dream sequence – Page 3 – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 682: He killed me

Governess Maggie Evans saw the evil spirit of the late Quentin Collins yesterday, and she tells housekeeper Mrs Johnson about it today. Mrs Johnson saw Quentin a few days ago; she and Maggie are the only adults in the great house of Collinwood who know that Quentin exists, and not even they know his name. Quentin is gradually taking control of Maggie’s charges, nine year old Amy Jennings and twelve year old David Collins. Yesterday, David led Maggie and his aunt, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, to the room in the long deserted west wing where Maggie saw Quentin. There is a mannequin there wearing a coat like Quentin’s; David says that he and Amy call it “Mr Juggins,” and Liz chooses to believe that Mr Juggins is what Maggie saw.

We see Maggie in bed. She gets up, goes back to the room, and sees Mr Juggins. We dissolve to a shot of Quentin in Mr Juggins’ place. Horrified, Maggie watches Quentin approach with a length of fabric. He chokes her with it. She falls to the floor. She is lying there when we cut to commercial. Maggie was introduced in #1 and has for long stretches been a central character, one of the most recognizable on Dark Shadows. Kathryn Leigh Scott tells a story of going to a wilderness area in Africa when the show was a hit and being greeted with cries of “Maggie Evans!” For the moment, it looks like they have decided to kill her off in the middle of a Tuesday episode.

Of course they haven’t. We come back from the break to hear Maggie telling old world gentleman Barnabas Collins about the dream in which she was strangled. She is surprised that Barnabas believes her story about seeing the man when she was awake, shares her suspicions that David and Amy are connected with the man, and is open to the idea that the dream is “a warning.” Barnabas tells Maggie that he and his inseparable friend, permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, MD, saw a woman dressed in clothes of the same period as Quentin’s clothes, that the woman’s presence could not be explained, and that she led them to Amy’s brother’s Chris at a moment when Chris needed medical help to save his life. Barnabas has concluded that the man and the woman are ghosts and that they represent something very dangerous.

Barnabas enlists the aid of occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes. Stokes agrees to conduct a séance in the drawing room in the hopes of contacting Madame Janet Findley, a psychic researcher whom he brought to the house in #647 to investigate the early signs of Quentin’s haunting. Amy and David tricked Madame Findley into going to Quentin’s stronghold in the west wing in #648, and she did battle with him there in #649. After that confrontation, Madame Findley appeared at the head of the stairs in the foyer and tumbled down them, dead.

This is the tenth séance we have seen on Dark Shadows. They usually come with four roles to be filled. In all séances, someone acted as organizer and leader. In eight of the first nine séances, someone else objected to the idea of a séance, but reluctantly took a place around the table. In seven of the nine, someone went into a trance, becoming a medium. Every time the trance began, someone grew alarmed at its first signs and tried to end the séance before the dead could speak; that drew a stern rebuke from the leader. The medium then spoke, more often than not passing out after struggling to utter a few mysterious words.

The roles of reluctant participant and objector are often combined. Today, Mrs Johnson is the first to combine the role of reluctant participant and medium. This is also the first time the trance does not draw an objection from someone wanting to stop the séance. Mrs Johnson does pull her hands back early on, breaking the circle of contact, and Stokes delivers the requisite stern rebuke. But no one speaks up when she starts to moan. As Madame Findley, she at first produces the usual jumble of words (“The children! Panel! Room!”) She manages to cry out “He killed me! He killed me!” before collapsing face first onto the table in the orthodox manner.

In their post about this episode on Dark Shadows Before I Die, John and Christine Scoleri compare Mr Juggins with Otto the Automatic Pilot from the 1980 film Airplane! Perhaps inspired by the dissolve from Mr Juggins to Quentin today, they go on to Juggins-ize Otto:

The Scoleris also list all the séances on the show up to this point. They name the leaders and mediums, but not the reluctant participants or the objectors. I have added those:

Dark Shadows Before I Die Séance Tracker

Episode 170/171: Dr. Peter Guthrie conducts; Carolyn, Vicki, Roger and Laura Collins participate; Josette speaks through Vicki in French; held in the drawing room at Collinwood [Roger and Laura join reluctantly; Carolyn objects]

Episode 186: Vicki conducts; Sam and David participate; David Radcliffe speaks through David; held in the drawing room at the Old House [Sam is both reluctant joiner and objector]

Episode 280/281: Roger conducts; Liz, Vicki, Burke, Barnabas, Carolyn participate; Josette speaks through Vicki; held in the drawing room at the Old House [Liz, Burke, and Barnabas are reluctant; Barnabas objects]

Episode 365: Roger conducts; Liz, Julia, Vicki, Carolyn and Barnabas participate; Sarah Collins speaks through Vicki after Carolyn pretends Sarah is speaking through her; Vicki is transferred to 1795; held in the drawing room at Collinwood [Liz and Barnabas are reluctant; Liz objects]

Episode 449: Countess duPrés conducts; Joshua Collins participates; Bathia Mapes shows up, claiming she was called; held in the drawing room at Collinwood [Joshua is reluctant; no trance]

Episode 510/511: Professor Stokes conducts; Julia and Tony Peterson participate; Reverend Trask speaks through Tony Peterson; the basement wall breaks open to reveal his skeleton; held in the basement at the Old House [Tony is reluctant, Julia objects]

Episode 600: Professor Stokes conducts; Barnabas and Julia participate; Phillipe Cordier speaks through Barnabas; held in the drawing room at the Old House [No conspicuously reluctant participant. Julia objects]

Episode 640: David conducts; Amy participates; unsuccessful attempt to contact Quentin Collins; held in Amy’s bedroom at Collinwood [Amy is reluctant; no trance]

Episode 642: Professor Stokes conducts; Liz, Vicki, Carolyn, Chris participate; Magda speaks through Carolyn; held in the drawing room at Collinwood [Chris is reluctant and is objector]

Today’s episode: Professor Stokes conducts; Barnabas, Maggie and Mrs. Johnson participate; Janet Findley speaks through Mrs. Johnson; held in the drawing room at Collinwood [Mrs Johnson is reluctant; no objector]

This is Maggie’s first séance, and they’ve been spending a lot of time lately showing us that she is unsure of herself. So it would have been expected for her to become frightened and try to stop the séance when Mrs Johnson goes into the trance. Maybe that’s why they left it out- it was too obvious a move. But the pattern is so familiar now that it feels like they’ve forgotten something when they leave the objection out.

