that’s fine with him, and drops the whole thing.

Alone in his room, David looks angry. He throws a book to the floor. Carolyn comes in, and David tells her that he is sorry and she is right to punish him. She sees immediately that he is lying, and tells him so. The resulting brief scene is far and away the best of the episode.

Later, Amy slips in, and finds David sitting in a chair in a dark corner. In their post about the episode on Dark Shadows Before I Die, John and Christine Scoleri point out that the effect of this shot of David is a bit different on an audience now than it would have been before 1972, since it makes David look very much like Don Vito Corleone in the opening scene of The Godfather.

“Shouldn’t I be holding a cat?” Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

David is still furious about the whole situation. He tells Amy that they will “play the game” after all, and that Carolyn will play with them. The ominous music on the soundtrack is enough to tell us that this means they will try to kill Carolyn.

This episode shows something about the importance of directors in television drama. Actor Joel Crothers appeared on Dark Shadows for the last time yesterday; in an interview he gave to a fan magazine shortly after leaving the show, he complained that the directors had become so busy managing the special effects and practical effects that they didn’t have time to work with actors. Furthermore, the show never had more than three writers on staff, so scripts were sometimes delivered too close to taping for the actors to do much rehearsal on their own.

Today, each actor finds a note and sticks with it, but few performances mesh with each other sufficiently to seem to be part of the same scene. Denise Nickerson is calm and relaxed even when Amy’s arm is being twisted, David Henesy is angry and confrontational even when Barnabas is falling for David’s pretense that everything is normal, and Nancy Barrett is stern and impatient even when Carolyn is taking Amy’s claim to have seen the panel move seriously. Each of these performances is good, and Mr Henesy stands out when he gets to play “creepy.” But clearly no one gave them an idea of what they should work together to get across to the audience.

Aside from the scene where Carolyn sees that David is lying, there are just two exceptions, and they don’t really help. Committed fans may find it endearing to see the preposterous threesome hiding in the secret room of the mausoleum, but first-time viewers are likely to be put off by that scene of low comedy in the midst of an otherwise heavy and somber melodrama. Jonathan Frid is warm and inviting with the children, which does make sense when Barnabas is talking with the relaxed Amy, but their two-scene about whether he will ask Carolyn to let David out of his room is such a low stakes affair that unexcited actors cannot hope to hold our attention.

The director today was executive producer Dan Curtis. Curtis was a titanic personality and would later direct many TV movies and some features, but he seems never to have directed as much as a school play when he first took the helm of Dark Shadows for a week in 1968. This stretch of episodes marks his second time in the director’s chair. His extreme inexperience as a director of actors may well explain why the cast does not come together more cohesively.

Episode 666: Barnabas isn’t like anyone else

Thayer David joined the cast of Dark Shadows in August 1966, taking over the role of moody handyman Matthew Morgan from George Mitchell starting with #38. In that first episode, Matthew brawled in a barroom and left dashing action hero Burke Devlin gasping. The main storyline of the next few months was the investigation into the death of beloved local man Bill Malloy; it turned out Matthew had unintentionally killed Bill when they got into a fight and Matthew didn’t know his own strength.

Those two events explain the recast. George Mitchell was a slender little man whose white hair and craggy face made him look older than his 61 years. He was a fine actor, but no one would have believed that he could win a fight with Burke or that he was so strong that he would accidentally kill Bill. David was Mitchell’s equal in acting ability, but more importantly was a burly fellow in his late 30s.

Today, we hark back to David’s original function on the show. The setting is the year 1796; vampire Barnabas Collins has traveled back from the 1960s to rescue his fellow time traveler, well-meaning governess Victoria Winters, from death by hanging. David plays another servant. As Matthew was fanatically loyal to matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, so Ben Stokes is utterly devoted to Barnabas. Ben finds roguish naval officer Nathan Forbes and visiting Countess Natalie DuPrés about to drive a stake through Barnabas’ heart. Ben demands they stop; Nathan aims his pistol in Ben’s direction and squeezes the trigger. The gun misfires. Ben reflexively clutches at his chest, but finding he is not hurt he advances on Nathan. They fight. As Matthew was so strong he could not fight Bill without accidentally killing him, so Ben accidentally kills Nathan. Ben then tells the countess he doesn’t want to hurt her and that she will be all right if she stays put until he can figure out what to do; she is unable to assure him she will do so, and in his attempt to restrain her he inadvertently kills her, too.

