Suave warlock Nicholas has botched his main project, and is in big trouble with his supervisor. He is called into the corner office, which apparently represents Hell, and talks the boss into giving him another chance.
Regular viewers will immediately recognize Hell as a redress of the basement of the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood, home to old world gentleman Barnabas. Strangely enough, this is not the first time it has seemed that Hell is in a corner of Barnabas’ basement. In #325, strange and troubled boy David had a dream in which the ghost of Barnabas’ sister Sarah brought him to the basement. The set was decorated much as we see it today. David met a faceless figure and saw Barnabas, who was at that time a vampire, rise from his coffin. In #512, the ghost of the Rev’d Mr Trask, a witchfinder whom Barnabas murdered in the late eighteenth century, conjured up the spirits of many of Barnabas’ victims, and put him on trial in the basement. Again, we see that it is the abode of the unhappy dead.
Nicholas has to admit to his boss that he has fallen in love with Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town. Contemptuous of warm human feelings, the boss tells Nicholas that he and Maggie can indeed be together for all time, but only “here”- confirming that the set does represent Hell. Nicholas is horrified, but the boss yields nothing. He will have to sacrifice Maggie in a Black Mass so that she can be damned along with him. He must also get his original project back on track, breeding a race of Frankenstein’s monsters who will be loyal to the spiritual forces of darkness.
Returned to the world of the living, Nicholas goes to the great house of Collinwood, where he tries to persuade mad scientist Julia to help him with the Frankenbabies plan. She can see that he is desperate, and is therefore unimpressed with him. She presses him for more information, and he tells her to read the Book of Genesis. His boss figures in it, as the one who tempted Adam and Eve. Julia gasps at the idea that Nicholas is one of Satan’s direct reports. Nicholas explains what he wants her to do. Julia calls the idea “monstrous,” a description which Nicholas considers apt. She refuses to have any part in such an enterprise, but she capitulates when he threatens her dear friend Barnabas.
Danny Horn’s post about this episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day is devoted to the packet of View-Master reels featuring images related to episodes made around this time. I’ve always enjoyed View-Master; I think it’s a shame it was slotted as something for young children only. I find it refreshing to spend three or four minutes peering into its little worlds. I left this comment:
Some years ago I bought a bunch of ViewMaster reels. I’d liked them when I was a kid, and I was curious about the non-cartoon ones, the reels depicting landscapes and such. I found that it was a meditative exercise looking into the viewer and teasing out all the 3-D effects.
Anyway, I still have those reels, including the Dark Shadows set. Inspired by this post, I looked at them this morning. There are a bunch of very good shots with high contrast between actors and background. Bud Astredo was particularly good at striking poses that would make him stand out. Grayson Hall is just as good, it’s a shame she’s only in the one picture.
(20 October 2020, 11:12 am Pacific time)
Danny’s post also links to this wonderful piece about the packet on a blog called View-Master 3D.
Angelique, wicked witch turned vampire, is dissatisfied with her boss, suave warlock Nicholas. She finds out that Nicholas has botched his current project and sees an opportunity to report him to his boss, a figure identified in the dialogue simply as “The Master” but in the closing credits as “Diabolos.” She performs a ceremony that is intended to get Diabolos to come to her in the basement of Nicholas’ house, but Diabolos insists she meet him in his office. That is obviously a redress of the set used for the basement of old world gentleman Barnabas Collins’ house. The show never does explain where Barnabas gets his income, so I guess it makes sense he rents out space to local businesses.
Diabolos is impatient with Angelique. When she starts complaining that Nicholas has been harsh with her, he responds “From what I know, you deserved it.” When she persists on this point, he says “I don’t want to hear anymore.” He goes on to praise Nicholas, saying that “His plan for creating a super-race which will follow only me is excellent.” Angelique then tells him that this plan has in fact failed. “One of the beings chosen for the plan has destroyed the other.” Indeed, the male Frankenstein’s monster known as Adam killed the woman built to be his Eve on Monday. Diabolos is shocked to hear this, and at the end of the episode we hear his voice telling Nicholas that he will soon face judgment.
Duane Morris plays Diabolos. Morris appeared several times as a stand-in for Adam before Robert Rodan wa s cast in the part; this is his first speaking role on the show. It would be a very difficult challenge for any actor. In the first place, his costume conceals his face altogether, so his physical movements and his voice acting in his scene with Angelique are two separate performances which he has to give simultaneously. Second, in that scene he spends much of his time looking away from her, so he cannot use his imposing height to create a sense of menace. Third, his voiceover at the close plays during an extreme closeup on the motionless face of Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town, who is supposed to be acting as his medium. But there is nothing to suggest Maggie is in peril, so even the mood lighting and other practical effects that precede the speech do not focus our attention on Diabolos as a threat. Fourth, the lines Morris has to deliver are written for a middle manager in a mundane office, not for one of the principalities of Hell. At every turn, Morris has to convince us of Diabolos’ dread might with only his voice. Unfortunately, his voice was anything but intimidating. As a result, the whole episode falls flat.