Episode 678: This time, I saved him

At the estate of Collinwood, two ghosts are at odds over the fate of a werewolf. Caught in the crossfire are a mad scientist, a recovering vampire, and a couple of kids.

The ghosts are the evil Quentin Collins and a weepy woman so far known only as Beth. The werewolf is Chris Jennings, who is staying in the caretaker’s cottage on the estate. The mad scientist is Julia Hoffman, MD, a permanent guest in the great house. The recovering vampire is Julia’s inseparable friend Barnabas Collins, master of the Old House. The kids are Chris’ nine year old sister Amy and strange and troubled boy David Collins, who live in the great house.

Yesterday, Quentin went to the cottage and put strychnine in Chris’ whiskey. Beth appeared to Julia and led her and Barnabas to the cottage in time to save Chris; today, they figure out that Beth is a ghost.

Quentin has been exercising power over David and Amy, at first with Beth’s cooperation. Beth appears to Amy in a dream visitation. While she guides Amy to images of Chris and David and to the realizations that Quentin means to kill Chris and that David has tried vainly to stop him, we hear Beth speak for the first time. She says everything twice, giving her dialogue a lyrical quality that could be quite lovely. Unfortunately, Terrayne Crawford’s limitations as an actress keep that loveliness from coming through.

Barnabas and Julia know that Chris is a werewolf and have persuaded him to accept their help. They question Chris and are satisfied that he did not poison himself. When he mentions that David visited him the previous morning, Barnabas decides to go interrogate David. Longtime viewers know that David has extensive experience with ghosts, a fact of which Barnabas has at times been most uncomfortably aware. Once Barnabas has learned that Beth is a ghost, it will strike us as reasonable that he will be interested in David’s connection with the matter.

Amy goes to the cottage and sees Julia tending to Chris. They tell her he just had an upset stomach and will be fine. She does not believe them, and says she had a dream that convinced her Chris was in mortal danger. This intrigues Julia, who presses for more details about the dream. Amy clams up, but now Julia and Barnabas, the show’s two chief protagonists, have figured out that David and Amy have something to do with ghosts, and that those ghosts in turn have to do with Chris. The Haunting of Collinwood story hasn’t made any real progress for several weeks, but that can now change.

Back in the great house, Barnabas questions David about his visit to Chris. He doesn’t get any more information out of him than Julia had got out of Amy. There is a bit of intentional humor when Barnabas tells David he thought it would be pleasant to share breakfast with him and Amy. David says it isn’t so pleasant at breakfast- housekeeper Mrs Johnson is in a bad mood in the mornings. Barnabas suggests they ignore her, and David replies that it is not easy to do that. David Henesy delivers this line with perfect comic timing.

Barnabas realizes David knows more than he is telling. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Amy shows up and responds favorably to Barnabas’ self-invitation to their breakfast. After Barnabas leaves the room, Amy confronts David about Quentin’s attempt to kill Chris. David has despaired of opposing Quentin, and is terrified when Amy tells him she will go tell matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard everything that has been going on. He is convinced Quentin will kill them if she does this. He is pleading with her to come back when the episode ends.

Episode 658: Joe’s rough night in

Hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell has gone out of his mind. He is in a jail cell, where a sheriff and a psychiatrist ask him questions which he can’t answer. When his cousin comes to visit him, he becomes violently agitated and the psychiatrist has to give him a shot to knock him out. He has a series of dreams reenacting some of the more recent events that contributed to his madness. When he comes to, the sheriff and the cousin are putting him in a straitjacket while the psychiatrist is explaining he will be transported to the mental hospital in the morning.

So long, Joe. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Every Day.

This is Joe’s final appearance. He debuted in #3 as a doggedly virtuous good guy; it was a personal triumph of JoelCrothers’ that he kept him interesting to watch when there was so little doubt what he would do (always The Right Thing, natch.) From November 1967 to March 1968, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the 1790s; Crothers played roguish naval officer Nathan Forbes in that part of the show. Nathan was as complex in his motivations and as busy in the plot as Joe was one-dimensional and underutilized, and it was great fun to see what Crothers could do when he had a real part to work with. After the show came back to contemporary dress, Joe was victimized by a series of supernatural villains, and Crothers had the opportunity to depict various forms of anguish and dread. Today is a showcase for this talented performer, and next week there will be a flashback next week in which we get one more chance to see Nathan. At that point, Joel Crothers will bid adieu to Dark Shadows once for all.*

Crothers worked steadily in soaps for many years. In 1982 and 1983, he did some important work on Broadway and seemed to be on the point of a whole new career on stage when his health started failing. It turned out he had AIDS. He died in 1985, at the age of 44. Danny Horn’s post about this one involves a heartfelt and really lovely tribute to Crothers. It ends with this tearful bit, with which I too will close:

He should have been here with us all these years.

He should be goofing around with Kathryn and Lara at the Dark Shadows Festivals, shaking his head in amazement at the crazy, stubborn people still watching the silly spook show that he thought he’d left behind.

After a while, he’d probably be appearing a couple times a month on Days of Our Lives or As the World Turns — his sexy rascal character finally domesticated, giving advice to the 22-year-olds who are suddenly playing his grandchildren.

But at the Dark Shadows Festivals, everyone still thinks of him as the beautiful 27-year-old who lost his mind and went off to Windcliff. For one weekend every summer, Joel Crothers is young again.

Every year at the Festival, someone always asks the big question: Did Joe ever come back to Collinsport and reunite with Maggie? Joel meets Kathryn’s eye, and they both grin, astonished every time. These paper-thin characters that they played are still alive, on VHS and public TV.

