Governess Maggie Evans forbids her charges, David Collins and Amy Jennings, from going outside. They ask her to play hide and seek. She agrees, and accepts the role of It. She searches for them for a long time, ultimately finding them outdoors. She points out that she had told them to stay indoors, and they pretend not to have understood that this applied to their hiding places.
Maggie does not punish Amy and David for this obvious insubordination. This establishes that Maggie is a squish who will not maintain discipline. That point had already been made in yesterday’s episode, when Maggie caught Amy hiding in David’s room, in defiance of orders from heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard. At that time, Maggie lied to housekeeper Mrs Johnson to cover up what the children had done. Maggie’s irresolution bears repeated exposure, though, since the children are coming under the influence of the evil spirit of the late Quentin Collins and would not be very effective as his helpers if they were subject to even moderately competent adult supervision.
Today Mrs Johnson and her son Harry are under orders from Carolyn to fix up the caretaker’s cottage on the estate. Carolyn has invited mysterious drifter Chris Jennings, Amy’s big brother, to live in the cottage. In the opening, Mrs Johnson tells Maggie she objects to this idea on the grounds that the cottage is cursed. Maggie dismisses Mrs Johnson’s belief in such a curse, but she really shouldn’t. Mrs Johnson keeps calling it “Matthew Morgan’s cottage” after the crazed handyman who lived there for eighteen years. Matthew killed Mrs Johnson’s beloved employer Bill Malloy, then tried to kill Maggie’s dear friend and predecessor as governess at Collinwood, Vicki Winters. Maggie knows all about those incidents. Mrs Johnson also says that no good happened at the cottage after Matthew; the only resident of the cottage since Matthew’s death was David’s mother, undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. Maggie knows plenty about Laura as well, since her father Sam was deeply involved in the strange goings-on concerning Laura and Vicki led the fight against her.
Under orders from Quentin, the children contrive to trap Mrs Johnson in the cottage by herself. Quentin appears to her there. She is terrified. This is quite a surprise to regular viewers. Quentin has appeared on screen only once before, in #646. Moreover, the children have made it very clear that Quentin is confined to the little room hidden in the long-deserted west wing of Collinwood where they found him. We are left to wonder how he gained the ability to manifest himself in the cottage and even to walk outside it when no one is looking.
Perhaps we are to think that Quentin is in some way connected with the curse on the cottage, and with Chris. When the children first contacted Quentin, Amy could communicate with him before David could. This left David miffed, since “Quentin Collins is my ancestor.” That line of David’s led us to expect that we would learn that Quentin is also Amy and Chris’ ancestor. Tomorrow, David will tell Amy that Quentin is “quite pleased” that Chris is living in the cottage. Maybe it was Amy’s presence in the room in the west wing that activated the ghost of Quentin there, and Chris’ impending arrival in the cottage that activates it in that space.
This episode marks the last appearance of Harry. Until today, he was played by Craig Slocum. Edward Marshall takes Harry over the horizon. Mr Marshall must have been watching the show; he does a flawless imitation of Slocum’s very peculiar line delivery. His Harry is just as petulant and resentful as Slocum’s was, but he is so much more physically relaxed and so much more responsive to his scene partners that he is enjoyable to watch in a way Slocum never was. I can’t help but wonder if Harry would have caught on and become a bigger part of the show had Mr Marshall taken the part earlier. Harry’s personality made it impossible for him to figure in a romance of any kind, limiting his usefulness on a soap, but there’s plenty of room on Dark Shadows for comic relief in the form of an inept, grumbly, dishonest servant.
Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, in temporary charge of the great house of Collinwood, has decided to pack children David Collins and Amy Jennings off to boarding schools in Boston. They pretend to be happy about this, but in fact want to stay in the house, where they have come under the power of the evil ghost of Quentin Collins. Neither they nor Quentin can figure out a way to stop Barnabas’ plan. David takes a photo of Barnabas standing with heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard; when the photo is developed, a mysterious figure appears in the background, hanging by the neck. Barnabas believes that the figure represents vanished governess Victoria Winters, and that he must travel back in time to rescue her. He therefore has no time to go to Boston and put the children in schools, so the plan is off.
Several characters see the photo, but only Barnabas recognizes the hanged woman as Vicki. No wonder- Vicki has been played by two actresses, and neither of them posed for it. The original Vicki was Alexandra Moltke Isles; the second was Betsy Durkin. This is Carolyn Groves, who will play Vicki in a couple of upcoming episodes. The usual rule of nomenclature when discussing recast parts is to give the performers numbers, and so Mrs Isles would be Vicki #1, Miss Durkin Vicki #2, and Miss Groves Vicki #3. But in deference to their first names, we might call them Vicki A, Vicki B, and Vicki C.
Craig Slocum appears on the show for the last time today. He plays Harry Johnson, a household servant. When Carolyn Stoddard orders Harry to fetch the children’s luggage, the camera lingers on the look of distaste she gives him. Carolyn and Harry had some unpleasant dealings several months ago, when she was hiding a Frankenstein’s monster named Adam in the long deserted west wing of the house and Harry tried to use this information to blackmail her. Carolyn kept control of that situation, but her facial expression as she looks at him today shows that she remembers Harry’s behavior and does not regard him as a man to be trusted.
Upstairs, Harry finds the children in David’s room. He catches them using an antique telephone through which they have been able to communicate with Quentin. He wants to know what they have been doing. David says that they might as well tell him, prompting an alarmed reaction from Amy. He gives a partly accurate account. The true parts are the ones Harry instantly disbelieves. This wouldn’t have worked with any of the other grownups at Collinwood; they have all had too much experience of the supernatural to disregard such a story. But Harry is relatively new to the house, and is too dim-witted to understand what he has seen. Their secret is safe with him.
