dark shadows before i die – Page 28 – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 614: Any morbid fantasy

Housekeeper Mrs Johnson saw old world gentleman Barnabas Collins last night, and he was in a frightful state. Her son, unsightly ex-convict Harry, had come upon Barnabas unconscious in the woods in the small hours of the morning, and brought him back to the great house of Collinwood. Barnabas was pale and weak, barely able to stand. Mrs Johnson wanted to call a doctor, but Barnabas refused any help and insisted on returning to his own home elsewhere on the grounds of the estate. This morning, Mrs Johnson drops in on Barnabas to see how he is doing, and to her horror finds that he is in an armchair in his front parlor, a rope being pulled tight around his neck by local man Joe Haskell. She fights Joe, and he runs off, leaving Barnabas alive.

Mrs Johnson does battle with Joe. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Had Joe succeeded in killing Barnabas, it would have been oddly appropriate for Mrs Johnson to be present. She was the first character we saw Barnabas speak to. He knocked on the door of the great house in #211 and she opened it, inviting him in when he identified himself as the Collins family’s cousin from England. They might have brought things full circle by having her also be the last person to speak to him.

As it is, Barnabas is not seriously hurt. He has no telephone in his house, so Mrs Johnson says she will go back to the great house to call the sheriff. Barnabas becomes agitated and forbids her to do this, saying that what has happened must remain between him and Joe. She doesn’t work for Barnabas, and even if she did he would have neither the legal authority to stop her reporting a crime to the police nor the power to silence a character whose function has long been to distribute information to anyone who might use it to advance the story.

Back in the great house, Mrs Johnson finds Harry in the foyer. She asks him what he is doing in the front part of the house, and he claims to be on an errand for one of the ladies. She mentions that Barnabas is in a bad way, and Harry expresses surprise she was at his house. He blurts out a reference to Joe, and his mother questions him sharply. She realizes that he knows far more than he is telling, and she wants to know what he is doing and who else is mixed up in it. He doesn’t give her any answers. She picks up the telephone to call the sheriff, and Harry puts his finger on the hook to hang it up.

The front door opens. The lady of the house, matriarch Liz, is there with her brother Roger. Joe is leaning on Roger’s shoulder. Liz and Roger found Joe in the Collins family mausoleum in the old cemetery north of town, which they were visiting because Roger wants to remodel it. Mrs Johnson is horrified to see Joe, and tells Liz and Roger what she saw at Barnabas’ house. They can’t believe that Joe, who has always been a decent and honest person and is now very ill, could have done such a thing. Roger and Harry help Joe to the sofa, where Roger asks him if Mrs Johnson is telling the truth. Joe responds by saying that he has to kill Barnabas before Barnabas kills him, and Roger calls the police.

Episode 612: I want you to be the guilty one

Joe Haskell has become a victim of vampire Angelique. That cost him his job, his fiancée, and everything else that gave him an identity. In #607, he went to visit Angelique and found that she had moved on to a new victim and didn’t want him anymore. Having lost even the source of his troubles, Joe stabbed himself.

Angelique shared Joe’s desire that he should die, but did not want her master, suave warlock Nicholas, to come home and find him bleeding to death on the carpet. So in #608 she called her new victim, recovering vampire Barnabas Collins, to take Joe away and leave him to die in the woods. Unable to be a party to Joe’s death, Barnabas took him back to his own house. He asked his friend, Julia Hoffman MD, to treat Joe there. Julia discovered the bite marks on Joe’s neck and figured out that he was a blood thrall and Angelique was the vampire, but she did not realize Barnabas was also in Angelique’s power.

Nicholas has for his own reasons joined Joe and Angelique in wanting Joe to die. Yesterday, he summoned a man he brought under his power in #601, unsightly ex-convict Harry Johnson, and ordered him to sneak into Barnabas’ house and pour a vial of poison into Joe’s medicine. In #528, Nicholas had scolded Angelique when she asked him to slip a potion into someone’s beverage, saying “I am much too talented to spend my time drugging drinks.” However talented Nicholas may be, the writing staff is taxed to the limit, so by #555 he was himself devising a plan to do just that. This time it doesn’t even seem to be a magical potion, just something colorless and toxic.