He should have been here. He should have felt that.

I don’t know if Joel had a lover when he died, but I know he was loved. He was gorgeous and sweet, a successful actor in a popular genre, and a lovely guy. He must have left a trail of broken hearts, everywhere he went. And here they are, all these years later, still broken.

Danny Horn, “Episode 658: Did He Fall, or Was He Pushed?,” from Dark Shadows Every Day, 4 June 2015

*Thanks to commenter Percy’s Owner for helping me correct this paragraph.

Episode 655: The doctor’s office

Hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell has been through a lot lately, and it is taking its toll. He was bitten and enslaved by a female vampire, with the result that he lost his job and his fiancée. He was still under her power when he realized that his cousin and close friend, Tom Jennings, was also a vampire. Now he has been attacked by a werewolf and has discovered that that werewolf is, on the few nights of the month when the moon is not full, Tom’s brother Chris. Last night he saw Chris transform in his lupine shape. He took Chris’ revolver and emptied it into the werewolf’s furry chest, but that only slowed him down. Joe escaped from the werewolf’s wrath, but we see today that he is never going to be right again.

Chris’ nine year old sister Amy is staying at the great house of Collinwood as the guest of matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. As we open, Liz’ daughter Carolyn is in the drawing room, recently returned from a trip. She is terribly distraught to hear a recap of the last couple of weeks from permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, MD. While they talk, Joe slips into the house, crazy-eyed and bent-backed.

Joe makes his way up to the bedroom where Amy is asleep. He dwells on what her brothers became, then approaches her bed with his hands in strangling position. After a commercial break, he says “Save her!,” then agrees with himself that he ought to save Amy.

Joe calls on Amy. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Joe wakes Amy, urges her to be silent, and starts packing her clothes. She asks if they are going to join Chris, and Joe becomes violently agitated. Amy grows frightened. Joe grabs her, puts his hand over her mouth, and carries her out of the house, leaving her half-packed bag behind.

In the woods, Joe hears sounds which he believes to be the werewolf. He starts shouting that he won’t let it have Amy. He is so absorbed in this that Amy gets loose and runs from him.

Joe’s derangement is entirely explainable as a natural response to the horrible and incomprehensible traumas he has undergone. The same could be said of the other mentally ill character in today’s episode, Liz, and in Monday’s episode Julia very nearly said it. Today, however, the show raises the possibility that Liz’ trouble might be the result of ongoing persecution by the spiritual forces of darkness.

Months ago, Liz fell afoul of her brother Roger’s wife. She called herself Cassandra, but was really an evil sorceress named Angelique wearing a black wig. This wiggéd witch cast a spell that caused Liz to sink into a deep depression, obsessed with the idea she would be buried alive. Twice before, Liz has sunk into similar depressions. The first was the result of a spell cast by Roger’s previous wife, Laura Murdoch Collins, who like Angelique/ Cassandra was an undead blonde fire witch. (Roger has a type.) The second was a response to a long blackmail to which a seagoing con man named Jason McGuire subjected her. For the last several weeks it has seemed that this third bout might be lifting, but it came back with a vengeance last week when well-meaning governess Victoria Winters dematerialized before Liz’ eyes.Vicki’s departure was as much a shock to Liz, in its own way, as Chris’ transformation was to Joe. Even before any spells were cast on her, Liz had shut herself up in the house and refused to leave for eighteen years. So we know that Liz is given to depression.

Today Liz has a nightmare. The dream sequence begins with a melody that for all the world sounds like “Rock-a-bye Baby” played on a kazoo, but which turns out to be a distorted recording of Amy singing that lullaby. Liz sees Amy atop the cliff on Widows Hill, a place associated with death and peril. In the past, several women have fallen to their deaths from Widows’ Hill; we have seen Liz and Vicki attempt suicide there. Amy’s image is as distorted as is the sound of her voice. She is swaying from side to side, perhaps dancing the hula; the visual effects exaggerate this sway.

Liz is trying to get Amy away from the cliff when she sees Angelique/ Cassandra. The witch tells her that she will fulfill her curse and see that Liz is buried alive. Liz finds that she can no longer communicate with Amy, for which Angelique/ Cassandra taunts her.

Shortly after Liz wakes up from her dream, Carolyn and Julia come to her room. They hear her crying out that “she” is a danger to her, but a moment later Liz cannot remember who that was. Julia mentions to Carolyn today that multiple psychiatrists have reported that Liz cannot remember how her depression started; that she sees Angelique/ Cassandra in the nightmare but cannot remember who she was so shortly after suggests that the nightmare is part of the depression. If Angelique/ Cassandra’s continued activity is causing the one, it must therefore be causing the other.

Liz says that she is afraid for Amy and asks Carolyn to check on her. When she finds Amy missing, she asks Julia what to tell her mother. Without missing a beat, Julia says “Lie to her!” This is perfectly fitting- Julia is the show’s most fluent and most accomplished liar. Julia and Carolyn begin a search. Julia is on the phone asking for the sheriff when Amy comes in the front door, followed by Joe.

Julia is at first relieved to see Amy with good ol’ Joe. But Amy is terrified of Joe, and when she runs upstairs Julia blocks the staircase to keep him from following. Joe says that he must take Amy far away from Collinsport at once. Julia says that if he can explain why, she will let him. Nothing he can put into words makes much sense to her, and he is so obviously unhinged that there is no way anyone would think he was the right person to assume responsibility for a child. Julia tells Joe that whatever he may have encountered in the village poses no threat to Amy in the mansion. He laughs, shakes his head, and mutters “You don’t know… you don’t know…”

Julia’s attempt to reassure Joe is interrupted by a blood-curdling scream from upstairs. She hurries up to see what is happening. Joe goes on laughing and muttering, wandering out of the house. That the scream coming from upstairs, where Amy is, does not catch his attention when he is so determined to protect Amy from imminent danger shows that he is truly lost, never to recover.

