In its first months, Dark Shadows spent a fair bit of time on the business interests of the ancient and esteemed Collins family. In those days, the Collinses were running out of money and their old nemesis, Burke Devlin, had come back to town with a plan to strip them of their remaining assets and drive them into poverty. The “Revenge of Burke Devlin” storyline never really took off, and was eventually subsumed into the tale of blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. Shortly after Laura disappeared, Burke formally gave up on his revenge. With that, the business stories ended, and there was no particular reason for Burke to stick around.
On Tuesday, Burke was recast. However little his character may have had to do on the show or however much he may have had to drink before he arrived at the studio, Mitch Ryan was always interesting to watch. Anthony George couldn’t match Ryan’s charisma, but by 1967 he had been a familiar face in feature films and primetime television for years. The original audience, even if they couldn’t remember George’s name, would have recognized him as a famous actor and assumed that his casting meant that something big was in store for Burke.
Today, we have two hints that business stories might be making a comeback as well. Seagoing con man Jason McGuire is blackmailing reclusive matriarch Liz into marrying him. Vampire Barnabas worries that the cozy little home he has made for himself in the Old House on the estate of Collinwood might be threatened if Jason takes control of the family’s holdings. He asks Liz’ brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger, to look at the original deeds for the Old House and the great house to see if there is some provision he might be able to use to defend his interests against Jason. That Barnabas asks about the deeds would suggest that he has acquired some form of ownership in the Old House. We’ve never seen him buy the house from Liz or receive it as a gift from her, but if both deeds are still in Liz’ name, he could hardly use their wording to claim a right to stay there. So when Roger goes off to look for the deeds, there is a chance he will come back with a story about real estate.
The second hint comes in Barnabas’ confrontation with Jason. Barnabas takes a very aggressive tone with Jason, who responds by asking Barnabas where he goes in the daytime and where his money comes from. “You have no accounts in the bank in town, and I know you don’t operate a business…” If Barnabas is going to be on the show for the long haul, as the ratings clearly indicate we should expect him to be, Jason will not be the last person to ask these questions. We might wonder how exactly he will forestall them.
If we have been watching from the beginning, the likeliest answer would involve Burke. When was a major character, Burke was presented as an inexhaustibly rich man who knew his way around some of the shadiest places in the world. If Burke happens upon Barnabas’ secret, we could expect Barnabas to bite him and thereby bring him under his power. With his money, Burke could set up plenty of bank accounts and businesses in Barnabas’ name. With his contacts in the demimonde, he could secure whatever papers Barnabas needs to establish his identity. Even a photo ID- Burke could easily hire a Barnabas lookalike to pose for a British passport.*
During the “Revenge of Burke Devlin” arc, Burke bought up a lot of Liz’ debts. In particular, he held enough notes payable on demand that she feared he might be able to put her out of business at any time. That hasn’t been mentioned for a long while, but if Barnabas takes control of Burke he could take those notes and exchange some of them for outright ownership of the Old House.
Barnabas could also compel Burke to fabricate some fraudulent papers that would make it look as if he were deeply in debt to Barnabas. When Barnabas got around to killing Burke, those papers would come to light. Liz and Roger would be grateful to Barnabas for taming their old adversary and clearing out some debts that posed a danger to their financial position, while well-meaning governess Vicki would be grateful to him for helping her boyfriend save his face after his business went south. As a result, his position at Collinwood would be unassailable.
Closing Miscellany
There is a location insert of Roger walking to the Old House, a flashlight in hand. I don’t think we have seen this footage before.
Until today, Barnabas has tried to be very suave with everyone who doesn’t know that he is a vampire. Since he has nothing to say to Jason that will intimidate him, he might as well continue that approach in his scene with him, or at least play dumb. But instead, he is openly, and self-defeatingly, hostile. This will become a pattern in future episodes. Time and again, Barnabas will greet a potential adversary with an immediate declaration of war, often before the adversary even knows who he is, thereby forfeiting whatever element of surprise he might have on his side.
Barnabas catches a glimpse of the ghost of his sister Sarah. He only sees her as a figure moving in the distance as he is looking out the window, and has no idea who she is. But it does confirm that he is able to see her, something we had not known he could do.
Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, has solved a riddle posed by the ghost of nine year old Sarah Collins. The solution led Maggie to a secret panel through which she has escaped from the cell in which she has been imprisoned by Sarah’s big brother, vampire Barnabas Collins. Barnabas is chasing Maggie through the corridors on the other side of the panel.
Maggie has reached two doors, both of which appear to be locked. The other day, Sarah had visited Maggie in the cell and played “London Bridge” on her recorder. Maggie hears a few notes of that same tune, and one of the doors opens. She runs through the door, closing it behind her. She finds herself in another maze of corridors. She hears the music again, and follows it to a stairway. A moment later, we cut to Barnabas going through the other door and heading in Maggie’s direction.
Maggie finds herself on the beach. She staggers about and collapses. Apparently her escape took more strength than she had left after her long imprisonment. Barnabas makes his way to the beach and stands over Maggie, declaring that he has defeated her. She screams.
Maggie’s father, Sam Evans, is on the beach. Sarah had visited him at home and told him he might find Maggie if he went there that night. Sam hears Maggie’s scream and calls out. Barnabas retreats while Sam runs to Maggie.
Barnabas hides behind a rock and stares hard at Maggie. When he first sucked Maggie’s blood, Barnabas gained great power over her mind. She has shaken free from that to the point where she can try to kill him and run away from him, but maybe he still thinks he can put some kind of zap on her.
Evil eye
In the hospital, Sam, addled quack Dr Woodard, and Maggie’s boyfriend Joe discover that Maggie has amnesia and thinks she’s ten years old. She greets Sam as “Papa,” a title Sam says she hasn’t used in “a long time.” She did call him that in #200, but that was an ultra-dramatic moment, so maybe he means it has been a long time since she used it when she was calm and cheerful. Sam tells Woodard about Sarah. Maggie reacts to Sarah’s name, which is surprising since Sarah never gave it to her. Maggie has Sarah’s doll, which the men find puzzling but don’t ask her about.
Woodard has an idea. The three of them will tell everyone that Maggie is dead, and she will go to Windcliff, a nursing home a hundred miles north of town, which would put it someplace near Mount Katahdin. There, she will be in the hands of Dr Woodard’s colleague Julia Hoffman.