There is also some business with Adam and mad scientist Julia. An unpleasant man known variously as Peter and Jeff is in police custody, charged with Eve’s killing, and Julia tries to convince Adam to help her clear him. In recent months Julia has become the audience’s chief point of view character, but in this case it is Adam’s resolute indifference to Peter/ Jeff’s fate that reflects our attitude. Julia tells Adam that Peter/ Jeff’s life may be on the line if he is tried for murder. In the state of Maine that exists in our universe, capital punishment was abolished for the last time in 1887. In November 1966, this was also true of the version of Maine in which Dark Shadows was set. It was mentioned in #101, broadcast that month, that the state did not carry out executions. Perhaps the fictional Mainers in the show’s universe responded to the horrendous news continually emanating from Collinsport by reestablishing the death penalty, or perhaps Julia realizes that no true statement could enlist anyone’s sympathy for the entirely repellent Peter/ Jeff and so she is resorting to a desperate lie.
Dan Curtis often said that the idea for Dark Shadows came to him in a dream about a girl with long black hair taking a journey by train. When he persuaded ABC-TV to let him make a pilot for a series, the most difficult part of the casting process was finding the actress who would embody that girl, whose name came to be Victoria Winters. Alexandra Isles, then still known as Alexandra Moltke, finally emerged as the one person who combined the right physical appearance with a mysterious, otherworldly quality that suggests a figure from a dream.
From Episode 1: The girl on the train. Reflected in the window behind her is Burke Devlin, her original love interest.
Mrs Isles’ casting had an immediate effect on the underlying story in Art Wallace’s original series bible, Shadows on the Wall. Wallace projected a puzzle about Vicki’s origins that would be resolved when it was revealed that she was the child of an extramarital liaison between Paul Stoddard, the long-missing husband of matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, and some unknown woman. Liz’ guilty feelings about Paul would explain her concern for Vicki and her decision to bring her to the great house of Collinwood as governess for her nephew, strange and troubled boy David Collins. Since Vicki would not be a blood relative of the Collins family, it would also leave an option for Vicki to develop a romance with David’s father, Liz’ brother Roger.
From Episode 1: The front doors of Collinwood open for the first time. Liz and Vicki come face to face, and each sees her own reflection in the other.
Wallace did include a note saying that if it was more story-productive, it could turn out that Liz was Vicki’s mother. Liz was played by Joan Bennett, whom Mrs Isles strongly resembled. When Bennett first saw Mrs Isles, she famously mistook her for her own daughter. From the first episode on, the show heavily signaled that Vicki was Liz’ daughter by a man other than Paul. Liz soon treats Vicki so much like a daughter that the only events that would follow from confirming the relationship would be to make some changes to Liz’ will. Since the business aspects of the characters’ lives ceased to generate action after the first few months, that would have been a severe anti-climax. So they wound up dropping the question altogether.
For the first 39 weeks of Dark Shadows, Vicki was its main protagonist. Not many of the storylines worked in those days; the only scenes that reliably clicked were those between Vicki and David. Even though their dialogue was as dreary as anything else in those early scripts, Mrs Isles and David Henesy managed to use their physical movements and the spaces they occupied to tell the story of a young woman persuading a boy to trust her. That version of the show ended with #191, when David ran from the mother who was trying to lure him to his death and flung himself into Vicki’s arms. That completed their story, and left neither character with a clear path forward.
From Episode 191: David turns from his mother and death, embracing Vicki and life.
After #191, the show was on course for the introduction of vampire Barnabas Collins. Vicki kept trying to get close to Barnabas; she even invited herself to spend the night at his house in #285 and #286. But he wouldn’t bite her, and she couldn’t get a foothold in the A-story otherwise. There was an odd meta-fictional side to Vicki in this phase. In-universe, she didn’t know that Barnabas was a vampire, and she certainly didn’t know that she was a character on a soap opera that was coming to be all about him. But her behavior made sense only if she did know those things and was making an effort to reestablish herself as a central figure in the action. I don’t know whether Mrs Isles or any other particular person was lobbying the writers to present her that way, or if it was a response to fan mail. It happened so often and led to so little that it did seem to be coming from somewhere outside the usual creative process behind the scripts.
In November 1967, Vicki came unstuck in time and found herself in the year 1795. She took the audience with her, and for several months the show was a costume drama set in the late eighteenth century. On balance, the result was a triumph. By the time Vicki and the show came back to contemporary dress in March 1968, Dark Shadows had become a real hit, and Barnabas had become one of the major pop culture phenomena of the 1960s. But Vicki did not benefit from that success. When the costume drama insert started, fans had every reason to expect it would revive her character. Barnabas spent most of his time in 1967 scrambling to impersonate a native of the twentieth century; Jonathan Frid would always say that it was in that scramble that he found Barnabas, and that he thought of him first and foremost as a liar. When Vicki turns up in Barnabas’ original period, we look forward to seeing her doing what he did, and trying to pass as his little sister’s governess. Remembering how well Mrs Isles did during the 39 weeks she carried the show on her shoulders, we look forward to her showing us what Vicki can do when she has to think fast.