Slocum ‘s performances were uneven in quality. He first appeared as Noah Gifford, a criminally inclined sailor who figured in five episodes from #439 to #455, a period when Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the 1790s. He was very bad in those five. He didn’t know what to do with his voice, so that he always sounded like he was reading words one at a time off a teleprompter that kept speeding up and slowing down on its own. Dark Shadows returned to contemporary dress a few weeks after Noah’s last appearance, and Slocum returned to the cast as Harry. He had the same trouble with his speech in his early stabs at that role, but he did eventually learn to relax. In #551, he amazed the world by doing a genuinely good job. He has been passable most of the time since, and he is all right today. Still, Harry doesn’t have much room to grow, and Slocum was so bad so many times that it’s a relief to see him go.
There is an intriguing little blooper near the beginning. Barnabas is supposed to say that he is on his way to see Carolyn. Jonathan Frid actually says that he is going to see “Barrah- Carolyn.” In a recent episode, a day player asked to see “Mister Jonathan” and was ushered to Barnabas, so perhaps he caught the bug and is going to call Carolyn “Barrett, Nancy.”
The ghost of Quentin Collins has lured children Amy Jennings and David Collins to the room in the long deserted west wing of the great house of Collinwood where his skeleton is hidden. For the first time, Quentin appears. Later, a woman in a white dress will also materialize.
An old gramophone starts playing a sickly waltz, and David snaps into an odd mental state. He is slow to respond when Amy calls him by name, and tells her she knows that the waltz is his favorite piece of music. She does not know this, and is puzzled to hear it, since he hadn’t heard the waltz until the night before. Soon it becomes apparent that David is coming to be possessed by Quentin. He tells Amy that they have things they must do, including a conversation with “Roger.” Roger is David’s father; this is the first time we have heard him refer to him by name, and it makes it clear to regular viewers that David is not himself. Later, they are wearing clothes of the same period as those Quentin and the woman in the white dress wore, and they decide to address each other as “Quentin” and “Beth.”
Longtime viewers will also recognize the motif of a piece of music as a device with the power to overwrite a character’s personality. In #155, David’s mother, undead fire witch Laura, gave him a music box, apparently as part of her plan to prepare him to follow her to a fiery doom.
Another music box became much more famous a little later. In the summer and fall of 1967, David’s distant cousin Barnabas was a vampire, and he was determined to re-create his lost love, the gracious Josette. His plan involved forcing a young woman to listen to Josette’s music box incessantly. Barnabas hoped that someone who spent enough time listening to the box would forget her old habits and memories and turn into Josette. The music box did seem to have some measure of the power Barnabas had in mind. First Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town, then Vicki, David’s well-meaning governess, did spend substantial amounts of time listening to the music box with a vacant look on her face. Episode #303 ended with Vicki’s boyfriend Burke listening to the music box and staring off into space; Mrs Acilius wondered if that meant Burke was going to think he was Josette. Burke wouldn’t have looked so good in the dress that comes with the part, but who knows, maybe he and Barnabas would have been happy together.
David and Amy carry a chest out the front door of the great house. Roger and his sister, matriarch Liz, see them do this and ask what is in the chest. David says that it is full of his toys, and that he and Amy want to play with them outdoors. Roger points out that David has never taken a chest full of toys outdoors before, and asks what has led him to do so now. David tells him it is a military secret. Amy explains that one of David’s toy soldiers is broken and they are going to bury him with full military honors. Amused by this idea, Roger holds the front door open and salutes the children as they carry the chest past. In fact, the chest holds, not a toy soldier, but Quentin’s skeleton. It is that which Amy and David bury.
At night, Roger is about to go to sleep when a knock comes on his bedroom door. It is Amy, telling him she heard from sounds from the downstairs that made her suspect someone might be trying to break into the house. Roger takes this concern seriously enough that he retrieves a pistol from his nightstand and carries it as he goes to investigate.
David ties a wire across the second stair from the top of the case from the bedrooms to the foyer, opens the front door, then hides. Roger enters. He is alarmed to see that the front door is open. He stumbles on the trap David has set. He lies unconscious and bleeding at the foot of the stairs. Amy and David enter, see his condition, and nod at each other gravely.
This is the second time David has tried to kill Roger. The first time, in #15, he had sabotaged the brakes on Roger’s car. As he watched the car pull away, he called to his mother. Laura was not physically present, and would not be for another 22 weeks, but when those who watch the show from the beginning learn of her supernatural character they will ask if she influenced David to patricide. Today there is no doubt that David and Amy are doing the bidding of the ghosts, and so we wonder again if David was under Laura’s power when he took the bleeder valve from the wheel cylinder of Roger’s car.
I don’t know how much of a spoiler it is to tell someone reading a Dark Shadows blog that in the spring of 1969 Quentin would become a major breakout star, rivaling Barnabas’ popularity. Quentin would be such a big part of the show’s appeal that Dan Ross would give the last 16 of the 32 original Dark Shadows novels he wrote under his wife Marilyn’s name titles beginning with the words “Barnabas, Quentin, and the.” They were:
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Mummy’s Curse, April 1970
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Avenging Ghost, May 1970
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Nightmare Assassin, June 1970
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Crystal Coffin, July 1970
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Witch’s Curse, August 1970
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Haunted Cave, September 1970
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Frightened Bride, October 1970
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Scorpio Curse, November 1970
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Serpent, December 1970
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Magic Potion, January 1971
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Body Snatchers, February 1971
Barnabas, Quentin, and Dr Jekyll’s Son, April 1971
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Grave Robbers, June 1971
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Sea Ghost, August 1971
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Mad Magician, October 1971
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Hidden Tomb, December 1971
Barnabas, Quentin, and the Vampire Beauty, March 1972
My first choice is always to title these entries after lines of dialogue from the episodes, and “morbid games children play” was so perfect that I couldn’t pass it up. But Barnabas, Quentin, and the Bleeder Valve was also very tempting, and I do suspect I will use at least a few Barnabas, Quentin, and the titles in the next two and a half years.
