dumb vicki – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 556: A pocket in time

Suave warlock Nicholas Blair has turned his subordinate Angelique into a vampire. Nicholas tells Angelique that she will bite only those people he orders her to bite.

Nicholas leaves Angelique in his house. She answers a knock at the door and finds a sheriff’s deputy asking questions related to a local man who recently suffered some mysterious neck wounds. Angelique identifies herself as Nicholas’ secretary and answers some questions. She invites the deputy to sit on the couch. He asks why, and she responds that it is because they are obviously attracted to each other. Within seconds, they are locked in an embrace. Angelique is about to bite his neck when Nicholas enters and breaks things up. The embarrassed deputy clambers to his feet and straightens his uniform. He asks Nicholas a few cursory questions about the injured man, then hastens away.

Angelique seduces the deputy. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Some of the commenters on the various fan sites point out that the deputy’s behavior does not conform to law enforcement’s conventional best practices, and others compare the scene to porno movies they have watched. I think the strength of the scene is that it shows how quickly an encounter between two people can take a turn in an utterly unexpected direction, perhaps with drastic consequences.

The deputy seems competent enough when first we see him, and for all we know he might have been a model policeman for years up to this point. But all he has to do is get lost in Angelique’s eyes for one second, and there he is in her arms, about to become her breakfast. When Nicholas interrupts them, the deputy’s reaction shows that he knows he is misbehaving and risking his job; the audience is clearly supposed to know that police officers are not supposed to act this way.

I don’t know about the porno movies, but a resonance with them would reinforce the same point. The movies those commenters describe begin with fully clothed people delivering dialogue and establishing scenarios, as if they were in domestic dramas or situation comedies. But then the clothes come off and the unsimulated sex starts, and they jump into a different genre, one from which there is no return. The deputy may act like a character in a police procedural, a genre in which Dark Shadows dabbled in its first months on the air. But it is a horror story now, and he comes within an ace of becoming someone who could fit only into such a story.

Nicholas chastises Angelique for ignoring his commands. He is holding well-meaning governess Vicki prisoner in another room in the house, and orders Angelique to go to that room and terrorize her. It turns out that he also wants her to persuade Vicki to give her her engagement ring. Vicki was unconscious when Nicholas claimed her and took her to his house, so if he simply wanted the ring he could have taken it then. Perhaps the people who bring up the porno movies are onto something about Nicholas’ motivations, and he is hoping to drop in on another seduction scene.

Vicki knows Angelique and knows that she has died. Vicki suspects that Angelique is a ghost; Angelique offers her hand as proof that she is not. This rather chilly contact is the only moment the two women touch.

Not hot enough to draw Nicholas. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

As it happens, Vicki has had extensive experience with ghosts, most of it quite friendly. During her first captivity, when strange and troubled boy David trapped her in a room in the west wing of the great house of Collinwood, the ghost of local man Bill Malloy appeared to her, sang, and dripped seaweed on the floor. That frightened her at the time, but led to the breakthrough that ended David’s hostility to her. During her third captivity, when crazed handyman Matthew Morgan kept her in a secret room in the Old House on the same estate, the ghost of gracious lady Josette appeared to Vicki, told her not to be afraid, and led other ghosts, including Bill’s, in scaring Matthew to death before he could kill her. Vicki and Josette’s ghost teamed up to lead the opposition to David’s mother, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, when she came back to Collinwood and tried to lure David to his death. So Angelique might be missing a chance to ingratiate herself to Vicki when she shows her that she is not a ghost.

Angelique asks Vicki for her ring and promises to give it to Vicki’s fiancé, an unpleasant man named Peter who prefers to be called Jeff. Vicki refuses, explaining that the ring is the only possession she has in this latest captivity to assure her that she is still connected to the world outside. Angelique says that if she does not give her the ring, she will spend eternity in the room.

Some time ago, Vicki spent nineteen weeks in the late eighteenth century, during which time she learned that Angelique was an enormously malign being responsible for the deaths of any number of people. She was herself accused of and sentenced to be hanged for some of Angelique’s crimes. Since she returned to the present, Vicki and the people she most cares about have suffered further agonies at Angelique’s hands, and Vicki knows about this, too. There is absolutely no reason why she should trust her, and she explicitly tells her she does not. Yet she does give her the ring at the end of the scene. The performers do what they can. Alexandra Moltke Isles’ steady gaze and trembling body do suggest that Vicki is so worn out, confused, and desperate that she might turn for help even to her bitterest enemy. But the script just does not give her enough support to make this interpretation stick.

Mrs Isles is facing another script problem that makes her character look like that old bane, Dumb Vicki. There is a window in the room with a Venetian blind in front of it and a shutter behind. Vicki looks at the window, but we do not see her even try to open it. The room is full of all sorts of objects, and she has a bed covered with blankets. Even if the window is sealed shut, she could easily cover it with a blanket and use some of the junk to smash the glass and beat on the shutters. That it does not occur to her to do so makes it all too easy to believe Angelique is telling the truth when she says Vicki will be in the room forever.

Episode 470: Nonsense about names

Part One. Roger/ Joshua

Much to her surprise, well-meaning governess Vicki Winters came unstuck in time in #365 and found herself in the year 1795. She spent the first few weeks of her sojourn in the past telling all the characters she met about the other roles that their actors played in the first 73 weeks of Dark Shadows, thereby puzzling them and irritating the audience. After a few months, the people of Collinsport had decided to try Vicki on a capital charge of witchcraft. There were no laws against witchcraft in Massachusetts or anywhere else in the English speaking world in the 1790s, but Vicki had got on so many people’s nerves by that point that they were willing to overlook that technicality and sentence her to hang. She was whisked back to 1968 in #461, with so little time to spare before she died on the gallows that she came back with rope burns on her neck.

