Version 4.0 of Dark Shadows began in #466 when old world gentleman Barnabas Collins was cured of vampirism and ended in #637 when Barnabas and his friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, found that witch-turned-vampire Angelique had departed the scene. That version was a Monster Mash in which the main attractions of all Universal Studios horror hits of the 1930s found their counterparts. Version 5.0 is focused on just two monsters, a werewolf and a ghost. The werewolf is Chris Jennings, brother of nine year old Amy. The ghost is Quentin Collins, who is obsessing Amy and her friend, strange and troubled boy David Collins.
Today is taken up with two problems of plot mechanics. First, Barnabas is the undisputed star of the show, and he does not have any particular connection to either of the ongoing stories. Second, well-meaning governess Vicki is too familiar with the supernatural, too secure in her place in the great house of Collinwood, and too familiar to the audience to permit Amy and David to figure in a story based on Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, even if that story is inverted so that it is the children who see the ghosts and the governess who doubts them.
Today, Vicki’s husband, a repellent man known variously as Peter and Jeff, returns from the dead and takes her with him. He materializes in her bedroom, takes her by the hands, and they both vanish while Barnabas and matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard look on. That solves the second problem.
Peter/ Jeff and Fake Vicki vanish as Barnabas and Liz look on. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Liz’ brother Roger solves the first problem when he asks Barnabas to hang around the house while he is away on a business trip to London. Barnabas will therefore be on the spot while the children cope with “The Haunting of Collinwood.”
The opening narration is delivered by Roger Davis, who plays Peter/ Jeff. This not only produces a sinking feeling in regular viewers who recognize Mr Davis’ voice and realize that his absence these last few weeks was only a temporary reprieve, it also spoils the surprise when Peter/ Jeff shows up.
This is the last of Betsy Durkin’s 10 appearances as Vicki. The part originated in #1 as the audience’s main point of view character; then and for the next 126 weeks, she was played by Alexandra Moltke Isles. By the time Mrs Isles left the show, Vicki had long since run out of story, and was saddled with the hopelessly unappealing Mr Davis as her primary scene partner. Inheriting those difficulties, Miss Durkin never had a chance to establish herself as part of the show.
Cavada Humphrey plays Madame Janet Findley, a medium who has come to the great house of Collinwood and is doing battle with the ghost of Quentin Collins. This battle takes the form of Humphrey alone in a room arguing with a series of inanimate objects. The only bipedal presence with whom she shares any of the ten minutes she is on camera is that ever-faithful member Dark Shadows’ supporting cast, a skeleton wearing a wig. Her most intense scenes are with Quetin’s record player.
Madame Findley gives Quentin’s record player a piece of her mind. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Humphrey’s style was more like pantomime or puppetry than it was like anything native to screen acting; she strikes a series of poses, and tells the story through them, producing the dialogue as a sort of incidental accompaniment. She has such a complete mastery of this approach that she could hold the audience’s interest for any length of time, regardless of what she had to do or with whom she had to do it. Unfortunately, today is her final appearance- at the end of the episode, Madame Findley falls down the stairs in the foyer of Collinwood, dead.
Madame Findley’s scenes give Humphrey about half the episode’s running time. Most of the rest is taken up with chatter between matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, who is worried about Madame Findley, and permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, MD, who is not.
There are also two scenes with mysterious drifter Chris Jennings. In the first, Chris is in his apartment, dreading the upcoming full moon and feeling guilty about a barmaid he killed during the last one. We know that Chris is a werewolf. Chris’ cousin Joe Haskell knocks on the door and insists he be let in. He tells Chris that he will be leaving town soon, probably forever. Joe chastises Chris for spending so little time with his little sister Amy, who has been staying at Collinwood. Joe mentions that when he was visiting Amy earlier to pass on Chris’ message that he was yet again too busy to see her, she saw a pentagram on his face. Chris knows this means that he will be the werewolf’s next victim, and he is horrified.
Joe has been on the show since #3. From November 1967 to March 1968, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the 1790s, and actor Joel Crothers played roguish naval officer Nathan Forbes. Both as Joe and as Nathan, Crothers has been a mainstay of the show’s appeal, even more so than the bewigged skull. He is about to leave the cast, and he deserves a spectacular exit followed by a huge and long-lasting display of grief. A fatal werewolf attack would fit the bill, especially since the werewolf is, in his human form, one of Joe’s closest relatives and dearest friends. If they play their cards right, Chris could be mournful and racked with guilt about Joe’s death for the rest of the show’s run, even if that goes for decades.
Later, Joe drops by Collinwood to see Julia. Julia specializes in treating monsters, vampires and Frankensteins particularly, so if Chris had disclosed his lycanthropy to her she may well have had a prescription handy. Unfortunately, he doesn’t know about that, so he just demands that Julia give him a super-powerful sedative right away. Julia routinely dispenses sedatives to address any and all conditions, including sleepiness, but she draws the line here. She has never examined Chris, looked at his medical records, or talked with a doctor who has. Still, she does finally agree to prescribe something, though apparently not the knockout drops he was hoping for.
Unique among the narrative arcs in Dark Shadows, the story of Frankenstein’s monster Adam has a clear structure. It consists of a prologue and five acts, with an interlude between the second and third acts.
The prologue is about the process of building a patchwork man and animating him. It begins when mad scientist Eric Lang meets vampire Barnabas Collins in #466 and ends in #490, when Barnabas and another mad scientist, Julia Hoffman, bring Adam to life.
The next two weeks make up Act One of Adam’s story. Vampires and mad scientists are both metaphors for extreme selfishness, and so it is unsurprising that Barnabas and Julia turn out to be the worst possible parents. Though he has the body of a grown man, Adam has just begun to live. Barnabas and Julia lock their newborn in the prison cell in the basement of Barnabas’ house and leave him alone there for hours on end, chaining him to the wall. Robert Rodan’s facial expressions convey the heartbreak of this horrific act of child abuse unforgettably. We can’t help but take his suffering seriously. This is the first major difficulty for the storyline. Barnabas and Julia are the core of Dark Shadows, so that if we feel bad about them, we feel bad about the show.
Act Two begins at the end of #500, when Adam escapes from his cell and fights Barnabas. Adam can speak only a few words, has no idea how people interact with each other, and does not know his own strength. As a result, he hurts everyone he meets. He makes one friend during this period, blind artist Sam Evans. In a moment of confusion, Adam hits Sam in #515, causing an injury that leads to Sam’s death. Again, we pity Adam throughout this period, but can see no way he will be able to contribute anything to the story but more death and sorrow.
In #518, occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes persuaded Adam to come home with him. Adam stays in Stokes’ apartment for some time, learning to talk, to read, and to do various other things. Aside from a few glimpses of these lessons, Adam is off-screen and not involved in the action during this period. That is why I say his time as a guest at Stokes’ place is an interlude, not an Act.