The ghost of the mysterious Quentin Collins has trapped children David Collins and Amy Jennings in a storeroom in the long-deserted west wing of the great house of Collinwood. Unable to open the door to the corridor, David and Amy have found another room hidden behind a panel in the storeroom. A room inside another room is often referred to as a “closet,” and this is the perfect soap opera closet- there is literally a skeleton in it.
On Dark Shadows, a fashion-conscious skeleton is never seen without a wig. This one is no exception. It is seated in a chair that swivels towards the children, revealing its face. This swivel reminds us of one of the most famous reveals of a bewigged skeleton in cinema, that of Norman Bates’ mother in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.
Amy and David conclude that the skeleton in the closet must be Quentin’s. The skeleton sits beside an antique gramophone that plays a sickly old waltz over and over; Amy wonders how it started playing. David has been living in the house for two and a half years, so his experience with ghosts is already very extensive, and the gramophone is the least of his concerns.
The adults in the great house have noticed David and Amy’s absence and have gone looking for them. Matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard calls at the other residence on the estate, the home of her distant cousin Barnabas Collins. She tells Barnabas that she wonders if they may have slipped in while he was sleeping. Barnabas tells Liz that he locked all the doors before going to bed, to which she responds “Barnabas, a locked door never kept David Collins out.” In 1967, Barnabas was a vampire and David kept endangering himself by sneaking into his house. In those days, David’s father Roger once made a similar remark. Barnabas isn’t a vampire anymore, but everyone other than Dark Shadows‘ hardcore fans will always think of him as one. David’s inability to get out of the room where Quentin kept him and Amy would suggest that he too has changed, and is now at a loss before locked doors. But for Liz, her nephew will always be a master burglar.
Barnabas searches his house and does not find the children. He and Liz leave for the great house. Hiding nearby, the children see them go and sneak in. As per Quentin’s orders, they go upstairs and take a wooden cradle. Later, we will see them put the cradle in the room with the skeleton and interact with Quentin’s ghost there. Their activities in the room don’t make any sense to the audience; they clearly are not meant to. They come after Amy and David have agreed to “play the game,” using a phrase we hear for the first time today. Those familiar with the mysterious atmosphere of ghost stories can assume it will be some time before we will get enough information even to guess what sort of game it is.
For longtime viewers, the highlight of today’s episode comes when Amy meets Barnabas and gives him a hug. Amy has dominated the show since her first appearance in #632; Barnabas has been its undisputed star since he joined the cast in #211. It turns out that the two of them became friends when they were both patients at Windcliff, a mental hospital a hundred miles north of town.
Amy hugs Barnabas while Liz and David look on.
The director of Windcliff is Julia Hoffman, MD. For almost a year and a half, Julia has been a permanent houseguest at Collinwood; as 1968 has gone on, she has become Barnabas’ inseparable friend. She hugged Barnabas for the first time in #635, to his evident discomfort. But as we saw when he interacted with the ghost of his little sister Sarah in #364 and again when we saw him with the living Sarah in the extended flashback to the 1790s that ran from November 1967 to March 1968, Barnabas gets along well with little girls, so it isn’t such a surprise that he returns Amy’s embrace.
In #629, Liz told Julia that Barnabas was miserable at Windcliff. If Barnabas were still a vampire, it would be easy to imagine his evil overwhelming the scientific rationality at the heart of a psychiatric facility, as it has long since overwhelmed Julia’s professional ethics. But his curse is in abeyance now. They’ve had to work to keep us thinking that he is exotic and uncanny and dangerous; one look at him in a group therapy session would undo all that work so abruptly that we would never stop laughing. Of course we never see him as a patient there. It was daring of them even to include Liz’ line, inviting us to imagine him in such a mundane setting.
There’s an implication that Barnabas and Amy hung out at Windcliff, because apparently exposing small children, in shock over the deaths of family members, to middle-aged mental patients is part of the healing process. The Barnabas/Amy scene makes me laugh at loud because it’s as if the writers think Windcliff is a vacation resort and Barnabas and Amy met by the pool.
Stephen E. Robinson, comment left 11 May 2015 at 6:59 AM Pacific time, on Danny Horn, “Episode 645: Spirited Away,” 10 May 2015, Dark Shadows Every Day.
Stephen is being generous- Barnabas was in the hospital because he had himself been the victim of a vampire, and Amy was there because her brother Tom had died. She did not know, but Julia did, that Tom had also come back as a vampire, and it was Barnabas who destroyed him, first by driving a stake through his heart, later by forcing him into the sunlight. I’m no psychiatrist, but with that history of closely related but non-discussable traumas I wouldn’t think the two of them ought to spend much time together.
But of course none of that matters. Barnabas and Julia are the show’s principal protagonists, and they ran out of story two weeks ago. Ever since Amy took over, we’ve been waiting to see how she will connect with them. Now that we know she is Barnabas’ substitute sister and Julia’s sometime patient, they are ready to rejoin the action.
The whole episode takes place within the great house of Collinwood. We start with conversations between heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard, mysterious drifter Chris Jennings, and sarcastic dandy Roger Collins. They are trying to determine the significance of the events of a séance that took place yesterday, during which Carolyn was possessed by the spirit of someone named “Magda.” This name is unknown to anyone in the house.
Through Carolyn, Magda uttered a command to “Stop them!” because “My curse!” means that “He must stay where he is!” Returning viewers know that Chris’ little sister Amy and Roger’s young son David are in touch with the ghost of Quentin Collins, a great-uncle of Roger’s who lived in the late nineteenth century and whom the family history falsely records as having gone to France and died there. We can assume that Magda was a contemporary of Quentin’s, that he is the one who must remain where he is, and that she means the children when she says “Stop them!” But none of the adult characters knows what Amy and David are up to, and Magda’s words mystify them.
