Joshua Collins comes back home to the great house of Collinwood. His wife Naomi asks what he was doing the night before, when she found him at the Old House on the estate. He tells her that he had summoned a woman named Bathia Mapes who tried to exorcise the curse that is upon the family. It’s news to Naomi that Joshua believes in curses, and he explains that so much has happened lately that he feels he has no choice but to believe in such things.
Naomi says that when she found Joshua in the Old House she heard the voice of their son Barnabas in the front parlor. Joshua reminds her that she saw Barnabas’ body after he died. He says that he has come to agree with her that Victoria Winters, the family’s former governess who is currently in the Collinsport Gaol awaiting execution on charges of witchcraft, is innocent. He now believes that Barnabas’ sometime wife, Angelique, was the real witch, and that he will do whatever he can to free Victoria. Naomi insists that Joshua isn’t telling her the whole story. He doesn’t contradict her. He keeps saying that he has told her everything she needs to know, and pleads with her to accept that for her sake as well as his own.
Joshua realizing he has to admit to Naomi that he has been wrong. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Returning viewers know that Joshua is withholding a great deal of information from Naomi. Barnabas did die, but Joshua has learned that at night he rises as a vampire. Bathia Mapes came to lift the curse from Barnabas. When Naomi interrupted the proceedings, Bathia lost her mojo and Angelique struck her dead. Joshua is desperate to protect Naomi from the horrible truth about their son, and he certainly doesn’t want her to know that her action led to Bathia’s death. More than once he stumbles over his words, often seeming to catch himself just in time to keep from telling her everything. In his reticence, we see that he really does love Naomi, but he is so firmly entrenched in his habits of concealment and denial and so attached to the control those habits give him over other people that he cannot stop measuring out the truths he will tell.
Joshua goes to the gaol, where Victoria is with her lawyer/ boyfriend/ etc, an unpleasant young man named Peter. Joshua tells Victoria that he wants to apologize to her for having helped convict her. Peter keeps interrupting with his nasty little shouts, and Joshua keeps looking away from him. Victoria accepts Joshua’s apology, and he vows to do whatever he can to prevent her execution.
Joshua talks with the judge who presided over Victoria’s trial. With difficulty, he brings himself to say that his sister Abigail, who was one of the driving forces behind the prosecution of Victoria, was not a reliable witness because of her preoccupation with the Devil. Regular viewers will understand his difficulty. After Abigail died, we saw Joshua, in #434, utterly despondent, freshly broken in ways we had not expected to see. He had already lost his brother, both of his children, and several other people he cared about, so it was no wonder the death of his beloved sister brought him to such a low state. In #446, he learned that Barnabas was responsible for Abigail’s death. When he has to say things about her to which she would object, all of that anguish comes flooding back. The judge asks Joshua if Abigail was insane; evidently that would make a difference. But he reflexively says “Of course not!”
The judge tells Joshua that nothing he has said justifies a new trial or even a postponement of Victoria’s execution. He asks if Joshua knows of a witness who could give unequivocal testimony that Angelique was the witch. As he had when Naomi alluded to the idea of such a witness earlier, Joshua falls silent for a moment. When they talk about this hypothetical witness, the judge and Naomi are both describing Barnabas. But Joshua, sincerely though he wants to spare Victoria, cannot reveal the truth about his son.
Joshua and Peter return to the cell and tell Victoria that nothing has changed. Joshua bids her farewell, looking more deeply defeated than we have seen him before.
A while later, Peter leaves the cell. Desperate, he steals the gaoler’s gun and forces him to unlock the cell. Victoria objects when she first sees what Peter is doing, but holds the gun for him while he tries to bind the gaoler. The gun goes off in the course of the struggle, injuring Victoria’s arm. Peter beats the gaoler unconscious and leads Victoria out of the cell. They hear the voices of a crowd outside and wander from room to room inside the gaol.
Howard Honig plays the gaoler, his first screen appearance. Honig would have a long and distinguished career in television and features from the 1970s to the 1990s. I remember him from the movie Airplane!, where he played a passenger named Jack. In the terminal, a friend greets him with “Hi, Jack!” bringing a bunch of very aggressive security guards. I first saw that movie when I was about 12, and that scene fascinated me so much that for a couple of years my father was reluctant to take me on an airplane, fearing I would try to recreate it.
Haughty overlord Joshua Collins and good witch Bathia Mapes decide to take Joshua’s son Barnabas to the deserted Old House on the estate of Collinwood. Bathia has agreed to do battle with the ghost of wicked witch Angelique in hopes of lifting the curse whereby Angelique turned Barnabas into a vampire. Bathia warns Joshua that if she is interrupted, Angelique will defeat her. In that case, Barnabas will remain as he is, and Bathia will die. Joshua assures her that no one will come to the Old House.
Bathia, Joshua, and Barnabas before they go to the Old House. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
In the great house on the estate, Barnabas’ mother Naomi talks with fluttery heiress Millicent Collins and Millicent’s new husband, naval officer/ sleazy operator Nathan Forbes. Millicent’s mental health has always been fragile, and Nathan has been making a concerted effort to shatter it altogether so that he can get his hands on her share of the Collins fortune. Making matters worse, Barnabas bit Milllicent the other day. She has a beautiful mad scene today, one of several that Nancy Barrett knocks out of the park during this storyline. She insists on telling Naomi that she has seen Barnabas. This distresses Naomi, who knows that Barnabas is dead but does not know about the vampire curse.
