The Countess DuPrés meets her brother, André DuPrés, Josette’s father, in the gazebo on the grounds of the great estate of Collinwood. She starts talking to André about evil powers at work in the house, and he tells her to stop wasting his time with her mumbo-jumbo. She tells him that she is not talking about something she learned by studying her tarot cards. She was hiding in the bushes next to the gazebo the night before, where she saw and heard a tryst between Josette and Jeremiah Collins, uncle of Josette’s fiancé Barnabas.
Since Josette is apparently in love with Barnabas, barely knows Jeremiah, and has always been a good girl, André finds this difficult to believe. The countess assures him it is so, and says that there is no sensible explanation but that Josette and Jeremiah are under a spell. André says that that isn’t a sensible explanation, either.
André goes back to the manor house. He confronts Jeremiah. The two of them do something virtually unprecedented on Dark Shadows– they address a problem directly in candid, rational conversation. In this narrative universe, that qualifies as a plan “so crazy that it just might work!” And, apparently, it does- Jeremiah apologizes for his behavior, admits that he himself is unable to explain what came over him, and promises that he and Josette will never again be alone together. That satisfies André.
The first and last intelligent conversation ever to take place on Dark Shadows. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Later, the countess is in the front parlor with the lady of the house, the alcoholic Naomi Collins. The countess tries to interest Naomi in the tarot. She deals a twelve card layout, and is horrified by what she sees. She tells Naomi that the card signifying the Lovers is inverted, that Death is near them, etc. She talks about a force of evil at work in the house, and asks about well-meaning governess Vicki. We can see why a sensible adult like André was reluctant to listen to his sister in the opening scene, but we also know that Dark Shadows is the sort of show where things like this are reliable guides to upcoming story beats.
After dealing with the countess, Naomi needs some sleep. She doesn’t get much, though. She dreams of a giant tarot card floating up from the foot of her bed. It is unclear whether she is awake or still dreaming when she rises from bed and follows the card. She sees Jeremiah walking past in the corridor outside her room. She follows him to the front parlor, and sees him locked in an embrace with a woman. She can see the woman’s arms caressing Jeremiah’s back and can hear her voice, but cannot see her face. She sees a simple trident shape on the woman’s hand. Jeremiah orders Naomi out of the room. Rather than comply, she grabs the woman’s arm. It comes off in Naomi’s hand, prompting her to scream.
The arm is so obviously made of plastic that we laughed out loud when it came off. I’m sure it looked less bad on the average TV set in 1967, at least in areas where ABC was on a station that didn’t come in particularly well, which was most of them.
The woman’s voice Naomi hears sounds like that of Kathryn Leigh Scott, who plays Josette; it also sounds like it is playing on a record. The woman Jeremiah is kissing is Dorrie Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh stood in for Miss Scott in #224, #225/226, #238, and #240, and had a speaking part as Phyllis Wick in #365. Sad to say, this is Kavanaugh’s last appearance on Dark Shadows; her brief turn as Phyllis was sensational, I was disappointed not to see her again. Even sadder, she would die of cancer in 1983, at the age of 38.
Well-meaning governess Vicki has learned that her depressing fiancé Burke probably died in a plane crash yesterday. His body hasn’t been found yet, and she still hopes he will turn out to be alive.
We open with a dream sequence. Vicki finds herself in the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood. She is in the bedroom once occupied by legendary grande dame Josette, restored to its original condition by the house’s current occupant, Old World gentleman Barnabas Collins. Barnabas enters, accompanied by permanent house guest Julia Hoffman. As is usual in dreams, much of it is a rehash of the dreamer’s recent experiences. Vicki had met Barnabas and Julia the preceding night while on a walk and told them that Burke was missing and feared dead. Barnabas told Julia that it was too cold for her to be outdoors and sent her home, then he told Vicki that he was sure she would be a bride soon. These same lines occur in the dream.
