The most interesting storyline in the first 39 weeks of Dark Shadows was the relationship between well-meaning governess Victoria Winters and her charge, strange and troubled boy David Collins. That story concluded when David chose life with Vicki over death with his mother, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. Vicki and David settled into a happy and uneventful friendship, and the show moved on. Now its core is vampire Barnabas Collins, and Vicki is trying to migrate into his orbit.
When we open, Vicki has made her way to Barnabas’ house as a storm was breaking. She had made a show of wanting to hurry home, only to find that it was raining so hard she had to stay with Barnabas overnight. The opening scenes take place in Barnabas’ front parlor, where Vicki is all wide-eyed innocence.
Vicki and Barnabas are both excited about the prospect of a sleepover. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die
Vicki asks Barnabas about the long-ago death of Josette Collins. Unknown to her, Josette killed herself because she feared Barnabas would turn her into a vampire, the fate he has in mind for Vicki now. As he tells the story, Barnabas shows more and more anguish. At the end, he suggests that the storm might be letting up and offers to take Vicki home. She says that the rain sounds worse than ever, and insists on staying. This is the first scene in which Barnabas plays the “reluctant vampire” we hear so much about in thumbnail sketches of Dark Shadows.
Vicki goes up to Josette’s restored bedroom. She lies on the bed and covers herself up, remaining fully clothed. She doesn’t even take her shoes off.
Downstairs, Barnabas’ sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie brings a child’s ball he found in the basement by Barnabas’ coffin. For a moment they are afraid that David might have made his way to the basement during the daytime, but Barnabas concludes that they would have heard about it by now if that had happened. Willie brings up the little girl whom he and David both saw playing outside the house on separate occasions some weeks ago. He also reminds Barnabas that when he was keeping Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, in the prison cell in the basement Maggie talked about a little girl who visited her there. Barnabas won’t listen to anything about Maggie, and is irritated when Willie keeps saying that he has the feeling that there is someone else in the house. But he does go to search the basement.
Meanwhile, Vicki is awakened by the sound of a child’s voice singing “London Bridge.” Returning viewers know that this is the little girl Willie spoke of, and that she is the ghost of Barnabas’ nine year old sister Sarah. Victoria lights a candle and searches the room, but finds nothing.
Willie is startled when Victoria comes down the stairs and calls him. Barnabas hadn’t bothered telling him she was around. We might be startled too. The diffident, girlish manner she had used with Barnabas earlier in the episode is gone; when she calls “Willie!” she is every inch the lady of the house summoning a servant. In their previous interactions, Willie has always called Vicki by her first name. Today she is “Miss Winters” to him, and that’s only to be expected- she retains an air of command even as Willie tries to warn her that she is in danger.
Barnabas enters and hears Willie urging Vicki to get out of the house at once. Willie takes a second to come up with a suitable lie, claiming that he was afraid spending the night in the house would get people talking about Vicki. She and Barnabas dismiss this concern. Vicki praises Willie’s generous offer to walk her home and shelter her from the rain, and Barnabas assures Willie that he will get what he deserves.
Vicki tells Barnabas that she heard a little girl singing “London Bridge.” Shaken by this report, he insists it is impossible for her to have heard any such thing. He says that he understands if she does not want to return to the room, implicitly repeating his offer to let her go, but she happily returns upstairs. In this conversation, she is not as loftily aristocratic as she had been with Willie, but neither does she revert to the diffident girlishness she had shown Barnabas in the first scene. She looks him in the eye, smiles, speaks briskly, and moves from her hips. She is a woman who knows what she wants and has made up her mind to get it.
Barnabas and Willie have an interesting talk after Vicki goes back upstairs. Willie asks about the little girl, and Barnabas hotly denies she exists. Barnabas is his usual menacing self at first, but then says he won’t punish him for trying to warn Vicki. He asks Willie to “talk to me.” Willie is startled by this, then Barnabas says he has a better idea- “don’t talk to me.” This generates a bad laugh. Some think this is Jonathan Frid trying to cover a misreading of a line, but I tend to think it is good acting exposing bad writing. After their talk, Barnabas sends Willie to his room, then goes upstairs and stares at Vicki while she sleeps, apparently contemplating the possibility of biting her.
Well-meaning governess Vicki says that she would like sit alone in her room “forever” listening to an antique music box. This may seem extreme, but consider the alternatives. Heiress Carolyn comes in and asks her to recap the last couple of episodes; Carolyn responds to every sentence Vicki speaks by asking her to repeat it. Fake Shemp Burke Devlin is downstairs waiting to take Vicki on a date; they went out yesterday, and he spent the time angrily telling her she must be crazy because she believed things he knew to be true. When she meets him today, he’s even angrier, and Carolyn joins in his gaslighting project.
The one bright spot in Vicki’s evening is the courtly Barnabas Collins. He has dropped by the house to give her a book that he thought she might like. By the time Vicki gets downstairs, Burke and Carolyn have come at Barnabas with a lot of free-floating hostility about Vicki’s interest in history. He responded to them affably, and when Vicki arrives he makes a show of not giving her the book.