Act Three begins in #539, when Adam has to leave Stokes’ place to avoid the police and heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard lets him live in the long-deserted west wing of the great house of Collinwood. In this period, Adam falls in love with Carolyn. She is attracted to him, but struggles against her feelings. This situation may sound more likely than either severe child abuse or lethal awkwardness to lead to an engaging story, but it suffers from its setting. Week after week, we see Adam cooped up in his dusty little room, alone with books and a chess set. The Creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein reads The Sorrows of Werther, Plutarch’s Lives, and Paradise Lost; Adam reads the poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the works of Sigmund Freud. He is marginally better off than he was in Barnabas’ basement cell, but he is still a prisoner, and it is still depressing to be confined along with him.
In Act Four, Adam is under the influence of suave warlock Nicholas Blair. In #549 Nicholas talks Adam into trying to rape Carolyn; that attack draws a line under their budding romance. By #551, Nicholas has talked Adam into confronting Barnabas and demanding that he build a woman to be his mate. Adam tells Barnabas that if he does not comply, he will murder everyone who lives in the great house of Collinwood, starting with well-meaning governess Vicki. Longtime viewers remember that Vicki spent the first 38 weeks of the show befriending strange and troubled boy David Collins, healing the psychological wounds David had suffered in his early years with his own unsuitable parents. If anyone could help Adam recover from the abuse he himself suffered from Barnabas and Julia in his first two weeks of life, it would be Vicki. His threat to kill her therefore shows just how little hope there is for Adam.
The project to build Adam’s mate reached its climax in #596, when she came to life and was given the name Eve. This began Act Five, which was all about Eve’s unconcealed hatred for Adam. Nicholas persuaded her to pretend to like him in #624; there is a jump cut in that episode which suggests that they may have had sex. Adam found out that she had been faking her interest in him, and murdered her in #626. Nicholas then persuaded him that if Barnabas and Julia could bring Eve’s body back to life, she would have a sweeter temperament. Adam renewed his demands upon them, and they ran the experiment again in #633/634, but it was a total failure, destroying Eve’s body so that it no further attempt would be possible.
Deranged with fury, Adam went to Vicki’s bedroom in the great house to abduct her. Carolyn found him there; she saw him hit Vicki in the face and flatten her. This not only alienated whatever sympathy Carolyn might have retained for Adam, it also shows how far he has come since the days when he was a danger because he didn’t know his own strength. The blow he delivers to Vicki is the same as the one he dealt to Sam, but while Sam wound up in the hospital and eventually died in part because of it, Vicki is only knocked out. He is still a deadly menace, but now he kills intentionally. This is emphasized when he chokes Carolyn in the same way as he had Eve, but she makes a full recovery a bit later.
Adam took Vicki to the laboratory in Barnabas’ basement where the equipment is still set up and Eve’s charred remains are still on a bed. He hooked Vicki up to the equipment and was trying to use it to torture her to death when Barnabas and Julia made their way to him. He laughs at Barnabas. Since the laboratory is only a few steps from the cell where Adam was kept in his early days, it was clear that this was closing the loop on the child abuse theme of Act One. Barnabas shot Adam in the shoulder, ending the threat to Vicki, and Adam escaped.
Stokes is the last friend Adam has left, and he sneaks into his apartment today. The telephone rings; Adam picks it up but does not say anything. Adam had done the same thing in #521, during the interlude when he was staying with Stokes. In those days, he didn’t know what a telephone was. But now, he is consciously trying to be stealthy. He recognizes the voice on the telephone as that of an intensely unpleasant man known variously as Peter and Jeff, and a moment later he picks up a knife. This is a perfectly understandable reaction to any reminder of Peter/ Jeff.
Stokes comes in, and Adam puts the weapon down. Stokes sees his gunshot wounds, and goes to call a doctor. “Not Julia!,” Adam objects, to which Stokes replies with the assurance that “Dr Hoffman is not my resident physician.” Before Adam can explain how he came to be shot, Stokes announces that “I won’t even ask you what has happened. Curiosity is the most boring obsession.” He telephones a doctor whom he calls “Carl,” and says that he knows he can count on his discretion. That Stokes knows a doctor who will come to his apartment, treat a fugitive from justice for a gunshot wound, and as a matter of course keep the matter between them is a sign that he is someone who will be able to look after Adam quite well.
Stokes gives Adam a new shirt. Adam tells him that he despairs of ever being loved because of the prominent scars on his face. Stokes introduces him to the concept of plastic surgery and tells him that the scars should be easy enough to correct. He is talking to Adam about the prospect of a new life when a knock comes at the door. Adam exits, never to be seen again.
One of the big surprises for me on this rewatch of Dark Shadows has been how good an actor Robert Rodan really was. The Adam story was such a downer that Mrs Acilius and I hadn’t liked anything about it before, and Rodan was caught up in our overall rejection of it. But he was excellent every step of the way. Whatever is going to happen to Adam after his exchange with Stokes will happen far from Collinsport, which is to say, not on Dark Shadows, so when we wish for more Rodan on the show we are wishing he could have been cast later as another character. I think his height- 6’6″- probably kept that from happening. Two other actors who are almost as tall as Rodan would become major cast members later. One of those, David Selby, will join the cast in just two weeks, much too soon for Rodan to reappear as someone else. The other, Christopher Pennock, won’t show up until #936, by which time Rodan had moved to Los Angeles.
Rodan did some commercials for Cheer detergent when he was in California. Here he is in a Star Trek themed bit where he wears pointed ears. Evidently he was the laundry officer aboard a Vulcan ship.
Suave warlock Nicholas has had bad news. His boss, Satan, will be recalling him to Hell, and does not plan to send him out to the world of the living again. Satan gave Nicholas two tasks to complete before his time runs out. He is to perform a Black Mass during which he will sacrifice Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town, and afterward take her to Hell with him as his bride. He is also to complete the project he has been working on, forcing mad scientist Julia and old world gentleman Barnabas to resurrect Eve, the mate of Frankenstein’s monster Adam. Yesterday, we saw that Nicholas plans to make Barnabas and Julia use Maggie as the donor of the “life force” that will bring the mate back to life. It was entirely unclear how Maggie could both be sacrificed on Nicholas’ altar and used as the “life force.”
We open today with a reprise of yesterday’s closing sequence, showing Nicholas performing a rite while Maggie lies on his altar. We then cut to the basement of Barnabas’ house, where Eve’s body lies on a bed in a laboratory full of mad science equipment. Barnabas vows to Julia that this is the last time they will ever go through the vivification procedure; she asks “What’s the point of saying that? We’re at Nicholas’ mercy.” The other day, Barnabas confronted Nicholas with some demands, threatening to stop cooperating with his project unless he complied. Nicholas gave some ground in response, suggesting there might yet be some dramatic tension left in his relationship with Barnabas and Julia. But when Julia sounds this note of total defeat she is telling us that their conflict with Nicholas is exhausted, that the Frankenstein story has nowhere to go, and that Barnabas is therefore right and this is the last time we will see them run the experiment.
