denial is not just a river in egypt – Page 2

Episode 370: Foreign to both of us

On Wednesday, we met a new arrival from Paris by way of the island of Martinique. She is Angelique, maidservant to the Countess DuPrés and onetime bedfellow of rich young gentleman Barnabas Collins. Barnabas is engaged to marry the countess’ niece Josette, and is anxious to keep Angelique in the background. Angelique does not share either of Barnabas’ goals.

At rise, Angelique meets Barnabas’ uncle Jeremiah in the front parlor of the manor house of Collinwood. She has found a toy soldier and asks Jeremiah about it. When he identifies it as one of the toys Barnabas was most fond of in his boyhood, he volunteers to take it to the playroom himself. She asks to keep it for a while, so that she can study its workmanship. He doesn’t object, and exits. Once she is alone in the parlor, Angelique starts talking to herself. She says that she will use it to cause Barnabas unimaginable pain. This is the first direct suggestion we have seen that Angelique is involved in witchcraft.

Time-traveling governess Vicki enters. She tells Angelique that they should be friends, because they are both servants in the house, and it is a foreign setting to both of them. Angelique asks what Vicki means by describing herself as foreign, since she is an American. Vicki realizes that she can’t tell someone she has just met that she is a time traveler thrust here from 1967 by the ghost of the little girl she is supposed to be educating, and so she mutters something about how Angelique wouldn’t understand. After they part, we hear Angelique musing that Vicki has no idea what she understands. At no point does Angelique show any interest whatever in becoming friends with Vicki.

Later, we see Angelique alone in her room with the toy soldier and Barnabas’ handkerchief. She is talking to herself about her evil plans again when she is interrupted by a knock at the door. She hides the things and answers it. Barnabas enters.

Barnabas renews the effort he made at the end of Wednesday’s episode to friendzone Angelique. Again, she isn’t having it. After he leaves, she takes the soldier and the handkerchief back out and tells them that she has decided to wait for Josette’s arrival to enact her revenge on Barnabas.

She won’t have to wait long. Josette’s father, André, is entering the parlor, grumbling about the lack of servants at Collinwood. He beckons his daughter, and she follows him into the house. She is played by Kathryn Leigh Scott.

A major cast member of the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s as Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, Miss Scott has played Josette’s ghost more than once. She created the part in #70, when she was the shimmery figure who emerged from Josette’s portrait in the very house we are in today and danced among its pillars. She reprised the part in #126, again in this house, when Josette led the other ghosts in rescuing Vicki from crazed handyman Matthew Morgan. For some months Barnabas, who is in 1967 a vampire, held Maggie prisoner here and tried to replace her personality with that of Josette. Barnabas often seemed convinced that Maggie really was Josette, and when strange and troubled boy David saw Maggie wearing Josette’s dress in #240 he said that her face was “exactly the same” as it was on the many occasions when he had seen Josette’s ghost.

Barnabas’ plan to Josettify Maggie is drawn from the 1932 film The Mummy, in which the undead Imhotep (Boris Karloff) is released from his tomb, holds Helen Grosvenor (Zita Johanns) prisoner, and tries to replace Helen’s personality with that of his lost love Princess Ankh-Esen-Amun. In that movie, there is a flashback to ancient Egypt, where we see that Zita Johanns also plays Ankh-Esen-Amun and we realize that Imhotep’s crazy plan was rooted in some supernatural connection between the two women. The connection between Josette and Maggie has been equivocal until now- Miss Scott was always veiled when she played Josette’s ghost, and stand-in Dorrie Kavanuagh was the one wearing the dress in #240. Moreover, after Maggie got away in #260, Barnabas soon turned his attentions to Vicki, and decided he would try the same gimmick with her. But now we see that Barnabas really was onto something with regard to Maggie, and we wonder where it will lead. I remember the first time we watched the show, my wife, Mrs Acilius, reacted with great excitement to Josette’s entrance in this episode and exclaimed “Of course! Maggie is Josette!”

Vicki spent the first three days of this week telling the actors what parts they played in the first 73 weeks of Dark Shadows, an annoying habit. But there is a reason for it. She knew Barnabas and Sarah as supernatural beings in 1967, so she will recognize them as the same people here. And Josette’s looks reveal her connection to Vicki’s friend Maggie, so she will recognize that. Since only Angelique, of the characters we have met so far in 1795, is played by someone who did not appear previously, the writers are in a difficult position with regard to all of the other members of the company.

I wish they had solved that problem by having Vicki show up in 1795 unable to speak. The suggestion I made in my post about #366 is that she could have materialized in the midst of the accident that upset the carriage bringing the original governess, Phyllis Wick.* Vicki could have sustained a slight injury that left her mute for a week or so, could have had voiceover monologues registering her recognitions of Barnabas, Sarah, and Josette/ Maggie, and would not have had audible monologues when she saw the others. By the time she could talk again, Vicki would know that she was supposed to pretend to be Phyllis Wick.

Clearly Vicki is supposed to get into some kind of trouble in 1795; she is still the heroine, and the first rule of all soap operas is that the heroine must always be in danger. But she is supposed to be seeing the events that started the phase of the Collins family curse that involves Barnabas’ vampirism, and those events did not involve a governess who went around calling people by the wrong names and blurting out information she learned from reading the Collins family history. The logic of the plot requires that whatever trouble Vicki gets into is more or less the same trouble Phyllis Wick would have got into, and the appeal of the character requires that the audience watch to see what kind of con artist Vicki might turn out to be. Both of those imperatives demand that she try to masquerade as Phyllis.

Vicki does manage to keep herself from telling André and Josette that they are being played by the actors who took the parts of Sam and Maggie Evans in other parts of Dark Shadows. She can’t help staring at Josette, however. Josette is quite cheerful when she asks Vicki why she is staring; André, a more conventional aristocrat than his relaxed daughter, is visibly annoyed with Vicki’s impertinence.

Josette asks Vicki why she is staring at her. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

There was an opportunity here for Vicki to show some quick thinking. She could have told Josette that Barnabas has gone on at length about her appearance, and that she is amazed at the accuracy of his descriptions. That would have endeared her to Josette as the bearer of the message that her fiancé is very much in love with her, and would have reassured her that, while Vicki is an attractive young woman who lives under Barnabas’ roof, she is not a rival for his affections. As it is, Vicki just mumbles something about not having known she was staring.

Angelique enters. She and Josette rush into each other’s arms and speak French. Miss Scott tells a funny story about that moment. She and Lara Parker had talked about the script and agreed that two Frenchwomen excited to see each other after a long separation ought to greet each other in French, and they persuaded the producer of their point. Only when they got the revised script with the dialogue in French did it dawn on them that neither of them could speak the language. Fortunately, several other members of the cast were fluent in it, and coached them through.

We can see that Josette really regards Angelique as a friend. Viewers who have been with the show from the beginning will remember Josette’s ghost as a powerful and stalwart force for good, and will also know that Maggie is The Nicest Girl in Town. So whatever grievance Angelique may have against Barnabas, and however unjust may be the social system that has exalted Josette and subordinated Angelique, when we see Angelique faking friendship for Josette while planning to make her watch her lover suffer, we know that she is really evil.

Barnabas enters. Josette tells him that her long, difficult journey was worthwhile now that she is with him. This is a very sharp retcon. In #345, mad scientist Julia Hoffman asked Barnabas if Josette ever came to him of her own free will, and he responded with a silent grimace that left no doubt as to the answer. Now, we see that she has gladly sailed from Martinique to central Maine in late autumn to be with him.

Barnabas and Josette are alone, and he wants to kiss her. She is bashful and says that their parents might be upset if they don’t wait for the wedding. He says they might pretend to be, but that in reality it is expected. That is a sweet little conversation, and it ends in a sweet little kiss.

Angelique is back in her room. She twists Barnabas’ handkerchief around the neck of his toy soldier.

Angelique casts a spell. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas starts choking and collapses.

Barnabas collapses. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The episode ends with Barnabas on the floor, apparently asphyxiating, while Josette looks on in horror.

Wednesday, Barnabas made it clear that he had his affair with Angelique because he didn’t think Josette could love him. That gives Angelique a perfectly understandable motive for seeking revenge on him. A rich man exploited his position to trifle with her, a servant, giving no thought to her feelings or interests.

The selfishness and entitlement Barnabas exhibited thereby is jarring in the mild-mannered, apparently egalitarian fellow we have seen so far this week, but it fits perfectly with his behavior as a vampire in 1967. Seen from another angle, his behavior is consistent with everything the Collinses have done to get themselves in trouble since we first met them. He was tempted to take advantage of Angelique because he had underestimated his own lovability and despaired of making a real connection with Josette.

