dennis patrick – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 902: I heard breathing

Heiress Carolyn Stoddard is working for her friends, Megan and Philip Todd, in their antique shop. She goes upstairs to tell Megan that Philip has telephoned. Carolyn hears heavy breathing coming from the room where a baby the Todds are taking care of sleeps. Megan comes out of the room and in a most imperious tone demands to know what Carolyn is doing there. She tells her Philip called, and asks about the breathing sounds. Megan sweetens up and says “It’s the radiator!” She says she’ll have to call the plumber about it. Carolyn is unconvinced.

Downstairs in the shop, Carolyn and Megan notice someone looking in the window. The shop is open for business and there is merchandise displayed in the window, but for some reason it unnerves them that they have attracted the notice of a potential customer. All we can see of the man is his clean-shaven upper lip. When Carolyn approaches the window, he runs away. The only sneaky man we have met so far in the current phase of the show is Carolyn’s long-absent and recently returned father Paul. Since Paul wears a mustache, the upper lip is enough to show us that this is a new character, at least new to the ongoing stories.

No mustache. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Carolyn and her mother Liz live in the great house on the estate of Collinwood. Also among the residents of the great house are Liz’ brother Roger Collins and Roger’s son, strange and troubled boy David. We cut to David’s bedroom, where a book opens by itself. We have seen books do this before on Dark Shadows, but I believe this is the first time I couldn’t see a cord being pulled. They really have come a long way with practical effects.

David reads aloud from the book, something about a child being cloaked in radiant garments. He is interrupted by his Aunt Liz. She asks him to notice that she knocked on the door, and tells him that she is learning to respect his privacy. She says she heard him reading aloud, and asks what it was. He says it was a school book. She starts talking about how terribly cold it is in his room. He brings up her ex-husband, Paul. Liz hadn’t known David was aware of Paul’s return, and gets very uncomfortable. She says he needs friends his own age, and hurries out of the room. Once she is gone, he goes through the room and gathers a lot of cash. Evidently David raised the subject of Paul to get the room to himself.

David does have one friend his own age, Amy Jennings. Amy lives in the great house, down the hall. We just saw Amy in #893 and #896, but she tends to be unmentioned in between appearances. Amy is a favorite of mine, and when they don’t use her name for long stretches I worry they are about to drop her from the show. It would have reassured me if Liz had named Amy as someone David ought to spend more time with.

Joan Bennett tends to do a lot of acting with her eyes when she plays a two-scene with David Henesy, and this is a good example. When Liz is pointing out her own good manners in knocking, it is her eyes that convey her mild amusement at the situation; when she is offering to help David with his schoolwork, her eyes follow him so closely that we notice all of the little movements he makes as he tries to get out of a tutoring session; when she talks about the coldness in the room, she looks from side to side, searching for the open window with increasing consternation; when he asks about Paul, her eyes bulge in their sockets, showing deep alarm. When she tells him he needs friends his own age, she raises her eyebrows, making it sound like a threat. Bennett had been so famous for so long that many of her scene partners would not react to what she was actually doing, but to what they expected her to do, forcing her to add Joan Bennett-isms to her performances. With Mr Henesy, she was free to work simply, and the result was consistently very effective.

Downstairs, Liz answers the telephone. To her disgust, Paul is calling. He tells her that if she doesn’t meet with him for a talk, she is in danger of losing Carolyn. She agrees to go to his hotel. Carolyn enters in time to catch the end of the conversation. Liz doesn’t want to talk about Paul with her any more than she did with David, and she exits.

Carolyn and David have a scene in the drawing room. She tells him he should go to bed; he says he wants to read the newspaper. He asks her if she hasn’t noticed that he has grown. Since the thirteen year old David Henesy was about the same height as Nancy Barrett, this question is worth a chuckle. David gets excited when he sees that Brewster’s Department Store in the village of Collinsport is going to be open nights until Christmas. He tears the Brewster’s ad out of the paper while Carolyn reminds him he can’t leave the house tonight. He says that of course he can’t, it’s late.

In his post about the episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn asked if David’s reaction to the Brewster’s ad is the only reference to Christmas in the whole series. His commenters responded that Christmas is also mentioned in #92, #123, #257, #810 (twice,) #887, and #1050. It’s hilarious to read through the thread and see the citations mount up. I sympathize with Danny, though- I tagged my posts about the first couple of episodes on that list with “Christmas,” because I, too, was sure that the holiday was only named once or twice in Dark Shadows.

Carolyn exits, and David sneaks out the front door. As he does, a man in a belted overcoat walks into the house. We see him only from the midsection down. He straightens the portrait of the Collinses’ distant cousin Barnabas that hangs in the foyer of the great house. This suggests that whoever he is, he has some connection with Barnabas. Carolyn comes back, and the man hides behind the curtains in the drawing room. This has been a favored hiding place for the last several months, suggesting that the man knows the house. Carolyn leaves, and the man goes out. If all he wanted to do was straighten that portrait, he could count his journey a success. Otherwise, it’s hard to see what the point of it was.

At the hotel, Paul struggles to explain his concerns to Liz. He is hampered by his own ignorance- he does not know exactly who is after him or what they want to do, but he knows they have some kind of sinister plan for Carolyn. Paul admits that Liz has no reason to believe anything he says, after his total failure as a husband, but he keeps urging her to take Carolyn and go far away, not telling anyone that they are going. She is exasperated with what she takes to be yet another of his scams, and tells him that “I’ll never figure out this latest plot of yours.” Indeed, the story is taking shape slowly enough that some viewers will have been saying the same thing.

Bennett and Dennis Patrick had many scenes together from March to July 1967, when he played seagoing con man Jason McGuire. Liz’ relationship with Jason was one-dimensional, consisting of nothing but a series of blackmail threats from him followed by capitulations from her. As her ex-husband, Paul offers far more for Liz to react against, and this scene is far richer and more satisfying than was anything we saw in the dreary Liz/ Jason story.

Liz goes out of the Collinsport Inn and sees David entering the antique shop across the street. The Inn has been part of the show from episode #1, but this is the first time we see a set representing its outside. Cutting between that set and the set representing the exterior of the antique shop, they make an attempt to create a sense of Collinsport as a place. When the show was in black and white, they would occasionally insert video they had taken at various locations in upstate New York and southern New England to achieve that effect, but they haven’t left 433 West 53rd Street since they went to color in August 1967. This quick cut between minimally decorated parts of the studio doesn’t work as well as that footage did, but it is a valiant effort in its own way.

