In the great house of Collinwood, matriarch Liz lies unconscious on a sofa, stricken with a mysterious ailment. Well-meaning governess Vicki cannot find Liz’ pulse or heartbeat, and fears she may have died.
Vicki telephones the family doctor. Her boyfriend, an unpleasant man named Peter who prefers to be called Jeff, asks why she doesn’t call for permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, MD. She explains Julia is at the Old House on the estate, home to old world gentleman Barnabas, and that there is no telephone there.
We cut to a bedroom where Barnabas and Julia are devising a plot to murder a woman named Eve. Since Vicki had said they were at the Old House, even longtime viewers will be unlikely to recognize this as Julia’s seldom-seen bedroom at the great house. She had been staying with Barnabas for a while; we might wonder if it is his bedroom, which we have never seen, or if she has a room of her own at his house now.
Julia has a hypodermic needle and plans to fill it with a concoction that will induce a heart attack and immediately dissolve in the bloodstream. This was the weapon Julia prepared for the first murder she and Barnabas committed together, when they killed Dr Dave Woodard in #341. Julia was all broken up about that, but then she and Dave were old med school classmates. Eve is just an undead abomination they whipped up in the laboratory, not a colleague, so Julia is relaxed and smiling this time. Her smile vanishes, though, when the topic turns to Barnabas’ intention to let himself into the house where Eve is staying. It is the home of suave warlock Nicholas, a formidable adversary, and Julia fears he may be walking into a trap.
Julia and Barnabas go downstairs and find Vicki and Peter/ Jeff with the unconscious Liz. Julia examines Liz and pronounces her dead. Seconds later, Liz sits up and starts talking. This is the second death pronouncement Julia has made in the last few days; in #592, which in dramatic time is supposed to have been last night, she declared Liz’ daughter Carolyn dead. Carolyn showed up alive and well a little later, so you might wonder if Julia will wait for an EEG reading next time.
Julia has a nightmare in which it turns out she was right and Barnabas did fall into a trap at Nicholas’ house. They do all the dialogue in recorded voiceover, a device they’ve been exploring lately, and shoot the whole thing through a gauzy filter. The recorded voiceover is OK, but the filter is pretty bad- it just looks like they needed to clean the lens. They even shoot the closing credits through the same greasy smudges. The result is far from satisfactory.
I left a comment on Danny Horn’s post about this episode on Dark Shadows Every Day. I note that Roger Davis, the actor who plays Peter/ Jeff, was in his usual form in this one:
When Barnabas sees Jeff kissing Vicki, he reacts with alarm and rushes out. We were alarmed too- Alexandra Moltke looked excruciatingly uncomfortable during the the first kiss. We almost expected her to call out to Barnabas to rescue her from the second.
Also, at the beginning of the episode Jeff is supposed to feel for Elizabeth’s heartbeat, so Roger Davis helps himself to a handful of Joan Bennett’s left breast. Classy guy…
Comment by “Acilius,” left at 12:13 PM Pacific Time 29 September 2020 on “Episode 604: The Sedating Game,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 13 March 2015.
At the end of Friday’s episode, the well-meaning Vicki Winters was driving her car and bickering irritably with her passenger, Barnabas Collins the vampire. Barnabas wants to elope with her, which she doesn’t object to doing. But first she insists on running an errand in his old neighborhood, the deserted cemetery north of town, and he hates that idea.
A pedestrian wandered into the middle of the road. To keep from hitting him, Vicki had to slam the brakes so hard she lost control of the car and crashed. At least she learned the lesson of the cowardly Roger, who ran over a pedestrian years before the show even started and as punishment was condemned to spend months looking for some guy’s fountain pen.
Today, Vicki and Barnabas are in the hospital. We see Barnabas in bed, moaning alternately for Vicki and his long-lost love, the late Josette. It doesn’t bode well for the planned elopement that in his delirium Barnabas gives Vicki only equal time to Josette. We then see Vicki in her bed, moaning for Peter, an unpleasant young man she got to know recently while visiting the late eighteenth century. She doesn’t mention Barnabas’ name at all.
Vicki comes to and finds Peter at her bedside. He denies that he is Peter, claiming merely to be a strange man who let himself into her room to watch her sleep. She recognizes him not only as her boyfriend from the 1790s, but also as the wayward pedestrian involved in the crash. He admits to this, but will not answer any of her questions.