Throughout the first year of Dark Shadows, the writers used Vicki more than any other character to move the action. Unfortunately, they sometimes moved it by having her do things that served the plot, but that the character had no reason to do. That gave rise to “Dumb Vicki,” and Dumb Vicki was very much on display throughout the whole segment set in 1795-1796.

Now, emigrés from the late eighteenth century are starting to join Vicki in her time. We open today as the clock chimes midnight. Vicki, wearing her nightgown, is coming down the grand staircase in the foyer of the great house of Collinwood, roused by the sound of an unexpected voice in the drawing room. It is the voice of haughty overlord Joshua Collins, master of Collinwood in 1795. Vicki enters the room to find sarcastic dandy Roger Collins carrying on a lively, albeit one-sided, conversation with a portrait. Roger is convinced that he is Joshua, and deals with Vicki in just the lofty way Joshua dealt with her during the costume drama segment. He even brings up Vicki’s frequent confusion with names, something Roger could not possibly have known about. This, therefore, is no mere delusion of Roger’s- Joshua’s ghost really is taking possession of him, manipulated by a force with its own malign intentions.

It is no secret from the audience what that force is. Roger has become obsessed with a portrait depicting wicked witch Angelique, who in the 1795 segment wrought terrible harm to the Collins family. Angelique was responsible, in one way or another, for the deaths of both of Joshua’s siblings, both of his children, his wife, and many other people. Too late, Vicki learned that Angelique was the witch for whose crimes she was being condemned to hang. As we have seen other supernatural beings do on Dark Shadows before, Angelique is using her portrait as a means of projecting her powers into the world of the living.

Roger/ Joshua’s remark about the name trouble reminds us of Dumb Vicki, but that is not the version of the character we see today. Instead, we have a visit from Smart Vicki. When Roger keeps insisting that he is Joshua Collins, Vicki picks up a telephone and shows it to him, declaring that it is something that did not exist in Joshua’s time. Roger looks at the receiver in silence for a moment, then groggily asks “Is it for me?”

Vicki says that she will take the portrait back to the antique store where she bought it so that it can be sold to Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes. This is a bit jarring for returning viewers- in #464, Stokes offered Vicki $200 for the painting, and Roger countered with a bid of $50o. Evidently Roger didn’t actually pay Vicki the money, because he doesn’t say that it is his when he urges her to leave it in the house.

Vicki and Roger leave the drawing room. Roger slips back in, takes the painting, and marches out of the house with it. While he does so, a nice little bit of music featuring the harp plays on the soundtrack. I don’t know that it is new, but I didn’t recognize it.

Part Two. Peter/ Jeff

Angelique not only killed Joshua’s son Barnabas, but cursed him to rise at night as a vampire. Barnabas returned to the great estate of Collinwood in 1967. He has been passing himself off to the living Collinses as their distant cousin from England. When Barnabas found that Vicki had visited his native period of history, he bit her in an attempt to keep her from revealing his secret.

Vicki and Barnabas were on their way to spend eternity together when she crashed her car to avoid hitting a pedestrian. In the hospital, the physician on duty when Vicki and Barnabas were brought in, Dr Eric Lang, turned out to be exactly the right sort of mad scientist. He has apparently cured Barnabas of vampirism. It is unclear whether Vicki remembers that Barnabas bit her and sucked her blood, and quite clear that she doesn’t think of him as a monster.

In the 1790s, Vicki met and somehow fell in love with an unpleasant man named Peter. Peter has returned to the present with her; in fact, he was the pedestrian Vicki had to crash her car to avoid hitting. They have seen each other several times since, and for no worthwhile reason Peter keeps insisting he is named Jeff. Peter/ Jeff shows up at Collinwood today. Vicki ushers him into what she alone calls “the living room,” and everyone else calls “the drawing room.” Peter/ Jeff asks Vicki if she loves Barnabas and plans to marry him. She tells him she does not. She says that she doesn’t want to hurt Barnabas’ feelings, but that she will have to break the news to him as soon as possible.

Part Three. Barnabas, Barnabas

Barnabas is still in the hospital. We see him in his room, in the daylight, looking at himself in the mirror. He can’t resist touching his reflection. It is a genuinely beautiful little moment, and an eloquent image. In the contrast between the solidity and familiarity of Barnabas’ standard right profile shot and the fragile little image slightly distorted in the mirror, we see a point of decision. The ghoul has not been destroyed, but a new and very vulnerable human life now co-exists with him in the same body. Wallace McBride says that “On Dark Shadows, your reflection always tells the truth“; this reflection tells a deep enough truth to keep the show going for years.

Barnabas meets Barnabas. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Vicki visits Barnabas in his hospital room to tell him that she cannot marry him. She thinks that she and Peter might be meant for each other. She also tells Barnabas that there are signs Angelique is making her influence felt at Collinwood again.

Vicki knows that her news about Peter will hurt Barnabas, but she understands that if they are to fight against Angelique, there can be no secrets between them. Barnabas understands this as well. Therefore, he decides to surrender immediately. Right after his scene with Vicki, we see him telling Lang he has decided to revert to vampirism.

That reaction is absurd, but it goes to the heart of the character as we came to understand him in the part of Dark Shadows set in the years 1795 and 1796. He did not believe that gracious lady Josette could love him, so he had a casual fling with her maid, Angelique. He did not believe Angelique cared very deeply about him, so he cast her aside once it became clear Josette was willing to marry him. He did not believe Josette could forgive him for having come to her from a dalliance with Angelique, so he did not tell Josette when Angelique vowed vengeance on them both. At each point, Barnabas’ underestimation of his own lovableness led to disaster. If only Barnabas could have read Jonathan Frid’s fan mail, he and Josette would have had a happy, quiet life and died in obscurity in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Part Four. Vicki

For her part, Vicki spent the first 38 weeks of Dark Shadows growing close to strange and troubled boy David Collins, who tried to kill her more than once, tried to kill his father Roger and frame her for it, who talks to ghosts, and whose mother is an undead fire witch. In the same time, she fell in love with a man named Burke, who spent years in prison for a killing in which Roger had a part but for which he was also very much responsible. While in the 1790s she fell in love with Peter, who committed many crimes and would doubtless have become a killer had Vicki not killed his man before he got to him. So Barnabas’ weird nature and career of homicide hardly guarantee that Vicki will spurn him.