Julia looks at the body and expresses sympathy for “poor motherless Eve.” “There’s a poem about that,” she says. Indeed there is, and it is an apt reference here. Nicholas’ attachment to the ingenuous Maggie has always been jarringly out of character for him; Ralph Hodgson’s 1913 poem “Eve,” with its juxtaposition of the innocent Eve with the crafty serpent, not only tells a story that is as broadly melodramatic as any episode of Dark Shadows, but also dwells on the incongruity of Eve and the serpent, the sheer strangeness of the fact that they coexist at all. “Here was the strangest pair/ In the world anywhere.”
Yesterday we caught our first glimpse in a long time of a character who, like Maggie, was introduced in the first episode. He was Mr Wells, the innkeeper. Maggie has been with us through all of the show’s transformations, but we hadn’t seen Mr Wells since #61, when Dark Shadows was all about what went on among people while they were drinking coffee together. Seeing him again puts that 1966 show side by side with this dramatization of “The Monster Mash,” and that contrast is as jolting as anything Hodgson manages.
Visitors let themselves into the lab. First comes Nicholas. He is trying to seem cheerful. He comes down the stairs with a bounce in his step and greets Julia and Barnabas with a jokey “Why are my conspirators so reluctant?” He might be trying to evoke the same unholy jollity that we see at the end of Hodgson’s poem, “Picture the lewd delight/ Under the hill tonight/ ‘Eva!’- the toast goes round-/ ‘Eva’ again.” But the imminent prospect of his return to Hell has Nicholas in no jolly mood, and his mask of good cheer falls away the moment Barnabas complains of his untrustworthiness.
It is true that Barnabas’ complaint strikes Nicholas at a most sensitive spot. He tells him that “You seem to specialize in second chances” and gripes that he revived vampire Tom Jennings and left him to do the dirty work of ensuring Tom would never rise again. Giving second chances was the very habit for which Satan reproved Nicholas in #629 when he told him he would soon be returning to Hell. Stung by the echo of his master’s words in Barnabas’ mouth, Nicholas retorts that destroying a vampire must have been “traumatic” for Barnabas, who was until recently a vampire himself. Because of some magical business, Barnabas will revert to that condition if Adam dies, and it is Nicholas’ threat to kill Adam that has compelled him and Julia to assist in his diabolical plan. Having reminded Barnabas and Julia of the source of his power over them, Nicholas composes himself, agrees with Julia that there is no time for quarrels, and leaves the room.
A moment later, Adam enters. Adam hates Barnabas and Julia, believes that Nicholas is his friend, and looks forward to Eve’s resurrection. Barnabas tells Adam he doesn’t want him there, but Nicholas enters with the command “He stays, Mr Collins.” A third visitor follows and shocks Julia and Barnabas even more deeply. It is Maggie.
The rite on the altar dedicated Maggie to Satan, but it did not involve her death. When Julia and Barnabas see that Nicholas has brought Maggie, they declare that they will not go ahead with the procedure. But Maggie declares that she is there of her own free will. Quite calmly, she looks around the laboratory in Barnabas’ basement, and says “I’ve been here so often.” Indeed she has- in May and June of 1967, Barnabas was still a vampire, Maggie was his victim, and he kept her imprisoned in a cell here. Julia used her extraordinary hypnotic abilities to make Maggie forget her ordeal, but this line suggests that she now remembers what Barnabas did to her, and that she is, terrifyingly enough, happy about it.
When Maggie was Barnabas’ prisoner, he was trying to erase her personality and replace it with that of his lost love Josette. Later, the show took us back in time to the year 1795, where we saw Josette when she was alive and realized that she wasn’t on board with Barnabas’ plans then any more than Maggie was in 1967. But it looks like Nicholas has succeeded where Barnabas failed and remade Maggie as a companion fit for a demon. Barnabas is already miserable at being forced to toil in Satan’s cause, and now he goes nuts with jealousy.
Barnabas loudly protests that he will not be a party to the experiment. Nicholas silences him by causing Adam’s heart to beat dangerously fast. Their magic bond gives Adam and Barnabas the connection Alexandre Dumas’ Corsican Brothers had, so that Barnabas also suffers the pain. Julia was originally introduced as Maggie’s doctor, but she long ago betrayed her patient for Barnabas’ sake. She pleads with Maggie to stop Nicholas, but Maggie just smiles and asks “Why should I?” Julia tells her that otherwise Nicholas will kill both Adam and Barnabas. Perfectly relaxed, Maggie responds “Then you stop him. Do what he wants.” Julia capitulates, saying “We’ll use her.”
This glimpse of Evil Maggie is breathtaking for longtime viewers. In #1, Maggie premiered as a wisecracking waitress who was, in the words of the original series bible, “everybody’s pal and nobody’s friend.” Soon, we saw her with her father Sam, the town drunk, and she emerged very clearly as a classic Adult Child of an Alcoholic (ACoA.) In #20, Maggie left behind the short blonde wig she had worn in her first appearances, and from then on she was The Nicest Girl in Town.
When Barnabas first bit Maggie, she went through the phases the vampire’s victim usually experiences, including snappishness towards her loved ones when they try to get between her and the ghoul on whom she is becoming dependent. During her time in Barnabas’ house, her level-headedness and warm-heartedness reasserted themselves, and even when she was in the mental hospital as a psychological wreck after escaping from him she was never far from a display of kindliness. In the eighteenth century flashback, Kathryn Leigh Scott took on the part of Josette. Josette was so unfailingly virtuous that not even Miss Scott could find a way to make her interesting. This brief moment of a Maggie utterly indifferent to the value of human life, even her own, is such an extreme departure that we can immediately see a world of possibilities opening up for her as a character and for Miss Scott as a performer.
Maggie is strapped to a table and Julia and Barnabas get to work. We have seen the procedure often enough that it is far from fresh, but in-universe it is still highly experimental. The equipment doesn’t work as Julia and Barnabas expected; gauges indicate higher readings than they want, and the adjustments that are supposed to bring them down just make them go even higher.
Maggie cries out that she is dying; Eve barely moves. The readings get even worse; Barnabas shuts the apparatus down. Nicholas tries to cast a spell to immobilize Barnabas; he struggles against Nicholas’ power at first, but still smashes the equipment, and soon is free of the spell altogether. Nicholas calls out to his master and pleads “Don’t desert me now!” His powers gone, he runs to Adam and starts trying to choke him, but Adam brushes him aside easily. Nicholas runs away; Barnabas runs after him, saying that he will take the opportunity to kill Nicholas.