After Sam and Joe have agreed to this, we see Barnabas enter the hospital. A clock prominently featured on the wall shows that it is 3:30 AM. Barnabas asks to see Maggie. Dr Woodard asks him how he knew she was in the hospital. He claims that he has heard a rumor to that effect from everyone in town. Woodard says he isn’t surprised. Collinsport must be rather an odd place if everyone is up and exchanging rumors at that hour.
Woodard tells Barnabas that Maggie is dead. She never recovered consciousness, so she wasn’t able to tell anyone what happened to her. Barnabas manages to keep from smiling until after he turns his face away from the doctor.
Barnabas’ obvious relief when Woodard tells him that Maggie is dead makes an interesting contrast with the shot of him behind the rock on the beach. Maggie’s amnesia is such a stark change from her mental state in the last couple of weeks that it seems Barnabas must have made a successful attempt to project psychic power against her. But those transmissions go in only one direction- he can’t sense that Maggie is still alive.
This is the first time we hear the name “Julia Hoffman.” Woodard first mentioned Dr Hoffman in #242, when she was a blood specialist and a man. Julia still has expert knowledge about blood, but is now primarily a psychiatrist.
There is a legend among fans of Dark Shadows that Julia transitioned from male to female as the result of a typographical error. Ron Sproat is supposed to have put the name “Julian Hoffman” in the script, but a typist left the “n” off the end of the first name. Executive Producer Dan Curtis liked the idea of a female Dr Hoffman, and they ran with it.
The Dark Shadows wiki explains that the evidence does not support this charming tale. Various members of cast and production staff told various stories over the years to explain the switch, and no surviving paperwork can settle the question for us. It certainly is true that the storylines sometimes took wild U-turns based on last-minute decisions by Curtis and others, and some of those decisions were so whimsical that they may as well have been based on typographical errors. But it is also true that we’ve never heard the name “Julian,” and the near-rhyme of “Julian Hoffman” would be the first awkward-sounding name on Dark Shadows. Further, Woodard stopped mentioning Hoffman weeks ago, likely before ABC had decided to renew the show beyond #260.
If they are going to make another 13 weeks of Dark Shadows, they are going to need new characters and new storylines. They must have responded to the renewal with some story conferences during which the producers, the writing staff, and others tried to flesh out some possibilities.
The writers appear to have decided there would be a secret passage from the Old House to the beach by #238, when well-meaning governess Vicki mentions that the Old House is very close to the sea. That was a retcon that would startle viewers who remembered previous episodes that suggested it was deep in the woods. But it wasn’t clear then that Maggie would be the one escaping by that passage. She was ranging freely through the house at that point, and wasn’t locked up in the cell until #251. Until that point, it was possible Maggie would become a vampire and be destroyed like Lucy in Dracula, leaving Vicki to be the Final Girl who escapes from Barnabas’ clutches and defeats him.
Months ago, they brought parapsychologist Dr Peter Guthrie on the show to help fight undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. In #183 and #184, Guthrie offered to help Laura if she would renounce evil and participate in his research. That suggested the possibility that a complex relationship might arise between the male visiting expert and the undead female menace. Laura was a one-shot monster, on a mission to burn her son David to death and bound to vanish after the attempt, and so could not stay on the show indefinitely. She could respond to Guthrie’s offer only by killing him the night after he made it. But now an undead male menace is here for the duration, so a female visiting expert might be able to pick up the marker Guthrie laid down.
There are a lot of jokes in Dark Shadows fandom about Julia’s two specialties. Psychiatry and hematology don’t usually go hand in hand. I’ve dreamed up a little fanfic that satisfies me about this. I shared it in a comment on Danny Horn’s Dark Shadows Every Day:
The story I made up for myself is that Julia started out as a blood specialist but switched to psychiatry. She was interested in rare diseases, the rarer the better. She found that in hematology, there’s so much money to be made from developing treatments for the most widespread disorders that a researcher with an emphasis in the exotic is constantly fighting an uphill battle for funding and recognition.* Even those colleagues who had an abstract appreciation of the importance of studying rare disorders had to work within a system where all the institutions push them towards the biggest projects possible.
Psychiatry, on the other hand, always had room for the unusual.** In fact, Julia discovered that high-strung rich people would pay a great deal of money to be told that whatever happens to be bothering them at the moment is not the same kind of problem that one of their servants might have, but is a mental aberration hitherto unattested in the annals of psychiatry.*** So she switched to that field and quickly made enough money to open her own, hugely profitable, mental hospital. But she never stopped working in rare blood diseases, and the experiments she was able to finance by flattering the vanity of her wealthier patients earned her such a reputation in a male-dominated field that even her old acquaintance Dave Woodard would commit sexist slips of the tongue and say of “Hoffman” that “he” is “the top man in the field” of rare blood diseases.
Lucrative as Windcliff was, Julia’s true love was never money, or even science per se, but the exotic. When she found herself as the best friend/ frequent accomplice/ bossy big sister of an honest-to-wickedness vampire, surrounded by ghosts and witches and werewolves and Frankensteins and time travelers and interdimensional anomalies and who knows what else, there was never any question of her going back to the office.
*I have no reason to believe this was true in the real world in the middle decades of the twentieth century, or that it is true today. It’s simply part of the fictional world in which I see Julia. **(Same note) ***(Same note)
Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, has been a prisoner of vampire Barnabas Collins for a long time now. Barnabas is planning to kill her tonight. We spend the opening scene with Barnabas’ sorely bedraggled blood thrall, Willie Loomis. We hear Willie’s thoughts as he does the housekeeping. Willie wishes he could save Maggie, but Barnabas has too much power over him. The most he can do is bring her a poisoned glass of milk and invite her to drink it if she wants to die an easy death.
Willie is not Maggie’s only friend. The ghost of Barnabas’ nine year old sister, Sarah, materializes in Maggie’s cell. Sarah asks Maggie why she is crying. Maggie tells her that if she doesn’t get out of the cell very soon, she will die. Sarah is distressed to hear this- “You mustn’t die- I don’t want you to die.”
Maggie hasn’t figured out that Sarah is a ghost, and keeps asking her how she manages to get in and out of the cell. Sarah usually evades this question, but now she says that there is a way. She came upon it accidentally, long ago, and her father ordered her not to tell anyone, not even her brother. She will be punished if she tells. If her father put her in the prison cell in their basement intentionally, Sarah’s fear of punishment is quite understandable.
Sarah overcomes her fear sufficiently to share a riddle with Maggie which she says will give her the answer:
One, two, away they flew.
Three, four, by the door.
Five, six, count the bricks.
Seven, eight, the clue is “grate.”