Roger is alone in the drawing room while Carolyn is showing Chris out of the house. He is about to take care of some work he brought home from the office when a book flies off the piano and lands on the floor. He finds a letter tucked in the book. Carolyn comes back, and he tells her what happened. He says that the letter is addressed to his father, Jamison Collins; this is the first time we have heard Jamison’s name. He says that it is dated 1887, when Jamison would have been a boy. And he tells her that it is signed “Quentin.” With a look of recognition, he says “We have a Quentin Collins as an ancestor. Actually, I didn’t know very much about him. I think he spent most of his time abroad.”
Roger reads the letter to her. The text is: “Dear Jamison, you must return to Collinwood. I need your help. You must intercede with Oscar. Only you can save me.” Considering how the book spontaneously leapt from the piano, Carolyn is sure that Magda’s ghost must have wanted them to read the letter, and that she is trying to warn them that someone in the house is in danger. It calls Quentin to their attention.
Roger goes upstairs to check on David. As it happens, Amy is in David’s room at the time, and they are about to go looking for Quentin’s ghost. They know that the adults will not tolerate this, and so David jumps into bed and Amy hides behind the door. There is some farcical business as Roger starts to go, Amy starts to come out, then he stops and she scurries back to her hiding place. Once his father is gone, David tells Amy that it was very unusual for him to drop in. “He never says good night to me.”
When Roger returns to the drawing room, Carolyn, who a few minutes ago announced that someone in the house- “It could be any one of us!”- was in imminent danger, asked Roger why he was “suddenly so concerned about David.” Even longtime viewers who remember Roger as the phenomenally bad father he was in the first 38 weeks of the show will think that this is overdoing it. After all, Magda’s warning to him and Carolyn came in the form of a letter addressed to a boy, and David is the only boy in the house. It is natural enough that the reference to Jamison would bring David to mind.
Amy had slipped into David’s room while he was sleeping. She woke him to say that Quentin was angry because “Something has happened.” She knows nothing about the séance or the conversations going on downstairs, and so cannot share our conjecture that Magda is an old enemy of Quentin’s and it is her activities that are disturbing him. David is at first reluctant to get up and irritated when Amy wants to contact Quentin. As he grumbles at her, they begin to sound like an old married couple, even though they only met on Monday and are eleven years old.
David grudgingly agrees to pick up the antique telephone through which he has heard Quentin’s breath and Amy has heard him speak. The breath is audible, and when he gives the receiver to Amy she hears Quentin says that “she would try to stop” them. He didn’t specify who “she” was, but Amy has drawn the conclusion that they should go to the room in the long deserted west wing of the house where they originally found the telephone and contacted Quentin. Every time David resists her ideas, Amy strikes exactly the note that will lead him to do what she wants. At one point, Amy tells David “You’re braaver than I am!” to which he bluffly replies “Because you’re a girl!” He then presses forward with the plan she had formulated.
The children find that the door they had previously used to get into the west wing is now locked. David says that there is another way in, but that it is a secret very few people know about. He leads her to the door of the drawing room, only to find that Roger and Carolyn are still in there. They hide. Once the coast is clear, David leads Amy to a secret panel behind a chair next to the fireplace. We have seen this panel before, in #87. On that occasion, Roger had used it to sneak into the west wing unobserved and release well-meaning governess Vicki from the room to which David had confined her, hoping that she would die. It was unclear whether anyone other than Roger knew of its existence. We haven’t seen it since. Dark Shadows‘ ratings were very low in October 1966, and most of the people watching now hadn’t heard of it then. So when David says that very few people know about the secret panel in the drawing room, his words apply to the audience as well as to the characters.
David opens the panel. He and Amy go into the passage. When the panel is closed behind them, we see the chair move itself back into place in front of it, suggesting an occult power is at work.
David and Amy encounter various signs of supernatural opposition as they make their way to the room. At one point Amy sounds genuinely frightened and suggests turning back, but she has done her work too well- David is now determined to prove his courage. Once they are in the room, the door slams shut and they find that they are trapped. Longtime viewers who remember what David did to Vicki way back when will see an irony in his captivity in the west wing.
Skillful as Amy is in her management of David Collins, Denise Nickerson and David Henesy haven’t quite figured out how to work together yet. They had very different styles of acting, his coming from inside out as he uses his lines and stage directions to project the character’s feelings and intentions, hers coming from outside in as she throws herself into whatever the character is doing at the moment and finding her inner life through those. She is on top of her form right from the start, but he keeps getting thrown off, atypically mangling his dialogue several times and putting the emphasis in odd places in the lines he does get right. That won’t last long- soon David and Amy will be a “supercouple,” as fun to watch together as any other pairing on the show. But this episode is a bad day at the office for Mr Henesy.
Danny Horn’s post about this episode on his Dark Shadows Every Day takes the bits and pieces of information that will fit well with continuity months down the line, contrasts them with the bits and pieces that won’t, and focuses on a case that the writers didn’t have any plan in mind when they were writing the show. I think Danny simultaneously goes too far and not far enough with this point.
In a 1991 interview that Danny himself put online, writer Violet Welles confirmed that the writing on Dark Shadows, as on other soaps, began with a six month story projection that the writers would break down into “flimsies,” day by day outlines of how it might all play out. No one was going to force them to stick with those projections, much less with the flimsies, but creating them meant that the writers spent a lot of time kicking ideas around for possible plots and possible characters. They also meant that there were stacks of paper recording those ideas, so if someone suggests in November that Quentin might have been enemies with a witch named Magda, it won’t require a feat of memory to recall that suggestion in January. So it is going too far to dismiss all thought of a connection between what the characters say today and what we will see next year.
But he doesn’t go far enough when he suggests that the pressure the writers were under to crank out five scripts a week would have kept them from planning for events we wouldn’t see for several more months. They were indeed subject to impossible deadlines, and they did indeed have to improvise at the last minute. So much so that they did not know whether any given event would happen next week, next month, six months from now, or not at all. They may well have planned a story out in detail thinking they might need it soon, only to have it sit on the shelf until next summer.
