Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, has gone missing. The audience knows that she is in the keeping of vampire Barnabas Collins and Barnabas’ sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie Loomis, but the show isn’t ready for any of the characters to get suspicious of Barnabas. So today is taken up with people bemoaning their ignorance of Maggie’s whereabouts.
To keep from stumbling upon information that might advance the plot, the sheriff and the doctor have to be idiots, and they both get particularly embarrassing scenes today. Not only does a frequently caustic commentator like Danny Horn mock them, but even the recap on the Dark Shadows wiki takes some potshots at their stupidity. It cites, as the sheriff’s most brilliant insight, that if Maggie is no longer where she was last seen, she “either got out… herself or was taken out by someone.” And it points out that the doctor goes on at length about the absolutely unique nature of Maggie’s ongoing illness, only to be reminded that Willie exhibited exactly the same symptoms a few weeks before.
Our point of view character in the first months of Dark Shadows was well-meaning governess Vicki. The other day Vicki received a phone call about Maggie from Willie, with whom she had spoken minutes before and who was not disguising his voice in any way. Somehow she failed to recognize him. They bring this up again today. They don’t replay the call, and she says that the voice was “muffled,” so people watching for the first time may not bracket her with the sheriff or the doctor among the show’s dum-dums. Regular viewers, however, will see further reason to despair that the characters will learn enough any time soon to get the story going again.
Seagoing con man Jason McGuire goes to Barnabas’ house and calls on Willie, who was originally his henchman. Jason is worried that Willie is attracting official attention, something which cannot be good for his own nefarious purposes. He refers to Barnabas as “His Nibs,” a phrase indiscreet housekeeper Mrs Johnson had applied to Jason himself in #185, and demands Willie leave town. Willie tells him he can’t do that. Willie threatens Jason with a hammer. Jason disarms Willie and beats him to the floor. As Jason leaves the house, he is surrounded by howling dogs and looks frightened.
We open with the sight of sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie Loomis broken and crumpled on the floor of the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. He is under the heavy cane which vampire Barnabas Collins carries and which he uses to beat Willie. Barnabas demands Willie confess that he played a part in preventing him from taking full possession of Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. Willie at first tries to deny his responsibility, but finally swears that he won’t disobey Barnabas again. Barnabas gives him some orders and dismisses him.
At the Evans cottage, Maggie is sick in bed. When her friend, well-meaning governess Vicki, comes to sit with her, she makes Vicki promise she won’t leave her alone no matter what she says or does. She won’t even let Vicki go as far as the kitchen to fetch her a glass of milk- she doesn’t dare spend one second by herself.
Maggie’s father, artist Sam, has called Vicki because he himself has had to go to the Old House to work on the portrait he is painting of Barnabas. He is working on some problems in the background, and encourages Barnabas to take a walk. While Barnabas is away, Willie comes into the room and asks Sam where he is. Sam is concentrating hard on his work and responds to Willie’s questions with irritated grunts.
When Willie asks Sam how his daughter is doing, Sam turns to him and angrily snaps “Don’t mention her name!” He didn’t mention her name, but he was very rude to Maggie more than once in the days before he met Barnabas, when he was still dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis. In #207, Willie was so crass in his behavior towards Maggie and Sam in The Blue Whale tavern that dashing action hero Burke Devlin had to beat him up and order him to leave town, the incident that prompted Willie to launch the grave-robbing expedition that released Barnabas. Sam was unhappy to see Willie again at the end of #222. By #225/226, he was willing to tell Burke that Willie had reformed, but that doesn’t mean he wants him to have anything to do with Maggie.
Of course, Maggie has already become Willie’s colleague, Barnabas’ second blood thrall. That’s the point of showing us the results of the beatings Barnabas inflicts on Willie. We’ve known Maggie for over 46 weeks and have liked her the whole time, so the idea that she is on her way to suffer that kind of abuse horrifies us. Willie’s determination to help Maggie, asking Sam about her even after the beatings, shows us how much he wants to spare Maggie the fate that has befallen him.
Back in the Evans cottage, Maggie has had another mood swing. These are familiar to readers of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, where the vampire’s victims Lucy and Mina are at one moment desperate to be rescued from him and at the next equally desperate to go to him. Maggie has been displaying these swings for several days now, and it is only because Kathryn Leigh Scott is a highly trained actress with a big bag of tricks that the scene where she demands Vicki leave is not painfully repetitious. My wife, Mrs Acilius, was particularly impressed with the way Maggie enunciates the word “leave” in her commands to Vicki.
Dogs make alarming noises near the french windows, sending Vicki into a state of panic. Maggie denies that she hears them at all. When the windows rattle and it seems that a pack of fierce dogs are about to burst in, Vicki runs to the next room to telephone Burke. When she is out, the door to Maggie’s room slams shut and Vicki finds that she is unable to open it.
Some wonder why Vicki goes to the next room to make her call when there is a telephone next to Maggie’s bed. Maggie used it to make a call in #225/226, and it was prominently featured in several shots in #231. I think it makes sense, though. Maggie is between Vicki and that telephone, and she is being extremely uncooperative. Vicki doesn’t want to take the time to fight her, she wants to call for help at once. Besides, Vicki is so terrified that we wouldn’t expect her to look around, and she has used the telephone in the other room before.
Others might wonder why she calls Burke rather than calling the police. Considering what we have seen of the Collinsport sheriff’s office, I don’t think this is a difficult decision to defend. Vicki tried to call the sheriff from the Evans cottage the other day, and no one was there to answer the phone. Nor have they managed to solve any of the crimes that have been committed on the show so far, even though the perpetrators left so much evidence lying around that Vicki herself, while going about her business, has accidentally stumbled on the solutions to one murder and two attempted murders.