Liz goes into the antique shop and insists Megan let her search the place for David. Since Liz essentially owns the town, Megan can’t say no. We conclude with Liz outside the door of the room upstairs from which Carolyn heard the breathing when we began. We hear the breathing again. David is inside the room, telling some unseen presence that it will like what he bought for it at Brewster’s. Perhaps he found it in the Unseen Presences section of the store. It’s in Collinsport, after all. David stops talking when he hears Liz’ voice; the breathing cuts out at the same time.

Episode 901: In Collinsport, where your only hope lies

Heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard thinks that her recently returned father, Paul Stoddard, is mentally ill. She knows that her mother Liz and Liz’ brother Roger are deeply hostile to Paul, and thinks that her distant cousin Barnabas is friendly to him.

We open in the Blue Whale tavern, where Carolyn has been pleased to discover Paul and Barnabas sitting together at a table. Barnabas says that Carolyn is her father’s most precious possession, and she happily agrees. Paul angrily denies that this is the case, and jumps up. He asks Carolyn to go away with him, and leaves the tavern.

Carolyn is bewildered by this reaction, and annoyed when Roger enters. She exits to follow Paul, and Roger goes to the table to warn Barnabas that friendship with Paul would mean trouble with Liz. Barnabas assures him they are not friends.

In Paul’s hotel room, Carolyn tells her father that his troubles are all in his head. She says that she will try to help him, and mentions Julia Hoffman, a psychiatrist who is permanently in residence at the great house of Collinwood. Paul insists that he really does have enemies, and pleads with Carolyn to join him in running far away. She refuses, and insists that he must solve his problems where he is.

Carolyn goes home to the great house. She and Roger have a confrontation. He gives her a check for $5000, payable to Paul. He tells her that the only reason Paul has come back is that he wants to get money out of the Collinses, and that if she gives him that check, he will leave again.

Carolyn goes to the antique shop where she has been working for her friends Megan and Philip Todd. Megan is holding a baby, whom she identified to Carolyn as her nephew Joseph, her sister’s son. Barnabas is with Megan and the baby. Carolyn apologizes to Megan for being late to work, and tells Barnabas she has been late many times. Megan says that it isn’t a problem, that she couldn’t have got away from the shop any earlier even if Carolyn had been there. Barnabas exits.

Carolyn tells Megan that is strange to be reunited with a father who left when she was a newborn. Megan says that she was close to her own father growing up, and that she was an only child. Carolyn furrows her brow, looks at the baby, and asks if he isn’t her sister’s son. Megan scrambles for a second, then claims that Joseph’s mother is her stepsister, one of two daughters of the widow her father married.

Megan takes the baby to his bedroom upstairs. Carolyn answers the telephone, and tells Philip that she will have Megan call him right back. She waits a moment, then goes upstairs. She hears a loud breathing sound coming from the baby’s room, as if a gigantic obscene telephone call were in progress.

Unknown to Carolyn, her father’s troubles are not imaginary, and Barnabas is not his friend. Between her two scenes in the antique shop, we saw Paul in his room. A true Collinsporter, he was in bed fully clothed, wearing even his tie and his shoes, but still he had difficulty sleeping. Barnabas entered the room and told him it was odd to sleep on such a sunny day. To demonstrate the day’s sunniness, he turns a light on. He also ruffles the window-shades, but does not open them. Evidently that would be a little too on-the-nose.

Paul aims a revolver at Barnabas and says that he will kill him if he doesn’t leave him alone. Barnabas says that if he kills him, someone else will be sent in his place. Paul says that he will also kill that person, and he squeezes the trigger several times. That only makes a clicking sound. Barnabas tells him that “we” knew about the gun, as “we” know about everything Paul might do before he does it, and that the ammunition was therefore removed. He also tells Paul that if he leaves Collinsport without permission from whomever it is Barnabas represents, Carolyn will suffer.

The telephone rings, and Barnabas orders Paul to answer it. It is Carolyn. He tells her that he is feeling better, and that he does not want to go away. Barnabas praises him for beginning to see things “our way.”

Paul telling Carolyn that everything is just great with him. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Today’s closing credits are the first headed by “Starring Jonathan Frid as Barnabas Collins.” From now on, Frid will get the “Starring” designation unless Joan Bennett is in the day’s cast, in which case she gets “Starring” and he follows with “Also Starring.”

Episode 899: How well I remember that charm of yours

When Dark Shadows debuted in June 1966, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard (Joan Bennett) had not left the estate of Collinwood in eighteen years. We soon gathered that Liz was afraid that if she strayed far from the house someone might open the locked room in the basement and discover that her husband Paul was buried there, dead of a blow she dealt him when he was trying to run off with a chunk of her patrimony.

Liz’ reclusiveness was a major theme of Dark Shadows‘ first 55 weeks. After the show committed itself to becoming a supernatural thriller with the story of Laura the humanoid Phoenix, which ran from December 1966 to March 1967, they brought in Paul’s old friend and partner in crime Jason McGuire (Dennis Patrick) as an in-betweener to sweep away the few miscellaneous this-worldly narrative threads not already subsumed in the Laura story and to help introduce the next uncanny Big Bad, vampire Barnabas Collins.

It turned out Jason was the one who agreed to bury Paul for Liz, in return for the money Paul had been trying to steal from her. Upon his return to Collinwood, Jason blackmailed Liz with this information. Time and again she caved in to his demands. Liz let him stay in the great house, gave him money, hired him for a lucrative non-job in the family business, let his rapey sidekick Willie Loomis stay in a room just down the hall from those occupied by her daughter Carolyn Stoddard and her all-but-acknowledged daughter, well-meaning governess Victoria Winters, and was in the middle of a wedding ceremony meant to unite her with Jason when she finally burst out with the truth. When she did that, Carolyn dropped the loaded pistol with which she had planned to prevent Jason becoming her stepfather. For his part, Jason said that Paul wasn’t dead, and that he hadn’t buried him. Perhaps the whole thing started when Jason said “cranberry sauce,” and Liz misheard it as “I buried Paul.” With that, the wedding was off, and a few days later Barnabas killed Jason. Since Jason was on his way out of town and had no friends left, no one missed him. He has barely been mentioned since.

Now, Paul himself has come back. Like Jason, he is played by Dennis Patrick. He has charmed Carolyn into thinking he had nothing to do with faking his own death, and she is falling over herself in her eagerness to establish a relationship with the father who left the family when she was an infant. Carolyn and Liz are on their way out the front door of the great house, heading to a committee in charge of raising funds for the hospital, when the phone rings. It is Paul, asking Carolyn to come to his hotel room at once. She agrees. She gives her mother a vague excuse, irking her, and the women leave the house separately.

In the hotel room, Paul tells Carolyn that he is in some kind of trouble that he can’t explain. Someone is trying to do something terrible to him, but he does not know who or what. Carolyn takes a firm tone when she urges him to tell her what he does know, and when she tells him that whatever is happening she will help him.