Barnabas is still underestimating himself and Josette now. Never once does it occur to him to come clean to her about what he did with Angelique. While Josette would no doubt be saddened to learn that her beloved fiancé had dallied with her pet servant, as a rich French girl from Martinique she has after all lived her whole life among wealthy men surrounded by enslaved women, and so could hardly have been shocked by what Barnabas had done. Surely she would have decided to go ahead with the wedding, and she would have known to be wary of Angelique.

By failing to trust Josette with the truth about his misdeeds, Barnabas puts her and himself at Angelique’s mercy. We think of 1966, when matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard and her brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins, were both prisoners of shameful secrets they dared not share even with each other. In 1967, when those secrets were finally laid bare to the whole world, Liz and Roger found they were free to go on about their business as if nothing had happened. In Barnabas’ petrified silence, we see all of the shadows that have kept his relatives in darkness for so long.

*Whom Dorrie Kavanaugh played in her brief appearance at the end of #365.

Episode 348: A matter of fact

We open on a new set, the bedroom of heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard in the great house of Collinwood. Dark Shadows has been in color since #295 in August. Though directors Lela Swift and John Sedwick were both ambitious visual artists, they haven’t been able to do much with color so far. With Carolyn’s bedroom, Swift and the staging team have accomplished one of their first real essays in color. It is composed mostly of shades of yellow, pink, and orange.

The color schemes of the other interiors we’ve seen up to this point run the gamut from sedate to subdued to drab to dank, so we already know we are in a unique space. The only other room in Collinwood that might have matched this one for brightness was the kitchen, but we haven’t seen that since #208.

Carolyn’s young cousin, strange and troubled boy David, lets himself into her room. He touches her, and she awakes with a scream. He explains that he just dropped in to make sure she wasn’t dead. When she turns on the light, the screen is so bright that I reflexively squinted, a reaction I’d never before had to an image on Dark Shadows.

David can’t quite explain why he was afraid Carolyn might be dead, but he does insist that she take an antique toy soldier, saying that she will be safe if she keeps it with her. Carolyn’s mother, matriarch Liz, comes into the room to investigate Carolyn’s scream. Liz wonders what David is doing there. Carolyn hastens to say that he was just making sure she was all right.

David goes, and Carolyn tells Liz she doesn’t think anything can be done for him at home. Liz is reluctant to send him away. Regular viewers will not be surprised by this. We know that Liz took David and his father, her ne’er-do-well brother Roger, into Collinwood at the beginning of the summer of 1966 and summoned her unacknowledged daughter, well-meaning governess Vicki, to come look after David starting with #1 on 27 June 1966, so that her conviction that the family ought to look after him got the whole show started. Nonetheless, Liz is so disturbed by David’s unusual statements and depressive affect that she agrees that he needs residential care.

We cut to the Old House on the estate. Vampire Barnabas Collins is sitting in a basement room where mad scientist Julia Hoffman maintains a laboratory. The room is full of electrical equipment, a bit odd since the Old House has no electricity; the laboratory itself is lit by flaming torches. But if we’ve ever seen a Universal Studios production from the 1930s, we know that where you find a mad scientist, you will find electrical currents, so naturally things start buzzing when Julia flips a switch.

Julia is trying to implement a medical cure for Barnabas’ vampirism. In the first shot of this scene, we see a visual metaphor for that project. Barnabas, an uncanny being, is confined to a small space in the middle of an elaborate collection of technology. If Julia succeeds, the supernatural will be vanquished altogether and scientific rationality will fill the whole world. The color scheme emphasizes the contrast between Julia’s optimistic goal and the terrain on which she operates. The walls and floor are dominated by the grays and browns of the basement, but the frames and tubing of her equipment are a bright metallic hue, light plays on the glass components, and the intense greens, reds, and blues of the potions are distributed in a slightly unbalanced, lively pattern. The irregular shapes of the frames and tubing emphasize this pattern, and contrast with the solid gray of the floor and the even grid of the brickwork on the walls.

This image not only represents Julia’s plans, but also one of the major themes the show is exploring at this period. Too many characters have encountered too much evidence of supernatural forces and beings for anyone to simply deny that such things exist. But even those who have been most heavily exposed to them keep reverting to a naturalistic frame of reference. Sure, Julia spends all her time hanging around with a vampire and has encountered a couple of ghosts, but she’s determined to ring all of those phenomena around with scientific explanations and technological interventions until they yield to rational control.

Julia’s project has hit its first major setback, as the latest treatment led Barnabas’ hands to age dramatically. He expresses the fear that time will catch up with him, and his apparent age will soon catch up with his actual age, something like 200 years. Julia’s hope that her experiment will not only free Barnabas of his curse, but found a new kind of medicine that will free everyone else of aging and death, will thus be defeated.

Barnabas gives a remarkable little speech about the situation he finds himself in:

I’ve been granted privileges given to few other men… For most men, time moves slowly, so very slowly. They don’t even realize it. But time has revealed itself to me in a very special way. Time is a rushing, howling wind raging past me, withering me in one relentless blast and then continues on. I have been sitting here passively, submissive to its rage, watching its work. Listen. Time, howling, withering.

Writer Joe Caldwell has a fine sense of what actors can do, and this odd little bit of purple prose is right in Jonathan Frid’s wheelhouse. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but the sound of his voice delivering it is so gorgeous it may as well be Shakespeare. Well, maybe not Shakespeare, but Ben Jonson at least.

It is possible to read this speech as a programmatic statement. Daytime soap operas of the 1960s were famously slow-paced; the old joke was that a viewer saw an episode that ended with a character hearing a telephone ring, missed four months of the show, and tuned back in to see the episode that started with the same character saying “Hello.” Even by the standards of the period, the first months of Dark Shadows were notoriously leisurely, with action often as not playing out in real time. When we are watching the 21 episodes centering on Roger’s attempts to find a fountain pen he misplaced, it is indeed the case that “time moves slowly, so very slowly.” But those days are behind us. The show is whipping through plot points at a pace that many prime time series contemporary with it would have had a hard time matching.

If the speech is programmatic, it is also autobiographical on the part of the screenwriter. A fast pace promises excitement for the viewers, but makes life hard for a writing staff that never numbered more than three. Indeed, this is the last episode Joe Caldwell will write for two and a half years. Perhaps he felt the demands of the new pace as “a relentless blast” withering his talents, and had to bow out.

We return to Carolyn’s room. She is in front of her mirror, contemplating the toy soldier. She hears the strains of “London Bridge” playing on a wooden flute, which she has learned is a sign that the ghost of ten year old Sarah Collins is present. Carolyn grew up in this haunted house, so it may not be entirely surprising that her response is to lean back and enjoy the music. But she sits up when Sarah manifests herself in visible form.

Sarah speaks, and Carolyn sees her reflected in her mirror. The following scene is so extraordinary I’m going to transcribe all of the dialogue:

Sarah: David must have given you that.

Carolyn: Sarah!

Sarah: He told you my name.

Carolyn: Sarah, how did you get in here?

Sarah: Didn’t David tell you?

Carolyn: Tell me what?

Sarah: All about me.

Carolyn: I’m not sure I understand.

Sarah: I think I’m a ghost. Matter of fact, I’m sure I am.

This is the first time Sarah has described herself in any terms, certainly the first time she has called herself a ghost. Her coyness about herself had left David confused about what she was; it was not until #325 that he finally concluded that she was a ghost. After that, she became more forthright with him. When he wasn’t sure what she was, she would wait until she was out of his line of sight to appear and disappear. But in #327, she fades away while he’s looking right at her.

Coming out to David not only allowed Sarah to relax around him, but has led her to discard her coyness altogether. She is startlingly blunt with Carolyn as this conversation goes on:

Carolyn: B-but- I don’t believe in-

Sarah: Yes you do. Or I wouldn’t have been able to come here. You’re not afraid of me, are you?

Carolyn: No…

Sarah: If you are, I understand.

This is the first confirmation that Sarah can appear only to those who are prepared to believe in her. It’s true that most of the people who have seen and heard her- David; Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town; Maggie’s father Sam; Vicki; Barnabas; Julia; Barnabas’ sometime blood thrall Willie; and local physician Dave Woodard- have either had extensive contact with the supernatural or had reasoned their way to the conclusion that she existed. But she also showed herself to Maggie’s nurse at the mental hospital Julia runs, and we don’t know anything about her background or beliefs. And local man Burke Devlin heard Sarah when she and David were talking in #327. While Burke has had plenty of contact with supernatural beings and in the early days of Dark Shadows, when he was fun, was willing to believe in them, he was at that point tearing around bellowing that there were no such things as ghosts. So this is new and unexpected information.

Carolyn’s denial that Sarah frightens her is given in a trembling voice that shows it to be a lie. Still, she isn’t as frightened as she might be. The other day, in #344, Carolyn was in David’s room when Sarah manifested there, not in the visible form of a little girl, but as the sound of “London Bridge” and as information appearing in David’s mind about Burke’s imminent death. Carolyn was terrified of Sarah when she came that way.