The final shot of the episode, with Vicki banging on Maggie’s door and pleading with her, is not very compelling, and brings a wince to the faces of viewers who remember #84-#87, when Vicki was locked in a room in an abandoned part of the great house of Collinwood and spent several hundred hours of screen time* banging on the door and calling for help. Today’s ending isn’t exactly a Dumb Vicki moment, but it certainly isn’t an interesting moment, and we hope there aren’t any more like it.
*An approximation. It seemed like at least a thousand hours, but since the whole story played out in three and a half episodes lasting 22 minutes each I don’t suppose it could actually have been quite that long.
Well-meaning governess Vicki and flighty heiress Carolyn are in the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood talking about how nervous the electrical storm outside is making them. Vicki describes her reactions while driving a car a few moments before. This deepens a mystery that opened yesterday- what car? They’ve so often made a point of having Vicki ask to borrow Carolyn’s car, or accepting rides from people, or catching the bus, or walking much further than people thought was sensible that you’d expect them to have mentioned something if she got a car of her own.
The lights go out, and the women get even more nervous. A figure appears in the doorway and frightens them. They are relieved to discover that it’s just cousin Barnabas. Barnabas is getting to be such a familiar presence that one suspects they might have been relieved to see him even if they knew he is a vampire.
Barnabas looks out the window at the storm and talks about how fierce the storms are on the hilltop Collinwood occupies. He mentions something we haven’t heard about for months, the “Widows’ Wail.” The wind makes a peculiar sound as it blows over Widows’ Hill, and there is a legend that it is really the disembodied voices of the widows whose menfolk died on the fishing boats of the cruel Collins family. We heard the sound effect several times in the first ten weeks of the show, and the legend often came up in those days.
Barnabas then goes on at great length about a woman who leapt to her death from the cliff on Widow’s Hill well over a century before. He makes it clear that the woman was alone with her lover, then describes particular words and gestures in such detail and with such feeling that only the lover himself could provide them. He assures the women that “every word” of his account is true, including the parts about the woman unable to face a future in which she would be transformed into something she found intolerable, the lover putting his lips on the woman’s neck, her growing faint as a result, her finding a last burst of energy to fling herself to death on the rocks below, and her body found bloodless, but with a look of serenity on her face.*
Carolyn was on edge to start with, and the story deepens her anxiety. She excuses herself to go to bed. Vicki was even more anxious than Carolyn before Barnabas started his tale, but as he goes on her fear vanishes. She tells Barnabas that she wonders if there is a connection between the “bloodless” body and the recent incidents of blood loss involving cows, Barnabas’ servant Willie, and Maggie Evans, the Nicest Girl in Town. Barnabas reminds her that his story took place in an earlier century. She says she knows that, but that she is thinking that the ordinary logic of the natural world may not be enough to solve the ongoing mysteries. Regular viewers will remember that Vicki has had extensive experience with the paranormal, and have been expecting her to be the first to consider the possibility that Willie, Maggie, and the cows have encountered something that is not subject to the same laws that describe ordinary phenomena.
Barnabas squirms, and at one point drops his “cousin from England” mask altogether. As Vicki is explaining her thinking, he says in a bland voice that she is a “very clever girl” and should be careful lest the same thing happen to her that happened to Willie, Maggie, and the cows. Then he looks up and starts to walk away from her, leading to an ominous music sting and a commercial break.
After the break, we see that Barnabas is still in the drawing room with Vicki. She looks startled, and asks him what he meant by his remark. He says that he merely meant that whatever happened to them might happen to anyone. If that is intended to retroactively veil his unveiled threat, it fails miserably- it sounds even more menacing.
Among the representatives of the show’s supernatural back-world whom Vicki has already met, none is more important than the ghost of Josette Collins. The woman Barnabas is describing threw herself to her death off Widow’s Hill in a previous century while wearing a white dress, as Josette did. Other women have jumped from there in the years since, but Josette is still the most famous. When Maggie’s father, artist Sam Evans, saw the portrait of Josette in #185, he asked if she was the lady who went over the cliff. Vicki’s excited reaction to the story suggests that she thinks Barnabas might be talking about Josette.
If he is, it is a major retcon. When we first saw Barnabas in the Old House in #212, he told strange and troubled boy David Collins that she was “our ancestor,” meaning a forebear both of David’s branch of the family and of “the original Barnabas Collins,” that is, himself. After David left, he told the portrait that the house was his now, and that the spirits of his father Joshua and of Josette have no more power there. When he refers to Josette as his ancestor and brackets her with his father, he implies that she sided with his father against him. Since we know that Joshua’s wife, Barnabas’ mother, was named Naomi, and that Josette’s husband was named Jeremiah Collins, the likeliest explanation of these lines would be that Josette was Barnabas’ grandmother. Just a few weeks later, they seem to have reinvented her as his lover.
Barnabas’ story is also a bit of a departure from the usual depiction of vampires. Bram Stoker’s Dracula may have been a revenant form of Vlad III of Wallachia, but he doesn’t mope around obsessing over the good old days in the fifteenth century when he could stay up all day impaling people to his heart’s content. He is entirely focused on the task before him. Dracula’s colleagues in film and on stage had likewise tended to be killing machines, not given to nostalgia or introspection.
Barnabas’ claims to be a devotee of the late eighteenth century have so far been a technique for shifting the conversation from current events, of which he is after all comprehensively ignorant, to the deep past, in discussion of which he can show that he knows so much about the Collins family that he must be a member of it. Even when he gets carried away, as in #214 when he was telling Vicki about the construction of the Old House and started laughing maniacally about the word “death,” it’s a reminder that the events he is talking about seem quite recent to him, since he emerged from his coffin not long ago. But today, he seems to be brooding over the past in a way that has less to do with previous vampires than it does with the character Boris Karloff played in The Mummy (1932). Indeed, Jonathan Frid’s voice and movements are so strongly reminiscent of Karloff that one wonders if Barnabas will turn out to be a merger of Dracula with Imhotep.
