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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
A mysterious woman appears at the front door of the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood. She introduces herself to the master of the house, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, under the name Leona Eltridge. The door opens further and we see that Leona is accompanied by Frankenstein’s monster Adam. She tells Barnabas that she has come to donate her “life force” to an experiment meant to create a bride for Adam. Barnabas has many questions, none of which Leona will answer. Adam orders Barnabas to find mad scientist Julia Hoffman and ushers Leona to an upstairs bedroom.
Erica Fitz as Danielle/Leona. Some participants on message boards think she looks masculine. Those people are very confused. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
There, Adam tells Leona that he doesn’t know any more about her than Barnabas does. She tells him that he doesn’t need to know more, and reminds him that they must not let Barnabas or Julia know that they met for the first time this night. Moreover, no one must know that she has any connection with suave warlock Nicholas Blair.
Julia shows up with occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes. Barnabas tells them about Leona, and Adam enters, demanding she start the experiment at once. Julia goes to the basement laboratory, and Stokes goes to question Leona.
Leona tells Stokes that she was in love with Adam’s creator, the late Dr Eric Lang. She also claims to be suffering from a terminal illness, and to have only a short time before she will die a painful death. She therefore wants to continue Lang’s work, and has no fear of the danger involved in the experiment.
Stokes, Julia, and Barnabas all regard Leona’s story as, in Julia’s words, “too pat and sentimental” to be true, but they have little choice but to comply with Adam’s demands. In fact, we know that Leona is really Danielle Roget, an eighteenth century homicidal maniac whom Nicholas conjured up yesterday. Nicholas himself has developed a crush on Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, which puts the lie to his pretense to be a stranger to human emotions. That Nicholas thinks anyone who knew the fiendish Lang would believe Danielle/Leona’s sappy story suggests that he might be an even bigger softie than his attraction to the magnificently wholesome Maggie would indicates.
Stokes figures out how the name “Eltridge” is spelled, which somehow means that he must hurry off to work on something or other. In the basement, Julia directs Danielle/Leona to the donor’s table. She offers her a painkiller, which she refuses. Adam watches the experiment. When Danielle/Leona flatlines, Julia pronounces her dead and says that the experiment has been a failure. Adam tells Barnabas and Julia that he ought to kill them. Barnabas disagrees. Before they can explore the issue in any depth, the Bride comes to life and Adam cheers up.
The opening voiceover says that if Barnabas realized that Danielle/Leona was “one of the living dead,” his reaction would be terror. Barnabas was himself a vampire for 172 years, so you might think he would be happy to meet someone with whom he had so much in common, but maybe not.
Frankenstein’s monster Adam has threatened to go on a murder spree unless old world gentleman Barnabas and mad scientist Julia build him a mate. He has further demanded that heiress Carolyn donate the “life force” that will animate his bride. We open today with a reprise of yesterday’s ending in which the experiment begins and immediately goes wrong. Julia announces that unless the mate comes to life in the next sixty seconds, Carolyn will die. They show us a clock. Sixty seconds pass, and the mate doesn’t come to life. So I guess Carolyn is dead now.
When we return from the opening titles, Adam insists on taking Carolyn from the laboratory. Julia says that Carolyn is in a bad way. Using a bit of Collinsport English, she says that Carolyn’s “pulsebeat” is decreasing. Alarmed, Barnabas asks if she might die. Julia reluctantly admits that it is possible. Evidently the opening titles wiped their memories clean of her earlier statement about the sixty seconds that would determine Carolyn’s fate.
Adam and Carolyn share a scene in the upstairs bedroom. Robert Rodan and Nancy Barrett do a wonderful job of acting, enough to save the episode from the “Stinkers” label. As Carolyn describes what she saw while she was unconscious during the experiment, images of sculpted pieces depicting body parts are superimposed on the screen over her face. She says she “saw something in the fog… hazy forms, floating in the air. They began to take shape. A collection of dead things, disconnected, coming toward me, wanting something from me-wanting life. My life!” The superimposed images don’t lead to anything, anymore than anything else in the episode does. But they are typical of the bold visual artistry of director Lela Swift, and evocative of the sort of thing you would see in the more ambitious low-budget films of the period.