Julia finds a distraught Carolyn standing over an immobile Liz. She gives Liz a quick look, and tells Carolyn that she is dead. You might think Julia would be more careful about this. She has several times made erroneous death pronouncements, most recently when she pronounced Liz herself dead in #604. That incident led Julia to conclude that Liz had an unusual disorder that could cause her to appear to be dead. Especially since Julia knows about Liz’ overwhelming fear that she will be mistakenly thought dead and be buried alive, this hasty diagnosis is bizarre. Of course we end with a shot of Liz on the floor and hear her voice on the soundtrack saying “I’m not dead! I’m not dead!”

Liz had collapsed after she had a vision of Angelique/ Cassandra appearing in her room and touching her. This would seem to be a strong suggestion that the show wants us to think that Liz is still actively hag-ridden, and that her depression is therefore among Dark Shadows‘ supernatural storylines. On the other hand, the vision might have been an hallucination on Liz’ part, and her apparent death might be the result of a psychological syndrome. There may not be any mental process in our world that can induce a seizure so complete that it would fool doctors into thinking that a patient was dead, but in the world of Dark Shadows Julia, whose abilities are all supposed to be strictly the result of her scientific training, can use hypnosis to erase and rewrite people’s memories at will. If the power of suggestion is that great in this fictional universe, it is easy to suppose that self-hypnosis could conceal anyone’s vital signs from the most sophisticated examination.

This was the first episode directed by Henry Kaplan. Lela Swift directed the first twenty episodes of the show, and half of the rest. From #21, she shared directing duties with John Sedwick, usually trading off from one week to the next. Sedwick left the show in June, and several other men have taken turns as Swift’s relief. Kaplan will occupy that spot until the end of the series.

Swift and Sedwick were both ambitious and accomplished visual artists, and the others have more or less lived up to the standard they set. Today’s episode doesn’t look particularly bad, but a great many of the hundreds of segments Kaplan would go on to direct would be made up of one closeup after another, most of them badly out of focus. Swift will continue to work at her usual high level, but the sludge Kaplan dumps on our screens day after day will go a long way towards breaking people of the habit of watching Dark Shadows and discrediting it in the eyes of critics and television professionals.

Moreover, Kaplan did not work well with actors. Many of the cast hated Kaplan for his habit of using a stick, not only to point to their marks, but often to prod them physically. Others hated him for the verbal abuse he casually heaped on them. In a recent panel discussion, Marie Wallace and Donna Wandrey share stories about the difficulties of working with this disagreeable hack. The performances in this one do not show Kaplan’s malign influence. Joel Crothers does a marvelous job as Joe. While the actresses step on each others’ lines so often that it is clear they are nervous, that is not so very unusual.

Episode 617: Few people in this world

The opening voiceover is very much to the point:

An autumn dusk has settled over Collinwood, bringing with it not the fear of night but a renewed hope of happiness for a young woman long acquainted with the terrors that have plagued these premises. But as the deepening dark surrenders to the night, a new threat, evil in its creation and awesome in its consequence, will reveal its final purpose, the destruction of Victoria Winters.

We then cut to a scene of Vicki with the evil creation that is destined to destroy her, her fiancé Peter. In place of a personality, Peter has a compulsion to insist that no one use his right name. Instead, he wants to be called “Jeff.” He also has a habit of pawing his scene partners and occasionally jerking them around violently. This loathsome man continually fondles Vicki in their scenes together, each time prompting Alexandra Moltke Isles first to stiffen, then to force an awkward smile when she remembers that her character is supposed to like the creep. It is painful to watch, and the more scenes Vicki has with Peter/ Jeff the sooner we hope she will leave the show.

A woman named Eve has seen Peter/ Jeff and recognized him from their previous acquaintance. She finds Peter/ Jeff alone on the terrace outside the great house of Collinwood and confronts him. He looks as uncomfortable alone with her as Vicki does alone with him. It is satisfying to see Peter/ Jeff get a taste of his own medicine, all the more so for regular viewers who know that Eve is a homicidal maniac and hope she will do him in before he blights any more episodes.

Eve has been kissing Peter/ Jeff passionately for several seconds when sarcastic dandy Roger Collins speaks up and says that he has not been introduced to her. She runs off, and Peter/ Jeff demands that Roger not tell Vicki what he has seen. Roger will not agree to that, but once the two of them are alone with Vicki in the drawing room he backs down and lets Peter/ Jeff off the hook. When Peter/ Jeff realizes Roger will keep his secret he breaks into a gleeful smile. Evil has triumphed once more.

Roger consigns Vicki to her fate, while her destroyer chortles with glee. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

In the early days of Dark Shadows, Roger was rather a dangerous villain. One of his crimes was perjury in a case that sent another man, one Burke Devlin, to prison for a homicide in which they were both implicated. In #201, Roger admitted to that perjury in front of Burke in this very room. That admission came after a long story arc involving the return of Roger’s estranged wife Laura to Collinwood. The Laura story absorbed all the dramatic significance of the conflict between Roger and Burke, leaving Burke nothing to do in response to Roger’s admission but to peace out. To viewers who remember that Vicki was once an interesting character and still have hopes that she will shake free of Peter/ Jeff’s baleful presence, Roger’s concession to Peter/ Jeff is an even bigger disappointment than was the too-late resolution of the Roger vs Burke story.

At the end, Roger has a dream in which it is revealed to him that if Vicki marries Peter/ Jeff, she will die. We suspect that he has missed his last chance to prevent this happening.

Episode 604: The presence of death

In the great house of Collinwood, matriarch Liz lies unconscious on a sofa, stricken with a mysterious ailment. Well-meaning governess Vicki cannot find Liz’ pulse or heartbeat, and fears she may have died.

Vicki telephones the family doctor. Her boyfriend, an unpleasant man named Peter who prefers to be called Jeff, asks why she doesn’t call for permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, MD. She explains Julia is at the Old House on the estate, home to old world gentleman Barnabas, and that there is no telephone there.