Millicent gives Naomi enough details to stir her curiosity about what is going on at the Old House. She goes there, interrupting Bathia’s efforts. Joshua manages to hustle Naomi out of the house, but the damage is done. Bathia bursts into flames and dies. In keeping with his habit of covering up compromising information, Joshua has kept everything from Naomi. Once more, we see the cost of this habit. Had he leveled with her about Barnabas’ condition, Barnabas might have been freed.
There is a detailed comparison of the script for this episode with the finished product on a tumblelog called sights9. It is in five parts, the first of them here.
A very famous blooper occurs before Joshua and Bathia take Barnabas from the great house to the Old House. Bathia is supposed to be giving instructions, but falls silent, stares at the teleprompter, and squints helplessly for a long moment. Then we hear the line producer, Bob Costello, prompt her with “Then go to the house” and she picks back up.
Haughty overlord Joshua Collins and his long-term house-guest the Countess DuPrés have summoned good witch Bathia Mapes to lift the curse that has made Joshua’s son Barnabas a vampire. Meanwhile, Barnabas has bitten his second cousin Millicent and gone to the waterfront to find another victim. Bloggers Danny Horn, Patrick McCray, and John and Christine Scoleri have said so much so well about this episode that I have only a few points to add.
Millicent tells Joshua that it is wrong of him to have “that man who says he is Barnabas” in the house when he does such frightful things. Nancy Barrett’s performance as a woman made insane by her encounter with the undead is achingly beautiful. And her idea that Barnabas is an impostor is an intriguing one. Should Bathia succeed, Barnabas will need a story to account for the several sightings people made of him when he was cursed. That success seems unlikely- if Barnabas is freed from the curse now, what will we find when Dark Shadows stops being a costume drama set in the 1790s and returns to a contemporary setting? But it is something to file away for future use…
Bathia summons Barnabas away from the docks, where he is about to kill a prostitute, by sending the flame from a candle to him. The movement of the flame is an interesting effect, but what most held my attention was the scene between Barnabas and the woman he almost victimizes. Jonathan Frid and day player Rebecca Shaw play this scene in silence, with exaggerated movements, against a heavy musical score. The resulting balletic interlude is a striking departure from Dark Shadows’ previous form.
Barnabas disappoints his partner at the end of the ballet sequence. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Bathia keeps Barnabas in place by showing him a cross from which he recoils. This is the first time we have seen this reaction. Barnabas routinely comes and goes through a cemetery where many of the grave markers are in the shape of the cross, and they don’t bother him a bit.
Not only is it the first time this particular symbol has been a problem for Barnabas, it is the first time Dark Shadows has suggested there might be something to Christianity. The representatives of the faith we have seen so far in the 1790s have been Barnabas’ Aunt Abigail, a disastrously repressed spinster; the Rev’d Mr Bland, of whom the best that could be said was said by the doomed Ruby Tate when she described him to Barnabas as the preacher who looked like a duck; and the Rev’d Mr Trask, a fanatical witchfinder who inadvertently became the handiest tool wicked witch Angelique had at her disposal. The 1960s characters, aside from one fleeting mention of the word “Christmas” in 1966, have not betrayed any awareness that there is such a thing as Christianity.
Bathia commands the spirit of Angelique to speak to them through Barnabas. When Angelique was first on the show, she very conspicuously kept doing many of the weirdest things Barnabas was in the habit of doing in 1967. So Barnabas exasperated his henchmen by fixating on well-meaning governess Vicki but refusing to bite her, insisting that Vicki would eventually come to him “of her own will.” Angelique exasperates her thrall, much put-upon servant Ben, by casting spells on everyone but Barnabas when her goal is to win Barnabas’ love, insisting that Barnabas would eventually come to her “of his own will.” When in 1967 Barnabas sends his thrall Carolyn to steal an incriminating document and she asks what will happen if she is caught, he replies “See that you don’t get caught.” When Angelique sends Ben to steal a hair ribbon from Abigail and he speaks of what will happen if he is caught, she replies “See that you don’t get caught.” Moments like these suggest that the vampire Barnabas is not simply cursed by Angelique, but possessed by her. Perhaps it was Angelique, wearing Barnabas’ body as a suit, that we saw in 1967, not the son of Joshua and Naomi at all.
This fits with the general idea of the supernatural developed in the first 73 weeks of Dark Shadows. The first supernatural menace on the show was undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, who was on from December 1966 to March 1967. Laura was a complex of beings, made up of at least two material bodies and an indeterminate number of spirits, some of which seemed to be unaware of the other parts of the system and pursuing goals incompatible with theirs. From June to November of 1967, the ghost of Barnabas’ little sister Sarah kept trying to contain the damage her big brother was doing to the living characters. Sarah too turned out to be a complicated sort of phenomenon, and the form in which she visited people when they were awake was unaware of and at odds with the form in which she visited them in their dreams. If we go by Laura and Sarah, we would have to assume that supernatural beings are multifarious and fissiparous. So perhaps each time Angelique casts a spell, she splits a bit off of herself and the fragment springs up as another version of her, functioning independently of the rest. In that case, the vampire Barnabas is an avatar of Angelique. When Bathia compels Angelique to speak, she is compelling one of the Angeliques to drop a mask.
