fanfic – Page 2 – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 599: If you open it, something terrible will happen

Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, is wandering in the woods. She is wearing her nightgown and staggering for lack of food. She has just escaped from the hidden chamber in the old Collins family mausoleum, where Willie Loomis had been holding her prisoner for some days.

Willie had abducted Maggie because he wanted to protect her from the evil plans of his master, recovering vampire Barnabas Collins, and Barnabas’ friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman. Because of his choice of hiding place he found that he had a new problem on his hands even after Barnabas and Julia had moved on to another victim. When Barnabas was in the full grip of the vampire curse in May and June of 1967, he had preyed upon Maggie, and the hidden chamber was one of the places he had taken her for torture.

After Maggie escaped from Barnabas, she was taken to a mental hospital. Julia was her psychiatrist, and in August 1967 she abused her position to hypnotize Maggie into forgetting her ordeal. When Willie took her to the hidden chamber, Maggie’s memory quickly came back. Willie is hopelessly dependent on Barnabas and Julia, and could see no alternative to keeping Maggie locked up once she became a threat to them. Yesterday, young David Collins found Maggie and freed her, and now she is trying to find her way to the sheriff’s office to tell her story.

It occurs to Maggie that the sheriff might not believe her once she starts accusing a member of the family that owns the town of being a vampire. He might be particularly skeptical when her psychiatrist comes along and tells them about how she behaved while she was an inmate in the mental hospital. Maggie decides that her ex-fiancé, the lately unemployed Joe Haskell, will believe her story and protect her, so she sets off for his apartment.

Maggie opens Joe’s door to find a blonde woman with her mouth on his neck. She faints. When she comes to, the woman is gone and Joe is apologizing for his inability to explain what is going on. Maggie tells him he doesn’t have to explain. She understands perfectly what has been happening to him, since the same thing happened to her. The woman is a vampire, and Joe has been showing the same symptoms Maggie showed when Barnabas started feeding on her.

Maggie urges Joe to leave town with her, right now. They should get in his car and drive, just drive until they are far, far away. Joe’s eyes are bright and he repeats the key words, clearly excited about the idea. It seems for a moment they might give it a try. A knock comes at the door. Maggie begs Joe not to answer it, but he is compelled to do so. Perhaps this is a symptom of being under the vampire’s power. Or perhaps it may just be a sign that he is a character on Dark Shadows, which usually devotes about 10% of its screen time to people answering doors. At the end of the scene, it is clear that Joe will answer the door, but we do not see what happens next.

Later that evening, Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, is at home looking at some sketches her late father made. She is wearing a red dress under a smart blue jacket, her hair well-styled. She seems quite=the comfortable. She answers the door, and finds old world gentleman Barnabas Collins and Barnabas’ servant, the high-strung Willie. They tell her that Joe had stopped by their house and brought them a message that Maggie wants to see them.

Maggie happily invites her old friends in. She shows them the sketches, and tells them her late father made them the year before while he was preparing to paint a portrait of Barnabas. She says it occurred to her Barnabas might want the sketches. He accepts them gratefully, and asks if that was the only reason she wanted to see them. Smiling, she says that it was. She mentions that she hasn’t seen Willie for three or four weeks. Willie agrees that she has not seen him in that time. Barnabas says they will have to be going; Maggie is disappointed they can’t stay for a cup of coffee.

Maggie wishes her friends Barnabas and Willie could stay longer.

Returning viewers will already know what Barnabas and Willie figure out in the final scene, that suave warlock Nicholas wiped Maggie’s memory. Unlike the, we are familiar with the plot mechanics that would have motivated Nicholas to do this.

The contrast between the frantic urgency of the scene between Maggie and Joe and the subsequent placidity of the scene in Maggie’s house makes for an effective single episode. The gold standard of anthology series, The Twilight Zone, often drew just that contrast as people would struggle more and more desperately for freedom, that struggle would mount to a fever pitch in a scene that seemed like it just might lead to something, then an event we don’t quite see thwarts them and all of a sudden everything is calm and peaceful and utterly hopeless. Three of my favorite examples are “Number Twelve Looks Just Like You,” “It’s a Good Life,” and “The Lateness of the Hour.” It’s especially piquant to see that scenario play out so much of the story is presented to us from the viewpoint of the villains. Barnabas and Julia generate so much of the show’s interest that none of its fans really wants to see them get their just deserts, and so it makes us squirm a bit when we see that they can evade punishment only by a triumph of evil over good. Writer Ron Sproat deserves credit for developing this structure expertly.

But Dark Shadows is not an anthology series, and as a segment in an ongoing serial, the whole thing is quite frustrating. When Maggie understands what is happening to Joe and can talk to him about it, there is a chance they will be able to make plans and take action that might have consequences for the story. But the mind-wipe just takes the last several weeks of the show and throws them in the trash. All that time we spent cooped up with Maggie and Willie in the hidden chamber? Never mind, it wasn’t important.

In a comment on Danny Horn’s Dark Shadows Every Day, “Mark Perigard” wonders what might have been:

The scenes between Maggie and Joe are just brilliant. For viewers, it’s like we’re being treated to a seven-course meal we’ve been promised for over a year – and then they snatch the tray away and tell us to suck on crumbs.

How incredible – how daring would it have been to show Maggie fighting for Joe’s sanity and life against the supernatural forces of Collinwood? DS would have a truly proactive heroine. One can imagine Maggie ultimately, reluctantly forming an alliance with Barnabas and Julia against Angelique and Nicholas.

Instead we got another mind-wipe. We was robbed.
Comment left at 11:46 Pacific time, 6 March 2015 by “Mark Perigard,” on “Episode 599: Live, Die, Repeat,” Danny Horn, Dark Shadows Every Day

I can see how that might have played out. Maggie gets to the sheriff’s office and tells him her whole story. He listens intently and instructs his assistant to take notes. When she finishes, he says “Bring her in.” The assistant goes to the door and ushers Julia in. “It’s just as you said, doctor,” the sheriff says. “She has lost her mind completely.”