But that was not to be. Instead, Curtis and his staff chose to write Vicki as an intolerable moron. She introduced herself to every new person by telling them that they are being played by actors who had other parts in the first 73 weeks of the show. Tedious as that habit was, it was compounded when she made one inexplicably idiotic decision after another as she failed utterly to adapt to her new surroundings. That would have been a difficult role to make appealing even if she had shared her screen time with a partner as capable as David Henesy. It became utterly impossible when Vicki made the least intelligible move of all and fell in love with her jailer/ lawyer/ boyfriend/ accomplice Peter Bradford, played by the abusive and shouty Roger Davis. Marooned in scene after scene with Mr Davis, Mrs Isles withered and Vicki became a cipher. By the time the court sentenced Vicki to be put to death for her many crimes, half the audience was on their side.
Shortly after Vicki returned to the 1960s, Barnabas finally bit her. Each of Barnabas’ victims reacted to his bite differently; Vicki’s reaction was perhaps the most unexpected, and certainly the funniest. She was just sort of chill about the whole thing. She showed up when Barnabas summoned her and didn’t object when he told he her she would become his vampire bride for all eternity, but first she had some errands to run, and she was irritated with him when he tried to get her to skip them. When a doctor saw the bite marks on her neck, she did not react with the fear or defensiveness of other victims, but innocently asked “Why are they bad?” She seemed to regard them as just another hickey, the result of Barnabas’ peculiar make-out technique.
Unfortunately, Peter came back to life and ruined Vicki’s relationship with Barnabas. He jumped out in the road in front of her car while she was driving off with Barnabas, causing her to crash. Vicki and Barnabas were taken to the hospital. There, one of the doctors turned out to be a mad scientist who cured Barnabas of vampirism. Once the cure took hold, Vicki forgot all about her time as Barnabas’ victim, and she sunk into a relationship with the irredeemably repellent Peter. Every time we’ve seen her in recent months, she has dragged Peter back to our attention. Mrs Isles has found ways to liven up Vicki’s scenes; she always projected a forceful personality when she was standing near the clock in the foyer of the great house of Collinwood, and she has even managed to coax Roger Davis into playing a couple of scenes competently. Mr Davis never had quite as much to offer as did the clock, but when Mrs Isles could raise her voice and fix him with a steely stare it does seem to have come back to him that he had had a lot of acting lessons and could deliver dialogue interestingly.
Today is Mrs Isles’ last day on the job. We open with a reprise of the end of yesterday’s episode, when Vicki finds the corpse of a strangled woman in the closet in Peter’s room. Peter assures her he doesn’t know how the corpse got there. She tells him they have to call the police. He says he needs time to figure out what happened before they can involve the police; she points out that delaying will only make him look guiltier in their eyes. He tells her that she should leave so that her name won’t be connected with the case; she tells him it is too late for that. We can see why Vicki has faded- she is thinking like a rational person from our world, not like anyone you would meet in Soap Opera Land.
Vicki goes home to Collinwood and tells permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman that Peter is in jail, suspected of murder. She explains that the dead person is a woman Peter knew only as Eve. Julia reacts with shock to the name; Vicki asks if she knew Eve. Julia says of course not, and Vicki tells her she will go wake Roger and ask him to help arrange bail for Peter. She goes into the door leading to the bedrooms, never to be seen again.
In her final appearance, Vicki talks with Julia, her successor as the principal audience-identification character.
Viewers who have been with the show from the beginning will see a loop closing in the idea of Vicki going to Roger’s bedroom while he sleeps. In #4, Roger had tried to let himself into Vicki’s bedroom at night, only to be caught with his hand on the doorknob by Liz. In response to Liz’ threats, Roger told her not to bother him about his “morals,” a choice of words that made it clear that his intentions with regard to Vicki were of a sexual nature. Later in the episode, he and Vicki bantered flirtatiously after he offered her a snifter of brandy; for the first and last time, Vicki sounded like what she was supposed to have been, a street kid from NYC. Roger has long since been stripped of all his villainous qualities; in #585, he and Vicki even shared a scene in her bedroom while she was in her nightgown, and it was all perfectly innocent. In that scene, we not only saw that the old menacing Roger was gone forever, but that Vicki was also reduced to such a humdrum status that a man can enter her bedroom at night without raising an eyebrow. Now that Julia sees nothing out of the ordinary in Vicki dropping in on Roger while he sleeps, that humdrum status is reinforced.
When Vicki first arrived in the village of Collinsport in #1, she met her original love interest, dashing action hero Burke Devlin. Burke told her she had found her way to “the beginning and the end of the world.” We are reminded of the beginning of the world since we know that the man who killed Eve was named Adam. This Adam and Eve are no one’s parents; they share nothing but hostility and death. The episode ends with the wicked Angelique trying to summon up the Devil, a symbol of the end of the world. She herself disappears, apparently destroyed. Burke’s description is finally fulfilled.
The part of Vicki will be recast twice in the months ahead, but those actresses never had a chance to breathe any life into her. The character had lost any reason to be on the show long before Mrs Isles’ departure. In #87, David had trapped Vicki and left her to die; wondering where she was, Roger said, “She came to us from nowhere, and now it seems she has disappeared into nowhere.” And so, at last, it has come to be. The long-haired girl from Dan Curtis’ dream, the image that started it all, has vanished, never to be seen again.