Adam is shocked that Nicholas attacked him. He and Julia find that nothing is left of Eve’s body but a skeleton with a wig. Adam sobs, declaring that now he has no one. Adam decides that Barnabas is to blame for Eve’s destruction. He goes upstairs, tells himself that Barnabas “doesn’t deserve to love,” then leaves the house. Later, we see him in the great house of Collinwood. Regular viewers know that Adam has in the past thought of punishing Barnabas by murdering well-meaning governess Vicki, in whom Barnabas does not actually take much interest but whom he frequently claims to love. So we can expect that Friday’s episode will involve some apparent danger to Vicki.
Julia is too busy with Maggie to take any notice of Adam’s doings. The last time Julia ran the experiment, the “life force” donor died. Julia is frightened when she cannot get Maggie to respond to any stimulus. She gives her a shot, and Maggie opens her eyes.
Longtime viewers wonder what Maggie will be like now. If Satan has lost interest in Nicholas, it seems unlikely that the heartless Maggie of a moment ago will stick around. If she returns to her usual sensibilities with her memories of Barnabas’ crimes restored, the show will no longer be able to use the sets representing the houses at Collinwood since Dark Shadows will become a prison drama about the activities of Barnabas and Julia on their respective cell blocks. If she just snaps back to the way she was before she got involved with Nicholas, it will feel like a cheat.
What they actually choose to do is to give Maggie total amnesia. She does not recognize her own name or Nicholas’, refuses to believe she has ever met Julia, and has no idea where she is. Julia tries desperately to reactivate Maggie’s memory. She takes her up to Barnabas’ living room. In a moment longtime viewers will find impossible to believe, Julia takes a music box and plays it for Maggie. She tells her that it once belonged to Josette and that Maggie has heard it many times. Indeed she has- Barnabas forced her to listen to it incessantly during the weeks when he was trying to Josettify her. Julia, who has gone to such great lengths to bury Maggie’s memory of what Barnabas did to her, is now trying to dislodge her recollection of his very worst crimes. When Maggie does not remember the music box, Julia takes her up to Josette’s bedroom, where Barnabas kept her for much of her time as his prisoner. It is simply impossible to imagine what Julia could be thinking at this point.
Meanwhile, Barnabas is skulking in the foliage near the peak of Widow’s Hill. He is eavesdropping on Nicholas, who is pleading with Satan to give him another week to get the Frankenstein project back on track. He dissolves into a process shot depicting flames, and Barnabas smiles the most evil grin anyone has ever managed.
Even though poor motherless Eve is on screen for only a minute or two, doesn’t open her eyes, has no lines, and moves only a couple of fingers and those just barely, they brought Marie Wallace back to play her. That was $333 well spent. Miss Wallace’s presence on screen convinces us that Eve is really dead and that she will not be back. Combined with Maggie’s amnesia, that leaves Nicholas without any connection to an unresolved storyline. The only former underling of his still at large is witch-turned-vampire Angelique, and she had broken from him decisively a couple of weeks ago. When he vanishes, we can accept it as a line drawn under the part of the show in which he was the principal villain.
Eve’s decomposition and Nicholas’ damnation are not the only departures today. This was the final episode directed by John Walter Sullivan. As “Jack Sullivan,” he was credited as an associate director on a great many episodes, from #15 to #549. When John Sedwick left the show in the summer of 1968, Sullivan took over his share of the directing duties, alternating with Lela Swift. He directed a dozen episodes as “Jack Sullivan,” from #504 to #580. He then took the name “Sean Dhu Sullivan,” and directed 50 more. Sullivan was not as accomplished a visual artist as either Swift or Sedwick, and the camera operators had more trouble keeping his episodes in focus than they did either Swift’s or Sedwick’s. But his scenes were never any more confusing than you would have expected, considering the ridiculously convoluted stories the scripts gave him to work with, and he seems to have been as good a director of actors as either of them. The period when he was helming segments happened to be the one when the show had its most explicitly Christian elements, which you might say made him a Sean Dhu for the Goyim,* but I doubt he had anything to do with that.
*This is my only chance to make this joke, please just let me have it.
Two arcs overlap today. Suave warlock Nicholas Blair is in one that is coming to its end, while mysterious drifter Chris Jennings is in one that is beginning.
The fansites I consult when I write these posts vary in how much detail they give about what happens in the episodes. At one pole is John and Christine Scoleri’s Dark Shadows Before I Die, which gives detailed summaries of every plot point, usually illustrating each with at least one screenshot. Their post about this one is no exception.
At the other pole is Patrick McCray and Wallace McBride’s Dark Shadows Daybook. They typically present a brief essay about one key point in an episode. Halfway between the two is Danny Horn’s Dark Shadows Every Day, which occasionally drifts towards one or the other of those extremes and occasionally disregards the episode altogether to focus on some other Dark Shadows related topic, but which as a rule focuses on two or three points and weaves them together as it runs through an overview of the day’s narrative outline. It’s a sign of the thickness of today’s story that not only Danny’s post, but even Patrick’s, approaches a Scoleri-esque level of retelling.
Nicholas is under orders from his boss, Satan, to do two things in a very short time. He must sacrifice Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, in a Black Mass. For this, he will be rewarded with Maggie’s eternal companionship in Hell. He doesn’t exactly seem happy about this, but he does drug Maggie, dress her up, and put her on an altar, so it seems like he’s going to comply.
Nicholas’ other task is to create a humanoid species entirely subject to the spiritual forces of darkness. This would seem like a big project, but he already has a start on it. A male Frankenstein’s monster known as Adam lives in his house, and at Nichol;as’ bidding Adam has coerced mad scientist Julia Hoffman and her friend, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, to revive a female of the same breed known as Eve. As their names suggest, Adam and Eve are to be the parents of this new race of people.
Nicholas finds that Adam has grown reluctant. Eve needs reviving because Adam killed her the first time she was brought to life. She hated Adam and rebelled against Nicholas’ command that she mate with him, and at the end the big guy murdered her. Adam says that if Eve comes back to life with the same personality, he will kill her again. Nicholas tells Adam that the reason Eve was so hard to live with was that the woman who donated the “life force” Julia used to animate her was evil, and that the woman who takes that role when Eve is brought back to life will be very sweet and loving. When Adam is skeptical, Nicholas tells him that Maggie will donate the “life force.” Knowing Maggie, Adam finds this acceptable.