A nurse enters and finally gets Peter to leave Vicki’s room. Perhaps he will let himself into other girls’ rooms and stare at them while they sleep. The doctor, a man named Lang, comes in.
Dr Lang asks Vicki if she knows Barnabas well. This is an interesting question. Before he bit her on Tuesday, Vicki definitely did not know that Barnabas was a vampire. Her behavior towards him since has been so blasé, not only by contrast with the behavior of his other victims but also by contrast with the eager friendliness and habitual deference she had always shown him in the many months they have known each other, that we can’t tell if she has learned that he is one even now. Indeed, we have no idea what Vicki thinks is going on between her and Barnabas, and as a result their scenes together have been pure comedy.
Vicki nibbles on her index finger and thinks for a moment about Lang’s question. Since they were going off to spend the rest of eternity together, it would be pretty embarrassing for her to admit that she doesn’t really have much understanding of Barnabas, so she says that she does know him well. As she does so, she glances away for a moment, and the light flashes off her eye, emphasizing her unease.
Vicki talking through her hand
Lang asks about Barnabas’ health before the crash. Vicki puts her hands down and stutters slightly as she says “He was in excellent health.” A note of uncertainty gives her voice a childlike quality. When Lang replies with “Really?,” her voice sounds even more childlike when she answers “Y-yes, have you discovered something Mr Collins didn’t know about?” Lang says that he thinks Barnabas knew about it.
Lang looks at Vicki’s neck and finds the marks of Barnabas’ bite. They are just two dark dots, not conspicuously different from the last stages of an ordinary hickey.
The bite marks.
When Lang asks about the marks, Vicki’s grogginess suddenly vanishes and she becomes hyper-alert. Since Vicki has been so bland about her experience with Barnabas, returning viewers might well expect her to answer Lang’s questions about the bite marks by saying that Barnabas gave them to her when they were making out. Instead, she gets defensive, at first denying that she remembers how she got the marks and then asking “What’s wrong with them? Why are they so bad, please tell me?” Alexandra Moltke Isles reads that line brilliantly. There is a touch of defiance in her voice, but also a sincere question- she genuinely does not see any reason she should have to hide the marks or explain them to anyone.
Early in the episode, the telephone rang at the great house of Collinwood, and long-term houseguest Julia Hoffman answered. It was the nurse, reporting that Vicki and Barnabas had been brought in after a traffic accident and that “Mr Collins is on the critical list.” Now Julia is in Barnabas’ room trying to arrange transport to his house. Lang comes in and is astounded at the thought of taking an unconscious patient, who is in critical condition, out of the hospital.
Lang and Julia have a showdown. Lang makes it clear that he knows that Barnabas is a vampire, and has deduced that Julia, who is a doctor doubly qualified to practice as a psychiatrist and a blood specialist, has been trying to cure him. Lang marvels that Julia has been treating “a legendary condition.” He asks to examine her neck; she never removes her scarf, surprising returning viewers who know that Barnabas has not bitten her. He continues to pose direct, well-informed questions, which she continues to parry with lies and evasions. She grits her teeth when he refers to Barnabas as “our patient.” At the last, she agrees to go, and he agrees to keep the room dark.
Barnabas awakens and sees Lang. He becomes agitated and demands to be released. Lang refuses. Lang tells him the time is nearly four o’clock. Dawn broke in central Maine at 4:33 on the morning of 8 April 1968, so Barnabas has little more than a half hour to get back home to his coffin. It is no wonder that Barnabas puts on his murdering face when Lang will not let him go. Lang backs away and says he must explain something Barnabas does not understand. Lang reaches the window. As he opens the heavy curtains, he intones, “Yes, it is four o’clock! But it is FOUR O’CLOCK- IN THE AFTERNOON!!” The sunlight floods the room. Barnabas screams and covers his eyes with his hands. But he does not turn to dust- he is no longer a vampire.