From November 1967 to March 1968, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the years 1795 and 1796. Well-meaning governess Vicki had come unstuck in time, found herself in that period, and failed utterly to adjust to her new surroundings. While she was in gaol charged with witchcraft, she befriended an unpleasant man named Peter, who served as her defense attorney. Peter handled the case so badly that he and Vicki were both sentenced to hang, but they nonetheless fell in love with each other.
Shortly after Vicki was whisked back to the 1960s, she found that Peter had also come back to life. Unfortunately, he had total amnesia covering everything prior to his arrival in the twentieth century, and he became belligerent every time Vicki tried to tell him about himself. These traits did nothing to improve Peter’s already repellent personality, but having fallen in love with him once Vicki remained grimly determined to make a life with him.
The other day, Peter and Vicki were about to get married when a mysterious woman known as Eve presented Peter with evidence that what Vicki has been telling him is true. He ran off to exhume the grave marked with his name and found that the coffin was empty. For some reason he took this to mean that he shouldn’t marry Vicki after all. He has gone back to his room, where he is packing his bags and looking at a train schedule.
Unknown to Peter, there have been two visitors in his room while he was away. Eve came in and called for him, saying aloud that she would “make it all right” for him. A man known as Adam followed her in and overheard this. Adam thus learned that, despite their names, he and Eve would never be a couple. He asked if, when “yesterday, you made me happy- that was a lie, wasn’t it?” She confirmed that it was, that she would never love him, that she had always hated him, and that she found him ugly. That last apparently struck a nerve, because Adam responded with great rage. He choked Eve, and she collapsed.
Vicki drops in on Peter while he is getting ready to leave town. He tells her they cannot be together, and she insists on giving their relationship a second chance. Peter opens his closet to get some more clothes to pack, only to close it quickly. Vicki opens it, and finds Eve’s strangled corpse crumpled on the floor.
There is a genuinely horrifying moment in this episode. Vicki thinks back to the night in the 1790s when she was taken to the gallows, and we see events from her point of view. At one point we see Peter’s face looming towards the camera with his lips puckered. We’ve seen how Roger Davis manhandles his female scene partners, and in particular how miserable Alexandra Moltke Isles is when he kisses her. The sight of him coming at us for a kiss is enough to make even the most seasoned horror viewer flinch.
Mrs Isles read the opening narration of episodes 1-274 in character as Vicki. After she lost her monopoly on the opening narrations, she read more than 100 others, no longer as part of that role. This is the final time she takes on that task. It is also the first time “and Alexandra Moltke as Victoria Winters” is followed on screen by other acting credits.
The first time we might have expected to see a wedding on Dark Shadows was in #270, when reclusive matriarch Liz was supposed to marry seagoing con man Jason in the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood. That wedding was called off when Liz, rather than saying “I do,” announced “I killed Paul Stoddard and that man was my accomplice!” It turned out that Liz didn’t actually kill Paul after all. She only stunned him, and he and Jason connived to trick her into thinking she had killed him so that she would give them a lot of money. The two of them buried an empty trunk in the basement of the great house and Jason told Liz that Paul’s corpse was in it. Liz’ refusal to be blackmailed into marrying Jason led to the exhumation of that empty trunk.
The next time there was supposed to be a wedding at Collinwood was in #380, when the show was a costume drama set in the 1790s. Scion Barnabas was supposed to marry the gracious Josette, but wicked witch Angelique cast a spell that caused Josette to elope with Barnabas’ uncle Jeremiah. We did not see their wedding, but we did see Barnabas and Angelique get married in #397. We also saw them on their wedding night, when Barnabas left Angelique in her bedroom and retired to his, without so much as a goodnight handshake between them. As Jason’s attempt to marry Liz ended with the exposure of a vacant coffin, so these marriages led to vacant coffins as well. Barnabas killed Jeremiah in a duel in #384, and Angelique raised him from the dead in #392. It does not appear he ever did go back to his grave. He opened his own coffin in #397 and tried to bury Angelique alive in it.
When Barnabas found out that Angelique was the witch responsible for Jeremiah and Josette’s elopement and all the misery afterward, he tried to kill her, and she retaliated by turning him into a vampire. His coffin was empty every night for a while, but in March 1968, shortly after Dark Shadows left the 1790s and returned to contemporary dress, he became human again. Now Angelique is a vampire, and it is her coffin that is regularly vacant.
Today, another wedding is scheduled for the drawing room of the great house. Well-meaning governess Vicki is supposed to marry an unpleasant man known variously as Peter and Jeff. A mysterious woman with two names of her own, Eve and Danielle, shows up while Peter is smoking on the terrace.
Peter/ Jeff and Eve/ Danielle both lived in the 1790s, and both have come back to life in 1968. Peter/ Jeff is in deep denial about his own status as a revenant, and gets even more obnoxious than he usually is whenever anyone brings it up. Eve/ Danielle remembers him from their previous lives, and is, inexplicably enough, in love with him. She brings him a note that she acquired on a recent trip through time. In Peter’s handwriting, under the salutation “Dear Danielle,” it says that he would rather go to the gallows on the off chance that in some future life he will be with Vicki than go away with Danielle. Somehow, Danielle takes Peter’s willingness to face death in hopes of reunion with Vicki to mean that he should now leave Vicki and go away with her. The logic may escape the viewer, but evidently it convinces Peter/ Jeff. He leaves Collinwood to go dig up his grave. He finds the coffin vacant. It is unclear whether this means he will reunite with Eve/ Danielle, but apparently it convinced him he should not marry Vicki.