Nicholas isn’t the only evil genius who is failing to meet his own standards. Barnabas and Julia go on and on about the importance of not leaving Joe alone in the upstairs bedroom for a minute. Barnabas takes the first watch, but Angelique calls him away. Julia is asleep while Harry enters the house and poisons Joe’s medicine. She wakes up, goes to Joe’s room, finds that Barnabas is gone, then goes back downstairs, leaving Joe alone. When Barnabas returns, Julia is still downstairs, and she tells him he has been away for “hours.” Apparently she has left Joe unattended that whole time.

In the interval, Angelique bit Barnabas and left him unconscious in the woods. Harry found him there and took him to the great house of Collinwood, where his mother, housekeeper Mrs Johnson, was appalled by Barnabas’ pale color and evident weakness. She kept insisting on helping Barnabas, at first wanting to call a doctor, then saying Harry would walk him home, but Barnabas refused all assistance and left alone.

This is the first time we have seen Mrs Johnson in over eight weeks. It is also the first time we have ever seen her out of her working clothes. She is in a robe and has her hair down. Clarice Blackburn walks with exaggerated care, suggesting arthritis, and talks as if she were mindful of dentures that might come loose. With these tricks and in her usual costume, she does manage to seem somewhat older than her 47 years. But en déshabillé, she cannot conceal that she is younger than the character, and only 13 years older than the actor playing her son.

Mrs Johnson tries to reason with Barnabas while Harry looks on. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Early in the episode, Harry watched the clock in the foyer of the great house while we heard his voice in a recorded monologue thinking about Nicholas’ command and his reluctance to obey it. That was the first time Craig Slocum was entrusted with a simultaneous dual performance as voice actor and silent actor. The monologue is an efficiently written bit of exposition, and as a voice actor he delivers it competently enough. As a silent actor, he stares lifelessly forward throughout it, adding nothing to the words. Slocum wasn’t reliably interesting as a performer, but he could do well on occasion, and there would have been some grounds for hoping that Nicholas’ command to kill Joe would have provided him with an occasion to which he could rise. Slocum first appeared on Dark Shadows as Noah Gifford, another hopeless schlub who found himself ordered to commit a murder. The person giving that order was the unscrupulous Nathan Forbes, who like Joe was played by Joel Crothers. You’d think that the second time around, Slocum would find a way to invest the role of reluctant murderer with something subtle and compelling.

At the end of the episode, Jonathan Frid has a voiceover monologue while Barnabas wrestles with Angelique’s command to give the poisoned medicine to Joe. This monologue is entirely superfluous; we know exactly what Barnabas is thinking. Frid goes to the opposite extreme from Slocum, and makes faces and gestures emphasizing every point he hears his voice make. Without the voiceover, Frid’s dumbshow might at least have been nostalgic for people who remembered the silent movies. With the voiceover, it’s just embarrassing, a bad ending to a mediocre installment.

Episode 609: For want of a fig leaf

Adam and Eve are discussing the Fall, comparing their incomplete memories of what came before it. This is not a flashback. The Adam and Eve we see today are Frankenstein’s monsters, and they do not live in exile from Eden when the world was young, but in the town of Collinsport, Maine in 1968. The Fall they have in mind is the one that is also known as Autumn. Adam is ashamed, not because he is naked, but because Eve accuses him of preferring life in captivity. He is not naked at all, even though Eve walks in on him and sees his Harry Johnson. Harry Johnson is the man to whom Adam has entrusted a letter, but since Adam’s favorite pastime is studying the works of Sigmund Freud, and since by 1968 “johnson” had been a familiar English slang word for “penis” for over a century, he would likely have been the first to make the connection to the predicament of their Biblical namesakes.