I always try to write these commentaries as if I hadn’t seen any of the subsequent episodes, so when I mention foreshadowing I try not to say whether or how it will pay off. I also try to write from a perspective that would have been more or less possible for someone watching the show when it was originally broadcast, so when foreshadowing does pay off or when in other ways an episode echoes something we had seen earlier I try to note that echo first and to speculate about what it might mean later, confining any references to information that became public afterward to the bottom of the post. So I won’t quote the particulars of Danny’s argument, or of my comment on it. I hesitated to say as much as I have about Magda, but when I tried to make the same point without using names the results looked like algebra (“Let x be a ghost and y be a witch. Suppose that x and y lived in the same period; call this period P.”) Since the episode leans so heavily into the relationship between Magda and Quentin today, I resigned myself to the spoiler.
Eleven year old Amy Jennings and her big brother Chris joined the show recently, and they are the stars today. Amy has discovered the ghost of Quentin Collins, who haunts a room in the long deserted west wing of the great house of Collinwood. Strange and troubled boy David Collins is rather miffed that Quentin prefers Amy’s company to his- after all, “Quentin Collins is my ancestor,” not Amy’s. They hold a séance in an attempt to bring Quentin to them. David has only participated in one séance, back in #186, when he went into a trance and gave voice to the late David Radcliffe, a boy who died (by fire!) in 1867. So he hasn’t had a chance to catch on that séances on Dark Shadows require a minimum of three people- the first to begin the ceremony and bark orders at everyone else, the second to go into the trance and act as medium, and the third to grow alarmed, try to wake the medium from the trance, and be sternly rebuked by the first. Since David and Amy have no third person, they have no chance of contacting Quentin.
Instead, a shadowy figure appears in the doorway. She is well-meaning governess Vicki, or a rough approximation thereof. David Collins’ scenes with Vicki had been the highlight of the first year of Dark Shadows, not because of the writing or the direction but entirely due to the rapport between actors David Henesy and Alexandra Moltke Isles. A few weeks ago Mrs Isles left the show, and Vicki was recast. Her brief appearance is Mr Henesy’s first scene with the new actress, Betsy Durkin. They can’t recreate his chemistry with Mrs Isles, and Vicki ran out of story long ago. As a result, the scene sounds a discordant note for longtime viewers, reminding us that Miss Durkin, whatever her talents, is here nothing more than a fake Shemp taking up screen time.
Unknown to the other characters, Chris is a werewolf. Chris accepts an offer from the Collins family to host Amy at Collinwood while he deals with his mysterious problems; in gratitude, he takes heiress Carolyn for a drink at the Blue Whale tavern. While there, he sees a pentagram on the barmaid’s face and hurriedly excuses himself. Later, he transforms into his lupine shape and returns to the barroom, not through the door this time but through the window. He kills the barmaid.
The barmaid appears only in this episode; she doesn’t even get a name. But we see her face in closeup often enough that she feels like a person. Even more importantly, she is wearing the same wig that Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, wore in her first four episodes (#1, #3, #7, and #12.) Since Maggie was also a server, working the counter at the diner in the Collinsport Inn, this wig tells longtime viewers that the werewolf’s victim could just as easily have been Maggie, one of everyone’s favorite characters.
Don Briscoe played Chris in his human phase, Alex Stevens as the werewolf. Stevens was credited not as an actor, but as “Stunt Coordinator.” Yet today, his credit card appears in between Briscoe’s and that of Carol Ann Lewis, who was cast as the luckless barmaid. Some of the original audience may have caught on that Stevens was the man in the character makeup, but others who noticed the odd billing order would have chalked it up as another of the show’s frequent imperfections.
The only story that consistently worked in the first year of Dark Shadows was well-meaning governess Victoria Winters’ quest to befriend her charge, strange and troubled boy David Collins. In #191, David’s mother, blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, was trying to immolate him and herself. At the climactic moment, David ran from the flames into Vicki’s arms. When David chose Vicki and life over Laura and death, their story was concluded, and Dark Shadows 1.0 came to an end.
Vampire Barnabas Collins would first appear on Dark Shadows in #211 and quickly become its main source of interest. The show never made up its mind how Vicki would relate to Barnabas’ story. The obvious move would have been to follow Bram Stoker’s Dracula and make Vicki the vampire’s first victim, rising from the dead like Lucy Westenra as “The Bloofer Lady,” a friend to children in life who in her undead afterlife feeds on the blood of children. In that case, Vicki would be destroyed as she was about to kill David. But Vicki had been an effective protagonist throughout the Laura story, which was itself in large part an adaptation of Dracula, and if as seemed likely the show was going to be cancelled with #265 they would have wanted Vicki to stake Barnabas at the end of that episode. So she was spared his bite, and instead he turned his fell gaze upon Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town.
With Vicki walled off from the vampire story, David’s contact with it was initially limited to the inconvenience he could make for Barnabas by sneaking into his house during the day. When Barnabas was keeping Maggie in his basement, a new character was introduced who would meet David and relate to him in a way that would bring him to the center of Barnabas’ concerns. This was the ghost of Barnabas’ little sister Sarah, a girl about David’s age.
David Henesy had been the only child actor on Dark Shadows until Sharon Smyth joined the cast as Sarah in #255. Miss Smyth had very little of the training and experience Mr Henesy brought to the show, but playing a ghost she didn’t really need them. Our main reaction to Sarah is puzzlement, puzzlement as to what she wants, what she can do, and whether she knows anything at all about herself and the world she finds herself in. Miss Smyth was just as puzzled as the audience about all of these questions, and that works to her advantage. In Sarah’s scenes with David Collins, Sharon Smyth’s feelings about David Henesy- a precocious crush mixed with fear of his propensity for playing rather nasty practical jokes on her- added a touch of urgency without erasing any of the character’s mystery. At the same time, Mr Henesy’s acting skills made it possible for us to believe that David Collins had gone a tremendously long time without catching on that Sarah was a ghost. Once David Collins finally did figure it out, David Henesy made the most both of scenes where he coolly presented skeptical adults with irrefutable evidence of Sarah’s true nature and of scenes where he became overwrought at his inability to convince them of the truth.
