Like every other episode of Dark Shadows, this one opens with a voiceover delivered by a member of the cast. The voiceovers in the segment of the series set in the year 1795 usually begin thus:
A séance has been held in the great house of Collinwood, a séance which has suspended time and space and sent one girl on an uncertain and frightening journey into the past, back to the year 1795. There, each of the Collins ancestors resembles a present-day member of the Collins family. But the names and relationships have changed, and Victoria Winters finds herself a stranger in a sea of familiar faces.
The “sea of familiar faces” results from the same actors appearing in the parts of the show set in different periods. The emphasis the show places on this, both by the repeated use of “sea of familiar faces” in one opening voiceover after another and by the hapless Vicki’s (Alexandra Moltke Isles) exasperating habit of telling the characters that they are being played by actors who previously took other parts, gives the audience a reading instruction. Evidently we are meant to compare and contrast each actor’s twentieth century and eighteenth century roles.
The first face we see today is the only unfamiliar one that has bobbed to the surface of the 1795 sea. It belongs to wicked witch/ lady’s maid Angelique, played by Lara Parker. Angelique had a brief fling with young gentleman Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid) some time ago. They met when he first went to the island of Martinique and met her employers, the wealthy DuPrés family.
Barnabas had fallen in love with the gracious young Josette DuPrés (Kathryn Leigh Scott,) but was convinced Josette could never love him. Barnabas consoled himself in Angelique’s arms until he realized Josette did love him. Barnabas and Josette agreed to marry. Josette came to Collinwood for the wedding, accompanied by her father André (David Ford) and her aunt, the Countess DuPrés (Grayson Hall.) Angelique is the countess’ maid, but also attends Josette.
Angelique used her powers of black magic to make Josette and Jeremiah Collins (Anthony George,) Barnabas’ uncle, conceive a mad passion for each other. Josette and Jeremiah eloped, breaking Barnabas’ heart. Barnabas and Jeremiah fought a duel; consumed with remorse, Jeremiah let his nephew kill him. Even after all that, Barnabas realized he would always love Josette, a fact of which he apprised Angelique. Frustrated to find that she could never have Barnabas, Angelique yesterday announced in a soliloquy that she would punish him by forcing him to watch his beloved little sister Sarah (Sharon Smyth) suffer. At the top of the episode, Angelique is in her room in the servants’ quarters of Collinwood’s manor house with Sarah’s doll and some pins.
We cut to the front parlor, where Sarah is looking up adoringly at her mother Naomi Collins (Joan Bennett,) who is reciting a story. We cut back to Angelique, who drives a pin into Sarah’s doll. In the front parlor, Sarah clutches her chest and cries out in pain. Angelique sticks more pins into the doll, and Sarah cries out again.
In the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s, Joan Bennett plays matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, owner of the great estate of Collinwood, of the Collins family enterprises, and of any other piece of property that they decide to tell a story about. In Liz’ time, the Collins family is much decayed from its eminence in 1795, but she is still the foremost figure in the town of Collinsport, and would have the authority to make just about anything happen. In fact, Liz can rarely bring herself to do very much that pertains to the plot, but when she does speak up we can see that she has great depths.
Naomi, by contrast, is utterly powerless, shut out by her husband, haughty overlord Joshua (Louis Edmonds) even from the management of the house. In today’s pre-title teaser, we see Sarah sitting on the floor of the front parlor, looking up adoringly while Naomi recites a story to her. That Naomi is reciting to Sarah rather than reading to her reminds us of what we learned when first we saw her in #366, that unlike most women in eighteenth century New England Naomi is altogether illiterate. Naomi occasionally bewails her inability to spend her time productively, and often drinks.
Sharon Smyth plays Sarah in 1795. In 1967, she was Sarah’s ghost, a frequent visitor to Collinwood and its environs. Sarah’s ghost was quite a different character than is the living Sarah. The little girl in the white bonnet who showed up in the oddest places and made the oddest remarks was only one aspect of a vast and mighty dislocation in time and space. It was Sarah’s ghost that started Vicki’s “uncertain and frightening journey into the past.”