I often wonder what might have been had the show decided to initiate Vicki into Barnabas’ secret. Alexandra Moltke Isles and David Henesy triumphed over some stunningly bad writing to make the story of Vicki’s bonding with David the one consistently interesting thread of the first year of Dark Shadows. Now that there are good writers and other stories that are working, I can only suppose she and Jonathan Frid would have given us something for the ages if they had been allowed to show Vicki coming to accept the true Barnabas.

There are several ways they could have done that. Maybe she gradually learns the horrible truth, can’t go to the authorities right away because she needs Barnabas as an ally against a more immediate threat, and by the time that threat passes decides he’s a good risk. Or maybe she becomes a vampire herself and finds out about his past in the process of being cured.

Or, most daring of all, maybe it turns out Vicki knew that Barnabas was a vampire all along. Sure, she was upset when she thought he’d killed her friend Maggie- why do you think she invited herself to spend the night at his house during that period? She had the guilts because she had failed to save Maggie and wanted him to bite her as punishment. Sure, there were some sleepless nights when it looked like he might be planning to kill David in order to silence him- why do you think she kept making herself available to Barnabas in that period as well, if she wasn’t offering herself as a tool he could use to keep the boy quiet without hurting him?

Episode 437: It’s gone on too long

Bewildered time traveler Vicki tells her lawyer/ gaoler/ boyfriend/ accomplice/ therapist/ assailant Peter that her time in the late eighteenth century seems like a nightmare. She then does something she often did in the early months of Dark Shadows, reminiscing about her childhood as an inmate of the farcically horrible Hammond Foundling Home. She says that she had so many nightmares when she was there that she became a connoisseur of nightmares. When she realized she was having a bad dream, she would choose to remain asleep right up to the moment she was about to be killed so that she could see how the whole thing would play out. I suppose that might have been useful training for a career as a character in a horror story, but if so Vicki has not benefited from it. She’s done nothing but make matters worse for herself since she arrived in the year 1795, and she is now in her last day as the defendant in a witchcraft trial which has been going very badly for her.

During this scene, Vicki gets very upset. Peter demands that she calm down and slaps her in the face when she doesn’t. That was a time-honored form of treatment for anxiety in fiction back then. It’s always gross to see, but is especially bad when the actor administering the slap is Roger Davis. Mr Davis was, shall we say, uninhibited in his physicality when dealing with his female scene partners. In his post about the episode on Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn includes screenshots of 10 distinct moments in this episode when Mr Davis aggressively rubs himself all over Alexandra Moltke Isles. Later in the series, he would, in separate incidents, hurt both Terrayne Crawford and Joan Bennett while on camera. His fake slap does not make contact with Mrs Isles today, but his sense of personal boundaries is so severely underdeveloped that we can hardly blame her for visibly ducking to avoid his hand.

Seriously, who needs that guy? Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Vicki takes the stand and says that she is a native of the twentieth century, whisked back in time by what force she knows not. Cross-examined by visiting witchfinder/ fanatical bigot/ prosecuting attorney Rev’d Trask, Vicki admits that her last memory of 1967 was when she was at a séance, and that this was not the first séance she had taken part in. Trask declares that this is an admission of witchcraft, which, if you think about it, it is. Vicki becomes upset, and we cut directly to a commercial break without a musical sting. This is a technique the show very rarely uses, and it is always effective when it does.

One of the witnesses against Vicki, untrustworthy naval officer Nathan, has a scene alone with Trask while they are waiting for the verdict. Nathan tells Trask he never thought he would meet a preacher whose specialty was blackmail. Trask denies that he blackmailed Nathan into testifying against Vicki. He has a point- it was more a matter of extortion, followed up with bribery. Anyway, actors Jerry Lacy and Joel Crothers were sensational together. Mr Lacy is exciting to watch when he’s wound up tight, the usual condition of a character on Dark Shadows, and Crothers always moved loosely and fluidly. The two of them strike an ideal balance.

The episode ends with the judges finding Vicki guilty and sentencing her to hang by the neck until dead. If we take her recollection of her childhood nightmares as a programmatic statement, we should expect her to mount the gallows and stick her head in the noose, then immediately find herself back at the séance.

Episode 436: Thin air

Bewildered time traveler Vicki Winters is on trial for witchcraft, and it is not going well. Her lawyer/ gaoler/ boyfriend/ whatever else they don’t have the budget to hire another actor to play, an unpleasant young man named Peter, says that he wants the judges to see her as he does, as “a lovely girl who isn’t capable of witchcraft or anything else.” Unfortunately, Peter is right about Vicki’s capabilities- ever since she came unstuck in time and found herself in the year 1795, Vicki hasn’t done a thing worth mentioning.

Later, Peter catches up to much put-upon servant Ben Stokes. He persuades Ben to take him to the unmarked grave of wicked witch Angelique. Peter digs up the grave, but Angelique isn’t in at the moment, and there is no place to leave a message. Peter goes back to Vicki’s gaol cell and tells her that she may as well take the stand at her trial and tell the judges that she is a refugee from the 1960s.

