good acting trumps bad writing – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 827: Magnificent, ain’t I?

Rroma chieftain/ New England crime boss King Johnny Romana and his Afro-Romani henchman Istvan have cornered broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi on top of the cliff at Widows’ Hill. King Johnny declares that he will now kill Magda. She is a major character, it’s a Tuesday, and this is the resolution of yesterday’s cliffhanger, so we have three reasons for expecting her to survive.

However, none of the three reasons is as strong as it might at first appear. First, while Magda precipitated every major storyline in the segment of Dark Shadows set in the year 1897, none of those stories needs any further action from her to continue right now. We’ve also had an indication that Grayson Hall’s original character, Julia Hoffman, will soon be returning to the cast. Second, Dark Shadows never followed the traditional soap opera format in which important developments were reserved for week-ending finales. Third, while the great majority of episode-ending cliffhangers fizzled out in the opening seconds of the next installment, occasionally they did go ahead and resolve one with a death. Besides, as my wife Mrs Acilius points out, Magda laid her husband Sandor’s ghost to rest at the top of the episode, and it is called Widows’ Hill because widows go there to die. So there actually is some suspense as to whether King Johnny will make good on his threat.

Time-traveling vampire Barnabas Collins shows up at the last moment and orders King Johnny to release Magda. King Johnny refuses and orders Istvan to throw Barnabas off the cliff. Barnabas looks into Istvan’s eyes, using his power of hypnosis. Once Istvan is under his control, Barnabas compels him to walk off the cliff. King Johnny then realizes who Barnabas is. He holds Barnabas at bay with a cross. Barnabas tells him that he can reclaim what Magda stole from him, but only if he lets her go. At that, King Johnny becomes cooperative. Too bad Barnabas didn’t open with that- Istvan could have lived. Fortunately for Barnabas and Magda, King Johnny forgets about Istvan instantly.

King Johnny shows off his hand-chopping clothes. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

For a hundred years, King Johnny’s tribe kept as its most prized possession The Hand of Count Petofi. This was literally a severed hand, cut from a Hungarian nobleman. Count Petofi was a sorcerer, and when nine Rroma men severed his right hand in a forest one night in 1797, most of his power went with it. Magda stole the Hand in hopes that she could use that power to undo a spell she herself had cast, but found that the Hand would not obey her. Now Count Petofi himself, 150 years of age, has reclaimed the Hand, and it is once more attached to his wrist. He is hugely powerful and a great problem for Barnabas.

Barnabas tells King Johnny what has happened. King Johnny turns out to be the one person in the world over whom Petofi has no power. In return for Petofi’s location, King Johnny agrees to return with the Hand and lift the curse Magda regrets. In his purple robe, King Johnny goes to Petofi’s hiding place. He and Petofi have a long and rather pointless conversation. Finally, Petofi is strapped to his chair and King Johnny raises his sacred scimitar, ready to re-sever the Hand.

This is a less suspenseful cliffhanger than yesterday’s. Petofi is still generating story; in fact, he is the only character who is. The hideout is Petofi’s territory; we have seen him thwarted there, but the defeats he suffered only confirmed that it is not a place where major changes take place in the direction of the narrative. And the meandering dialogue between Petofi and King Johnny deflates all the dramatic tension. Returning viewers have plenty of time to remember that, while Petofi’s magic may be useless against King Johnny, Petofi’s henchman Aristide is somewhere around, and he is quick with a knife. Without Istvan to run interference for him, King Johnny will be vulnerable to Aristide the whole time he’s dawdling around.

As King Johnny, Paul Michael has a very hard job. Not only is the character an egregious stereotype, but he really is scandalously ill-written. Violet Welles was far and away the best writer of dialogue on the show, and she manages to give a few glittering lines even to King Johnny. Still, he is ridiculous from beginning to end, a lot of menacing poses held together with a sinister laugh. That he is watchable at all is a tribute to Michael’s mastery of his craft. In his facial expressions and body language, we can see evidence of thought that is entirely absent from his words.