Barnabas had originally lived in the eighteenth century. He passed from that time into the 1960s because he was chained in his coffin in 1796 and discovered in 1967 by would-be grave-robber Willie Loomis. Now, he has rescued Victoria, and he is eager to go back to 1969, when he is free of the effects of the vampire curse. He traveled back by standing in an old graveyard and calling to the spirit of Vicki’s boyfriend, an unpleasant man known variously as Peter and Jeff, to pull him into the past. He went to the same graveyard yesterday and tried the same trick in reverse. Peter/ Jeff isn’t in 1969, so he calls instead to his friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman. That didn’t work, so he decided to have Ben chain him in the coffin and take the long way back.

Barnabas is unhappy to wake up this evening. He leaves his crypt to find Ben using a shovel to pat down some earth nearby. He asks why Ben did not chain the coffin as he was instructed. Ben tells him about Nathan and the countess; evidently he is only now finishing their shallow graves. Ben has never murdered anyone before, so he asks Barnabas’ expert opinion about the next steps. Barnabas tells him to get rid of the countess’ things and to tell whoever asks that she left for Paris.

The reference to Paris is a bit unexpected to longtime viewers. When the countess first appeared in #368/369, she said that she chose to live on the island of Martinique because metropolitan France had become a republic. She and her servant Angelique came to Collinwood along with the countess’ brother André DuPrés and André’s daughter Josette, who was at that time engaged to marry the still-human Barnabas. André is identified as the owner of a sugar plantation on Martinique.

In 1796, France was of course still a republic. But the Terror had ended shortly after the execution of Robespierre in the summer of 1794. Among the beneficiaries were the real-world counterparts of the DuPrés family, the vaguely aristocratic owners of a sugar plantation on Martinique. Their name was Tascher; the daughter of the family was named, not Josette, but Josephine, the widow of the Vicomte de Beauharnais. Josephine was imprisoned in Paris during the Terror, but she was freed, reunited with her son, and restored to her property by June 1795. In May of 1796, Josephine would marry an up-and-coming artillery officer named Napoleon Bonaparte. It would indeed be plausible that the countess would want to go back to Paris and take the opportunity to reestablish a life there.

After the story of Matthew Morgan and the consequences of the death of Bill Malloy ended in December 1966, Dark Shadows was for 13 weeks dominated by the battle between undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins and the forces of good, led by Victoria with assistance from the ghost of Josette. Laura was the show’s first supernatural menace.

The ghost of Josette had been introduced in #70 as the tutelary spirit of the long-deserted Old House on the estate of Collinwood. Matthew held Victoria prisoner in the Old House late in 1966, and in #126 he decided to kill her. Josette led the other ghosts out of the supernatural back-world that exists somewhere behind the action to save Victoria by scaring Matthew to death. During the Laura story, Josette’s ghost was deeply involved in the action, literally painting a picture to explain to the characters what was going on.

Prompted by Josette’s ghost, Victoria figured out that Laura was going to burn her son, strange and troubled boy David Collins, to death on the anniversary of similar immolations. This would turn out to be a key turn in Dark Shadows’ world-building. When you are telling stories about supernatural beings, you can’t rely on the laws of nature or logic to shape the audience’s expectations. You need to give them some other mechanism of cause and effect if you are going to create suspense. So from that point on, the show would use anniversaries as causal forces. “It happened exactly one hundred years ago tomorrow night!” means it will happen again then.

That was the basis of Barnabas’ trip to 1796 and of his hope to return by standing on the same spot. Tombstones indicating that Victoria and Peter/ Jeff had been hanged materialized at times related to the anniversaries of those events, and Barnabas must leave 1969 at a certain point to arrive at a certain point in 1796. Eight o’clock on a given night in 1796 corresponds to eight o’clock on a given night in 1969, and those are the times when Barnabas and Julia go to the graveyard from which he vanished and call out to each other.

Even though the conjoined eight o’clocks don’t facilitate Barnabas’ return trip, the structure of today’s episode plays on the same idea of intercutting timelines. We alternate between scenes of Barnabas and Ben in 1796, and of Julia and Willie in 1969. Barnabas bit Willie and enslaved him when he opened his coffin; by the time Barnabas was cured of the effects of the vampire curse, Willie had let go of any hard feelings about that. Barnabas has made the Old House his home, and Willie voluntarily lives there as his servant. Julia has been a permanent guest in the great house on the estate since 1967, but now is apparently staying at Barnabas’.