Vicki sees the book and insists Barnabas let her look at it. When she sees that he inscribed it to her, she asks what is going on. Burke admits that he talked Barnabas out of making the present. Vicki becomes upset with him. Barnabas apologizes for having come and hastens back to his house. Burke is left looking like an absolute fool, which was no doubt Barnabas’ plan.
Burke keeps banging on about how it is unhealthy to “live in the past.” He means that he doesn’t want Vicki to learn about the history of the people she works for and of the house they live in, and that Barnabas is a big nerd because he restored the Old House on the estate to its condition as of a previous century and that he lives there.
This is an eccentric way of using the phrase. Usually when people say that someone “lives in the past,” they are accusing them of being stuck in a bygone period of their own life. Burke doesn’t know that Barnabas is a vampire, or that he lived in the house when it was in the condition to which he has restored it. So that isn’t the charge he has in mind. So far as Burke knows, Barnabas is a creative person who imagined a new project, committed himself to it, and with great effort and great skill made it a reality. Nor does he know that Barnabas wants to turn Vicki into a vampiric version of his lost love Josette, or that her interest in history is partly inspired by Barnabas’ supernatural influence over her. So far as Burke knows, Vicki has taken up a scholarly hobby that would be wholesome for anyone and that is particularly appropriate for a teacher.
If any character is “living in the past,” in the sense in which that expression is typically used, it is Burke. When he was Vicki’s age, he was a member of the local working class, presumably living in a rented room in the town of Collinsport. Since then, he went to New York, became a corporate raider, and grew so rich he could live anywhere he chooses. The place he has chosen is another rented room in Collinsport. He is dating a woman half his age, and regularly drops in on the Collinses, who were acquaintances of his in his youth. In all these ways, he has turned his back on his current life and created a fantasy version of the life he lived long ago.
Burke is also an echo of the past of Dark Shadows. When the show started, he was the driving force of many storylines. But those storylines all fizzled, and what remained of them was wrapped up in the story of his ex-girlfriend, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. Shortly after Laura’s story ended, Burke formally renounced the quest for revenge that had been his chief motive, and there’s been no reason for him to be on the show since. Making matters worse, he was recast last month as actor Anthony George, who is completely lost in the part. So we can sympathize with Vicki’s reluctance to keep spending time with him.
Burke demands that Vicki come with him. He barks at her that he needs a drink. He’s already so angry and so insulting that we can only hope he isn’t a mean drunk. After he issues several more declarations and commands, Vicki tells him she will be staying home with a book. He leaves.
Staying in and reading doesn’t seem to be Vicki’s real plan. Vicki goes to Barnabas’ house, ostensibly to apologize for the unpleasant reception Burke and Carolyn gave him, and for her failure to thank him for the book. He accepts her apologies most graciously.
A storm is starting, and Vicki has neglected to wear the raincoat and headscarf we’ve seen her in several times. When they look outside, she and Barnabas say that it is raining too heavily for anyone to go anywhere. She apologizes for getting caught at his house, and Barnabas says that he is happy to have her. He suggests she spend the night in the restored bedroom of Josette Collins. She is delighted by this idea.
Yesterday, Victoria had said she could stay in Josette’s room “forever.” So it seems obvious that she fully intended to be at Barnabas’ house when the storm started raging, and to spend the night there. Of course this fits very well with Barnabas’ scheme, so he is quite happy to oblige her.
Vampire Barnabas Collins is giving a costume party in his home at the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood. His distant relatives, the living members of the Collins family, are dressed as their ancestors from Barnabas’ own time as a living being. The whole thing was impossibly dull until the mischievous and witty Roger Collins suggested they have a séance. Now well-meaning governess Vicki is in a trance, channeling the spirit of Josette Collins.
The last time Josette took possession of Vicki at a séance was in #170 and #171. At that time, Josette delivered her message in French. Since Vicki could not speak French (but Alexandra Moltke speaks it fluently,) that was evidence enough to convince even the most skeptical that something was going on. Today Josette speaks English. The characters are all sure that she is the one speaking, but it doesn’t have the same effect on the audience as did that earlier irruption of a language we had not expected to hear.
I do wonder if the decision not to use French came at the last moment. Even though Vicki/ Josette’s voice is loud and clear, the others make a show of struggling to understand what she is saying and seize on a word here and there (“Something about ‘run!'”,) as people do when they are listening to someone speak a language they don’t quite understand. Perhaps writer Joe Caldwell wasn’t quite up to writing in French, and the Writer’s Guild wouldn’t let Alexandra Moltke Isles or any other Francophones on set make a translation. Or maybe they thought that the switch to French wouldn’t be as effective the second time as it was the first.
Josette is telling the story of her death. A man was chasing her, and fleeing him she threw herself off the peak of Widow’s Hill to the rocks below. Barnabas interrupts and breaks Vicki’s trance.