Episode 826: King Johnny’s court

Rroma chieftain/ New England crime boss King Johnny Romana puts broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi on trial in the secret room of the old Collins family mausoleum. Evidently King Johnny has considerable magic powers; he conjures up the ghosts of several notorious murderers to serve as the jury. He also brings in the ghost of Magda’s husband to serve as the one witness for the defense.

The scenario is a remake of The Devil and Daniel Webster, a play that debuted at the Martin Beck Theatre in 1939. But the makers of Dark Shadows were likely thinking of a more recent Broadway production as well. From November 1964 to June 1965, a musical with a book by Ernest Kinoy and music by Walter Marks ran first at the Shubert Theatre, then at the Lunt-Fontanne, for a total of 232 Broadway performances. Its title is one of King Johnny’s favorite words- Bajour.

King Johnny keeps complaining that Magda tried to “pull the bajour on me!,” by which he means that she gave him one thing disguised as another. In the show, based on Joseph Mitchell’s stories of life among Rroma in the New York metropolitan area, bajour refers simply to a confidence trick with a big payoff for its perpetrators. The cast, saddled with a bunch of instantly forgettable songs, sings as joyously as it can about how the Rroma, to whom they of course refer as “gypsies,”* love nothing more than cheating lonely old women out of their life savings. This uninhibited celebration of racism reported losses of nearly a million dollars, more than twice the total amount of money invested in it. Perhaps the fictional Rroma weren’t the only ones who enjoyed running a good scam. Perhaps, too, Mel Brooks’ 1967 film The Producers wasn’t entirely a work of fiction.

The cast of Bajour does not appear to have overlapped with that of any episode of Dark Shadows. The closest link I can find to the cast at this period of the show is Michael Bennett, who danced in Bajour and later married Donna McKechnie. Many very distinguished performers appeared in Bajour, but I’m not tempted to do any imaginary recasting. I’m sure Chita Rivera and Herschel Bernardi were wonderful as leads Anyanka and Cockeye Johnny Dembo, but they couldn’t have outdone Grayson Hall and Thayer David as Magda and Sandor. Herbert Edelman was good in everything, and I’m sure his turn as “The King of Newark” was no exception, but no one could have done more than Paul Michael does to make the cartoonish role of King Johnny watchable. Paul Sorvino had a great career, and even has a screen credit in common with Henry Judd Baker- they both appeared in the disastrous 1980 film Cruising. I’m sure Sorvino would have been interesting as a replacement for Baker as Istvan, the mute Black Rroma, but that part is all about physical presence, and as was the case with Baker’s part in Cruising he is effective in a way that Sorvino could not have matched. Nancy Dussault is another performer who never lets an audience down, but Diana Davila’s approach to the character of Rroma maiden Julianka was so cleverly conceived that I couldn’t bear to think of anyone else taking the part.

While I’m on the topic of the Rroma, I want to bring up an oddity about my favorite Dark Shadows blog, Danny Horn’s great Dark Shadows Every Day. When he was writing about these episodes, Danny often stopped to ridicule the idea of a Rroma tribe living in New England in 1897. Danny works for the Wikimedia Foundation; you’d think he’d be in the habit of checking Wikipedia, where the article “Romani People in the United States” would tell him that, while Rroma have been migrating to North America continually since 1498, the majority of the ancestors of the million or so Americans who now identify as Rroma came in the late nineteenth century. The new arrivals tended to take some time to assimilate to the ways of the USA; the article is, as of this writing, illustrated with a photo of a Rroma caravan near Portland, Oregon, in 1905:

Rroma caravan near Portland, Oregon, in 1905. Photograph by the Portland Oregonian, found on Wikipedia.

Most Romani-Americans are totally assimilated nowadays, so much so that many people in the USA don’t realize that there actually is such an ethnic group. But there are still Romani heritage festivals in many cities, and the last traditional caravans were still traveling the Great Plains as late as the 1940s. And in Maine in 1897, Romani caravans were a frequent sight, one that indeed aroused exactly the sort of zyganophobic** reactions Magda and Sandor encountered from virtually everyone in their first days on the show.