Maggie would then go back to the mental hospital. While she was there, Nicholas would try to get at her. He would overplay his hand and reveal that he is a warlock. Maggie would realize that Nicholas is responsible for the vampire attack on Joe and that he is at odds with Barnabas and Julia. That’s when she makes her uneasy alliance with her old tormentors and the story really gets going.

Laramie Dean’s Shadows on the Wall posted a scan of the script for this one in August 2016, it’s interesting to see it side by side with a transcript of the dialogue that was actually delivered.

Episode 593: To face reality

Our story so far…

Frankenstein’s monster Adam has threatened to kill everyone in the great house of Collinwood unless old world gentleman Barnabas and mad scientist Julia create a mate for him. They are to do this by building a woman out of parts scavenged from corpses and draining someone’s “life force” into her. Adam has a crush on heiress Carolyn, so he insisted she be the “life force” donor. Under the influence of suave warlock Nicholas, Carolyn volunteered to serve in that capacity. On Monday, Adam figured out that Carolyn is in love with him, so he told her there was no need to complete the procedure. They could just marry each other. She reacted to that with evident confusion, her own feelings competing with Nicholas’ spell. Nicholas’ influence won out, and Carolyn insisted on going through with the experiment.

The experiment failed to bring the mate to life, and left Carolyn badly injured. After a soulful conversation with Adam in the upstairs bedroom, she lost consciousness. Julia pronounced her dead. Adam then went to Barnabas and declared that he would make good on his threat. He knocked Barnabas down and stalked out of the house. When Julia saw how badly Barnabas was hurt, she went back up to the bedroom to get her medical bag. She found that Carolyn’s body was gone.

Barnabas and Julia wonder where Carolyn’s remains could be and how they can prevent Adam killing everyone. Barnabas’ servant Willie returns to the house to tell them about another crisis. In May and June of 1967, when Barnabas was a vampire, Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town, was his victim. He imprisoned and tortured her. In August of that year, Julia abused her position as Maggie’s psychiatrist to hypnotize her so that she would forget all about her ordeal. Now Maggie’s memory has come back, and Willie is keeping her locked up in the hidden chamber of the old Collins family mausoleum. Willie tells Barnabas and Julia that Maggie has figured out how to get out of the chamber, and that she is staying there now only because he knocked her out with chloroform. It’s just a matter of time before she gets away.

Willie also says that he saw Adam a few minutes before. Adam was sitting quietly under a tree. He did not have Carolyn’s body with him. Julia wonders if that means that Adam has decided not to go through with his threats, but Barnabas is not so optimistic.

In the Mausoleum

We see Maggie awaken in the mausoleum. She goes to open the door, only to find Julia standing behind it. Julia blocks the exit and enters. Maggie is afraid Barnabas has sent Julia to kill her. Julia can deny that, but denies nothing else Maggie says. Maggie confronts her as Barnabas’ accomplice and walks toward her; Julia backs away, and Maggie chases her around the coffin in the center of the little space. Julia tells Maggie that she will never get out of the chamber unless she cooperates. Julia tries to hypnotize Maggie, but that only succeeds in reminding her of how Julia erased her memory before. Julia admits that she did that, and tells Maggie her only hope for survival is to let her do it again. Maggie says she would rather die than submit to such a thing. When we first met Julia, she was a doctor whose ambition to treat a vampire led her to betray a patient’s trust, but who could still tell herself that she was serving a greater good. Now, we see that she has lost her moral compass completely. This scene is a showcase for both Grayson Hall and Kathryn Leigh Scott.

A Fanfic Interlude

Julia has been inseparable from Barnabas long enough that it is possible for daily viewers to forget that she was introduced in scenes with Maggie, and that it was by betraying Maggie’s trust that she earned her place as a main character. This scene reminds us of that history, but it doesn’t really make sense. Julia must know that if she calls on Maggie in the hidden chamber where she is being held prisoner, it will be obvious to her that she is in league with her captors. If she wants Maggie trust her so that she can hypnotize her, she will have to deceive her in some way. Julia is the show’s most fluent and plausible liar, so you might assume she would have come up with an effective stratagem.

Mrs Acilius and I came up with a method that might have worked. Imagine an episode that opens with Maggie alone in the hidden chamber. The door opens, and Willie enters. Maggie confronts him with enough information to bring the audience up to date with her situation. Maggie hits him with something, stunning him momentarily. She is opening the door when he grabs her and puts a cloth over her nose. She passes out.

After the opening titles, Maggie comes to in her old prison cell in Barnabas’ basement. She finds that Julia is also there, chained to the wall. Julia tells her that she has only recently discovered the full truth about Barnabas, and that he locked her up to keep her quiet. Maggie knows how close Julia and Barnabas have been for the last year, and is skeptical. At the end of Act One, Maggie is still unsure whether she can trust her.

In Act Two, Barnabas comes in and threatens both women. He lets slip that Maggie found a way to escape from the cell in June 1967. By the time he leaves, Maggie believes that Julia is on her side. In Act Three, Julia asks Maggie how she escaped the year before. That part of Maggie’s memory hasn’t come back, so Julia offers to hypnotize her so that she will remember. Maggie agrees. Julia produces her medallion, and Maggie goes under. We dissolve to the aftermath of the hypnosis. Maggie is asleep on the cot in the cell; she is smiling. Julia is taking the fetter off; it was never locked. Barnabas and Willie open the door; Julia says that Maggie’s memory has been wiped clean again. She will be asleep for an hour, so they should take her home now.

That would not only remind us how Julia began, show us how she has turned out, and explain how Maggie lost her memory, but it would also give us a glimpse of the old, evil Barnabas who first made the show a hit. Barnabas spent his first year as a bloodthirsty ghoul pretending to be a kindly cousin from England; it would be interesting to see the humanized Barnabas pretending to be his old self.