Nicholas doesn’t have time to recruit any other woman, since the experiment must take place tonight. It seems he must be telling Adam the truth about Maggie. Perhaps he will take her to Barnabas’ basement and tell Julia to hook her up to the machinery. But even before the end of the episode, when we see her on the altar, her throat apparently about to be cut, it puzzles returning viewers how this can be. Yesterday Barnabas forced Nicholas to promise he would not harm Maggie in any way, and said that he and Julia would not continue working to revive Eve unless he honored that promise. So it is a mystery how he can expect them to cooperate if he shows up with Maggie and tells them to subject her to a procedure that is more likely than not to kill her.
Meanwhile, Chris is visiting his little sister in the hospital. The hospital is Windcliff, a sanitarium about a hundred miles north of Collinsport; Julia is its nominal head. The sister was first mentioned in #627; her name was “Molly” then. It’s “Amy” now. There’s good precedent for such an identity change. When Julia was first mentioned in #242, she was simply “Dr Hoffman,” and she was “one of the best men in the field” of rare blood diseases. A change from “Molly” to “Amy” isn’t so drastic as that.
Amy reacts blankly to Chris. He offers her a box of paints. He tries to get her to say something in response; at length, she replies “Why didn’t you come before?” He doesn’t have a satisfactory answer to that, and she says “You did what you had to do. You brought me the present. You can go now.” He looks for words to express his wish that he could be with her, and all she hears is that he is about to go away again. He breaks down and promises to stay “right here in Collinsport.” Regular viewers will recognize that as a continuity error, but if we imagine it to be a slip on Chris’ part it is intriguing- he has been so far away for so long that any location in Maine seems like Collinsport. He repeats his promise, and finally she throws her arms around him, bursts into tears, and pleads with him to stay.
This is our introduction to Denise Nickerson. In the hands of another actress, Amy’s transition from suspecting Chris to embracing him could have seemed very pat indeed, but she is so utterly cold to him in the first part of the scene, so subtle in showing signs of hope in the middle of it, and so abrupt when time comes to warm up, that the whole thing plays as a real surprise. When we see that she has those skills, we can be confident that the show will be in good hands as long as Nickerson is part of the cast.
Nickerson and Don Briscoe play part of their scene behind an aquarium. We last saw that aquarium in #276. In that one, we were supposed to be uneasy about Windcliff and about Julia as its director. When we saw her feed the fish, it was a metaphor for her role as the mistress of a strange, self-contained little world whose inhabitants were at her mercy. Julia has been living on the estate of Collinwood for well over a year now, and the only member of Windcliff’s staff whom we see today is a nurse whose bit part was a prize given to beauty contest winner Bobbi Ann Woronko. So our attention is directed not to whoever is in charge of the place, but to Nickerson and Briscoe’s faces distorted in the water as the goldfish pass in front of them. This is rather a heavy-handed way of telling the audience that they are, each in their own way, as much prisoners as are the fish.
Chris has seen the weather report in the newspaper and realized that the moon will be full tonight. This alarms him. Back at the Collinsport Inn, he asks the innkeeper, whom longtime viewers met in #1 and know as Mr Wells, if he can change his room. He wants the most isolated room in the place. He also wants Mr Wells to lock the door from the outside and to leave the door closed no matter what he hears inside. Mr Wells is reluctant, but agrees to all of these conditions.
Even viewers who stumbled onto Dark Shadows never having heard of it would know from what we have seen between Maggie and Nicholas that it is a horror story. Those who have been to the movies will add Chris’ status as a mysterious drifter to his alarm at the full moon and his request to be locked up and left alone no matter what Mr Wells may hear and will come up with the irresistible conclusion that he is a werewolf. They will also be sure that Mr Wells will eventually decide the sounds coming from behind the door are so terrible he cannot leave Chris alone, and that when he unlocks it Chris will kill him. Of course this is exactly what does happen. Our last shot of Mr Wells shows his face streaked with red and blue markings. The red ones presumably signify blood, and the others signify that most TV sets in the USA in 1968 received only in black and white, so blue lines would look like bruises.
Mr Wells, played by veteran character actor and future TV star Conrad Bain, had last appeared in #61. That was one of the longest gaps between appearances by a cast member, though the record belongs to Albert Hinckley, who like Bain appeared in #1. Hinckley, a train conductor in that one, will return playing a doctor in #868. That’s quite an extended absence from the show, but a remarkably short period to make it all the way through medical school, he must have been very bright.
Also in #1 was Alexandra Moltke Isles as well-meaning governess Victoria Winters; Mrs Isles left the show three days before this episode was taped. Victoria was Dark Shadows’ chief protagonist for its first year, and Mrs Isles’ presence in the cast was a powerful reminder of the show’s history even after the character was relegated to the sidelines of the action. Combining her departure with Mr Wells’ on-screen death, it might seem plausible that Maggie, another survivor from the first episode, might really die on Nicholas’ altar.
Dan Curtis often said that the idea for Dark Shadows came to him in a dream about a girl with long black hair taking a journey by train. When he persuaded ABC-TV to let him make a pilot for a series, the most difficult part of the casting process was finding the actress who would embody that girl, whose name came to be Victoria Winters. Alexandra Isles, then still known as Alexandra Moltke, finally emerged as the one person who combined the right physical appearance with a mysterious, otherworldly quality that suggests a figure from a dream.
From Episode 1: The girl on the train. Reflected in the window behind her is Burke Devlin, her original love interest.
Mrs Isles’ casting had an immediate effect on the underlying story in Art Wallace’s original series bible, Shadows on the Wall. Wallace projected a puzzle about Vicki’s origins that would be resolved when it was revealed that she was the child of an extramarital liaison between Paul Stoddard, the long-missing husband of matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, and some unknown woman. Liz’ guilty feelings about Paul would explain her concern for Vicki and her decision to bring her to the great house of Collinwood as governess for her nephew, strange and troubled boy David Collins. Since Vicki would not be a blood relative of the Collins family, it would also leave an option for Vicki to develop a romance with David’s father, Liz’ brother Roger.
From Episode 1: The front doors of Collinwood open for the first time. Liz and Vicki come face to face, and each sees her own reflection in the other.
Wallace did include a note saying that if it was more story-productive, it could turn out that Liz was Vicki’s mother. Liz was played by Joan Bennett, whom Mrs Isles strongly resembled. When Bennett first saw Mrs Isles, she famously mistook her for her own daughter. From the first episode on, the show heavily signaled that Vicki was Liz’ daughter by a man other than Paul. Liz soon treats Vicki so much like a daughter that the only events that would follow from confirming the relationship would be to make some changes to Liz’ will. Since the business aspects of the characters’ lives ceased to generate action after the first few months, that would have been a severe anti-climax. So they wound up dropping the question altogether.