Nine, ten, home again.
Maggie asks Sarah to repeat the riddle, and she says she can only say it once. Maggie tells her where to find her own father, Sam Evans, and asks her to tell Sam that she has seen her. Sarah disappears.
Sarah’s fear of punishment will ring a bell for regular viewers. Strange and troubled boy David Collins is so intensely afraid that his father, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger, will punish him by sending him away to a boarding school or a jail that he tried to murder Roger. Later, David left his favorite person, well-meaning governess Vicki, to be decapitated by crazed handyman Matthew Morgan because he was afraid that if he helped Vicki his father would find out he had earlier defied him and would punish him. Now, Maggie is in mortal danger because another Collins child, one who lived in a previous century, has a similar fear of punishment. The cell in the basement of the Old House was there before slavery was abolished in the area in 1783; perhaps Sarah’s fear and David’s are a bequest from the slaves and indentured servants whom their forebears locked up in it.
We cut to the Evans cottage. Sam is an artist, and is working. Sarah materializes in the living room. Sam had locked the door and Sarah won’t explain how she got in, but he seems to be delighted with her anyway. She is impressed with his paintings and asks him to paint a picture of her. He offers a drawing instead. When she agrees, he picks her up and sets her on a stool. She flashes a grin at being picked up. She asks if she can keep the drawing when he is done with it.
The most fun Sarah has had the whole time she’s been dead
Sam tells Sarah that her dress is very pretty. He then mentions that you don’t see many dresses in its style. She asks if that means he doesn’t like it. When Sam says that all he means is that it isn’t the sort of thing other little girls wear, she says she doesn’t play with other little girls so she doesn’t care what they wear. She seems to be getting worked up about this, so Sam calms her down with, “All right, all right, I see.” This little exchange gave my wife, Mrs Acilius, a laugh. Sarah may have been born in the same year as Jacob Grimm, but she is very much a nine year old girl.
While Sam draws Sarah, she steers the conversation to Maggie. She asks Sam if he looked for Maggie on the beach under Widow’s Hill. He says he’s looked everywhere he could. She repeats her suggestion that he look for her on the beach. He says he is sure he won’t find her there. She responds “You might, if you go there tonight.” Disturbed by this, Sam looks up, and finds that Sarah has vanished.
This surprises us almost as much as it surprises Sam. Sarah had made it clear that she very much wanted to keep the drawing, yet she disappears before Sam is finished. Evidently, it wasn’t within her power to stay.
Back in the cell, we see Maggie and hear her thoughts as she tries to remember Sarah’s riddle. Like Willie’s voiceover internal monologue in the opening scenes, Maggie’s goes on too long. We can see that Maggie is in an upsetting situation and understand why Sarah’s presence confuses and distracts her. That makes it clear she would have difficulty remembering the exact wording of the riddle, but we really don’t need to hear her go over every part of it.
By the time Maggie finds the loose brick that triggers the opening of the secret panel, Barnabas is already rising from his coffin. We cut between Barnabas walking through the basement and Maggie struggling to open the panel. It may sound like we’re describing filler when we say that we see Barnabas traversing three distinct corridors between his coffin and Maggie’s cell, but it doesn’t feel that way. Not only do these shots build suspense as we wonder if Maggie will get out before he reaches her, but in Barnabas shown as a hunched, solitary figure in narrow spaces sketched in shades of gray we see the representative of a world bleak beyond endurance. We can see why the first serious feature film about a vampire, F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), devoted so much screen time to showing Count Orlok skulking about the corridors of his castle.
First corridorSecond corridorThird corridor
Maggie crawls into the secret passage. She doesn’t close the panel behind her. Not only doesn’t Maggie know that Sarah is a ghost, she doesn’t know that Barnabas is Sarah’s brother. When Sarah says that not even her brother knows about the secret panel, she is telling us, but not Maggie, that Barnabas is unfamiliar with this way. We know that if Maggie had closed the panel, Barnabas wouldn’t have known where to look for her, and so we might yell at the screen urging her to do that. But since it is his house, she has to assume that he does know about the panel, and she knows that he might be at the door any second. So it is rational for her to forget the panel and use all of her time moving forward.
The gap between Maggie’s knowledge and ours again adds to the suspense as we watch her flee from Barnabas through the twisting passages beyond the panel. We only see one path, but the looks on the actors’ faces as they look from side to side tell us that there are several. Maggie is moving cautiously, choosing her way with care, the sensible thing to do if Barnabas is familiar with the passages. Since we know that it is new to him as it is to her, we want her simply to pick a path and run.
Maggie beholding the paths before her
Maggie finds two heavy doors, both of them apparently stuck. Barnabas looks around, seems bewildered, and takes a breath. He shouts a speech at Maggie, claiming that she has no chance of escape because he can hear her. He can’t hear much while he’s shouting, so we want her to take advantage of that and bash away at one of the doors during his speech.
Barnabas wondering at part of his house he never knew existedMaggie with two closed doors in front of her and an angry vampire behind her
This episode ends the 52nd week of Dark Shadows. When ABC* picked the series up in 1966, it gave executive producer Dan Curtis a 26 week commitment, carrying production to #130. After that, the network renewed it for the then-standard 13 week period. The first renewal carried them to #195, the second to this episode. Until just a couple of months ago, the ratings were so low that no one thought it was likely that it would get a third renewal. When the vampire was introduced in April, viewership started to pick up, preventing cancellation and requiring them to come up with a story that they could keep telling.
I do think we can see traces here and there of the original plan. The first part of the plan seems to have been to copy Bram Stoker’s Dracula far more thoroughly than they wound up doing.
The two female characters on the show who had or were about to have boyfriends when Barnabas was introduced were Maggie and Vicki, who are both seeing men who are cut out to be stout-hearted action heroes. The two female characters in Bram Stoker’s Dracula who had boyfriends were Lucy Westenra and Mina Murray, who were both seeing men who emerge as stout-hearted action heroes. Dracula feeds on Lucy, prompting several other people to band together to try to save her. Dr John Seward, MD, contacts his old Professor, the brilliant Abraham Van Helsing, to advise the group. Despite their best efforts, Lucy dies and rises as a vampire, the “Bloofer Lady” who feeds on the children of east London. Lucy’s boyfriend has to destroy her body to free her soul of the vampire curse.
If the show was about to be canceled, it would have been a favor to Kathryn Leigh Scott to have Maggie suffer Lucy’s fate. Going out with a splash like that would certainly have given her something to lead with as she looked for her next job. But once it was decided that the show would continue beyond #260, it was out of the question to lose a character as popular and versatile as Maggie. When the network ordered 65 more episodes, Maggie had to be saved.