When the others scold him for stopping Josette before she could reveal the name of the man who ran her off the cliff, Barnabas says that the name could not have been of any importance, since whoever it was who drove Josette to kill herself must have been dead for “almost 200 years.” The others do not suspect that he was that man. They do not know that he is a reanimated corpse; they think he’s just English.
When Dark Shadows started, the stories of the tragic death of Josette and of the building of the great house of Collinwood were set in the 1830s. In the weeks before Barnabas’ introduction in April of 1967, they implied that Josette’s dates were much earlier, sometime in the 18th century. Last week, they plumped for the 1830s again. But Barnabas’ line about “almost 200 years ago” puts us back to the 1700s.
After the séance ends, we have evidence that this bit of background continuity might start to matter. Vicki looks at the landing on top of the staircase and sees the ghost of Barnabas’ 9 year old sister Sarah watching the party.
It seems that when Barnabas was freed to prey upon the living, he unknowingly brought Sarah with him. Sarah has been popping in and out quite a bit the last few weeks, and she has already made some important plot points happen. We’re starting to wonder just how many more beings will emerge from the supernatural back-world into the main action of the show. The opening voiceover today tells us that “the mists that have protected the present from the past are lifting,” so perhaps they will have to nail these dates down sooner rather than later.
The whole party had accepted instantly that Vicki was channeling the spirit of Josette and none of them ever comes to doubt it. But when she says that she saw a little girl at the head of the stairs, they get all incredulous. By the end of the episode, Vicki will have encountered so much disbelief on this point that she herself will decide that she must have been hallucinating.
Back in the great house, Roger is still overjoyed that the séance turned out to be so exciting. His sister Liz and Liz’ daughter Carolyn consider this to be in terrible taste. But Roger won’t give an inch. He has some great lines, exiting with “I think that all of the unhappiness of all of my ancestors is my rightful heritage, and you shouldn’t try to keep it from me. Good night, ladies.” Both Patrick McCray, in his Dark Shadows Daybook post about this episode, and Danny Horn, in his Dark Shadows Every Day post, make insightful remarks as they analyze the fun Louis Edmonds has playing Roger.
Carolyn approaches Vicki to speak privately. She tells her that she isn’t bothered that fake Shemp Burke Devlin is dating Vicki. Vicki’s response to this is “What?” Carolyn reminds Vicki that she used to be interested in Burke and was initially jealous of Burke’s interest in her. But she assures her she doesn’t feel that way any longer. Vicki smiles, nods, and looks away. Carolyn then says “He’s really very nice!” Vicki answers “Who?” “Burke!” says Carolyn. Again, Vicki smiles, nods, and looks away.
This is probably supposed to tell us that Vicki is coming under some kind of spell associated with Barnabas, but in fact it is likely to suggest something quite different to the audience. Burke was originally a dashing action hero played by Mitch Ryan. Dark Shadows never really came up with very much for a dashing action hero to do, but Ryan’s skills as an actor and his charismatic personality always made it seem that he was about to do something interesting. Several weeks ago, Ryan was fired off the show after he came to the set too drunk to work.
Since then, the part of Burke has been played by Anthony George. George was a well-trained actor with an impressive resume, and by all accounts was a nice guy. But he cannot dig anything interesting out of the character of Burke as he stands at this point in the series. The only scene in which George has shown any energy so far was in #267, when Burke had lost a dime in a pay phone. The rest of the time, he has blended so completely into the scenery that it is no wonder Vicki can’t remember him from one line to the next.
Back in the Old House, Barnabas talks to Josette’s portrait. In the months from #70 to #192, it was established that Josette can hear you if you do this. Several times she manifested herself either as a light glowing from the surface of the portrait or as a figure emerging from it. In #102, we saw strange and troubled boy David Collins having a conversation with the portrait- we could hear only his side of it, but it was clear that Josette was answering him.
The first time we saw Barnabas in the Old House, in #212, he spoke to the portrait. At that point, Josette was not yet his lost love. It seemed that she was his grandmother, and that she had sided against him in some terrible fight with his father Joshua. He ordered Josette and Joshua to leave the house to him. The next time David tried to talk to the portrait, in #240, it seemed that they had complied- David could no longer sense Josette’s presence in it.
Barnabas had spoken briefly to the portrait the other day, but today he makes his first substantial address to it since banishing Josette and Joshua in #212. Again he entreats her to go, but for a very different reason. Now he says that she is lost to him forever, and must allow him to live in the present. Since he has been scheming to capture a woman, erase her personality, replace it with Josette’s, and then kill her so that she will rise from the grave as a vampiric Josette, this sounds like he has decided to make a big change in his relations to the other characters.
It turns out that he hasn’t, but the writers have decided to change their relationship to their source material. Barnabas’ original plan was identical to that which Imhotep, the title character in the 1932 film The Mummy, had pursued in his attempt to replicate his relationship with his long-dead love Princess Ankh-esen-amun. Imhotep met Helen Grosvenor, whom he regarded as the reincarnation of Ankh-esen-amun because they were both played by Zita Johanns, and subjected her to the same treatment Barnabas first inflicted on Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, and now plans to try on Vicki.