The dream deviates from the waking scene in three key ways. First, Barnabas addresses Julia as “Doctor.” In fact, Julia is a medical doctor, a mad scientist who has come to Collinwood with an experimental treatment intended to cure Barnabas of a chronic ailment, vampirism. But Vicki doesn’t know that Julia is a doctor, any more than she knows Barnabas is a vampire. Still less does she know that Barnabas always addresses Julia as “Doctor” when they are alone. That suggests that it is not a normal dream, but is a message from the supernatural.
Second, Julia looks humiliated when Barnabas tells her she is suffering from the cold and orders her to leave. That did happen in yesterday’s encounter, but Vicki didn’t see it. So that is further evidence that the dream is a transmission from worlds beyond.
Third, while Barnabas yesterday encouraged Vicki to believe that Burke was alive, in this dream he shows her a shrouded figure on the bed and identifies it as Burke. He still insists that she will be a bride. When she says that she can never be a bride if Burke is dead, Barnabas adopts a chipper tone and says that he doesn’t see why. She is saying “He is dead, he is dead” and the camera is focused on Barnabas when the dream ends. Evidently the message is something to do with Barnabas being dead, as he is during the daylight hours, and therefore being an unsuitable groom for her.
Later, we cut back to Josette’s room, where we see Julia standing around and hear her thoughts in an extended voiceover. She has resigned herself to spending the rest of her life linked to Barnabas, and has decided that she may as well fall in love with him. For his part, he is still hung up on his long-dead love Josette and believes that Vicki will someday turn into Josette and come to him. Julia is ruminating about this crackpot notion when she senses a ghostly presence. She wonders if it is Josette. Indeed, for 28 weeks, from #70 to #210, Josette’s ghost was the foremost supernatural presence on Dark Shadows, and it was based in the Old House. But Julia resists the idea that it could be her.
In her resistance, we can hear one of the themes the show has been exploring lately. Even characters who have accepted the reality of particular supernatural phenomena don’t have a frame of reference for those phenomena. They keep snapping back to Logical-Explanation-Land and trying to find mundane answers to unearthly questions. Julia is personal physician to a vampire, and even she starts telling herself that she’s being silly to expect to see a ghost.
There is a good deal of noise from off-screen, and Julia finally accepts that there is a ghost in the room. She says aloud that it is not Josette’s ghost, it is a man’s. She thinks it is the ghost of Dave Woodard, her old medical school classmate, whom she and Barnabas murdered a week ago. She is calling out “Dave!” when she hears Vicki in the hallway outside.
Julia calls to Vicki, who joins her in Josette’s room. Vicki tells her that after she left them the night before, Barnabas volunteered to help her restore the west wing of the great house of Collinwood. Vicki wants to accept that offer. Julia becomes angry and says that Barnabas is much too busy to do any such thing, and that if he offered to do it he was only being polite.
Later, Vicki is back in the great house. Barnabas visits her there. When she tells him what Julia said and how agitated she was when she said it, he assures that he sincerely wants to help her with the project, and they speculate that Julia is working too hard.
Julia joins them. She is carrying flowers and in an abashed mood. She apologizes to Vicki for raising her voice and says that she must have been working too hard. Vicki goes to get a vase, leaving Julia and Barnabas alone in the drawing room.
Barnabas demands that Julia put her feelings to one side and approach their relationship simply as one of doctor and patient. He doesn’t ignore her feelings, nor does he make the slightest attempt to be gallant about them; he speaks of her attraction to him as if it were a mildly ridiculous offense against good manners. I suppose if someone treated you that way, it would be relatively easy to get over your unrequited passion for them, but Julia is stuck with Barnabas. When he tells her to stop being foolish and keep their relationship simple, she says that it is too late for that. Barnabas understands that as a reference to their murder of Woodard, which has indeed cut her off from any other potential life partner for the foreseeable future.