Even Istvan isn’t as hard to explain as Danny seems to think. In the early days of European settlement, Rroma were often brought across the Atlantic as slaves; that was the case for the people on Christopher Columbus’ third voyage in 1498. Some intermarried with enslaved people of African extraction. There are still Afro-Romani communities in Louisiana and Cuba.

I started writing about Dark Shadows in the comment sections on Danny’s blog. He made a great display of ignoring the first 42 weeks of the show, and consistently made the harshest possible judgments of the acting of Alexandra Moltke Isles, who played well-meaning governess Vicki. That created a space for me to point out when the show was harking back to its early days, and to defend Mrs Isles. I would be remiss in a post like this if I did not mention that Mrs Isles made a documentary feature in 2003 called Porraimos: Europe’s Gypsies in the Holocaust. I’ve never been able to get hold of a copy of the film, but the New York Times liked it when it was shown on PBS.

*Rroma sometimes call themselves Gypsies, but you can’t assume they’ll like it if an outsider uses that word.

**Zyganophobia- racism against Rroma.

Episode 789: We are going to create a thing

In #762, the Rev’d Mr Gregory Trask walked in on lawyer Evan Hanley and handsome rake Quentin Collins as they were performing a Satanic rite. Trask’s response was to blackmail Evan. Trask wanted his wife Minerva out of the way so that he could marry rich spinster Judith Collins, Quentin’s sister. Threatened with exposure, Evan cast a spell on an unfortunate young man named Tim Shaw. He brainwashed Tim into reenacting the plot of The Manchurian Candidate, with Trask in the Angela Lansbury role and Evan as the People’s Republic of China. As Evan and Trask planned, Tim killed Minerva. Shortly after, Trask married Judith.

On their wedding day, Judith saw Minerva’s ghost in the corner of the drawing room in the great house of Collinwood. In yesterday’s episode, Minerva’s ghost took possession of Judith, and the closing cliffhanger showed the possessed Judith about to stab Evan with a letter opener to avenge Minerva’s death. As we open today, Judith’s brother Edward enters and prevents the stabbing, and Judith is released from possession. She can remember nothing that happened while she was under Minerva’s power, and Edward is convinced that she has gone mad.

Edward takes Judith to her room, and Trask enters. Evan tells him that Minerva’s ghost has been in touch with Judith. The ghost knows what they did, and if the contact continues Judith will know as well. Trask demands that Evan do something to prevent that, and Evan says that he can cast a spell that may turn the haunting to their advantage and neutralize Judith permanently.

The plan turns out to be the creation of a “black ghost.” The only Black actor to have had a speaking part on Dark Shadows was Beverley Hope Atkinson, who played an unnamed nurse in one scene in #563, almost a year ago. Humbert Allen Astredo, who plays Evan, was also in that scene, playing suave warlock Nicholas Blair. Atkinson was terrific, and it would be great to see her again, but it turns out that the “black ghost” is not actually black. Nor is it a ghost. This misnamed entity is a simulacrum of Minerva, a kind of supernatural hologram that Evan will fabricate and that will appear when Judith is around. This will lead Judith to believe that she is insane, thereby causing her actually to become insane and to cease to be an obstacle to Trask’s enjoyment of her wealth.

The simulacrum first shows up in a transparent form in Judith’s bedroom. Judith screams. In the drawing room, Trask and Edward hear her scream and break off a conversation in which Edward has been urging Trask to agree to annul his marriage to the obviously disturbed Judith. Judith comes downstairs. She is reluctant to explain why she screamed, and tells Edward and Trask that nothing is wrong. She and Trask go to the drawing room and talk privately. He has to prod her a bit before she will admit she saw Minerva. He tells her it was just her imagination. She considers this; after all, she was in bed when she saw the image, so it may have been a dream. But then the simulacrum appears in the drawing room, near the spot where she saw Minerva’s ghost on her wedding day. Judith sees Minerva sitting quietly and sewing. Trask pretends he does not see anything; after a bit, Judith pretends she can’t see the image either. Trask leaves Judith alone with the simulacrum. Judith goes upstairs, and the simulacrum follows her. When they reach the top of the staircase, Judith cries out in fear and tells the simulacrum to stay away from her.