The Van Helsing analogue was actually named on screen. In #242, the show’s equivalent of Dr John Seward, addled quack Dr Woodard, said that he was going to call in a specialist to consult on Maggie’s case, a Dr Hoffman, who is “one of the best men in the field.” We haven’t heard about this man since Dan Curtis found out the show was going to be renewed, suggesting that they’ve abandoned the idea to hew quite so closely to Dracula.
In Stoker’s novel, once Van Helsing has corrected the group’s knowledge deficits concerning vampires, Mina emerges as its leader. Attempting to be gallant, the men cut Mina out of their operations, with the result that Dracula escapes them and bites her. Mina is able to resist his influence so far that she can play a pivotal role in the Count’s final destruction.
The first time Dark Shadows modeled a storyline on Dracula, the menace was not a vampire, but undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. In that arc, the men formed a group of stout-hearted heroes advised by Dr Peter Guthrie and led by well-meaning governess Vicki. Guthrie and Vicki were plainly Van Helsing and Mina. Laura killed Guthrie, so he can’t come back to help in the fight against Barnabas, but Vicki is still around, still the chief protagonist, and still the one likeliest to lead the opposition to a villain.
Indeed, Barnabas has expressed interest in Vicki as a replacement for Maggie, and in #233 he blurted out an obvious threat when he realized she was getting uncomfortably close to figuring out the truth about him. So, had Dark Shadows ended with this episode, it is likely that it would have ended with Vicki overcoming Barnabas’ power and driving a stake through his heart.
Of course, the vampire is the source of the ratings, and Vicki and Maggie are needed for future story development. So the makers of the show can’t use any of those plot elements. What in the world they can do is a question that does not, as yet, have a clear answer. So they have been stalling and stalling. Sooner or later, the stalling will have to end.
*The American Broadcasting Company, that is, not the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
A mysterious little girl in eighteenth century garb shows up outside the dungeon cell where vampire Barnabas Collins is keeping his victim, Maggie Evans. The girl stands with her back to Maggie’s cell and sings a couple of verses of “London Bridge” over and over while tossing a ball. Maggie pleads with her to stop singing, to get away before Barnabas and his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie Loomis catch her, and to tell someone that she has seen her. The girl does not acknowledge Maggie in any way.
Seconds after the girl has strolled slowly away, Willie comes by the same path she had taken. Maggie is bewildered that Willie didn’t see her. She urges Willie to escape from Barnabas. Willie gives a big speech about how he thinks about escaping all the time, and that when he is in his car he has sometimes tried to keep driving. But Barnabas’ power keeps pulling him back. Regular viewers will be interested in this confirmation that Willie has a car.*
At the great house of Collinwood, strange and troubled boy David Collins is impatient with the geography lesson his governess Vicki is trying to give him. In the first 39 weeks of the show, the only set which consistently saw interesting scenes was David’s room, where he and Vicki became friends during his lessons. They don’t have the studio space to build that set today, so this lesson is conducted in the drawing room. When flighty heiress Carolyn comes into the room, Vicki sends David to play outside. Since the interrupted lesson was about Australia, he hops away kangaroo-style.
Vicki and Carolyn talk about Carolyn’s boyfriend, motorcycle enthusiast Buzz. Buzz is a refugee from Beach Blanket Bingo, so broadly comic a figure that he might have been too silly even for the biker gang in that movie and its sequels. Unfortunately, Buzz doesn’t show up today, and Vicki and Carolyn’s conversation is a pure specimen of old-time soap opera earnestness. There is an odd moment when Vicki asks Carolyn “How far do you intend to go with Buzz?” and Carolyn answers “All the way!” At the end of the scene, Carolyn uses the phrase “all the way” again. She’s talking about her plan to marry Buzz, but “all the way” was such a familiar euphemism for sexual intercourse in the 1960s that it is hard to imagine it wasn’t intentional on some level. When Carolyn tells Vicki that she and Buzz will go “all the way” while Vicki watches, we wonder what weddings are like in Collinsport.**
David has gone to the yard around Barnabas’ house. We see a location insert of him on the swing set there. This footage is reused from #130, when we discovered that he was being watched by his mother, blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. Laura had died sometime previously, but it didn’t take.
Now, he is being watched again. The mysterious little girl from the dungeon has made her way up to the porch and calls to him as “Boy!” When he tells her his name is David, she says “I know.” She gives her name as Sarah, and asks him to play with her. They toss her ball back and forth, and he finds fault with her fondness for “London Bridge.” She says she used to go to school, a long time ago. She lives around there, but everyone she lives with went away and left her all alone. She excuses herself to go look for them. Willie then comes out of the house. David tells him about Sarah, and Willie shoos him away.
Playing catch as best you can when you’re on a tiny set, photographed in 4X3. Screenshot byDark Shadows Before I Die
That Sarah can come and go from the dungeon without being seen shows that she is one of the ghosts who haunt the house. David has seen several of these, but does not recognize her. Her behavior in the opening scenes leaves us wondering if she is aware of Maggie’s presence; if not, she may simply be an apparition, unable to interact with the living characters.
When Sarah meets David, not only is she able to converse with him, but her ability to play catch with him using the ball she brought with her shows that she has a physical body and that she can manipulate material objects. That makes it all the more puzzling that she did not answer Maggie. Was she ignoring her, or was she somehow less capable in the dungeon than she is on the porch?
When Sarah uses the words “a long time ago,” we suspect that she knows she is a ghost and she has been displaced to a future century. But then she becomes confused as to where her people are, and is filled with a terrible urgency to go look for them. Again it is ambiguous just what sort of being Sarah is and what she can do.
There is always a vagueness about the supernatural- if you could explain a phenomenon fully in words and measurements, it wouldn’t be in that category at all. The key to holding an audience’s attention with a story about ghosts and such is to intrigue them with questions that seem like they might have answers and to use them to lead to another, equally imponderable set of questions before the first set gets old. So it is a promising sign that Sarah is introduced while we are still asking what Barnabas can do, what he wants to accomplish, what he needs for survival, and how he got to be the way he is.
That we see David in a lesson with Vicki and then hear him talking with Sarah about how neither of them goes to school anymore is also interesting to regular viewers. Dark Shadows is just about a year old. It started with Vicki’s arrival at Collinwood, where reclusive matriarch Liz had summoned her to teach David. David and his father, Liz’ impecunious brother Roger Collins, had been living at Collinwood for about a month. Before then, they had lived in Augusta, Maine, where David went to school.