This whole conversation is conducted in loud stage voices with the doors wide open. Vicki walks in as Barnabas and Julia are in the middle of a fairly incriminating topic. She is sufficiently absorbed in her worries about Burke that it is believable that her only reaction would be a startled look after she enters the room and sees Barnabas and Julia in an intense confrontation, but they really are being remarkably careless.
Vicki finds that the flowers, which were in full bloom when she left the room a few minutes before, are now dead and shriveled. Barnabas had held the flowers briefly; evidently the vampire’s touch drained them of life. He squirms and looks up, the picture of someone embarrassed by his failure to control a bodily function in a social setting.
Looks like David Ford isn’t the only one whose metabolism creates awkward moments.
Back in the Old House, Barnabas and Julia are in the basement laboratory. She is preparing to give him an injection. He wants her to accelerate the treatments so that he can woo Vicki now, while she is lonely and confused. In case Burke does come back, Barnabas wants to have established a foothold from which to compete with him for Vicki’s affections. Julia is nervous, fumbling with the needle and complaining about the way Barnabas is looking at her. When she is about to give him the shot, he stops her, telling her that he suspects her jealousy will lead her to do something to harm him. He warns her against any such attempt. After this last moment of unrelenting hostility, we end with a closeup on Julia, her lower lip trembling.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, most households in the USA had television sets that received only in black and white. So the first requirement of any program’s visual strategy was that it look good on those sets. Prime-time programs with big budgets and long production schedules could sometimes look good in black and white and dazzling in color; the most noteworthy example was the 1966-1968 Batman series. But even most prime-time shows limited themselves to a palette that resembled a plate of processed baby food, with the green of strained peas next to the orange of puréed carrots and the purple of mashed prunes. The use of color on a show like Dark Shadows, which every week had to crank out five episodes on a total budget of $70,000, could rarely rise even to the level of a well-presented infant’s breakfast. Directors Lela Swift and John Sedwick were ambitious visual artists who sometimes managed to use color to advantage, but most of the time the color is a gimmick as worthless as any spear pointed at the viewer of a 3D movie.
Today begins with a reprise of the dream sequence that ended Friday’s episode so effectively. But where that episode survived only on a black and white kinescope, the original videotape of this one has come down to us. As a result, we see the dream in color today. Black and white images are abstract; color images, even when they are composed of only two or three flat colors, make everything literal. So while the dream we saw in Friday’s ending was a terrifying message from a mysterious realm, today’s opening is something that might trouble the sleep of someone who ate a big meal too soon before bedtime.
Strange and troubled boy David wakes up from his nightmare, and well-meaning governess Vicki tries to calm him down. David is frustrated that Vicki won’t take him seriously when he tells her that he learned from the dream that his cousin Barnabas is an undead ghoul and that his friend Sarah is a ghost. We know that he is right, but after the color version of the dream, we can understand why Vicki thinks all he needs is a warm glass of milk.
Meanwhile, Barnabas is at home, being unpleasant to his co-conspirator, mad scientist Julia Hoffman. He snaps at Julia for sitting in his house browsing through medical journals. This is unfair of him- since Julia is concealing her medical degree and pretending to be an historian studying the old families of New England, she can’t very well read medical journals anywhere else.
What is really bothering Barnabas is that his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie isn’t dead yet. The authorities have decided to blame Willie for the many unsolved crimes Barnabas himself committed, primarily because Willie is poor and unpopular, and if he dies of the gunshot wounds the police inflicted on him in #322, they will close all those cases. Yet Willie “clings to life with leech-like persistence.” Barnabas fears that Willie will make a miraculous recovery and set about “writing his memoirs.” Barnabas wants to break into the hospital and kill Willie, but Julia persuades him this would be counterproductive.
Barnabas then starts talking about his inclination to kill David. Julia persuades him that she can hypnotize David so that he will no longer be curious about him. In both parts of the conversation, Barnabas is a pouting child, Julia an authoritative figure, though because of her amorality ultimately a no less childish one. We see again the Bossy Big Sister/ Bratty Little Brother dynamic that has been at the heart of Dark Shadows since the first episode, when we were introduced to matriarch Liz and her brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger.