For the first 39 weeks of Dark Shadows, Vicki was its main protagonist. Not many of the storylines worked in those days; the only scenes that reliably clicked were those between Vicki and David. Even though their dialogue was as dreary as anything else in those early scripts, Mrs Isles and David Henesy managed to use their physical movements and the spaces they occupied to tell the story of a young woman persuading a boy to trust her. That version of the show ended with #191, when David ran from the mother who was trying to lure him to his death and flung himself into Vicki’s arms. That completed their story, and left neither character with a clear path forward.
From Episode 191: David turns from his mother and death, embracing Vicki and life.
After #191, the show was on course for the introduction of vampire Barnabas Collins. Vicki kept trying to get close to Barnabas; she even invited herself to spend the night at his house in #285 and #286. But he wouldn’t bite her, and she couldn’t get a foothold in the A-story otherwise. There was an odd meta-fictional side to Vicki in this phase. In-universe, she didn’t know that Barnabas was a vampire, and she certainly didn’t know that she was a character on a soap opera that was coming to be all about him. But her behavior made sense only if she did know those things and was making an effort to reestablish herself as a central figure in the action. I don’t know whether Mrs Isles or any other particular person was lobbying the writers to present her that way, or if it was a response to fan mail. It happened so often and led to so little that it did seem to be coming from somewhere outside the usual creative process behind the scripts.
In November 1967, Vicki came unstuck in time and found herself in the year 1795. She took the audience with her, and for several months the show was a costume drama set in the late eighteenth century. On balance, the result was a triumph. By the time Vicki and the show came back to contemporary dress in March 1968, Dark Shadows had become a real hit, and Barnabas had become one of the major pop culture phenomena of the 1960s. But Vicki did not benefit from that success. When the costume drama insert started, fans had every reason to expect it would revive her character. Barnabas spent most of his time in 1967 scrambling to impersonate a native of the twentieth century; Jonathan Frid would always say that it was in that scramble that he found Barnabas, and that he thought of him first and foremost as a liar. When Vicki turns up in Barnabas’ original period, we look forward to seeing her doing what he did, and trying to pass as his little sister’s governess. Remembering how well Mrs Isles did during the 39 weeks she carried the show on her shoulders, we look forward to her showing us what Vicki can do when she has to think fast.
But that was not to be. Instead, Curtis and his staff chose to write Vicki as an intolerable moron. She introduced herself to every new person by telling them that they are being played by actors who had other parts in the first 73 weeks of the show. Tedious as that habit was, it was compounded when she made one inexplicably idiotic decision after another as she failed utterly to adapt to her new surroundings. That would have been a difficult role to make appealing even if she had shared her screen time with a partner as capable as David Henesy. It became utterly impossible when Vicki made the least intelligible move of all and fell in love with her jailer/ lawyer/ boyfriend/ accomplice Peter Bradford, played by the abusive and shouty Roger Davis. Marooned in scene after scene with Mr Davis, Mrs Isles withered and Vicki became a cipher. By the time the court sentenced Vicki to be put to death for her many crimes, half the audience was on their side.
Shortly after Vicki returned to the 1960s, Barnabas finally bit her. Each of Barnabas’ victims reacted to his bite differently; Vicki’s reaction was perhaps the most unexpected, and certainly the funniest. She was just sort of chill about the whole thing. She showed up when Barnabas summoned her and didn’t object when he told he her she would become his vampire bride for all eternity, but first she had some errands to run, and she was irritated with him when he tried to get her to skip them. When a doctor saw the bite marks on her neck, she did not react with the fear or defensiveness of other victims, but innocently asked “Why are they bad?” She seemed to regard them as just another hickey, the result of Barnabas’ peculiar make-out technique.
Unfortunately, Peter came back to life and ruined Vicki’s relationship with Barnabas. He jumped out in the road in front of her car while she was driving off with Barnabas, causing her to crash. Vicki and Barnabas were taken to the hospital. There, one of the doctors turned out to be a mad scientist who cured Barnabas of vampirism. Once the cure took hold, Vicki forgot all about her time as Barnabas’ victim, and she sunk into a relationship with the irredeemably repellent Peter. Every time we’ve seen her in recent months, she has dragged Peter back to our attention. Mrs Isles has found ways to liven up Vicki’s scenes; she always projected a forceful personality when she was standing near the clock in the foyer of the great house of Collinwood, and she has even managed to coax Roger Davis into playing a couple of scenes competently. Mr Davis never had quite as much to offer as did the clock, but when Mrs Isles could raise her voice and fix him with a steely stare it does seem to have come back to him that he had had a lot of acting lessons and could deliver dialogue interestingly.
Today is Mrs Isles’ last day on the job. We open with a reprise of the end of yesterday’s episode, when Vicki finds the corpse of a strangled woman in the closet in Peter’s room. Peter assures her he doesn’t know how the corpse got there. She tells him they have to call the police. He says he needs time to figure out what happened before they can involve the police; she points out that delaying will only make him look guiltier in their eyes. He tells her that she should leave so that her name won’t be connected with the case; she tells him it is too late for that. We can see why Vicki has faded- she is thinking like a rational person from our world, not like anyone you would meet in Soap Opera Land.
Vicki goes home to Collinwood and tells permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman that Peter is in jail, suspected of murder. She explains that the dead person is a woman Peter knew only as Eve. Julia reacts with shock to the name; Vicki asks if she knew Eve. Julia says of course not, and Vicki tells her she will go wake Roger and ask him to help arrange bail for Peter. She goes into the door leading to the bedrooms, never to be seen again.
In her final appearance, Vicki talks with Julia, her successor as the principal audience-identification character.
Viewers who have been with the show from the beginning will see a loop closing in the idea of Vicki going to Roger’s bedroom while he sleeps. In #4, Roger had tried to let himself into Vicki’s bedroom at night, only to be caught with his hand on the doorknob by Liz. In response to Liz’ threats, Roger told her not to bother him about his “morals,” a choice of words that made it clear that his intentions with regard to Vicki were of a sexual nature. Later in the episode, he and Vicki bantered flirtatiously after he offered her a snifter of brandy; for the first and last time, Vicki sounded like what she was supposed to have been, a street kid from NYC. Roger has long since been stripped of all his villainous qualities; in #585, he and Vicki even shared a scene in her bedroom while she was in her nightgown, and it was all perfectly innocent. In that scene, we not only saw that the old menacing Roger was gone forever, but that Vicki was also reduced to such a humdrum status that a man can enter her bedroom at night without raising an eyebrow. Now that Julia sees nothing out of the ordinary in Vicki dropping in on Roger while he sleeps, that humdrum status is reinforced.
When Vicki first arrived in the village of Collinsport in #1, she met her original love interest, dashing action hero Burke Devlin. Burke told her she had found her way to “the beginning and the end of the world.” We are reminded of the beginning of the world since we know that the man who killed Eve was named Adam. This Adam and Eve are no one’s parents; they share nothing but hostility and death. The episode ends with the wicked Angelique trying to summon up the Devil, a symbol of the end of the world. She herself disappears, apparently destroyed. Burke’s description is finally fulfilled.