Seagoing con man Jason McGuire enters. Vicki hates Jason, who is flagrantly blackmailing reclusive matriarch Liz. She likes Barnabas, but the encounter with him is getting extremely awkward. She quickly excuses herself to go to bed. When Barnabas says that he too must be going, Jason insists that he stay.
Barnabas’ reaction to Jason is pretty funny. When Jason says he wants to discuss something with him, Barnabas tenses and rolls his eyes. Suddenly the drawing room is the scene of a drawing room comedy, and Barnabas is the classic snob forced to deal with an uncouth bounder. For regular viewers, their scene is not just a well-played, if not particularly well-written, specimen of this genre. Barnabas is the latest of the supernatural beings who have been driving the action of the show for six months, while Jason is a throwback to the days when Dark Shadows was a noir-ish crime drama centered on the search for Burke Devlin’s fountain pen. Barnabas’ disdain for Jason mirrors our lack of interest in reviving that phase of the show.
Jason reveals to Barnabas that he had seen Willie earlier that night, that he suspects Willie is involved somehow in the troubles afflicting Maggie, and that he knows Willie has been visiting Eagle Hill cemetery. All of this is unsettling to Barnabas. He goes home to the Old House on the estate, shouts “Willie!,” and raises the cane he had earlier used to give Willie a severe beating.
Dark Shadows has been a supernatural thriller ever since the ghosts of Josette and the Widows scared Matthew Morgan to death in December 1966. But today’s episode is the first one that is structured like a horror movie.
Horror movies tend to focus on the visible damage done to the bodies of the female victims of the monster. The current victim is Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, and the monster is vampire Barnabas Collins. We open with Maggie’s father, artist Sam Evans, looking helplessly around the house. Sam doesn’t know it, but Maggie was compelled to leave by the power that Barnabas has gained over her by drinking her blood.
What Sam does know is that Maggie was in extremely poor health. He cannot understand how she could have gone anywhere under her own power. We then see Maggie looking awful and wandering around the graveyard. Later, a closeup of a professional headshot of actress Kathryn Leigh Scott will dissolve into an image of Maggie among the tombstones, contrasting her usual fresh-faced beauty with her present ghastly haggardness.
Maggie’s professional headshotThe dissolveBride of the monster
The monster who has reduced her to this sorry state, vampire Barnabas Collins, emerges from the fog. Barnabas has been on the show for four full weeks now, but this is the first time we see his face not in the pleasant disguise of a wealthy gentleman visiting from across the sea. He is wearing a more extreme version of the makeup Maggie has on, and his fangs feature prominently. This is the introduction of the monster, a key element on any horror film, and it suggests that Barnabas is now what Maggie will become.
When Barnabas hears Maggie’s friends approaching before he can complete his evil plan, he drops her on the ground and steps over her, again treating her body as a thing.
Barnabas steps over Maggie
After she is carried home, Maggie moans about her pain but can say nothing about what has happened to her, who is responsible for it, or what she is thinking. Again, we can connect only with her physical being, not her social relations or her inner life or the events that have involved her. At the end, the handkerchief tied around her neck is removed without her permission or objection, as if she were inanimate. The camera zooms in on open wounds on her neck, isolating that area and leaving us with the image of the wounds as things available to us to examine apart from Maggie’s personality or the rest of her body.
The Source of the Evil
The episode is an adaptation of elements from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Early in that novel, the vampire’s victim Lucy rose from her sickbed and wandered off to a graveyard. As Lucy is found by her friend Mina, so Maggie will be found by her friend, well-meaning governess Vicki. As Mina would spend the second half of the novel as the only female member of a group of stalwart and dynamic men doing battle with the evil Count, so Vicki is working with an otherwise all-male search party led by dashing action hero Burke Devlin. As Mina’s colleagues exclude her from their activities and thereby come close to total failure, so the men leave Vicki behind in the Evans cottage to wait by the phone, only to find that she is the one who will have the most to offer when she joins them in the field.
After Lucy dies and her undead form is destroyed, Mina becomes Dracula’s victim. Mina ends up as the precursor of the “Final Girl” in the mad slasher movie, playing a key part in Dracula’s final defeat, though unlike those movies Dracula ends with a successful team effort.
Since Vicki has been our point of view character from the beginning, was an effective protagonist in the “Phoenix” storyline, and is as relentlessly wholesome as the Final Girl typically is, we might expect that she will be Barnabas’ last victim. That expectation in turn suggests that Maggie, like Lucy, will die, rise as a vampire, and be destroyed by those who love her most. Maggie is one of every viewer’s favorite characters, so the prospect that she might turn into a monster and then leave the show altogether brings keen suspense.
Barnabas Beats His Willie
Vicki does have two important conversations with sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie Loomis while she is in the Evans cottage. The first occurs when Willie comes to the door to bring a message that his master Barnabas will not be available at the usual time to sit for the portrait Maggie’s father is painting of him. Vicki tells Willie that Sam is out searching for Maggie, and Willie becomes very upset to learn that Maggie is missing.
The second conversation comes a few minutes later, when Willie, not disguising his voice in any way, telephones the Evans cottage and tells Vicki that Maggie is in the cemetery and that she is in extreme danger. Somehow Vicki doesn’t recognize his voice. I suppose there were lots of people it might have been- maybe it was Detective Mary Beth Lacey’s husband Harvey from Cagney and Lacey, or Stefan from Daughters of Darkness, or Jock Porter from Love is a Many Splendored Thing, or Geoffrey Fitton from the original Broadway cast of All in Good Time, or any of dozens of policemen and criminals who were in single episodes of cop shows in the 1970s and 1980s.