Carolyn: Well, what do you want?

Sarah: Don’t send David away.

Carolyn: How do you know about that?

Sarah: I don’t know, I just do.

At this point, we see Carolyn’s fear fading. She is starting to react to Sarah as if she really were a ten year old girl.

Carolyn: But Sarah, we have to send David away. It’s the only way we can help him.

Sarah: But if you send David away, I won’t have anyone to play with.

Carolyn: Well, maybe it isn’t good for David to play with you.

Sarah: Why do you say that?

Carolyn: Because it leads him into believing all sorts of things that aren’t true.

Sarah: How do you know they’re not true?

Carolyn: Well, they’re just not, they couldn’t be.

Sarah: He wasn’t lying about me, was he?

Carolyn: No.

Sarah: Well.. then maybe David is acting the way he is because no one will believe him.

Carolyn: But… it isn’t possible.

Sarah: People say I’m not possible, but I am. Why doesn’t that make the rest possible?

Carolyn: Sarah, maybe you don’t know the stories David’s been telling!

Sarah: Why do you think that?

Carolyn: Because they’re too fantastic! And besides, they’ve all been proved false.

Sarah: How do you know they’ve been proved false?

Carolyn: Sarah, are you trying to tell me that Barnabas actually slee-

This exchange is the ultimate example of a character accepting the existence of a particular supernatural being and then snapping back into a frame of reference that does not allow for supernatural beings. Carolyn knows that Sarah is a ghost, and starts arguing with her about how fantastic the world is permitted to be.

There comes a knock at the door. Carolyn turns away from Sarah to look at the door, and when she looks back, Sarah has vanished. Regular viewers know that Sarah was Barnabas’ little sister, that she wants to keep him from doing horrible things to people she likes, but that she will not say anything against him. So when Carolyn says Barnabas’ name, we know that Sarah is about to vanish.

Sarah’s part is an outstanding example of writing to an actor’s abilities, even more so than was Barnabas’ speech. Caldwell knew that Jonathan Frid had a flair for making flowery gibberish appealing, because that is what he has been doing the whole time he’s been on Dark Shadows. What Sharon Smyth has been doing well as Sarah is being a cutie pie and creating a vague and mysterious impression. When she has more than a few lines to deliver, things tend to get very wobbly. Today, she has to maintain a commanding tone and an adult demeanor throughout an extended patch of rapid-fire dialogue. Absolutely nothing we have seen on screen would suggest that she could handle that. But she pulls it off, more than competently. There are a few glances at the teleprompter, but at no point does she break out of the patient and authoritative manner she has to adopt. It is an impressive job of acting by any standard.

The person at Carolyn’s door is Liz. Liz is Dark Shadows‘ queen of denial. Viewers who have been with the show from the beginning have seen a few cracks in her facade of disbelief in the supernatural. In #10, she dozed off in the drawing room and started talking in her sleep about ghosts. When Vicki insisted to her in #127 that she had seen a ghost, Liz said she believed her. And in #280 and #281, Liz reluctantly agreed to participate in a séance, and afterward agreed that Vicki had been possessed by a spirit. But even in those moments Liz was fighting to keep the topic of ghosts at bay, and the rest of the time she has presented a blank wall to any attempt to face facts about the strange goings-on. So it is not surprising that Carolyn tells her mother she was talking to herself while tidying up her room.

Having talked Liz into sending David away, she now has to talk her back out of it. She manages to get her to agree to wait a few days. “London Bridge” plays. Carolyn reacts to it, Liz does not.

In his room, a distraught David is looking at a mobile. Its whimsical black and white markings suggest a puzzle and make a stark contrast with the vivid colors around them.*

Carolyn comes in. She brings the toy soldier and tells David she doesn’t think she will need it. He insists that she will, but she explains that Sarah visited her and now she believes him and knows how to help him. David is horrified by this. He says that Sarah visited Dr Woodard, that Woodard believed him, and that led to his death. He begs Carolyn not to believe him and claims to have been lying. He sobs and clutches her.

Back in the Old House, Julia prepares to give Barnabas another treatment. He snaps at her. She tells him that whatever happens, she wants him to know that she always wished him well. That prompts him to unload a further stream of sour remarks about her competence and intentions. Julia carries out the treatments, only to find that the aged appearance of Barnabas’ hands has spread to his head.

In his post about this episode on Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn puts it well when he says that “This is just good soap opera construction. People that we care about, facing terrible danger, and desperate to help each other.” He’s referring specifically to the scenes between David and Carolyn and Liz, but it applies to everyone. We care not only about the good people in the great house (well, they’ve been relatively good, lately,) but also about Barnabas and Julia, evil people who are the terrible danger David and Carolyn and Liz are facing, but who make the show fun to watch. We care about Sarah too, and she’s desperately trying to accomplish exactly the result we most want to see, an outcome in which David, Barnabas, and everyone else we enjoy watching stays on the show.

*Evidently this mobile was a commercially produced item. One of the commenters on Danny Horn’s Dark Shadows Every Day reports having had one like it as a child.

Episode 321: How many times do I have to tell you?

Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, is not allowed to leave home. The yard outside her door is full of policemen. They are hoping that a rumor that her amnesia is breaking and she will soon remember who abducted her and held her prisoner will draw that person out of hiding. If he approaches the house, they will… it isn’t clear what they will do, exactly. Whatever they do, Maggie hopes that it will end the danger so that she can get back to her normal life.

Maggie and her father Sam talk about the situation. This conversation doesn’t advance the plot or give the audience new information, but it is somewhat interesting to people who have been watching the show from the beginning. For the first 40 weeks of the show, Sam was an alcoholic and Maggie’s attempts to keep him out of trouble were a substantial part of the story. Adult Child of an Alcoholic (ACoA, in the lingo of the twelve step movement) mannerisms such as advertising that she is happy by starting utterances with a laugh and stressing whatever syllables have a rising pitch are still a major part of Maggie’s characterization.

But Sam isn’t an alcoholic anymore. Not only doesn’t his drinking cause him problems, but we’ve seen him function as a social drinker. He keeps a bottle of whiskey in the living room of the Evans cottage and occasionally takes a drink or two; he often goes to The Blue Whale tavern and enjoys happy hour there. But he declines drinks when they are offered at inconvenient times, doesn’t get drunk, doesn’t have trouble with his work, and Maggie doesn’t have any complaints. The other day, the show referred back to Sam’s drinking days. He and the sheriff went to The Blue Whale, where Sam started the rumor about Maggie’s memory. Sam pretended to be drunk and the sheriff pretended to hush him while he declared that Maggie would be leading the police to her captor any day now. But he was stone sober the whole time, even though he had had a drink at home before leaving for the tavern.

The show dropped the theme of Sam’s alcoholism when it gave up on the storyline of “The Revenge of Burke Devlin.” Sam had started drinking because of the events behind that storyline and his drunkenness made it unpredictable what role he would play in it. Since that ended in #201, the writers don’t seem to see a point in presenting Sam as an alcoholic, even as one in recovery. But I think that is a mistake. The actors and directors remember that Sam has that history, and it adds depth to both David Ford’s portrayal of Sam and Kathryn Leigh Scott’s of Maggie. You wouldn’t have to spend any more screen time presenting Sam as a recovering alcoholic than they spend now presenting him as a social drinker. All he’d have to do is reply to a remark about booze by saying that he never touches the stuff anymore, and you’ve made the point.

Viewers who have been with the show from the beginning will look at Sam and Maggie’s heart-to-heart talk and remember the scenes from the first 40 weeks where Maggie wound up playing the parent in the parent-child relationship. Seeing him really function as a father here will not only reassure us that they are free of that now, but will also explain why Maggie kept falling into all of the patterns of behavior that enabled Sam when he was a drunk. Today, he’s the Daddy she knew before alcohol got the better of him, the one she was always sure was still in there someplace.

Sam leaves the room, and Maggie gets a visitor. After Sam had assured Maggie that the house was so well-guarded no one could get in, we saw a shot of the permanently nine year old ghost of Sarah Collins outdoors, peering over a picket fence.

Maggie falls asleep, and wakes to find Sarah in the room with her. Maggie repeatedly asks Sarah how she got in, and Sarah keeps declining to answer. Maggie keeps trying to get her father into the room, and Sarah keeps telling her that if a third person comes in, she will have to go away. Sarah finds that Maggie is not in possession of the doll she gave her, and tells her that she will have to get it back as soon as possible and keep it with her at all times. Maggie asks more than one question about that as well, and Sarah again tells her that she can’t explain. Sarah gets to be quite exasperated that she has to keep reviewing the ghost rules with Maggie.