When Vicki showed up, Roger objected that he knew nothing about her, and Liz refused to tell him or Vicki how she knew that she existed or why she chose her to be David’s governess. The show has been hinting very heavily that Vicki is Liz’ biological daughter and that Liz is desperate to keep that relationship secret. It is also clear that Liz wants above all for David to grow into her idea of a male Collins, an idea to which her bratty little brother Roger does not in any way conform.
Barnabas’ plan for Maggie is a ghoulish parody of Liz’ for David. He wants to erase her personality and replace it with that of his long-lost love, Josette Collins. Over the generations since her death, Josette has become the patroness of the Collins family and the emblem of its perfect female member. And of course Barnabas is as anxious to hide the secrets in his basement as Liz is to hide those in hers. That Sarah appears to both Maggie and David emphasizes that Barnabas is a funhouse mirror reflection of Liz.
Back in the great house, David hears Buzz’ motorcycle and tells Carolyn that he is there for her. She can’t quite bring herself to tell David that she and Buzz are planning to get married, but does encourage his interest in going for a bike ride with Buzz. As she leaves, he brilliantly mimes motorcycle riding.
David gives Vicki a detailed account of his encounter with Sarah. She is disappointed he didn’t bring her home. Though it is her job to be David’s only friend, Vicki is no more enthusiastic about his isolation from playmates his own age than Willie is about Barnabas’ treatment of Maggie.
Back in the dungeon, Willie finds that Maggie has not eaten. They share a sad moment. He leaves, and Sarah reappears. Maggie talks to her. At first, she doesn’t respond. But then she turns to her and says “If you see my big brother, don’t tell him you saw me. He doesn’t like anybody to come down here.” Then she leaves, a spring in her step.
The last time a ghost spoke to an imprisoned woman was in the same house, in #126. That time, Vicki was bound and gagged and hidden in a secret room on the main floor by crazed handyman Matthew Morgan. When Matthew had gone to get an ax with which to decapitate Vicki, the ghost of Josette had appeared to her and said, in a perfectly cheerful voice,*** “Do not be afraid.” Josette didn’t untie Vicki or anything, she just told her that and vanished. Later in the episode, she and some other ghosts scare Matthew to death before he can kill Vicki. When Sarah goes away from the stunned Maggie and skips along the floor, regular viewers might remember that event and see a promise that Sarah has something up her sleeve.
Closing Miscellany
Sarah is identified in the closing credits as “Sarah Collins,” the name given in #211 for Barnabas’ sister who died in childhood. That rather blunts the surprise of her closing reference to her “big brother.”
Sarah’s identity raises a couple of other questions. Barnabas’ house was the original Collins family home, and he and Sarah would have lived there. The cell in which he keeps Maggie is covered with cobwebs, evidently a feature of the house from its beginning. When she tells Maggie that her big brother “doesn’t like anybody to come down here,” she is speaking from experience- the adults don’t like it when you go near the jail cell in the basement.
Slavery was a legal institution in Massachusetts**** until 1783, and indentured servitude under conditions not so far removed from those to which slaves were subject continued long after. The Old House has been described as a “huge mansion,” so presumably its owners would have held people under at least one of these statuses. As a Collins of the eighteenth century, Sarah’s blithe attitude towards someone held in the cell would seem to be chillingly appropriate.
Sarah’s address to David as “Boy!” when she knows his name is also interesting coming from her. To be sure, if she had called him by name before they met, he would have known right away that there was something very strange about her. Since he has seen many ghosts and knows that ghosts congregate in and around the Old House, he may have identified her as one right away.
On the other hand, during the “Revenge of Burke Devlin” storyline that ran from #1-#201, there was considerable doubt as to whether David was Roger’s natural son or Burke’s. That doubt came to a head when Laura was on the show. Laura only left 13 weeks ago, and Burke is still hanging around. As far as we know, the question may come back up, and David Collins may turn out to be David Devlin. In that case, Sarah may have chosen to call him “boy” because she is a Collins and therefore better than everyone who is not.
I posted a couple of long comments about this episode on Danny Horn’s Dark Shadows Every Day. I won’t copy them here, because they contain spoilers for people who haven’t seen the whole series. But I’ll link to them- under the post about this episode, I argued that Sarah’s introduction was the most important plot development in the entire series; and under a post about a much later episode, I wish one of the words in her closing line had been different.
*Regular viewers are interested in some weird stuff, what can I say.
**My wife, Mrs Acilius, is very much taken with the actresses’ recollections of how Louis Edmonds, who played Roger, would make them laugh so hard during rehearsals that it was sometimes difficult for them to stay in character during filming. She says it is just as well that Roger wasn’t in this episode, because there is no way they could have got through this scene if he had been.
***Provided by Kathryn Leigh Scott, who also plays Maggie.
Two of the best blogs about Dark Shadows share the same web address. One is Dark Shadows Every Day, a series of more than a thousand well-crafted, insightful, often hilarious essays by Danny Horn about episodes #210 through #1245 and related topics. The other is the group blog that Danny’s readers maintain in the comment threads under each of his posts. The commenters outdid themselves in their remarks on Danny’s post about this episode.
At the beginning of the episode, addled quack Dr Woodard has figured out that the two victims of vampire Barnabas Collins, sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie Loomis and missing local girl Maggie Evans, have something in common. He hopes that if he can compare a sample of Willie’s blood with Maggie’s he will figure out what that is. Willie is terrified that this will lead to the exposure of Barnabas. Puzzlingly, Barnabas is unworried and orders Willie to cooperate. Only after Willie has given the blood and the doctor has left do we learn that Barnabas switched Willie’s sample with a normal one. “DS Willie” comments:
Barnabas is seriously messing with Willie’s mind in this one. So much of what Barnabas says has double meanings, even triple. Of course he’s playing with Woodard too, but Woodard never realizes it.
For one thing, just after Willie’s blood is taken, Barnabas makes creepy blood comments, ending with “…surrendering your utmost self” and his next line “Now, you had no choice.” I suspect this is all meant more for Willie than for the doctor. Willie had no choice but to surrender his utmost self.
Barnabas delights in repeatedly demonstrating his control over Willie, all to the doctor’s approval. When Willie flares up momentarily at Dr. Woodard’s remark about understanding being frightened, Barnabas immediately brings Willie to heel with a harsh word and harsher look.