Though it is disappointing to be reminded that Beverley Hope Atkinson isn’t coming back, it is always good to see Clarice Blackburn. In her interviews with the authors of the book Barnabas and Company, Nancy Barrett said that Blackburn was the best performer in the entire cast of Dark Shadows. She doesn’t have a lot to do today- she delivers the opening voiceover, we see a snapshot of her, and as the simulacrum she stands motionless in a corner, sews placidly, then is seen from behind as she follows Judith up the stairs. But if there ever was a case to prove the old cliche that no part is small when a big enough actor plays it, Blackburn makes each of these little turns into a moment viewers will remember.

Screenshots by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

As Judith, Joan Bennett also deserves a great deal of credit for getting the gaslighting plot off to a good start. For example, there is an embarrassingly ill-written scene when Judith is in her room, pacing back and forth while some vibes play on the soundtrack. A knock comes at the door, and the music stops. Judith opens the door, and no one is there. The music resumes, and she starts pacing again. There is another knock. Again the music stops, again Judith opens the door, and again no one is there. The music resumes, and she’s back to pacing. The knock comes a third time. A third time the music stops, and a third time Judith turns to the door. This time she asks who’s there. It’s Trask. She lets him in, and he denies having knocked before. Knocking on doors and running away is a pretty crude tactic even on a show with an audience consisting largely of kids aged twelve and under, and the apparent complicity of the music in Trask’s plot is the kind of thing they ridiculed in Looney Tunes cartoons. But Bennett’s soulful performance holds our attention throughout.

This is the second time Dark Shadows has shown us an adventurer trying to gaslight his new wife so that she will go away and give him unfettered access to her fortune. The first time was in March 1968, when the show was set in 1796. Naval officer/ sleazy operator Nathan Forbes had married fluttery heiress Millicent Collins. Nathan discovered that Millicent had transferred all her assets to her little brother Daniel. Nathan then set about driving Millicent out of her mind so that he could take her place as Daniel’s legal guardian. That plot also featured some weak writing, but Joel Crothers and Nancy Barrett were so irresistible as Nathan and Millicent that it hardly mattered. Perhaps the writers wanted to revisit the gaslighting theme to show that this time they could consistently write scripts worthy of their outstanding cast.

Episode 743: A person of the supernatural

Rakish Quentin and time traveling vampire Barnabas have each been fighting undead blonde fire witch Laura, and today they agree to team up. This marks the beginning of their friendship, which will be central to Dark Shadows for the next 90 weeks.

The script has some problems. The dialogue between Quentin and Barnabas runs in circles, and there are scenes where, for no apparent reason, the two of them go back and forth between Barnabas’ house and the cottage where Laura is staying. But the episode is still fun. The actors deserve a lot of credit for that. David Selby and Jonathan Frid both turn in such fine performances that even the most unnecessary scenes between Quentin and Barnabas hold our interest, and Diana Millay finds ways to make Laura intriguing even when she is saddled with the disagreeable Roger Davis as her only scene partner.

There is also a happy accident with a special effect. Barnabas has called on Laura to appear in his house as a ghost; she is before him as a transparency when Quentin enters. Quentin’s presence breaks the spell, and she vanishes. In the cottage where she has been staying, a male servant whom she has bewitched is waiting for her. She reappears there; she materializes and passes out. The image of her overlaid on the picture is a little too small and a little too high in the frame, so that when she collapses she doesn’t quite reach the floor.

The result turns out to be better than it would if the effect had worked as intended. Laura’s appearance and her fainting seem to play out in a window briefly opened between one world and another.

The episode ends with Laura sending a telepathic message to Quentin’s estranged wife, madwoman Jenny. The scene plays out with Laura in voiceover while Jenny is alone in the cell where Quentin’s brother and sister have been keeping her. Laura wants Jenny to escape and kill Quentin. Again the dialogue is awkward and repetitive, but Millay and Marie Wallace save it.