In between these scenes, untrustworthy naval officer Nathan Forbes finds Ben and tries to pay him for information about a man who was once their mutual friend, Barnabas Collins. Ben indignantly refuses the money. When Nathan keeps trying to talk him into it, Ben handles him roughly, then stalks off.

Ben shows Nathan he is not for sale. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

This exchange will be of some interest to those who have been watching Dark Shadows from the beginning. Nathan is played by Joel Crothers, who in the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s plays hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell. In #3, hard-charging businessman Burke Devlin found Joe and tried to pay him for information about the Collins family. Joe indignantly refused the money.

It’s interesting to see Crothers reprising the situation, playing the opposite role. Burke had poured on a heavy display of oily charm in response to Joe’s quiet stiffening, telling a rather alarming story about the beginning of his rise to wealth and inviting Joe to adopt him as a father figure. By contrast, Nathan retreats rather quickly in response to Ben’s angry outburst, but then rephrases the offer in a hale and hearty tone, trying to assure Ben that he sees him as an equal and wants to be his buddy.

Neither Burke nor Nathan gets anywhere with his persistence, but each man’s approach is typical of him. As a man born into the working class of Collinsport who became a millionaire, Burke proceeds from an ironclad certainty that every wage earner in town wants to follow his example. He cannot doubt that Joe will jump at the chance to take his money and his advice. As a self-involved navy officer, Nathan believes that enlisted sailors will be sincerely grateful to him if he acts like their friend, and extends that belief to include governesses, ladies’ maids, bartenders, streetwalkers, indentured servants, and everyone else he sees as his inferior.

Ben’s angry response to Nathan’s proposition also echoes the early days of the show. When Dark Shadows was set in 1966, Thayer David played violently irritable handyman Matthew Morgan. When Ben lunges at Nathan today, he is the very image of Matthew lunging at Burke in #64. But where Matthew had to be restrained by bystanders and threatened by the sheriff before he settled down, Ben quickly backs off.

The contrast between Matthew and Ben goes to the heart of the eighteenth century flashback. Each is a formidable fighter. Each is excessively devoted to a member of the Collins family, Matthew to reclusive matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, Ben to Barnabas. Each lands himself in trouble because of that devotion. But Matthew grew up in a Collinsport that had been laboring under a curse for many generations. He is unstable, irrational, dangerous. But for Ben, the curse just began a few months ago, long after his adult personality was fully formed. He is a sane man, and a good one. We can hope that he will emerge from Barnabas’ shadow and make a bright future. In that hope, we can see what the curse will cost not only the Collinses, but all the people of Collinsport.

Episode 427: I object

The opening voiceover melds into a sequence in which we cut back and forth between repressed spinster Abigail Collins and the fanatical Rev’d Mr Trask standing in front of black backgrounds, looking directly into the camera, and declaring that the trial of bewildered time-traveler Vicki for witchcraft must begin at once.

Trask against a balck background. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Soap Opera Land famously does not observe the legal codes that prevail elsewhere. If that is going to bother you, you probably aren’t in the right frame of mind to enjoy the show at all. But there is an art to depicting a fictional trial. You can deviate as much as you like from the rules that prevail in the real world, but there have to be some kind of rules the audience can understand. We can either see those rules applied with the result that a disorderly world is reduced to order, or see them flouted so that our heroes’ hopes of justice are cruelly dashed. If we aren’t aware of any rules, there is no point in setting the play in a courtroom.

That’s the first problem with Vicki’s trial. Now and then her lawyer/ gaoler/ boyfriend/ etc Peter will object to some question or move that a statement be stricken, and once or twice the judges will agree with him. But they are just as likely to respond to identical protests by ordering him to stop interrupting. The witnesses respond to questions with extended free association sessions. Vicki herself interrupts testimony repeatedly, usually to make self-incriminating remarks, and no one tries to stop her. Trask is for some reason simultaneously the prosecutor and one of the witnesses. Opposing counsel periodically engage in shouting matches with each other while the judges watch. The whole thing is so chaotic that it may as well be taking place in a bar-room or at the county fair or on the waterfront after dark.

The second problem with the trial is that it requires Peter to raise his voice repeatedly. Actor Roger Davis can deliver dialogue more or less competently when he is speaking in a normal conversational tone, but his loud voice always tends toward an ugly snarl. This is a major limitation for any performer on a show as shouty as Dark Shadows, but the opposition of Peter to Trask puts Davis head to head with Jerry Lacy, who is a virtuoso of shouting. Next to Lacy’s, Davis’ shouting is not recognizable as a performance.

When I’m watching a scene on Dark Shadows that suffers because of an actor’s shortcomings, I sometimes try to make it bearable by imagining what it would have been like had someone else who may have been available for the part been cast instead. Harvey Keitel was an extra on the show in #33; no doubt he would have accepted a speaking part if offered. Roger Davis plays Peter as a deeply angry man, and Mr Keitel is one of the very best at making audiences empathize with such characters. So it’s interesting to try to picture him as Peter.

On the other hand, there’s nothing in the scripts that requires Peter to constantly seethe with barely contained rage. That was Mr Davis’ contribution. Had the show gone with a more amiable Peter, they might have been able to cast Frederic Forrest in the part. In #137, Forrest was a background player. While Forrest played his share of angry men over the years, he also excelled as goofily cheerful characters, most famously as Chef in Apocalypse Now. I would have liked to see Peter played that way. I think he would have had some real chemistry with Alexandra Moltke Isles’ Vicki, and that we would have had protective feelings for him as he went up against the formidable Trask.

There is a third problem with the trial that neither Harvey Keitel nor the late Frederic Forrest could have done any more with than could Mrs Isles. That is that Vicki and Peter are written as phenomenally stupid. Vicki hasn’t done a single intelligent thing since arriving in the late eighteenth century in November,* but she has become, if anything, even dumber since 1795 gave way to 1796. Peter’s behavior has also been deeply foolish, and today he hits rock bottom when he blurts out to the court that he abused his position as gaoler to help Vicki sneak out, to commit a burglary at the great house of Collinwood, and to steal evidence against her so that it could not be presented to the court. Even under Soap Opera Law, that’s three felonies.