Maggie is played by Kathryn Leigh Scott. The audience in 1967 would not have known that Miss Scott also played the ghost of Josette in some of her most important appearances. However, they would have noticed when David saw Maggie dressed as Josette in #240 he assumed it was the ghost, because her face was “exactly the same” as it had been when she manifested herself to him previously. So we have the same reason to believe that Maggie is the reincarnation of Josette that Imhotep had to believe that Helen was the reincarnation of the princess, and we therefore assume that Barnabas, like Imhotep, was trying to take possession of both the ghost and the living woman.
But after Barnabas tells Josette to go away, he declares that if he is to have her, she must be someone from the present. This sequence of words is nonsensical in itself, but harks back to a theory he had laid out to his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie in #274: “Take the right individual, place her under the proper conditions and circumstances, apply the required pressure, and a new personality is created.” Jonathan Frid would always sound and move like Boris Karloff, but now his project of Josettery is inspired less by Imhotep than by the various “mad doctors” Karloff played in the 1940s. Of course, in the 1960s real-life mad scientists such as Stanley Milgram and John Money were performing experiments on human subjects for which Barnabas’ statement might have served as a motto. So Barnabas is coming to be less a merger of Dracula and Imhotep than of Dracula and Dr Frankenstein.
One of the devices by which Barnabas tries to place women “under the proper conditions and circumstances” for Josettification is a music box which he bought for the original Josette and may or may not have given her.* He gives this to Vicki. To his satisfaction, she is reduced to a complete stupor when she hears it play. She is in that state when the episode ends.
* In #236, he says he never had the chance to give it to her. In subsequent episodes, he implies the opposite.
The living members of the ancient and esteemed Collins family have been invited to a party hosted by their not-so-living cousin, Barnabas Collins the vampire.* It will be a costume party, in which each adult Collins will dress as a counterpart from the era when Barnabas was human.
The show has been hinting from episode #1 that well-meaning governess Vicki is the illegitimate daughter of matriarch Liz, and today Liz’ daughter Carolyn tells her she “deserves to be a Collins.” From what we’ve seen of the Collinses, that’s hardly a compliment, but she is going to the party dressed as the legendary Josette Collins, to whom she refers as one of “our ancestors.”
Vicki and Carolyn confide in each other that they feel strange wearing the dresses. Vicki gets a strong sense of déjàvu when she wears Josette’s dress, and when Carolyn puts on Millicent’s she feels like an intruder.
Vicki’s boyfriend, fake Shemp Burke Devlin, shows up. Vicki tells him about the party. He expresses unease at the idea of her dressing as Josette. He brings up the séance in #170, when Josette spoke through Vicki. That was one of a great many contacts Vicki had with Josette’s ghost between episodes #126 and #192, but Vicki seems startled when Burke brings the matter up.
Vicki suggests that she might go to Barnabas and wangle an invitation to the party for him. He jovially responds that he would be out of place at a Collins family party. He makes it clear that he is not at all bothered to be left out, but Vicki insists. He drives her across the estate to Barnabas’ house and waits in his car while she goes inside.
Vicki lies to Barnabas, claiming she had a previous commitment to go out with Burke. This is only the second time Vicki has successfully told a lie. The first time, in #228, she told Liz something she so desperately wanted to believe that she ignored the fact that Vicki couldn’t look at her, or stand still, or maintain a normal conversational tone of voice. Now, she tells her lie smoothly and easily. Perhaps Carolyn was right, and Vicki has indeed earned the right to be a Collins.
Barnabas is initially disappointed that Vicki wants to bring a date, but brightens when he thinks of a role for Burke to play. Burke can wear the clothing of Jeremiah Collins. After Vicki leaves, Barnabas tells sorely-bedraggled blood thrall Willie that he hated Jeremiah and wanted to “destroy him.” He smiles and says that perhaps he will have that opportunity at the party. My wife, Mrs Acilius, was impressed with Jonathan Frid’s expression as he delivers that line. “Man, he knows how to do evil-face!”
Barnabas had told Willie that he expected the party to be “the most important night of [his] life,” and now he thinks it might present him with opportunities to “destroy” the guests. I’ll admit that there have been times when I had unrealistic hopes for a party I was planning, but I can’t say I’ve ever raised my expectations quite to that level.
On his blog Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn pokes fun at Barnabas for setting the bar so high. In a long comment, I tried to figure out what the writers might have been getting at by giving Barnabas these lines. I won’t copy it here, in part because it goes over material I’ve discussed repeatedly in earlier posts and in part includes spoilers for people who haven’t seen the rest of the series.