Meanwhile, In the Episode They Actually Made…

Julia leaves the mausoleum and goes back to Barnabas’ house. She tells him the hypnosis failed. At that, Barnabas decides the time has come for him to go to the surviving members of the family in the great house and tell them the truth. Julia tries to talk him out of it, and he says he will do what he can to “exonerate” her from responsibility for the crimes they have committed together. But with Adam and Maggie both at large, he feels he can no longer keep secrets. Just as Julia has lost her conscience it seems that Barnabas, who earlier this week told Julia he would murder Maggie if she couldn’t keep her quiet, may at last have found his.

At the door of the great house, Barnabas wrestles with doubts:

I can’t go through with it. I can’t tell them Carolyn is dead. I’d be forced to tell them about the experiments, Adam, everything Julia and I have done. And if the truth starts to come out, where will it end? Where?… No. I can’t think about that. The family has to know that Carolyn is dead–how she died! I have to tell them no matter what happens to me. No matter what happens. I must tell them!

He finally knocks on the door, and is thunderstruck when Carolyn opens it, looking the picture of health. This might have been an effective surprise if Barnabas’ voiceover soliloquy hadn’t given us ninety seconds to think about who might open the door, and realize there is only one possible candidate.

Episode 563: A kind of magician

Beverly Hope Atkinson

This episode features the first appearance on Dark Shadows by an actor of color, and the only speaking part any non-White performer ever had. (CORRECTION: Mr Nakamura, played by Sho Onodera in #903, has a couple of lines.) This fact is made even more depressing because that performer fits so perfectly into the show that a first time viewer would assume she had been a major player from episode #1.

Beverly Hope Atkinson plays an unnamed nurse who meets suave warlock Nicholas Blair when he is trying to make his way into a hospital room occupied by Tom Jennings, a victim of one of Nicholas’ evil schemes. She firmly refuses him admittance. When Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, enters and asks to see Tom, the unnamed nurse smiles brightly and says “Of course, Maggie!” in a tone that makes it sound like they’ve been friends all their lives. She then shuts the door before Nicholas can follow. He asks her why Maggie can go in and he cannot, and she tells him sternly that Maggie has permission from the doctor.

Unnamed nurse is happy to see Maggie. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

I have a fanfic idea about Atkinson’s nurse that I originally posted as a comment on Danny Horn’s Dark Shadows Every Day. I can’t find it there, but here is a copy of it:

In the first 42 weeks of the show, when the supernatural was in the background and the stories were slow, it would have been easy to have a couple of tea party scenes at the Evans cottage where Maggie and her lifelong friend, Unnamed Nurse, recap whatever is going on. Those scenes could have led to a whole exploration of the tension between the working-class people in the village and the jerks in the big house on the hill. That in turn could have led to the introduction of Unnamed Nurse’s family, headed by Unnamed’s parents, Mr and Mrs Nurse, including her brothers, Young Mr Nurse and Master Nurse, and her sister, Moody Miss Nurse. We could then have seen the ancestors of the Nurse family in each of the flashback segments and analogues of them in Parallel Time.

At some point in my musings about this idea, I decided the family should be named “Wilson” (if I had a reason for this, I’ve forgotten it, but I now think of Atkinson’s character as Nurse Wilson,) and that in a flashback segment we should learn that they are descended from free persons of color who settled in Collinsport before the Civil War and were the first proprietors of the Collinsport Inn. Some wicked deed by a member of the Collins family knocked them out of the entrepreneurial class long ago, and they’ve been working their way back up the socio-economic ladder ever since.

We met Maggie in #1 as the waitress at the diner in the Collinsport Inn. She, her late father Sam, and her fiancé, hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell, have been Dark Shadows‘ main representatives of the people in the village. Her house, the modest counterpoint to the mansions on the Collins family’s great estate, has been familiar to us from the beginning, and is the place where we have seen most vividly what the Collinses’ doings have meant for the people who work for their businesses and live in their town. So, as a frequent visitor there, the nurse could have given a whole new dimension to the drama, showing that it isn’t just one family whose lives hang in the balance, but that a whole community is exposed to the consequences of what happens on the hill.

The Blue Whale

Joe is sitting alone at a table in the Blue Whale tavern, and he looks terrible. He’s pale and fidgety, looking around and periodically jumping up to peek out the window.

Maggie comes in and joins Joe. At first she is angry with him- he stood her up last night, without so much as a telephone call. She sees how upset he is and her anger is mixed with worry. He pounds on the table while the camera is tight on her. Her startled reaction reminds us of the early months of the show, when Sam was a self-pitying drunk and Maggie was a sophisticated portrait of an Adult Child of an Alcoholic.

Maggie startled. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

After that moment, Maggie gets very quiet. When Joe says with alarm that it is getting dark, she responds that “It usually does, at this time of day.” It’s inherently funny to hear someone make that kind of matter-of-fact statement in response to an inexplicably intense remark, but also poignant to those of us who remember Maggie’s early interactions with Sam. From childhood on, simple rationality must have seemed to Maggie like a joke in the face of the overpowering irrationality at the center of her life.

As it happens, Joe is indeed exhibiting addicted behavior. But he isn’t hooked on alcohol. Instead, he is under the power of a vampire. Angelique, who was once the wicked witch who first made Barnabas Collins a vampire, found herself reduced to bloodsucker status when she displeased Nicholas. At Nicholas’ direction, she bit Joe the other day, and now Joe is desperate to hear her summons and report for another bite. She does call, and he does dash out, leaving a bewildered Maggie behind.

It was at the Blue Whale that we first met Joe, back in #3. Then, he was an upstanding young man who indignantly rejected the attempts of one of the Collins family’s sworn enemies to bribe him into spying against them. We’ve seen him in the tavern many times since then, always as the doughty representative of the wholesome and intelligible world against the sinister and supernatural. For example, in #215 it was a deeply troubled Joe who brought the news to Maggie and others at the Blue Whale that the cows on his uncle’s farm had been somehow drained of blood, news which turned out to be the first sign of vampirism in the area. This is the first time we’ve seen the Blue Whale since #358, back in November, and the first time a scene has closed with the formerly very familiar Blue Whale jukebox dance tunes in even longer than that. Longtime viewers see a loop closing. Joe leaves the place where he has most often shown himself as one who dwells in the daylight and goes down to the deepest dark.