The given name “Bathia” is rare; the only person with it who ranks higher in Google search than Bathia Mapes is a musicologist named Bathia Churgin. Professor Churgin was born in New York in 1928, went to Harvard, and taught in the USA until she moved to Israel in 1970. So it is possible that someone connected with Dark Shadows may have heard of Professor Churgin and named Bathia Mapes after her, either as a tribute or just because the name stuck in their mind.
The surname “Mapes” is somewhat less rare; apparently “it is borne by around one in 903,601 people.” In 1963 and 1965, Frank Herbert published two novels that were later issued together under the title Dune; there is an elderly woman with a mystical bent named The Shadout Mapes in those. I’ve never taken much interest in Dune, and owe my awareness of this to comments on Danny Horn’s blog (from Park Cooper here and from “Straker” here.) There doesn’t seem to be much doubt that Bathia’s family name is a nod to The Shadout Mapes; whether it was Sam Hall or another of the writers or someone else who worked on Dark Shadows or one of their kids who had read Dune, I cannot say.
In the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s, Grayson Hall plays mad scientist Julia Hoffman, sometime confidant of ancient vampire Barnabas Collins. Now it is 1796, Barnabas has only recently become a vampire, and Hall is the Countess DuPrés. Like Julia, the countess is deeply versed in the supernatural, and like her she is a long-term guest at the great house on the estate of Collinwood.
Barnabas’ father Joshua has learned of his son’s curse, and is desperate to find a way to free him of it. Today, we open in the Old House on the estate. Joshua has summoned the countess to meet him there. Joshua brings the countess up to date about Barnabas’ condition. He also informs her that the one who played the curse was not the luckless Victoria Winters, who is currently in gaol awaiting execution on charges of witchcraft, but was in fact the countess’ one-time maid Angelique. At this, the portrait above the mantel vanishes and is replaced with one of Angelique.
This is the first we have seen the portrait of Angelique. As Danny Horn points out in his post about this episode on Dark Shadows Every Day, it is a message to the audience. Barnabas killed Angelique weeks ago, and her ghost, which was pretty busy on the show for a little while after that, has not been prominent lately. They are running out of unresolved storylines, and will be returning to the 1960s soon. When they show us that they have commissioned and paid for a portrait of Angelique, the makers of Dark Shadows are telling us that she will be back when they return to a contemporary setting.
Joshua asks the countess if she can help lift the curse. At first the countess shows incredulity that Joshua thinks she can “provide a witch” who will counteract Angelique’s spell, but she immediately follows this display by announcing exactly how they will go about summoning such a person.
Back in the great house, naval officer/ sleazy operator Nathan Forbes is continuing with his efforts to drive his new wife Millicent insane so that he can get his hands on her share of the Collins family fortune. Millicent has seen a light in the room on top of the mansion’s tower. Nathan denies having seen the light, and Millicent takes his denial, not as a sign that his vision is failing, but as a reason to fear that she is hallucinating. Nathan insists that she go to the tower room and prove to herself that no one is there.
Returning viewers will be startled by this insistence of Nathan’s. Nathan has deduced that Barnabas is in the tower room. He does not know that Barnabas is a vampire, but does know that he is responsible for the many killings that have taken place in the area recently. When he presses Millicent to go to the room, he is not only trying to unhinge her mind, but is sending her to surprise a crazed murderer in his lair.
Perhaps Nathan hopes only that Millicent will be shocked to see her cousin. But he has been using his knowledge of Barnabas’ presence on the estate to blackmail Joshua. Millicent is a compulsive talker. If she learns that Barnabas is at home, it will only be a matter of time before she tells everyone about it, making Nathan’s information worthless as leverage over Joshua. Unless Nathan does in fact calculate that Barnabas will kill Millicent, it is hard to see what he thinks will happen when Millicent goes to the room.
Joshua and the countess return to the great house. Joshua hustles everyone out, commanding them to go into town to attend a speech by the governor of Massachusetts.* Nathan resists; alone with Joshua, he asks if Barnabas will still be in the tower when everyone gets back. Joshua refuses to discuss the matter.
Joshua and the countess begin their summoning ceremony in the drawing room. Nathan eavesdrops at the door. Joshua finds him there and drives him from the house; the ceremony begins again.
Millicent goes to the tower room. She lets herself in. Barnabas confronts her. He tells her that he will let her go if she will promise never to tell anyone she saw him there; she cannot do that. Patrick McCray puts it well in his post on The Dark Shadows Daybook: “Millicent’s tragedy is that her nature compels her to tell the truth. She knows it will kill her and she knows that she is consigned to it. She is addicted to chatter and chatter will kill her. When she screams at Barnabas’ attack, I think she’s not so much screaming at the terror of the vampire as she is screaming at herself.”
In the drawing room, the countess and Joshua continue the ceremony. We hear the wind. One draft blows out the candle; another blows open the door. An old woman appears in the doorway. She enters the foyer, and says that it is too late- the man they have summoned her to help has already gone.