Liz’ aborted wedding to Jason marked the end of the blackmail arc, which was itself an extended in-betweener meant to clean up the last non-supernatural stories, introduce the vampire, and give the rest of the cast something to do while Barnabas was settling in. The aborted wedding of Barnabas and Josette marked the end of the part of the 1795 segment in which most of the characters don’t know that there is a tragedy brewing, while Barnabas and Angelique’s wedding told the audience that the preliminaries were over and they were about to explain how Barnabas became a vampire. Vicki and Peter/ Jeff’s attempted wedding today marks another ending. Alexandra Moltke Isles will leave the role of Vicki after the episode coming up on Tuesday. Vicki started moving to the sidelines once undead fire witch Laura went up in smoke in #191, and she has long been a secondary character. But she was the main protagonist for the first 39 weeks of Dark Shadows, and Mrs Isles carried the show very capably during those days. It was disappointing when she moved so far out of the main current of the action, and sad to see her go.
Today, we open with well-meaning governess Vicki in her room in the great house of Collinwood, wearing her wedding dress. Matriarch Liz enters, gives her a peck on the cheek, and tells her what a lovely bride she will be. Everything in their words and actions suggests to first-time viewers that they are mother and daughter; the strong resemblance between Joan Bennett and Alexandra Moltke Isles would tend to corroborate this impression. In a later scene, we hear Vicki call Liz “Mrs Stoddard.” Thus we learn she is one of the household staff.
Meanwhile, Frankenstein’s monsters Adam and Eve share a moment. Eve was created to be Adam’s mate, but she has wanted nothing to do with him. She has gone so far as to tell him to his face that she hates him and will kill him. Today, suave warlock Nicholas has ordered Eve to make nice with Adam, and so she tells him to forget all about her previous remarks. They sit facing each other on the floor in front of the fire, the first time we have seen potential lovers do that on Dark Shadows. They kiss.
A jump cut indicates the passage of time, and we see Adam and Eve snuggling on a little sofa and being pleasant to each other. We are free to surmise that they had sex. Perhaps there will be Frankenbabies after all. Adam leaves. In his absence, Eve again says that she cares nothing for him, but only for someone named “Peter.” Since Peter is the man Vicki is supposed to marry today, that sets up a conflict.
Back at Collinwood, Vicki opens a wedding gift she finds disturbing. The card enclosed is simply labeled “Peter” in all caps. In fact, Eve sent it, but Peter is such a tedious character that it is easy to imagine that he has never learned to use lower-case letters or to write more than his first name, so we can understand Vicki’s reaction.
An eighteenth century homicidal maniac named Danielle Roget was raised from the dead in 1968 to serve a warlock’s evil scheme. Today, she is taking a break. Another witch has sent her back to her original era for a short visit.
Danielle wants to see a man named Peter Bradford, who has also been raised from the dead and whom she has seen several times in 1968. Peter has a collection of intensely annoying habits which serve as a substitute for a personality. Among these is a tendency to fly into a rage whenever anyone calls him by his right name, and to insist that he be called “Jeff Clark” instead. Danielle has traveled back to the 1790s in search of some evidence that will convince him to desist from this tedious practice.
Today we open at the Collinsport gaol. Peter is in a cell, the gaoler and his assistant are reading Peter’s death warrant, and a gallows is under construction outside. Danielle materializes behind the gaolers, and talks with them for a while. They tell her that a woman named “Gloria Winters” was recently hanged for witchcraft. Danielle realizes that they are actually talking about Victoria Winters, who was the chief protagonist of Dark Shadows for about a year. In November 1967, Victoria came unstuck in time and found herself in the year 1795. She was trapped there until March 1968. Victoria’s utter failure to adapt to her new surroundings led to her condemnation as a witch. At the last second she was whisked from the gallows and returned to her own time. The luckless person whose place she had taken when she arrived from the 1960s appeared at the end of the rope and died in her place.
Danielle asks to see Peter. The gaolers escort her into his cell, lock her in with him, and leave them alone together for several minutes. Peter is unhappy to see Danielle, to whom he was once engaged but whose murderous ways have alienated him. He tells her it saddens him that she is free while he, an innocent person, is about to be executed. Indeed, it was Victoria who killed the man Peter was convicted of murdering, and she did it only to prevent that man killing a child. She tried to tell the court what had happened, but since she was already sentenced to hang and was in love with Peter, her testimony did not persuade the judges.
Danielle offers to break Peter out of gaol. He agrees. She tells him she will go to the great house of Collinwood to enlist much-put-upon indentured servant Ben Stokes in her scheme. Ben, she says, could refuse her nothing.
During the flashback that lasted from November 1967 to March 1968, Ben was ensorcelled by wicked witch Angelique. Now we learn that before Angelique came along, he had been under the influence of Danielle, another beautiful woman with an evil heart and a greatly heightened acting style. Perhaps Ben would do better if he looked for a homely, soft-spoken woman.