Willie’s call to Vicki made me wonder about the extent of Barnabas’ powers. When we first saw Barnabas with Willie, his power over him was so extreme that it cost Willie a great effort even to ask Barnabas an unwelcome question, and a look was enough to drive Willie to scurry off and perform the most hateful of tasks. An act of defiance like this was out of the question. Perhaps Barnabas can only keep one blood thrall under total control at a time, and by adding Maggie to his diet he has weakened his hold over Willie.
Willie intrudes on Barnabas’ encounter with Maggie in the cemetery to warn him that Maggie’s friends are on their way. Barnabas instantly suspects that Willie told them where to look for her. When Vicki’s party arrives in the cemetery, Barnabas and Willie run away and hide in the back room of the Collins family tomb where Barnabas was trapped for about 170 years until Willie accidentally released him. This is a departure from Dracula– the Count would have attacked whoever interrupted him, no matter how many of them there were, and fled only if they were armed with crucifixes or consecrated communion wafers or other objects he couldn’t tolerate. But, as my wife Mrs Acilius pointed out, Barnabas has gone a long time without using his vampire powers, so he’s probably rusty.
Barnabas and Willie listen as Burke looks around the outer room of the mausoleum. Once they are sure he is gone, Barnabas confronts Willie with his suspicions. Willie’s lies do not satisfy him, and he lifts his heavy cane and starts beating Willie with it. All we see of this beating is Jonathan Frid’s face and the cane in his hand, but those images, coupled with sound of John Karlen’s cries, imply a violence that shocks us.
Burke picks Maggie up off the ground, grunting audibly as he does so. He carries her into her house, again with a lot of grunting. If I had been Kathryn Leigh Scott’s agent, the production staff would have received a very hot letter about that grunting. The good-looking young women on a soap opera aren’t supposed to weigh anything at all, certainly not enough to cause a dashing action hero to grunt like that even if he carried her all the way from the cemetery.*
In his post about this episode, Danny Horn has some lines about the ineffectiveness of the Collinsport police that I can’t resist quoting:
Sam tells the Scooby gang that he’s alerted the police — the sheriff and his deputies are out looking for Maggie. But, as everyone knows, the police department in Collinsport is 100% useless, so by now the deputies have probably arrested each other, and the sheriff’s all tangled up in a clothesline somewhere…
Vicki tries to call the sheriff, but there’s no answer; apparently every single person associated with the police department is out searching for Maggie, or falling down wells, or buying magic beans, or whatever the hell it is that Collinsport police officers do in a crisis.
When I first read about “the sheriff all tangled up in a clothesline somewhere” a few years ago, I laughed for about five minutes and knew I would be reading Danny’s blog to the end. I’m glad I did, it’s so much fun it inspired me to start this one.
*Mrs Acilius and I remembered a story Miss Scott tells nowadays. Early in the production of the show, Joan Bennett saw her eating a cheese Danish and said “The figure you have now can be your career for the rest of your life.” She put the cheese Danish down immediately, and hasn’t eaten another since. Our response to the story has been to eat cheese Danish on Miss Scott’s behalf at regular intervals.
Vampire Barnabas Collins enters the bedroom of Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. We see a closeup of him in profile, his mouth open to expose his fangs. This shot might have been effective if it had flashed on the screen for a fifth of a second or less and been followed by some kind of action, but we linger on it for a couple of seconds and cut to the opening credits. The result is laugh-out-loud funny. It makes him look like he’s pretending to be a dog in a cartoon. It’s bad enough when Barnabas reminds us of a Scooby-Doo villain without pushing him over the line into imitating Scooby-Doo.
The rest of the episode is composed of scenes that go on too long, though none quite as disastrously as this. In the morning, Maggie’s father, artist and former alcoholic Sam, wakes her. She is ill and moody. Kathryn Leigh Scott maintains just the right level of intensity, and David Ford plays Sam quietly enough to stay out of her way. But they make all their points in the first minute or two, and it just keeps going.
Later, Maggie is sitting at the counter at her place of employment in the restaurant at the Collinsport Inn.* She’s wearing a scarf and feeling awful. Her boyfriend, hardworking young fisherman Joe, comes in. He teasingly asks her how a paying customer can get a cup of coffee. She tells him to pour it himself. He’s about to do it when she drags herself to her feet. She drops the cup. He makes a little joke about seeing her use a broom and she says she’ll sweep it up later. He is shocked, and she snaps at him.
She continues to have trouble with basic tasks, and Joe grows concerned. Sam comes in and reminds her that he told her she shouldn’t have gone to work. He says he’ll call the doctor, and she yells at him. Then, she faints.
That’s probably the best scene in the episode. Miss Scott holds on at the level she had established in the previous scene, while Joel Crothers matches Ford’s steady, understated support. With three actors, there’s enough action to keep us interested. My wife, Mrs Acilius, praised the choreography that allowed Miss Scott to make such a memorable turn unencumbered by Malcolm Marmorstein’s dialogue. Still, they could have done all that in about half the time and we wouldn’t have missed a thing.
Then Maggie’s back in her room, this time with Joe sitting on the side of the bed while she lies in it. The body language between them is affectionate, but after about a minute and a half you can’t help but notice them complying with the requirements of the Standards and Practices office. Sick as Maggie is, it is jarring to see Joe keep his distance from her quite so scrupulously.
Night falls, and we see Barnabas in his house. He peers out his window, and we cut to Maggie. She’s still in her room, but now she is out of bed, brushing her hair, and grinning. Sam enters and is surprised at the change in her.
After a meandering conversation, Maggie volunteers to drive Sam to Barnabas’ house where Sam will be working on a portrait of Barnabas. Evidently Sam agrees, because the two of them enter there together.
Maggie and Barnabas exchange looks and conversation loaded with double meanings while Sam sets up. Jonathan Frid plays Barnabas’ part in this so heavily that it is laughable Sam doesn’t notice something is going on between him and Maggie.