Closing Miscellany
Carolyn talks about the ancestors they will be impersonating as people who lived “over 130 years ago” and talks about “nineteenth century” styles. That fits with some references in the early months of the show to Josette having lived in the 1830s, and to the great house of Collinwood having been built in that decade by Josette’s husband Jeremiah Collins. The other day Barnabas said that his sister Sarah, whose ghost we have seen a number of times, lived long before he met Josette, and her dates have been established as 1786-1796. Apparently Barnabas and Sarah were both children when she died, and Barnabas was in his 40s when he knew Josette. Actor Jonathan Frid was in his early 40s when Dark Shadows was in production, so that would be plausible as the age at which Barnabas is frozen. Also, today a portrait of a man wearing a suit from the 1840s is identified as Joshua Collins, Barnabas’ father and a contemporary of Josette and Jeremiah.
This portrait usually hangs in the foyer, and I usually think of it as James K. Polk Collins. In #59, it was identified as Benjamin Collins, but today Vicki says it is Joshua. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die
At other times Jeremiah and Josette have been placed earlier, in the eighteenth century. It is unclear whether they have decided to stick with the 1830s as the time when Barnabas originally became a vampire, or if the date will shift again.
Burke asks Carolyn if her interest in motorcycling is a thing of the past. She says it is. This is the last reference we will hear to her onetime fiancé, biker dude Buzz. Buzz was hilariously out of place on Dark Shadows, and he will be missed as a source of comic relief.
When Burke was introduced in #1, he was a self-made millionaire planning to use his great wealth to take revenge on the Collinses. He gave up on his revenge in #201, and we haven’t seen much sign of his wealth lately. The last time a financial question was attached to him was in #267, when he was heartbroken because he had lost a dime in a pay phone. Today he shows up wearing a jacket that we’ve seen working class characters like Willie and hardworking young fisherman Joe wear. It might make the audience wonder if they are thinking of retconning his wealth away for some reason.
*They have no idea Barnabas is a vampire. They chalk his eccentricities up to being English.
For the first 54 weeks of Dark Shadows, reclusive matriarch Liz was paralyzed by the fear that someone would enter the locked room in the basement of the great house of Collinwood and find the murdered body of her husband Paul Stoddard buried there. For the last 16 of those weeks, seagoing con man Jason McGuire exploited that fear to blackmail Liz.
It turned out that Liz didn’t actually kill Stoddard and there never was a corpse hidden in the basement of the great house. There is, however, a corpse hidden in the basement of another house on the same estate. During the daytime, Liz’ distant cousin Barnabas Collins is a dead body resting in a coffin in the basement of the Old House. He gets up at night to feed on the blood of the living, lure the unwary to their damnation, and deliver rambling monologues about how sorry he feels for himself. Unlike Stoddard’s supposed grave in the great house, Barnabas’ coffin is not kept in a locked room, so the parallel has been incomplete.
Today, Barnabas decides to complete it. Trying to find and steal Barnabas’ jewels, Jason had broken into the Old House. He made his way to the basement, where he stumbled upon the coffin. He opened it, and Barnabas strangled him. Now, Barnabas orders his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie to help him carry Jason’s body to the secret room in the mausoleum where Barnabas himself was imprisoned and undiscovered for “nearly 200 years.”
Before they leave the basement, Barnabas tells Willie about his sister Sarah, who died when she was very young and innocent. After they leave, Sarah’s ghost appears and puts Jason’s sea cap on Barnabas’ coffin.
Episodes #1-#274 had all opened with voiceover narrations delivered by Alexandra Moltke Isles in character as well-meaning governess Vicki. Starting Friday, they gave the opening monologues to one of the actresses who happened to be in the episode to deliver as an unnamed external narrator. Today, this spoils a surprise. We haven’t seen Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, for a while, and aren’t sure when we will see her again. When Kathryn Leigh Scott delivers today’s opening voiceover, we know we will see Maggie today.
Barnabas had held Maggie prisoner for several weeks. He had borrowed a plan from the 1932 Universal film The Mummy. He would erase Maggie’s personality and replace it with that of his long lost love Josette. Once he had done that, he would kill her and she would rise from the dead as a vampiric version of Josette. Maggie did not go along with the plan, and Sarah’s ghost helped her to escape. Barnabas managed to scramble Maggie’s memory before her father found her, and she is now in treatment at a sanitarium called Windcliff.
Maggie’s hometown doctor, addled quack Dave Woodard, is visiting the director of Windcliff, Dr Julia Hoffman. Woodard wants to show Maggie a sketch Maggie’s father, artist Sam Evans, made when the ghost of Sarah visited him to tell him where to look for Maggie. Julia resists, Woodard insists. While Julia delays, she feeds the fish in the aquarium in her office. We see enough of the aquarium to suggest that Julia is the keeper of a world within a world, a little enclosure with its own rules.
Woodard shows Maggie the sketch. After a moment, she says “Sarah.” She tells them that Sarah visited her in the room where she was confined, that she told her a riddle that showed her how to escape. She becomes too upset to talk. She starts miming her search for a loose brick in the wall of the cell, then sings a verse of Sarah’s signature tune, “London Bridge.” She is shouting words from “London Bridge” when the nurse drags her down the hall, back to her room. Julia declares that the whole thing was a waste of time, a judgment in which Woodard does not concur.