Sarah’s ghost hasn’t appeared since #364. A couple of weeks ago Alexandra Moltke Isles left the show and the part of Vicki was recast; Mr Henesy hasn’t shared a scene with the new actress, but he had barely shared a scene with Mrs Isles for a year. Throughout 1968, his appearances on the show have been few and far between. Today, for example, he makes his first appearance since #609, which was in turn only his second appearance since #541. That changes when he meets a new co-star who will change the trajectory of his character and of the show.
Amy Jennings is played by Denise Nickerson, whose preparation was fully equal to Mr Henesy’s. Her style was quite different from his- while he, like Mrs Isles, tended to play his characters from the inside out, figuring out what is in their minds and then using the dialogue and action to project that understanding, she tended to start with the action and find the character in the middle of it. Today she shows up on the grounds of the estate of Collinwood just as David’s aunt, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, comes face to face with a werewolf. The werewolf was about to attack Liz, but he runs off at the sight of Amy. Liz takes her unlikely rescuer home with her to the great house on the estate.
There, Amy meets permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, MD. Julia is the nominal head of Windcliff, a sanitarium from which Amy recently escaped. Liz describes the encounter with the werewolf, and Amy explains that she is looking for her brother Chris. Returning viewers know that Chris is the werewolf, but none of the characters knows this yet. The adults are mystified by Chris’ wandering ways and his refusal to take responsibility for his little sister, while Amy is convinced that he is ready to give that up and settle with her in the village of Collinsport.
Julia wants to ship Amy back to Windcliff at once, but Liz talks her into letting Amy stay the night. David strolls in; he meets Amy, and Liz sends the two of them to get housekeeper Mrs Johnson.
We see David and Amy looking out the window of a guest room during a storm. David is disappointed to hear that Amy won’t be staying through the next day, and talks about what they will do the next time she visits. He asks if the thunder and lightning frightens her, she says no, “It can’t hurt you.” To this he replies, “Sure can! Lightning can strike you dead.” After a brief pause, he adds “Well, if you’re not afraid, I guess you don’t need me.” That sequence of lines is so funny the humor must have been intentional.
Amy asks David to stay. They sit on the floor in front of the fireplace in her room, and at her suggestion they decide to explore the long-deserted west wing of the house. They go straight to a room in which they find an antique telephone. They decide to play a game in which they pretend to talk to the ghosts of the people who used to live in the house using the telephone. Amy actually gets through to one of them. David thinks she’s kidding him, and takes the phone. To his amazement, he hears breathing on the other end, even though the telephone’s line is cut.
David only heard the breathing, no words. Amy tells him that the voice identified itself as that of Quentin Collins. David, whose avid interest in Collins family history made it logical that he, in #205, would be the first character to mention the name “Barnabas Collins,” says he has never heard of Quentin.
Later, they return to Amy’s room and find Quentin’s picture in a family album. Liz comes in, and when David asks her about Quentin she tells him that he was her great-uncle, that he left for Europe when he was young, and that he died in Paris. Regular viewers will remember that when Barnabas became a vampire, the Collinses put about the story that he had gone to London, and when he came back in 1967 he introduced himself to Liz as a cousin from England. Thus the show suggests that Quentin may be its next attempt to match Barnabas’ breakout success.
Amy has taken the telephone to her room, and at the end of the episode she talks to Quentin again. He beckons her to return to the room in the west wing, and she goes. If Quentin is indeed going to succeed Barnabas as Dark Shadows‘ great supernatural menace, evidently it is Amy who is in danger of becoming his first victim.
In #636, occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes remarked that he had never heard of a ghost communicating by telephone. During this period, the show was going through a lot of last minute rewrites; the Dark Shadows wiki reports on several flimsies and drafts that were cast aside and replaced with new scripts. So I can imagine that Stokes’ line may have inspired the idea of using the telephone to introduce Quentin, though perhaps it is likelier that they already had the prop and Stokes’ line was a private joke among the writers.
Adam and Eve are discussing the Fall, comparing their incomplete memories of what came before it. This is not a flashback. The Adam and Eve we see today are Frankenstein’s monsters, and they do not live in exile from Eden when the world was young, but in the town of Collinsport, Maine in 1968. The Fall they have in mind is the one that is also known as Autumn. Adam is ashamed, not because he is naked, but because Eve accuses him of preferring life in captivity. He is not naked at all, even though Eve walks in on him and sees his Harry Johnson. Harry Johnson is the man to whom Adam has entrusted a letter, but since Adam’s favorite pastime is studying the works of Sigmund Freud, and since by 1968 “johnson” had been a familiar English slang word for “penis” for over a century, he would likely have been the first to make the connection to the predicament of their Biblical namesakes.
Adam takes Eve to his old home, a dusty room in the long-deserted west wing of the great house of Collinwood. Heiress Carolyn hid him there for a period that seemed so long the audience might feel that the original Adam and Eve were probably still around when it started. Carolyn greets them there. She is happy to see Adam again and eager to befriend Eve. Adam wants that too, but Eve isn’t having it. She quarrels with Adam and storms out, leaving Carolyn in an awkward position.
On the terrace outside the great house, an unpleasant man named Peter who prefers to be called Jeff is waiting for his date, well-meaning governess Vicki. Vicki has kept him waiting for an hour. Vicki’s charge, young David, happens by. Peter/ Jeff immediately makes it clear why Vicki is in no hurry to see him. He greets David with an accusation that he was hiding from him. When David denies this, Peter/ Jeff demands that he tell him who he was hiding from. Peter/ Jeff may have forgotten who is a guest in whose house, but David hasn’t, and he turns to go. Peter/ Jeff stops him, asking “We’re friends, aren’t we?” David doesn’t explicitly agree that they are, but he stays.