I’m always reluctant to complain about Frid’s acting. It’s so hard to explain just what it was that made Barnabas such an enormous hit that you can never rule out the possibility that any given thing might have been indispensable to it. Still, seeing him ham it up so shamelessly today, especially after the other three members of the cast have shown such strict discipline, I did have to wonder what he was thinking. It’s hard to imagine anyone would have directed him to play the part that way.
I can see one advantage to Frid’s overacting. Maggie sticks around his house a couple of minutes after the point of the sequence has been made, and the time is filled with repetitious dialogue about her illness. When Barnabas says that the house is an unhealthy place for someone in her condition, Frid leans so hard on the line and makes himself look so silly that you don’t really notice that there is no reason for the scene still to be going on.
After Maggie has gone home and got back into bed, Sam tells Barnabas he’s tired and thinks it’s time to stop for the night.** Barnabas wants him to keep going for a while and to take the next night off. They discuss this fascinating topic at length. Sam decides to spend an hour working on the background. Their conversation has already taken so long that we fear they might show that hour of painting in real time, and it is a relief when Barnabas says he will go outside while Sam paints. We can assume he’s going to pop into Maggie’s room for a snack.
*The last appearance of this set, alas.
**Barnabas’ sorely bedraggled blood-thrall, Willie Loomis, will be driving Sam home. At this point they’ve settled on the idea that Willie has a car.
This teleplay badly needed another trip through the typewriter.
In the opening scenes, seagoing con man Jason McGuire demands his friend and former henchman, the sorely bedraggled Willie Loomis, leave the estate of Collinwood and the town of Collinsport. He mentions that he saw Willie’s car the night before at the cemetery. He then orders Willie to get on a bus and leave town. Then he starts talking about Willie’s car again. Does Willie have a car or not? They’ve gone back and forth on this from one episode to another, but today they can’t keep it straight from one line of dialogue to the next.
A doctor shows up to examine Willie. He tells Jason that Willie is not sick at all. The reason he is so weak is that he has lost “an enormous amount of blood.” What does the doctor think the word “sick” means if it doesn’t apply to a person who is doing badly because of an “enormous” loss of blood?
Whatever meaning the doctor attaches to “sick” apparently also applies to “ailment.” High-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins asks what Willie’s ailment is, and the doctor says he has no ailment. He is simply immobilized due to an enormous loss of blood.
The doctor tells first Jason, then Roger, that Willie will be fine if he gets some rest and fluids and food. The idea of a blood transfusion doesn’t cross his mind, nor do Jason or Roger bring it up. It would be one thing if the doctor, Jason, and Roger were played by the Three Stooges, but there is no sign that we are supposed to think that they are a load of idiots.
An actor who has repeatedly triumphed over bad writing reappears after an absence of sixteen weeks. This is Dana Elcar as Sheriff George Patterson. The sheriff’s activities don’t always make a great deal of sense, but Elcar’s acting choices and his zest for performance make him a pleasure to watch no matter how dire the script he has to work with.
Today, the sheriff is telling Roger that a number of cows on the farms owned by the Collins family have been destroyed. A person or persons unknown somehow sucked every drop of blood out of these cows through small punctures in their hides. Roger is deeply unsettled by this strange news, and the sheriff sympathizes with him.
Roger repeatedly asks the sheriff why he is the one telling him about the cows. He says that he would have expected the veterinarian to call him. The sheriff says that the veterinarian called his office, because he determined that the cows were killed by someone’s deliberate act. That doesn’t explain why the veterinarian, whose bill the Collinses will presumably be paying, didn’t call him. We were so glad to see these fine actors working together that the senselessness of the scene didn’t bother us while we were watching it, but as soon as it was over we were left with a feeling of confusion.
Regular viewers do wonder what farms the sheriff and Roger are talking about. The only previous reference to the word “farm” in connection with the Collinses was in #64, when Sheriff Patterson told their servant Matthew Morgan to “work their farm for them” and stay out of trouble. Today’s conversation repeatedly refers to “farms,” plural, more than one of which are big enough to have cows. That’s an operation much too complicated for Matthew, who had many other duties, to have handled by himself. Besides, Matthew left his job in #112 and was scared to death by ghosts in #126, and hasn’t been replaced. Whatever farm Matthew was working must have been so small that the Collinses can take care of it themselves in whatever time they can spare from their main occupation, keeping secrets and being sarcastic.
Writer Ron Sproat specialized in inventorying disused storylines and getting them out of the way. Back when Matthew was on the show, the Collinses were heavily in debt and running out of money. Dashing action hero Burke Devlin spent the first 40 weeks of the show trying to avenge himself on the Collinses by driving them into bankruptcy. All of that has gone by the boards, and we aren’t hearing any more about troubles concerning the business. So it’s time for Dark Shadows to reconceive the family as financially secure, indeed as imposingly rich. Talking about their many farms and the herds of livestock on them helps Sproat open up space in his narrative warehouse, but it doesn’t offer much to interest the audience.
My wife, Mrs Acilius, thought up a little fanfic that might have introduced the same points more intriguingly. The trouble with the cows first came up in #215. Hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell told the story of a calf belonging to his uncle that was found drained of blood. That suggested that an evil has been loosed that is spreading throughout the town and beyond. Why not stick with Joe as the point of view character in connection with the mystery of the desiccated cows? Not only would that give a badly under-utilized character something to do, but would also give us the sense that the fate of a whole community is at stake in the action.
If they needed to connect the Collinses to the cow story, they could have come up with a way to oblige them to join with Joe to figure out what’s going on. That in turn would raise the prospect of a story structured like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, in which one character after another joins the team opposing the malign Count. The formation of the group that resisted blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins in the months leading up to #191 very much followed the pattern set in Stoker’s novel. Of course, the ending could be modified. The Laura story ended, not with the triumphant team-work that defeats Dracula, but with well-meaning governess Vicki cut off from her allies and left to confront Laura alone. But the team-work leading up to that point was full of interest, as characters shared information with each other, reconfigured their relationships, and found themselves doing things neither they nor we would have expected. Simply reintroducing the topic of the cows and leaving Joe and the Collinses siloed off from each other is easy for the writers, but it doesn’t take the story anywhere.