Sam’s sketch of Sarah. Apparently the drawing was done before Sharon Smyth was cast as Sarah, when they planned to give the part to Harvey Keitel in drag. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die
Meanwhile, Barnabas and Willie take the body of Jason to the tomb of the Collinses and bury it in the secret room. They talk about the people buried in the part of the structure known to the public- Barnabas’ parents and his sister Sarah. Barnabas confirms that Sarah is the one he was telling Willie about in the basement, the friend he knew long before he met Josette. He reminisces about repairing a doll of hers the night before she died. We see the plaque giving her dates as 1786-1796, implying that Barnabas met Josette after 1796. They leave, and Sarah appears.
Liz had last seen Jason the night she thought she killed Stoddard; his reappearance would lead to the opening of the locked room and the exposure of its secret. Barnabas last saw Sarah in 1796; her reappearance, today’s events suggest, might lead to the opening of all the rooms Barnabas wants to keep closed and to the exposure of all his secrets.
For sixteen weeks, starting with the introduction of seagoing con man Jason McGuire in #193 and ending today, Dark Shadows has subjected its viewers to a storyline about Jason blackmailing reclusive matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Thirteen times in those sixteen weeks, we saw iterations of the same dreary scene- Jason makes a demand of Liz, Liz resists, he threatens to expose her terrible secret, she capitulates.
Now, Liz has exposed her own terrible secret. She has told everyone that eighteen years ago, she killed her husband Paul Stoddard and Jason buried Stoddard in the basement of the great house of Collinwood. Jason denied that Stoddard’s body could be found there, and as we open Sheriff Patterson and Fake Shemp Burke Devlin are digging up the basement to see who is right.
Liz and her brother Roger are in the drawing room. He asks why she didn’t confide her terrible secret in him. She says that perhaps she was too proud of her role as his older sister and the family’s moral compass. He admits that, if had told him the secret, he probably would have used it to blackmail her himself. This startling admission tells us just how completely isolated Liz is.
It tells regular viewers more than that. When Dark Shadows began, Roger was a deep-dyed villain. He hasn’t been directly connected to an ongoing storyline since his estranged wife, Laura Murdoch Collins, vanished in #191, and in the months since has figured as an immature, ineffectual person, a bratty little brother dependent on Liz’ money and unable to help her against Jason. With this admission he harks back to his first incarnation, and makes us wonder if we will see another side of him. If he has the strength to admit his villainy, perhaps he has the strength to change.
Meanwhile, Burke and the sheriff have turned up a trunk in the floor of the basement. It is empty and clean. There is no sign that there ever was a body in it.
Viewers who have been with the show from the beginning will think of Laura. Laura had died in Phoenix, Arizona shortly before showing up in Collinsport. After the apparently alive Laura had been in Collinsport for some time, her corpse mysteriously vanished from the morgue back in Maricopa County. Upon inspection, the graves of several of her ancestors turned out to be empty and clean. The Laura arc swallowed up most of the non-paranormal story elements left over from Dark Shadows’ early days as a Gothic romance tinged with the suggestion of a noir crime drama, and the blackmail plot is meant to sweep the last of them away and get the show on track as a supernatural thriller/ horror story. So we might think that the empty trunk is a sign that there was something not of this world about Stoddard.
They retreat from that intriguing possibility, as yesterday they retreated from the evidence they had already given us that a ghost haunted the place of Stoddard’s supposed burial. Jason admits to Liz that he and Stoddard cooked up a scheme where Stoddard would pretend to be dead so that he and Jason could help themselves to a big chunk of her wealth, then go away to live the high life. Jason says that he saw Stoddard in Hong Kong a bit over ten years ago, and that so far as he knows he is still alive and well.
Liz doesn’t want to press charges against Jason- she simply wants him to go away. Roger demands that Jason be charged with blackmail. In front of the sheriff, Roger announces that he is outraged at the money Jason took from Liz, including “business money.” This might make us wonder about Liz’ own criminal exposure. In #242, Roger told Liz that the company’s accounts were out of balance. We knew it was because she was slipping money to Jason, and they made a big enough point of her meeting with the accountants and telling them lies so that they would fix the books that for a moment it seemed like they were getting ready for a story about her getting in trouble for falsifying business documents.
That was dropped right away, and it doesn’t seem likely that Liz will be charged for paying hush money to Jason. Not many people in the USA in 1967 had any understanding of the crime of obstruction of justice. It wasn’t until the Senate Committee investigating the Watergate affair broadcast its hearings live in 1973 that the average viewer of daytime television would learn that giving a person money to stay away from the police is a felony. Before then, even many trained lawyers, among them several of the Watergate defendants, did not grasp this. So we can be confident that such matters would not enter Soap Opera Law in the 1960s.