Julia is determined that Barnabas will return by rematerializing on the spot from which he vanished, and she keeps going back there. Willie doesn’t believe this will happen, but in a long interior monologue comes up with the idea that he might reappear in his old coffin. In her turn, Julia dismisses that idea. They quarrel about these competing absurdities, and Willie decides to put his hypothesis to the test. He goes to the old mausoleum to check on the coffin, and finds it empty. He returns to the house to report this to Julia.

Julia decides it’s time to sleep, so she goes upstairs- apparently to her own bedroom. Seconds later, a ghost appears to Willie. He recognizes it as Josette. She vanishes, and he calls Julia. When Julia comes he tells her that Josette had never appeared to either of them unless Barnabas was in danger. As far as I can recall the audience has never known Josette to appear to Willie or Julia at all, and Barnabas is always in danger, so that remark is a bit of a mystery to longtime viewers.

In the days leading up to Willie’s discovery of Barnabas in April 1967, he, and he alone, heard a heartbeat coming from the eighteenth century portrait of Barnabas that hangs in the foyer of the great house. While he is talking with Julia, Willie turns to the portrait of Barnabas that artist Sam Evans painted in May 1967 and hears the heartbeat again. Julia cannot hear the heartbeat. Willie combines the sound of the heartbeat with the sight of Josette and concludes that Barnabas has returned and the old coffin is no longer empty. We cut to the hidden room in the mausoleum. Chains materialize around the coffin, and we see Barnabas inside it, struggling to escape.

Willie realizes what’s going on and tells Julia about it. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

We may wonder if Barnabas has been struggling that way every night since he was chained there in his attempt to return to the 1960s. That would be 173 years, added to the 171 years the first time. It would seem that 344 years confined to a box would make Barnabas even screwier than he is. In a much later episode, we will see Barnabas released after a long entombment and he will be surprised that more than one day has passed. The 2012 film adaptation of Dark Shadows includes a humorous scene based on the idea that time does not pass for Barnabas while he is chained in his coffin. But when he was first released in April 1967, there were indications that he had undergone a nightly torment through the centuries, and the closing image of Barnabas in the box today echoes those indications.

Nathan’s death marks the final appearance of actor Joel Crothers, who has been one of Dark Shadows’ most valuable cast members since his debut in #3, when he played hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell. We said goodbye to Joe last week; it was nice to have another glimpse of Crothers in his villainous role before he left for the last time.

Episode 663: Forbes, capitalist tool

Barnabas Collins, on a quest to rescue well-meaning governess Vicki Winters and her boyfriend Peter Bradford from death by hanging, has traveled back in time to the year 1796, reverting to vampirism in the process. He bites roguish naval officer Nathan Forbes and compels him to go to the authorities with a confession of his role in framing Vicki and Peter. This leads them to order Peter’s release, but there is enough other evidence against Vicki that her hanging is still scheduled to go forward tonight.

Barnabas meets with his sidekick, much-put-upon indentured servant Ben Stokes, down at the docks. They confer about this situation. Barnabas says he may have to forcibly break Vicki out of gaol. He and Ben are discussing the difficulties of achieving this when a prostitute emerges from the fog. Barnabas’ eyes lock on her, and he sends Ben away.

The following scene is a reworking of one we saw in #414. Then, Barnabas met Ruby Tate, another professionally agreeable lady, on this same set. As Ruby introduced herself to him, so Crystal Cabot introduces herself. As Barnabas struggled with his impulse to bite Ruby, so he struggles with his impulse to bite Crystal. As Ruby sealed her fate by eventually telling Barnabas she recognized him, so it dawns on Crystal that she is talking with the scion of the family that owns the town and she goes on about having seen Barnabas coming and going from his father’s offices. As Barnabas finally gave in and bared his teeth to Ruby, so he bares them to Crystal. He is a more experienced vampire now than he was then, so he gets Crystal in his grips repeatedly, something he never managed with Ruby. But he has also had several months respite from his curse, during which he has come to think highly of himself, and he is after all on a mission of mercy. So each time he grabs Crystal, his conscience stops him from biting her. In 1967, Barnabas kept trying to bite Vicki, but could not bring himself to do it. Longtime viewers will be reminded of that reluctance when Barnabas keeps holding back with Crystal. The scene returns to the model from #414 when Crystal breaks free of Barnabas and, like Ruby before her, she goes into the water. We hear the same splash we heard when Ruby fell, and Barnabas’ face again tells us that she will not come out of the water alive.

