Dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis spent a week staring at the eighteenth century portrait of Barnabas Collins in the foyer of the great house of Collinwood back in April, then tried to rob Barnabas’ grave. That turned out to be an awkward situation when Willie found that Barnabas wasn’t entirely dead. Barnabas was a vampire who bit Willie, turned him into his sorely bedraggled blood thrall, and had lots of conversations with him. Yesterday, Willie was written out of the show.
Today we open with strange and troubled boy David Collins staring at the same portrait. As Willie was obsessed with the idea that there were jewels hidden in the Collins mausoleum in the old cemetery north of town, where in fact Barnabas’ coffin was hidden, so David is preoccupied with the idea that Barnabas has something terrible stashed in the basement of the Old House on the estate, where in fact his new coffin is hidden. As Willie sneaked off to the cemetery on his ill-starred expedition, David will sneak off to the Old House today and try to search Barnabas’ basement.
Unlike Willie, David is not driven by greed. He is afraid of Barnabas, and his friend, the ten year old ghost of Barnabas’ sister Sarah, has told him that he must not go to the Old House. But his aunt Liz and his father Roger dismiss his attempts to warn them about Barnabas, and he thinks it is his duty to provide them with evidence. So he screws up his courage and makes his way across the property.
David lets himself into the Old House by opening the parlor window. Not only have we seen David do this before, but Willie’s sometime friend, seagoing con man Jason McGuire, got into the house the same way in #274. Barnabas would kill Jason when he reached the basement in #275, so you might think he’d have put a lock on that window by now.
Jason’s fate is certainly on the minds of returning viewers when David tries to open the basement door. It comes as a relief when he finds the door locked. Barnabas’ co-conspirator, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, catches him there.
Julia demands to know what David is doing in the house, and he tries to brazen it out. He claims that he has a right to be there, since it belongs to his Aunt Liz. This is a bit of a murky point- we never see Liz transfer title to Barnabas, but she and others act as if he owns the place and its contents. Julia doesn’t clarify it when she responds that Liz gave the house to Barnabas- she doesn’t deny that it still belongs to Liz, only says that it also belongs to Barnabas.
Back in the great house, Roger is banging away at the piano. We saw Liz play the piano in #47 and #91, a reference to the conception of her character writer Art Wallace developed in his original story bible, titled Shadows on the Wall, in which she, like similar characters in a couple of TV plays he wrote in the 1950s under the title “The House,” gave piano lessons. Since then, Liz’ daughter Carolyn tried her hand at “Chopsticks” in #119 and used the piano as a prop in a teen rebel scene in #258, and Jason poked at a few keys in #198. Roger isn’t exactly Vladimir Horowitz, but he’s the first one we’ve seen who actually achieves a melody.
Liz comes in and tells Roger that David isn’t in his room. They fret over David’s attitude towards Barnabas. Julia brings David home and tells Liz and Roger where she found him. After an angry scene between father and son, David goes upstairs, and Liz scolds Roger for his inept parenting. In these as in all of Liz and Roger’s scenes together, we see a bossy big sister who tries to govern her bratty little brother, but who ultimately abets all of his worst behavior.
In the Old House, Barnabas notices that Julia is troubled. He keeps asking what’s on her mind, and she has difficulty deflecting his questions. This is odd- Julia has been established as a master of deception, and Barnabas is the most selfish creature in the universe. All she has to do is start talking about something that does not affect him directly, and he will lose interest at once. Rather than talk about her personal finances, or the job from which she is apparently on an indefinite leave of absence, or some ache or pain she might have, or how sad she is to miss her Aunt Zelda’s birthday, she brings up Willie. That does get Barnabas’ mind off her tension, but it also reminds him of David. He thinks David knows too much about him, and is thinking of murdering him. Julia assures him that the boy doesn’t know so very much, that whatever he does know he hasn’t told anyone, and that if he does say something his reputation as an overly imaginative child will lead the adults to ignore him.
From the beginning of the series, we’ve heard people say that David is “imaginative.” The audience finds an irony in this, since we have never seen David show any imagination whatsoever. All his stories of ghosts are strictly literal accounts of apparitions he has seen. We’ve seen some drawings he has done and heard quotes from some essays he has written. Some of these are technically accomplished for a person his age, but they are just as literal as his ghost stories. And when he tells lies to cover his various misdeeds, he tells simple little tales that fall apart at once.