Sarah can *not* believe Maggie still doesn’t get it.

Several characters have entertained the possibility that Sarah might be a ghost, among them Maggie and Sam. They keep snapping back from really believing that she is. In the early months of the show, characters had speculated that there might be ghosts on and around the great estate of Collinwood, but they couldn’t let go of the idea that they lived in a world that basically made sense according to the usual natural laws. So no matter what they saw, they kept retreating from the full implications of the supernatural events that came to be a more and more obvious part of their experiences. Sarah’s impatience with Maggie today is reflected in the impatience many viewers of the show express when characters who have had encounter after encounter with the paranormal won’t stop droning on about how there must be a perfectly logical explanation.

Sarah keeps repeating herself and Maggie keeps missing the point. Maggie tells Sarah that she will like Sam, who likes little girls. That again is a poignant line to those who are thinking about the happy life Maggie had with her father before he started drinking and that has only recently resumed, though it is lost on newer viewers. We also know that Sarah already likes Sam- she visited him in this house in #260 and told him where to find Maggie.

But in the world of Dark Shadows, ghosts cannot appear to more than one person at a time. For example, in #141 strange and troubled boy David Collins took his mother, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, to the Old House on the grounds of Collinwood, hoping that the ghost of Josette Collins would appear to her. He left her alone in the house, explaining that Josette appears only to one person at a time. Josette did communicate with Laura after David left, though Laura concealed that fact from her son.

We’ve seen only two exceptions to the rule that ghosts appear to one person at a time. The first case was in #165, when Josette manifested herself in a room with David and Laura. The second time was in #294, when Sarah herself helped Maggie escape from the mental hospital where mad scientist Julia Hoffman was keeping her for evil reasons. Both Maggie and her nurse could see Sarah that time.

But those were special occasions. It was such a strain for Josette to present herself to two people that she could shimmer into view only when David was asleep, and a few words from Laura were enough to shoo her away before he could wake up, though he did feel her presence afterward. And Sarah’s appearance to Maggie and the nurse lasted for only a few seconds. Viewers reminded of Sarah’s earlier appearance to Sam will remember that she vanished before he finished a sketch of her that she very much wanted him to give her, so however great a power she might represent, we know that it is not entirely under her control. She can do what she is supposed to do and tell people what they are supposed to know, but she cannot simply do as she wishes, and when she has completed an assigned task or entered an uncongenial situation she will disappear.

Eventually Maggie insists on opening the door and calling to Sam. Of course Sarah has vanished when he enters, of course the men guarding the house didn’t see her, and of course Sam and Maggie fret that if Sarah could come and go unobserved so could the person they are trying to catch. Those bits bring on our frustration with characters who don’t get that they are living in a universe pervaded with supernatural beings. If they were proceeding from the premise that Sarah was a ghost and considering the possibility that Maggie’s captor may also have been some kind of uncanny being, that would indicate that the action is about to start moving a lot faster. As it is, it’s just filler.

Meanwhile, Julia has left her hospital and come to Collinwood, where she is in league with Maggie’s captor, vampire Barnabas Collins. Barnabas has heard the rumor that Maggie is recovering from her amnesia. Julia induced that amnesia to keep Maggie from exposing him and inconveniencing her.

In Friday’s episode, Julia tried to talk Barnabas out of killing Maggie. He had calmly and suavely told her that he had no choice but to yield to her arguments, and she had been satisfied that she had persuaded him. Today, he tells his sorely bedraggled blood-thrall Willie Loomis that he will set out for the Evans cottage as soon as the clouds cover the moon and give him a deep enough cover of darkness.

Willie sneaks over to the terrace at the great house of Collinwood, where he informs Julia of Barnabas’ intentions. Julia cannot believe that her powers of persuasion failed to win Barnabas away from his plan to kill Maggie. Willie has to repeat himself time and again, until he grows as exasperated with Julia as Sarah was with Maggie.

This is the first time we have seen Julia in denial. It’s understandable that she would overestimate her ability to bend Barnabas to her will- not only has she had a great deal of success so far at dominating their relationship, but she is usually able to manipulate people to a fantastic degree. When she induced Maggie’s current amnesia, she took her in a matter of minutes from a state in which she remembered everything that had happened to her to one in which an impenetrable mental block covered exactly the period in which Barnabas abused her. Someone who can do that might well have difficulty grasping the fact that she has not turned someone to her way of thinking.

Barnabas stares out the window of his house in the direction of the Evans cottage and thinks murderous thoughts about Maggie. My wife and I often laugh about the comment Danny Horn made on this scene in his post about this episode on his blog Dark Shadows Every Day:

Meanwhile, the dogs are howling, and Barnabas is standing at the window, staring out into the night.

“Goodbye, Maggie Evans,” he thinks. “I might have loved you. I might have spared you. Now… you must die.”

Man, what a diva. He even has backup singers.
Danny Horn, “Episode 321: What We Talk About When We Talk About Ghosts,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 3 February 2014

When the show dwells on the dog-noise, Mrs Acilius and I often turn to each other, say “the backup singers!,” and laugh. When we watched this episode yesterday, we laughed louder than usual because our beagle joined in with them, right on cue. He often looks up when the howling starts, the backup singers are the stars of the show as far as he is concerned, but it is unusual for him to sing along. They must be in particularly good voice in this one.

Episode 316: He just showed up one night

Strange and troubled boy David Collins got himself trapped in the secret chamber of the old Collins mausoleum in #310, and everyone has been searching for him ever since. Most of them want to get him home safe, but his distant cousin, Barnabas, has a different agenda. He suspects that David has learned that he is a vampire, and is determined to be the first to find him so that he can kill him.

Friday, David got out of the secret chamber and walked outside, straight into Barnabas’ hands. Today, we open with a reprise of that scene. After Barnabas greets his young cousin with a richly sinister “Hel-lo, David!,” he questions him sharply. He expresses dissatisfaction with David’s answers, then tells him that because no one is at home in the great house of Collinwood, he will be taking David to his own house. David grows more and more uncomfortable. Just as he is coming to be really frightened, the voice of local man Burke Devlin calls his name.

When Burke reaches them, David throws his arms around him and Barnabas squirms guiltily. Burke dislikes Barnabas, and gives him a suspicious look while he and David explain what has happened. When Burke says that there are people at home in the great house, David flashes a look of alarm at Barnabas. Barnabas says that no one had answered when he knocked on the door earlier, so he assumed everyone had joined the search. The two men take David home.

There, David eats a sandwich in his room while his father Roger asks him where he has been. This conversation is just magnificent. Roger is trying to be stern, but is such a flagrantly neglectful father that David knows full well that he can’t be bothered to punish him. So while Roger puts a series of pointed questions to him, David ignores him and muses aloud about Barnabas. “Barnabas is mysterious, isn’t he, Father?…You know, we don’t know anything about him. He just showed up one night.” Roger keeps urging David to forget about Barnabas and start answering his questions, but gets nowhere. Louis Edmonds and David Henesy were both talented comic actors, and they worked well together, so it’s no surprise this scene is laugh-out-loud funny.

Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Along with the comedy comes the thrill of a potential change in the show. In his post about this episode, Danny Horn writes: “It’s a great moment. It’s like the ‘logical explanation’ spell was suddenly broken, and David just realized how bizarre his life is.” The structure of Dark Shadows’ storylines has been that someone has a terrible secret, they are deep in denial about the extent to which the secret is deforming their lives, and when they finally let go of their secrets they are free. So matriarch Liz had a terrible secret that kept her from leaving her house for over eighteen years, she revealed the secret in #270, and now she’s happy to go anywhere. She’s on an extended visit to Boston at the moment. Roger had a secret connected with an incident for which Burke went to prison years ago and he spent all his time making a fool of himself as he struggled to keep it hidden; he admitted the truth in #201, and since then he has been a carefree fellow who can make anyone laugh. So the Collins family curse that Barnabas embodies is made up chiefly of denial, and it can be defeated by facing facts. If David has seen through all the lies and is willing to reckon with the truth, he has the power to bring everything to a conclusion. So when he says that Barnabas “just showed up one night,” we catch a glimpse of what it would be like if the entire series came to its ultimate climax.

We end with David still in his room, telling well-meaning governess Vicki that he feels someone evil is watching him. We cut to Barnabas in his own house, staring out the window at the great house in the distance, thinking his sinister thoughts. David’s feeling should be familiar to him- when his mother, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, was staying in the cottage in the estate, she often stared out her window and caused David to have nightmares.

Laura was a threat to David because the basic conditions of her existence drove to kill her son. Barnabas’ threat to him is a result of circumstances that were always likely to arise, but that might not have, and that might yet be changed. So when Laura was on the show, the suspense was how she would be destroyed before she could kill David. Now with Barnabas, there is a question whether he will try to kill David at all. So the suspense is more complicated, and there are more options for pacing. The plot doesn’t have to be either glacial or rapid, as it did with Laura, but can move at any of a variety of speeds depending on which of the many possible directions they decide to take the story.