*In our time-band, Samuel Adams held that office in 1796. We might imagine that Adams had a counterpart in the universe of Dark Shadows. If so, it would have struck people odd that Joshua was not already committed to attending the speech, and indeed that he had not invited Governor Adams to spend the night at Collinwood. When Joshua first met the countess, he proudly claimed that the French Revolution was an imitation of the USA’s War of Independence; by that point in history, such a claim marked its maker as a supporter of the faction in American politics that the governor represented, the more militant wing of Thomas Jefferson’s party. In fact, much later in the series we will see a portrait of Jefferson prominently displayed at Collinwood. Joshua must surely have been the richest and most eminent Jeffersonian in the region, so much so that even though his family was in mourning they would still have been expected to host the governor in their mansion.
Yesterday, haughty tyrant Joshua Collins found out that his son Barnabas is a vampire. Today, he shoots Barnabas in the chest and learns that vampires can’t be killed by gunshots. So Joshua insists that Barnabas come with him to a place where he can be kept until they figure out a way to lift his curse.
Barnabas is always making plans that fail spectacularly the moment they come into contact with reality. Today, Joshua shows that Barnabas inherited his planning abilities from him. The hiding place Joshua chooses for Barnabas is not one of the underground prison cells on the estate or a cabin off in the woods somewhere, but the many-windowed room on top of the tower in the center of the great house. No one in the house can avoid seeing the light of the candle Joshua carries up there.
The tower at Collinwood.
The tower room has been vacant up to this point, so when Joshua returns to the drawing room his wife Naomi meets him with questions about why there was a light there. He is reduced to insisting that she didn’t see what she clearly knows she saw.
Joshua realizes Naomi saw the light.
There are a couple of interesting visual echoes today. Naomi and Joshua are played by Joan Bennett and Louis Edmonds, who in the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s play reclusive matriarch Liz and her brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger. Liz was standing at this window when we first saw her in episode #1. Roger approached her there and whined to her about her decision to hire well-meaning governess Vicki. The selfish, cowardly, weak-willed Roger represents the ultimate destination of the path on which Joshua’s habit of denial and concealment has set the family. Joshua’s absurd insistence that Naomi did not see a light in the tower puts him in a position as ridiculous and contemptible as any that Roger brings upon himself.
From episode #1.
In their post about this episode on Dark Shadows Before I Die, John and Christine Scoleri point out that the tower looks very much like the one in F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu. That movie was not widely available in the 1960s, but books about film history were finding a mass audience in those days, and some of them would have had stills from it.
Haughty tyrant Joshua Collins goes to the basement of the Old House on his estate and finds his son Barnabas rising from a coffin. Barnabas explains to his father that he has become a vampire.
This scene prompts considerable discussion in fandom about gay subtext. In his post about the episode on Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn points out that actors Jonathan Frid and Louis Edmonds were both gay, and speculates that this fact might have had some influence on the way they play Barnabas’ coming out to his father. “I’m not suggesting that this situation is intended to be a metaphor for a gay child talking to his father about his terrible, shameful secret life… But the ‘keep the secret, don’t tell my mother’ part — there’s some resonance, isn’t there? At least, it’s a hook into the story that helps us to get closer, and really feel some of the horror of this moment. A father hands a gun to his son, and says, Kill yourself, so that your mother never finds out.”
Even this tentative raising of the question, with its “I’m not suggesting” and “some resonance” and “at least,” is too much for Patrick McCray. In his Dark Shadows Daybook post about #446, he concedes that “homosexuality is the obvious choice” for an interpretive lens through which to read the scene, but goes on to flatly assert that “this isn’t a veiled metaphor for something like homosexuality.” For him, as for Danny, Barnabas figures in the scene as a murderer first and last, and Joshua as a man finding himself irrevocably severed from the world of rationally explainable phenomena.
For my part, I think that we have to remember that intentionality is always a more complicated thing in a work of art than it is when lawyers are interpreting a contract or cryptographers are cracking a cipher. Certainly the scene is not simply a coming-out scene played in code. Barnabas’ murders do not map onto any metaphor for sexual encounters. While the vampire’s bite is often a metaphor for the sexual act, Barnabas presents his acknowledgement in this scene that he has murdered three women in terms of the secrets he calculated he could keep by killing them and maintains a cold, matter-of-fact tone while doing so. When in the course of the scene Barnabas exasperates Joshua by attempting to murder him, there is nothing erotic between the men. No doubt the scene is at one level meant to be what Danny Horn and Patrick McCray say it is, the point when Joshua realizes he is part of a supernatural horror story and the audience realizes that Barnabas is a cold-blooded killer. As such, it is one of the key moments that defines the 1795 flashback as The Tragedy of Joshua Collins.
But there are other levels of intentionality here as well. One has to do with the word “vampire.” When Barnabas is trying to tell his story to Joshua, his first approach is to give him the facts and leave it to him to apply the correct label. But the facts are so alien to Joshua that they only deepen his confusion. Seeing his father’s bewildered reaction, Barnabas’ frustration mounts until he finally shouts “I am a vampire!”
We have heard this word only once before on Dark Shadows, when wicked witch Angelique mentioned it in #410, but it figured in the show as a metaphor for outness long before it was spoken. In #315, Barnabas’ associate, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, urges him not to murder strange and troubled boy David Collins. She catches herself, breaking off after saying that David deserves better than “to die at the hands of a-” Barnabas grins and teases her, asking “At the hands of a what, doctor?” He dares her to say the word and taunts her for her faux pas in coming so close to using it. Julia and Barnabas have a tacit understanding that they will discuss his vampirism only in euphemisms and circumlocutions. To say the word would be to push beyond the limits of Barnabas’ outness to Julia.