Adam takes Eve to his old home, a dusty room in the long-deserted west wing of the great house of Collinwood. Heiress Carolyn hid him there for a period that seemed so long the audience might feel that the original Adam and Eve were probably still around when it started. Carolyn greets them there. She is happy to see Adam again and eager to befriend Eve. Adam wants that too, but Eve isn’t having it. She quarrels with Adam and storms out, leaving Carolyn in an awkward position.

On the terrace outside the great house, an unpleasant man named Peter who prefers to be called Jeff is waiting for his date, well-meaning governess Vicki. Vicki has kept him waiting for an hour. Vicki’s charge, young David, happens by. Peter/ Jeff immediately makes it clear why Vicki is in no hurry to see him. He greets David with an accusation that he was hiding from him. When David denies this, Peter/ Jeff demands that he tell him who he was hiding from. Peter/ Jeff may have forgotten who is a guest in whose house, but David hasn’t, and he turns to go. Peter/ Jeff stops him, asking “We’re friends, aren’t we?” David doesn’t explicitly agree that they are, but he stays.

Peter/ Jeff starts to talk about his plans to marry Vicki. David calls him “Peter,” and since the closest thing he has to a personality is his insistence on being called “Jeff” he grabs David and shakes him violently. Watching this scene today, my wife, Mrs Acilius, said one word- “Psycho.” She wasn’t talking about Peter/ Jeff, but about actor Roger Davis. When one character shakes another, it is usually the actor playing the shakee who makes all the movements, while the shaker just mimes the action without actually touching them. Not so Mr Davis- he really did rattle David Henesy around hard enough that it’s pure luck he didn’t give him a concussion. That’s typical of the approach Mr Davis took to his performances on Dark Shadows, in the course of which he assaulted several women on camera. Mr Henesy is uncharacteristically tense throughout this scene, does not sustain eye contact with Mr Davis, and when the scene ends he rushes off stage.

Roger Davis has his fun. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

In his dialogue, Peter/ Jeff makes some pretty bizarre remarks:

You know, David, pretty soon, you’re gonna find out that love isn’t something you can remember. Sixteen years old… You know when you’re sixteen, you can really love somebody. And then you come back ten years later and you wouldn’t even notice her.

At this, David gives Peter/ Jeff a look that accords with Mrs Acilius’ one word assessment of Roger Davis. “Love isn’t something you can remember”? Which item on the sociopathy screening test is that? And what does “Sixteen years old” have to do with anything? David is twelve, Peter/ Jeff and Vicki are in their twenties, no one mentioned the number sixteen. And David would be doing Vicki a solid if he told her that her fiancé won’t remember her in ten years.

David Collins wonders what the #%*^ is wrong with Peter/ Jeff, while David Henesy recovers from Roger Davis’ assault on him. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

David leaves, and Eve shows up. She recognizes Peter/ Jeff and addresses him as “Peter Bradford!” The closing credits start rolling before Peter/ Jeff can shake her violently while whining that he wants to be called “Jeff Clark.” Eve is the reincarnation of an eighteenth century homicidal maniac; she hasn’t killed anyone since she was brought to life the other day, and Peter/ Jeff would be an excellent choice for her first victim. If she does kill him, I would be “Team Eve” all the way.

Episode 608: The experts

Julia Hoffman, MD, is an authority on vampirism. We first saw her treating Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, who was recovering from her time as the victim of vampire Barnabas Collins. Julia then met Barnabas and transferred her loyalties to him. She used her extraordinary abilities as a hypnotist to erase Maggie’s memories of her ordeal, and conducted an experiment meant to turn Barnabas back into a human.

That experiment failed, but subsequent intervention by another mad scientist did put Barnabas’ vampirism into remission. Since then, another vampire appeared and took Julia as his victim. Barnabas staked him and freed her. Now a third vampire is on the loose. She is Angelique, Barnabas’ ex-wife and once the witch who condemned him to the ranks of the undead in the first place. Angelique has two blood thralls at the moment. One is Barnabas himself. The other is Joe Haskell, formerly a hardworking young fisherman and fiancé to Maggie.