We cut to Collinwood, where haughty patriarch Joshua Collins is summoning Ben. They discuss Peter’s upcoming hanging and Victoria’s recent one, and lament the injustice of it all. Joshua calls Ben’s attention to a book Victoria brought with her from the twentieth century. It is a highly inaccurate history of the Collins family up to that time. Joshua says that he believes the book is an evil thing and that getting rid of it is the only hope of ending the cascade of horrors that have befallen the family and everyone they know since Victoria first arrived. Joshua orders Ben to take the book deep into the woods and burn it. He tells him something else- he has read the book thoroughly, and will see to it that posterity accepts all of its false reports as true. Rather than risk the world finding out that his son became a vampire, his wife committed suicide, and his cousin married a bounder, he will see that it is published that the son moved to England, the wife died of natural causes, and the cousin was a spinster all her life. Thus we learn how the events we saw during the 1795 segment were kept out of the historical record.
Ben is barely out the front door when Danielle stops him. He is dismayed to see her. He tells her she wasn’t supposed to come back, and refuses to look at her. She says she has a plan to spare Peter. Ben says that her plans always involve hurting someone, and she says that this time it is different. Ben asks if she intends to poison the gaoler. She tosses her head, laughs at the thought, and assures Ben all she will put in the gaoler’s drink is a “harmless drug.” Ben asks if she is sure the man won’t be hurt, and she assures him she has no grievance against him, only a desire for him to sleep long enough to get Peter to safety. At length, Ben agrees to take two horses to the gaol. There won’t be time for him to burn the book first; Danielle takes it from him for safekeeping.
We cut to the office of the gaol, where Danielle has been reading the book. She tells herself that Victoria must have brought it from the 1960s, and that it might be very valuable to her. The gaoler enters, and Danielle tells him she wants to see him after the hanging. He doesn’t understand why; she clarifies that she is making a pass at him. They are an unlikely couple, and he seems dubious of her interest in him. He tells her Peter is writing a note, probably for her, and sends her back to see him.
The gaoler has the look of a man who believes that if a thing seems too good to be true, it probably is. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Peter tells Danielle he has decided not to escape. He hands her a note which he predicts she will have trouble understanding. Delivered by another actor, this might have sounded like an apology for an unsuccessful effort to express a complicated idea, but Roger Davis has a way of spitting out his lines that makes it sound very much like he is telling Danielle she is stupid. The gaoler and his assistant come to take Peter off to be hanged, not a moment too soon.
In the office, Danielle reads the note and is pleased with it. She closes it in the book. Apparently she expects to be able to use both of those items to get Peter to stop boring everyone with his nonsense about being named “Jeff Clark.” The gaoler stands behind her and watches as she fades away, taking the book with her.
The gaoler is played by Tom Gorman. Gorman was on Dark Shadows at least 14 times, until now always as an uncredited background player. His first part was in November 1966, when each episode began with the words “My name is Victoria Winters.” So it really is remarkable when he proclaims “Her name was Gloria Winters!” Despite that spectacular blooper, he does a nifty job playing the gaoler’s confusion and skepticism about Danielle, and it is too bad this is his final appearance.
Well-meaning governess Vicki is on the terrace of the great estate of Collinwood. A man known variously as Peter and Jeff keeps clutching at Vicki’s arms so sharply that her biceps pulse, then holds her with one hand and paws her with the other as she stands rigidly still. First time viewers, knowing only that Dark Shadows features stories of monsters and crime, would think that the man had some power over the woman and that they were seeing him abuse that power. They would be right. Unfortunately, the man and woman are not Peter/ Jeff and Vicki, but actors Roger Davis and Alexandra Moltke Isles. Vicki is supposed to be in love with Peter/ Jeff and reluctant to part from him, but the instant she has spoken her last line she turns her face from him and runs away, without the slightest attempt to suggest that she wants to linger.
Roger Davis has his fun.
After Vicki escapes from Peter/ Jeff’s repellent attentions, a woman named Eve emerges from the bushes. Peter/ Jeff is angry with her. He grabs her roughly and throws her out of the frame. Peter/ Jeff then stalks off. Eve comes back into the frame. It’s a relief to see her upright and well-put-together- Mr Davis shoved Marie Wallace so hard she had to struggle to right herself as she spun out of view. It looked like she might have slammed her head against the floor.
Marie Wallace using her arm to regain her balance and keep from sustaining a serious injury.
This was the episode where Grabby Davis got so overly excited in his scene with Marie Wallace on the terrace that he grabbed her by the arms and threw her completely out of frame. You see her struggling to remain on her feet as she stumbles off to the right. Some 20 years later at a fan convention (it’s in Dark Shadows 25th Anniversary Special from the disc set that has the last episode of the series), Marie Wallace brought this up as Roger Davis was telling the audience of how they (or rather he) would cut up and laugh and have fun while they were making the episode, and of how they would just laugh off their flubs. Wallace then broke in to remind Davis of episode 622 as she recalled, “Hey, Roger? I didn’t laugh when you threw me out of frame in that scene, on camera. Remember that? Several times?” She explained to the audience how all during dress rehearsal he’d never touch her and then when he’d done it on camera he’d come up to her and apologize profusely, but Wallace told him then and there at the convention that she never believed him.