Seagoing con man Jason McGuire finds his old henchman, the sorely bedraggled Willie Loomis, in a bar and drags him back to the great house of Collinwood. He orders Willie to apologize to reclusive matriarch Liz and her daughter Carolyn for, among other things, trying to rape Carolyn. The ladies distrust Willie at first, and Carolyn has occasion to remind Willie that she had to fend him off by pointing a loaded pistol at him and promising to blow his brains out. After a few minutes, though, Carolyn realizes that Willie is strangely changed and seriously ill.
Carolyn leaves, and Liz and Jason have a scene together in the drawing room while Willie and the portrait of Barnabas Collins have a scene in the foyer. Willie and the portrait have some fresh material to explore; Willie tries to evade the portrait’s gaze. When he cannot, he screams and faints. A closeup of the portrait emphasizes its grim look of command. It was Willie’s obsession with the portrait that drew him to his doom, and now a sinister force calls to him through it.
The scene in the drawing room is anything but fresh. Jason makes a demand of Liz, in this case that she let Willie stay in the house; Liz resists the demand; Jason threatens to expose her terrible secret; Liz capitulates. This is the eleventh time we have seen this particular ritual, and it is no more interesting than were the previous ten.
Writing from the perspective of someone who started watching Dark Shadows with #210, Danny Horn praises the acting of Joan Bennett and Dennis Patrick and declares this the first good scene on the show. Bennett and Patrick were outstanding performers to be sure, but those of us who have seen this same scene so many times before will be less enthusiastic. Besides, there have been some other good scenes in the last few days, even if most of them involved actors triumphing over weak scripts. And in the first months of the series, there were whole episodes that were good, one of them as recently as eight weeks ago.
It is by no means clear why Jason wants Willie in the house. Jason’s whole plan seems to be to blackmail Liz and squeeze her for whatever he can get, and Willie plays no part in that. On the contrary, the danger he represents to Carolyn and to well-meaning governess Vicki very nearly prompts Liz to call the police and put an end to the whole situation.
In #204 and #205, Willie threatened to expose Jason’s guilty secrets if he didn’t deliver a large sum of money right away, suggesting that Jason is keeping his own blackmailer close at hand. But yesterday, Willie said he didn’t want any money, and today he says that he wants to go far away and never see Collinwood again. So it would seem Jason is off whatever hook Willie may have been keeping him on.
Liz breaks it to Carolyn that Willie is going to be back in the house while he recovers from his illness. Carolyn at once agrees that this is as it should be. She is deeply concerned about Willie’s sorry state and believes that his apology is sincere. She asks Liz if she also believes this. Joan Bennett plays her response for a laugh- Liz is so surprised that Carolyn is actually convinced by Willie that she momentarily forgets to pretend to be convinced herself.
Viewers who saw all of Willie’s depredations will appreciate Carolyn’s response. If someone as thoroughly loathsome as he was can inspire this much sympathy after falling under the malign influence he has released, how much more poignant will it be when the same influence starts to work on a character we actually like?
The episode ends with a scene between Willie and Jason. Willie is in bed, moaning that he wants to get away from Collinwood, while Jason bullies him to stay and tries to find out what’s wrong with him. When Willie snarls at him to stay away from the bite on his wrist, all those scenes with Liz become retroactively easier to tolerate. Willie was hard to watch when he was trying to rape the female characters, but now that he has been brought low by the fell powers of darkness he’s likable enough. Jason’s insistence on probing into Willie’s doings suggests he too will get his comeuppance sooner or later.
The contrast between Carolyn’s final speech to Liz, with its reference to Willie’s apparently “spiritual” disorder and her remark that she isn’t sure she wants to know what is going on with him, and Jason’s final interrogation of Willie, with its assumptions that Willie has committed a specific crime and sustained a specific injury in the course of it, shows the difference between Carolyn and Jason as characters. Carolyn has been on Dark Shadows from the beginning and knows that the ghosts have been getting more and more intrusive. She remembers that her Aunt Laura visited recently and turned out to be a murderous fire witch from beyond the grave, and that by the end of Laura’s time no one could be sure if anything that has happened in Collinsport has been entirely of this earth. She knows that she is part of a supernatural thriller/ horror story, and has an eye out for the uncanny.
Jason showed up only a few weeks ago, immediately after Laura vanished. He is an in-betweener, meant to sweep away some leftover story elements, get the vampire onto the show, and fill time before the deadline for departure the actor gave the producers when he took the part. But as far as Jason knows, he is the leading character in a show about blackmail plots, whodunits, and missing fountain pens. He is a throwback to a phase of the show that ended in November of 1966, and he is speeding towards his doom.
In episode 1 of Dark Shadows, dashing action hero Burke Devlin returned to his home town, the isolated fishing village of Collinsport, Maine. He’d left Collinsport in poverty and disgrace, and returned as a millionaire many times over, the master of a financial empire. He had vowed to use his great wealth to exact vengeance on the ancient and esteemed Collins family. In #201, he gave up his quest for revenge, which had never been very interesting to watch anyway, and now is unconnected to any storyline. He’s still in town though, spending his evenings in The Blue Whale, a waterfront tavern where he has appointed himself to act as bouncer.
In #207, dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis was rude to some other patrons at the Blue Whale. Burke defeated Willie in a fight and ordered him to leave town. Today, Burke comes back to the tavern. No one has seen Willie for a week or so, but neither is it clear that he has left Collinsport for good. Burke is looking for Willie, planning to beat him up again if he finds him.