Episode 315: The night holds no danger for me

In our house, we watch Dark Shadows on Tubi, a free advertiser-supported streaming app. As we click on each episode, we see a summary reading “Freed from his grave after 200 years, a tormented vampire returns home to protect his loved ones in this classic gothic daytime TV series.”

That “tormented vampire” is Barnabas Collins. In the opening scenes of today’s episode, Barnabas is talking with Julia Hoffman, a mad scientist who is trying to cure him of vampirism. They are discussing the missing David Collins, the ten-year old boy who is the last bearer of the Collins family name. This ardent protector of family announces that he must be the first to find David, because he is going to kill him. He tells Julia that he’d been “getting very fond” of David, but that he is pretty sure the boy knows that he is a vampire, so he will have to choose survival over “sentiment.” When Julia objects, Barnabas smiles and tells her that he might also be killing her and his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie soon. He invites her to inform Willie of this fact.

Barnabas goes to the great house of Collinwood, where he visits well-meaning governess Vicki. Vicki is worried sick about David, to whom she is devoted. She regards Barnabas as a dear friend, and he enjoys spending time with her. He has some vague intention of killing Vicki so that she will rise as his vampire bride, and may get around to doing that once he has killed David, Vicki’s fiancé Burke, and maybe Julia and Willie. Perhaps what he is determined to “protect his loved ones” from is aging- with him around, it seems unlikely anyone is going to get much older.

Vicki unwittingly tips Barnabas off as to where David is. David is trapped in the secret chamber inside the Collins mausoleum in the old cemetery north of town. Vicki doesn’t know that this chamber exists, but Barnabas was confined there for 170 years. So when she tells him that the doddering caretaker of the cemetery thought he heard voices coming from behind the stone walls of the outer chamber, she thinks she is giving evidence that the old man has lost his mind. Barnabas, however, knows different.

David learned about the chamber from the permanently nine year old ghost of Barnabas’ sister Sarah. Sarah has been showing up a lot lately, and yesterday we saw several characters starting to admit that she must be a supernatural being. It is Sarah’s friendship with David that has led Barnabas to believe that he knows he is a vampire. In fact, she did not tell him about this, but David did overhear a conversation between Barnabas and Willie which gave him enough clues that he could probably figure it out.

When Barnabas arrives at the cemetery, he meets the caretaker and has a confusing conversation that is straight out of vaudeville. On his Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn compares it to “a summer stock production of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, where Abbott is being played by Count Dracula.” At one point Barnabas is so exasperated with the caretaker that he nearly blurts out that he is Sarah’s brother. That’s the second time in the episode a character almost blurts out a word that would make a major change in the show- towards the beginning, Julia came within a breath of saying “vampire,” a word we have not yet heard on Dark Shadows.

Meanwhile, Sarah appears to David. He asks her how she got into the sealed chamber, and she replies “I can get in anywhere.” David is dissatisfied with this answer, but doesn’t really seem surprised to see her. He seems to know that she is a ghost, and to be holding off on using the word in her presence in the same way that Julia is holding off on using the word “vampire” with Barnabas. It’s just sort of indelicate to use a label people haven’t told you they like. Maybe Sarah prefers to be called a Phantom-American, and it would be this whole big thing if you called her a “ghost.”

Sarah shows David how to open the panel. He does, and when he looks back she is gone. He expresses irritation with her for “hiding,” which is rather strange- he was trapped in the chamber for days, so clearly she wasn’t hiding there the whole time. She must have made her way in through the solid walls. Even if David hasn’t figured out that she is a ghost, he must know that she can get out the same way.

David walks out of the mausoleum, directly into the hands of his cousin Barnabas. It was obvious that he would, but that obviousness is not a problem- on the contrary, it comes with a sense of inevitability that leaves us dreading what Barnabas is going to do to David.

Protector of his loved ones. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

That Sarah shows David the secret chamber just in time for his presence there to alarm Barnabas and leaves him there for days, letting him out at precisely the moment when he will run into Barnabas, raises questions about Sarah’s motivations. Danny Horn and some of his commenters find themselves considering “the uncomfortable possibility that Sarah has lured David here because she’s actively trying to starve him to death, so that he becomes her ghost playmate.”

I think that’s too simple an interpretation to cover everything we’ve seen Sarah do so far on the show. It is true that she never really gets anyone out of danger. She helped Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, escape from Barnabas when he was about to kill her, but that escape led directly to her imprisonment in Julia’s hospital. She broke Maggie out of that hospital before Julia could complete her evil plan to keep her in a state of total psychological collapse, only to lead her directly to Barnabas. She prevented Barnabas killing Maggie in her bed, but left him determined to strike again if Julia failed to keep her memory from returning.

Some say that Sarah is really an avatar of Barnabas, that she is his conscience roaming free in the world. Julia explicitly proposed this interpretation on screen in #302, and Sharon Smyth Lentz says that it is direction she was given when she was playing Sarah. So it was an idea that the writers meant to develop, but I don’t think it covers everything either. A guilty conscience can lead a person to take actions that will lead to his own exposure, but the likeliest way Sarah’s latest actions will lead to Barnabas’ exposure will be if he kills David and is caught. That doesn’t really sound like “conscience.”

Dark Shadows is, in all its phases, the story of the great estate of Collinwood and the accursed family that lives there. I would say that, whatever else Sarah is, she is a symptom of the curse that Barnabas also embodies. For several weeks, Barnabas has had a tendency to lie low and keep quiet, letting the curse fester silently and pull the Collinses and the community around them deeper into its power by imperceptible steps. Sarah disrupts all of his plans, prompting him to act and forcing into the open more and more evidence that spiritual forces of darkness are at work.

But for all the inconvenience she represents to Barnabas, Sarah is no more an opponent of the curse itself than he is a protector of family and friends. On the contrary, she presents a different version of the curse. She confronts the living characters with facts they are desperate to avoid facing. If they continue on the form they have set so far, most of them will react to the evidence of otherworldly dangers by digging ever deeper into denial. If they do that, even Barnabas’ destruction would not really free them from the life-draining evil that engendered him.

Episode 178: Bake me a cake

We open in the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood. Visiting parapsychologist Dr Guthrie is trying to talk hardworking young fisherman Joe into helping him open a grave. Joe’s ex-girlfriend, flighty heiress Carolyn, is alarmed by the idea, but is on Guthrie’s side. Guthrie recaps the current storyline until he bores Joe into submission. Joe goes off to get his tools.

Guthrie, Carolyn, and Joe make their plans

As Joe, Joel Crothers does manage to hold the audience’s attention. While the other actors are starting to seem bored with the endless repetitions, his shocked interjections make him seem like someone learning these bizarre facts for the first time. With so much time spent selling old rope, it is genuinely surprising to find oneself taking an interest in anything about the dialogue.

We cut to stock footage of the Moon behind clouds, then see blonde fire witch Laura staring out the window of the cottage on the estate. This is the first time we see that footage coupled with the sight of a supernatural villain staring out a window, but it won’t be the last.

Laura’s estranged husband, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger drops in on her. They recap the same material Guthrie has been going over.

When we were watching the episode, Mrs Acilius became frustrated. Laura tells Roger that Guthrie is not simply a psychologist- he is a parapsychologist. Roger is appalled by this news. Mrs Acilius was appalled that Roger, who has always been presented as a reasonably intelligent person, is suddenly so dumb that he hadn’t figured it out yet. After all, Roger and Laura had both participated in a séance Guthrie had organized- wasn’t that enough of a clue for him?

My interpretation is that Roger isn’t being dumb. He has said time and again that he regards Guthrie as a quack. I think that up to this point, he has assumed that Guthrie was just making stuff up as he went along. When Laura tells him that Guthrie is a researcher specializing in psychic phenomena, he is stunned to realize Guthrie isn’t improvising- he is a committed to a systematic plan of quackery. The missus seemed to find that interpretation intriguing.

Roger is stunned deeply enough, in fact, that his resistance to the idea that there might be something seriously weird about Laura starts to break down. Roger runs through all the unexplainable occurrences that have taken place since Laura has come back to town, and insists she tell him anything she might be holding back. Roger usually responds to information that inconveniences him by declaring that he will erase it from his memory as soon as possible, but it seems that he can no longer seal off the warning signs about Laura.

As Roger talks to Laura, she realizes that he might be about to become a lot less manageable. Her look changes from irritation to worry to a brief, beautiful moment when she is clearly thinking of casting a spell on him. I missed that bit when we were watching the episode, and Mrs Acilius had to point it out to me. I must have been looking away- as Diana Millay plays the scene, the flickering thought is easily legible on her face.