This marks the end of the epilogue to the 1795 segment, and with that the end of Dark Shadows 3.0. Unlike version 1.0, which ended with no unresolved story threads of any interest, and version 2.0, which ended at a moment when the only way forward was the annihilation of all the characters, they have cued up at least three major storylines. Eventually Peter will stop pretending to be someone else and something will happen between him and Vicki; Roger will bring wicked witch Angelique home with him; Lang and Julia will work together to manage Barnabas’ aftercare. There are several other characters available for story-building. We have met kindly eccentric Professor Stokes and expect him to contribute to some or all of these storylines. We do not know how Barnabas’ cure will affect his blood thralls Vicki and Carolyn. Carolyn’s relationship with Humphrey Bogart-esque lawyer Tony is in an awkward spot, and Tony is in a position to trigger a major storyline if he starts telling people what he thinks he knows about Carolyn and Barnabas.
On his blog Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn often identified Addison Powell, who plays Lang, as “THE WORST ACTOR EVER TO APPEAR ON DARK SHADOWS.” I don’t think he deserves that title. In fact, he isn’t even the worst actor in this episode. I’m sure the Nurse was written to be pretentious and silly, but Katharine Balfour’s stiffness and relentlessly exaggerated vocal mannerisms are simply excruciating. Powell isn’t great, and will get much, much worse, but he is basically competent today. Mrs Isles, Jonathan Frid, and Grayson Hall all do excellent work in their scenes with him, and he never once gets in their way. But when Balfour is on stage, the others can do nothing but stop and wait for her to leave. She had an extensive stage career, so I suppose she must have played many parts well, but she is stupefyingly bad today.
After Lang’s big “FOUR O’CLOCK- IN THE AFTERNOON!!,” we cut to the closing credits. Under them is a set where a clock’s hands indicate four. From April 1967 to July 1968, ABC suggested its affiliates run Dark Shadows from 3:30 to 4:00 PM. There were a great many stations which insisted on showing it at 10:30 AM. While it was a hit by this point in the 3:30 slot, its ratings were always rock bottom where it was shown in the mornings, so the great majority of viewers would have seen the correct time as they read the names of the people who worked on the show.
Mad scientist Julia Hoffman is hanging around her new base of operations, the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood. She is getting ready to perform an experiment which, if successful, will convert vampire Barnabas Collins into a real boy. She learned of Barnabas’ existence when treating his former victim Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. Julia answers a knock on the front door, and sees her old acquaintance, addled quack Dave Woodard.
Woodard has no idea what Julia is up to. So far as he knows, she is still on board with his own idiotic scheme, in which he, along with Maggie’s father Sam and her fiancé Joe, has told everyone in town that Maggie is dead in hopes that her captor would forget about imprisoning girls and draining their blood. In fact, Julia has told Barnabas that Maggie is alive and has lured him into cooperating with her project by promising to keep Maggie in a state of amnesia so that she will not represent a threat to him.
In yesterday’s episode, Sam and Joe called on Woodard and complained that Julia is staying at Collinwood while Maggie is a hundred miles away. They demanded that Woodard take her out of Julia’s care. Woodard tells Julia today that her conduct is growing “more and more unethical.”
Last week, Julia was able to forestall Woodard’s threat to take her off the case by playing dumb. This time, she has to take him partly into her confidence, telling him that Maggie encountered the supernatural and that her case represents an opportunity to find a crossing point on the boundary between life and death. She dangles the possibility of great fame before him, saying that the doctors who make the breakthrough she sees coming will go down in history. When he presses for details, she says that there is great danger in what she already knows, and that she must not tell him more.
Woodard has been on the show for months, and has been stuck in just two modes the whole time. When he’s with a patient, he makes a show of brisk dissatisfaction, as if trying to convince them that they oughtn’t to take their disease so seriously that they give up. This mode was as far as Richard Woods, the first actor to play Woodard, got in his two appearances (in #219 and #229.) When he is talking with someone else, Woodard struggles to find the words to express his bafflement at the terrible case he is treating. These two modes didn’t make Woodard a source of suspense. They were just filler between his announcements of what the script called for him to do next.
When Julia asks Woodard if, when he was in school, he dreamed of making a major contribution to the science of medicine, he gets a thoughtful look and says “Well, of course.” This is the first moment we have seen Woodard outside his two modes. When Julia tempts him with the idea that he will go down in history as the co-discoverer of the most fundamental truth imaginable, he displays an emotion that might lead to him to any of a number of exciting, story-productive actions. The first scene in the first episode credited to writer Gordon Russell manages the astounding feat of turning Dr Woodard into an interesting character.