Barnabas goes back to the great house of Collinwood and tells Ben how sorry he feels for himself. He had forgotten what it was like to be a vampire, how overpowering the urge for blood would be. Ben does not know that Barnabas has returned from the future, much less that he had a vacation from the effects of his curse, and so does not know what he is talking about. Ben leaves Barnabas alone in the study, and Crystal’s drowned body materializes in an armchair.

Crystal appears in the study at Collinwood. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

This again harks back to Barnabas’ early days as a vampire. In #440, Barnabas killed yet another sex worker, the luckless Maude Browning. Barnabas took revenge on the fanatical Reverend Trask by planting Maude’s body in Trask’s apartment. The next day, Nathan helped Trask dispose of Maude and evade the police. Barnabas never found out who thwarted his evil plan for Trask.

Nathan is in gaol, and so does not seem available to help Nathan as he once helped Trask. Moreover, it seems Barnabas’ control over him is fading. Nathan’s wife, Barnabas’ feather-headed second cousin Millicent Collins, saw Barnabas and Ben frog-marching Nathan out of the great house of Collinwood. She goes to visit him in his cell and asks why he is there. He doesn’t give her a straight answer, but does try to tell her about Barnabas. She can’t follow his story, but does understand his instructions to go to Barnabas’ coffin in the morning and drive a wooden stake through his heart. It is hard to believe that the giggly Millicent, a character from light comedy whose mistreatment at Nathan’s hands turned her into a hopeless mental case, will actually take any such action. But it is clear that if Barnabas is going to call on Nathan to do any more work for him, he will not only have to get him out of gaol, but will also have to bite him again to renew his power over him.

Episode 662: The course of history

Vampire Barnabas Collins has traveled back in time to the year 1796, where he plans to change what happened on one crucial night.

Yesterday’s episode was a clip show excerpted from #456-#460, the last full week of a period when Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the 1790s. Today’s consists largely of reenactments of those scenes. It all pays off in the last minute, when a confrontation between Barnabas and roguish naval officer Nathan Forbes ends differently than it had the first time round. As before, Nathan loads a crossbow with a wooden bolt and waits for Barnabas to come to him, hoping that he will shoot the bolt through Barnabas’ heart and thereby achieve the same effect as a wooden stake. The first time, Nathan missed Barnabas’ heart and Barnabas killed him. Unlike the first time, Barnabas knows what Nathan is planning. So he opens the door, but does not enter the room. Nathan can hear Barnabas’ voice, but cannot see him. Finally Barnabas jumps Nathan from behind, evidently biting him.

Barnabas originally killed Nathan as revenge for Nathan’s role in his mother’s death. This time he is willing to let Nathan live. He wants to take control of him and force him to tell the authorities that he lied when he testified against governess Victoria Winters and her boyfriend, an unpleasant man named Peter. Victoria is herself a time-traveler, and Barnabas got to be quite fond of her in her original period, the 1960s. She is scheduled to be hanged tonight for her many crimes, and Peter is also condemned to the gallows. Barnabas has come to rescue them.

During the opening title sequence, Thayer David announces that “Today the part of Victoria Winters will be played by Carolyn Groves.” When we first see her, Victoria is asleep in her cell at the Collinsport gaol, and her face looks very much like that of Alexandra Moltke Isles, the original Victoria.

A rude awakening for Vicki C. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas wakes Victoria. She is puzzled to see him. He has never told her that he was a vampire; even when he was biting her on the neck and sucking her blood for a week in March 1968, she didn’t seem to catch on. She just seemed to think he had a particularly aggressive make-out technique. She thinks that the Barnabas she knew in the 1960s was a descendant of the one she knew in the 1790s, and that the one from the 1790s is dead. Barnabas would rather not get into the weeds about his personal history, such as the countless murders he has committed, and gives Victoria a truncated account of how he, the man from the 1790s, is laboring under a curse that made it seem that he was dead. He doesn’t explain how he got into her cell, how he knows who Peter is, or how he plans to free the two of them from their death sentences. He asks her to take all of that on faith.