Yesterday Angelique told Joe she didn’t want him anymore. In response, he tried to kill himself. Seeing him bleeding to death, Angelique summoned Barnabas and ordered him to carry Joe off to the woods and leave him to die. Barnabas disobeyed her, and instead brought him back to his house, where Julia treats him.

Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Julia spots the puncture wounds on Joe’s neck. She figures out that he is a blood thrall and surmises that Angelique, whom she knows under the alias Cassandra, is the vampire. When Barnabas resists her inquiries, she becomes suspicious of him. At first she bluntly tells him that she wonders if he knows more than he is telling, but when he tries to dismiss her theory about Angelique/ Cassandra she backs away and claims that she is proceeding from “Intuition… I’ve no logical reason… I want to find a solution so badly that I’m willing to accept the idea of Cassandra Collins coming back.” Regular viewers know, not only that Julia has an abundance of logical reasons for her conclusions, but that she is a talented liar. We may well expect to find that she is entirely in control of the situation.

Barnabas brings Maggie over to talk with Joe. Longtime viewers will find this jarring. Joe is in the upstairs bedroom where Barnabas kept Maggie when she was his victim, and she briefly recovered her memory just two weeks ago. You might think that Barnabas and Julia would be taking a terrible risk by letting her see Joe suffer as she did in the room where she did. Oddly, she remembers seeing Joe with Angelique in #599, but does not remember what she knew then, that Angelique is a vampire and that Joe is going through what Barnabas put her through.

Later, Barnabas is alone with Joe when he regains consciousness. Joe figures out that Barnabas is Angelique’s new blood thrall. He vows to kill him, and we cut to the closing credits.

Episode 607: Bedtime

Suave warlock Nicholas Blair wakes Frankenstein’s monster Adam from a nightmare. As we have seen from night-time glimpses of fisherman Joe Haskell and the unpleasant Jeff Clark, it is standard for the young men of Collinsport to go to bed fully dressed, wearing coats, ties, and shoes. Adam is the youngest man around, having been brought to life just this May, but he is wearing pajamas.

Many commenters on fan boards assume that Adam has poor personal hygiene, perhaps because he has spent so much of his short life cooped up in hiding places without running water. But he lives in Nicholas’ house now, and unlike most characters, including Nicholas himself, he has two changes of clothing- the clothes that apparently came with the corpses from which he was assembled, a bright green sweater heiress Carolyn gave him, and his pajamas. So I think we ought to assume that he keeps himself clean.

Earlier this night, Nicholas sicced vampire Angelique on old world gentleman Barnabas Collins in order to keep Barnabas from interfering with his plans for Adam. But he discovers that Adam and Barnabas have a Corsican Brothers-type connection, so that puncture marks have appeared on Adam’s neck. Adam is also weakened, and afraid of Angelique. Nicholas concludes that Angelique will have to leave Barnabas alone. She is deeply disappointed when he tells her of this, but cannot argue, as it is almost dawn and she must get back in her coffin.

We then cut to the Blue Whale, where an unshaven Joe is drinking. Joe is another of Angelique’s victims, and as a result of her power over him has lost his job, his fiancée Maggie Evans, and his self-respect. We were first introduced to Joe in this room, back in #3. In those days, he was a hardworking young fisherman who was too sturdily honest to be tempted by a bribe to spy on the ancient and esteemed Collins family. We have seen him back on this set many times, usually as a stalwart representative of whatever is wholesome and rational. But today he is one of the old drunks leaning on the bar.

Maggie enters. She walks up to Joe. He does not react, and she starts to walk away. She turns back to him and says hello. They have a sad little chat. She says he almost seems to feel about her the way he used to; he says she has no idea how he feels. She tells him what she expects him to say, that he won’t be able to explain to her what’s going on with him; he confirms that it is so. He asks if she is there to meet Nicholas; she says she is, and asks if there is any reason she shouldn’t. He says he supposes not.