When Burke enters, he sees Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, sitting alone at a table. While she waits for her boyfriend, hardworking young fisherman Joe, Maggie talks with Burke about not knowing where Willie is.
Willie’s associate, seagoing con man Jason McGuire, comes into the tavern. Burke goes up to him. They also talk about not knowing where Willie is.
Joe shows up. He’s been helping his uncle search, not for Willie, but for a missing calf. They found remains of the little guy, far from the farm and completely drained of blood by some mysterious process. They are baffled by this development.
Willie drifts in. He sits down at the bar and starts drinking. Burke goes up to confront him, but is confounded by Willie’s broken demeanor. After a few moments, his hostility gives way to compassion, and he speaks gently to Willie.
Jason returns, and Burke tells him he’s worried that Willie seems to be very ill. Jason then confronts Willie, and is astounded when Willie tells him he doesn’t want the $500 in cash Jason is holding for him. Jason also notices that Willie has some bloodstains on his sleeve.
I like this one. Sure, the writing has its flaws, and there are a couple of shots where it’s hard to tell what the visual composition was supposed to be. And Mitch Ryan is obviously drunk. But they rise beyond all that.
Kathryn Leigh Scott plays Maggie throughout as an understated version of her original wised-up conception, very apt for the barroom setting and a fine offset to the intensity all the male characters have to show this time. She doesn’t have many lines, but she has everything she needs to keep the show on track.
Dennis Patrick’s face and voice show at least two emotions in every shot, and he and Mitch Ryan do a terrific job as two men who don’t like each other but can’t help getting absorbed in a puzzle that fascinates them both. The music that builds throughout that scene and reaches its crescendo as Jason leaves the bar matches the complex emotional palette with which the actors are working; it doesn’t sound anything like the usual Dark Shadows music, and I don’t think we ever hear it again.
Joel Crothers’ turn as the messenger announcing the tragedy of the calves is as tense as the dialogue between Patrick and Ryan, but his studiousness and deliberation change the pace sufficiently to keep the scenes from blurring together. Ryan and Scott deliver their responses to him with a calm intelligence that emphasizes those qualities and makes Willie’s stumbling entrance a real surprise.
Ryan’s scene with John Karlen is a turning point in the series. Burke’s shift from a menacing demand that Willie leave town to an alarmed concern for his well-being marks the end of Scary Violent Willie and the arrival of Wretched Broken Willie, and his conference with Jason confirms that change. Everything Karlen does on the show from this point on, right up to his performance as Kendrick, begins with this scene.
If that looks familiar, it may be because I linked to it on tumblr.
I should also link to a characteristically insightful post in which Patrick McCray explains how this episode, in which Barnabas Collins is neither seen nor mentioned, contributes substantially to the sense of danger surrounding him. The story Joe tells about his uncle’s calf is the show’s first reference to blood-sucking, and it comes after we’ve started to wonder whether Barnabas really is a vampire, or is some less familiar type of hobgoblin.
For the first 20 weeks of its run, Dark Shadows developed its story at a stately pace. When writers Art Wallace and Francis Swann were replaced by Ron Sproat and Malcolm Marmorstein, stately became glacial, and at times ground to a halt altogether. For the last few months, Joe Caldwell has been making uncredited contributions to the writing. While Caldwell is probably responsible for some of the glittering moments of witty dialogue and intriguing characterization that have cropped up, everything is still taking a very long time. And this is the second episode in a row in which nothing at all happens to advance the plot.
There are a few interesting moments. We begin with well-meaning governess Vicki entering the long-abandoned Old House on the grounds of the estate of Collinwood in search of her charge, strange and troubled boy David Collins. The doors swing shut, and she cannot open them. The recently arrived Barnabas Collins comes down the stairs, startling her. He opens the doors easily.
This may not sound like a big thrill, but regular viewers will remember that doors swung open at the approach of the previous supernatural menace, blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. When characters who did not know that Laura was anything other than a woman saw that happen, they didn’t react- it was a small enough thing that they could fail to notice it, and a weird enough thing that it didn’t register. So we have been prepared to watch for tricks with doors as a sign of the uncanny.
Barnabas’ big challenge today is a job of acting. He has to convince the residents of Collinwood that he is a living man from the twentieth century, not a reanimated corpse come to prey upon the living. He has trouble staying in character. When he tells Vicki that once, centuries ago, a father and son had a quarrel in the Old House that led to the son’s death, he starts laughing and repeats the word “death.” Vicki looks at him like he’s a lunatic. He gets it back together fairly quickly, but when Vicki goes back to the great house on the estate she will tell flighty heiress Carolyn that Barnabas is kind of strange.
Barnabas gives Vicki a long, flowery speech about the building of the house, one with no apparent motivation and many logical stopping places. Marmorstein has been giving these overheated orations to actor after actor, defeating them all. As Vicki, Alexandra Moltke Isles came the closest to selling one of them, at the beginning of #167, but she needed maximum support from the director in the form of close-up shots and lighting effects, and even then it was a relief when it was over.
Barnabas’ entire part consists of such speeches. Jonathan Frid stumbles over his lines quite a bit today, as he will do henceforth. No wonder- not only was he dyslexic, but at this point they were shooting seven days a week to make up for production time they lost in a strike late in March. That left him with precious little time to memorize the pages and pages of purple prose they kept dumping on him.
Listening to Frid struggle through his dialogue today, we discover the first reason why Barnabas became such a hit. In his voice, through his mannerisms, Marmorstein’s gibberish sounds gorgeous. Sometimes Frid’s struggle to remember what he’s supposed to say is a problem for the character. Since Barnabas is himself an actor essaying a demanding role, it gets confusing to see Frid’s own difficulties laid on top of his. But even at those times the sound of his voice is so appealing that we root for him to recover and deliver more of his ridiculous lines.