Episode 729: A tired family

Libertine Quentin Collins has learned that his estranged wife, madwoman Jenny, is being kept locked up somewhere in the great house of Collinwood. He learned this when Jenny escaped and stabbed him. He also learned that his brother, stuffy Edward, and maidservant Beth Chavez are involved in the plot to keep Jenny in confinement. He spends time today trying to find out where Jenny is, openly telling both Beth and Edward that when he finds her, he will kill her.

Edward is estranged from his own wife, and just yesterday we learned that her name is Laura. Evidently she is the same sort of creature as we came to know from December 1966 to March 1967. In those days Dark Shadows was set in contemporary times, and Edward’s grandson Roger Collins was dismayed at the return of his estranged wife, who was also named Laura. That Laura was an undead blonde fire witch, a humanoid Phoenix who sought to be incinerated with her son, strange and troubled boy David Collins, so that her own life could be renewed.

Today, the year is 1897 and Edward and Laura’s nine year old daughter Nora is convinced that her mother will return after a year when she has been away and it has been forbidden to mention her name. Nora has a vision of Laura’s face in the fireplace, a vision of flames in the corridor, and a dream in which she meets Laura in the woods outside the house. At the end of the episode she wakes up, sneaks out to the woods, and finds the cloak Laura was wearing in her dream lying on the ground.

All of this is recapped from previous episodes, but actors David Selby, Louis Edmonds, and Denise Nickerson make it worth watching. As Beth, Terrayne Crawford is stiff and literal, and her awkward performance does detract from her scenes. But everyone else is so good that you don’t notice her weaknesses too much.

This episode marks the second time we hear the name “Mrs Fillmore.” In #707, we learned that Beth took substantial sums of money into the village of Collinsport to a lady of that name as part of the plot to cover up Jenny’s presence in the house. Today Beth has to remind Edward of that fact, and Quentin looks through the envelope with hundreds of dollars in banknotes meant for Mrs Fillmore.

When Nora screams that there is a fire in the upstairs hallway, Edward and Beth run towards it. Quentin just sulks in the drawing room; evidently the idea that the house is on fire bores him. By the time Beth and Edward get upstairs, the flames Nora saw have vanished, and nothing is burned. She swears that there was a fire, they cannot believe her. This echoes #400, when wicked witch Angelique cast a spell that caused time-traveling governess Vicki to see flames in her room in the Old House on the estate, and subsequently Vicki’s friends were puzzled that there was no indication there of anything burned. That confusion led to trouble for Vicki, and longtime viewers can imagine it is a sign of trouble for Nora as well.

Yesterday, Nora drew a series of Egyptian hieroglyphics saying that her mother was coming home. At the beginning of her dream, a maniacal Edward holds an oversized copy of that drawing and rips it up, declaring Laura will never be back. The oversized drawing harks back all the way to episode #722, when Nora’s governess, neurotic intellectual Rachel Drummond, had a dream in which the daffy Carl Collins held a gigantic pocket watch. That was a striking enough image that not even the Vaseline almost entirely covering the lens could ruin it. But today even less of the picture is legible, and the gambit isn’t fresh anymore. Louis Edmonds does do a fine job of laughing maniacally, though, I will grant that.

The picture really does look like that, and it is supposed to look like that. Director Henry Kaplan was not much of a visual artist. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 592: Why isn’t it showing some sign of life?

Frankenstein’s monster Adam has threatened to go on a murder spree unless old world gentleman Barnabas and mad scientist Julia build him a mate. He has further demanded that heiress Carolyn donate the “life force” that will animate his bride. We open today with a reprise of yesterday’s ending in which the experiment begins and immediately goes wrong. Julia announces that unless the mate comes to life in the next sixty seconds, Carolyn will die. They show us a clock. Sixty seconds pass, and the mate doesn’t come to life. So I guess Carolyn is dead now.

When we return from the opening titles, Adam insists on taking Carolyn from the laboratory. Julia says that Carolyn is in a bad way. Using a bit of Collinsport English, she says that Carolyn’s “pulsebeat” is decreasing. Alarmed, Barnabas asks if she might die. Julia reluctantly admits that it is possible. Evidently the opening titles wiped their memories clean of her earlier statement about the sixty seconds that would determine Carolyn’s fate.