Once Joe is gone, Nicholas enters. He engages Maggie in conversation, and talks his way into the seat Joe vacated. Soon he is doing magic tricks for her and she is agreeing to have dinner with him. He brings up the idea of staying out all night, and she seems amenable. Where is her old friend the nurse when you need her?

The Fix

Joe lets himself into Nicholas’ house, a place by the sea that he is renting from the Collinses. Angelique is there. Joe laments his dependency on her, and asks if she was the one who attacked Tom, whom he identifies as his cousin. Perhaps the son of the uncle whose cows fell victim to Barnabas long ago! She doesn’t bother to deny it. She tells him that they will both visit Tom tonight. She bites Joe.

Joe visits Tom, who has emerged from the coma in which Angelique’s first bite left him. He tells Joe all about Angelique’s attack on him. He says he knows how bizarre the story sounds, but that he hopes that if he has Joe to vouch for him he will be able to make the police take it seriously. Joe gives Tom a few perfunctory assurances, then opens the window. Joe explains that he is doing this because it is hot in the room. Tom does not agree that it is hot, but Joe insists, and Tom is too ill to argue long.

Joe leaves, and we jump forward to 2 AM. The window is still open- apparently no nurse was on duty. Perhaps the hospital thought Beverly Hope Atkinson’s character did such a good job on the day shift that the patients could just cruise along through the night. We hear a bat squeaking, and Angelique appears. She bites Tom.

In Barnabas’ first weeks on Dark Shadows, the show made heavy use of the idea that vampires can enter a lodging only when they have been invited. For example, he went to the diner after hours so that Maggie would have to invite him in, and later went to her house and stood just outside the front door for a noticeably long time before she explicitly asked him to enter. They haven’t done anything with that idea in a long time, but neither have they very clearly contradicted it. Perhaps Joe’s opening of the window is the invitation Angelique needs to make her way into the hospital.

Episode 496: A walking dead man

In the 1790s, wicked witch Angelique turned scion Barnabas Collins into a vampire. When Barnabas realized what she had done to him, he killed Angelique.

In 1967, Barnabas was freed from a long captivity once more to prey upon the living. In 1968, Angelique also returned. Wearing a black wig and calling herself Cassandra, Angelique met sarcastic dandy Roger, ensorcelled him into marrying her, and thereby established herself as a resident of the great house of Collinwood. Wiggéd witch Angelique/ Cassandra found that Barnabas’ vampirism had gone into remission as a result of treatments he had received from mad scientist Eric Lang. She killed Lang before he could complete the process meant to make the cure permanent, but the senior mad scientist in the area, Barnabas’ friend Julia Hoffman, finished his work.

Angelique/ Cassandra and Julia know these facts about each other, but it is unclear how much Angelique/ Cassandra knows about Lang’s process. In particular, when today’s episode begins we do not know whether she has figured out that the main part of it was building a Frankenstein’s monster named Adam and trying to transfer Barnabas’ “life force” into him. Still less do we know whether Angelique/ Cassandra is aware that when Julia took over the experiment she brought Adam to life without killing Barnabas, and that as long as Adam is alive Barnabas will be free of the effects of the vampire curse.

Julia lives at Collinwood as a permanent guest. Today’s episode opens with her and Angelique/ Cassandra coming home, both smiling and chirpy, talking about an exciting conversation they had while they were out together. They had visited Angelique/ Cassandra’s former professor, Timothy Eliot Stokes. Stokes is an expert on paranormal phenomena. In #488 Barnabas told Stokes that Angelique/ Cassandra was a witch and he resolved to join Julia and Barnabas in the battle against her. Julia tells Roger that the exciting conversation she and Angelique/ Cassandra had at Stokes’ home was about the occult.

Considering what these three people know about each other, this conversation would have been fascinating to watch. Julia and Stokes want to probe for Angelique/ Cassandra’s weaknesses; she wants to make sure neither of them has any powers she doesn’t know about, to find out their plans, and if possible to bring them under her influence. Properly written and played by actors as accomplished as Grayson Hall, Lara Parker, and Thayer David, that scene might have been one of the highlights of the whole series. But it doesn’t happen. They just tell us about it in the first 30 seconds of the episode, then move on. It’s one of the major what-ifs of Dark Shadows.

Yesterday Adam escaped from the cell in the basement of Barnabas’ house where he has been confined and met several members of the family who live in the great house. They spend the day recapping that incident. Roger tells Cassandra that Adam seemed to know Barnabas, and she is all ears. It quickly becomes clear that Adam’s existence is news to her, that she is putting everything together, and that Adam is now in grave danger from her.

Angelique/ Cassandra takes in the news Roger has brought her. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

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 402: Name the witch

Well-meaning governess Vicki is in jail, about to be tried on a capital charge of witchcraft. That couldn’t happen in the New England that existed in 1795 in our timeband, but many things were possible in the world of Dark Shadows that we don’t see in ours.

Gallant gentleman Barnabas Collins has figured out that Vicki is innocent and that the real witch is his new wife, Angelique. Rather than go to the authorities with his evidence, he decides to take a more direct approach and murder Angelique. That won’t be much use to Vicki, but Barnabas can’t be bothered with details.

The longest sequence of the episode is a farce in which Barnabas pours two glasses of sherry, puts poison in the one he then gives Angelique, and tries to get her to drink. They don’t do “the old switcheroo” and mix up the glasses, but instead go with an equally hoary device of having Barnabas’ mother show up and take Angelique’s glass. Barnabas has to claim the glass is cracked and knock it from her hand.

After the failure of his attempt to poison Angelique, Barnabas opens a hidden compartment of his desk and takes out a dagger. If it weren’t for Robert Cobert’s solemn musical score, the effect would be that of seeing Wile E. Coyote open yet another crate from the Acme Corporation. He goes up to Angelique’s bedroom and lifts the dagger. Since there has been no indication that she has got into her bed, and all we see on it are a lump of covers, the audience has no reason to suppose she is in there. We end with the distinct impression that Barnabas, having barely avoided matricide, is stabbing a mattress.