Peter/ Jeff starts to talk about his plans to marry Vicki. David calls him “Peter,” and since the closest thing he has to a personality is his insistence on being called “Jeff” he grabs David and shakes him violently. Watching this scene today, my wife, Mrs Acilius, said one word- “Psycho.” She wasn’t talking about Peter/ Jeff, but about actor Roger Davis. When one character shakes another, it is usually the actor playing the shakee who makes all the movements, while the shaker just mimes the action without actually touching them. Not so Mr Davis- he really did rattle David Henesy around hard enough that it’s pure luck he didn’t give him a concussion. That’s typical of the approach Mr Davis took to his performances on Dark Shadows, in the course of which he assaulted several women on camera. Mr Henesy is uncharacteristically tense throughout this scene, does not sustain eye contact with Mr Davis, and when the scene ends he rushes off stage.
In his dialogue, Peter/ Jeff makes some pretty bizarre remarks:
You know, David, pretty soon, you’re gonna find out that love isn’t something you can remember. Sixteen years old… You know when you’re sixteen, you can really love somebody. And then you come back ten years later and you wouldn’t even notice her.
At this, David gives Peter/ Jeff a look that accords with Mrs Acilius’ one word assessment of Roger Davis. “Love isn’t something you can remember”? Which item on the sociopathy screening test is that? And what does “Sixteen years old” have to do with anything? David is twelve, Peter/ Jeff and Vicki are in their twenties, no one mentioned the number sixteen. And David would be doing Vicki a solid if he told her that her fiancé won’t remember her in ten years.
David Collins wonders what the #%*^ is wrong with Peter/ Jeff, while David Henesy recovers from Roger Davis’ assault on him. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
David leaves, and Eve shows up. She recognizes Peter/ Jeff and addresses him as “Peter Bradford!” The closing credits start rolling before Peter/ Jeff can shake her violently while whining that he wants to be called “Jeff Clark.” Eve is the reincarnation of an eighteenth century homicidal maniac; she hasn’t killed anyone since she was brought to life the other day, and Peter/ Jeff would be an excellent choice for her first victim. If she does kill him, I would be “Team Eve” all the way.
Occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes is searching the room in the long-deserted west wing of the great house of Collinwood where heiress Carolyn has been hiding Frankenstein’s monster Adam since #539 in July. Strange and troubled boy David Collins saunters into the room and greets him with a casual “Hello, professor.” When a flustered Stokes makes up a story about Carolyn sending him to the room to look for some old books, David calmly replies, “Oh, I thought you might be looking for Adam.”
We haven’t seen David since #541. The only time we saw him interact with Adam was when they crossed paths in the woods in #495, and in none of the countless scenes featuring Adam cooped up in this dusty little room has David been mentioned. Yet today he tells Stokes that he visited Adam there many times, and that the two of them became great friends. I take that to mean that Ron Sproat, writer of today’s script, wanted to show us a lot of conversations between David and Adam and was overruled by the producers. It’s a major disappointment Sproat didn’t get his way. David Henesy and Robert Rodan would have been a wonderful pairing. David Collins tells Stokes that Adam told him last night that he would be leaving Collinwood before morning, and that he would never return.
Carolyn enters the room and tells David to go. He eavesdrops on her conversation with Stokes. He hears Stokes acknowledge that he is in the room without her permission, confirming that he was lying when he claimed Carolyn sent him there. He stays long enough to hear that Stokes is anxious to find Adam because he is afraid he is in danger. He goes off to look for the big guy.
During Carolyn’s conversation with Stokes, it becomes clear that she does not remember the events of the previous night. Since that night stretched over 13 episodes, that is quite a gap. During it, a mate was created for Adam; Carolyn participated in the first attempt at that procedure as the donor of the “life force.” She did that under the influence of suave warlock Nicholas Blair; Nicholas later enlisted her in another task, after which he erased her memory. Perhaps she forgot everything she did while his spell was upon her. That would explain why she doesn’t remember anything about Adam’s mate or about his passionate goodbye kiss. The show was so much more interesting during the little interval when Carolyn knew what was going on that it is almost as big a disappointment to learn of this mind-wipe as it is to hear that we were denied a chance to see a friendship develop between David and Adam.
David goes to Eagle Hill cemetery to look for Adam. He sees Willie Loomis, bedraggled servant of David’s distant cousin Barnabas Collins, emerge from the old Collins family mausoleum. David hides behind a tombstone until Willie is gone.
David wonders what Willie was doing in the mausoleum. He goes inside, and decides to open the panel to the hidden chamber. There, he finds Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, bound and gagged. He calls her by name, and we cut to commercial.
This situation will be familiar to longtime viewers. In #124, David found his governess, the well-meaning Vicki Winters, bound and gagged in a secret room in the Old House on the estate. That time, he panicked and left Vicki still restrained.
After the commercial break, we spend some time with Willie and Stokes in the Old House, where Barnabas now lives. Thayer David plays Stokes. In #124, he played Matthew Morgan, the crazed handyman who was holding Vicki prisoner. Seeing him in this house with Willie at this point in the episode ensures that those of us who saw it will remember #124 and wonder how David’s response to the situation with Maggie will compare to his failure to help Vicki.
Willie then goes back to the mausoleum and finds David sitting on one of the coffins in the publicly known part. He asks David what he is doing there. David answers in a roundabout way. We start to wonder if he may have reverted to his old form and left Maggie where she was. But he eventually gets around to describing how Maggie behaved when he was untying her. Willie is terribly upset to find that Maggie is gone.
Willie abducted Maggie and locked her up in the mausoleum because Barnabas and mad scientist Julia Hoffman were planning to impose the role of “life force” donor on her. While there, she remembered that in May and June of 1967 Barnabas was a vampire who fed on her, imprisoned her, tried to replace her personality with that of his lost love Josette, and tortured her when she resisted. Willie doesn’t see any way to let her out when she has information like that. In the middle of today’s episode, Kathryn Leigh Scott and John Karlen have a big scene in the mausoleum as Maggie defies Willie and he begs her to be nice to him. They do an excellent job, but it is quite a relief to be out of that dungeon.