Some claim that the phrase “Dumb Vicki” is ableist. I disagree. “Dumb” really does not mean “mute” anymore, so that using it isn’t ableist against people who do not have the power of speech. And the intelligence characters like Peter and this version of Vicki lack is not the intelligence that IQ tests are supposed to measure. One of the most interesting characters in the part of Dark Shadows set in the eighteenth century is fluttery heiress Millicent Collins, who would probably fall far short of a triple digit score on a Stanford-Binet scale, but whose behavior makes sense to us because we tell what she wants out of life and how she thinks her actions will help her get it. That’s really all we mean when we talk about a “smart character.” A well-crafted story about someone with profound developmental disabilities can depict that person as a smart character, in that sense, as easily as can one about a great sage or a brilliant scientist. Vicki and Peter are not smart characters, no matter how what kind of school we might suppose would best suit them as students, because there is nothing for us to learn by observing their behavior and no suspense as to what their several actions will add up to. They just do one damn thing after another.

Clarice Blackburn and Jerry Lacy do some fine acting today, as does Grayson Hall in a brief turn as the Countess DuPrés. The pre-title bit with Blackburn and Lacy in front of the black backgrounds is so specific to theater in the 1960s that I can’t help but smile at it, but I’m glad it’s there. It isn’t as though you could ever really forget that the show is 56 years old, and I like to see that they preserved something that would have been so typical of the off-Broadway productions that would have been such a big part of the working lives of the cast and other creatives in those days.

*In her testimony today, Abigail gives the dramatic date of Vicki’s arrival in the past as 12 October 1795. The episodes in which the events she describes happened were broadcast on 17 November and 20 November 1967. In the last few weeks, the show has explicitly told us that the day and month of the dramatic setting in 1796 is the same as the broadcast date in 1968, so it’s confusing.

Episode 413: So sad for such a long time

Sarah Collins is going to turn 11 two days from now, on 26 January 1796. Sarah misses her big brother Barnabas. She has been told that Barnabas has gone to England, and today her mother, Naomi, tells her that Barnabas may not be back for a long time, maybe not until Sarah is grown up. Sarah refuses to believe this. She insists that if she lights a candle in the window of the bedroom where Barnabas’ onetime fiancée, the gracious Josette, has been staying, Barnabas will “somehow know it’s there” and come home.

Sarah is right to disbelieve her mother. On the orders of her husband, haughty overlord Joshua, Naomi is repeating a lie to conceal Barnabas’ death. Joshua believes that Barnabas died from the plague, and that if that word gets out the men won’t report for work at the family’s shipyard. In fact, Barnabas never had the plague. He died of a witch’s curse. As a further result of the curse, he is now a vampire. The last few nights, he has been snacking on the women who frequent the waterfront of the village.

Josette is out of town, so Sarah takes the candle to her room, meaning to leave it there as a surprise. Looking out the window, she sees Barnabas on the lawn, peering up. Sarah is excited to see her brother, and runs out of the house after him. He doesn’t want her to know what has become of him, and runs off.

Seconds after she exits the front door, Sarah is in the cemetery. It has been established many times that this cemetery is miles from the house; earlier in this very episode, Barnabas’ helper Ben visited him in his tomb there, and made it clear he had plenty of opportunity to shake anyone who might be following him as he journeyed there from the house. This inconsistency bothers a lot of people, but I kind of like it. We got to know Sarah as a ghost in 1967, and she was at the center of a number of very intriguing surrealistic sequences. She’s alive now, but the whole situation is so bizarre that it only seems right she moves as she would in a dream. Watching the scene this time, I was surprised- I had remembered the set behind Sarah being blurred as she ran and some other visual effects that would have presented it as an eldritch moment, but none of those was actually there.

The episode ends with Sarah in the outer part of the tomb, near the secret panel behind which Barnabas’ coffin is hidden. She is calling out to him. We have been warned that Sarah will die on her birthday as a result of exposure; when Barnabas does not come to her, she complains of the cold, and we end on an ominous note.

When Sarah sees Barnabas standing on the lawn, we echo earlier phases of Dark Shadows. We often saw characters looking out that window during the first 73 weeks of Dark Shadows, when the dramatic date was 1966 or 1967 and the room was occupied by well-meaning governess Vicki. We also saw Barnabas peer up at Vicki’s window from the lawn several times. The first time was at the end of #214, when the camera stuck with him so long we wondered if he really was a vampire and not just a garden gnome.

The closing shot of #214, set in 1967. Compare with the image of Barnabas on the lawn above.

Barnabas’ penchant for staring at windows in turn echoed his predecessor as the show’s supernatural menace, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. As ten year old Sarah Collins looks out a window and sees her big brother Barnabas looking up at her from the lawn today, so in #134 did another child of the same age, strange and troubled boy David Collins, look out a window and see his mother Laura looking up at him from the same lawn.

Vicki is in this episode. Sarah’s ghost yanked her here from November 1967 so that she could “tell the story from the beginning.” It isn’t so much Vicki who has been getting the story as it is the audience. Vicki is left out of most of the key developments; in particular, she has no clue Barnabas is a vampire. She has done such a poor job of fitting into her new environment that even though witchcraft laws had been repealed throughout the English-speaking world sixty years before, the village of Collinsport has brought them back just for her. She is in gaol, and from there has continued to find ways to make her situation so much worse that she is now all but certain to be hanged.