The part of Vicki will be recast twice in the months ahead, but those actresses never had a chance to breathe any life into her. The character had lost any reason to be on the show long before Mrs Isles’ departure. In #87, David had trapped Vicki and left her to die; wondering where she was, Roger said, “She came to us from nowhere, and now it seems she has disappeared into nowhere.” And so, at last, it has come to be. The long-haired girl from Dan Curtis’ dream, the image that started it all, has vanished, never to be seen again.
From November 1967 to March 1968, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the years 1795 and 1796. Well-meaning governess Vicki had come unstuck in time, found herself in that period, and failed utterly to adjust to her new surroundings. While she was in gaol charged with witchcraft, she befriended an unpleasant man named Peter, who served as her defense attorney. Peter handled the case so badly that he and Vicki were both sentenced to hang, but they nonetheless fell in love with each other.
Shortly after Vicki was whisked back to the 1960s, she found that Peter had also come back to life. Unfortunately, he had total amnesia covering everything prior to his arrival in the twentieth century, and he became belligerent every time Vicki tried to tell him about himself. These traits did nothing to improve Peter’s already repellent personality, but having fallen in love with him once Vicki remained grimly determined to make a life with him.
The other day, Peter and Vicki were about to get married when a mysterious woman known as Eve presented Peter with evidence that what Vicki has been telling him is true. He ran off to exhume the grave marked with his name and found that the coffin was empty. For some reason he took this to mean that he shouldn’t marry Vicki after all. He has gone back to his room, where he is packing his bags and looking at a train schedule.
Unknown to Peter, there have been two visitors in his room while he was away. Eve came in and called for him, saying aloud that she would “make it all right” for him. A man known as Adam followed her in and overheard this. Adam thus learned that, despite their names, he and Eve would never be a couple. He asked if, when “yesterday, you made me happy- that was a lie, wasn’t it?” She confirmed that it was, that she would never love him, that she had always hated him, and that she found him ugly. That last apparently struck a nerve, because Adam responded with great rage. He choked Eve, and she collapsed.
Vicki drops in on Peter while he is getting ready to leave town. He tells her they cannot be together, and she insists on giving their relationship a second chance. Peter opens his closet to get some more clothes to pack, only to close it quickly. Vicki opens it, and finds Eve’s strangled corpse crumpled on the floor.
There is a genuinely horrifying moment in this episode. Vicki thinks back to the night in the 1790s when she was taken to the gallows, and we see events from her point of view. At one point we see Peter’s face looming towards the camera with his lips puckered. We’ve seen how Roger Davis manhandles his female scene partners, and in particular how miserable Alexandra Moltke Isles is when he kisses her. The sight of him coming at us for a kiss is enough to make even the most seasoned horror viewer flinch.
Mrs Isles read the opening narration of episodes 1-274 in character as Vicki. After she lost her monopoly on the opening narrations, she read more than 100 others, no longer as part of that role. This is the final time she takes on that task. It is also the first time “and Alexandra Moltke as Victoria Winters” is followed on screen by other acting credits.
An eighteenth century homicidal maniac named Danielle Roget was raised from the dead in 1968 to serve a warlock’s evil scheme. Today, she is taking a break. Another witch has sent her back to her original era for a short visit.
Danielle wants to see a man named Peter Bradford, who has also been raised from the dead and whom she has seen several times in 1968. Peter has a collection of intensely annoying habits which serve as a substitute for a personality. Among these is a tendency to fly into a rage whenever anyone calls him by his right name, and to insist that he be called “Jeff Clark” instead. Danielle has traveled back to the 1790s in search of some evidence that will convince him to desist from this tedious practice.
Today we open at the Collinsport gaol. Peter is in a cell, the gaoler and his assistant are reading Peter’s death warrant, and a gallows is under construction outside. Danielle materializes behind the gaolers, and talks with them for a while. They tell her that a woman named “Gloria Winters” was recently hanged for witchcraft. Danielle realizes that they are actually talking about Victoria Winters, who was the chief protagonist of Dark Shadows for about a year. In November 1967, Victoria came unstuck in time and found herself in the year 1795. She was trapped there until March 1968. Victoria’s utter failure to adapt to her new surroundings led to her condemnation as a witch. At the last second she was whisked from the gallows and returned to her own time. The luckless person whose place she had taken when she arrived from the 1960s appeared at the end of the rope and died in her place.
Danielle asks to see Peter. The gaolers escort her into his cell, lock her in with him, and leave them alone together for several minutes. Peter is unhappy to see Danielle, to whom he was once engaged but whose murderous ways have alienated him. He tells her it saddens him that she is free while he, an innocent person, is about to be executed. Indeed, it was Victoria who killed the man Peter was convicted of murdering, and she did it only to prevent that man killing a child. She tried to tell the court what had happened, but since she was already sentenced to hang and was in love with Peter, her testimony did not persuade the judges.
Danielle offers to break Peter out of gaol. He agrees. She tells him she will go to the great house of Collinwood to enlist much-put-upon indentured servant Ben Stokes in her scheme. Ben, she says, could refuse her nothing.
During the flashback that lasted from November 1967 to March 1968, Ben was ensorcelled by wicked witch Angelique. Now we learn that before Angelique came along, he had been under the influence of Danielle, another beautiful woman with an evil heart and a greatly heightened acting style. Perhaps Ben would do better if he looked for a homely, soft-spoken woman.
We cut to Collinwood, where haughty patriarch Joshua Collins is summoning Ben. They discuss Peter’s upcoming hanging and Victoria’s recent one, and lament the injustice of it all. Joshua calls Ben’s attention to a book Victoria brought with her from the twentieth century. It is a highly inaccurate history of the Collins family up to that time. Joshua says that he believes the book is an evil thing and that getting rid of it is the only hope of ending the cascade of horrors that have befallen the family and everyone they know since Victoria first arrived. Joshua orders Ben to take the book deep into the woods and burn it. He tells him something else- he has read the book thoroughly, and will see to it that posterity accepts all of its false reports as true. Rather than risk the world finding out that his son became a vampire, his wife committed suicide, and his cousin married a bounder, he will see that it is published that the son moved to England, the wife died of natural causes, and the cousin was a spinster all her life. Thus we learn how the events we saw during the 1795 segment were kept out of the historical record.
Ben is barely out the front door when Danielle stops him. He is dismayed to see her. He tells her she wasn’t supposed to come back, and refuses to look at her. She says she has a plan to spare Peter. Ben says that her plans always involve hurting someone, and she says that this time it is different. Ben asks if she intends to poison the gaoler. She tosses her head, laughs at the thought, and assures Ben all she will put in the gaoler’s drink is a “harmless drug.” Ben asks if she is sure the man won’t be hurt, and she assures him she has no grievance against him, only a desire for him to sleep long enough to get Peter to safety. At length, Ben agrees to take two horses to the gaol. There won’t be time for him to burn the book first; Danielle takes it from him for safekeeping.