Miss Smyth* nowadays describes her acting style when she was nine and ten saying “the first word that comes to mind is ‘clueless,'” but that works out surprisingly well for a ghost. It isn’t clear to us how the visible part of the Sarah phenomenon relates to the rest, much less how the whole thing works, and it can’t be clear- if a phenomenon stops being mysterious, it isn’t supernatural anymore. So it is gripping to see that the visible Sarah is herself in the dark about what she represents. That doesn’t work so well for living characters. When Miss Smyth can’t take her eyes off the teleprompter while delivering lines like “Help me, mother! It hurts!,” we can perhaps see one reason why the unfathomably mighty Sarah of 1967 was reduced to such a subordinate role in 1795.
But Miss Smyth’s limitations as a performer were not the only reason this development was inevitable. The whole idea of the supernatural is that something which appears to be very weak is in fact very strong. So children usually have fewer resources at their disposal than do adults, females are less likely to be found in positions of authority than are males, and the dead cannot rival the dynamism of the living. So the ghost of a little girl will of course be an immense force. The Sarah we see in 1795 is not yet a supernatural being, and so it would ruin the irony if even before her death she were already great and powerful.
In the part of the show set in 1967, Liz was one of the few major characters who never saw the ghost of Sarah. Liz was pretty firmly in denial about all reports of paranormal phenomena, and in #348 Sarah would declare that she could appear only to people who were prepared to believe in ghosts. So it is a bit startling for regular viewers to see these two actors together for the first time. Naomi is the same calm, indulgent presence to Sarah that Liz is to the children in her life, suggesting that though “the names and relationships have changed,” Liz and Naomi are two versions of the same person.
If the viewer’s main activity in watching the 1795 segment is contrasting the characters with those played by the same actors in the first 73 weeks, Angelique’s prominence is a puzzle. She is the only one who doesn’t fit into that scheme, yet she has driven all of the action so far. By the end of today’s episode, I think we can see a 1967 character with whom Angelique stands in juxtaposition. That character is Barnabas.
From April to November of 1967, Dark Shadows was largely the story of vampire Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid) and his attempt to impersonate a living man native to the twentieth century. It was so much fun to watch Barnabas scramble to keep this game going that the audience found it easy to put to one side the horrible evil he did and to look for reasons to think of him as good. But if we ever succeeded in doing that, Dark Shadows would be ruined. A deep-dyed villain allows a drama to be less serious overall than it might otherwise be, so that a thoroughly bad Barnabas lightens the tone. Make him relatable, or even forgivable, and everything gets terribly serious again. Yet a nonthreatening vampire is a purely comic character, like Count von Count on Sesame Street. So until they can establish another Big Bad, Barnabas has to be beyond redemption. If he is a lovable guy who just needs help dealing with his neck-biting problem, he has no place on the show, and it has no story left to tell. So they spent the fall systematically kicking away every possible mitigating factor and forcing us to behold Barnabas’ unrelieved evil.
The last hope of redemption for Barnabas in 1967 was his attachment to the late Sarah. Sarah had died when she was about ten, and her ghost started haunting the estate of Collinwood back in June, when Barnabas was holding Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town (Kathryn Leigh Scott,) prisoner in his basement. By November, many people had seen and talked with Sarah, but she had shunned Barnabas, even though he was desperately eager to reconnect with his baby sister. In his speeches about his longing for Sarah and in two moments when a suggestion he might see Sarah distracted him from a murder he was in the middle of committing, we saw the possibility that when Barnabas was finally reunited with her, he would change his ways.