Back at the great house of Collinwood, Julia asks Liz and Vicki if she might talk alone with David about his fear of Barnabas. She explains that she has had some experience of child psychology. This led my wife, Mrs Acilius, to exclaim that Julia has forgotten her cover story and is presenting herself as what she actually is, a medical doctor dually qualified as a specialist in psychiatry and hematology. Liz remarks that Julia is “a woman of many talents.” This is not the first time Liz seems suspicious of Julia, but she nonetheless agrees to bring David to meet with her alone in the drawing room.
Julia and David sit on the couch, and she takes out the medallion she shows to people while she is hypnotizing them. David recognizes the medallion from his dream. He saw a faceless woman wearing Julia’s wig and coat showing him that medallion. He declares that the dream was warning him against Julia, and runs off, calling to Vicki.
Strange and troubled boy David Collins was, for the first 39 weeks of Dark Shadows, the character most intimately connected to the supernatural back-world of ghosts and uncanny phenomena that would occasionally peek through the main action of the show. That changed in #191, when he chose life with well-meaning governess Vicki over death with his mother, humanoid Phoenix Laura Murdoch Collins. After that, he had little memory of his mother, and none at all of the paranormal experiences he had during her time with him on the great estate of Collinwood.
Not that David lost his connection to the supernatural all at once. When he first met his cousin Barnabas in #212, he cheerfully asked him if he was a ghost, and was disappointed to hear that he wasn’t. In #288, he speculated that his friend, mysterious little girl Sarah, might be a ghost, and he has taken it in his stride every time he has seen Sarah do something only a ghost could do. In #310, he took out his crystal ball, a gift he had received in #48 and hadn’t used since #82, and peered into it to try to find Sarah. He did see her in it, too.
Yet David seems to be resisting the idea that Sarah is a ghost, and indeed to be shying away from the whole concept of the supernatural. When she led him to the secret chamber in the Collins mausoleum in #306, she told him that the empty coffin there once had a body in it, but that the body got up and left. David objected that the dead don’t walk away, and was incredulous when she assured him that sometimes, they do. When David was trapped in the chamber in #315, Sarah materialized there and showed him how to get out. He had called on her to come, and was facing away from the only door when he did so, indicating that he knew she could pass through the walls. Yet when she did, he demanded a naturalistic explanation for her entrance, and when she vanished he asserted that she must be hiding in the chamber somewhere.
Now, David is terrified of Barnabas, much to the puzzlement of the adults he lives with. In the opening scenes, he is staring at the portrait of Barnabas in the foyer of the great house, and we hear Barnabas in voiceover, delivering the lines with which he frightened David in #315. He screams with terror, bringing his aunt Liz. She sees that David is upset, but he hurries away from her, upstairs to his bedroom.
There, we hear his thoughts in another voiceover. He remembers the events of #310, when he discovered that Barnabas and his servant Willie knew about the secret chamber in the mausoleum. In his agitation, he calls out to Sarah. He hasn’t admitted to himself that Sarah is a ghost, but evidently he expects her to materialize out of thin air. Sarah doesn’t come, but Vicki does, asking who he was talking to.
After David says he wants to work on his stamp collection, Vicki goes downstairs and finds Liz putting her coat on. She says that David is afraid of Barnabas for some reason, and that she is going to Barnabas’ house to ask him to help put the boy’s fears to rest. She says that David is more disturbed than he has been since his mother Laura was around; this is the first direct reference to Laura in months.
There is a knock on the front door. It is Barnabas, saving Liz the trip. Liz and Vicki explain how fearful David is, and Barnabas offers to have a talk with him.