Nicholas enters. He asks Maggie if she would like to sit at the bar, but she indicates a table. Joe looks at them, and we hear his thoughts as he wishes he could explain what Angelique has done to him. This gains poignancy for regular viewers, not only because of the contrast between the broken-down figure we see today and the robust young man who so often modeled health and sanity on this same set previously, but also because less than two weeks ago, in #599, Maggie knew all about what Joe was going through. She and Joe were ready to run off together when Nicholas used his sorcery to mind-wipe their knowledge away and reset the story to its current dismal status quo.

Joe leaves the bar and goes to Nicholas’ house to call on Angelique. She is surprised to see him. She didn’t summon him, and she isn’t hungry. She tells him to go away. He says that he’s lost everything because of her, and that she is all he has left. She says he doesn’t have her either, because she is done with him. To make him even more miserable, she takes him to Nicholas’ magical mirror, which can be used to spy on whomever the user chooses, and shows Joe that Nicholas has walked Maggie home. Joe hears Maggie agree that she might fall in love with Nicholas, and watches them exchange a long, passionate kiss.

Joe asks Angelique if she cares that she has utterly ruined his life, to which she replies “Not particularly.” He says that he hates everything he has become, and that he despairs of ever being anything else. He picks up a letter opener intending to stab Angelique. Unable to bring himself to attack her, he sticks it into his own belly.

Angelique makes Joe feel like Mickey Mouse. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Joel Crothers was dissatisfied with the part of Joe and with Dark Shadows generally. In a couple of months, he will leave the show and take a role on another soap. Very few viewers would have been likely to know that was coming in 1968, but Joe was a popular character who was chronically underutilized. He would have had many fans who might have shared Joe’s fear that the show will leave him in the state to which this storyline has reduced him.

Episode 605: Ordinary people like us

Recovering vampire Barnabas Collins has determined to let himself into a house occupied by suave warlock Nicholas Blair. He knows that Nicholas is harboring Frankenstein’s monsters named Adam and Eve, that Eve is the reincarnation of a homicidal maniac, and that Nicholas has sinister plans for the pair. Once in the house, he intends to kill Eve.

Most of the episode is taken up with Barnabas’ preparation for this mission. He works with his friends, mad scientist Julia Hoffman and occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes, to ensure that Nicholas will be out of the house when Barnabas gets there. When he goes into the room where he expects to find Eve, Barnabas discovers that she is not there. Instead, he is greeted by his erstwhile wife, Angelique. Angelique is now a vampire. We end with her baring her fangs at him.

Beneath all the homicidal and fantastic elements is a classic situation of farce. A man sneaks into a house hoping to meet a young woman, only to come face to face with his ex-wife. There are several notes of intentional comedy. Keeping Nicholas distracted, Stokes gives him a long lecture about the history of the Collins family. When he starts in on the details of their shipping interests, Nicholas squirms, jumps up, and thinks of someplace else he ought to be. Stokes and Julia destroy that excuse, and Nicholas sinks sadly back into his chair, bracing himself to hear more.

It dawns on Nicholas he will have to listen to the rest of Stokes’ disquisition. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

When Barnabas first enters Eve’s room, he thinks he sees a figure in her bed, only to find that there are pillows piled up under the covers. Angelique pulled that on him in #403, and Julia did the same thing in #291. Longtime viewers are left wondering when he will fall for the same trick a fourth time.

I do wish writer Gordon Russell had called on his frequent collaborator Violet Welles for help with this one. There are four or five nice laughs, but the tone immediately subsides back to seriousness between them. Welles had a gift for glittering dialogue that could have kept us chuckling throughout.

Episode 602: Someone who will make you happy to be a vampire

Frankenstein’s monster Adam came to life in #485, and has been cooped up in one cage after another ever since. Last week a mate was created for him and given the name Eve. Eve hates Adam, and today tells him that she will kill him as soon as she can. Adam is getting pretty tired of the whole thing.

Adam’s latest keeper is suave warlock Nicholas. Nicholas masterminded the creation of Eve because he hopes she and Adam will make Frankenbabies, founding a humanoid species that will owe its creation to Satan. Adam doesn’t know about Nicholas’ allegiance to the Devil or about his plans, but he is sick of taking his orders. The two quarrel at the beginning of today’s episode. Nicholas quiets Adam by showing off one of his magical gimmicks. Hanging on his wall is a device that is usually a mirror, but that can be switched over to function as a closed circuit television focused on anyone he chooses. Today, he wants to know where his unruly subordinate, vampire Angelique, has wandered off to.