That reunion finally took place in #364. Sarah walks in as Barnabas is strangling his only friend and sometime co-conspirator, mad scientist Julia Hoffman (Grayson Hall.) Barnabas does let Julia go, and has a heartfelt conversation with Sarah. Sarah says that she will not come back until Barnabas learns to be good. We can see just how long that is likely to be when, less than two minutes after Sarah has vanished, Barnabas tells Julia that, while he may not kill her tonight, her existence means no more to him than does that of a moth.
When even a direct encounter with Sarah cannot move Barnabas to find value in human life, we see that what Barnabas wanted when he was yearning for her to come near him was not to renew a relationship in which anything would be expected of him, but was something more like nostalgia. He has moved into the house where he spent his time when he was alive, and has restored it to its appearance in those days. He once persuaded his distant relatives, Liz and the other living members of the Collins family, to attend a party in that house dressed in clothing that belonged to their ancestors of his period and answering to their names. And he cherishes a fantasy that a young woman will discard her personality and replace it with that of Josette, then come to him and live out the life he had once believed he would have, long ago. His wishes for Sarah are of a piece with these attempts to recreate a past world. He wants to reenact the time he had with her, not to face the present alongside her. Barnabas is a damned soul, unable to love, unable to grow, unable to do anything for the first time.
Today, the show pushes Angelique into the same “Irredeemable” category where his reaction to Sarah’s visit had landed Barnabas. Again, it is an interaction with Sarah that represents the last straw. Josette and Barnabas made a sweet couple, but we knew before we ever saw them together that they were not fated to end up together. Jeremiah was likable enough, but we knew that he, too, had a sharply limited future. But Sarah is a child, a particularly adorable one, and is someone we have come to feel we know through her months as a ghost. When Angelique treats her so cruelly, we cannot imagine ever forgiving her.
And yet, there were times we felt that way about Barnabas, too. Angelique’s insane fixations are remarkably close to those vampire Barnabas exhibited in 1967, so much so that we keep wondering if whatever she does that turns Barnabas into a vampire will also put her personality into his body. We have come to be attached to the vampire; perhaps we will eventually discover it is Angelique we were watching until Vicki came to the past.
That isn’t to deny that the human Barnabas we have seen so far has points of contact with the ghoul from 1967. He was selfish enough to take advantage of a servant girl in Martinique when he didn’t think he could win the love of the grand lady he wanted and to discard her when he learned he could. He is cowardly enough that it never occurred to him to tell Josette that he had a past with Angelique at a time when doing so could have prevented Angelique casting the fatal spells on her and Jeremiah.
Real as these vices are, they are endemic to soap opera characters. Few daytime serials would have any stories to tell if they were about people who had a gift for monogamy, and we are supposed to find ourselves yelling at the screen “Just tell her!” and “Just tell him!” at regular intervals. Even the power differential between Barnabas the scion of the wealthy Collins family and Angelique the servant girl, problematic** as it would be in real life, is less troubling in the soaps, which take place in worlds where heirs and heiresses marry servants and their relatives all the time. Of course, most viewers know that Barnabas is destined to become a vampire, a metaphor for selfishness, and will be inclined to see in his use of Angelique the seeds of his subsequent damnation. And Angelique has enough lines about Barnabas’ selfishness that even viewers who joined the show during the 1795 segment can’t let him off the hook altogether.
Still, there is a great deal of good in the living Barnabas. We see him at Sarah’s bedside, consumed with worry for his beloved little sister. The doctor has been to see Sarah, and he has nothing to offer. Sarah asks to see her governess Vicki, who is in hiding because a visiting witch-hunter named Trask has blamed her for a series of inexplicable misfortunes that have befallen the house since she showed up in #366. It was Vicki’s own odd behavior that first made her a suspect, and Angelique has taken advantage of Trask’s foolishness to fabricate evidence against Vicki. She has gone into hiding, and Barnabas is helping her.
When Sarah keeps asking to see Vicki, Barnabas promises to bring her. Naomi is surprised to learn that Barnabas knows where Vicki is, and is not at all sure Trask isn’t right about her. But when she sees her daughter with Vicki, she is sure that she is innocent.