When he tries to avoid calling himself a vampire, Barnabas is trying to establish a relationship in which his father will know enough that he is no longer inclined to ask questions, but not enough to achieve any real understanding of his feelings. When he realizes that he cannot keep from using the embarrassing, ridiculous, utterly necessary word, Barnabas is forced to come out to Joshua in a way he had desperately wanted to avoid.
Moreover, Jonathan Frid’s performance as Barnabas departs starkly from anything else he does on Dark Shadows. After he calls himself a vampire, Frid’s whole body relaxes. His neck, shoulders, and hips are looser than we have ever seen them; even his knees bend a little. His voice shifts a bit away from the old-fashioned mid-Atlantic accent he typically uses as Barnabas, a bit toward twentieth century Hamilton, Ontario. At that point, he is not playing a murderer or a creature from the supernatural or an eighteenth century aristocrat- he is playing himself, enacting a scene from his own life.
Barnabas’ coming out to his father is not today’s only story about information management. Joshua rules his corner of the world by parceling out just that information he thinks people ought to have. We have seen this habit lead to disaster after disaster. In his scene with Barnabas, we see another such instance. Joshua has come to the basement because naval officer/ sleazy operator Nathan Forbes told him that he had seen Barnabas at the Old House, and that Barnabas had attacked Joshua’s second cousin Millicent. After Barnabas admits to his various murders, Joshua brings up the attack on Millicent. Barnabas denies that he had any involvement in that attack, sparking an angry response from Joshua. When Barnabas later asks Joshua why he came to the basement, he swears that Barnabas will never know why.
Had Joshua told Barnabas that Nathan sent him to the basement, the two of them might have figured out that Nathan faked the attack on Millicent as part of his scheme to trick her into agreeing to marry him and to blackmail Joshua into consenting to the marriage. That in turn might have helped Joshua find a way to prevent Nathan from carrying out his evil schemes. But his parsimony with information leaves Joshua believing Nathan’s story about the attack, and therefore puts him and the rest of the Collinses entirely at Nathan’s mercy. When we see the effect that the radical honesty of coming out as a vampire had on Barnabas, we can’t help but wonder how many misfortunes the Collinses might have avoided if they had not lived according to Joshua’s code of truthlessness.
A voice comes from the upstairs. Naomi Collins, wife to Joshua and mother to Barnabas, has entered the house. Joshua leaves his gun with Barnabas and tells him to do the honorable thing, then hastens up to meet her.
Naomi tells Joshua that she he came to the Old House because Nathan told her he had gone there. She insists that Joshua explain what is going on; he pleads with her not to ask. She tells him to think of her; a quiver in his voice, he says “I am thinking of you now.” Naomi is as mystified and as frustrated by Joshua’s refusal to explain himself as Joshua had been with Barnabas’ story, but even as she plays these reactions Joan Bennett also shows us Naomi softening towards her husband. She catches a glimpse of the lover hidden beneath the lord of the manor, peeking out from below the massive superstructure of his pride.
Back in the great house, Nathan is sprawled on the sofa, his boots resting on a polished table, guzzling the Collinses’ fine liqueurs. When Joshua and Naomi return, Nathan offers Joshua a snifter of brandy and invites him to drink it with him in the drawing room. Joshua reacts indignantly, protesting that he is not accustomed to a guest offering him the hospitality of his own house.
This exchange is familiar to longtime viewers. From March to June of 1967, when Dark Shadows was set in contemporary times, the great house was dominated by seagoing con man Jason McGuire, who was blackmailing reclusive matriarch Liz. Several times, most notably in #200 and #264, Jason poured himself a drink and invited Liz’ brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins, to join him. Roger would protest that he was not accustomed to being offered a drink of his own brandy in his own house, often drawing the rejoinder that it was Liz’ brandy and Liz’ house, and that he was as much her guest as Jason was.
Roger and Joshua are both played by Louis Edmonds. Roger represents the final stage of decay from the height Joshua represents. He has squandered his entire inheritance, committed acts of cowardice that cost the lives of two men, and let a more or less innocent man go to prison in his place. In #4 he tried to sneak into well-meaning governess Vicki’s room while she slept, and when Liz caught him he told her he didn’t want to be lectured on his “morals,” leaving no doubt that he was looking for some kind of cheap sexual thrill at Vicki’s expense. He openly scorns his responsibilities as a father, cares nothing for the family’s traditions, and the one time we see him working in his office at the headquarters of the family’s business all he does is answer the telephone and tell the caller to contact someone else instead. He drinks constantly, is always the first to give up on a difficult task, makes sarcastic remarks to everyone, and backs down whenever he faces the prospect of a fair fight. In #273, he even admitted to Liz that, had he known what Jason knew about her, he probably would have blackmailed her too.
Joshua’s relentlessly dishonest approach to life may be rooted in fear, and it is never difficult to see that its end result would be to produce a man as craven as Roger. But Joshua himself is as strong as Roger is weak. It is impossible to imagine Roger shaking off an attempt on his life as Joshua shakes off Barnabas’ attempt to strangle him today. While Roger is prepared to sacrifice any member of his family for his own convenience, Joshua will go to any lengths to protect Naomi from the truth of Barnabas’ horrible secret. Nor does Joshua take the easy way out even when he is knuckling under to Nathan. In their scene today, Nathan makes it clear that he is willing to accompany Joshua back to the Old House. Had Roger known what Joshua knows about that basement, he would never have missed an opportunity to send Jason there and let Barnabas do his dirty work for him. But Joshua cuts Nathan off the moment he raises the subject.