In #327, well-meaning governess Vicki became the first character to dissent from the “David is a highly imaginative child” orthodoxy. Liz and local man Burke Devlin were dismissing David’s laboriously accurate account of his latest encounter with Sarah as a sign of his “imagination,” and Vicki interrupted with “I don’t think it has anything to do with his imagination.” Now, Barnabas goes a step further. After pronouncing the word “imaginative” in a truly marvelous way that makes it sound like something I’ve never heard before, he tells Julia that she has given him an idea. Frightened, she asks what he means. All he will say is “You’ll see.”
Roger goes to David’s room and has a friendly talk with his son. Throughout the conversation and afterward, David is thinking intensely, trying hard to figure out what his next step should be.
Once he is alone in the room, the window blows open and a bat enters. More precisely, a bat-shaped marionette is brought in on clearly visible strings by a pole that casts a shadow we can see the entire time, but no one who has been watching the show up to this point will doubt for a second that David’s fear, as depicted by David Henesy, is fully justified. David tries to flee from the bat, but he cannot open the door to escape from his room. His back against the door, David slides onto the floor and screams as the bat comes near him.
When Barnabas is about to attack someone, dogs start howling. Sometimes this works to his advantage, but it so often puts his intended victims on their guard that it doesn’t really seem to be something he is doing on purpose. So this bat represents something new. Perhaps Barnabas is using magic to control a bat- if so, it marks the first time we have seen Barnabas use magic to project influence over something other than a human mind. Or perhaps he himself has assumed the form of a bat. If so, that is the first indication we’ve had that he has shape shifting powers. In either case, Barnabas’ powers have just gone up a level.
Closing Miscellany
The bat was created by famed puppeteer Bil Baird. Most famous today for the puppets he created for “The Lonely Goatherd” sequence in The Sound of Music, Baird was a frequent guest on television programs like The Ed Sullivan Show, and Jim Henson cited Baird’s own TV series, the short lived Life with Snarky Parker, as a major influence on the Muppets. In December 1966, Baird opened a marionette theater in New York City, at 59 Barrow Street in Greenwich Village; it operated until 1978, and many leading puppeteers, including dozens who would go on to work with Henson, were members of its company in those years.
This is the last episode to end with ABC staff announcer Bob Lloyd saying “Dark Shadows is a Dan Curtis production.” We do hear the announcement again in February of 1969, but that won’t be because Lloyd has returned- they used an old recording for the music under the closing credits that day, and they picked one with him on it.
Fans of Dark Shadows will often talk about “the early episodes” which ended with Lloyd making that announcement. So I suppose #330 is the last of “the early episodes.”
Danny Horn’s post about this one on Dark Shadows Every Day includes a morphology of episode endings. He divides them into five categories, Haiku,* Restatement of Threat, ** New Information,*** Crisis Point,**** and Spectacle.***** It’s an intriguing scheme, and he makes a good case for it.
*Danny explains that “Haiku” “aren’t necessarily recognizable as endings in the traditional sense, because nothing is resolved and no progress is made. It’s just a little moment when a character pauses, and possibly has a feeling about something… In some extreme cases, the audience may not realize that the episode is over until halfway through The Dating Game.”
**Restatement of Threat, at this period of Dark Shadows, usually means Barnabas looking at us through his window and saying that someone or other “must die!” Which of course means that you can safely sell a million dollar life insurance policy to that character.
***”A New Information ending provides an actual plot point, which either advances the story another step, or tells us something that we didn’t know.”
****”The Crisis Point cliffhanger is the big game-changer, and for best effect, it should come at the end of a sequence that’s been building up for a while. This is a big turn in the story, and it should feel satisfying and thrilling… The defining feature of a Crisis Point ending is that the resolution marks a change in the status quo, ending one chapter and setting up the next.”
***** “Obviously, plot advancement is always welcome, but every once in a while the show needs to set its sights a little higher. These are the moments when the show goes above and beyond, in order to surprise and dazzle you… The point of a Spectacle is: You can’t take your eyes off the screen. Housewives in the audience have put down the iron, and switched off the vacuum. Teenagers have stopped swatting at their siblings… A Crisis Point cliffhanger will bring you back for the next episode, because you want to see what happens next. But a Spectacle cliffhanger is bigger than that — you’ll be coming back for the next episode, but it’s because you can’t believe what you’re seeing, and maybe tomorrow they’ll do it again.”
Dark Shadows Commentary 