Marc Masse, as “Prisoner of the Night,” in a comment left 8 April 2015 on “Episode 622: Heated Conversations on Somebody Else’s Lawn,” Danny Horn, Dark Shadows Every Day, 8 April 2015.
In a response to another post of Danny’s, Marc added that in the same video you can see actress Donna Wandrey’s appalled reaction to Mr Davis’ statement, and her increasingly visible disdain for him as Miss Wallace makes her case against him.
After Peter/ Jeff is gone, another visitor comes and addresses Eve by name. She is Angelique. Angelique is not a Roger Davis character, she is merely a vampire, so everyone can relax.
Regular viewers have been wondering what would happen when Angelique shared a scene with Eve. Marie Wallace’s style as Eve relies on many of the same techniques Lara Parker uses as Angelique. Both use an elevated style with many catches of breath, changes of volume in mid-sentence, and striking of oratorical poses. Each was capable of making this exaggerated method work, but no one could conceal its profound silliness, and a scene consisting of two characters both using it would be too ridiculous even to make a good joke in a cartoon. What actually happens is that Parker demonstrates the quietest possible version of the style, while Miss Wallace shows a more typically brassy version. Recognizing their approaches as two poles of the same axis, we are not only interested in their encounter, but also in what they show us about the craft of acting.
Angelique persuades Eve to join her in an alliance against warlock Nicholas. This might be an exciting development. Nicholas is the show’s chief villain at the moment, and between them Angelique and Eve just might be able to bring him down. It is also the first alliance we have seen take shape in a long time. Many characters have tried to control other characters, to deceive them, to imprison them, to enslave them, to brain-wash them. But the only group working towards a common end is made up of old world gentleman Barnabas, mad scientist Julia, occult expert Stokes, and servant Willie. That team formed long ago, has not managed to get anywhere lately, and is, at the moment, immobilized by Barnabas’ absence. Yesterday Julia tried to form an alliance with Nicholas against Angelique, but at the last minute his inability to talk with her forthrightly aborted that effort. So it is refreshing to see that the show is still capable of imagining a new alliance.
Danny’s post about this one is one of his very best, a composition in free verse weaving together quotes from the dialogue with retellings of the overarching narrative with meditations on a number of topics that the episode touches on. If you are a Dark Shadows fan and haven’t read Dark Shadows Every Day, this is a fine post to start with. It’s like a song- you may not understand all the lyrics the first time you hear it, but the sound of it will carry you along.
The comments below it include some great stuff too. I’ve already mentioned Marc Masse’s remark about Marie Wallace’s confrontation with Roger Davis. There are also two fanfic ideas about how the show might have resolved the question of who Vicki’s parents were. Someone posting under the name “William” had this plausible one:
My own theory: Victoria the daughter of Jamison Collins and Betty Hanscomb. So she’s Roger and Liz’s half-sister. Liz knows and Roger doesn’t.
Jamison aggressively seduces Betty, on whom Roger had teenage crush. He makes her pregnant and then coldly casts her out. A pregnant Betty shows up at Collinwood and tells Liz and Roger about what happened.
Roger confronts his father in a fit of rage in the Tower Room during one of Collinwood’s famous storms.
Jamison Collins has a heart attack during the confrontation, and Roger leaves him in the room to die. Roger staggers out, and Liz finds her father dead.
Roger has a complete breakdown and is sent to Windcliff, where Dr. Julius Hoffman, uncle of Julia Hoffman, wipes out his memory of that night in the summer of 1946.
Liz, with the help of new guy in town Paul Stoddard, pays off Betty Hanscomb to leave town and arranges for her half-sister to be raised at the foundling home in New York. Grateful to Paul for his help, Liz starts to fall for his charms …
(And this is why Liz is so fond of Victoria, but not like she is with Carolyn. And this is why she refuses to tell Roger anything about why she brought Victoria back).
–“William,” in a comment left 22 August 2016 on “Episode 622: Heated Conversations on Somebody Else’s Lawn,” Danny Horn, Dark Shadows Every Day, 8 April 2015.
That has a lot of potential. Liz doesn’t seem ever to have loved Paul, she did marry him shortly after her father’s death, and Roger’s attitude towards Vicki in the first months of the show was a strange mixture of extreme hostility and obvious attraction. “William’s” story would account for all of those things. But it doesn’t hold a pale blue candle to this theory posted by Pedro Cabezuelo:
Everybody, we’re missing the obvious! Vicki IS Betty Hanscombe!!!!! Somehow she managed to time travel AGAIN and ended up in Collinsport circa the 1940s and adopted the Betty Hanscombe identity, working her way as a servant at Collinwood. She had an affair with Paul Stoddard, gave birth to herself (at which point the adult Vicki ceased to exist) and THAT’S what caused all the irreperable harm to the time stream/parallel time/anything else you want to blame on Vicki.
Pedro Cabezuelo, in a comment left 10 April 2015 on “Episode 622: Heated Conversations on Somebody Else’s Lawn, Danny Horn, Dark Shadows Every Day, 8 April 2015.