In his speech to Vicki about the building of the Old House, Barnabas mentions that the foundations were made of rocks deposited by glaciers. Any reference at all to glaciers is pretty brave, considering the rate at which the story has been moving in the Sproat/ Marmorstein era. It also raises a question about Barnabas. He is the man who posed for a portrait done in an eighteenth century style, and David told dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis stories about Barnabas’ mother Naomi that would place her towards the middle of the eighteenth century. We’ve also glimpsed a plaque on Naomi’s tomb that gives her dates as 1761-1821, but that prop hasn’t received anything like the screen time the portrait of Barnabas has had, and must have been made long before David’s lines to Willie were finalized. So the trend is to regard Barnabas as someone who was confined to a coffin from the eighteenth century until Monday night. When he starts talking about the rocks laid down during the Ice Age, an event unknown until the mid-nineteenth century, we wonder which night this week he spent updating his understanding of geology.
In the great house, high-born ne-er-do-well Roger comes home from a business trip to Boston. Before updating him and the audience on recent plot developments, Carolyn reminisces about her childhood, when he used to bring gifts to her when he would come home from business trips. She tells him he was the only father she knew. This is a retcon- up to this point, they’ve taken pains to make it clear that Roger and David only moved into the house a few weeks before Vicki’s arrival in episode 1.
Vicki and Barnabas enter the great house. She introduces him to Carolyn and Roger. Roger quickly escorts Barnabas to the study where the two of them talk alone. Roger mentions that a vineyard in Spain that had been in the family in the eighteenth century was still theirs until shortly before World War Two. Barnabas does not react to the phrase “World War Two” at all. Whether this is because he has been studying history as well as geology, or because he was simply overwhelmed with so much new information, is not explained.
While Roger and Barnabas are in the study, Vicki tries to explain to Carolyn why she thinks Barnabas is a bit odd. Carolyn doesn’t want to hear it. She explains the basis of the Collins family’s attitude towards Barnabas when she says it’s a relief just to meet someone friendly after the rough time they’ve had lately. Viewers who have been watching from the beginning will understand how strong that sense of relief must be, and will know that Barnabas is in a position to ride it right into a permanent billet on the estate.
Barnabas leaves, and Roger shows Vicki and Carolyn the portrait. He points out that Barnabas is wearing the same ring as its subject. He does not point out that he is also carrying the even more distinctive wolf’s-head cane.
While those three talk about the wealthy and genial visitor from England Barnabas appears to be, we wonder what he really is. Barnabas first appeared as a hand darting out of a coffin, he has shown up only at night, he lived hundreds of years ago, and he is played by an actor who bears a noticeable resemblance to Bela Lugosi. So we assume that he is a vampire. But so far, there hasn’t been any direct evidence of blood-sucking. During the months Laura was on the show, they made a point of not assimilating her to any familiar mythology. So for all we know, he might be something we’ve never heard of.
The final shot before the credits roll is in the outdoors, where Barnabas is standing perfectly still, surrounded by shrubbery, and with a big smile on his face. Perhaps that shot is telling us that Barnabas is not the vampire we might assume he is, but that he is in fact an undead garden gnome.
We begin in the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood, where reclusive matriarch Liz and seagoing con man Jason are shouting at each other. Jason showed up and started blackmailing Liz when the last interesting storyline ended four weeks ago, and she is so fed up with the whole thing she doesn’t even bother to close the door when they’re yelling about her terrible secret. Liz’ daughter, flighty heiress Carolyn, comes in and overhears a chunk of the quarrel. She demands to know what it’s all about. Liz tries to fob her off with an obvious lie. Carolyn stalks off, frustrated that her mother won’t tell her what is happening.
Carolyn tries to figure out what’s going on with her mother and Jason
Carolyn goes to the local tavern, The Blue Whale. There, she meets two other characters who don’t have any particular reason to be on the show right now. One of them is dashing action hero Burke Devlin, whose quest to avenge himself on Carolyn’s family drove much of the action in the early months of the show, gradually fizzled out, and came to an abrupt conclusion in #201.
With Burke is hardworking young fisherman Joe. When Dark Shadows started, Joe and Carolyn were dating, and there were a bunch of scenes about how their relationship wasn’t working. Since they were already terminally bored with each other the first time we saw them, this was never much of a story. Now Joe is seeing Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town. Joe and Maggie are relaxed and happy together, and they want to get married. During the Revenge of Burke Devlin story, there was the prospect that Maggie’s father’s connection with Burke’s plans would get in their way. Now that’s all over, and nobody’s stopping them from getting on with their lives.
Burke, Joe, and Carolyn hang around the tavern for most of the episode and apologize to each other for what they did and said back in the days when they were principals in ongoing narrative threads. Meanwhile, the jukebox keeps going, playing a wider assortment of music than we’ve ever heard from it. In addition to several pieces by Robert Cobert, including an orchestral bit I don’t think we’ve heard before, we hear Les and Larry Elgart’s versions of a tune by Gerry and the Pacemakers and of “Brazil.” This latter is something of a signature of Burke’s. He has often talked about his business interests in South America, and “Brazil” usually plays when a scene at The Blue Whale focuses on him. In his conversation with Carolyn, he behaves as if he is at home and she is his guest, even escorting her to the door when she leaves. As he shows her out, “Brazil” swells on the soundtrack.
Carolyn returns to Collinwood. The drawing room doors are closed now, but Liz and Jason are so loud that she can tell they are still having the same quarrel they were having when she left. Carolyn goes into the room and tells her what she couldn’t help overhearing. Liz tells another transparent lie, then leaves.
Liz is still visible on the stairs when Carolyn asks Jason what they were really talking about. When she presses him for answers, Jason tells Carolyn that if she doesn’t stop asking questions, her mother could get into serious trouble. We’ve seen Jason threaten Liz many, many times, but this is the first time he has shown his nasty side to another member of the family.
Dark Shadows Commentary 