Later Barnabas jerks Willie’s chain some more, just because he can, and to tighten his control even more. It’s classic Stockholm syndrome type stuff. The victim is abused and in absolute fear for his life, and yet any lessening of the captor’s threats or violence can be perceived as mercy, bonding the victim to his captor.
His shirt in Barnabas’ menacing grasp, Willie swears he would never, never betray Barnabas. He is only thrown to the ground instead of being choked or beaten. Barnabas proceeds to make Willie feel stupid and disloyal and dishonorable and undeserving of future protection. Add enthrallment on top of that. Oh, and the police having Willie as their top suspect, and Jason having beaten and threatened to kill Willie, even though Willie was trying to protect him.
It is actually pretty amazing that Willie has held up under the strain. He is in full-on survival mode, and yet still has the decency to try to shield Maggie and others insofar as he can, given his powerlessness.
Hey, what was up with Barnabas saying Willie’s blood is a “delicate little flower painted on glass”? He says it twice (once to Woodard and once to Willie) while looking directly at the slide. That doesn’t come across as a remark about blood in general.
Oh. Barnabas was using yet another method to get Willie under his thumb: verbally emasculating him with the “delicate little flower” reference to Willie’s blood on the slide. But I think Willie was so relieved that he missed the diss.
I made a contribution of my own to the thread. In response to Danny’s unfavorable comparison of Dr Woodard with Bram Stoker’s Professor Van Helsing, I commented:
I don’t think Woodard is Van Helsing at all. He’s Dr John Seward, treating Lucy and Renfield and baffled by the whole thing until he calls in his brilliant old professor. The mysterious Hoffman, one of the best men in the field, that’s the expert who is going to shake things up.
Seward is young, dynamic, and ready for adventure, while Woodard is middle aged, pudgy, and ready for an afternoon tee-time at the local country club. But that change is necessary. Readers of the novel have plenty of time to think about the sort of group that might go on the expedition Van Helsing organizes, and will expect a bunch of high-spirited youths. On a soap, a character like Seward would be the heroine’s new love interest, and Dark Shadows is flailing about trying to figure out what to do with the love interests Vicki and Maggie have now. The last thing they want right now is another bold, handsome young man who is apparently under a vow of celibacy.
In response to Danny’s remark that Jonathan Frid’s bobbles make it hard to guess what lines the script originally gave vampire Barnabas Collins, commenter “TD” replies:
#1. “Now, in a way, isn’t that understandable?
#2. “After all, blood is the life force.
#3. “It reaches into the deepest recesses of both the heart, and the brain.
#4. “It is the familiar of our complete being.
#5. “To surrender even one drop of it is to suggest a partial surrender of one’s utmost self.”
I’m not so sure this is actual Fridspeak. Yes, it’s kind of gibberishy, but it does make grammatical sense and some sort of syntactical sense. Frid delivers it smoothly and with confidence, unlike his halting fumblings when he can’t remember his lines. When he says this, it’s in a close-up shot, and he’s looking down. My guess is that he is reading it directly from a script. Also, this is Joe Caldwell’s first script (or first credited script–he did some writing on earlier Ron Sproat scripts, if another website is accurate). Maybe this is Caldwell exhibiting the enthusiasm of a first solo outing. Dr. Woodard has a couple of hi-falutin’ and rhetorically “poetic” (and gibberishy) speeches of his own in this episode.
Also, might this episode be marked as the first one to demonstrate the “reluctant” or “sympathetic” vampire in Barnabas’s character? In this episode (in another speechy series of lines), when Dr. Woodard and Barnabas are discussing the “madman” who broke into Woodard’s office and stole the blood sample, we get this exchange:
Dr. Woodard: You know, it’s the peculiar magnificence of the human spirit that’s required to provide the potential for such corruption. [See? This is like the Barnabas “blood is the life force” speech–who talks like this???] Barnabas: Yes, I know what you mean. Whoever he is, he must certainly be, at one and the same time, more than a man…and less than a man. Dr. Woodard: You seem almost sorry for him. Barnabas: Sorry? No, I’m not sorry. The truth is, I loathe him. I loathe him very, very deeply.
I agree with “TD” that today’s dialogue is marred by purple passages; I would go so far as to say that none of the lines would have survived a rewrite. Not among the lines delivered by the human actors, anyway- our beagle was fascinated when the hound howled on the soundtrack.
I should mention that at least one perceptive critic of Dark Shadows disagrees with me and “TD” about the script. Patrick McCray’s Dark Shadows Daybook is in its own way the equal of the two blogs at Dark Shadows Every Day. Patrick wrote two posts about this episode. In one from 2016, he wrote that “The language is poetic and evocative. Barnabas has moments of self-loathing and ambiguity that are gorgeously, hauntingly phrased, and the same can be said for Woodard’s exploration of science and mystery.” In 2019, he went so far as to call it “the best written episode of the series.”
John and Christine Scoleri also include some interesting material in the post about this episode on their recap-heavy blog Dark Shadows Before I Die. I particularly liked the series of screenshots at the end of the post captioned with some of the purple prose from today’s dialogue.
Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, has vanished from her hospital bed. We start with a long succession of characters talking about this fact with Maggie’s father Sam. Had David Ford played Sam as effectively as he did in his first weeks on the show, one such exchange might have made for a good scene. But Ford is overacting today, and the first part of the episode drags on and on.
We cut to the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood, where Maggie’s boyfriend Joe and dashing action hero Burke Devlin have gone. Vampire Barnabas Collins resides in the Old House along with his sorely bedraggled blood thrall, Willie Loomis. Joe and Burke have no clue there is anything odd about Barnabas, but they don’t like Willie and suspect he may know what happened to Maggie.
Barnabas lets Joe and Burke in the house and explains that he sent Willie to run some errands for him out of town. When they tell him about the evidence that has led them to think Willie might be connected with Maggie’s disappearance, he persuades them that there is nothing to their suspicions. Once they are gone, he calls out “It’s all right, they’ve gone. You’re safe here- safe here with me.” Maggie walks into the room.
Barnabas talking to Burke
This scene is very good. Barnabas is made up to look much more like The Vampire than he has been in previous encounters with characters he was trying to fool into thinking he was a harmless eccentric recently arrived from overseas. He is polite enough to Joe and Burke that they can chalk his appearance up to the lateness of the hour, but as the audience watches him extract information from them point by point, until he knows exactly what they do and don’t know, we can see him calculating when and how he will have to kill them. It is as good a scene as Jonathan Frid has had since he debuted as Barnabas.