Liz ushers Barnabas into David’s room. Once the door is closed on the two of them, Barnabas questions David aggressively about Sarah and the secret chamber in the mausoleum. He asks him if Sarah told him about her family, twice mentioning her brother. When David says that Sarah hasn’t told him anything about herself, Barnabas accuses him of lying. He sits next to David on his bed. David doesn’t know that Barnabas is a vampire, but if he did he couldn’t look much more uncomfortable than he does when Barnabas assumes this position.
Barnabas sitting with David on his bed.
Barnabas tells David repeatedly that he knows he was in the secret chamber. David denies it, Barnabas again tells him he is lying, and to prove it shows him the knife he left there.
Barnabas confronts David with his knife
A knock comes at the door. It is Vicki. Vicki adores Barnabas, and the smile she wears when she enters the room shows her certainty that a heart-to-heart talk with him will have relieved David’s anxiety.
Smiling Vicki, sure everything will be all right
Vicki sees that David is still frightened, and her smile gives way to a look of confusion. Vicki was originally the audience’s point-of-view character; the audience is now composed chiefly of people who have tuned in wanting to see how they were going to fit a vampire into a daytime soap opera, and so of course she has to be Barnabas’ biggest fan at Collinwood. She and Barnabas leave David’s room together, and Barnabas wishes David “Pleasant dreams…”
We see David tossing in bed. He is talking in his sleep, calling out to Sarah. In yet another voiceover, we hear his dream. It is a bit of conversation from #306, when Sarah told him about the empty coffin.
We then see the beginning of another dream. It takes place amid a composite of decorations from the cemetery set and from the set representing Barnabas’ basement. David at first appears in a corridor like the ones we saw in the basement in #260.
The fog machine is working hard today.
He then encounters a faceless woman whom regular viewers will recognize as Barnabas’ co-conspirator, mad scientist Julia Hoffman.
David sees the faceless woman.
We see that she is wearing Julia’s wig and frock and holding the jeweled medallion she uses to hypnotize people:
Julia’s identifying marks.
David flees from the faceless woman, saying he has to find Sarah. He finds himself behind a grating like the one on the door to the Collins mausoleum:
Entering the tomb
He walks up a few stairs, and sees Sarah.
David finds Sarah
When David tells Sarah that she is hard to find, she denies it, saying that she is easy to find if you know where she is. David does not respond to this characteristically cryptic remark, but complains that she won’t tell him anything about herself. She asks what he wants to know, and says he wants to know who she is and where she comes from. She tells him:
Sarah: That’s easy. I was born the same place you were. I lived in a house on a hill until I was nine years old. Then I got very sick. Everyone came to see me, and they were very sad.
David: Because you were sick?
Sarah: No, because I died. I died, and everyone brought such pretty flowers.
“I died that time. I died, and everyone brought such pretty flowers.”
When David asks why she is around now if she died then, she tells him she doesn’t really know. All she knows is that she is looking for someone. David asks who that might be, and Sarah says she will show him. Suddenly he becomes frightened and does not want to go with her. She insists. She takes his hand and leads him.
Sarah leading David to her secret
The camera follows the children on their journey across the set. At first Sarah takes David down some stairs, leading him from depths to depths:
Sarah leads David down into the depths
The set is now unmistakably Barnabas’ basement, though with more candelabra casting more intricate shadows on the walls than we have seen there:
Vergil and Dante, junior edition
At last Sarah stops and looks straight ahead. They have reached their destination.
David is bewildered by the sight.
They see a coffin. David asks if this coffin is empty, as was the one in the secret chamber. Sarah tells him no. This one has a body in it. The lid starts to open. David points in astonishment, while Sarah looks on serenely.
The lid begins to open.
Barnabas rises from the coffin.
Barnabas rises.
David recognizes Barnabas and is stunned. Sarah has eyes only for her big brother.
David stunned.
Barnabas stands. He turns, and sees Sarah. He is glad to see her.
David watches Sarah’s reunion with Barnabas.
Barnabas notices David. He turns to follow him.
Barnabas blocks David from our view and from Sarah’s.