Joshua does go back to the coffin room, and he finds Barnabas standing around. He is disappointed that his son has not killed himself. Barnabas tries to explain that he cannot die by a gunshot, but Joshua dismisses his words. He takes the gun himself and, with a display of anguish, shoots Barnabas in the heart. Only thus, he believes, can he keep the unbearable truth from coming to light.
Fluttery heiress Millicent Collins has been staying at the great estate of Collinwood as the guest of her second cousin, haughty tyrant Joshua Collins, and Joshua’s wife Naomi. Today, Millicent has news for Joshua and Naomi. She has agreed to marry naval officer/ sleazy operator Nathan Forbes.
Joshua and Naomi are stunned by this announcement. Millicent had been obsessed with avenging herself on Nathan for some time, ever since she discovered that when they became engaged on a previous occasion he was already married. But now Nathan has apparently rescued her from an attempt on her life by Joshua and Naomi’s son Barnabas, and Millicent no longer holds Nathan’s late wife against him. For their part, Joshua and Naomi are quite sure that Barnabas did not attack Millicent, and suspect that the whole thing was a ruse by Nathan. Joshua forbids Millicent to marry Nathan, and threatens to have her declared insane if she tries to go through with the marriage.
Nathan shows up. He tells Joshua that he and Millicent will not marry without his consent. At that, Joshua agrees to meet privately with Nathan. Joshua withdraws. Millicent tells Nathan that she wishes he had not told Joshua that they would accede to his demands, and Nathan tells her that he has the situation in hand.
In this scene, played out in the entryway and seen from a point of view inside the coat closet, director John Sedwick makes some clever use of a portrait. The portrait, which hangs in the drawing room in the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s and which is identified by fans as that of Joshua,* at first mirrors the furious Joshua as he looks at a sheepish Nathan:
Richard Wagner Collins is on Joshua’s side.
Nathan screws up his courage to face his accusers.
As Nathan begins to make his play, his face overlaps with the portrait, creating the momentary illusion of a kiss. Joshua is startled by Nathan’s assertiveness.
Smoochy-smoochy!
When Nathan and Millicent are alone in the entryway, Nathan stands where Joshua had stood. The portrait now mirrors him as before it had mirrored Joshua, suggesting that he is in the process of taking Joshua’s place.
Big Richard energy
Joshua and Nathan meet in the study. The study was a set that first became prominent during a blackmail story that played out from March to June of 1967, when Dark Shadows was set in contemporary times. Then, seagoing conman Jason McGuire had established the drawing room of the great house at Collinwood as his base, and the study was a place to which his victim, reclusive matriarch Liz, would retreat, only to discover that Jason had even more power over her than she had thought.
Now, the show is a costume drama set in the 1790s, and Nathan is coming to resemble Jason more and more strongly. Joshua is in Liz’ place as head of the household. When Nathan starts talking about a secret he is sure Joshua very much wants to keep from public view, Joshua at first has no idea what he is talking about. He assumes, to his scornful amazement, that Nathan is taking a shot in the dark, hoping that Joshua might have some shameful secret and gambling that he will be able to convince him that he is in a position to expose it.
Nathan shows Joshua Barnabas’ cane with its distinctive wolf’s-head handle. He assures Joshua that Barnabas dropped it when he attacked Millicent. Joshua does not believe that Barnabas had anything to do with the attack on Millicent, for the excellent reason that he knows Barnabas is dead. Joshua cannot share this information with Nathan, since he has insisted on lying to everyone and claiming that Barnabas is alive and well and living in England. In fact, Nathan and a henchman of his did fake the attack on Millicent, but Barnabas’ situation is not so simple as his parents believe. Unknown to them, or to Nathan, or to any of the Collinses, Barnabas has risen from the dead and now preys upon the living as a vampire.
For his part, Nathan knows that his one-time friend Barnabas is in town, and that he is responsible for the many killings that have recently taken place there. He believes that Barnabas is alive and has become a serial killer, and that the family spread the story about England to cover up this new hobby. Nathan presses more information on Joshua about sightings he and others have recently made of Barnabas, and about evidence connecting Barnabas with the murders. Since Joshua himself had seen that Barnabas’ coffin was vacant in #422 and occupied again in #428, he cannot simply dismiss Nathan’s story. Nathan tells him that Barnabas is hiding in the Old House on the estate, and Joshua decides to go there.
While Joshua prepares to go, Nathan makes himself at home in the great house. He pours himself a drink in the drawing room, as Jason McGuire often did. We cut from the shot of him doing that to the study, where Naomi pours her own drink. Longtime viewers, remembering the miserable state to which Jason reduced Liz while blackmailing her, will be apprehensive that Nathan’s blackmail of the family will bring the alcoholic Naomi to an equally profound despair.