Carolyn loses consciousness just before Julia comes in with her medical bag. Julia pronounces Carolyn dead. Adam goes to the basement, where he tells Barnabas he is ready to start his murder spree. Barnabas tries to stop him, and Adam easily beats him down. Adam storms out of the house, passing Julia in the foyer on his way to the great house of Collinwood. Barnabas staggers upstairs and tells Julia what happened. She goes upstairs to retrieve her bag so she can treat his wounds, and finds that Carolyn’s body has vanished from the bed.
Frankenstein’s monster Adam has demanded that old world gentleman Barnabas and mad scientist Julia build him a mate. The other day, he added a condition, specifying that heiress Carolyn must donate the “life force” that will animate this new woman. The body is constructed, the equipment is ready, and yesterday Carolyn presented herself as a volunteer. So we have every reason to expect today’s episode to end with the introduction of Adam’s bride.
That’s certainly what Adam expects. He lets himself in Barnabas’ house, finds Julia in the foyer calling servant Willie to join her on an excursion, and asks why she is not working in the basement laboratory. She makes up a story about having to go off and attend a patient; Adam is intelligent enough to know that Willie would be no help on a house call, and he forces her into an additional lie, claiming that she was going to drop Willie off in the village of Collinsport along her way. Barnabas comes upstairs and rails at Adam for a while.
Adam in charge. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
In fact, Julia and Willie were on their way to the hidden chamber inside the old Collins family mausoleum. Before Adam decreed Carolyn would donate the “life force,” Barnabas and Julia were planning to impose that task on Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town. Willie has a crush on Maggie, so he took it on himself to abduct her before Barnabas and Julia could fulfill that evil intention.
Willie had drugged Maggie with chloroform when he took her from her bedroom. When she woke up in the hidden chamber, she started to remember what happened to her in May and June of 1967. Willie reacted to that with panic. In those days, Barnabas was a vampire. He took Maggie as his victim. He imprisoned her, tortured her, and tried to replace her personality with that of his lost love, the gracious Josette. After Maggie escaped from Barnabas, she fell into Julia’s clutches. Julia eventually hypnotized her so that she forgot all about her ordeal and thought that Barnabas was a swell guy.
Barnabas was cured of vampirism when he donated the “life force” that animates Adam. Repeating to Julia the news that Willie brought, he laments the unfairness of it all:
Can you imagine the police coming here now?
Now that I am free of my affliction,
and now to pay the penalty for those first months
at Collinwood?
I can’t, Julia. I won’t.
It would be interesting if Maggie were to reach the police. She could not only show them the hidden chamber and its secrets, including perhaps the body Barnabas and Willie buried in its floor in #276, but would also lead them to Barnabas’ basement. On their way to the prison cell where Barnabas locked Maggie up, they couldn’t help but notice the female cadaver constructed of parts salvaged from various corpses Willie dug up from their graves. Even investigators as maladroit as the Collinsport sheriff’s department would likely be able to think of some pointed questions to ask in the face of all that.
Barnabas demands that Julia go to the mausoleum and use her powers of hypnosis to re-erase Maggie’s memory. Julia says the experiment is at such a critical point that she can’t leave it. To that, Barnabas replies “If you will not silence Maggie Evans, I must.” Barnabas does not specify the means by which he will “silence” her, and he lost all his supernatural powers when he was freed of vampirism. So this would seem to be a declaration of intent to commit murder. It is no wonder Julia was prepared to try her methods if that was the alternative.
Barnabas has not told Adam about his former vampirism, and he doesn’t like to talk about what he did to Maggie. At one point today, he exclaims to Willie “Those days are gone! Anyone who remembers them should forget them now, including you!” Rather than bring Adam into his circle of confidence, he repeats Julia’s lies and adds a lot of bluster. That doesn’t move things along very effectively; it leaves time for Willie to run upstairs, get a rifle, and threaten Adam. Adam disarms him and uses the weapon to get Julia back to the lab.