We cut to a bedroom where Barnabas and Julia are devising a plot to murder a woman named Eve. Since Vicki had said they were at the Old House, even longtime viewers will be unlikely to recognize this as Julia’s seldom-seen bedroom at the great house. She had been staying with Barnabas for a while; we might wonder if it is his bedroom, which we have never seen, or if she has a room of her own at his house now.

Julia has a hypodermic needle and plans to fill it with a concoction that will induce a heart attack and immediately dissolve in the bloodstream. This was the weapon Julia prepared for the first murder she and Barnabas committed together, when they killed Dr Dave Woodard in #341. Julia was all broken up about that, but then she and Dave were old med school classmates. Eve is just an undead abomination they whipped up in the laboratory, not a colleague, so Julia is relaxed and smiling this time. Her smile vanishes, though, when the topic turns to Barnabas’ intention to let himself into the house where Eve is staying. It is the home of suave warlock Nicholas, a formidable adversary, and Julia fears he may be walking into a trap.

Julia and Barnabas go downstairs and find Vicki and Peter/ Jeff with the unconscious Liz. Julia examines Liz and pronounces her dead. Seconds later, Liz sits up and starts talking. This is the second death pronouncement Julia has made in the last few days; in #592, which in dramatic time is supposed to have been last night, she declared Liz’ daughter Carolyn dead. Carolyn showed up alive and well a little later, so you might wonder if Julia will wait for an EEG reading next time.

Julia has a nightmare in which it turns out she was right and Barnabas did fall into a trap at Nicholas’ house. They do all the dialogue in recorded voiceover, a device they’ve been exploring lately, and shoot the whole thing through a gauzy filter. The recorded voiceover is OK, but the filter is pretty bad- it just looks like they needed to clean the lens. They even shoot the closing credits through the same greasy smudges. The result is far from satisfactory.

I left a comment on Danny Horn’s post about this episode on Dark Shadows Every Day. I note that Roger Davis, the actor who plays Peter/ Jeff, was in his usual form in this one:

When Barnabas sees Jeff kissing Vicki, he reacts with alarm and rushes out. We were alarmed too- Alexandra Moltke looked excruciatingly uncomfortable during the the first kiss. We almost expected her to call out to Barnabas to rescue her from the second.

Also, at the beginning of the episode Jeff is supposed to feel for Elizabeth’s heartbeat, so Roger Davis helps himself to a handful of Joan Bennett’s left breast. Classy guy…
Comment by “Acilius,” left at 12:13 PM Pacific Time 29 September 2020 on “Episode 604: The Sedating Game,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 13 March 2015.

Episode 588: Remember it after tonight

In August 1967, Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, was about to expose old world gentleman Barnabas Collins as a vampire. In the nick of time, Maggie’s doctor, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, hypnotized her and blocked all memory of her time as Barnabas’ victim.

Today, suave warlock Nicholas puts a magical zap on the mind of heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard to induce her to take part in an experiment meant to produce a mate for Frankenstein’s monster Adam. All this mind control makes for a low level of suspense. If traumatic memories can be erased and personal motives overriden by whatever mumbo-jumbo is convenient, there is no reason to suppose that the story’s events will have consequences or that there is any point in getting to know the characters.

This episode includes a tacit acknowledgement of the problem. The other day, Willie Loomis, Barnabas’ bedraggled servant, overheard Barnabas and Julia discussing another evil plan for Maggie. Willie has a crush on Maggie, so he resolved to foil that plan. He has abducted Maggie and is holding her in the hidden chamber inside the old Collins family mausoleum. This turns out to be the worst possible choice of location. Barnabas tortured Maggie there when she was his victim, and in a series of dream sequences those events come back to her. At the end of this episode, Maggie exclaims “I know what Barnabas Collins is!”

Maggie dreams of Barnabas as he was. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Now, Barnabas is not in fact a vampire at the moment. An experiment involving the creation of a Frankenstein’s monster freed him from the effects of that curse. But it would cause a lot of trouble for Barnabas, Julia, Willie, and the plot if Maggie were to go to the police and identify Barnabas as the man who held her prisoner. So Maggie’s closing exclamation might encourage us to hope that the show will swear off its habit of turning its characters into each other’s puppets.

Episode 576: Enough to occupy your mind

Well-meaning governess Vicki is engaged to marry an unpleasant man named Peter who prefers to be called Jeff. Vicki knows that Peter/ Jeff has some kind of job that keeps him busy during the day. She does not know that he has been spending all night working at a second job. He is helping to build a Frankenstein’s monster. This second job is unpaid; his incentive is that if the monster is not built, an already existing Frankenstein’s monster named Adam has said that he will kill Vicki and everyone else in the great house of Collinwood.

As we open today, Peter/ Jeff is bitten by vampire Angelique. After Peter/ Jeff regains consciousness, Angelique starts giving him orders. He ignores them, and she bites him again. After that, he seems dazed and agrees to do whatever she commands. She wants him to hook her up to the body under construction and to use her “life force” to animate it. He tells her that he doesn’t know how to do that, and that the body isn’t ready to come to life in any case. Turns out she needn’t have bothered.

Meanwhile, Vicki gets some news. Roger, brother of matriarch Liz, tells her that he wants to send Peter/ Jeff on a six-week training program along with two junior executives from the Collins family business, and that if he works out there will be a job for him at the end of it. Vicki is dazzled by the offer.

Peter/ Jeff comes by. Roger meets him alone in the drawing room to make the offer. Peter/ Jeff can neither leave the Frankenstein project nor tell Roger about it. He has to turn the offer down without explanation, leaving Roger offended. Vicki then asks Peter/ Jeff what he was thinking, and he can’t explain the situation to her, either. She is frustrated that she tells him everything about herself, but she can’t get any information from him. She says that the offer must have represented a “family decision” on the part of the Collinses, implying that Peter/ Jeff’s refusal will reflect badly on both of them in their eyes.