Miss Groves plays Victoria as so happy to see Barnabas she smiles all through her account of her imminent and, she believes, inevitable execution. That’s odd to see, but it fits so perfectly with the delight Victoria always took in Barnabas’ company that it shouldn’t bother longtime viewers.

Mrs Isles was cast as the original Victoria in large part because she looked so much like Joan Bennett that Bennett famously mistook her for her daughter when she first saw her. In the Collinsport Historical Society’s 30 December 2017 post for this episode, Patrick McCray not only tells us that Miss Groves appeared in a play with Joan Bennett in 1960, but provides a still of the cast in which the two women look like they could be mother and daughter:

Screenshot from The Collinsport Historical Society, 30 December 2017.

The show spent much of its first year hinting heavily that Victoria was the unacknowledged daughter of Bennett’s character, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. They never collected those hints and built them into a story, and the question of Victoria’s parentage was left as one of Dark Shadows’ most annoying loose ends. Perhaps Miss Groves’ casting is a sign that the failure to resolve that question bothered the makers of the show as much as it did the audience.

Episode 659: Changing of the guard

Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, in temporary charge of the great house of Collinwood, has decided to pack children David Collins and Amy Jennings off to boarding schools in Boston. They pretend to be happy about this, but in fact want to stay in the house, where they have come under the power of the evil ghost of Quentin Collins. Neither they nor Quentin can figure out a way to stop Barnabas’ plan. David takes a photo of Barnabas standing with heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard; when the photo is developed, a mysterious figure appears in the background, hanging by the neck. Barnabas believes that the figure represents vanished governess Victoria Winters, and that he must travel back in time to rescue her. He therefore has no time to go to Boston and put the children in schools, so the plan is off.

Hanging out. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Several characters see the photo, but only Barnabas recognizes the hanged woman as Vicki. No wonder- Vicki has been played by two actresses, and neither of them posed for it. The original Vicki was Alexandra Moltke Isles; the second was Betsy Durkin. This is Carolyn Groves, who will play Vicki in a couple of upcoming episodes. The usual rule of nomenclature when discussing recast parts is to give the performers numbers, and so Mrs Isles would be Vicki #1, Miss Durkin Vicki #2, and Miss Groves Vicki #3. But in deference to their first names, we might call them Vicki A, Vicki B, and Vicki C.

Craig Slocum appears on the show for the last time today. He plays Harry Johnson, a household servant. When Carolyn Stoddard orders Harry to fetch the children’s luggage, the camera lingers on the look of distaste she gives him. Carolyn and Harry had some unpleasant dealings several months ago, when she was hiding a Frankenstein’s monster named Adam in the long deserted west wing of the house and Harry tried to use this information to blackmail her. Carolyn kept control of that situation, but her facial expression as she looks at him today shows that she remembers Harry’s behavior and does not regard him as a man to be trusted.

Upstairs, Harry finds the children in David’s room. He catches them using an antique telephone through which they have been able to communicate with Quentin. He wants to know what they have been doing. David says that they might as well tell him, prompting an alarmed reaction from Amy. He gives a partly accurate account. The true parts are the ones Harry instantly disbelieves. This wouldn’t have worked with any of the other grownups at Collinwood; they have all had too much experience of the supernatural to disregard such a story. But Harry is relatively new to the house, and is too dim-witted to understand what he has seen. Their secret is safe with him.

Slocum ‘s performances were uneven in quality. He first appeared as Noah Gifford, a criminally inclined sailor who figured in five episodes from #439 to #455, a period when Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the 1790s. He was very bad in those five. He didn’t know what to do with his voice, so that he always sounded like he was reading words one at a time off a teleprompter that kept speeding up and slowing down on its own. Dark Shadows returned to contemporary dress a few weeks after Noah’s last appearance, and Slocum returned to the cast as Harry. He had the same trouble with his speech in his early stabs at that role, but he did eventually learn to relax. In #551, he amazed the world by doing a genuinely good job. He has been passable most of the time since, and he is all right today. Still, Harry doesn’t have much room to grow, and Slocum was so bad so many times that it’s a relief to see him go.

There is an intriguing little blooper near the beginning. Barnabas is supposed to say that he is on his way to see Carolyn. Jonathan Frid actually says that he is going to see “Barrah- Carolyn.” In a recent episode, a day player asked to see “Mister Jonathan” and was ushered to Barnabas, so perhaps he caught the bug and is going to call Carolyn “Barrett, Nancy.”