The episode peters out in the basement with Julia still fiddling with knobs and Carolyn still upstairs taking a nap. Adam rhapsodizes about how beautiful his mate will be. She is being created by the same process that engendered him, and he is convinced that he is unbearably ugly, so it is unclear where he got this expectation. He says she will be as beautiful as Carolyn. He knows that Barnabas was his “life force” donor, and he doesn’t look anything like him, so her role in the experiment doesn’t explain it.
I usually have an intense dislike for dramas about people being held prisoner by intruders in their homes. Since Barnabas, Julia, and Willie are all violent felons who ought to be locked up, and since Adam spent the first weeks of his life as a recipient of shocking abuse at their hands, I can make an exception for this one.
In 1968, a drama about a home invasion in which the captor gets the best lines would have brought three films to mind for most of the adults in the audience: The Petrified Forest (1936,) in which Humphrey Bogart became a star in the role of the captor; Key Largo (1948,) in which Bogart cemented his troubled good-guy image as one of the captives; and The Desperate Hours (1955,) in which Bogart was again, and for the last time in his career, cast as a villain. Since this is so much a Humphrey Bogart situation, it is too bad the character of Tony Peterson is no longer on the show. Tony consisted primarily of Jerry Lacy’s Humphrey Bogart imitation, and it would have been neat to see him in this scenario.
In August 1967, Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, was about to expose old world gentleman Barnabas Collins as a vampire. In the nick of time, Maggie’s doctor, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, hypnotized her and blocked all memory of her time as Barnabas’ victim.
Today, suave warlock Nicholas puts a magical zap on the mind of heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard to induce her to take part in an experiment meant to produce a mate for Frankenstein’s monster Adam. All this mind control makes for a low level of suspense. If traumatic memories can be erased and personal motives overriden by whatever mumbo-jumbo is convenient, there is no reason to suppose that the story’s events will have consequences or that there is any point in getting to know the characters.
This episode includes a tacit acknowledgement of the problem. The other day, Willie Loomis, Barnabas’ bedraggled servant, overheard Barnabas and Julia discussing another evil plan for Maggie. Willie has a crush on Maggie, so he resolved to foil that plan. He has abducted Maggie and is holding her in the hidden chamber inside the old Collins family mausoleum. This turns out to be the worst possible choice of location. Barnabas tortured Maggie there when she was his victim, and in a series of dream sequences those events come back to her. At the end of this episode, Maggie exclaims “I know what Barnabas Collins is!”
Now, Barnabas is not in fact a vampire at the moment. An experiment involving the creation of a Frankenstein’s monster freed him from the effects of that curse. But it would cause a lot of trouble for Barnabas, Julia, Willie, and the plot if Maggie were to go to the police and identify Barnabas as the man who held her prisoner. So Maggie’s closing exclamation might encourage us to hope that the show will swear off its habit of turning its characters into each other’s puppets.
Friday’s episode ended with Frankenstein’s monster Adam in the act of strangling well-meaning governess Vicki as she lies in her bed at the great house on the estate of Collinwood. In today’s opening Adam goes on throttling Vicki for quite a while. At length heiress Carolyn and recovering vampire Barnabas mosey into Vicki’s room. Adam is long gone, and Vicki is still alive. Permanent houseguest Julia is a doctor, and we hear a report of her prognosis that Vicki will be all right. Carolyn has been hiding Adam in a spare room; suave warlock Nicholas shows up and does some damage control. He suggests to Carolyn that Adam might not be guilty of the attempted strangulation, then goes to Adam’s room to talk with him while they wait for Carolyn to come. By the time she gets there, Adam and Nicholas have their story straight. Carolyn accepts Adam’s denials. At that point, everyone loses interest in Vicki and what happened to her.