Roger goes to the great house and acts like he owns the place. Carolyn and Guthrie play along with him. He orders Guthrie out. Guthrie goes quietly; it’s time for him to meet up with Joe anyway. Carolyn pleads with him to give Guthrie a chance. After yet more recapping, he breaks down and admits that it is possible that something supernatural might be going on.

We see Guthrie and Joe at the door of the building in which the crypt they want to open is located. They try vainly to open the door. They knock and get no answer. They are about to give up when the doorknob starts to turn. The door opens, and they peer inside with startled looks. This is a reprise of the ending of #153, when well-meaning governess Vicki and her boyfriend, instantly forgettable young lawyer Frank, came to the same door with the same result. Vicki and Frank had been led to the building by the ghost of Josette Collins, and did not know what they were to do there. Guthrie and Joe have decided to go there because Guthrie’s analysis has led him to the conclusion that they have to open the tomb of L. Murdoch Stockbridge. That difference in context doesn’t make today’s conclusion any more exciting than that one was, but at least it marks a certain measure of progress in the development of the plot.

Episode 151: Finishing my puzzle

There isn’t really any structure to this episode, certainly no suspense. It’s a collection of scenes in various moods, each exploring some familiar themes, all taking place in the great house of Collinwood.

Reclusive matriarch Liz wakes her nephew, strange and troubled boy David. She is glad to find that David is cheerful, but disturbed to hear that his mother, the mysterious and long-absent Laura, visited him in his room last night. Liz says that Laura couldn’t have been in the house last night. David proves that she was there by showing Liz the handkerchief she gave him.

Liz is puzzled how Laura got in and out of the house without being seen. Friday, she learned that there had been strong evidence of supernatural activity in the house yesterday. As she questions David about the details of Laura’s visit, it looks like she might be trying to rule out a supernatural explanation of Laura’s visit. That’s a bit of a dead end- Liz is committed to covering up anything that will make the family look weird, so if she is thinking along those lines she certainly won’t be talking about it with anyone. But she had a confrontation yesterday with Laura, in the course of which each implied that she had sufficient willpower to defeat the other. So Liz’ unsettled reaction might explain why Laura left the handkerchief. She wants Liz to know that she is not dealing with any ordinary antagonist.

We then see Liz and her brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins, having breakfast in the kitchen. Roger is delighted by the prospect that his wife Laura will divorce him and go away with their son David. He promises Liz he will think fondly of David when David is a distant memory. Liz is exasperated with Roger’s narcissism. She reminds him that he lives as a guest in her house, and that it was for David’s sake she took him in. He studiously ignores the implication that if David goes away, he will have to find a place to live and pay his own bills.

Liz and Roger in the kitchen. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

Liz’ daughter, flighty heiress Carolyn, comes into the kitchen as Roger is leaving. She informs Liz that Laura has been seeing the family’s arch-nemesis, dashing action hero Burke Devlin. Before Laura came back, Burke had been leading Carolyn on, and she has been bitterly disappointed that no romance will be blossoming between them. She leads Liz to the idea that after Roger and Laura are divorced, Laura will deliver David to Burke. “The last of the Collins! The only hope our name will continue!” exclaims Liz. Fearing Burke’s intentions, she vows to keep Laura away from David.

While she may not have forgotten what she heard Friday about the indications of supernatural doings, Liz has not grasped the message the ghosts are trying to send. While Burke may want David to forget Roger, think of him as his father, and change his name from Collins to Devlin, the ghosts have been telling anyone they can reach that he won’t get the chance. If David goes to Laura, she will change far more about him than his last name. Perhaps she will kill him, perhaps she will turn him into some kind of otherworldly creature, but whatever her plans are, Burke should be the least of Liz’ worries.

Roger was among those who saw and heard the signs of the ghosts on Thursday. On Friday, he flatly declared to well-meaning governess Vicki that he refused to think about them any more. While Carolyn is in the kitchen giving Liz the news about Burke and Laura, Roger goes to David’s room to try to talk him into spending more time with his mother.

When he hears Roger at the door, David is sitting on his bed, playing with toy soldiers on a chessboard. He hastily shoves the soldiers and the edge of the board under his pillow and picks up a textbook.

Everything Roger says seems to bewilder David. When Roger tells David that he has done something to please him, David replies “I have?” David continues to answer all of Roger’s statements in that wise until Roger protests that David is using “two-word questions” only to annoy him. He talks about how important it is for a boy to spend time with his mother, that he ought to ask Liz if he can go on a long trip with his mother, etc. At the end of their talk, Roger tells David “You can be a very intelligent little fella when you want to be.” David continues to give him a mystified look.

Since David has already had several scenes where he angrily told Roger that he knew Roger was trying to send him away with his mother because he wants to get rid of him, regular viewers are likely to take this scene as an indication that David is changing his approach to Roger. He’s tried confronting his father with the ugly truth, screaming at him, and threatening him. Last summer, when Laura was still an unseen, half-remembered figure David would call to while standing at the window, he tried murdering him. None of those tactics got him anywhere, so now he is just deflecting him with a show of incomprehension.

There is another possible explanation for David’s change. The most shocking of David’s recent behavior came when the ghost of Josette Collins was making her most intense efforts to get through to him about the danger his mother represented. That process manifested itself in nightmares and a frightening painting that threw David’s mind into an uproar. Now, Laura has appeared to him in the night, blocking the nightmares, and Roger has burned the painting. Josette is temporarily silenced. David is not afraid of his mother, and may not be enraged with his father.

Those who have been watching closely all along will find another interesting note in Roger’s attempt to manipulate David. In #68, Roger had been eager to get rid of well-meaning governess Vicki. In those days, David saw Vicki as an enemy. Roger sits with David in the drawing room and talks very calmly about the fact that David hates him. He asks if he doesn’t hate Vicki even more. David doesn’t deny it, and expresses extreme hostility. This was only a few weeks after Roger found out that David had tried to kill him, so it is rather chilling when he tells David that he will leave it entirely up to him to solve the problem of Vicki.

In that scene of horrifying child abuse, David was helpless as his father deliberately set about warping his mind so that he would attempt a murder. By contrast, this scene is a comedy in which David Henesy and Louis Edmonds get real laughs, and David Collins is certainly no worse off at the end than he was a the beginning.

David is playing with his toy soldiers again when he hears someone else at the door. Again, he stuffs the soldiers under his pillow. It is his cousin Carolyn. He tells her that with so many visitors to his room, he is having trouble studying. Carolyn takes the soldiers from under the pillow and says she can see how hard he’s been studying. He asks “Secret?” She replies “Secret!”

As far as I can recall, this is the first time we’ve seen Carolyn in David’s room. The “Secret?” “Secret!” exchange is certainly the first time we’ve seen them so friendly. It’s a relief- Carolyn’s over-the-top denunciations of David as a “little monster” were getting monotonous, and each of these characters needs more people to talk to.

After she and David have talked about Laura for a while, Carolyn goes back downstairs to talk to her Uncle Roger. Roger is lounging on the couch doing the crossword puzzle. He is quite annoyed that Carolyn is interrupting him in this most important task of his day. This is a bit of mirroring- as David is more concerned with his toy soldiers than with his studies, so Roger is more concerned with his puzzle than with any of the responsibilities you might suppose would attach themselves to a grown man who is nominally employed as an executive at his sister’s business.

Carolyn brings up Burke and Laura. Roger says that she needn’t worry about that- until their divorce is final, Laura won’t dare do anything to alienate the Collinses. Carolyn asks what will happen after the divorce, when David is living with Laura and Laura is available to Burke. It seems to dawn on Roger that it might be bad for the Collinses if the family’s only male heir is the stepson of their deadliest enemy, and so he says he’ll do something about it. Carolyn so adores her uncle and so resents Laura and Burke’s relationship that not even his crossword puzzle can keep her from blinding herself to his complete ineffectiveness. She is gleeful at the thought that Burke and Laura will now get their comeuppance at his hands.

Carolyn and Roger on the couch. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

Like Roger, Carolyn was among those who saw and heard the signs of Josette’s presence Thursday. She knows all about David’s nightmare and about the painting in which she warned that Laura would set fire to herself and David. Yet she has inherited the family’s tradition of denial. She will not see what is in front of her, and cannot shift her focus from her thwarted desire for Burke to the grave danger impending over David.

Episode 149: The scent of jasmine

Yesterday’s episode gave writer Ron Sproat six major points to communicate to the audience:

None of the characters yet believed that the relationship between mysterious and long-absent Laura Collins and her son, strange and troubled boy David, involved physical danger or crime, much less a threat from the supernatural realm.
An police investigation taking place off-screen and centered in Phoenix, Arizona will advance the plot.
Well-meaning governess Vicki is a credible protagonist in the storyline about Laura.
Dashing action hero Burke Devlin is too smitten with Laura to be of much help to Vicki in her efforts to protect David from Laura.
The budding romance between Burke and flighty heiress Carolyn is at an end.
Vicki has decided the time has come to start fighting Laura.