As Barnabas follows David, Sarah simply watches.
Sarah watching big brother.
Barnabas follows David through another corridor. The shadows on the wall and floor form a design suggesting David is caught in a web. Readers of Gold Key comics’ Dark Shadows series will recognize the bend of Barnabas’ knees and the angle of his cane in this shot as their usual depiction of him:
David caught in Barnabas’ web.
David’s back is to the wall and Barnabas closes in on him.
Cornered.
Barnabas raises the cane he used to block David’s escape in #315 and which regular viewers several times saw him use to beat Willie. We zoom in on the wall, where we see the cane’s shadow rise and fall while we hear David cry out in distress.
Sarah’s fixation on Barnabas and her passivity when Barnabas follows David mark a pivotal moment in her development. She looks and sounds like a friendly little girl, and we have seen her rescue people from danger. She usually seems like a cross between Caspar the Friendly Ghost and the Powerpuff Girls. But she is not that at all. She is a symptom of the same curse that has brought Barnabas forth to prey upon the living, and she is leading David ever deeper into a world where only the dead belong. The show has given us no reason at all to think that she can bring him back to the realm of the living.
Even if Sarah wants to save David, she may still represent a deadly threat to him. We saw this in the Laura story. When Laura tried to lure David into the flames, she told him that he, like her, would rise from the ashes and live again. We had heard her say things like this before, and she may well have believed it to be true. But unknown to her, we saw a séance in which David spoke with the voice of a son Laura had in one of her previous incarnations. She had burned him with her, but while she gained a new life in the flames, he had become one of the unquiet spirits of the dead. Perhaps Sarah, too, is unwittingly leading David to his death.
Closing Miscellany
When Liz leads Barnabas into David’s room, she tells David that “Unc- Cousin Barnabas” wants to have a man-to-man talk with him. In later years, Jonathan Frid would refer to his character as “Uncle Barnabas” when he talked with interviewers about how the Collinses responded to him. I wonder if Joan Bennett’s blooper is a sign that he was already calling him that at this time.
There is a slight puzzle in Sarah telling David she was “born in the same place” he was. We’d heard in the early episodes that Laura and Roger never spent a night together in Collinwood as man and wife- the day of their wedding, they went to their new home in Augusta, Maine, and David was born a few months later. Perhaps Sarah’s remark is a retcon, and we are now to think of David as having been born at Collinwood. Or perhaps Sarah really was born where Augusta would stand- we know that her birth year was 1786, and that was the year the settlement that would become Augusta saw the establishment of its first public whipping post. Maybe her parents wanted to go there to celebrate the occasion.
When Sarah tells David she lived on the hill until she was nine, she interrupts herself and shouts “Ten!” This is an odd little blooper. Just a few days ago, David told Barnabas that Sarah was ten, and Barnabas jumped down his throat asking if she wasn’t “almost ten?” Now Sharon Smyth has been on the show long enough to have celebrated a birthday, and they aren’t done with Sarah yet. So they are retconning Sarah as having made it to ten.
We open with the most spectacular dream sequence Dark Shadows has yet attempted. Strange and troubled boy David Collins is tossing and turning in bed. We cut to his dream, where he sees his distant cousin, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, approaching. Barnabas gets closer and closer, grows enormous, and opens his mouth, exposing the fangs of a vampire. David screams and wakes up.
As it happens, Barnabas really is a vampire. He has heard a rumor that Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, is recovering from amnesia. Since that amnesia was induced by his associate, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, in order to keep her from remembering that Barnabas is an undead ghoul who abducted her and held her prisoner, he is on the point of a panic attack.