Frid’s performance in this scene benefits from his flawless line delivery. Not so, unfortunately, the scene that follows. His bobbles are not especially bad by Dark Shadows standards, but his task is far more fragile than any he has taken on before. We’ve seen him pretending to be the Collins family’s mild-mannered cousin from England; in those moments, Barnabas himself is taking on a challenging acting job, and Frid’s difficulties sometimes dovetail with troubles we might expect Barnabas to have in his performance. We’ve seen him abusing Willie; in those moments, we might expect him to sputter a bit, and Frid can hide some of his memory lapses in that mannerism. But now, he is telling Maggie what his plans are for her. As he does so, we realize he is a crazy man spilling out his deepest and sickest obsession. That context leaves nowhere to conceal even the slightest flub. As a sign of triumphant psychosis, the lines have to flow without interruption. Every time Frid stumbles for a fraction of a second, he breaks character.
Nor can Kathryn Leigh Scott bail him out. As Maggie, her part is to wander around in a stupor and occasionally repeat the last word or two of whatever is said to her. She makes that a lot more interesting to watch than you might expect, but there’s only so far it can take you.
Barnabas’ plan takes us outside the themes we are familiar with from vampire fiction. He wants to brainwash Maggie into thinking that she is Josette Collins, who has now been retconned into the woman Barnabas loved in his human days. His goal is that Maggie Evans will cease to exist, and that in her body Josette will live again.
Dracula never wanted to do anything like that, though after Dark Shadows has a hit with this storyline it will become part of vampire lore. Prince Mamuwalde, the menace in the 1972 film Blacula, kidnapped the heroine and tried to turn her into his long-dead love. Another undead fictional man from Africa had tried the same thing in 1932, when Imhotep, played by Boris Karloff, had spent the bulk of The Mummytrying to turn the heroine into a revived form of his adored Princess Ankh-esen-amun. Frid’s face and coloring were somewhat similar to those of Bela Lugosi, a fact often remarked in connection with his casting as a vampire. But his voice and movements are strongly reminiscent of Boris Karloff, and as a mashup of Dracula and Imhotep he is a synthesis of these two actors.
Barnabas gives Maggie a music box that he had intended to give Josette. He says that he bought it for Josette in his travels in “the Orient,” intending to give it to her “on a very special day,” and “this is that day.” This leaves us wondering why the day never came when he could give it to Josette. Did he become a vampire before he returned from his travels? Did he come back from his travels to find that she was no longer available to him? Or was it supposed to be a present at their wedding, a wedding that never occurred?
Barnabas also produces Josette’s wedding dress and tells Maggie that she, as the new Josette, will wear it. When Imhotep produces Ankh-esen-amun’s clothing and jewelry, we remember that royal personages in ancient Egypt were buried with their possessions and assume that he has retrieved them from her tomb. The show did lead us to wonder if the Collinses once had a similar practice. Willie released Barnabas because he had heard a story that some of the Collinses were buried with expensive jewelry and so was trying to rob a grave. The story of the buried jewels was framed as an echo of the Gothic romances that inspired the first weeks of Dark Shadows, but has now become an anticipation of the show’s journey into Universal Pictures’ back catalogue of horror movies.
If Barnabas does manage to somehow erase Maggie and bring Josette back to life in her body, it won’t be the first time Miss Scott has played Josette. In #70, Miss Scott was the ghost who emerged from Josette’s portrait and danced outside the Old House. Miss Scott put Josette’s veil on again in #126 when she led the ghosts who scared maniacal handyman Matthew Morgan to death before he could murder well-meaning governess Vicki. In that one, she delivered a few lines as Josette. Miss Scott’s name did not appear in the credits as Josette in either of those episodes, and the only time we caught a glimpse of Josette’s face was in #149, when she was played by stand-in Rosemary McNamara. But if by any odd chance a viewer does know that Miss Scott has played Josette before, the final dissolve from a closeup of Miss Scott to one of Josette’s portrait suggests a definite possibility that Barnabas’ plan, nonsensical though it seems, will somehow succeed.
Danny Horn’s post about this episode on his Dark Shadows Every Dayis particularly good. He compares its visual strategy to that of the one surviving contemporary segment of General Hospital, and praises the ambitious approach director Lela Swift took to composing images. I should also mention Patrick McCray’s Dark Shadows Daybook post, in which he analyzes the way the story alienates us from our rooting interest in Maggie’s safety by promising a more exciting story if Barnabas has his way with her for an extended period.
Today is only the second time we hear a voice announce a recast over the opening title. The first time was in #35, when David Ford took over the part of drunken artist Sam Evans from wildly incompetent actor Mark Allen. This time Robert Gerringer is taking over the part of addled quack Dr Woodard from Richard Woods. Woods only played the role twice, and neither time could he find a way to distract the audience from the ignorance of medicine that the writers showed in their scripts.
Gerringer’s lines don’t make much more sense than did the ones they dumped on Woods, but he acts up a storm. Woodard is examining Sam’s daughter Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. Unknown to Sam or Woodard, vampire Barnabas Collins has been sucking Maggie’s blood. Woodard is firm with Maggie when she resists his examination. He seems to be somewhat on edge, just enough that we wonder if there is more to it than the difficulties we can see Maggie giving him. Perhaps he is thinking something he isn’t saying. Woods never managed to make us wonder if his version of the doctor was doing that.
When Woodard and Sam leave Maggie’s room, Woodard assumes an alarmed tone. He tells Sam that Maggie is on the point of death and needs a blood transfusion at once. By showing us that Woodard was concealing the true nature of his concern when he was with Maggie, Gerringer gives substance to our hopes that the character’s nonsensical words and deeds will turn out to be a screen hiding something interesting.
Maggie’s boyfriend, hardworking young fisherman Joe, joins Sam and Woodard. Woodard asks if either Sam or Joe has blood type A. Joe does. Woodard doesn’t ask about Rh factors or Joe’s medical history or anything else, he simply marches Joe into Maggie’s room and the bodily fluids start pumping right away. Joe holds Maggie’s hand at first, but her violent protests force him to let go.
Transfusion
In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Professor Van Helsing and Dr John Seward give blood transfusions to the vampire’s victims. That novel was written in 1897, and blood types weren’t discovered until 1900, so Van Helsing and Seward take blood indiscriminately from all the men cooperating in the effort to defeat Dracula. Van Helsing is particularly enthusiastic when he learns that Arthur Holmwood has given blood to Lucy Westenra, because Arthur “is the lover of her!” Van Helsing is Dutch, and speaks in a vaguely comical broken English. Woodard doesn’t seem particularly excited that Joe is “the lover of her,” but audiences who had read the book will recognize the allusion.