We first knew Barnabas in the year 1967, when he will be a vampire and will develop from a profoundly bleak presence and an urgent threat to our favorite characters into a comic villain for whom we can’t help but feel a kind of affection as we watch him fail again and again in his elaborate schemes. In that way, his maladroit attempts on Angelique’s life today are entirely typical of the Barnabas we had met before Vicki traveled back in time in November.

In another way, this episode represents one of the biggest retcons in the whole series. Throughout his first eight months on the show, Barnabas nursed a bitter hatred for his uncle Jeremiah Collins. In the first weeks of the 1795 segment, we saw that Jeremiah eloped with Barnabas’ beloved fiancée, the gracious Josette, and that Barnabas responded to this betrayal by killing Jeremiah in a duel. When Barnabas is talking today about Angelique’s black magic, he realizes that Jeremiah and Josette ran off together only because they were under a spell, and that neither was responsible for betraying him. He has no hostility left for Jeremiah.

In the various accounts the vampire Barnabas gave in 1967 of his last years as a living being, he never mentioned Angelique. Nor did he ever say that he, Josette, or Jeremiah had been the victim of witchcraft. Instead, he had indicated that he himself had gotten involved in black magic. In #345, he told his sometime friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, that he became a vampire after trying to gain eternal youth, and that Josette killed herself when he offered her that eternal youth. In #358, he uses “the secret magic number of the universe,” which he had learned while studying witchcraft under a warlock on Barbados, to torment Julia. The Barnabas we met when we came to 1795 hadn’t done any of that. Until he learned the truth about Angelique, Barnabas was a man of the Enlightenment and didn’t believe that witches even existed.

Perhaps this is a change Vicki’s arrival and her bizarre behavior have wrought. The stories Barnabas tells in #345 and #358 both took place years after Josette and Jeremiah were married. So perhaps in the original timeline, with no one around yammering about what the first 73 weeks of the show were like, events moved much more slowly. The change of loves took place gradually enough that Barnabas did not feel he had to challenge Jeremiah to a duel, but he was still full of hatred and resentment. Angelique was able to cover her tracks so that no one suspected witchcraft was underway. She gradually lured Barnabas into the occult arts, perhaps giving up the idea of marrying him at some point, certainly losing his attention. By the time he brought the vampire curse on himself, the version of Barnabas in that timeline would have forgotten Angelique and would have come to be consumed by his grievance against Jeremiah. That fits far better with the April-November 1967 Barnabas than does the character we have seen so far in 1795.

Barnabas asks a key question in this episode. When Angelique says that she will always love him, he asks her what she thinks love is. She answers “Why of course I do!,” which probably means that the script called for him to ask if she knew what love was, but “What do you think love is, Angelique?” is a better question. She’s been destroying every relationship that makes him the man he is in order to have him all to herself, suggesting that if Barnabas pressed Angelique to explain what love is, she would wind up saying that it means having total control over someone. As a vampire, that’s going to be Barnabas’ working definition too, suggesting that he will be more like Angelique then than he already is now.

In this episode, the portrait of Josette is delivered to Barnabas’ home, the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. This portrait, haunted by Josette’s ghost, was the dominant presence in the Old House from its first appearance in #70 until Barnabas moved back in there in #221, and was important as a symbol of Barnabas’ obsession with Josette thereafter. The makers of the show left it on the wall of Josette’s bedroom at the beginning of the 1795 segment; we see it there in #374, but they replace it with a different portrait in #377. It’s hard to understand why it would already have been there before Josette formally became a member of the family- perhaps it was just a slip-up that it was there in #374, and they’d always planned to show its arrival at Collinwood.

The portrait of Josette arrives at the Old House. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 395: Stay on as master of the Old House

It is 1795. In the foyer of the great house of Collinwood, young gentleman Barnabas Collins stands on the staircase, his father Joshua stands on the floor. Joshua forbids Barnabas to marry lady’s maid Angelique on pain of disinheritance; when Barnabas declares he will marry her anyway, Joshua announces that they are no longer father and son.

Barnabas on the stairs, Joshua standing on the floor. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

In 1967, Barnabas will return to Collinwood as a vampire. In that year, in episode #214, he will take well-meaning governess Vicki on a guided tour of the foyer of the old manor house, indicate the staircase there, and say that “On these stairs, a father and son hurled words at each other, words that would lead to the death of the son.” He will then begin laughing maniacally and repeat the words “The death!,” seeing the desperate irony of referring to his own death in the past tense.

By today’s episode, the Collinses have moved out of the old manor house without any shocking scenes between Barnabas and Joshua playing out on the stairs there. That isn’t so surprising- that one remark eight months ago was the only reference to the stairs as the site of a fateful quarrel between Barnabas and Joshua, and the writer responsible for that day’s script, Malcolm Marmorstein, has been gone and forgotten since August. Neither today’s screenwriter, Gordon Russell, nor his colleague, Sam Hall, was with the show when Barnabas gave that speech to Vicki, and the third member of the writing staff, Ron Sproat, has been in the background for most of the 1795 segment so far.

But they do go out of their way to put Barnabas on the stairs of the new house for his showdown with Joshua today. It seems likely that they are hoping that at least some viewers will remember Barnabas’ remark in #214 and look for a significance in the connection. They did that sort of thing all the time in the early months of the show. For example, when they were developing a murder mystery about the death of beloved local man Bill Malloy in the last four months of 1966, they would show us a clock face in one episode, then weeks later have a character lie about the time established by that clock. Sproat more or less put a stop to those kinds of wild over-estimations of the audience’s attention span when he joined the writing staff near the end of 1966, but ever since the vampire story began in April of 1967 they had acquired obsessive fans who sent letters and gathered outside the studio. So they do have a reason to try to close the loop on a very long and very slender thread. What might the significance be of this particular nod to Barnabas’ first days on the show?