Jonathan Frid turns in a bravura performance as Barnabas today. He plays Barnabas’ mounting anxiety compellingly when we see him in his house alone with his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie, waiting for Julia. When she does come, he rages at her and demands she go to Maggie at once to reinforce her memory loss. When Julia admits that she is no longer Maggie’s doctor, Barnabas’ rage mounts and he threatens to kill her. She keeps talking, and eventually he composes himself and suavely tells her that he won’t kill anyone tonight. She smiles, and goes off to her laboratory to resume meddling in God’s realm. Willie knows Barnabas better than Julia does and has none of her self-assurance; he doesn’t for a moment believe that Barnabas has relented. When he gets Barnabas to confirm that he is indeed going to kill Maggie, Frid moves from the cool suavity he had achieved just before Julia’s exit back to the near-panic he had displayed before she entered. The whole trip from panic to rage to suavity and back to panic is remarkably well executed.
Reclusive matriarch Liz is despondent, and no wonder. For months and months, seagoing con man Jason McGuire has been blackmailing her. She hasn’t been able to resist any of his demands; today she tells him that “There is no point in not being agreeable.” She makes a great show of submissiveness towards him, asking his permission to leave the drawing room. They are scheduled to marry in a few days, much to the dismay of everyone except Jason.
In the pre-credit teaser, we see Liz’ dream that she is standing atop the high cliff on her property, looking at the rocks and the sea far below. The ghosts of the Widows who have jumped to their deaths from the cliff over the years are calling her name. The Widows were a big part of Dark Shadows‘ supernatural back-world in its first months, but this is the first we’ve seen or heard from them since #126. In her dream, they call her name and she tumbles headlong over the cliff.
Liz mopes around the house during the day, then goes to the cliff. Housekeeper Mrs Johnson finds her there at nightfall. This is the first time in ten and a half weeks we have seen Mrs Johnson; I don’t usually give spoilers, but we won’t see her again for fourteen and a half more weeks. I suspect she was in this one just to be sure actress Clarice Blackburn would be in the studio when they were taking the cast photo I use as the header on this blog.
Was this photo taken the day this episode was shot?
Mrs Johnson mentions the Widows and tells Liz she doesn’t like hearing the legends about them. So Liz launches a detailed recounting of all of those legends. By the time Mrs Johnson is thoroughly uncomfortable, Liz starts to faint and pitch forward towards the edge of the cliff. Mrs Johnson rescues her, and walks her back to the house.
Liz goes back to bed and has the dream from the opening again. She gets up, opens the window, and tells the Widows she can hear them. As their voices travel in the wind, she repeats a catchphrase from one of the legends- “The sea is my grave. My grave is the sea.”
We begin with a chat between strange and troubled boy David Collins and his (vastly) older cousin, vampire Barnabas Collins. David has questions about the portrait of his ancestor Josette that long hung in the house Barnabas is now occupying. Barnabas assures him that he will hang it prominently once the house has been refurbished.
Yesterday, David was wandering from set to set moaning that he couldn’t feel the presence of Josette’s ghost. This was a clumsy way of addressing a question that is at the top of the minds of regular viewers. Josette’s ghost has been decisive in all the storylines on Dark Shadows for the six months prior to Barnabas’ arrival, and the house Barnabas has taken over is her stronghold. Though she can at moments erupt into the foreground with awesome power, as when she and the other ghosts scared crazed handyman Matthew Morgan to death in #126, she is usually a vague, wispy presence. It is unclear how or if she can survive contact with a menace as dynamic as a vampire.
Josette communicates with David through her portrait, and when she was recruiting a team to thwart the plans David’s mother, blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, had to burn him alive, she took possession of artist Sam Evans and made him paint pictures warning what Laura was up to. Now Barnabas has hired Sam and is sitting for a portrait that he will hang where Josette’s was long displayed. In #212, Barnabas looked at Josette’s portrait and said that the power it represented was ended, and David’s reactions yesterday suggested he was right.
Portraits are not Josette’s only means of communication. During the Laura storyline, David had a recurring nightmare that may have been in part the product of Josette’s intervention. Someone else has a nightmare today, and it is clearly a warning about Barnabas.