At the Old House, Joshua encounters much put-upon servant Ben Stokes, who tries to keep him from going to the basement. Ben has reason to hate Joshua, and often expressed such hatred earlier in the 1795 flashback. But there is no hatred in him today. He sincerely wants to spare Joshua the sight that he knows awaits him downstairs. But Ben is powerless to stop Joshua, and sadly watches him go through the cellar door.
Joshua finds Barnabas’ coffin at the foot of the stairs. The lid opens, and Joshua sees a hand under it wearing a familiar ring. As Jason had inadvertently pushed Liz to discover a secret she had herself not dreamed of when he directed her attention to the basement of the great house once too often, thereby losing his power over her and leading to his death at Barnabas’ hands, so Nathan is about to change Joshua’s awareness of the situation in ways he himself could not have anticipated and which are likely to lead to his own downfall.
This one made us think about the nature of suspense. Yesterday, naval officer/ sleazy operator Nathan Forbes schemed with his henchman, the unsightly Noah Gifford, to trick fluttery heiress Millicent Collins into thinking that her second cousin Barnabas was trying to kill her.
Today, we see that plan unfold just as Nathan had hoped it would. Millicent goes to the gazebo on the estate of Collinwood, having received a message asking her to go there. The message appeared to be from Barnabas, but was actually from Nathan. Noah, wearing a Zorro costume and carrying Barnabas’ highly recognizable cane, springs out of the bushes. He attacks Millicent with the cane, then Nathan appears. The men pretend to fight, Noah pretends to lose, and he runs off into the night. Millicent thanks Nathan profusely and wonders why Barnabas would want to hurt her.
Noah really should wear that mask all the time, he has the face for it.
Millicent and Nathan are so interesting to watch together that we can’t stop ourselves hoping Nathan’s scheme works. On the other hand, we know that Nathan is only after Millicent’s money, and that if she marries him he will make her and the rest of the Collinses miserable. So when Barnabas’ mother Naomi shows up and asks Nathan what he was doing on the grounds of the estate of Collinwood, our hope for more Millicent/ Nathan scenes competes with a hope that Naomi will follow up Nathan’s answers with questions that will expose his plot. It would be easy enough to do- he says he was hoping to see Millicent, but how could he know she would be at the gazebo? And how could he have failed to see the assailant, considering that they arrived there at virtually the same moment?
Naomi and her husband Joshua have been telling everyone that Barnabas left for England several weeks ago. Nathan and Millicent both know this is false, because both have seen him since. Nathan has figured out that Barnabas is the serial killer preying on the women of Collinsport, and is apparently planning to use this information to blackmail Joshua. At the moment the Collinses are not afraid of being blackmailed with information about anything Barnabas has done lately. They spread the story about England because Barnabas had died. They thought he died from the plague, and Joshua feared that if that became known the men would not report to work at the family’s shipyard.
What neither Nathan nor any of the Collinses know is that Barnabas has become a vampire. Naomi is depressed that her son has died and that she cannot talk freely about his death with anyone. She is miserable when Millicent keeps claiming it was Barnabas who attacked her, and tries desperately to stop her from talking about him at all. Naomi and Millicent are both good-hearted people, of the sort we would like to see come to happy endings. They also make the most of the dramatic values in this situation. Again, we find ourselves in suspense generated by our conflicting desires. We have a rooting interest in the characters’ well-being, but we want to see a lively story, and the tragedy in which they are locked is providing that. So we can see any number of possible developments that would disappoint us, either by hurting characters we like or by short-circuiting a plot we are enjoying.
A very pure example of suspense comes in a scene between Nathan and Noah in Nathan’s room at a local inn. Noah refuses to leave until Nathan pays the money he owes him; Nathan says he has no money and that he isn’t likely to get any unless Noah leaves at once, since Millicent is on her way and will get suspicious if she sees him there. Noah doesn’t understand this, and Nathan has to keep repeating the point. When Millicent knocks on the door, Noah finally agrees to hide. On his way to let Millicent in, Nathan realizes Barnabas’ cane is in plain view in the middle of the room, and hides it under his bed.
The only danger in this scene is that the Nathan/ Millicent story will end abruptly, but we are sufficiently invested in watching that story play out that our irritation at Noah’s stupidity is combined with suspense as we fear that he will ruin the scheme. Nathan’s success with Noah and his last-second concealment of the cane come as a relief. Again, the suspense is entirely contained within our role as the audience, and is not a product of any concern we have for the characters or anything they represent to us.
Naval officer/ sleazy operator Nathan Forbes seemed to have lost his best chance at getting rich quick when his fiancée, fluttery heiress Millicent Collins, discovered that he was already married when they got engaged. Since then, he has figured out that Millicent’s second cousin, Barnabas Collins, did not go to England as the family has been telling everyone, but that he is still lurking about the village of Collinsport and has murdered several people there. Among Barnabas’ victims was Nathan’s wife Suki.
Widower Nathan has a plan to profit from this information. Today, we see the first step in Nathan’s plan. He persuades his henchman, commercial mariner Noah Gifford, to wear a mask, carry Barnabas’ cane, and assault Millicent while he lies in wait. Apparently he will rescue her, and she will tell her family both that Nathan was the hero of the incident and that the attacker carried Barnabas’ instantly recognizable cane.