Father and daughter embrace, and Liz enters. She is furious to see Paul. She demands Carolyn leave the room. Only when Paul says that he and Liz need a moment together does Carolyn comply. The ex-spouses have a confrontation in which Liz gets to voice her righteous indignation with Paul. She tells him that she expects him to be on the next train out of town. She lists some of the people she will call if he isn’t. Among these is the proprietor of the hotel, who will presumably throw him out in the street at her behest.

In its first months, Dark Shadows tended to attract an aging audience, largely composed of people who still thought of Joan Bennett as the star she was in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Now, with its cast of vampires and werewolves and witches and ghosts and zombies and mad scientists and heaven knows what, it is more of a kid’s show. By the end of the costume drama segment set in the year 1897 that ran from March to November of 1969, viewers over the age of twelve would find themselves reacting to more and more episodes with little more than an indulgent chuckle.

Now that they have returned to contemporary dress, they have swung sharply back towards an adult audience. Carolyn was supposed to be a teenager when the show started; Nancy Barrett was significantly older than the character, and they let Carolyn catch up to her age after a while. But having her spend her evenings serving alongside her mother on the hospital’s fundraising board suggests that they’ve aged her up quite a bit further than that, foreclosing any youth-oriented stories. The conventionally soapy situation the Stoddards find themselves in today is of course something that will be of little interest to the elementary school students who are running home to see the show at this period. And while the main overall story is supernatural, about a cult controlled by unseen beings called the Leviathans that assimilates to itself one character after another, it is understated in tone, allegorical in development, and densely allusive in its relation to its literary antecedents. However many older viewers the show may have lost in the second half of the 1897 segment, they are in danger of shaking off an even larger number of their very young fans if they continue down this road.

In Art Wallace’s original story bible for Dark Shadows, titled “Shadows on the Wall,” the blackmail story was to be followed immediately by Paul’s return. Wallace called for Paul to be a man pursued by dark forces from his past. They made major changes to “Shadows on the Wall” long before they taped the first episode, and it has been almost entirely forgotten for years now. Indeed writer Ron Sproat, who was with the show from October 1966 to January 1969, said that executive producer Dan Curtis told him when he joined the staff that they were going to be leaving “Shadows on the Wall” behind and never let him see it. But they did dip into it in the case of Paul’s return- he is indeed being pursued by dark forces from his past. The Leviathan cult is after him.

After his confrontation with Liz, we see Paul sitting at the bar in the Blue Whale tavern. The jukebox plays a tune familiar from the early days of the show, when the Blue Whale was a frequent set and there were usually extras dancing in the background. Today the only people we see there are Paul and a middle aged sailor sitting next to him.

The sailor keeps looking at Paul. We hear Paul’s thoughts as he wonders if the sailor is “one of them.” Paul irritably asks him why he is looking at him. The sailor says that he wants to buy Paul a drink. Paul angrily snaps back that “I buy my own drinks!” After some sharp words, the two men warm to each other. They wind up getting handsy with each other and disappear for some private time together.

Paul and his new fella. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

This scene turns out to be motivated by the two men’s mutual awareness of the Leviathan cult. Over the years, I’ve seen lots of guys in bars interact with each other in exactly this way. I don’t know what that’s all about, maybe the Leviathans are real.

Since I mentioned “Shadows on the Wall” above, I should say that the tavern figures in there as well. Only it isn’t called “The Blue Whale,” but “The Rainbow Bar.” I don’t know, somehow I think Paul and the sailor might not have got off to such a rocky start if the show had gone with that name. Sounds friendlier, somehow, at least to lonesome sailors and the mature men for whom they want to buy drinks.

Paul’s new buddy, unnamed in the dialogue, is identified in the closing credits as “Jack Long.” He is played by Kenneth McMillan, in his first screen credit. In the 1970s and 1980s, McMillan was one of the busiest television actors in the USA. I always mixed him up with Dolph Sweet, who was a similar physical type. Sweet appeared on Dark Shadows once, in #99. He played Ezra Hearne, the most loyal employee at Liz’ cannery. Sweet was a tremendous actor, McMillan a very good one, and they occasionally worked together. So long as they are doing normal soap opera stuff, it would have been nice if they could have had a little story about Ezra’s reunion with his long-lost cousin Jack. Maybe Jack could have introduced Paul to Ezra, we could have seen how he’d fit in with the family.

Episode 893: We serve him now

Heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard is sitting at a table in the Blue Whale, a tavern. A man who refused to give his name when she caught him trespassing on her property invites himself to sit down with her. She objects to this. He identifies himself as her father, the long-missing Paul Stoddard. She objects far more strenuously to that. Not only did Paul leave the family when Carolyn was an infant, he and his friend Jason McGuire faked his death. Jason convinced Carolyn’s mother, Liz, that she had killed Paul and he had buried the corpse in the basement. In response, Liz immured herself in the house for nineteen years. Only after Jason came back and was blackmailing Liz into marrying him did the truth come out and Liz break free of her reclusive ways.

Paul tells Carolyn that he didn’t know Jason told Liz that she had killed him. Longtime viewers may suspect this is a lie, not least because Paul and Jason are both played by Dennis Patrick. Nonetheless, Carolyn falls for it. Soon she is agreeing to sound Liz out to see how she might react were she to hear that Paul had returned. He walks her home to the great house on the estate of Collinwood. He can’t go in, but gives her a goodnight kiss on the forehead.

Carolyn’s young cousin, strange and troubled boy David Collins, sees Paul kissing her. When she goes inside, he asks who her new boyfriend is. Carolyn is vexed. She refuses to tell David anything, and sends him to bed.

Carolyn’s friend Philip Todd comes to the door. He tells her that he and his wife Megan want Carolyn to work at their antique shop in the village. It may seem rather odd for the keeper of a little shop to go to a vast mansion and ask the daughter of its proprietor to take a job as his assistant, but Carolyn loves the shop and was volunteering there yesterday. She agrees happily, and mentions that a man might be leaving messages for her there.

In the shop the next morning, Carolyn sees that Megan has a baby. Megan says it is her sister’s son. Carolyn asks his name. Megan thinks for quite a while before coming up with “Joseph!”

Carolyn is alone in the shop when David comes in with his friend and fellow resident of Collinwood, Amy Jennings. We haven’t seen Amy since #835; that in turn was her first appearance since #700. For eight months, from #701 to #884, Dark Shadows was set in the year 1897, with only a few brief glimpses of the 1960s. In the 1897 segment, Denise Nickerson played Nora Collins, whose own final appearance was in #859. Both Nora and Amy had long absences from the cast, and were usually unmentioned while they were away. So we’ve been afraid that we wouldn’t see Amy or any other Nickerson character again. It’s good to have her back. She even pulls her signature move and gives a meaningful look directly into the camera at one point.