The blackmail arc was dredged up from Art Wallace’s original story bible for Dark Shadows, called Shadows on the Wall. The first time Wallace told the story was in a 1954 installment of an anthology TV series called The Web; that segment was titled “The House,” and he had to pad it a bit to fill out a 30 minute time slot. In 1957, Wallace stretched “The House” to even greater length, into an hour-long entry in another dramatic anthology, Goodyear Playhouse. Wallace left Dark Shadows in October 1966, but the series has been hanging from the old rope he sold Dan Curtis for four full months now. Jason will still be on the show for a couple more days, but we’ve finally seen the last of this drab tale.
Reclusive matriarch Liz has spoiled her wedding to seagoing con man Jason by telling everyone that she was only marrying him to keep him from telling that she’d murdered her first husband and he’d buried the body in the basement. Fake Shemp Burke has found a gun and points it at every other character.
Jason denies Liz’ story, knocks the gun out of Burke’s hand, and runs out of the house. Burke runs after him and fires a couple of shots at a figure he assumes to be Jason, though it could be the sheriff or a small child or some other target of convenience for all he knows. The original Shemp Howard might have thought that last display of stupidity was a bit over-the-top for the Three Stooges. On Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn has a bit of fun with Burke’s carelessness. His whole post about this episode is funny.
Out in the woods, Liz’ brother Roger looks directly at Jason, fails to see him, and moves on.
The sheriff comes and tells Liz that he is very sorry for bothering her with all of this, and assures her that his men will do everything they can to catch Jason and make things as easy for her as they can. Meanwhile, he needs some help digging up the body buried in her basement.
Liz has loudly refused to talk to her lawyers, a wildly bad move in our world, but under Soap Opera Law she has every reason to believe that, as a good person who has already suffered for her deeds, all she has to do is to tell the authorities about a bad person who has profited from his iniquity. The sheriff’s attitude confirms this assessment.
Liz tells well-meaning governess Vicki that she often went into the room where Paul is buried and cried. Vicki had heard sobbing coming from that room several times in the early days of the show, as had housekeeper Mrs Johnson on her first night in the house. At first, the show was equivocal as to whether it was Liz crying or a ghost. That equivocation fit with the show’s initial attitude towards the supernatural, which was to hint that there might be literal ghosts in the background, but to use the word “ghost” primarily as a metaphor for unresolved conflicts based on past events. Eventually, they showed us the door to the room locked from the outside while sobbing came from the inside, confirming that it couldn’t have been Liz. This week the show is committing totally to stories of the paranormal, yet they retreat to the idea that The Sobbing Woman was Liz all along.
Carolyn Collins Stoddard is moping at the bar in the Blue Whale tavern. Bob the Bartender tells her she’s had enough to drink and suggests she go home. Ignoring the suggestion, she plays a Tijuana Brass-style number on the jukebox, then stands in the middle of the floor as if she were about to dance.
Bob is the second person to try to throw Carolyn out of a place today. In the opening, seagoing con man Jason McGuire caught her going through his things in search of a clue as to what he is using to blackmail her mother, matriarch Liz, into marrying him. He told her that after the wedding this evening, he will expect her to move out of what will then be his house.
Carolyn is the only customer in the Blue Whale until her ex-boyfriend, hardworking young fisherman Joe, comes in. She tells Joe she is waiting for her fiancé, motorcycle enthusiast Buzz. The last time we saw Buzz, in #262, he seemed to be losing all patience with Carolyn, and he never does show up at the tavern. It’s starting to seem as if Carolyn will soon find herself with absolutely nowhere to go.
When Joe tells her that she can’t fight McGuire, Carolyn seems to get an idea. She says that maybe she won’t marry Buzz after all. When Joe insists on driving her home, she agrees, with a flourish. We then see her back in the mansion, taking a pistol from a drawer and putting it in her purse.
The wedding is to take place in the drawing room of the mansion. When the judge asks Liz if she will take Jason to be her lawful wedded husband, she declares that she cannot. In a beautiful piece of choreography, four actors fall into place behind her so smoothly that it looks natural for people to line up and look at each other’s backs while talking. Director Lela Swift deserves a lot of credit for finding a perfectly logical way to get people into this perfectly absurd position.
As the guests are absorbing Liz’ statement that she cannot marry Jason, she points at him and declares “I killed Paul Stoddard, and that man was my accomplice.”
Closing Miscellany
We see Jason’s initials on some shoe-brushes in his room.
Jason’s shoe brushes
We’ve seen Bob the Bartender mouthing words in the background in many of the 36 episodes he has appeared in so far, but his refusal to serve Carolyn is only the fourth time he has spoken on camera, after #3, #156, and #186.
Matriarch Liz stands at the edge of a cliff. Rather than let seagoing con man Jason McGuire blackmail her into marrying him, she has resolved to throw herself to her death on the rocks below. As she takes a running start, well-meaning governess Vicki grabs her. Vicki talks Liz out of killing herself, and Liz hugs her.