Nicholas had put Adam up to demanding that Barnabas and Julia build him a mate. Adam had threatened to kill Vicki if they did not comply. Yesterday, he concluded that they were not taking him seriously, and that was his motive for the murder attempt. At the end of today’s episode, Barnabas goes back home to the Old House on the estate and finds Adam waiting for him. Adam tells Barnabas that he has decided they should use Carolyn as the donor of the “life force” that will bring the mate to life.
Adam’s attack on Vicki was Friday’s week-ending cliffhanger. It might have generated substantial suspense, as it has been so long since Vicki has had much to do on the show that it is possible we might be seeing the last of her. But, as Danny points out, they botch the scene badly:
I mean, there is obviously no way that she could have survived this attack. Adam is an enormous Frankenstein creature; it’s been established that he can bend steel bars just by giving them a stern look. Even for a soap heroine, there’s no way that Vicki could maintain structural integrity under these circumstances. She’s just not built for it.
It’s quite a grisly little scene, actually, because it happens so quickly. She doesn’t really get a chance to react. She was sleeping, and then Adam put his hands around her neck, and now she’s dead, and she doesn’t even know what’s going on…
By the time Carolyn returns to the scene of the crime, Julia’s already been and gone — the invisible off-screen soap doctor who doesn’t actually appear in this episode.
Barnabas tells Carolyn that Vicki’s alive, but she’s in shock. I am too, actually; our lame Frankenstein monster can’t even kill a governess at point-blank range.
Danny Horn, “Episode 586: The Invisible Woman,” posted 17 February 2015 on Dark Shadows Every Day.
Danny revisits this point later in his post:
Problem number one is the lack of consequences. They actually opened the week with the murder of a main character — and ten minutes later, everyone’s back to starting positions. Vicki’s not dead, and Adam’s not even being blamed for the assault.
Now, I’m not complaining that Adam hurt somebody and isn’t expressing any noticeable remorse. It’s true that today’s felony places Adam squarely in the villain column, but that’s fine. Fantasy-adventure stories need villains, and villains are supposed to do villainous things.
The consequences issue is that Adam basically just killed Vicki, and it hardly even registers as a plot point. There’s no investigation, no confession, and no character development; it’s just a thing that happened, and we can all forget about it.
Danny Horn, “Episode 586: The Invisible Woman,” posted 17 February 2015 on Dark Shadows Every Day.
Adam’s threat to kill Vicki never seemed to fit with his personality, but considering that he accidentally killed his friend Sam because he didn’t know his own strength, we could at least imagine that he might inadvertently carry it through. And as Danny says, the brevity and simplicity of the scene add to its force if we think it might actually show Vicki’s death. She was the show’s protagonist for its first 38 weeks and an important part of it for a long time after, and for her life to end so abruptly that she doesn’t even have a chance to scream, for the sake of a plot point that isn’t even her killer’s own idea, would be shocking in the pointless, unsatisfying way that violent deaths are shocking in real life. But if Adam can shake Vicki by the neck from the opening teaser through the first scene without seriously injuring her, he clearly isn’t going to kill anyone, and Barnabas and Julia may as well go off and do something else.
Nicholas is Dark Shadows’ main villain at this point; he is supposed to seem so powerful that we can’t imagine how the other characters will overcome him, and so wicked that we will forgive them for any expedient they can find that will work against him. This is currently the show’s main source of suspense. As Danny explains, they do serious damage to that today:
Nicholas is supposed to be the real mastermind behind this operation, so Adam still ends up reduced to being the dumb muscle, rather than a strategic thinker.
Unfortunately, Nicholas’ management skills are also kind of questionable at the moment. We see him scolding Adam for trying to kill Vicki, but where has Nicholas been for the last couple weeks?
It’s up to Adam to fill Nicholas in on the latest plot development — that Barnabas has chosen Maggie to be the sacrificial victim in their Bride of Frankenstein mad science experiment, giving her “life force” so Adam’s new mate can live.