Amy and David see a doll that longtime viewers will recognize as Samantha, favorite plaything of the late Sarah Collins both when we saw her as a living being in the 1790s from November 1967 to March 1968 and before that, when she was a ghost haunting Collinwood and its environs in 1967. There are also a couple of toy soldiers from “The Regiment,” which Sarah’s brother Barnabas played with when he was a young boy and which Sarah gave to people in 1967 as protection against Barnabas, who was at that time a vampire. Barnabas did sell a bunch of things to Megan and Philip the other day, but neither Samantha nor the members of The Regiment were in Barnabas’ possession when last we saw them. Presumably the camera lingers on the toys, not because we are supposed to know how Philip and Megan got them, but because we are supposed to be pleased with ourselves for recognizing them.

Paul comes into the shop. David recognizes him as the man he saw kissing Carolyn. Carolyn addresses Paul as “Mr Prescott,” sends him into a back room, and hustles the children out of the shop. She tells Paul who David is, and explains that he saw them together, complicating their plans.

When Carolyn was minding the shop yesterday, her friend Maggie noticed an old book on a table. Neither of them knew what it was, but viewers knew it was an object of great importance to a cult into which Philip and Megan have been inducted. It seemed inexplicable that they would leave it on a table in their shop, as if it were for sale. We get a hint today as to what they may have been thinking. In his room at Collinwood, David shows Amy that he has stolen the book. She asks why he would want it. He explains that Carolyn said that if they damaged anything in the shop, his father, Roger, would have to pay for it, and he creased a page in the book. David’s fear that his father would punish him drove several stories in the early months of the show. Roger has mellowed enormously since then, but evidently David is still so afraid of him that he will make a bad situation worse rather than face his wrath.

Indeed, many major storylines have begun with David. The 1897 flashback started because Barnabas was trying to keep a ghost from killing David, as the 1790s segment started when David’s governess Vicki participated in a séance meant to solve a mystery concerning him. For that matter, the whole show started when Vicki was summoned to Collinwood to take charge of David’s education. David doesn’t always have a lot to do in the stories, and when they are over it is often as not forgotten that he was in peril when they began. But he is so often the catalyst that we can suppose that David was supposed to find the book so that the current story could move into its major phase.

If that was the intention, Megan and Philip didn’t know about it. When they discover that the book is gone from the shop, they fly into a panic and declare that whoever took it must be killed. It may turn out that the mysterious forces behind the cult want David to become involved and that they created a situation in which he would find the book and take it with him, but if so, those forces are operating outside the cognizance of anyone in today’s episode.

Episode 888: The place that he disappeared

The Prowler

Yesterday, we spent a lot of time watching an unidentifiable man wandering around the estate of Collinwood. We only saw him from the back; he was wearing a dark coat and hat, and had silver-gray hair. Evidently we were supposed to expect his face would mean something to us when it was finally revealed.

At the end of yesterday’s episode, permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman caught the prowler coming out of the Old House on the grounds of the estate, home of her friend, missing person Barnabas Collins. She did not recognize the man, and he refused to identify himself. We see him in today’s opening reprise. His face would not be familiar to her, but it is instantly recognizable to longtime viewers. It is that of actor Dennis Patrick, who from March to July 1967 played seagoing con man Jason McGuire. Jason blackmailed reclusive matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard to the point of marriage. When Liz finally stood up to Jason, his scheme collapsed. On his way out of town, Jason went to the Old House hoping to steal jewels from Barnabas. That attempt also failed, and Barnabas strangled Jason.

We spend most of the episode wondering how Jason managed to rise from the dead. Near the end, Liz’ daughter Carolyn runs into the prowler. She gets a good look at him and talks to him for a few minutes, but does not recognize him. Carolyn would certainly recognize Jason, whom she was ready to shoot if Liz had gone through with the wedding. So Patrick must be playing another character. He does not give Carolyn his name, but his strong emotional reaction when she gives hers tells us that he has some kind of connection to her. We are again supposed to leave the episode wondering who he might be.

Unfortunately, word of that did not get to the people who make up the closing credits. Patrick is billed today as “Paul Stoddard.” Paul is Carolyn’s long-missing father, Liz’ ex-husband, and a close friend and partner in crime of the late Jason McGuire. This is not the first time on Dark Shadows the closing credits have identified a character whose identity was supposed to keep us guessing. For example, at the end of #124 we are supposed to be in suspense as to which of a few people a mysterious woman is, but the closing credits identify her as “Laura Collins,” a name which blows the secret completely for attentive longtime viewers. A mysterious little girl turns up in #255 and for a few episodes we are supposed to be in the dark as to who she is. But at her first appearance the character was billed as “Sarah Collins.”

It’s interesting to cast Patrick as Paul. Jason’s scheme was based on Liz’ belief that she had killed Paul, when in fact Paul and Jason had worked together to fake his death and swindle her of some money. Since Paul and Jason committed the two halves of the same crime, they merge together in the disastrous effects they have had on Liz’ life. So they may as well look and sound exactly alike.

Waiting for Barnabas

Barnabas vanished from his basement some time ago while he was involved with some supernatural doings. Julia has been hanging around the house for over a month, waiting for him to rematerialize. She explains to Carolyn that because he disappeared from the basement, it is the only place where he can reappear. They go into the house and Julia almost immediately suggests they leave. She is sure he isn’t there, because she locked the basement door. Evidently Julia has spent all this time waiting to hear Barnabas banging on that door demanding to be let out.

Carolyn points out that Barnabas might be unconscious, and if he is he would not be banging on the door even if he has come back. Julia exclaims “I hadn’t even thought of that! He- he could be down there now!” At this, my wife, Mrs Acilius, laughed and said “He could have been down there for a month!” By profession, Julia is a mad scientist. She knows how to cure vampirism, bring Frankenstein’s monsters to life, rewrite people’s memories at will, and travel back in time, but she has her blind spots.

Be that as it may, Julia checks the basement and finds Barnabas is not there.

The Antique Shop

Carolyn takes Julia to an antique shop that has just opened in the village of Colllinsport. Carolyn called the shop “divine” yesterday, and is still thrilled about it today. I suppose it reminds her of home- like all the unoccupied spaces in the great house of Collinwood, it is crammed with a lot of miscellaneous junk.

Carolyn may have a soft spot for the place, but she hasn’t lost all capacity for judgment. The proprietors, a young couple named Philip and Megan Todd, have just unpacked a painting they bought that morning. Philip says that when it came up for auction he couldn’t resist it. Carolyn widens her eyes, tilts her head back, and says in an incredulous voice, “Hmm, your taste must be quite different from mine, Philip. I could have resisted that.”