Nicholas and Adam look into the mirror, where we see Angelique at the bedside of an unpleasant man named Peter who prefers to be called Jeff. She is about to bite Peter/ Jeff, contrary to Nicholas’ rules for her diet. We zoom in, and the scene from the mirror takes over our own screen. After a moment, Nicholas is there too, stopping Angelique and scolding her for disobeying his nutrition guidelines. It’s too bad we didn’t see Nicholas step into the mirror, like Buster Keaton in Sherlock, Junior, but you can’t have everything.

After Angelique obeys Nicholas’ command to leave Peter/ Jeff’s apartment, Nicholas puts Peter/ Jeff back to bed. He casts spells on him to cause him to forget his encounters with Angelique and to heal from the effects of them. While he was doing this, my wife, Mrs Acilius, was talking to the screen, pleading with Nicholas to cast a spell on Roger Davis to give him some acting ability. Shortly after that, Mr Davis delivered some more lines, making it instantly clear that Nicholas had no such power.

Back at Nicholas’ house, Adam is fuming that Nicholas switched the mirror back to reflecting mode just as the show was getting interesting. In the room with him, and she is too bored for words. The two of them have a rough physical confrontation, and Adam locks her up in the basement. Eve has the memories and personality of Danielle Roget, an eighteenth century homicidal maniac whom Nicholas conjured up to animate Eve. He first brought her out of Hell in a ceremony he conducted in this basement; when Adam takes her there, she is terrified he will send her back. Eve is so impatient with Adam’s naivete that it is startling to see her overestimate his knowledge of the situation.

Adam and Eve fight. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Nicholas comes home and has another chat with Adam. Angelique enters the room and announces that it is almost dawn. Nicholas dismisses Adam. Angelique expects to be punished for her unauthorized attacks on Peter/ Jeff, but Nicholas tells her that he has a job she will like. He wants her to bite old world gentleman Barnabas Collins and enslave him. Since Angelique has been obsessed with Barnabas since the 1790s, this assignment delights her.

*Peter/ Jeff is fully dressed, in a coat, tie, and shoes, by the way. That’s the bedtime uniform for young men in Collinsport, as for Angelique’s other victim, the recently unemployed Joe Haskell.

Episode 598: I thought you might be looking for Adam

Occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes is searching the room in the long-deserted west wing of the great house of Collinwood where heiress Carolyn has been hiding Frankenstein’s monster Adam since #539 in July. Strange and troubled boy David Collins saunters into the room and greets him with a casual “Hello, professor.” When a flustered Stokes makes up a story about Carolyn sending him to the room to look for some old books, David calmly replies, “Oh, I thought you might be looking for Adam.”

We haven’t seen David since #541. The only time we saw him interact with Adam was when they crossed paths in the woods in #495, and in none of the countless scenes featuring Adam cooped up in this dusty little room has David been mentioned. Yet today he tells Stokes that he visited Adam there many times, and that the two of them became great friends. I take that to mean that Ron Sproat, writer of today’s script, wanted to show us a lot of conversations between David and Adam and was overruled by the producers. It’s a major disappointment Sproat didn’t get his way. David Henesy and Robert Rodan would have been a wonderful pairing. David Collins tells Stokes that Adam told him last night that he would be leaving Collinwood before morning, and that he would never return.

David tells Stokes about Ron Sproat’s good idea. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Carolyn enters the room and tells David to go. He eavesdrops on her conversation with Stokes. He hears Stokes acknowledge that he is in the room without her permission, confirming that he was lying when he claimed Carolyn sent him there. He stays long enough to hear that Stokes is anxious to find Adam because he is afraid he is in danger. He goes off to look for the big guy.