Adam and Carolyn share a scene in the upstairs bedroom. Robert Rodan and Nancy Barrett do a wonderful job of acting, enough to save the episode from the “Stinkers” label. As Carolyn describes what she saw while she was unconscious during the experiment, images of sculpted pieces depicting body parts are superimposed on the screen over her face. She says she “saw something in the fog… hazy forms, floating in the air. They began to take shape. A collection of dead things, disconnected, coming toward me, wanting something from me-wanting life. My life!” The superimposed images don’t lead to anything, anymore than anything else in the episode does. But they are typical of the bold visual artistry of director Lela Swift, and evocative of the sort of thing you would see in the more ambitious low-budget films of the period.

One of the images that illustrates Carolyn’s account. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Carolyn loses consciousness just before Julia comes in with her medical bag. Julia pronounces Carolyn dead. Adam goes to the basement, where he tells Barnabas he is ready to start his murder spree. Barnabas tries to stop him, and Adam easily beats him down. Adam storms out of the house, passing Julia in the foyer on his way to the great house of Collinwood. Barnabas staggers upstairs and tells Julia what happened. She goes upstairs to retrieve her bag so she can treat his wounds, and finds that Carolyn’s body has vanished from the bed.

Episode 591: Frightened of new things

When suave warlock Nicholas learned that a tall man named Adam was a Frankenstein’s monster, he decided to use him to found a new race of people who would owe their creation to the spiritual forces of darkness. Nicholas wormed his way into Adam’s confidence and persuaded him to demand that a mate be created for him. Adam put this demand to old world gentleman Barnabas. Barnabas donated the “life force” that animated Adam, and mad scientist Julia performed the experiment. When Adam tells Barnabas that he will kill everyone he cares about if he does not provide him with an artificially constructed woman, he and Julia acquiesce.

The Bride of Frankenstein story has been stalled for several days. The body has been built, the equipment is ready, and heiress Carolyn has volunteered to serve as “life force” donor. Today, Barnabas and Julia tell Adam, Carolyn, and each other that they would rather not perform the experiment. Adam talks with Carolyn, whom he loves and who cannot deny that she loves him; he tells her that there is no need for the experiment, that the two of them can simply go away together. Carolyn insists on doing the experiment, for reasons she does not explain. She doesn’t really want it, either- Nicholas has put a spell on her to compel her to volunteer.

Adam and Carolyn share a tender moment in front of the portrait of Josette. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Nicholas is the only character who wants the experiment. It makes little sense that he would want it. Assuming that Adam and his mate are both fertile, assuming that they in fact produce children, and assuming that those children are any more subject to sin than are the descendants of the first Adam, it would take years for them to grow up. Even if they all developed severe cases of Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome, it would be many years before they would be ready to supplant H. Sap. The show can’t very well expect us to wait that long for the next story point.

There is one fresh thing in today’s episode, and that is the scene between Adam and Carolyn. Robert Rodan projects an overwhelming warmth and gentleness, and Nancy Barrett shows us every twist of Carolyn’s torment and confusion.

Episode 589: He wants it to happen all over again

A terrible script, full of repetitious language and recycled story points, but each member of the cast is in top form. They almost make it feel like we haven’t seen all of this before.

In May and June of 1967, vampire Barnabas Collins imprisoned Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, and tried to brainwash her into thinking she was his his lost love, the gracious Josette. After Maggie escaped from Barnabas, she was in a state of total mental collapse for several weeks. By the time her memory came back in August, Maggie’s psychiatrist, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, had become Barnabas’ accomplice. Julia has a preternatural power of hypnosis, and she used it to block Maggie’s memories before she could expose Barnabas.

Now, Barnabas and Julia are conducting an experiment to build a female Frankenstein’s monster. Once constructed, the new woman is to be the mate to patchwork man Adam. They need an existing woman to donate her “life force” to animate their creation. They were planning to use Maggie. Barnabas’ servant Willie has a crush on Maggie, so when he learned of their intentions he abducted Maggie before they could get at her.