We cut to the office of the gaol, where Danielle has been reading the book. She tells herself that Victoria must have brought it from the 1960s, and that it might be very valuable to her. The gaoler enters, and Danielle tells him she wants to see him after the hanging. He doesn’t understand why; she clarifies that she is making a pass at him. They are an unlikely couple, and he seems dubious of her interest in him. He tells her Peter is writing a note, probably for her, and sends her back to see him.
The gaoler has the look of a man who believes that if a thing seems too good to be true, it probably is. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Peter tells Danielle he has decided not to escape. He hands her a note which he predicts she will have trouble understanding. Delivered by another actor, this might have sounded like an apology for an unsuccessful effort to express a complicated idea, but Roger Davis has a way of spitting out his lines that makes it sound very much like he is telling Danielle she is stupid. The gaoler and his assistant come to take Peter off to be hanged, not a moment too soon.
In the office, Danielle reads the note and is pleased with it. She closes it in the book. Apparently she expects to be able to use both of those items to get Peter to stop boring everyone with his nonsense about being named “Jeff Clark.” The gaoler stands behind her and watches as she fades away, taking the book with her.
The gaoler is played by Tom Gorman. Gorman was on Dark Shadows at least 14 times, until now always as an uncredited background player. His first part was in November 1966, when each episode began with the words “My name is Victoria Winters.” So it really is remarkable when he proclaims “Her name was Gloria Winters!” Despite that spectacular blooper, he does a nifty job playing the gaoler’s confusion and skepticism about Danielle, and it is too bad this is his final appearance.
Nancy Barrett was taken ill not long before shooting began for this episode, and she was replaced in the role of Carolyn Stoddard by Diana Walker. Miss Walker had her sides letter perfect; her only flub comes when she delivers a line in a level conversational tone, and a moment later has to apologize for shouting. She doesn’t seem to have much idea of what was going on in the story, though. Her Carolyn is a calm, practical-minded homemaker of the sort you might find on another daytime soap of the period, not someone who is keeping a stray Frankenstein’s monster in the spare room. Besides, Miss Barrett is probably Dark Shadows’ most reliably entertaining performer, an impossible act for anyone to follow.
Aside from the two actors who at various times filled in for Vince O’Brien in the famously disposable role of Sheriff Patterson, I believe Miss Walker is the only person to have served as a substitute for a temporarily unavailable cast member. Many times, the makers of the show went out of their way to rearrange the shooting schedule or rewrite scripts to avoid substitutions. Many of the show’s fans were extremely young and extremely intense, so I suspect Miss Walker’s mail after this appearance would have included some ugly items that would have confirmed the producers in their reluctance to call up the reserves.
Today is the last time we see Jerry Lacy as lawyer Tony Peterson. Mr Lacy will be back in other roles. In 1969 and 1970, he and Diana Walker were reunited in the original Broadway cast of Play It Again, Sam, in which Mr Lacy scored a triumph with the same Humphrey Bogart imitation that is the basis of Tony’s character, while Miss Walker played Sharon and understudied Nancy.
Suave warlock Nicholas has expressly forbidden his subordinate, the wicked witch known variously as Angelique and Cassandra, from killing Frankenstein’s monster Adam. But now he has twice caught her trying to do just that. He punishes her by stripping her of her powers. He tells her that she is now a human being, and that she will die soon.
Nicholas de-witches Angelique/ Cassandra, while also trying to hold her wig in place. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Angelique/ Cassandra’s husband, sarcastic dandy Roger, comes downstairs and confronts her about her indifference to him. She responds that there never was anything between them and never will be, and rushes out of the house. My wife, Mrs Acilius, is a soap opera fan from way back, and she says that as far as she is concerned this archetypal soap moment makes for a “Genuinely Good Episode.”
Angelique/ Cassandra goes to see recovering vampire Barnabas. He opens the door and asks what she wants. She says that she was once the mistress of the house and that as such she has a right to enter.
Ever since she showed up in the year 1968, Angelique/ Cassandra has been trying Barnabas’ patience and the audience’s by pretending that she was not the witch he married in the 1790s. He asks her why she has dropped that pretense now, and she says that she, like he, has become human. She also says that she will die at dawn. It is unclear why she thinks this- all Nicholas told her was that her life expectancy was to be measured in “minutes.” She declares her intention to kill Barnabas, and is pointing a gun at him when the episode ends.
If it does not lead to her immediate demise, depriving Angelique/ Cassandra of her powers would be an intriguing way of making her a more flexible character. In the costume drama segment set in the late eighteenth century, she was so powerful that she painted herself into a corner, facing no real opposition. The only suspense she could generate came when she was indecisive or distracted and got in her own way. In 1968, her subordination to Nicholas has pushed her to the opposite extreme. She has been very busy, but hasn’t done much. If she survives without her powers, it might be interesting to see her learn how to live as a human after all this time.
Angelique/ Cassandra’s appearance reflects the end of her dual identity perhaps more clearly than was intended. When she answered to the name Angelique in the 1790s, she had blonde hair; when she turned up in 1968 calling herself Cassandra, she wore a black wig. Throughout this episode, the wig keeps sliding around on her head.
This episode includes another of the innumerable replays of an audiotape message about Barnabas and Adam. The other day, it seemed that Nicholas and Cassandra had taped over the message, as undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins taped over a recording she didn’t want parapsychologist Peter Guthrie to hear in #172. But Friday they played it for us yet again. When Nicholas threatens Angelique/ Cassandra with death if she keeps disobeying him, Mrs Acilius said to the screen “I’ll kill you myself if you play that tape again!” I am glad to report that this is the last time we will hear the thing.
Danny Horn’s Dark Shadows Every Day post about this episode juxtaposes screenshots and dialogue from the scene in which Nicholas strips Angelique/ Cassandra of her powers with screenshots and dialogue from a contemporary episode of General Hospital. The contrast is hilarious. It also shows why even the conventionally soapy scenes with Roger and Barnabas stand out from the other daytime dramas of the period. Director Lela Swift’s use of the camera was incomparably more dynamic and ambitious than anything General Hospital was doing, Robert Cobert’s original orchestral score is comprehensible to a modern audience in a way that an organ playing in the background would never be, and the action is paced so that it takes less time for Angelique/ Cassandra to lose her supernatural powers, end her marriage to Roger, and pull a gun on Barnabas than it took Lucille to explain to Audrey that she had an idea about how she could learn to play bridge.
Dark Shadows Commentary 