While Barnabas is sitting for Sam, he makes a series of remarks about Sam’s daughter Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town. To those who know that he is a vampire, everything about Barnabas is creepy, but he lays such heavy emphasis on lines like “I believe her future is already assured” that it is hard to believe Sam isn’t alarmed. We dissolve from that sequence to Maggie in her bedroom* trying to get some sleep. That in turn dissolves to a dream sequence** in which Maggie sees herself in a coffin and screams. She then wakes up, still screaming.
Josette was able to use Sam as a medium, and to do so while he was in the front room of the same house where Maggie is sleeping. So those who remember the Laura storyline will see the nightmare as the opening gambit in Josette’s effort to oppose Barnabas, and will be anticipating her next move.
Between these two segments, we spend some time with seagoing con man Jason McGuire and his former associate, Barnabas’ sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie Loomis. Reclusive matriarch Liz informs Jason that Willie has been living with and working for Barnabas. Jason had believed that Willie left town permanently several days earlier, and has no idea he is in any way connected with Barnabas. Liz wants to be rid of Willie. Jason likes to boast that he can control Willie, something we have never seen him succeed in doing, and assures her that he will be able to handle the situation.
Jason goes to the Old House and confronts Willie. He makes a number of sarcastic remarks questioning Willie’s masculinity, demands to know what kind of scam he is running on Barnabas, and grabs him by the lapels when Willie can tell him only that he is trying to lead a different sort of life. Jason is holding Willie and snarling at him when Barnabas shows up. Jason unhands Willie and is surprised at how meekly Willie complies with Barnabas’ command that he run an errand.
Barnabas catches Jason with his hands on his Willie
Barnabas tells Jason that he has spoken with Liz and that she has agreed to let him keep Willie. Jason tries to tell Barnabas about Willie’s past and boasts once more of his ability to control Willie. Barnabas cuts him off with “I can deal with him far more effectively than anyone.” That leaves Jason speechless.
In his post about this episode on Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn tells us that the scene between Jason and Willie brought a memo from ABC’s Standards and Practices office. A censor named Bernardine McKenna was concerned that Jason’s lines might suggest a sexual relationship between Willie and Barnabas.***
McKenna’s memo raises some questions about Jason’s whole relationship with Willie. When Jason was first introduced, we occasionally saw him on the telephone talking to someone who was evidently important to his plans. Eventually he started calling this person “Willie.” After Willie appeared in person, we kept waiting to see what Jason wanted him to do. Jason’s only project is to blackmail Liz, and he doesn’t need any help with that. Not only did we never see Jason give Willie anything to do, but Willie continually caused him troubles that made life so unpleasant for Liz that she considered calling the police, a move that would would have brought Jason’s whole plan crashing down around his ears. So Jason’s decisions to bring Willie along and to keep him around were not motivated by any immediate need for his assistance.
A couple of times, Willie threatened to expose Jason’s own terrible secrets. But by the time Willie was recovering from Barnabas’ initial attacks on him, those threats didn’t seem to have much substance, and yet Jason insisted on keeping Willie around Collinwood and nursing him back to health. Jason’s scenes with Willie in his sickroom show enough traces of tenderness and genuine concern that there must be some depth to their relationship.
The original plan had been to name the character, not “Willie,” but “Chris.” I wonder if that would have given Bernadine McKenna more to worry about. If we’d listened to Jason on the telephone with a mysterious “Chris” who was in some kind of partnership with him, we might assume that “Chris” was his girlfriend. When Chris turned out to be Christopher, we would set that thought aside. But we might not have forgotten it entirely. When we were wondering what the connection is between the men, one of the possibilities we couldn’t quite exclude might have been that they had been lovers.
*This is the first time we see Maggie’s bedroom. The living room of the Evans cottage has been a frequent set from the earliest days of the show, but this addition of a second room augments its importance and confirms that Maggie will be a major character in the current storyline.
**We’ve heard characters talk about their dreams before, but this is the first time a dream is shown to us.
Acilius on Dark Shadows 