We cut to the woods on the estate. We see the ghost of Barnabas’ nine year old sister Sarah sitting on a rock crying. All of Sarah’s previous scenes started with some other character on camera, then proceeded to Sarah making a mysterious entrance. That’s what we would expect of a ghost, after all. This time, Sarah is all by herself at rise. The first time we saw a ghost was in #70, when the ghost of Josette Collins emerged from her portrait and danced around the columns of the Old House. That was a solo appearance as well, but people had been in the Old House talking about Josette immediately before, so she was manifesting herself in response to attention from the living. Here, we see a ghost on her own, processing her emotions, hoping someone will come and hang out with her.
Strange and troubled boy David Collins shows up and asks Sarah why she is crying. She says she can’t find Maggie. David breaks the news to her that Maggie is dead. Sarah laughs, and assures David that she is still alive. When David insists that Maggie is dead, Sarah tells him that he may know “about leaves and everything,” but she knows “who’s dead, and who isn’t.”
Less than a week ago, in #288, David saw a portrait of Sarah and wondered aloud if the girl he has met is her ghost. In the first 39 weeks of the show, he was on intimate terms with Josette and some of the other ghosts. When he first met Barnabas in #212, he asked him if he were a ghost, and was disappointed to hear that he was not. So returning viewers expect David to ask Sarah the same question. Indeed, David has always interacted with ghosts as if they were people with whom he could pass the time of day, share thoughts and feelings, and get to know better from one encounter to the next. Seeing Sarah crying by herself should validate this attitude. But instead, David has developed Soap Opera Goldfish Syndrome, forgetting information which everything we have seen has led us to expect he will remember.
David insists Sarah come home with him to the great house of Collinwood and have dinner with the family. She tries to decline politely, but he will not take “I’ve been dead for centuries” for an answer. He gets Sarah into the foyer, then goes to the drawing room to announce her presence. He finds Julia there, with well-meaning governess Vicki and Vicki’s depressing boyfriend, fake Shemp Burke Devlin. By the time David gets the adults into the foyer, Sarah has disappeared.
Vicki is suffering from an even more frustrating version of Soap Opera Goldfish Syndrome. She had had extensive dealings with the ghosts of Collinwood on many occasions between #85 and #191, and that had been the basis of her bond with David. Vicki’s interactions with the supernatural reached a climax when she led the opposition to David’s mother, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, from #126 to #191. Since then, Josette has spoken through Vicki at a séance and she has seen Sarah.
But lately, Vicki has started to deny that there are ghosts. This is in response to Burke’s demands. Burke lost his connection to the story months ago, and he’s been trying to gaslight Vicki into dismissing all of her spectral encounters as signs of mental illness so that she will join him on the show’s discard pile of useless characters. In Friday’s episode, Vicki had apparently decided to give in to Burke and make herself believe that there were no supernatural beings at work around Collinwood. As a result, her scenes in that episode were unbearably dreary.
Before David brought Sarah home, Vicki had been dreary again. She’s excited about some old house she saw, and wants Burke to go look at it with her. As David’s governess, Vicki’s compensation consists largely of room and board, so as long as she has her job her interest in any particular piece of real estate isn’t going to lead to story development. If she quits the job and marries Burke, she will be giving up on ever being part of the action again. So her rambling about “the house by the sea” is suspenseful only to fans of Vicki who are afraid she will vanish into the background of the show.
When David starts telling the adults about Sarah, Vicki launches into the same garbage Burke has been giving her, talking down to him about imaginary friends and insinuating that anyone who believes in ghosts is soft in the head. Burke, who had previously been David’s great friend, joins in this abusive behavior. After David indignantly stalks away, Julia gets very uptight and lectures Vicki and Burke about the need to stifle David’s imagination and discourage him from telling them things they don’t already know. This scene is effective, but the effect is claustrophobic- by the end of Julia’s little speech, we feel like the mad scientist is holding us prisoner.
Vicki and Burke decide to leave to look at the house, and Vicki finds Sarah’s cap on the floor. That’s such a great moment that not only do we leave the episode no longer disappointed in David’s goldfish memory, we can even forgive Vicki’s.
The closing credits run over an image of the foyer with Sarah’s cap on the table. My wife, Mrs Acilius, thought it would have been hilarious if Sarah had marched in and taken the cap while the credits were rolling. I’d have liked to see that too, especially if, after putting it back on, Sarah had turned to the camera and put her finger to her lips, telling the audience to keep quiet about what we had seen.
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