Philip mentions that the artist’s name is Charles Delaware Tate. At that, Julia perks up. She asks Philip if he is certain that it is an authentic Tate; he assures her that he is. He astonishes her by saying that it was painted only about twenty years ago. Julia says that Tate would have been in his 80s then. Seeing that the painting is about as good as anything Tate ever did, she says that he was still at the height of his powers despite his advanced age. She wonders if, having been in such good shape so recently, he could still be alive. Philip doesn’t know about that.

Julia asks for the price. When Philip says he will part with the painting for $300, Julia takes out her checkbook. Carolyn looks on, amazed to see her shell out so much money so quickly for a mediocre picture. When it is time to go, Julia asks her if she is ready. Still agape, Carolyn replies “Yes.. for practically anything!”

For eight months, from #701 at the beginning of March to #884 last week, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the year 1897. In the second half of that segment, Tate was one of the minor villains. He had made a bargain with evil sorcerer Count Petofi. Petofi made him a nationally famous painter whose works were very much in demand. Many of his paintings also had magical powers. The magical powers were the result of Petofi’s spell, but it was never made entirely clear whether Tate’s fame was the result of a talent Petofi gave him to paint well or if Petofi’s intervention was more direct and he simply bewitched people into admiring Tate’s paintings and wanting to buy them. Indeed, if we had to classify the works of Tate that we saw, the most secure categorization would be “Nothing Special.” They certainly do not stand comparison to the best of the portraits that the ABC Network’s Art Department prepared for the Collinwood sets. Carolyn’s reaction today clearly suggests that once Petofi’s influence receded, the paintings lost their charm.

Julia’s interest in Tate is not aesthetic. Julia traveled back in time for a couple of weeks in September. She knows that Tate’s portrait of Quentin Collins prevented Quentin from turning into a werewolf. The prospect that Tate might still be alive leads her to hope that her friend Chris Jennings, a great-grandson of Quentin’s, might also be cured of lycanthropy.

The audience is unlikely to find much ground for optimism in the thought of more Tate. As is usual for characters played by Roger Davis, Tate is hard to watch. He delivers most of his lines in a shout, and he amplifies his voice by clenching his rectal sphincter muscles. The result is what Pauline Kael used to call an “anal screech.” He also has what we might tactfully call a poor sense of personal space; indeed, two of the tags that most often appear together on posts on this blog are “Roger Davis” and “Abusive Behavior on Camera.” So I would just as soon Julia give up her search for Tate.

The Todds

Megan and Philip exult over Julia’s purchase. They are in the middle of talking about how it is a good sign for their new business, when Megan is suddenly seized with a fit of foreboding. She wants to close the shop early; Philip protests that they still have time to make a few more sales. Megan then says she has a premonition that if they stay in Collinsport something terrible will happen to them. She says she wants to sell the shop and move away. Philip tries to soothe her. He puts his head against hers and kisses her. She just looks straight on, her eyes full of dread.

Philip working his way to Megan’s neck while it dawns on her that they are now characters on *Dark Shadows*.

Megan is the third role Marie Wallace played on Dark Shadows. Her first two were Eve, the Fiancée of Frankenstein, and Crazy Jenny Collins, Quentin’s estranged and deranged wife. Miss Wallace had a lot of fun with those parts, but neither of them gave her much opportunity to interact meaningfully with her scene partners. Eve was unyieldingly nasty to everyone, whatever they might say or do, and Jenny was just one long mad scene. As Megan, she gets to listen to Philip and react to what he says. That ends when she ignores his kissing her neck, but while it lasts it’s good to see.

Philip is played by Christopher Bernau. Some fans say that Bernau and Miss Wallace lacked “chemistry,” but their last shot today shows how misguided that criticism is. The key to chemistry is for one character to initiate a kiss and the other to kiss back. Megan is supposed to be too preoccupied with her premonition to notice anything in her environment, even her beloved husband kissing her. If she had responded to him at all, the whole point of the scene would have been lost.

It is true that Bernau does not perfectly embody a romantic lead in Philip’s scenes with Megan. As a happy couple, Philip and Megan constantly make little jokes with each other. The jokes in the script aren’t very good, and Bernau tries to put some life into them by imitating Jack Benny. In the 1920s and 1930s, Benny’s persona struck people as a spoiled rich kid, and in later years he was so famous that it just meant Jack Benny. But by the 1960s, any man other than Jack Benny would send a very different message if he were to speak with that drawl and walk with that mincing gait. When the man in question is an antique dealer wearing a belted sweater that looks suspiciously like a dress, it does not seem especially likely that he will passionately in love with his wife.

I think Philip borrowed this from Maggie Evans…

Several times in his career Bernau proved he could be effective in love scenes with women, most famously as ladies’ man Alan Spaulding on The Guiding Light. I mentioned that role in a comment on Danny Horn’s post about this episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day:

I was a kid when Bernau joined GUIDING LIGHT. My mother watched that show, and I had several times attempted to watch it with her, but it always defeated me after 5 or 10 minutes. It just seemed like a window into the deepest level of Hell, the frozen cavern where absolutely nothing happens. But Bernau caught my imagination. I could watch entire episodes if he was in them.

Years later, when I watched DARK SHADOWS on the Sci-Fi Channel, I realized what made Bernau so compelling on GUIDING LIGHT. He was doing a Jonathan Frid imitation. Within moments of first seeing Barnabas, I exclaimed “Alan Spaulding!” It was only years later that I learned Bernau had been on DARK SHADOWS.

Comment left 10 December 2020 by Acilius, on Danny Horn, “Episode 888: Little Shop,” 26 June 2016, Dark Shadows Every Day.

I’m very fond of John Gielgud’s story that from the time he first saw Claude Rains give a performance, his acting style consisted of imitating Claude Rains. Gielgud went on to say that this represented a great improvement over his previous style, which consisted of imitating Noël Coward. I doubt Bernau’s style ever depended entirely on either Jack Benny or Jonathan Frid, but he certainly learned a great deal by watching each of them.

Episode 443: Masculine details

Naval officer/ sleazy operator Nathan Forbes seemed to have lost his best chance at getting rich quick when his fiancée, fluttery heiress Millicent Collins, discovered that he was already married when they got engaged. Since then, he has figured out that Millicent’s second cousin, Barnabas Collins, did not go to England as the family has been telling everyone, but that he is still lurking about the village of Collinsport and has murdered several people there. Among Barnabas’ victims was Nathan’s wife Suki.

Widower Nathan has a plan to profit from this information. Today, we see the first step in Nathan’s plan. He persuades his henchman, commercial mariner Noah Gifford, to wear a mask, carry Barnabas’ cane, and assault Millicent while he lies in wait. Apparently he will rescue her, and she will tell her family both that Nathan was the hero of the incident and that the attacker carried Barnabas’ instantly recognizable cane.