When Dark Shadows started in June 1966, Vicki was its chief protagonist, Roger its most menacing villain, and the Collinses’ business interests a major part of the story. Vicki receded to the margins after her most interesting storyline, her difficult relationship with her charge David, was resolved in March 1967, and by that time Roger had become harmless and the business had long since ceased to be a source of interest. When we hear Roger talking about a job for Peter/ Jeff, for a moment it seems that he and the business might once again be important, and that Vicki might again have something to do with the plot. Vicki’s disappointment in her beau reminds us that the character doesn’t really have a place on the show any more.

Upstairs, Liz is taking clothes out of her closet and talking about them with her daughter Carolyn. They jar longtime viewers when they look at a particular dress and reminisce that they bought it on a trip to Boston. For the first 55 weeks of the show, Liz was a recluse who hadn’t left home since Carolyn was an infant. I suspect Liz had worn that dress during that period, and wish I’d looked for it when we were on those episodes during this watch-through. There certainly hasn’t been enough time since then for the trip to Boston to evoke the nostalgic tone in which they describe it, or for the dress to have fallen so far out of fashion that the ladies agree it is time to throw it away.

The Liz-is-a-recluse story was never exciting, and once they ditched it the show was quick to give us scenes of Liz happily going out. It is sometimes said that Dark Shadows is what Star Trek would have been if they had replaced space travel with agoraphobia, and Liz’ seclusion was the first exploration of this topic. Following the deep cut into the early days of the show in Roger’s offer to Peter/ Jeff with a moment when such a prominent part of its first year is simply forgotten is so typical of this period’s episodes that I wonder if some of the dialogue was written by uncredited contributors who weren’t up to date on bygone story points.

Carolyn is glad that Liz, who just recently escaped from a mental hospital, is taking an interest in her wardrobe. Liz lets her down hard when she says that she wants to get rid of as many belongings as possible in the short time before her death. Carolyn tries to tell her that she isn’t dying, but Liz refuses to listen. She demands that Carolyn promise to have an open casket at her funeral.

Liz was in the mental hospital because of a psychological disturbance with which Angelique afflicted her some months ago. When she did that, Angelique was a witch. Since then, Angelique has been stripped of her witchly powers, killed, and brought back to the world as a vampire. You might think Angelique’s spells would all have been broken when she was de-witched; that has been the pattern on Dark Shadows previously. For example, when blonde fire witch Laura vanished in #191, the spell she had cast that caused Liz to mope around and be obsessed with death until she was sent off to a hospital was broken. Longtime viewers wonder if Liz’ continuing obsession with death and her paranoid fear of being buried alive are natural symptoms of the trauma Angelique put her through, and if she just needs better therapy than she was getting in the hospital.

Liz has a dream. It opens with Angelique looking directly into the camera. Angelique is wearing the same costume she wore in the scene with Peter/ Jeff and laughing. When Liz knew Angelique, she never dressed that way, she wore a black wig, and so far as the audience knows she never let Liz hear her signature evil laugh. So it seems that Liz’ current troubles are indeed a part of Angelique’s ongoing spell.

Facing us, Angelique tells Liz that she will be plagued by her obsessions until she dies. This is enough to trigger PTSD flashbacks in regular viewers. Twenty weeks ago, in #477, Angelique was looking at us when she described “The Dream Curse,” an abysmally repetitious, ultimately pointless storyline that dragged on for months. Joan Bennett was a fine actress and a great star, but there was only so much even she could do with a character who just mopes around and talks about death, and Dark Shadows has already made her do it more than once. In a comment on Danny Horn’s post about this episode, I wondered if Angelique couldn’t have cast a spell on Liz that isn’t just a retread of one we’ve seen before, and suggested one that would give her “a compulsion to put on a top hat and tails and sing and dance.” Here’s an animated gif of a cartoon showing Joan Bennett’s sister Constance dancing with Jean Harlow and Joan Crawford; it has more entertainment value than did the entire Dream Curse, and might serve as a consolation to those of us left shaking by Angelique’s threat to clog up the story again:

Episode 531: A blazing light

Yesterday, recovering vampire Barnabas opened the door to his closet. Hardworking young fisherman Joe fell out, and Barnabas saw Frankenstein’s monster Adam at the window, laughing menacingly. Adam has many reasons to hate Barnabas, and Barnabas concludes that Adam wants to frame him for the murder of Joe.

A commenter on John and Christine Scoleri’s Dark Shadows Before I Die, posting under the name “Grant,” pointed out that in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s novel Frankenstein the Creature kills someone and frames one of Frankenstein’s closest friends for the crime. The reference seems to be pretty obvious.

Barnabas’ friend, mad scientist Julia, shows up. She finds that Joe is not dead. She says that he has, in a bit of Collinsport English we have heard once or twice before, “a pulsebeat.” She and Barnabas have a long conversation about a variety of topics, several of them highly incriminating, while Joe lies on the floor. Julia goes off to attend to another matter, and Barnabas’ servant Willie comes. Joe is still on the floor while Willie argues against Barnabas’ orders to take Joe to the hospital. Barnabas, who had told Julia that Adam must have “wanted Joe to be found here,” dismisses Willie as “absurd” when he says that Adam is trying to frame them.

When Willie was first on the show, he was a dangerously unstable ruffian who was determined to rape all the young women and beat up their boyfriends. In #210, he accidentally released Barnabas, who enslaved him and turned him into a nice guy. Now that Barnabas’ vampirism has gone into remission, Willie has taken several steps back to his old ways. He whines that if Joe dies, his fiancée Maggie might turn to him. Barnabas finds this idea “insane,” and Willie tells him that Maggie has recently stopped by the house and talked to him more than once. This is true, and Barnabas’ reaction makes it clear that it is the first time he has heard it. He responds that he is not interested in discussing Willie’s “mental aberrations,” and tells him that if Joe dies he will tell the police about Willie’s interest in Maggie. That leaves Willie no choice but to help get Joe to the hospital.