The 1795 segment began when the ghost of Barnabas’ little sister Sarah took possession of Vicki at a séance in #365, announced she wanted to “tell the story from the beginning,” and hurled Vicki back to her own time as a living being. But it is not simply a flashback explaining what made Barnabas a vampire. Vicki has completely failed to adapt to her new environment, and as a result has made significant changes to the timeline. She is now in hiding, suspected of witchcraft because of her endless stream of bizarre words and actions.

In fact, there is a witch at Collinwood. It is Angelique. Presumably, the first time these events took place Angelique pinned responsibility for her crimes on Sarah’s proper governess, Phyllis Wick. We caught a glimpse of Phyllis in #365; we could tell, not only that she was indigenous to the eighteenth century, but that she was quite cautious about anything that might suggest the paranormal. It would have taken Angelique some time and effort to set Phyllis up as a patsy, while Vicki volunteered for the role without any action at all on Angelique’s part. So maybe Vicki has speeded everything up. Maybe the family was still in the Old House when Joshua disowned Barnabas in the original sequence of events, but Vicki’s blunderings have accelerated matters so that they moved out before the conflict between them came to a head.

There is another puzzle about the writers’ intentions in this episode. It is established that without his inheritance or his position in the family business, Barnabas will be in a most parlous state. In separate scenes, both Barnabas and Joshua talk about the impossibility of Barnabas finding a job in Collinsport. Barnabas tells Angelique they will have to go at least as far as Boston before they can find anyone who will risk Joshua’s displeasure by hiring him. Later, Joshua tells Naomi that Barnabas won’t even be able to reach Boston- he doesn’t have enough money and won’t be able to get enough credit to stay in an inn, and he has no friends who will so much as put him up for a night if they know he doesn’t have an inheritance coming.

Barnabas’ mother, Naomi, has a solution to his financial problems. She gives him the Old House. The Old House is supposed to be a huge mansion, which it takes a very substantial income to maintain. How a man who can’t even afford a room for the night is going to meet those expenses is not made clear.

The frustrating thing about this is that they dwell at such length about the hard realities of dollars and cents immediately before, and then again after, Naomi makes her gift. By the laws of Soap Opera Land, a character who possesses a symbol of wealth such as a mansion does not need an income. We can accept that convention, and do in the 1967 segment, when a moneyless Barnabas occupies the Old House and can pay for all sorts of expensive things. But today they keep rubbing our faces in the implausibility of it.

My wife, Mrs Acilius, suggested they could have presented both themes if they’d dealt with the realistic financial problems in one episode and in a subsequent episode had gone back to the fantasy world. Maybe Joshua disinherits Barnabas on a Friday, he worries about getting a job on Monday, Tuesday we watch someone try to introduce Vicki to the concept of “lying,” Wednesday we see caddish naval officer Nathan woo feather-headed heiress Millicent, Thursday much-put-upon servant Ben Stokes tries to escape from the spell with which Angelique controls him, and then comes another Friday, when Naomi waves her magic wand and gives Barnabas the house. But as it stands, Barnabas talks to Angelique about how they have to go hundreds of miles to eke out a bare subsistence, Joshua talks to Naomi about Barnabas’ impending poverty, and then all of a sudden they remember that none of that matters, sorry sorry we shouldn’t have bothered you with it.

There were times in 1966 and 1967 when Dark Shadows only had one viable storyline, and no readily apparent means of starting others. But now they have several stories in progress, and an abundance of lively characters with whom they can make as many more as they like. There is no need for events in any one plot-line to move so quickly that incompatible themes crash into each other with such an unfortunate result.

Naomi’s gift to Barnabas was legally impossible in 1795. Until 1821, Maine was part of Massachusetts, and married women could not own property in Massachusetts until 1822. Maine did not pass its own Married Women’s Property Act until 1844. The show never brings this up, so it isn’t the same kind of problem as Barnabas’ lack of income.

Still, it does represent a missed opportunity. If Naomi’s family of origin had owned the house, they might have placed it in a trust over which she would have enough influence to deliver it to her son against her husband’s wishes. In fact, the show never makes the slightest allusion to where Naomi came from. If they’d given her relatives of her own, she would have had potential allies in a clash with Joshua and potential goals to pursue independently of him. As it stands, they have put her firmly in his shadow, so that the category of possible stories about Naomi is a subset of stories about Joshua. That’s a sad situation for a character who is capable of the dynamism she shows today, and a criminal waste of the talents of an actress as accomplished as Joan Bennett.

In place of episode 391: Jonathan Frid reads “The Water Ghost of Harrowby Hall”

It used to be customary in many parts of the English-speaking world to tell ghost stories at Christmas. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is today the most famous of these stories, and it was dramatized in 2021 by the surviving members of the Dark Shadows cast.

But there are many others. John Kendrick Bangs’ “Water Ghost of Harrowby Hall” is one. Here is a recording of Jonathan Frid’s dramatic reading of it. He did it in the fall of 1969, and it was posted to YouTube by Frid’s close friend and longtime business partner Mary O’Leary in 2022.

The story echoes Dark Shadows at several points, most obviously when we hear about a ghost which, like that of Bill Malloy in #85, leaves pieces of the sea in its wake, and when we hear about a maiden who, like so many in the series, jumps off a seaside cliff and finds a watery grave at its foot.

When we listened to it, my reaction prompted my wife, Mrs Acilius, to say that I was “trying to ruin it, like you always do.” I’d pointed out that the Oglethorpes spend the whole story trying to build structures to contain the water that the ghost brings with her. Surely the logical thing would be to build a drain to sluice it all out of the house.

When Mrs A said that this would leave them without a story to tell, I protested that it should give them a more interesting story. Let them make a series of unsuccessful attempts to keep the water out, then an unsuccessful attempt to keep it in, and finally construct a means of draining it out. That would set you up for an ending where you see that the drainage, even though it might be mechanically successful, will still be an unsatisfactory response to the real problem, which is not the water at all but the curse of which the water is a symptom. That led her to agree that I was not “trying to ruin it,” which is about all I could hope for, I suppose.