When Dark Shadows began in the summer of 1966, its most intelligent character was also its most dangerous, strange and troubled boy David Collins. David twice came within an inch of committing the perfect murder, first when he sabotaged his father Roger’s car, then when he trapped his governess Vicki in a room in the long-deserted west wing of the great house of Collinwood.
The only story that consistently worked in those days was the relationship between David and Vicki, and that was solely due to actors David Henesy and Alexandra Moltke Isles. While the writers gave them terrible dialogue- at one point having Vicki read aloud to David from a reference book on the geography of Maine- they used their faces, voices, and movements to show us what was going on inside the characters. Mr Henesy always looked like an angry boy who was grimly determined to keep hating his governess even though he couldn’t help but like her, while Mrs Isles always looked like a fearless young woman who was determined to befriend a boy who might make an attempt on her life at any moment. As David relented from his hatred, we could see a friendship budding between them, even if the words were still no good.
The story of Vicki and David had its climactic phase from December 1966 to March 1967, when his mother Laura Murdoch Collins was on the show. Laura was Dark Shadows’ first supernatural menace, an undead fire witch who planned to incinerate herself and David so that she could attain a new life. When David ran from the burning Laura into Vicki’s arms in #191, he chose her and life over Laura and death. She thus became his new mother, and their story was complete.
Since then, the show has found very little for David to do. Yesterday, he was wandering around the house with a tape recorder. He told his stepmother Cassandra that he couldn’t figure out how to play a tape. The preoccupied Cassandra sent him away, and he asked his cousin Carolyn to help him. Carolyn made it clear that all you do is press the button labeled “Play.” Two years ago, David could sabotage a brake cylinder to fail at precisely the spot on the road where it would be likeliest to lead to a fatal crash, but now he can’t grasp the concept of “Press play to listen to the tape”?
Longtime viewers will see a missed opportunity here. Cassandra is a wicked witch, also known as Angelique. In #492, Angelique/ Cassandra cast a spell that caused David to forget some incriminating information about her, so we know that he is subject to her power. Vicki knows a great deal about Angelique/ Cassandra; they could easily give us a series of scenes in which Vicki tries to warn David about his stepmother, but his mind is clouded. Instead, we never see Vicki and David alone together during this phase of the show, and Angelique/ Cassandra rarely does anything more with David than display irritation and order him to go away.
David eventually played the tape for Angelique/ Cassandra. She reacted with great excitement, since it included a message that explained why she failed in her attempt to restore the vampire curse she once placed on David’s distant cousin Barnabas Collins. She sends David away and keeps the tape recorder.
Angelique/ Cassandra won’t let David take the tape recorder back to his room. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Angelique/ Cassandra informs her supervisor, suave warlock Nicholas, that she can re-vamp Barnabas if she kills Frankenstein’s monster Adam. Fascinated by the idea of an artificially constructed human being, Nicholas loses interest in Barnabas and instructs Angelique/ Cassandra to find out more about Adam.
In #532/533, Nicholas met Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town. Nicholas was obviously smitten with Maggie, putting the lie to his taunting of Angelique/ Cassandra for her ability to feel an emotional attachment to Barnabas and his own claim to be motivated solely by a devotion to evil for its own sake. After he gives Angelique/ Cassandra her orders, Nicholas goes to Maggie’s house. Ostensibly this is to find out if she knows where Adam might be, but she so obviously does not that it is clear he just wants to see her. He asks her about her hospitalized fiancé Joe, admires her late father’s paintings, and offers to buy one of them at a high price and lend it back to her. Maggie seems to be quite charmed by him. Nicholas’ “Evil, be thou my good” schtick can be fun to watch for short periods, but if he is going to be a major character for any length of time he will need a more complex inner life. His attraction to Maggie is a step towards giving him one.
David goes to Barnabas’ house. He tells Barnabas’ friend Julia that at least twice this evening he has listened to a message on a tape recorder that had something to do with Barnabas and Adam, but he can’t remember any of the details. He does remember that Angelique/ Cassandra got excited when he played it for her, but that’s it. If Angelique/ Cassandra had cast a spell on David, his forgetfulness would be understandable. If Vicki and Angelique/ Cassandra were locked in battle for David’s allegiance, it could be dramatic. But as it is, the show has chosen simply to present David as an abject moron, and that is infuriating.
Julia and David go back to the great house, where they find Nicholas and Angelique/ Cassandra with the tape recorder. Nicholas and Angelique/ Cassandra leave, and Julia and David play the tape. It no longer has the original message, but instead has the witches’ sabbath portion of Berlioz’ Symphonie Fantastique. David furrows his brow, then comes up with the bright suggestion that Angelique/ Cassandra, who has been in possession of the tape the entire time, may just possibly be the one who made the change. Again, since we have not seen Angelique/ Cassandra cast a spell to confuse David’s thinking, this incredible stupidity can do nothing but exasperate the audience.
They don’t even have the excuse that the current writing staff doesn’t know that David used to be interesting. The gimmick of replacing important information on a reel-to-reel tape with an audio signature suggestive of the culprit is a callback to #172, when Laura thwarted parapsychologist Dr Peter Guthrie by replacing an audio recording of a séance with the sound of fire crackling. If they can recall that bit, surely they can remember that David used to have a functioning brain.
In the early days of the show, Vicki was on a quest to find out who her parents were and why they left her at a foundling home when she was an infant. In #60, Vicki stumbled upon a portrait Maggie’s father Sam painted twenty years before of a woman who looked just like her. Vicki wondered if this woman, whose name was Betty Hanscombe, might have been her mother or aunt. Sam gave Vicki the painting then, but it is back in Maggie’s house today, and Nicholas picks it up at one point. We don’t get a very good look at it, but you can buy a reproduction of it on canvas for $25.99 plus shipping from someone on Etsy, it looks nice.
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