Mad scientist Julia Hoffman and bedraggled servant Willie Loomis have been in the woods, looking for old world gentleman Barnabas Collins. Barnabas has become the victim of vampire Angelique, and loss of blood has brought him very low. Julia and Willie fear that if they do not find Barnabas before nightfall, he will die. Barnabas was a vampire himself until March; they fear he will revert to that condition if they cannot save his life.
Despairing of the search, they return to Barnabas’ house. Julia remarks that “I actually found myself feeling that we’d come home and find him here.” Willie lives there, Julia doesn’t, but as Barnabas’ inseparable friend and partner in all his adventures she may as well. Julia and Willie decide that the only way to save Barnabas is to drive a stake through Angelique’s heart. She tells Willie that she believes the suave Nicholas Blair to be keeping Angelique’s coffin in his house. She sends Willie to fetch a stake and mallet, and she ventures forth to visit Nicholas.
Julia and Nicholas had a very dramatic confrontation in his living room in #619. Today, she tells him she has come to provide medical attention to Frankenstein’s monster Adam. Adam and Barnabas have a Corsican brothers connection, so Julia knows that Barnabas’ injuries will have reduced Adam to a dire state. Nicholas is keeping Adam at his house because he has plans for him, and if those plans fail it “will bring down the Master’s wrath.” Facing that prospect, Nicholas has little choice but to allow Julia to attend to Adam. She gives him some shots, which do provide him with considerable relief. But she says this is only temporary. She proclaims that “the only known cure” for Adam and Barnabas’ joint condition is Angelique’s destruction.
Early in the scene, Julia says that she and Nicholas must work together to help Adam and Barnabas. Nicholas tells her that he has no healing powers. At that, we may think he is about to talk forthrightly about himself as a warlock. But when she asks where Angelique’s coffin is, Niccholas starts playing dumb again. This frustrates Julia, as it might frustrate the audience. Danny Horn’s whole post about the episode on Dark Shadows Every Day is about how much it frustrates him. Julia leaves the stake behind when she goes, and Nicholas takes it downstairs to Angelique’s coffin with the intention of destroying her.
Meanwhile, Julia’s ministrations have done enough to revive Adam and Barnabas that the latter is able to cry out in the woods. Willie finds him and takes him home. Julia comes back, sees them, and sends Willie to call for an ambulance to take Barnabas to Windcliff, a sanitarium of which she is the nominal head and which is located about a hundred miles away. Barnabas objects to that, but Julia insists.
There is a spectacular goof in this one. We see Barnabas lying on the “grass” in the “woods.” For several seconds we can see the edges of the little green rug Jonathan Frid is on, and a studio light on the floor next to it.
They gave a number to each episode of Dark Shadows reflecting its place in broadcast order. They skipped the numbers for the days the show wasn’t on, so that episode #620 was actually the 613th episode. Fascinating, I know. Even more interesting, there were a total of 1225 episodes, making this one the exact middle of the series.
When Dark Shadows started in June 1966, its undisputed star was Joan Bennett as matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Describing Dark Shadows’ overall narrative structure, Bennett said “We ramble around.” At its beginning, the show was heavily atmospheric and slow paced, with stories very much aimed at an adult audience who remembered Bennett’s heyday in the 1930s and her father’s in the early twentieth century. As it developed, supernatural elements that had at the outset lurked in the background came to the fore and attracted a much younger audience. By this time, Dark Shadows is a slam-bang kid’s show with a cliffhanger at every commercial break and a cast including witches, vampires, mad scientists, and Frankenstein’s monsters. So it is appropriate that the episode at its chronological center is in a way the most unrepresentative of them all. Dark Shadows tended to go to great lengths to avoid anything that would get the audience thinking about Christianity. Yet this outing is all about the saving power of the cross.
Old world gentleman Barnabas is hiding in the long deserted west wing of the great house of Collinwood. Well-meaning governess Vicki took him there after finding him lying on the ground in the woods, grievously injured. Vicki does not know that Barnabas is the victim of a vampire, and so she does not know why he is anxious that she bring him a cross. When he sees that she has brought one, he mutters “The cross… I need it so.” He clutches it to him and tells her “I need no one but you, and nothing but this.” At the middle of the episode, he is going on about this again, saying “No one frightens me… All I need is the cross. The cross!”
When the vampire’s helper Adam comes to steal the cross from him, Barnabas exclaims “The cross! The cross, it will save us both!” Adam takes the cross back to the vampire. He offers it to her. She recoils from it and tells him to destroy it. She runs away, and he looks at it in wonder, not knowing what it is. We are left to ask if he will find out what gives the cross its power, and if learning about it will indeed bring salvation both to him and Barnabas.
Over the next few weeks, much will change on Dark Shadows. There will be major changes in the cast, several storylines will be resolved, new storylines will start, and the pacing will become more deliberate. As that goes on, the show will curve back around to something at once more reminiscent of its early days and more suggestive of what is to come than is this utterly zany period. Not that it will stop being weird- the weirdness will just be developed in greater depth over longer periods. I would say that this bizarre detour into Christian piety marks the most remote point it ever reached in its rambling away from its original concept.
Dark Shadows Commentary 