Today, Vicki asks for Naomi to visit her in the gaol. Barnabas and Ben are the only ones who know who the witch really was, but neither of them is in a position to talk to the authorities and clear Vicki’s name. Naomi and Sarah are the only other people who believe that Vicki is innocent. Vicki tells Naomi that she has a book printed in the twentieth century that tells her Sarah will die of exposure on her eleventh birthday. In response, Naomi looks at her in wonderment and says that she is starting to believe she really is a witch. Vicki dismisses that topic, and pleads with her to keep Sarah indoors for the next few days. Naomi agrees to do so.

Vicki’s warnings not only make Naomi suspect that the charges against her are true; it is because Naomi is not home that no one stops Sarah running out and getting stuck in a cold place. I suppose there is meant to be a dramatic irony in seeing Vicki bring about the very disasters she is trying to prevent, but the character’s foolishness throughout the whole segment set in the late eighteenth century blunts that irony.

If we saw a smart person operating at the top of her form and still causing a series of calamities, we might have a sense of tragic inevitability, a feeling that the course of history cannot be changed whatever we do. But Vicki has not been that person. Movie reviewer Roger Ebert famously called stories that depend on the characters doing things the average member of the audience would be too smart to do “idiot plot.” For all the strengths of the 1795 segment, there is an idiot plot at the center of it, and Vicki is the Designated Dum-Dum. That undercuts the arc and destroys the character.

Episode 412: The book

For the first 39 weeks of Dark Shadows, well-meaning governess Vicki was the main protagonist. Her understated, sometimes diffident manner fit with the pace and themes of the show in that period. When the show introduced its first supernatural villain, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, Vicki rose to the occasion and led the opposition to her. When Laura went up in smoke, the last of the themes that made Vicki a suitable lead went with her. Vicki remained our chief point-of-view character for some time after that, but she didn’t find much footing in any of the stories. She receded steadily from center stage for months.

In November 1967, Vicki came unstuck in time and found herself in the year 1795. At first this seemed to be an opportunity for a reset, but Vicki wound up being written in the time-travel story as a complete moron. She kept yelling at the other characters that they were being played by actors who had other parts in the first 73 weeks of the show, refused to take advice from people who tried to explain how she could fit in with her new surroundings, and insistently held onto possessions that eighteenth century people would take as evidence that she was evil. Now she finds herself in gaol, accused of witchcraft and facing a possible death sentence.

The other day, the gracious Josette visited Vicki in gaol and begged her to lift the spell that had brought a terminal illness on the gallant Barnabas Collins. Unable to persuade Josette that she was not a witch, Vicki told her that she had come from the future and brought with her a book about the history of the Collins family printed in the twentieth century. She told Josette where to find this book. When she did find it, Josette was more convinced than ever that Vicki was the witch.

Now, Barnabas has died. Josette visits Vicki again, and vows to do whatever she can to see that she is hanged. Josette is so distraught over Barnabas’ death that she quite calmly says she may want to take her own life soon, but she does look forward fondly to testifying against Vicki and seeing her execution.

Josette takes consolation in the idea that she will help get Vicki sentenced to death. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

After Josette leaves, Vicki asks her gaoler/ defense attorney/ prospective boyfriend Peter to sneak her out of the gaol. She wants to go to Collinwood and steal the book back.

Evidently Peter is no brighter than Vicki, because he agrees to this plan. Vicki goes to Josette’s bedroom. As we might have expected, Vicki is seen in the room- Josette’s aunt, the Countess DuPrés, opens the door and finds her with the book in her hands. By the time the countess returns with Josette and the witch-hunting Rev’d Trask, Vicki and the book are gone. This will be Vicki’s own bedroom in 1967, and she knows of a secret passage leading out of it. The other three do not know of this passage, and no one in 1795 knows of any reason Vicki would be aware of it. So far as they know, she has appeared and disappeared by magic.

Back in the gaol, Peter locks Vicki in her cell and hides the book in his desk. Trask and the ladies knock on the door and demand to see Vicki. Peter swears that she has been in her cell all night. Josette is concerned that they no longer have the book, but Trask says they don’t need it- only a witch can be in two places at once. Peter’s statement will suffice to put Vicki’s neck in the noose.

As of this writing (18 January 2024,) four of the five actors in this episode are still alive. Only Grayson Hall is no longer with us; she died in 1985. Hall’s countess, like Kathryn Leigh Scott’s Josette and Jerry Lacy’s Trask, is a lot of fun to watch. Vicki is so brainless that the part defeats Alexandra Moltke Isles, and Roger Davis is never an agreeable screen presence. So we wind up cheering on the people who want to put the heroine to death and hoping that her love interest joins her on the gibbet.

Episode 408: My imperfect science

Late in 1966, the ghost of Josette Collins emerged from the supernatural back-world behind the action of Dark Shadows and rescued well-meaning governess Vicki from homicidal groundskeeper Matthew Morgan. Early in 1967, Vicki and several other characters worked closely with the ghost of Josette to thwart the evil plans of undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. After these experiences, Vicki felt so close to the ghost that, to some, it seemed possible that her personality might disintegrate and she might become a sort of reincarnation of Josette.

In November 1967, the back-world and the foreground traded places. Vicki came unstuck in time and found herself in 1795, where Josette and others whom she had met as uncanny entities are alive and she is the alien interloper from another world. Vicki did not in any way adapt to her new surroundings, and immediately brought suspicion on herself. Now she is in jail, spelled “gaol,” awaiting trial on charges of witchcraft.

Josette visits Vicki today and begs her to lift the curse that has brought a mysterious and apparently terminal illness to gallant gentleman Barnabas Collins. Despite her situation, Vicki is shocked that Josette believes her to be a witch. Unable to persuade her of her innocence, Vicki tells Josette that she is a time-traveler and sends her off to look for a book she brought with her from the future. Josette interprets this as a confession of witchcraft, and when she finds the book makes it clear that she could not possibly have interpreted it as anything else.