During Carolyn’s conversation with Stokes, it becomes clear that she does not remember the events of the previous night. Since that night stretched over 13 episodes, that is quite a gap. During it, a mate was created for Adam; Carolyn participated in the first attempt at that procedure as the donor of the “life force.” She did that under the influence of suave warlock Nicholas Blair; Nicholas later enlisted her in another task, after which he erased her memory. Perhaps she forgot everything she did while his spell was upon her. That would explain why she doesn’t remember anything about Adam’s mate or about his passionate goodbye kiss. The show was so much more interesting during the little interval when Carolyn knew what was going on that it is almost as big a disappointment to learn of this mind-wipe as it is to hear that we were denied a chance to see a friendship develop between David and Adam.

David goes to Eagle Hill cemetery to look for Adam. He sees Willie Loomis, bedraggled servant of David’s distant cousin Barnabas Collins, emerge from the old Collins family mausoleum. David hides behind a tombstone until Willie is gone.

David wonders what Willie was doing in the mausoleum. He goes inside, and decides to open the panel to the hidden chamber. There, he finds Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, bound and gagged. He calls her by name, and we cut to commercial.

This situation will be familiar to longtime viewers. In #124, David found his governess, the well-meaning Vicki Winters, bound and gagged in a secret room in the Old House on the estate. That time, he panicked and left Vicki still restrained.

After the commercial break, we spend some time with Willie and Stokes in the Old House, where Barnabas now lives. Thayer David plays Stokes. In #124, he played Matthew Morgan, the crazed handyman who was holding Vicki prisoner. Seeing him in this house with Willie at this point in the episode ensures that those of us who saw it will remember #124 and wonder how David’s response to the situation with Maggie will compare to his failure to help Vicki.

Willie then goes back to the mausoleum and finds David sitting on one of the coffins in the publicly known part. He asks David what he is doing there. David answers in a roundabout way. We start to wonder if he may have reverted to his old form and left Maggie where she was. But he eventually gets around to describing how Maggie behaved when he was untying her. Willie is terribly upset to find that Maggie is gone.

Willie abducted Maggie and locked her up in the mausoleum because Barnabas and mad scientist Julia Hoffman were planning to impose the role of “life force” donor on her. While there, she remembered that in May and June of 1967 Barnabas was a vampire who fed on her, imprisoned her, tried to replace her personality with that of his lost love Josette, and tortured her when she resisted. Willie doesn’t see any way to let her out when she has information like that. In the middle of today’s episode, Kathryn Leigh Scott and John Karlen have a big scene in the mausoleum as Maggie defies Willie and he begs her to be nice to him. They do an excellent job, but it is quite a relief to be out of that dungeon.

Episode 597: Do not expect the logical

Barnabas Collins has four guests in his home, the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood. They are mad scientist Julia Hoffman, occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes, and an unusual pair known as Adam and Eve. These last are Frankenstein’s monsters. Eve came to life for the first time less than an hour ago, in the basement of the house, and has not yet been outside.

Stokes has figured out that Eve is the reincarnation of Danielle Roget, a homicidal maniac who fled France in the late eighteenth century and was later hanged in America. He tries to convince Adam of this, but Adam is committed to the idea that Eve will be his loving wife, and refuses to listen. For her part, Eve dominates Adam and scorns him when he is slow to obey her commands. She takes a similarly high-handed approach when Stokes and Barnabas question her, but with less success. When Stokes asks her about her previous existence, she claims to remember nothing, but when they refuse to tell her what she wants to know a moment later, she blurts out that she is used to having her questions answered. Barnabas asks when she grew used to that, and she is flustered.

Eve realizes she has said too much. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

At the end, a wind blows into the front parlor. Stokes identifies it as a ghostly presence, and asks it to lead him, Barnabas, and Julia to what it wants them to see. It takes them to the basement, where they find that the body of the mysterious woman who died donating her “life force” to the creation of Eve has vanished.

None of these events is new to returning viewers, but the script is crisply written, the actors do a good job, and they all have fun with it. So it was a pleasant enough way to spend a half hour.