Willie stashed Maggie in the hidden chamber of the old Collins family mausoleum. As it turns out, Barnabas had taken Maggie there to torture her when she was his prisoner, so when she found herself in that setting her memories came back. Maggie made that clear at the end of yesterday’s episode; she and Willie spend most of today’s talking it over. Kathryn Leigh Scott plays Maggie’s horror and John Karlen plays Willie’s panic with admirable intensity.

Barnabas is visiting the great house of Collinwood when his distant cousin Roger tells him that heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard has left the house to spend several days in Boston. Adam is threatening to kill various people unless the experiment is completed soon and Carolyn donates the life force, so Barnabas is alarmed by this news.

Barnabas goes home to the Old House on the estate. He finds Carolyn waiting for him there. She tells him she knows all about the experiment and is eager to serve as the donor. Barnabas is bewildered by her enthusiasm. As Carolyn, Nancy Barrett plays this scene with such gusto that she is electrifying to watch. When Barnabas finds her standing in his front parlor looking at him with total self-assurance the show has what is, as far as I am concerned, its sexiest moment so far.

The look of a woman who knows what she wants.

Episode 555: Innocent, completely innocent

Suave Nicholas Blair, a middle manager in Satan’s terrestrial operations, has met with considerable success in his efforts to corrupt Frankenstein’s monster Adam. Today, Nicholas finds that Adam has abducted well-meaning governess Vicki Winters as part of his effort to force old world gentleman Barnabas Collins to create a mate for him. Nicholas praises Adam’s plan, and persuades Adam to let him take Vicki from his hiding place in the west wing of the great house of Collinwood. Nicholas says that he can keep Vicki far more securely in his own house.

Nicholas gives Adam a vial full of drugs and tells him to put them in Vicki’s drink when she comes to so that she will be easier to handle. In #528, Nicholas described himself as “much too talented to spend my time drugging drinks.” Perhaps he is, but the writers have to pump out five scripts a week, so whaddaya gonna do.

When Vicki wakes up, she pleads with Adam to let her go. She asks what reason he has for abducting her, and he immediately says “No reason!,” then scrunches up his face and says “No, I have a reason.” He won’t tell Vicki what that reason is, but he is interesting to listen to. Vicki makes a run for the door; he grabs her and puts her back on the bed. He asks her, with genuine concern, whether he hurt her. She assures him he did not. He gives her the drugged drink.

Nicholas comes to take Vicki. We cut directly from Vicki unconscious on Adam’s bed to her unconscious on a bed in Nicholas’ house. I don’t think this is the first time Dark Shadows has used a jump cut, but we certainly haven’t seen it often. Abrupt editing is so much at odds with the stately visual grammar of the show that it qualifies as a special effect. Unfortunately, it is an effect that does not make any particular point here, and so is wasted.

The other day, the corpse of Nicholas’ subordinate, wicked witch Angelique, disappeared. We then saw a coffin in Nicholas’ basement. Nicholas talked to the coffin, calling it “Angelique,” indicating that her body was inside. Yesterday, there was a vampire attack. We didn’t see the vampire, but there couldn’t be much doubt that it was her. That is confirmed in the final shot of today’s episode, when we see Angelique in the coffin, her fangs showing.

Toothsome blonde. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 541: Creating a living human being

When Dark Shadows began in the summer of 1966, its most intelligent character was also its most dangerous, strange and troubled boy David Collins. David twice came within an inch of committing the perfect murder, first when he sabotaged his father Roger’s car, then when he trapped his governess Vicki in a room in the long-deserted west wing of the great house of Collinwood.

The only story that consistently worked in those days was the relationship between David and Vicki, and that was solely due to actors David Henesy and Alexandra Moltke Isles. While the writers gave them terrible dialogue- at one point having Vicki read aloud to David from a reference book on the geography of Maine- they used their faces, voices, and movements to show us what was going on inside the characters. Mr Henesy always looked like an angry boy who was grimly determined to keep hating his governess even though he couldn’t help but like her, while Mrs Isles always looked like a fearless young woman who was determined to befriend a boy who might make an attempt on her life at any moment. As David relented from his hatred, we could see a friendship budding between them, even if the words were still no good.