Vicki makes Josette cry. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

If the show had kept the memory of Vicki’s friendship with Josette’s ghost fresh, this might have been a powerful scene. But Josette’s ghost receded from the action after the Laura story ended in #191, and in #223 and #240 it was made explicit that she is no longer a palpable presence on the estate of Collinwood. We’ve barely heard of Vicki’s connection to Josette in recent months. By this point, even viewers who have been with the show from the beginning are unlikely to make a connection between Vicki’s behavior in her scene with Josette and those old stories. Instead, we see yet another case of Vicki being a tiresome fool.

Disappointing as that scene is, it is not the low point of the episode. That came in the scene immediately before. Actor Jack Stamberger appears as a doctor called to treat Barnabas. Doctors on Dark Shadows are ineffectual figures brought on to fill time, unless they are mad scientists who take a bad situation that is troubling one or a few characters and make it so much worse that it can be a major narrative arc. Stamberger’s part is of the former sort.

It is a particularly objectionable specimen of the category. The other G.P.s usually started with at least a theoretical possibility that they might do something to advance the plot, or turn out to be old friends with established characters who could show a new facet of their personalities in interaction with them, or at least bring out some unusual medical equipment that would be fun to look at. They’ve already foreclosed all of those possibilities before this doctor appears, so the scene is advertised as a waste of time.

One of these is not like the others. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Worse, watching Stamberger’s performance is like sticking your head in a bucket of itching powder. His scene partners, Kathryn Leigh Scott, Lara Parker, and Grayson Scott with dialogue, and Jonathan Frid with moans and anguished facial expressions, are all totally committed to the period setting, and really do seem like gentlefolk inhabiting a mansion in a previous century. Stamberger doesn’t even try to do what they are doing. He puts on a growly voice that might have been acceptable if he were playing a trail-boss in a Western, but that doesn’t have much place in any scene set indoors. It certainly doesn’t make sense for a man in genteel surroundings who talks about nothing but how helpless he is. He doesn’t maintain eye contact with any of the ladies long enough to put himself into the same space with them. He bungles most of his lines, and even those he speaks as written he follows by shuffling his feet, breathing heavily, and looking around. Dark Shadows was, for all practical purposes, done live; if videotape editing had been freely available, it’s hard to imagine director Lela Swift wouldn’t have stopped the scene and taken the time to smack him upside the head.

On his Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn argues that Addison Powell was, as he stylizes it, THE WORST ACTOR EVER TO APPEAR ON DARK SHADOWS. I’m not sure who deserves that title, but today Stamberger locks up the award for Most Irritating Performance.

Episode 398: The only real witch there is

Wrongly suspected of witchcraft, bewildered time-traveler Vicki has found refuge in the home of young gentleman Barnabas Collins. Vicki doesn’t know it yet, but last night Barnabas married a woman named Angelique. Vicki knew Angelique when they were both working in the home of Barnabas’ family, Vicki as a governess, Angelique as a lady’s maid. Unknown to almost anyone, Angelique is the real witch and is glad Vicki has fallen into taking the blame for her evil deeds.

Angelique herself is in the dark about Vicki’s presence in the house. She chances upon Vicki in the morning. Angelique is the only character in the segment of Dark Shadows set in the year 1795 to address her as “Vicki”; everyone else insists on calling her “Victoria” or “Miss Winters.” Since we have known Vicki since the first episode, and we know that her friends call her “Vicki,” hearing her use that form of the name tells us that Angelique has presented herself to Vicki as a friend.

Angelique tells Vicki that she and Barnabas are now married. If Vicki had learned anything from the long string of failures to adapt to the mores of 1795 that have brought her to her current state, she would respond to this by lowering her eyes, curtsying, and saying “Mrs. Collins.” But instead, she reacts with a blank stare. Angelique asks what if she is merely startled by the news, or is shocked. Vicki resumes babbling, still calling Angelique by her first name, still referring to Barnabas by his.

Not only is Vicki continuing to flout the modes of address conventional to the period in which she finds herself, she seems genuinely unaware that a newlywed might be disturbed to stumble upon an attractive young woman her husband is hiding in the house. After a minute or two, it occurs to her to ask Angelique if she wants her to stay. Angelique says that because Barnabas is the master of the house, it is not for her to object. Vicki responds by jumping into her face and exclaiming “But you’re the mistress!” Even after that, she keeps on with her first-naming of Barnabas and Angelique and shows absolutely no sign of awareness that Angelique might be concerned about the nature of Barnabas’ attachment to her.

Downstairs, Angelique asks Barnabas about Vicki. He asks incredulously if she is jealous. Barnabas didn’t visit Angelique in her bedroom on their wedding night and she knows that he tends to make free with servant girls, since that’s how they met. Even so, he can’t figure out why Angelique might be unhappy to find that he has Vicki stashed in the house. It really is a shame Barnabas and Vicki didn’t marry, just imagine what oblivious children they might have had. They might have been the progenitors of a whole line of Detective Frank Drebins.

Later, Angelique has a spell she wants to cast on Barnabas’ aunt, repressed spinster Abigail Collins. She summons indentured servant Ben, whom she has enslaved. She orders Ben to steal Abigail’s hair ribbon from her night-stand. Ben is horrified by the command. It would have been bad enough if he had been caught sneaking into one of the gentlemen’s bedrooms, but he might have been able to talk his way out of that. If he is found in a lady’s bedroom, he’ll be lucky if all that happens is that he’s sent back to prison for several years. Impatient, Angelique tells him not to get caught.