Episode 596: She can speak

An experimental procedure has killed one woman and brought another to life. Yesterday someone identifying herself as Leona Eltridge turned up out of the blue and volunteered to be the “life force” donor who would help animate a bride for Frankenstein’s monster Adam. Mad scientist Julia and old world gentleman Barnabas capitulated to Adam’s insistence and went through with the procedure. Leona died, but the Bride, whom Adam has taken to calling Eve, is alive.

After a few minutes in a daze, Eve starts talking. This surprises Julia, Barnabas, and Adam. When Adam came to life, he didn’t know any words or anything else. They puzzle over the difference. Even after Eve starts alluding to her previous existence, they do not remember the original plan when Adam was created. Barnabas was Adam’s “life force” donor, and it was expected his body would die and his spirit would awaken in Adam. Evidently this is what has happened with Eve. Her memory comes back in bits and pieces; she is bewildered to find herself in Barnabas’ basement, and is quite anxious for an explanation as to how she got there. Eve faints, and Adam takes her to the upstairs bedroom. Julia examines her there, and concludes that she will be all right.

Meanwhile, occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes has come to the house. In Friday’s episode, he reacted to the name “Leona Eltridge” by rushing off to do something terribly important. Today, we see that what he had to do was reenact a scene from Rosemary’s Baby. In that film, released 12 June 1968, Rosemary uses Scrabble tiles to figure out that two names are anagrams of each other. In this episode, recorded 30 September 1968, Stokes uses alphabetic refrigerator magnets to figure out that “Leona Eltridge” is an anagram of “Danielle Roget,” the name of an eighteenth century homicidal maniac. Barnabas and Julia don’t get to the movies much, so they don’t realize that this is proof positive that Eve is now the reincarnation of that hyper-violent personage.

In the upstairs bedroom, Eve demands a kiss from Adam. He is shy at first, but obliges. After he leaves her alone to go downstairs and confront Barnabas, Julia, and Stokes, spooky music plays, wind blows the bedroom door open and lifts the window treatments, and we hear chimes. Eve is standing in front of a portrait of gracious lady Josette, who like Danielle Roget was a Frenchwoman of the late eighteenth century; when Eve reacts to the ghostly manifestations by saying “I remember you!” we might think that Josette’s ghost, a major presence in the first year of Dark Shadows, has returned to do battle with an old foe. Eve rules this out when she addresses the ghost as “mon petit,” not “ma petite.”

As soon as Marie Wallace starts delivering lines, it is obvious she is going to be on the show for a while. She is firmly in command of a larger than life acting style of the sort the directors liked, and she dominates every shot she is in. She also solves another riddle. Thursday and Friday, Erica Fitz played Danielle/Leona. A technical description of Miss Fitz’ approach to that role would be quite similar to one of Miss Wallace’s approach to Eve. Each woman speaks her lines one word at a time, often giving a special inflection to a particular word in the middle of a sentence. Their posture and basic facial expressions are also similar. But while Miss Fitz did a stupefyingly bad job, Miss Wallace holds the audience’s attention easily, and leaves us with the sense that we are seeing a character with a coherent set of motivations. I suspect Miss Fitz must have seen Miss Wallace rehearsing, and made a woeful attempt to mimic her style.

Miss Wallace’s prominence in this episode adds a special piquancy to the reference to Rosemary’s Baby. In a comment on Danny Horn’s Dark Shadows Every Day, “Rob Staeger” points out that “Marie was in Nobody Loves an Albatross — which is actually one of the plays Rosemary’s husband had in his credits in Rosemary’s Baby!” Which is true- Rosemary says that Guy “was in Luther and Nobody Loves an Albatross and a lot of television plays and commercials.” That only two titles are given makes it quite a coincidence that one of the thirteen members of the opening night cast of one of them has her first lines in an episode that references the movie.

(I should mention that Barnard Hughes, a very distinguished actor who appeared in #27, was also in Nobody Loves an Albatross. I don’t know if he and Marie Wallace ever ran into each other and compared notes about their subsequent work on Dark Shadows.)