Nicholas has a crush on Maggie, so he’s furious about this, but it’s a hollow moment. If Nicholas is the manipulative wizard running the show, then he should have known that they spent a good chunk of last week discussing this.
Dude, you have a magic mirror that can show you anything that’s going on at the Old House. You should have been on top of this. It’s just irresponsible.
Danny Horn, “Episode 586: The Invisible Woman,” posted 17 February 2015 on Dark Shadows Every Day.
A third major flaw with the episode comes with Carolyn’s role. Danny explains:
I know that it’s odd to say, “This storyline about creating a female love-slave for a violent psychopath isn’t particularly strong on women’s issues,” but Dark Shadows isn’t just a fantasy-adventure story, where you can marginalize all the female characters and move on to the car chase. It’s also a soap opera, and soap operas are supposed to be about women, and women-related subjects like feelings and consequences.
But here we are, watching an episode of daytime television that begins with strangling a woman who doesn’t struggle or even cry out, and then the rest of the time is mostly Carolyn talking to a series of men who lie to her and boss her around.
This is a real problem, and it’s going to come up again. The Bride of Frankenstein story has turned into a reverse beauty pageant, where the guys get together and argue about which woman they’re going to sacrifice on the altar of mad science. This hot potato is going to be tossed around between Carolyn, Vicki and Maggie all week.
Julia is the one female character in the story who actually has agency of her own, but she’s kind of sidelined too — mostly just turning the knobs and flipping the switches while the guys decide whose life force they’re going to extract. The fact that they can have this whole episode with Julia off-camera pretty much says everything.
Danny Horn, “Episode 586: The Invisible Woman,” posted 17 February 2015 on Dark Shadows Every Day.
Danny goes so far as to say that the gullibility Carolyn has to display when Adam and Nicholas lie to her “actually threatens to break the show,” and he is right. The failure to take female characters seriously not only disrespects the show’s core demographic, but specifically makes it harder to tell a suspenseful story. We can see why when Carolyn asks Barnabas why he believes Adam attacked Vicki. At this point Barnabas knows that Carolyn is hiding Adam, and he believes that Carolyn, like everyone else in the great house, is in danger from him. He therefore has every reason to confide in her, and since she can’t go to the police, no reason to hold back even the parts of the story that would incriminate him. But he flatly refuses to tell her anything at all. Ever since March 1967, the rule on Dark Shadows has been that only the villains are allowed to know what is going on. That cramps the action seriously, and when they add further restrictions on who can participate, it limits the possible outcomes of any situation so severely that it becomes all too predictable.
The scene in which Barnabas refuses to tell Carolyn what he knows brings up yet a fourth problem, one Danny does not mention. Barnabas takes such an indefensible position that he winds up seeming ridiculously weak. The main villain already looks weak, so when the principal protagonist does too, we have little reason to hope for an exciting story.
What keeps this episode from the “Stinkers” bin is Robert Rodan’s performance as Adam. In his early days, when Adam knew only a few words, Rodan managed to play on our sympathies, but had little opportunity to do more. Now the character speaks fluently and the actor delivers his lines with remarkable precision. Danny calls it a blooper when, during the three-scene in Adam’s room, Nicholas tells Carolyn that Adam is growing used to being blamed, and he responds by shouting all but the last word of “I am not used to… it.” I disagree. The dropping of his voice shows that there is a great deal Adam is not used to and does not plan to get used to, more than he can put into words.
The final scene in Barnabas’ house is also a fine turn for Rodan. Barnabas finds Adam waiting for him in his front parlor. We had seen Adam there in his first weeks as an inarticulate, raging creature; now he is well-spoken and very much in control of himself as he presents Barnabas with an impossible demand implicitly backed by a horrifying ultimatum. The contrast is chilling. I particularly relished Rodan’s rendering of this little speech:
Barnabas, please sit down.
When I first knew you,
I never thought I could be the gentleman that you are.
You are a very imposing man, Barnabas.
I still find it difficult not to be frightened by your manner.