Julia has gone off to see well-meaning governess Vicki. Vicki is about to have a nightmare that is part of the “Dream Curse.” Three months ago, wicked witch Angelique decreed that one person after another would have the same dream. After Vicki has it, the dream will pass to Barnabas, and Angelique means for it to reactivate his vampirism. Vicki doesn’t seem to know that Barnabas was a vampire, though she has had many clues, as for example when he kept biting her and sucking her blood. I suppose she just thought he had a really aggressive make-out technique. But she does know that Barnabas is supposed to die if he has the dream.

Julia urges Vicki to come with her to Windcliff, a sanitarium she runs, and promises that she will get the best of care there. But she finds that Vicki is resigned to having the dream. Julia reports this to Barnabas, and tells him that she wants to go away with him, far away from Vicki. Vicki can’t pass the dream to Barnabas unless she describes it to him after she has it, and she won’t be able to do that if she can’t find him. Barnabas refuses to go, reminding Julia that those who have the dream suffer terribly until they pass it on to the next person. When he says “You know how I feel about Vicki,” Julia gets a brief closeup, and her reaction reminds us that she is supposed to be harboring an unrequited love for Barnabas. This is rather an easy point to forget. Barnabas and Julia spend all their time together and tell each other all their secrets. Since there doesn’t seem to be any such thing as sexual contact in the world of Dark Shadows, it’s hard to see how her feelings could be much more requited.

Julia urges Barnabas to run away with her.

Vampires are metaphors for extreme selfishness, and Barnabas usually plays to type. It is startling that he tells Julia that any part of his motivation for sticking around is his wish to spare Vicki suffering. But he also talks about his long vain struggle against Angelique in terms that immediately make it clear that whatever goodwill he might have for Vicki is a distant third behind his usual ruling passions, self-pity and laziness, but still, her well-being is among his considerations. That sets him apart from her ostensible boyfriend, a man variously known as Peter and Jeff. As Christine Scoleri points out on Dark Shadows Before I Die, Vicki might never have had the dream at all if Peter/ Jeff hadn’t refused to listen to her explanation of the curse and insisted that she stay where he could visit her easily, yet now that she is suffering from the dream and its effects he is nowhere to be seen. Christine speaks for all of us with her summary of Peter/ Jeff’s character- “What a louse!”

Vicki has the dream. Barnabas beckons her into the haunted house attraction where the bulk of it has always taken place before. She keeps telling him that she doesn’t want to have the dream, not for her sake, but for his. She opens three doors that show Halloween gimmicks we’ve seen before, then opens a fourth behind which she sees the Sun. The Sun shrinks into the distance, and she walks through the door, following it. Her face dissolves into an image of the Sun; the Sun dissolves to the exterior of Barnabas’ house. We cut to the interior, looking at the doors. A small dot of Sun appears there. It expands until it fills most of the screen. The doors open, and the Sun gives way to Vicki. She enters, and sees Barnabas lying on the floor by his desk. He is bleeding from two small wounds on his neck.

Part of the dream is a bit of doggerel that has never made much sense. The last lines are “Ahead a blazing light does burn, And one door leads to the point of return.” These lines are almost explained today. Each door exposes a symbol of something that is frightening either to the dreamer or to Barnabas or to both. Vicki isn’t afraid of the Sun, but she knows that Barnabas has a strange and intense relationship with it. In #277, he harangued her about his hatred for the Sun; in #347, he made plans with her to watch the Sun rise, plans which he had to break under very strange circumstances in #349. So now we know that the “blazing light” is the Sun, which vampires cannot withstand.

Of the ten characters who had the dream before Vicki, only strange and troubled boy David, her charge and dear friend, was able to walk through any of the doorways. In his case, he walked into a gigantic spider web and was caught there, just a few feet beyond the entry. But Vicki is on the path that “leads to the point of return,” and she goes to a different set altogether.

Had Barnabas’ introduction not brought a new audience to the show, Dark Shadows would probably have been canceled in June 1967. In that case, the final episode would have been #260, and it surely would have ended with Vicki, who was in those days the show’s main character, driving a stake through Barnabas’ heart. That she and the Sun overlap in the same space on the screen suggests that by passing the dream to Barnabas she will fulfill her original destiny and become his destroyer.

When Vicki looks into the parlor and sees Barnabas bloodied and lying on the floor by his desk, we are reminded of #405. In that episode, we saw that Angelique originally turned Barnabas into a vampire by sending a bat to bite him in this room. At that time, he fell, not by his desk, but by the staircase. That’s very close to where Joe was lying for the first half of the episode, so they have to do some rearranging to avoid suggesting an identity between them. Barnabas’ vampirism is so much the foundation of the show’s success that virtually everyone in the audience expects him to relapse sooner or later, but they are being careful not to raise the question of whether Joe will also join the ranks of the undead.

Until the dream, the episode is made up of long scenes with a great deal of dialogue. That isn’t unusual for Dark Shadows. It is unusual that the scenes play out with very little background music. I wonder if director Jack Sullivan decided that a spare sound design would set the right mood for the very ambitious dream sequence. I think it paid off- the dialogue scenes felt slow, but Vicki’s dream achieves the surrealistic quality it needs.

One of the main themes Danny Horn developed on his blog Dark Shadows Every Day was his ridiculously exaggerated impatience with the character of Vicki and his severe bias against Alexandra Moltke Isles’ acting. That gave me something to talk about in his comments section, and was part of the reason I started this blog. Danny’s post about this episode very nearly makes up for his incessant Vickiphobia. He alternates stills of Vicki with epigrams written in her voice, and the result is just magnificent, worth anyone’s while to read.

Episode 497: Acting like ourselves

Mrs Johnson, housekeeper in the principal mansion on the great estate of Collinwood, isn’t herself. She had a nightmare a week ago, and ever since has been plagued with a compulsion to tell its details to strange and troubled boy David Collins. She knows that if she does, David will have the same nightmare, the same compulsion to tell it to some third person, and that if he does that person will suffer the same complex. She doesn’t know that the nightmare is part of a curse sent by wicked witch Angelique, or that at the climax of the curse old world gentleman Barnabas Collins is supposed to revert to the vampirism that afflicted him from the 1790s until last month. But she does know that it is part of something horrible, and she has tried desperately to keep it from continuing.