Episode 386: Innocent until proved innocent

For the first nine months it was on the air, Dark Shadows was the story of well-meaning governess Vicki Winters and her efforts to befriend her charge, strange and troubled boy David Collins. That phase of the show reached a climax with the story of David’s mother, blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, who was on from December 1966 until March 1967. Vicki rallied the regular characters in opposition to Laura’s evil plans for David, and when Laura went up in smoke David found refuge in Vicki’s arms. He had exchanged his destructive, death-oriented mother for the loving, life-affirming Vicki. At that moment, Dark Shadows version 1.0 ended.

Now, Vicki has been thrust back in time to the year 1795. Vicki has managed to get another job as governess on the great estate of Collinwood, supervising the education of ten year old Sarah Collins and her second cousin once removed, the visiting (but so far unseen) Daniel Collins. There is a blonde fire witch here as well, the mysterious Angelique. Viewers who have been with the show from the beginning will remember Vicki’s leadership of the campaign against Laura, and are waiting to see how she will take charge of the effort to defeat Angelique.

It’s already been a long wait. Vicki has not adapted her thinking at all to her new surroundings. Angelique’s spells have wrought considerable havoc, and members of the Collins household have begun to wonder whether a witch might be at work among them. Angelique hasn’t lifted a finger to deflect suspicion to Vicki, but Vicki’s own behavior has been so bizarre that she is the obvious suspect. As we open today, she has been tied to a tree by the Rev’d Mr Trask, a visiting witch-hunter from Salem, Massachusetts.

Vicki’s ineptitude is particularly frustrating to watch because the major theme of Dark Shadows 2.0, which ran from Laura’s immolation in March to Vicki’s temporal displacement in November, had been a brilliantly successful deception by a different sort of time-traveler. Vampire Barnabas Collins presented himself to the Collinses and their neighbors, not as a blood-sucking ghoul native to another century, but as a distant cousin from contemporary England. Barnabas made plenty of slips and raised miscellaneous suspicions in the minds of various people, but he played his part well enough that the Collinses let him take possession of a house on their estate, the people of Collinsport accepted him as a member of the local aristocracy, and in one way or another he made himself indispensable to everyone around him. We began this version 3.0 expecting to see Vicki do in 1795 something like what Barnabas had done in 1967, and instead we see her as a tedious dingbat.

Barnabas is alive and benevolent in 1795. He and his friend, caddish naval officer Nathan Forbes, are men of the Enlightenment who are appalled that there are still people who believe in witchcraft. They hold Trask in contempt and are committed to saving Vicki from him. Barnabas and Nathan ask the Collins family’s house-guest, the Countess DuPrés, what Trask has done with Vicki. The countess had originally believed Vicki to be a witch, but after seeing Trask’s lunatic behavior while interrogating her came to regret her involvement in bringing him to Collinwood. She tells them that Trask tied Vicki up and took her out of the house, whither he would not say.

Outraged, the men head out of the house. They meet Trask coming in. He refuses to tell them where he has left Vicki. Barnabas thunders that “[I]t perhaps has escaped your memory that we have just fought a war recently-a war to establish certain rights. And I am defending the right of this girl to be judged innocent until she is proved innocent. I am sure that this idea is a little complicated for your mind to absorb.” He’s probably right about that, I certainly find it difficult to absorb.

“Innocent until she is proved innocent!” Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Once Barnabas and Nathan are on their way to look for Vicki, Trask tells the countess he has tied her to a tree somewhere in the woods and that if she is a witch, the tree will be dead by morning. Angelique’s regular job is as the countess’ maid. She is in the room with a tea tray when Trask says this, and she smiles delightedly when she hears it. Later, she will sneak out of the house to go searching for Vicki herself.

Barnabas and Nathan find Vicki and untie her. They decide to hide her in the great house of Collinwood. The great house is Vicki’s home in the 1960s, and is under construction in 1795. They set off, and Angelique comes to the tree.

Once she is alone, Angelique takes a cutting from the tree and sets fire to it. This causes the tree itself to burn. It is not entirely clear why she doesn’t just set fire to the tree, since the cutting she has taken is the greenest and least flammable part of it, but witches gonna witch, I guess.

Building a fire the witchy way. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The next morning, Trask goes to the tree. The countess insists on accompanying him. They find that Vicki is gone and the tree is a hunk of scorched timber. Trask triumphantly silences the countess’ doubts.

In our time-band, the last witchcraft trial in the English-speaking world was held in Scotland in 1727. The Westminster Parliament finally abolished all laws against witchcraft in 1736, including those still on the books in Massachusetts* and some other British colonies in North America. Had they lived in our 1795, Barnabas and Nathan could have gone to the constable and reported that Trask had abducted Vicki, bound her, and left her outside. The constable would help them find her, arrest Trask, and that would be it. But of course Dark Shadows takes place in a world that differs from ours in many respects, not least in regard to the legal history of Massachusetts.

As the countess, Grayson Hall has been doing an excellent job establishing a character who is distinct from mad scientist Julia Hoffman, the role she plays in the segments of Dark Shadows set in the twentieth century. But as my wife, Mrs Acilius, points out, Hall does lapse into Julia a few times today. When she gasps in horror, she makes a little clicking noise in the back of her throat that is one of Julia’s most recognizable mannerisms. Julia is deeply entangled with Barnabas’ activities, and has developed an emotional attachment to go along with her inability to get away from him; shortly before Vicki took us with her to 1795, we heard Julia address him with a deeply felt “Barnabas, Barnabas.” The countess barely knows Barnabas, but in an anguished moment today, she says “Barnabas, Barnabas” to him. Hall does return to being the countess before the episode is over, but there is a weird little visit from Julia in the middle of it all.

Vicki went back to the past after Sarah’s ghost took possession of her at a séance and said she was going to “tell the story from the beginning.” Vicki has traded places with Sarah’s original governess, a woman named Phyllis Wick. Presumably Angelique chose Phyllis as a patsy, and she wound up as Trask’s target. Maybe Angelique did this simply because Phyllis was new to the house and had no old friends to object that she couldn’t possibly be a witch, but maybe it was because she had caught on to Angelique.