Liz hugs Vicki
In #140, Vicki had rescued strange and troubled boy David Collins, hauling him to safety as he hung from this same cliff. He too reacted by hugging Vicki. David had been impeding the progress of the story by refusing to spend time with his mother, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. Since Vicki is our point-of-view character, she represents the audience. To embrace her is to embrace the viewers, and to promise to do something we will find interesting, or at least intelligible. Laura’s arc consumed most of the non-paranormal story elements and committed Dark Shadows to become a supernatural thriller/ horror story.
The blackmail arc is meant to finish off the few daylight-world themes left unresolved and to complete that transformation. It has been slow and monotonous, taking a story that Art Wallace had to pad pretty heavily to fill a half hour in 1954 and stretching it over sixteen weeks. Liz’ suicidal moping has been terribly dull. As David’s embrace of Vicki at the cliff’s edge signaled that the real story of Laura and David could start and bring Dark Shadows 1.0 to its conclusion, so Liz’ embrace of Vicki signals that the she will now take action to get Dark Shadows 2.0 off the ground. That signal is amplified a moment later. Liz and Vicki are back in the drawing room, and Liz tells Vicki that she has made her want to live again.
Jason enters the drawing room. He presents Liz with a wedding ring and asks her to try it on. When she refuses to wear it before the wedding, he insists. Liz has already told Vicki about the terrible secret Jason is using to control her. Vicki offers to stay, and looks ready for a fight. The idea of a battle-royale among Vicki, Liz, and Jason is exciting, to the extent that anything within the blackmail story can be exciting, but it doesn’t come off. Liz looks confident and tells Vicki that she can handle the situation herself now. Vicki goes, and we have another dreary scene between Liz and Jason.
We cut to the Blue Whale tavern, where Vicki’s boyfriend, fake Shemp Burke Devlin, is using the pay phone. Burke is talking with a private investigator who has sent him a report about Jason. Seems like a call you’d want to take in a more private setting, but now that they have to keep the Old House set up all the time they no longer have the studio space to build the set for Burke’s hotel room. So Burke lives in the tavern now, and runs his business from there.
Vicki joins Burke. He shows her the report. Jason is wanted by the police in port cities around the world. In no country do the authorities have enough evidence against him to send an extradition request to the USA, but it does explain why he chose this time to put his sea papers away and try his luck with Liz.
Vicki and Burke go back to the house and show the report to Liz. She doesn’t care about it, and Burke admits that he has no means of fighting Jason. Jason kisses Liz, and Burke and Vicki see her recoil in disgust. If Liz has found the means to oppose Jason and break out of the dead end he has confined her to, neither they nor we can see what that means is.
Matriarch Liz is being blackmailed into marrying seagoing con man Jason McGuire. A couple of days ago, she decided the only way to address this situation was to throw herself to her death from a nearby cliff overlooking the sea. She has been prevented from completing this plan twice, first by her housekeeper Mrs Johnson, then by her cousin Barnabas the vampire.
Today, she tries to say goodbye to her nephew, strange and troubled boy David, and to her daughter, aspiring biker mama Carolyn. David tells her it sounds like she is going someplace. “You’re not, are you?” “Of course not!” she replies. Her storyline certainly isn’t going anywhere, why should she be any different.
David suggests that he and Liz take a walk on the beach. He says he wants to show her a cove he found in the rocks there. This will pique the interest of returning viewers. In #260, Barnabas’ prisoner Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town, found a secret panel in the wall of her cell and followed it to just such a chamber, from which she escaped onto the beach. Perhaps David has found the channel that leads into Barnabas’ dungeon.
When Liz tries to have a pleasant conversation with Carolyn, Carolyn responds angrily. She is furious about Liz’ upcoming marriage and insists on voicing her objections to it. Afterward, she has a talk with well-meaning governess Vicki in which she appears to regret her anger. She is worried that Liz might do something desperate.
When Carolyn shares her fears, Vicki asserts that they are groundless. Since both Mrs Johnson and Barnabas had confided in Vicki about Liz’ previous journeys to the edge of the cliff, this seems like a Dumb Vicki moment. But Vicki does go up to Liz’ room afterward. She finds that Liz is gone and she has written her date of death in the family Bible. We cut to the cliff, where Liz is approaching the edge.
The date she wrote was 10 April 1967. The episode was taped on 19 June and broadcast on 5 July; the usual rule of soap opera time is that the events are taking place the day the audience sees them, so that is a puzzling date. All the more so because there was no episode taped or broadcast on 10 April; that date fell on a Sunday, and the actors were in the middle of a strike at that time.
There is some good acting in this one. Joan Bennett does a good job showing Liz having achieved the kind of peace people sometimes reach after they’ve made up their minds to commit suicide, and Liz’ scene with David is especially fine. My wife, Mrs Acilius, was enthusiastic about these performances, but they frustrated me- seeing how good the actors are just made me wish they had a decent script to work with.
Dark Shadows Commentary 