Abigail does catch Ben in her room with the hair ribbon in his hand. She was the first to suspect witchcraft at Collinwood, before there even was any. Ben begs her not to ask him any questions, but she isn’t having it. She presses him, and he says that the witch sent him. She demands he say the witch’s name, wanting to hear him say “Victoria Winters.” He is about to say “Angelique” when we see her, in the Old House, cast the spell that causes him to choke. This scene takes about a minute to make all the points the story needs, but goes on for several times that long. That doesn’t hurt a thing- Clarice Blackburn and Thayer David were such a pair of pros that they could hold the audience’s attention for a good deal longer with a lot less to work with. It’s a fine ending.

Episode 387: Just how does one go about sensing an evil spirit?

Lady’s maid Angelique is keeping busy, even though none of the ladies is on the show today, by carrying tea trays in and out of the front parlor of the manor house on the great estate of Collinwood. As she does so, she hears the Rev’d Mr Trask, a professional witch hunter visiting from Salem, Massachusetts, lay out his plan for uncovering what he believes to be a coven of witches operating in the house. Since Angelique spends her non-tea related time being a wicked witch and causing all the suffering that everyone has undergone on the show since we arrived in this year 1795, it is unsurprising that she reacts to Trask’s plan with concern.

We see the servants’ entrance to the manor house. Not only is this a new set, it is a new kind of set for Dark Shadows. So far, we have seen at most one entrance for any building. Since we are in the middle of the 78th week, we have come to expect that’s all we ever will see, so it comes as a bit of a jolt to see this doorway.

Angelique sees caddish naval officer Nathan Forbes coming out of the servants’ entrance. She remarks that the family and their guests never use it; he jokes about breaking rules. She asks what he has in his hands; he asks what hands she means, then admits that he stole some food from the kitchen. He claims to be on his way to a picnic, and invites her to join him. He is typically uninhibited in his dealings with young women, and he certainly doesn’t try to keep Angelique from thinking that if she accepts his invitation she will have her work cut out for her if she wants to remain fully clothed. She declines, insisting that she has duties to attend to.

Angelique sees through Nathan. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

She watches him go, and in a soliloquy says that she sees through him. He is taking the food to Victoria “Vicki” Winters, governess to young Sarah Collins and Trask’s prime suspect, who is in hiding. Perhaps Nathan was leveraging his reputation as a lecher by presenting his invitation to Angelique in terms he knew she would have to decline.

Back in the front parlor, Trask is asking the master of the house, haughty overlord Joshua Collins, why Angelique did not report when the servants were summoned for his questioning. Joshua replies that she is not the Collinses’ servant, but that she belongs to their house-guests, the DuPrés family. Trask rails against the DuPrés, and Angelique enters, meekly saying that her mistress told her she was wanted.

Even though Angelique was bustling around the room in the opening teaser, Trask does not recognize her. It may not have been customary to take much notice of servants in the eighteenth century, but Angelique is rather a hard person to miss. For one thing, she looks exactly like Lara Parker. A person would have to be pretty intensely focused not to notice someone who was so obviously meant to be a movie star.

Trask asks Angelique where she was when the other servants came. When she tells him she was walking alone in the woods, he asks if she went there to meet with someone- “perhaps the DE-VIL!!!” Jerry Lacy is an accomplished sketch comic, and the laughs he raises when Trask shouts about “The DE-VIL!!!” and “THE ALMIGHTY!!!!” must be intentional.

Trask questions Angelique closely, and for a fraction of a second it seems like he might know what he is doing. That produces mixed feelings in the audience- if he exposes Angelique, he will save Vicki and other characters we care about from the terrible fates that are apparently in store for them. On the other hand, Dark Shadows might then become The Adventures of the Heroic Reverend Trask, and that would be so ridiculous that no writing staff in the world could possibly keep it going for more than a few episodes.

Angelique sees through Trask as easily as she had seen through Nathan. She falls to her knees and claims to be having a vision. She hams it up shamelessly.

At first Trask says that she is either a complete charlatan or is speaking under divine inspiration; before Joshua can express a doubt as to which it is, he proclaims it genuine. She has claimed to hear the voices of a man and a woman speaking in a large new house that is otherwise vacant. Trask and Joshua decide it is the new house under construction on the estate, and rush off. We see Angelique with a weary look on her face, as if she can’t believe she is up against such a load of idiots.

In the drawing room of the new house, Vicki is eating the food Nathan has brought. She starts talking about her situation. As it happens, Vicki is not native to 1795 at all. She was thrust back to that year from a séance she was attending in 1967, after Sarah’s ghost took possession of her and said she wanted to tell “the story from the beginning.” Vicki hasn’t told anyone about this, but she is continually saying and doing things that make it obvious she doesn’t belong in this world. She tells Nathan that “In order to get here, I had to transcend time and space.” Nathan says he doesn’t know what she’s talking about, but that if she keeps saying things like that even her friends will think she’s a witch.

**Vicki natters** away. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

There was a time when Vicki was an intelligent, dynamic character. Apparently she left her brain in 1967, because what Nathan says comes as news to her. A few days after Vicki arrived, kindly gentleman Jeremiah Collins befriended her; when she answered his questions about her past by claiming to have amnesia, he bluntly told her she would have to make up a better story than that. Someone who needs advice at that level is not likely to do well in a situation where only a con artist could survive.

Vicki and Nathan hear voices in the foyer. Trask and Joshua have arrived. Nathan goes out to meet them, claiming to have come to inspect the architecture of the house. Joshua is appalled that Nathan has not asked his permission to enter the house, and Trask is sure he has come to visit Vicki.

Trask, Joshua, and Nathan go into the drawing room. Vicki is not there. A window is open, and there is a piece of fresh food wrapped in a cloth on a crate. Nathan doesn’t claim that he opened the window or that he was eating the food; Trask and Joshua are left to conclude that Vicki had been there.