The whole episode is full of comic moments, and the climactic scene of the assault at the gazebo had my wife, Mrs Acilius, laughing out loud and making comparisons to A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. That reaction shows that Nathan and Noah are a more successful rewriting of Dark Shadows‘ first seagoing con man, Jason McGuire, and his henchman Willie Loomis. Jason was supposed to be a comic villain, but the writers never gave him much that was funny to do or say. Actor Dennis Patrick was such a talented comic that he could pad his part with facial expressions, tones of voice, and gestures that got laughs, especially in his scenes with Willie. But it was never at all clear why he needed Willie, and most of the time he was on camera Jason was grinding the other characters down with a depressing blackmail scheme. But Nathan keeps scrambling to find his way into his marks’ good graces, and he and Noah get up to all sorts of high-jinks. Regular viewers will be happy to see a demonstration of what Jason and Willie might have been had Dark Shadows been able to employ a better writing staff in 1967.

Another major improvement over the period when Dark Shadows was set in 1966 and 1967 is the show’s use of Joel Crothers. He did what he could with the part of hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell, but since Joe’s only note is earnestness he always winds up as less of a character than a function. But Nathan is always working an angle, is never quite predictable, and is tremendously fun to watch. The prospect of seeing Crothers return to the role of Joe is one of the major reasons the audience might want to prolong our stay in the eighteenth century.

Closing Miscellany

Noah remarks on one of the odd quirks of the Collins family when he mentions that the vacant Old House on their property is still full of all sorts of valuable objects. From the first week of the show, we’ve seen that disused parts of their estate are heavily stocked with high-priced antiques. This acknowledgement of the oddness of that fact leaves us wondering if the show is going to change it.

Today marks the only appearance on Dark Shadows of actress Charlotte Fairchild. Fairchild plays a downstairs maid who tells Millicent that a man has brought her a fan. Her angular figure and pale complexion made her a perfect choice to play an eighteenth century servant, and she does a fine job with the dialogue.

Millicent and the downstairs maid. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 278: If you become Josette

The first major villain on Dark Shadows was high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins, played by Louis Edmonds. Edmonds was a master of the sarcastic remark, so that Roger was often funny. But no matter how often he made the audience laugh, Roger was never a comic villain. That requires a character we can empathize with as we watch them scheme and plot, scramble and improvise, in pursuit of goals that could not be achieved without ruining all the fun. We laugh when we recognize our own foibles in an outlandish character, and laugh again when we realize that our ability to feel with others encompasses even those whose feelings have led them to do dastardly deeds.

Roger’s personality was too cold, his motives too contemptible for us to empathize with him. Where a comic villain thinks fast and puts himself in ridiculous situations, Roger stuck with his fixed ideas, using the same tactics time and again to bully his unwilling co-conspirator Sam to stick with their plan. Even when he bumbled about with a damning piece of evidence, a fountain pen left at a crime scene, he was never the coyote caught in his own over-elaborate trap, but a criminal in a police procedural. He was a melodramatic villain who was only incidentally funny.

The first supernatural menace on the show was Roger’s ex-wife, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, played by Diana Millay. Millay was hilarious, every bit as funny as Louis Edmonds. It was a shame the two of them didn’t play a married couple in a long-running comedy. They could have raised sarcasm to heights previously unknown to humankind. But while Millay gets laughs every time the script gives her the least chance, Laura was even less of a comic villain than Roger.

It is clear that Laura is a malign presence from beyond the grave and that, if she is not stopped, she will burn her young son David to death. But everything else about her is an impenetrable mystery. She is not part of a familiar mythology, and even the most basic questions about her remain unanswered. We cannot empathize with her motives, since we cannot begin to guess what her motives are or even be sure if she has motives.

The first comic villain on Dark Shadows was seagoing con man Jason McGuire, played by Dennis Patrick. Jason had his first comic turns only after he had been on the show for weeks, during which time we had been subjected to many iterations of a dreary ritual in which he made a demand of reclusive matriarch Liz, Liz resisted, he threatened to expose her terrible secret, and she capitulated. When his henchman Willie slips out of Jason’s control and he starts scrambling to contain the damage Willie is doing to his plan, Patrick finally gets a chance to play Jason as a comic villain, and the result is very engaging. But those scenes are scattered too thinly through Jason’s long-running, relentlessly monotonous storyline to make him a success as a comic villain.

Now, the show has struck gold. Vampire Barnabas Collins is becoming a pop culture phenomenon and bringing the show the first good ratings it has ever had. They have to keep Barnabas on the show indefinitely, and he has to be the most important character. That presents a practical difficulty. Vampires usually figure in folklore and fiction as unstoppable killing machines. Daytime soap operas explore the shifting relationships among large casts of characters. It’s going to be hard to maintain that cast if Barnabas sets about murdering everyone. To square the circle, they try to redefine Barnabas as a comic villain.

Barnabas is giving a costume party for his distant cousins, the living members of the Collins family. He has invited well-meaning governess Vicki to attend and to wear the dress of the legendary Josette Collins. In the first 39 weeks of Dark Shadows, Vicki had developed a close friendship with Josette’s ghost, so she is excited about this. For his part, Barnabas has borrowed an evil scheme from the 1932 film The Mummy. He will erase Vicki’s personality and replace it with Josette’s, then kill her so that she will rise as a vampiric Josette. So he is glad she likes the dress.

Barnabas asks Vicki to come to his house and help him pick out the antique clothes that the family will wear at the party. She enthusiastically agrees, saying that she loves to go through trunks full of old clothes. The clothes are in a trunk in Josette’s old room, which Barnabas has restored.

In the room, we see the ghost of Barnabas’ 9 year old sister Sarah sitting on the trunk. She vanishes a second before Barnabas and Vicki enter. Both of them have a strong feeling that someone just left the room. Barnabas tries to dismiss the sensation as nervousness, but Vicki has had too much experience with ghosts to be put off so easily.

Vicki has been our point of view character for most of the series. At first, that was because she was a newcomer to the great estate of Collinwood and the nearby town of Collinsport, and so we would learn everything we needed to know as we listened to people explain things to her. Later, it was because she was the key protagonist in the stories, so that the action got going once she knew what was going on. So when Barnabas equals Vicki’s sensitivity to Sarah’s presence, he is presented to us as another possible point of view character.

Barnabas keeps talking about the Collinses’ eighteenth century ancestors in terms that make it obvious that he knew them, so that he more than once has to clean up after himself with remarks like “I would imagine.” He does alarm Vicki when he blurts out something about what will happen to her should she “become Josette.” He hastens to say that he means that Vicki will become her for the duration of the party.