With more help from the actors than he really deserved, Sproat managed to get all six of these points across. Today, Malcolm Marmorstein has only two themes to deal with. First, he shows us Carolyn processing her feelings about Burke. Then, he shows us the characters discovering that they are living in a ghost story.

Carolyn comes home to the great house of Collinwood in a grim mood. Vicki asks Carolyn who has upset her. She says that Burke has put an end to their budding romance. She asks Vicki to guess who has caught Burke’s eye now, and Vicki names Laura.

Later, Carolyn puts the same question to Laura’s estranged husband, her uncle, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins. Roger also names Laura, also without batting an eye. When Carolyn is surprised at his calm reaction, he assures her he has no interest in anything Burke and Laura might get up to.

In her anguish, Carolyn tells Roger that he would take an entirely different attitude if he could see Burke from a woman’s point of view. As Roger, Louis Edmonds replies to this remark by raising an eyebrow ever so slightly.

The episodes Art Wallace and Francis Swann wrote in the first twenty weeks of Dark Shadows gave more than a few hints that Burke and Roger’s enmity has its roots in a past homoerotic relationship. In the months since Sproat and Marmorstein took over the writing duties, that idea has only cropped up a couple of times in Sproat’s scripts, and not at all in Marmorstein’s.

Edmonds’ raised eyebrow here will bring a chuckle to regular viewers who have caught on to the theme. As the look passes from his face, Carolyn turns to look at her uncle. When Nancy Barrett saw Louis Edmonds, she must have been glad the scene was ending, as she didn’t have to worry about keeping herself from laughing out loud.

In the village of Collinsport, drunken artist Sam Evans and his daughter Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town, are at home. Maggie is trying to cheer her father up after a recent mishap with fire injured his hands, leaving him temporarily unable to hold either a paint brush or a whiskey glass. Losing his ability to paint is not as upsetting to Sam as it might be at another time. Lately, an occult power has compelled him to paint nothing but pictures of Laura, naked and in flames, a subject which he and everyone else, especially the lady herself, finds horrifying.

Maggie tries to talk sense to Sam. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

What is weighing most heavily on Sam at the moment is a mystical feeling that something is happening to the first of these paintings. It now hangs at Collinwood in the bedroom of Laura and Roger’s son, strange and troubled boy David. An occult power, presumably the same one that took possession of Sam, made Vicki take it back to Collinwood and show it to David. David took the painting because it depicted the scene of a recurring nightmare that had afflicted him and that Sam had no way of knowing about. In the nightmare, Laura had beckoned David to join her in the flames. Again, the nightmare seems to be a communication from an occult power, and there is no reason why it could not be the same one that possessed Sam and Vicki.

The painting has a blank spot the size and shape of David. Sam’s mystical feeling suggests to him that the painting is being completed. He goes to Collinwood to investigate.

While Sam is on his way, we see David’s room. The painting glows, as both it and the portrait of Josette Collins hanging in the long-abandoned Old House have done when supernatural beings were about. Josette herself manifests. She looks around. She turns to the painting and touches the blank spot.

Josette’s ghost is played here by stand-in Rosemary McNamara. We get a fair glimpse of her face. Her hair and makeup looks very much like those we just saw Kathryn Leigh Scott wearing as Maggie. Miss Scott has played the ghost of Josette several times already and will be closely associated with Josette later in the series. If resemblance is intentional, as it would seem it must be,* why not simply have Miss Scott play Josette today?

The ghost of Josette in David’s room. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

Roger, Carolyn, and Vicki are gathered in the drawing room, talking about the painting. Carolyn reminds Roger that David is out of the house, and suggests that he take the painting now and destroy it. Vicki objects that David would take that as a grave betrayal.

A knock comes at the door. Vicki answers it and greets Sam. She shows concern for his injured hands, and very gently takes his coat. She tells him that she is as mystified by her own actions in taking the painting and giving it to David as Sam is mystified by his compulsion to paint it in the first place. Sam asks to speak with Roger. Vicki ushers him into the drawing room, where he meets Roger and Carolyn.

Roger and Sam hate each other, but in front of the young ladies they behave almost correctly. Certainly their hostility doesn’t slow down the exchange of story-productive information. Sam asks to see the painting. Roger and Carolyn send Vicki up to David’s room to fetch it.

That’s an interesting moment. When Sam knocked, Vicki had gone to answer the door at once, and had presented him to Roger and Carolyn very much in the person of a household servant. When Roger and Carolyn send her for the painting, she is all smiles, happy to be on the job. Yet when she and Carolyn were in the drawing room earlier discussing Burke, Vicki was functioning entirely as Carolyn’s equal. The two of them sound like old friends, or like the sisters the show has been hinting they might be. Vicki can move with remarkable facility between the roles of servant and family member. That extraordinary flexibility is one of the qualities that we can imagine will come in handy as she confronts the spiritual forces of darkness gathering in the background.

When Vicki enters David’s room, spooky music starts to play. Vicki walks in slowly, looking from side to side. She senses an eerie presence. She looks at the painting, and sees that where it once was blank it now sports an image of David. She screams.

Roger, Carolyn, and Sam are momentarily stunned by Vicki’s scream. By the time they leave the drawing room, Vicki is already on the stairs holding the painting. Seeing David’s face depicted there, Roger exclaims that he saw the painting earlier that day, and that the spot was still blank then. Sam touches it, and says that is impossible- it is oil paint, and would take days to dry. Roger says that the painting now shows the whole scene of David’s nightmare.

As the four of them try to figure out what could have happened, Vicki says that when she entered the room she felt a weird presence. She says there was a specific perception accompanying this vague feeling- she could smell jasmine perfume. None of the ladies in the house wear that scent. Vicki says that she smelled it once before- in #126, when she saw the ghost of Josette Collins. The association of Josette with the scent of jasmine will continue throughout the series.

Vicki and Carolyn wonder how David will react to his own likeness in the painting, and Roger replies that he never will see it. He throws it in the fireplace. As it burns, the sound of a woman’s scream rings through the room.

This episode is a turning point. Hints of supernatural activity have been cropping up in the show from week one, the audience has been seeing evidence of it for months, and both Vicki and David have seen and talked with ghosts. But the completed painting and the scream that emerges from the fireplace are the first unambiguous tokens of the occult that have been presented to a group like these four.

The only other time more than one person had seen anything like it came in #88, when Roger and his sister, reclusive matriarch Liz, found seaweed on the spot where Vicki reported that the ghost of beloved local man Bill Malloy had dropped it. But Roger and Liz both want to keep the stories of Collinwood’s haunting to a minimum, and they threw the seaweed into the fire without telling Vicki or anyone else that they had found it. Denial, the psychological defense mechanism, is the ruling passion of their lives, and when the two of them found the evidence it was a foregone conclusion that it would be destroyed.

There is no such unity among Sam, Vicki, Carolyn, and Roger. Now that the only way any of them can deny that supernatural powers are operating in connection with Laura and David is to lie, we see that the four of them are strikingly ill-appointed to be the members of a plot to keep a secret. Sam is an outsider and no friend of the Collinses. Vicki is too conscientious to be part of a coverup. Carolyn is a loose cannon, and might tell anyone anything. Roger is unburdened by a conscience and is quite happy to tell lies, but he is also so cowardly and irresolute that he might be the weak link in any conspiracy he might join. So, not only do these characters now know that spirits are at work in connection with Laura’s relationship with David, but everyone else is likely to find out as well.

*Rosemary McNamara’s face is of the same general type as Kathryn Leigh Scott’s, but I think the hair and makeup above emphasize the similarity. Here’s the picture from her imdb profile:

Episode 93: A little wrong about David

Strange and troubled boy David Collins talks with his father, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger, about David’s governess, the well-meaning Vicki. David wants Vicki to stay on. Puzzled by this, Roger lists some of the cruelties David has meted out to Vicki. David explains that he has changed his mind about her since he did those things. Roger asks why. David explains that Vicki has seen the ghost of beloved local man Bill Malloy, and that if she sees the ghost again, it might reveal that Roger murdered Bill. Roger responds to this remark by slapping David across the face. David is shocked, and runs to his aunt, reclusive matriarch Liz, to complain.

Roger is well-established as an abusive parent. He has time and again spoken openly of his hatred for his son, and more than once we have seen him manipulate the rage with which he has filled David so that the boy will do his dirty work for him. This is the first time we’ve seen him engage in physical violence. David’s disbelieving reaction and his assumption that he has the right to complain support the idea that Roger has previously limited himself to psychological abuse.