Adam does not make threats in this scene; he creates a frightening situation simply by the imperturbable calm with which he issues his commands. It is Rodan’s finest moment so far.
Nicholas tells Carolyn that he is concerned about what happens on the estate of Collinwood since “I live here too.” When he first moved into the house he now rents from the Collins family, it was on the other side of the village of Collinsport from their home. A week or two ago, the opening voiceover referred to it as “another house on the estate,” and we’ve been hearing people around Collinwood refer to it as “very near.” So that’s a retcon. Since Adam has been coming and going between Collinwood and Nicholas’ house without being seen, I suppose it is a logical one, but it does make you wonder what they were thinking when they originally made it so clear it was some distance away.
Barnabas asks Carolyn if there is a way into Vicki’s room than her locked door. He knows very well that there is, since he himself used a secret passage to get into that room twice when Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the 1790s and the gracious Josette slept there.
Frankenstein’s monster Adam wants recovering vampire Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman to build him a mate. Adam has threatened to kill well-meaning governess Vicki Winters and everyone else at the great house of Collinwood unless they comply. Today, Barnabas and Julia have to tell Adam that the procedure has hit a snag and they are not sure how to resolve it. So Adam goes to Vicki’s bedroom and, while she sleeps, prepares to strangle her. We hear Adam’s thoughts in a voiceover, saying that he does not hate Vicki, but that because Barnabas loves her and Barnabas “has condemned me to being alone forever,” Barnabas “must be alone too.” Barnabas knocks on Vicki’s door while Adam puts his hands on Vicki’s throat. Adam has hold of Vicki before she has a chance to cry out.
Adam first came to life when Barnabas donated his “life force” to him. When the episode ends with Barnabas trying to save Vicki while Adam tries to kill her, we therefore see two sides of the same character in conflict with each other. The donation that created Adam freed Barnabas from vampirism. The sides in this particular conflict reverse what we saw at Adam’s creation, when he represented an end to the danger Barnabas posed to Vicki.
Had the show been made in the 1990s or the 2000s, this ending might have been very suspenseful indeed. By this point in the series, Alexandra Moltke Isles was rather vocal about her dissatisfaction with the role of Vicki, and wanted out of her contract. In the era of soap opera magazines and internet discussion fora, that would have been well-known to the fans. When they saw a week-ending cliffhanger in the form of an attack on Vicki, they might have wondered whether this meant Mrs Isles had succeeded in escaping from the show. But none of those media existed in 1968. Besides, the broadcast networks’ Standards and Practices offices enforced rules that murderers had to be punished. If Adam killed Vicki, those rules would limit what they could do with the character. So I doubt the original audience really thought they might tune in Monday to see that Vicki was dead.
Closing Miscellany
They shot this one with cameras that were in very bad shape. Most of the episode is so heavily green tinted that it is surprising it met ABC’s broadcast standards.
Early in the episode, there is a fight scene between Adam and Barnabas. Violent scenes like these usually give way to woodwind music and the sight of either Vicki or heiress Carolyn in the sedate setting of the great house. But today it is followed by more heavy music and another scene of violence, as Adam finds Julia in the woods and assaults her. After that, we hear the woodwinds and see Vicki in her bedroom.
There, longtime viewers will be reminded of the fourth episode. In that one, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins tried to let himself into Vicki’s bedroom while she slept, and when he was caught and his sister Liz scolded him, he told her not to supervise his “morals.” That choice of words leaves little doubt he meant to violate Vicki in some sexual way. Since then Roger has ceased to be a villain and has become occasional comic relief. Today, he knocks on Vicki’s door, identifies himself, and she very calmly lets him in while in her nightgown, with no suggestion anything untoward might be in the offing. They have a little conference about Vicki’s relationship problems and Liz’ mental health. We can see why Mrs Isles was frustrated with Vicki’s part on the show- even when a man comes into her room in the middle of the night, half the time it’s for some dull recapping, and the other half she doesn’t even get to scream.
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