Vicki goes back to the great house and talks with Liz about the party. Liz smiles happily, the first time we’ve seen this expression on her face in the whole run of the series.

Vicki goes on about Barnabas’ connection to the past, saying that he gives the impression of someone who really is misplaced in time. She has the feeling that he needs to recreate a bygone era, and that he is doomed to be unhappy because of the impossibility of traveling backward in time. Vicki does not know what Barnabas’ plans for her are, but she understands his motives perfectly and empathizes with him deeply. That Vicki, Barnabas’ intended victim, can feel this way suggests that we can, too.

Back in Barnabas’ house, Sarah reappears in Josette’s room and sees her blue dress. She is excited to find it. She looks at her reflection in the mirror and smiles. Her good cheer is emphasized when her musical cue, an excerpt from “London Bridge,” is for the first time played in a major key.

Sarah’s reflection looks like it has never seen a ghost before

The minor key was appropriate during Sarah’s previous appearances. The first several times we saw her, Sarah was associated with Barnabas’ imprisonment of Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. Maggie was the victim of Barnabas’ first mad attempt at Josettery, and Sarah intervened just in time to keep Barnabas from killing her. The other day, Barnabas killed Jason, and we saw Sarah when Barnabas was forcing Willie to help him hide his old friend’s corpse. Barnabas isn’t killing anyone today, so Sarah can be a bit more cheerful.

Sarah helps to establish Barnabas as a comic villain. As the ghostly sister who returned to the upper world when Barnabas was loosed to prey upon the living, Sarah and he are part of the same eruption from Dark Shadows‘ supernatural back-world into its main continuity. Perhaps she personifies his conscience, certainly she gives him an occasion to make schmaltzy speeches about his days as a human. More important than either of these, when we see that Barnabas’ 9 year old sister is his most powerful adversary, we begin to wonder just how seriously we should take him.

Closing Miscellany

Yesterday and today, Alexandra Moltke Isles delivered the recorded voiceover monologue at the beginning of the episode. The first 270 times she did this, it was in character as Vicki. Now, they’ve given up the idea that Vicki or any other one character will eventually find out about everything that we see on screen, so the openings are delivered by whatever actress is available as a nameless external narrator.

In those first 270 outings, Mrs Isles sounded like Vicki. She adopted Vicki’s distinctive way of speaking, carefully articulating one word at a time and often ending sentences with surprising little inflections- a curl of uncertainty here, a touch of breathy optimism there, a falling note of despair in another place. The voiceovers were usually remarks about the weather or the sea that were supposed to involve some vague metaphor for events in the story, so that it is open to question whether it was really worth Mrs Isles’ time to put so much effort into creating a character with them. But I guess a pro is a pro, and it was a matter of course that she would do her best no matter how little she had to work with.

In these last two, she has used a relatively flat voice, with none of Vicki’s particular vocal traits. The pacing has been structured, not around sentences, but around an attempt to convey an overall sense of urgency. They sound very much like The Narrator. I wonder what Mrs Isles would have made of The Narrator if the voiceover passages had extended beyond the opening moments and run through the episodes.

There is a famous production error under the closing credits, when a stagehand shows up in the window, realizes he’s on camera, and makes himself all the more conspicuous when he tries to escape from his predicament.

Episode 244: The nature of evil

The entire episode is taken up with the thirteenth iteration of something that wasn’t especially appealing the first time we saw it: seagoing con man Jason McGuire makes a demand of reclusive matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard; Liz resists; Jason threatens to expose her terrible secret; Liz capitulates.

Today, Jason makes the ultimate demand, that Liz marry him. In response, she laughs merrily, the first time we have seen her do this. She takes her resistance to the very point of calling the sheriff’s office and admitting that, eighteen years ago, she killed her husband Paul Stoddard and Jason buried him in the basement.

Jason stops her, telling her that the first person who ought to hear her confession is her daughter Carolyn. Liz agrees to this. Jason goes to summon Carolyn from the study, warning her that her mother is “on edge.”

Carolyn comes in. When Liz tells her that she has something important to discuss, Carolyn tries to lighten the mood by joking that it’s a bit late to break the news to her about the birds & bees. When Liz goes into detail about how Paul was a terrible man who never loved her, Carolyn is so upset that she refuses to listen to any more. She hurries out. This is the first time in months that flighty heiress Carolyn has had an opportunity to behave in a flighty manner.

Carolyn returns to the study. Jason is waiting for her there. She asks Jason how her father felt about her. He spins tales about what a loving father Stoddard was, which Carolyn eats up.

Jason returns to Liz. He stands over her, while she tells him Carolyn wouldn’t listen to her. We can see that her resistance is at an end. She asks him to give her time. He answers that he will give her time, but not much.

Liz, still examining Jason for vulnerabilities

Over the last several weeks, we’ve seen Jason doing things other than enacting his liturgy with Liz. He and Liz have even shared a few scenes where they don’t perform it. When Dennis Patrick gets to play a charming swindler who has to think on his feet, he is fun to watch. We’ve come to like Jason enough that seeing him twist Carolyn into a fetter binding Liz to his will is a genuinely horrifying moment.

Episode 243: Something about your cousin bothers me

Jason realizing he is in an awkward position

Barnabas Collins has a problem. He wants people to think of him as a mild-mannered and highly respectable English gentleman, but he is in fact a vampire from central Maine. So he leaves it to his sorely bedraggled blood thrall, Willie Loomis, to keep people away from his house while he himself apologizes for Willie’s curtness.

Today, addled quack Dave Woodard has come to Barnabas’ house asking Willie to help him investigate the case of Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, who fell gravely ill and then vanished from the hospital. Willie refuses, but Barnabas promises Dr Woodard he will try to persuade Willie to cooperate. Since Barnabas is keeping Maggie in his house and doing various abominable things to her, we wonder how he will contrive to appear helpful.

Elizabeth Collins Stoddard has a problem. She wants people to think of her as an able businesswoman and a faultless model of virtue, but she is in fact being blackmailed. People have started to notice the money Liz is giving seagoing con man Jason McGuire, and they are certainly talking about the fact that Jason is living in her house. Today, Jason tells Liz that the solution to these problems is for the two of them to get married. Liz is not enthusiastic.

Jason has a problem. Before Barnabas enslaved Willie, Willie was Jason’s dangerously unstable henchman. So Jason doesn’t want people to think of Willie at all. But many do remember his violent ways, and suspect him of wrongdoing in connection with Maggie. Jason visits Barnabas’ house and the two of them talk about Willie and the case of Maggie Evans. Jason urges Barnabas to get Willie to cooperate with Dr Woodard.