It would make it all the more exciting to see Vicki catch on to Angelique and do battle with her. We’ve already seen Smart Vicki defeat one blonde fire witch, so if we see her try to fight another, we will hope that she might win again. Only when we saw the attempt end in disaster would we realize that everything we’ve seen Vicki doing is what Phyllis Wick did the first time around, and that her intervention won’t have changed a thing. That would be a powerful twist ending to the whole 1795 flashback. Instead, we are subjected to Dumb Vicki doing things neither Phyllis nor anyone else who belonged in 1795 could possibly have done, and we end up wondering what she is doing in this story.

*Collinsport is in Maine, which until 1821 was part of Massachusetts.

Episode 382: The devil sent one of his minions

Haughty overlord Joshua Collins, master of the estate of Collinwood in this year 1795, has gone missing. His sister, repressed spinster Abigail Collins, is convinced this is the result of witchcraft. One of the Collinses’ house-guests, the Countess DuPrés, agrees with Abigail, and like Abigail is sure that the witch is well-meaning governess Victoria Winters (whom we know as “Vicki.”) Abigail and the countess also blame Vicki’s black magic for the fact that Joshua’s brother Jeremiah and the countess’ niece Josette have apparently eloped, jilting Josette’s fiancé. That sad man is Jeremiah’s nephew and Joshua’s son, Barnabas Collins.

In fact, Vicki is the audience’s point-of-view character. One night in 1967, she was attending a séance, attempting to contact the ghost of Joshua’s ten year old daughter Sarah, when Sarah spoke through her, said she wanted to tell the whole story from the beginning, and yanked Vicki back through time to 1795, while her own governess Phyllis Wick took Vicki’s place at the table. Vicki can hardly tell this story, and the makers of Dark Shadows have decided not to show her being a con artist, or doing anything else interesting. So Vicki flails about, calling attention to the fact that she is profoundly alien to her surroundings.

If Sarah brought Vicki back to her own time so that she could see what happened then, Vicki’s failure to pick up where Phyllis Wick left off would seem to defeat her plan. Surely Phyllis didn’t go around telling everyone she met that they are being played by actors who had other parts in the first 73 weeks of the show, or constantly blurt out information that she learned from reading the Collins family history. Nor did she show up carrying a copy of that history and wearing clothes from 1967. In the first episode of the 1795 arc, we learned that Phyllis’ carriage overturned, that she is missing, and everyone else aboard is dead. If Vicki was going to become a part of what already happened, she should have been found at the scene of that accident, wearing Phyllis’ clothes and suffering a minor injury that left her unable to speak until she figured out when she was and that she had to pretend to be Phyllis.

Today, we begin with a shot of Vicki being silent while her voice plays in the background, thinking that she must somehow keep from verbalizing her every thought. This might not seem like a great challenge, but she hasn’t managed it yet. The countess enters and confronts Vicki about the evil she believes she has done. Vicki can only feign ignorance and run away.

We cut to the lady of the house, Joshua’s wife Naomi. Naomi is an alcoholic, a fact of which we are reminded when virtually every scene she is in begins with a shot of her alone, pouring herself a drink. This scene is no exception.

Naomi’s theme. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Abigail enters. After nagging Naomi about her drinking, she denounces Josette for being French and Vicki for being a witch. Naomi likes Vicki and dismisses the idea that she is a witch. She also likes Josette, but can’t deny that she is French.

The countess joins them. She is just as French as her niece, but Abigail is willing to overlook that fault, since they share a desire to persecute Vicki. Naomi resists their arguments.

Abigail and the countess make their case to Naomi. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Unable to persuade Naomi, Abigail goes on her own authority to Vicki’s room. She tells her Naomi wants to see her at once. Vicki asks her if she will be coming along. Abigail says she will stay in Vicki’s room. Vicki says she wouldn’t stay in Abigail’s room without her permission; Abigail replies “You don’t own this house. We do.” As the governess in the house in 1967, Vicki may have had an expectation of privacy in her room, but that is clearly not the case in 1795.

Vicki exits, and Abigail starts to rummage through Vicki’s things. Since she was looking through the family history right before Abigail came in, we expect her to find that book, which would be a pretty hard thing to explain. Before she can, a cat that had been squatting on Vicki’s bed disappears in a puff of smoke and Joshua takes its place.

Look who’s back. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Returning viewers know that the wicked witch is the countess’ maid Angelique, and that Angelique turned Joshua into a cat last week for reasons of her own. Abigail doesn’t know anything about that, and she is so discombobulated by the experience that she calls her brother “Josh.. ua!” As soon as he stands up, she faints in his arms.

Back in Naomi’s room, she and the countess are questioning Vicki about her life before coming to Collinwood and her many strange utterances since. Vicki pleads amnesia about the first topic and makes feeble responses about the second. Even so, Naomi is satisfied. Then Abigail and Joshua enter.

Joshua remembers nothing about his time as a cat, and is shocked by the news about Jeremiah and Josette’s disappearance. He and Naomi send Victoria downstairs to do some chores, and excuse Abigail and the countess.

Abigail and the countess let themselves into Vicki’s room and start searching through her things. They find the clothes she was wearing when she showed up. In them they discover a charm bracelet. Among the charms is a cartoon devil.

Abigail and the countess find the evidence. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The ladies are horrified by this blasphemous thing. Abigail says that she will write to a clergyman in Salem, Massachusetts, a Reverend Trask. The countess is glad to hear that the Reverend Trask has a way with witches.

We can only wonder whether Abigail and the countess called on the Reverend Trask to investigate Phyllis Wick in the original timeline, and if so, what it was about her that aroused their suspicions. Perhaps Angelique simply chose her as a convenient patsy. Or maybe Phyllis made some decisions that generated an interesting story leading up to it. Either way, it would have been significantly different from Vicki’s woeful blunderings.