At this point in the production of Dark Shadows, the tentative plan was that Dr Woodard would become something like the expert on paranormal dangers that Dr Peter Guthrie had been during the Phoenix storyline, and that Barnabas would be destroyed in episode 275. Like Stoker’s Dracula, the Phoenix arc had featured a group of stout-hearted men and one valiant young woman coming together to do battle with an undead menace. Dr Guthrie had been their Van Helsing, an expert from out of town who leapfrogs over some weaknesses in the evidence actually available to the protagonists to get them to the same level of understanding that the audience has been given. Also like Van Helsing, Guthrie is the first to realize that the one female member of the team is the key to the success of their efforts, and so he insists on putting her in situations the other men regard as too dangerous for her. As Mina had been instrumental in the destruction of Dracula, so well-meaning governess Vicki is the person who finally thwarts the plans of the Phoenix.
If Woodard and Vicki are going to destroy Barnabas in #275, we have to wonder what story the show will have to tell in #276. The only other plotline going at the moment is the blackmail of reclusive matriarch Liz by seagoing con man Jason McGuire, and that can’t continue indefinitely. Not only will Liz run out of things for Jason to take away from her, but Dennis Patrick, the actor playing Jason, will leave the show no later than the end of June. Since the end of June is when #275 will be airing, we can hardly expect Jason to take the show over after that time.
In fact, Jason is an in-betweener brought on the show to clear away the last non-paranormal plot elements left over from the period before the show became a supernatural thriller in December 1966. By the time he leaves, both the reason for Liz’ long self-immuration in the great house of Collinwood and the identity of Vicki’s parents are supposed to be laid bare for all to see. Neither of those secrets ever generated an interesting story, but as long as they are around it is at least theoretically possible that the show will become a conventional daytime soap opera again. Without them, they are altogether committed to the spook show route. Destroy Barnabas, and you just have to come up with yet another menace from beyond the grave.
I remember Gerringer’s acting style from the first time I saw Dark Shadows. That was back in the 90s, when it was on what was then called the SciFi Channel. He so perfectly represented the doctor characters on the soaps my mother used to watch when I was a kid twenty years before that seeing him in the middle of a story about a vampire told me everything about the strangeness of a conventional daytime serial switching to a horror theme. If that guy is the one to drive the stake through Barnabas’ heart, or if he is even part of the team that finishes him off, it will be a statement that the makers of Dark Shadows have decided to stop being silly and start imitating The Guiding Light.
My wife, Mrs Acilius, was particularly frustrated with the dialogue in this episode. As Maggie, Kathryn Leigh Scott does a good job with nonverbal communication creating the image of a reluctant patient trying to get out of her skin, but her lines consist chiefly of repeating whatever is said to her. The other members of the cast are equally effective at projecting concern for a loved one whose grave illness they don’t understand and can’t help, but their lines too are so heavily loaded with repetition that we started to suspect that Malcolm Marmorstein was writing for a cast of myna birds. In particular, Woodard’s lines to Sam in the living room repeat the word “shock” so many times that they start to sound like he’s stuttering.
The original choices for the roles of Sam, Joe, Dr Woodard, and Maggie. Photo by Bird Ecology Study Group
In his post about this episode, Danny Horn complains that there is not a single interesting still image in it. I agree with that, though I would say that the actors’ movements tell a story. Granted, it is a story that could have been told in a tiny fraction of the actual running time, but they deserve credit for holding the show together when the script gave them zero support.
Danny says that the episode would have been just as good if it were a radio show. Mrs Acilius says that it would have been “a thousand times better” than it is if it were a silent movie. Maybe they could compromise, and it could be presented with neither audio nor video, and the audience could spend the 22 minutes doing something else.
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.
The opening voiceover tells us that “Evil reaches deeply into man’s soul, turning his heart to stone, transforming him into a vile monstrosity, and it is horrible to observe this process in an innocent and not be able to recognize it or prevent it.” Without that introduction, first-time viewers would have no reason to assume that Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, is going through anything other than an ordinary sickness that has her looking bad and snapping at people.
Kathryn Leigh Scott does play Maggie’s moodiness very well. She does an especially admirable job in the scene where she yells at her boyfriend, hardworking young fisherman Joe, and orders him out of the house. After Joe goes, Maggie looks directly into the camera, and returning viewers will recognize that she is well on her her way to becoming the undead.
Bloofer lady
Meanwhile, well-meaning governess Vicki and dashing action hero Burke are dressed up and having dinner in Collinsport’s only night spot, The Blue Whale. Most of the time, The Blue Whale is a waterfront dive with frequent bar fights. But when Burke and Vicki dine there in their good clothes, the place transforms into a respectable restaurant, as it did in #189.
Burke and Vicki recap some plot points surrounding the great estate of Collinwood. Later, Maggie’s father Sam comes in and tells them of her condition. Vicki replies to Sam’s description with “Now let me see if I understand this. You said that yesterday she was sick and she collapsed, and last night she was up and around, and this morning she was sick again?”
In his post about this episode on his great blog Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn’s response to this line is “IT IS NOT OKAY TO SUMMARIZE A RECAP THAT HE JUST SAID ONE SENTENCE AGO.” It’s true that the episode is heavy on recapping. A defter writer than Malcolm Marmorstein probably would have started the scene with Vicki putting this question to Sam, leaving out the recap that it re-recaps. But Vicki’s question itself is a good moment. As she delivers it, Alexandra Moltke Isles uses her face to show Vicki coming to a realization that has so far eluded everyone else.
The moment of recognition
Vicki recognizes that Maggie’s symptoms are identical to those which sorely bedraggled blood-thrall Willie Loomis displayed a couple of weeks ago. As she explains this, we see Burke gradually catch on and Sam absorb the information. Up to this point, everyone has been remarkably obtuse in failing to make this connection- the same doctor who examined Willie examined Maggie today, and doesn’t give any sign of recognizing it, or for that matter of understanding anything else relating to medicine.
As Vicki was the only character yesterday who escaped the long-running Idiot Plot that goes on because everyone fails to notice the abundant evidence that reclusive matriarch Liz killed her husband and buried him in the basement, so she is the only character today who spots the obvious similarity between the cases of the two victims of the vampire. The show is still sputtering along, but in a Smart Vicki turn like this we can find a glimmer of hope that it will start moving soon.
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.
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