The whole episode is full of comic moments, and the climactic scene of the assault at the gazebo had my wife, Mrs Acilius, laughing out loud and making comparisons to A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. That reaction shows that Nathan and Noah are a more successful rewriting of Dark Shadows‘ first seagoing con man, Jason McGuire, and his henchman Willie Loomis. Jason was supposed to be a comic villain, but the writers never gave him much that was funny to do or say. Actor Dennis Patrick was such a talented comic that he could pad his part with facial expressions, tones of voice, and gestures that got laughs, especially in his scenes with Willie. But it was never at all clear why he needed Willie, and most of the time he was on camera Jason was grinding the other characters down with a depressing blackmail scheme. But Nathan keeps scrambling to find his way into his marks’ good graces, and he and Noah get up to all sorts of high-jinks. Regular viewers will be happy to see a demonstration of what Jason and Willie might have been had Dark Shadows been able to employ a better writing staff in 1967.
Another major improvement over the period when Dark Shadows was set in 1966 and 1967 is the show’s use of Joel Crothers. He did what he could with the part of hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell, but since Joe’s only note is earnestness he always winds up as less of a character than a function. But Nathan is always working an angle, is never quite predictable, and is tremendously fun to watch. The prospect of seeing Crothers return to the role of Joe is one of the major reasons the audience might want to prolong our stay in the eighteenth century.
Closing Miscellany
Noah remarks on one of the odd quirks of the Collins family when he mentions that the vacant Old House on their property is still full of all sorts of valuable objects. From the first week of the show, we’ve seen that disused parts of their estate are heavily stocked with high-priced antiques. This acknowledgement of the oddness of that fact leaves us wondering if the show is going to change it.
Today marks the only appearance on Dark Shadows of actress Charlotte Fairchild. Fairchild plays a downstairs maid who tells Millicent that a man has brought her a fan. Her angular figure and pale complexion made her a perfect choice to play an eighteenth century servant, and she does a fine job with the dialogue.
When vampire Barnabas Collins rose from his grave to prey upon the living in April 1967, he was a bleak, frightening presence. As the show went on, we saw him spend a great deal of time ruminating on murders he might like to commit, but he had few opportunities to act on those thoughts. By November, when well-meaning governess Vicki came unstuck in time and wound up in the year 1795, Barnabas had killed only two people, only one of them with premeditation. Both of those victims, seagoing con man Jason McGuire and addled quack Dave Woodard, had long since lost their relevance to the plot, and neither has been mentioned more than a few times since his death. As a result, Barnabas’ talk of killing comes to seem like nothing more than a series of hostile fantasies.
Soon, Dark Shadows will have to return to a contemporary setting. It was the frightening impression Barnabas created in his first weeks that made Dark Shadows a hit, and to keep it going the show will have to make him seem dangerous again. In the fifteen and a half weeks they have been in the 1790s, he has killed at least six people, including his uncle, his aunt, his wife, two streetwalkers, and a woman named Suki. That’s an adequate rate of murders to reestablish Barnabas as a fiend, but volume will only get you so far. They need to give us some shocking images of cruelty, preferably as the result of crimes committed with slender motives, to get him back in place as a truly scary creature.
Today, the show addresses both that need and the need to give a fitting sendoff to a character who has been one of the standouts of the eighteenth century flashback. The Rev’d Mr Trask, visiting witchfinder, was, along with repressed spinster Abigail, one of the two bright lights of the show’s otherwise dreary reworking of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Now the witch trial is over, Vicki has been convicted, and she is waiting to be hanged. In #437, Vicki gave a speech which left little doubt that at the moment appointed for her execution she would return to the 1960s and the costume drama period would end. Therefore, Trask can hardly reopen the case without confusing the whole plot. As a personality totally warped by fanaticism, he can’t very well branch out into other kinds of stories without a long buildup, much longer than they are likely to stay in the 1790s. Yet Trask has been so much fun that the audience would feel cheated if he simply went back where he came from.
So Barnabas lures Trask to his basement, ties him to the ceiling, and seals him up behind a brick wall. Unfortunately, this homage to Edgar Allan Poe’s “Cask of Amontillado” does not adapt the most celebrated line of that story and have Trask cry out “For the love of God, Mr Collins!”
In a moment of black humor, the closing credits run over an image of the completed brick wall. We might imagine Jerry Lacy still dangling from the ceiling behind the wall. Mr Lacy was often a model of an actor’s devotion to his craft, but I very much doubt that even he took matters that far.
A recording of Jonathan Frid reading “The Cask of Amontillado” made in the spring of 1992 can be found on YouTube, posted by Frid’s longtime business partner Mary O’Leary.
In #264, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins visited Barnabas at home. When it was time for a drink, Barnabas offered him a glass of amontillado. Poe’s story is so famous and amontillado is such an unusual variety of sherry that it must have been a deliberate reference. Perhaps the idea of Barnabas sealing someone up behind bricks was floating around among the writing staff for months and months.
Several fansites label it a continuity error that Trask reacts to the sight of Barnabas by exclaiming that he is dead. The family has been covering up Barnabas’ death, putting word about that he went to England. Many think Trask should not be among those privy to the Collinses’ secret. But as Danielle Gelehrter points out in a comment on Danny Horn’s Dark Shadows Before I Die, Trask and the gracious Josette discussed Barnabas’ death in #412.
I am writing this post on 19 February 2024. In a bit of synchronicity, yesterday, I saw this post on the site that all normal people still call Twitter:
Dark Shadows Commentary 