Barnabas dislikes Jason; Jonathan Frid and Dennis Patrick play all their scenes together as a drawing room comedy about a snob burdened by the presence of an insufferable bounder. The script doesn’t always give them funny lines- today’s certainly doesn’t- but their nonverbal communication is enjoyable to watch. Frid and Patrick have so much fun with their scenes together that you never notice Frid stumbling over his lines. He is so deeply in character that you’d have to follow along with a copy of the script to catch any bobbles. He caps today’s scene with a moment when Barnabas watches Jason leave. His potentially comic expression of pained politeness gives way to a much colder look, the look of someone planning a drastic action.

Before Jason announces to Liz that he is engaged to her, he talks to her about some of Barnabas’ quirks, suggesting that he intends to continue probing into her cousin’s doings. The hour may be coming very soon when Barnabas will decide he has to deal with Jason permanently.

Episode 231: Anyone’s blood

Today is only the second time we hear a voice announce a recast over the opening title. The first time was in #35, when David Ford took over the part of drunken artist Sam Evans from wildly incompetent actor Mark Allen. This time Robert Gerringer is taking over the part of addled quack Dr Woodard from Richard Woods. Woods only played the role twice, and neither time could he find a way to distract the audience from the ignorance of medicine that the writers showed in their scripts.

Gerringer’s lines don’t make much more sense than did the ones they dumped on Woods, but he acts up a storm. Woodard is examining Sam’s daughter Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. Unknown to Sam or Woodard, vampire Barnabas Collins has been sucking Maggie’s blood. Woodard is firm with Maggie when she resists his examination. He seems to be somewhat on edge, just enough that we wonder if there is more to it than the difficulties we can see Maggie giving him. Perhaps he is thinking something he isn’t saying. Woods never managed to make us wonder if his version of the doctor was doing that.

When Woodard and Sam leave Maggie’s room, Woodard assumes an alarmed tone. He tells Sam that Maggie is on the point of death and needs a blood transfusion at once. By showing us that Woodard was concealing the true nature of his concern when he was with Maggie, Gerringer gives substance to our hopes that the character’s nonsensical words and deeds will turn out to be a screen hiding something interesting.

Maggie’s boyfriend, hardworking young fisherman Joe, joins Sam and Woodard. Woodard asks if either Sam or Joe has blood type A. Joe does. Woodard doesn’t ask about Rh factors or Joe’s medical history or anything else, he simply marches Joe into Maggie’s room and the bodily fluids start pumping right away. Joe holds Maggie’s hand at first, but her violent protests force him to let go.

In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Professor Van Helsing and Dr John Seward give blood transfusions to the vampire’s victims. That novel was written in 1897, and blood types weren’t discovered until 1900, so Van Helsing and Seward take blood indiscriminately from all the men cooperating in the effort to defeat Dracula. Van Helsing is particularly enthusiastic when he learns that Arthur Holmwood has given blood to Lucy Westenra, because Arthur “is the lover of her!” Van Helsing is Dutch, and speaks in a vaguely comical broken English. Woodard doesn’t seem particularly excited that Joe is “the lover of her,” but audiences who had read the book will recognize the allusion.

At this point in the production of Dark Shadows, the tentative plan was that Dr Woodard would become something like the expert on paranormal dangers that Dr Peter Guthrie had been during the Phoenix storyline, and that Barnabas would be destroyed in episode 275. Like Stoker’s Dracula, the Phoenix arc had featured a group of stout-hearted men and one valiant young woman coming together to do battle with an undead menace. Dr Guthrie had been their Van Helsing, an expert from out of town who leapfrogs over some weaknesses in the evidence actually available to the protagonists to get them to the same level of understanding that the audience has been given. Also like Van Helsing, Guthrie is the first to realize that the one female member of the team is the key to the success of their efforts, and so he insists on putting her in situations the other men regard as too dangerous for her. As Mina had been instrumental in the destruction of Dracula, so well-meaning governess Vicki is the person who finally thwarts the plans of the Phoenix.

If Woodard and Vicki are going to destroy Barnabas in #275, we have to wonder what story the show will have to tell in #276. The only other plotline going at the moment is the blackmail of reclusive matriarch Liz by seagoing con man Jason McGuire, and that can’t continue indefinitely. Not only will Liz run out of things for Jason to take away from her, but Dennis Patrick, the actor playing Jason, will leave the show no later than the end of June. Since the end of June is when #275 will be airing, we can hardly expect Jason to take the show over after that time.

In fact, Jason is an in-betweener brought on the show to clear away the last non-paranormal plot elements left over from the period before the show became a supernatural thriller in December 1966. By the time he leaves, both the reason for Liz’ long self-immuration in the great house of Collinwood and the identity of Vicki’s parents are supposed to be laid bare for all to see. Neither of those secrets ever generated an interesting story, but as long as they are around it is at least theoretically possible that the show will become a conventional daytime soap opera again. Without them, they are altogether committed to the spook show route. Destroy Barnabas, and you just have to come up with yet another menace from beyond the grave.

I remember Gerringer’s acting style from the first time I saw Dark Shadows. That was back in the 90s, when it was on what was then called the SciFi Channel. He so perfectly represented the doctor characters on the soaps my mother used to watch when I was a kid twenty years before that seeing him in the middle of a story about a vampire told me everything about the strangeness of a conventional daytime serial switching to a horror theme. If that guy is the one to drive the stake through Barnabas’ heart, or if he is even part of the team that finishes him off, it will be a statement that the makers of Dark Shadows have decided to stop being silly and start imitating The Guiding Light.

My wife, Mrs Acilius, was particularly frustrated with the dialogue in this episode. As Maggie, Kathryn Leigh Scott does a good job with nonverbal communication creating the image of a reluctant patient trying to get out of her skin, but her lines consist chiefly of repeating whatever is said to her. The other members of the cast are equally effective at projecting concern for a loved one whose grave illness they don’t understand and can’t help, but their lines too are so heavily loaded with repetition that we started to suspect that Malcolm Marmorstein was writing for a cast of myna birds. In particular, Woodard’s lines to Sam in the living room repeat the word “shock” so many times that they start to sound like he’s stuttering.

The original choices for the roles of Sam, Joe, Dr Woodard, and Maggie.
Photo by Bird Ecology Study Group

In his post about this episode, Danny Horn complains that there is not a single interesting still image in it. I agree with that, though I would say that the actors’ movements tell a story. Granted, it is a story that could have been told in a tiny fraction of the actual running time, but they deserve credit for holding the show together when the script gave them zero support.

Danny says that the episode would have been just as good if it were a radio show. Mrs Acilius says that it would have been “a thousand times better” than it is if it were a silent movie. Maybe they could compromise, and it could be presented with neither audio nor video, and the audience could spend the 22 minutes doing something else.