Mrs Johnson spent a couple of days with her sister in Boston to stay far from David, but she kept having the nightmare there. She has given up, and has come back to Collinwood. She does not go straight home to the great house, but stops first at the Old House in the estate. Barnabas lives there, but it is Barnabas’ friend Julia Hoffman she sees. Julia had passed the dream to her. Julia urges Mrs Johnson not to tell David about it. She replies that she knows she should not tell him, but that she has no more choice in the matter than Julia had in telling her.

This scene will raise a question in the minds of regular viewers. Julia is a medical doctor doubly qualified in hematology and psychiatry; she also has developed a method of hypnosis so powerful that she can virtually rewrite a subject’s memory, confining even very intense recollections to the depths of the unconscious mind, sometimes after an acquaintance of only a few minutes. Why doesn’t she try to hypnotize Mrs Johnson into forgetting the dream? All she actually does is slap her and repeat her command to avoid David.

David turns up. His father has sent him to ask Julia to come to the great house at her convenience. Julia tries to manage the situation by sending Mrs Johnson home first and keeping David in the house for a while. After Mrs Johnson leaves, Barnabas’ servant Willie enters and tells Julia there is an emergency in the basement. David agrees to wait for her to come back, but once she is gone he shouts that he will be playing outside.

We follow David out the front door, and find that Mrs Johnson is there waiting for him. She comes up on him from behind and says she has something to tell him. This scene will startle regular viewers. For nineteen weeks, from #365 to #461, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the 1790s. In that period, Clarice Blackburn played repressed spinster Abigail Collins and David Henesy played Daniel Collins, heir to the Collins fortune. We first saw Daniel in #431, when his Aunt Abigail intercepted him on this very spot and scolded him for playing at the Old House. Abigail was enforcing rules and believed she was acting in Daniel’s best interests; now the same actors invert the scene, showing us Mrs Johnson doing something she knows to be wrong and harmful to David.

Mrs Johnson sneaks up on David. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, isn’t herself. Some emerald earrings mysteriously appeared in her purse the other day, and when she tried them on she got a faraway look on her face, began speaking in a voice different from her own, and a tinkling music played on the soundtrack. Today her boyfriend Joe tells her that he took the earrings and showed them to a jeweler and to the police. The jeweler valued them at $15,000* and the police said that they didn’t match the description of any jewelry that had been reported missing. Maggie was not only irked that Joe had taken the earrings without her permission, as anyone might be, but when he tries to get her to agree that such expensive things don’t just materialize out of thin air her usual level-headedness and cheerful disposition vanish and she becomes childishly defensive. Maggie does not know that Barnabas’ servant Willie placed the earrings in her purse as an attempt to reestablish the connection the two of them had when she was Barnabas’ prisoner in the Old House. As a result of Julia’s hypnosis, she does not even remember what Barnabas did to her. But after she runs Joe off, she is compelled to go to the Old House.

Again, regular viewers will recognize an echo of an earlier episode, in this case one that aired a year ago. When Maggie was Barnabas’ victim in May 1967, she snapped at Joe and drove him out of her house as she does today. Then too, she headed for Barnabas once Joe was gone.

Maggie doesn’t find Barnabas at the Old House. Instead, she sees Willie. Barnabas had framed Willie for his crimes against Maggie, and Willie was confined to the mental hospital Julia runs. Barnabas and Julia have brought him back to the Old House to help with their latest nefarious scheme. Willie had been Barnabas’ blood thrall; it is not clear to the audience just what effect it had on Willie when Barnabas’ vampirism went into remission. When we first see him today, he is playing with an unloaded rifle and grinning maniacally, reminding us of the dangerously unstable ruffian he was before Barnabas first bit him.

Maggie knocks on the door and asks Willie if she can come in. He falls over himself inviting her. He becomes the friend he tried to be to her during her imprisonment. She says she knows that he wasn’t the one who hurt her, and he is overjoyed. She seems blissful. He asks her out on a date; she says that Joe wouldn’t like it. Before Barnabas, Willie propositioned all the young women and threatened all their boyfriends, and at first this approach, like his gleeful handling of the rifle, suggests that dangerously unstable ruffian is back. He assures Maggie that he only wants friendship, but after she leaves he picks the rifle up again and says that Joe will be out of the way soon.

Maggie finds herself strangely at home. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

For her part, Maggie’s behavior does not represent a reversion to her time as Barnabas’ prisoner. Rather, the earrings seem to have done what Barnabas tried to do when he bit her, imprisoned her, and subjected her to a series of role-playing exercises. Her personality is showing signs of giving way to that of Barnabas’ lost love, gracious lady Josette. In #260, Barnabas told Maggie “You are Josette!”; in #370, we saw that he was right, inasmuch as Kathryn Leigh Scott played both characters, as Zita Johanns had played both Helen Grosvenor and Princess Ankh-Esen-Amun in the 1932 film The Mummy, from which Barnabas’ Josettification project was borrowed. The tinkling melody that plays on the soundtrack when Maggie wears the earrings is that of Josette’s music box; this could be a sign that her memory of what Barnabas did to her is coming back, since he forced her to listen to the music box for hours on end. But the voice she speaks in at those times is the voice Miss Scott used as Josette, and her blissfulness reminds us of Josette’s first scenes with her beloved Barnabas, not of Maggie’s captivity in the ghoul’s dungeon.

Back at Collinwood, Mrs Johnson watches David sleep. She tells him she is sorry for what she has done and for what he will suffer. Clarice Blackburn was always good, but she outdoes herself with this speech. It is a beautiful performance.

David has the nightmare. The first several dream sequences in the Dream Curse storyline ended with the dreamer opening a door, seeing something scary, and screaming. David’s goes a step further. There is a gigantic spider web behind the last door he opens. He not only sees it, but is tangled in it when he starts screaming. He awakes, still screaming, and Mrs Johnson holds him.

*Equivalent to $135,796.52 in 2024’s money, according to the CPI Inflation Calculator.