The actors are such pros that I find it hard to imagine Louis Edmonds really made contact with David Henesy when he swung his hand. But Henesy visibly flinches a second before the slap, as if he expected to be hit. Maybe Edmonds came close enough in dress rehearsal that Henesy couldn’t help being scared.

Roger hits David. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

When David runs to Liz, he finds that she is busy trying to reason with her own strange and troubled child, flighty heiress Carolyn. Carolyn is annoyed by David’s interruption, and dismisses his claims about Roger out of hand. Even after Roger proclaims that he did hit David and will do it again if he doesn’t stop babbling about ghosts, Carolyn says that she believes David made the whole thing up. Liz sends Roger, but not Carolyn, out of the room, and talks to David about the incident. Liz walks him back to his room, not saying much as he seethes and says that he wishes his father were dead.

Liz returns to her conversation with Carolyn, trying to talk her out of her obsession with the family’s arch-nemesis, dashing action hero Burke Devlin. Liz understands the fascination- how could she not? Carolyn is a vigorous young woman, and she’s already broken up with the only other attractive man on the show, hardworking young fisherman Joe. So Liz shares some information about how miserable her marriage to Carolyn’s father was, tells her that Joe reminds her of the man she wishes she had married instead, and urges her to try to patch things up with him.

Roger reappears and pouts to his sister Liz. He claims that Vicki is a bad influence on David and demands that Liz fire her. Liz refuses to do so, or to take anything Roger says at all seriously. When he refers to the idea that he might take David and leave her house, she tells him she is sure that her money means more to him than does his son. His response to that is to slam his hand on the piano and to concede her point.

The Liz/ Roger moments today focus on Dark Shadows‘ most characteristic relationship, that between a Bossy Big Sister and her Bratty Little Brother. Liz fails to address Roger’s hitting David for the same reason she fails to address his psychological abuse of the boy- facing either problem would require acknowledging that Roger is a father and that he has the responsibilities of a grown man. Liz is deeply invested in treating him like a naughty little boy whose behavior she will try to correct when the two of them are alone together, but for whom she will always cover when the grownups are around.

Her cutting remark about Roger’s attachment to her money shows the same pattern. When it’s just the two of them, Liz scolds him for living off her. But when there was a prospect he would face consequences for his spendthrift ways, she borrowed against everything she has to pay his way out of trouble.

In a world of Bossy Big Sisters and Bratty Little Brothers, David is adrift. He’s bratty enough, but has no sister. The obvious candidate for a substitute big sister, his cousin Carolyn, makes it clear today she couldn’t be less interested in David. Regular viewers know that Roger and David moved into the house not long before episode 1, that Carolyn didn’t grow up with David, and that she was not happy when he ended her long reign as an only child. Aunt Liz likes David very much, but she has spent too much time protecting Roger from accountability to protect anyone from Roger. Vicki is determined to befriend David, and now that she has seen a ghost there is a chance she will succeed. But she is far too mentally healthy to reenact with him the pattern the Collinses of Collinwood are bred to expect. To accept Vicki’s friendship, David will have to learn an altogether new way of relating to another person.

Episode 90: In this house, nothing is impossible

The one storyline in the first 42 weeks of Dark Shadows that has a satisfactory beginning, middle, and end is the transformation of strange and troubled boy David Collins from the deadly enemy of his governess, the well-meaning Victoria Winters, to her faithful friend. That storyline reaches a turning point in today’s episode.

Last Friday, David imprisoned Vicki in an abandoned room deep in the closed off section of the great house of Collinwood. From the other side of the locked door, he taunted her that she would remain trapped there until she died. After she was freed from the room, Vicki decided that she would leave her position unless she could see something new in David that would convince her she could reach him.

In today’s teaser, David visits Vicki in her bedroom and tries to deny that he wanted to kill her. She quotes several remarks he has made to her over the months she has been at Collinwood in which David indicated that he would very much like to kill her, leading up to his declaration that when she dies he won’t even go to her funeral. He retracts that one, explaining that “I like funerals.”

After a few more minutes of this charming conversation, Vicki mentions that, while trapped in the room, she saw the ghost of beloved local man Bill Malloy. David’s attitude changes abruptly. He pleads with her to continue as his governess.

David’s cousin, flighty heiress Carolyn, walks into Vicki’s room in time to hear David begging Vicki to stay in the house. Stunned, she asks what brought this reversal about. Vicki explains that she told David that she saw a ghost, and that “Any friend of a ghost’s is a friend of David’s.” Carolyn wants Vicki to stay, and tries to argue that what David has said is enough to prove that she can become his friend. Vicki is not at all persuaded of this, and is still inclined to go away.

Vicki’s skepticism about David’s sudden friendliness after so much extreme hostility is a sign of intelligence. Her next actions suggest that the Dumb Vicki of later years is not far away.

Gruff caretaker Matthew is replacing the lock on the door that separates the unused part of the house from the rest of it. Matthew leaves for a moment in the middle of this job to attend to other business. Vicki and Carolyn take advantage of his absence to slip through the lockless door and make their way to the room where Vicki was trapped.

While the girls are in the closed-off section, Matthew returns to work on the door. David asks him what would happen if someone were behind that door now- would they be able to get out once he finishes putting the new lock on? Matthew dismisses him without an answer. It would seem to be a question Vicki and Carolyn might have considered asking before they sneaked into the disused wing.

Once they are in the room, Vicki behaves even less sensibly. She tells Carolyn that while she was trapped there, she tried to use a piece of paper to slide the room key under the door. Carolyn asks her to explain what she means. So she recreates the situation. She puts the key in the lock on the outside of the door, closes the door, pushes a bobby pin into the keyhole from the inside so that the key falls onto the floor outside, then slides a piece of paper under the door. The paper slides under the key. To her surprise, this time she is able to fit it under the door. Evidently she had expected to imprison herself and Carolyn in the room.

Fortunately, the two of them are able to make their way back to the main part of the house. They find David waiting for them in Vicki’s room. He says that he was worried about Vicki. The girls wonder if his concern is genuine. He looks up at Vicki, stares into her eyes, and says “I love you, Miss Winters!” Then he rushes out of the room.

Thunderstruck, Vicki asks Carolyn if David had ever said those words to anyone or anything before. Looking stiffly off into the distance, Carolyn tells her that he said them once, to a kitten he had. Vicki asks what happened to the kitten. Carolyn tells her that David drowned it.

In Wednesday’s episode, David’s father, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins, had called his son an “incipient psychopath.” Carolyn’s closing line would seem to corroborate that diagnosis. Nor is it the only thing that deepens the sense of danger around David.

David has a couple of interactions with Matthew. David’s aunt, reclusive matriarch Liz, owns the house and has ordered Matthew to change the lock. David asks what reason she gave. Matthew says Liz told him that Vicki somehow made her way in the closed-off part of the house and got herself trapped there. Matthew takes it that Vicki was “snoopin’ around.” In Matthew’s scale of values, “snoopin’ around where you ain’t no call to be” is the cardinal sin. And Liz warned Vicki long ago that Matthew is a “strange and violent man” who might be dangerous to her if he thinks she is overly inquisitive.

We catch a glimpse of Matthew’s violent side today. When David tells him that Vicki saw the ghost of Bill Malloy, he becomes intensely agitated. He grabs the boy by the arm, shakes him, and struggles with himself before he can let go.

Liz is fond of Vicki and has a sense of responsibility for her. Yet given the choice between telling the truth about David’s terrible behavior or defaming Vicki and thereby exposing her to Matthew’s wrath, it’s under the bus for Vicki. That Liz tells the cover story she has devised to shield David from any consequences for his murderous actions to Matthew of all people is not only cruel to Vicki, but a sign of Liz’ extreme unwillingness to face unpleasant facts. Matthew is fanatically loyal to Liz and to the Collins family in general. He is the very last person in the world to use any information against them. Yet Liz can’t bring herself to tell even him the truth about David.

This is not the first time Liz has lied to Matthew to cover up a murder attempt by David. The first time we saw Thayer David in the role of Matthew was in episode 38. In that one, Liz told him to take the blame for an auto crash that might have killed Roger. He is to say that he failed to check the brakes. She refuses to tell him why she wants him to tell this lie. We know the truth- David tampered with the brakes in order to kill his father, and Liz has decided to conceal this fact. Since then, she has behaved as if she never knew of David’s crime.

Liz is not only protecting David- she is protecting herself from a fact she cannot bring herself to face. Liz has all the power in the family, Roger openly hates David, and Carolyn is too selfish to do much for her little cousin. We can see no prospect that anyone will rein David in before he does something Liz can’t hide from the police. Since attempted murder doesn’t qualify, I suppose we have to wonder whether David is on track to succeed in murder. Vicki’s efforts to make an emotional connection with her charge may be his last chance to avoid a hideous future.