Vicki was the audience’s main point-of-view character throughout 1966 and well into 1967. Major story developments took place after Vicki found out what was going on. Vicki was the chief protagonist in the most important story of that period, the crisis represented by undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. Vicki took charge of the household, organized a group to fight Laura, and rescued strange and troubled boy David from the flames when Laura tried to burn him alive. That intelligent, forceful character has been fading ever further into memory in recent months, and we haven’t seen a trace of her in the 1795 storyline. Sarah is happy to see Vicki and says she likes the stories she tells, but she is a passive witness to today’s events. She serves chiefly as a prop, used to demonstrate that the human Barnabas, whatever his faults, is capable of heroic action.
Barnabas’ compassion for Sarah and his valiant defense of Vicki do not negate his vices. As the heir to Collinwood, Barnabas can express his self-regard both by gratifying his urge to treat some women badly and by earning admiration for treating other women well. In her low station, the same trait leads Angelique directly to the “Dark Triad” of Narcissism, Manipulativeness, and Psychopathy. As a vampire, Barnabas will exhibit the same three qualities in abundance, but for now, we still have license to hope for better from him.
As it was so much fun to watch Barnabas trying to pass as a modern man that we wanted to like him even after he had been terribly cruel to Maggie, a character we like very much, it was so much fun to watch Angelique twist Trask around her finger that we wanted to like her. Besides, her desire to remake Barnabas as her lover is understandable for those who have been watching the show and wanting him to be something other than a heartless murder machine. So, perhaps we will wind up liking Angelique after all.
Angelique has bewitched indentured servant Ben Stokes (Thayer David) and forced him to act as her assistant. Ben is devoted to Barnabas and miserable that he has been the instrument of so much evil done to him, but has been powerless to resist Angelique’s commands. When he realizes that Angelique is causing Sarah to sicken and perhaps die, he goes to her room and demands that she stop. He threatens to kill her if she does not relent. In response, Angelique causes him to have a heart attack. She lets his heart start pumping again when he promises to be quiet.
This is the second heart attack a character of David’s has had on screen. The first also prevented a servant in this same house from killing a young woman. That came in #126, when crazed handyman Matthew Morgan had been holding Vicki prisoner here and was about to decapitate her. The ghost of Josette led several other supernatural presences who scared Matthew to death before he could complete his fell purpose. Matthew and Ben are both devoted to the Collinses, and both are led astray so that they become parties to terrible crimes. As the benevolent spirit of Josette put a stop to Matthew’s crimes, so the malign Angelique prevents Ben from putting a stop to her own.
Barnabas drops by Angelique’s room to ask if she has seen Sarah’s doll, which she calls Samantha. He tells her that Sarah is very ill and has asked for the doll. It occurs to Angelique that she has some leverage over Barnabas. She says that she can brew a special kind of tea that might cure Sarah’s symptoms. He asks her to do so. She makes him promise to marry her if she does.
Several times, we have seen that Angelique is flying by the seat of her pants. She had no idea of using Sarah’s illness to gain a hold over Barnabas until he chanced to come into her room. Nor is she thinking ahead- as it stands, the witch-hunters have fastened on Vicki as their suspect, and are not thinking of her. If word gets out that she had the power to cure Sarah’s mysterious ailment and exercised it only after extorting Barnabas’ promise of marriage, that would seem to be proof positive that she is a witch.
In her own bedroom, Sarah sips the tea. At the same moment, Angelique, in the servants’ quarters, pulls the pins from the doll. How exactly Angelique got the timing just right isn’t exactly clear, but she must have had a way- she is perfectly confident when she tells the doll that it has served her well.
*Mrs Lentz now, but it’s strange to say “Mrs” when you’re talking about a ten year old.
**I know people don’t really say “problematic” anymore, but it seems to be the right word here.
Dark Shadows Commentary 