The story of Vicki and David had its climactic phase from December 1966 to March 1967, when his mother Laura Murdoch Collins was on the show. Laura was Dark Shadows’ first supernatural menace, an undead fire witch who planned to incinerate herself and David so that she could attain a new life. When David ran from the burning Laura into Vicki’s arms in #191, he chose her and life over Laura and death. She thus became his new mother, and their story was complete.

Since then, the show has found very little for David to do. Yesterday, he was wandering around the house with a tape recorder. He told his stepmother Cassandra that he couldn’t figure out how to play a tape. The preoccupied Cassandra sent him away, and he asked his cousin Carolyn to help him. Carolyn made it clear that all you do is press the button labeled “Play.” Two years ago, David could sabotage a brake cylinder to fail at precisely the spot on the road where it would be likeliest to lead to a fatal crash, but now he can’t grasp the concept of “Press play to listen to the tape”?

Longtime viewers will see a missed opportunity here. Cassandra is a wicked witch, also known as Angelique. In #492, Angelique/ Cassandra cast a spell that caused David to forget some incriminating information about her, so we know that he is subject to her power. Vicki knows a great deal about Angelique/ Cassandra; they could easily give us a series of scenes in which Vicki tries to warn David about his stepmother, but his mind is clouded. Instead, we never see Vicki and David alone together during this phase of the show, and Angelique/ Cassandra rarely does anything more with David than display irritation and order him to go away.

David eventually played the tape for Angelique/ Cassandra. She reacted with great excitement, since it included a message that explained why she failed in her attempt to restore the vampire curse she once placed on David’s distant cousin Barnabas Collins. She sends David away and keeps the tape recorder.

Angelique/ Cassandra won’t let David take the tape recorder back to his room. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Angelique/ Cassandra informs her supervisor, suave warlock Nicholas, that she can re-vamp Barnabas if she kills Frankenstein’s monster Adam. Fascinated by the idea of an artificially constructed human being, Nicholas loses interest in Barnabas and instructs Angelique/ Cassandra to find out more about Adam.

In #532/533, Nicholas met Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town. Nicholas was obviously smitten with Maggie, putting the lie to his taunting of Angelique/ Cassandra for her ability to feel an emotional attachment to Barnabas and his own claim to be motivated solely by a devotion to evil for its own sake. After he gives Angelique/ Cassandra her orders, Nicholas goes to Maggie’s house. Ostensibly this is to find out if she knows where Adam might be, but she so obviously does not that it is clear he just wants to see her. He asks her about her hospitalized fiancé Joe, admires her late father’s paintings, and offers to buy one of them at a high price and lend it back to her. Maggie seems to be quite charmed by him. Nicholas’ “Evil, be thou my good” schtick can be fun to watch for short periods, but if he is going to be a major character for any length of time he will need a more complex inner life. His attraction to Maggie is a step towards giving him one.

David goes to Barnabas’ house. He tells Barnabas’ friend Julia that at least twice this evening he has listened to a message on a tape recorder that had something to do with Barnabas and Adam, but he can’t remember any of the details. He does remember that Angelique/ Cassandra got excited when he played it for her, but that’s it. If Angelique/ Cassandra had cast a spell on David, his forgetfulness would be understandable. If Vicki and Angelique/ Cassandra were locked in battle for David’s allegiance, it could be dramatic. But as it is, the show has chosen simply to present David as an abject moron, and that is infuriating.

Julia and David go back to the great house, where they find Nicholas and Angelique/ Cassandra with the tape recorder. Nicholas and Angelique/ Cassandra leave, and Julia and David play the tape. It no longer has the original message, but instead has the witches’ sabbath portion of Berlioz’ Symphonie Fantastique. David furrows his brow, then comes up with the bright suggestion that Angelique/ Cassandra, who has been in possession of the tape the entire time, may just possibly be the one who made the change. Again, since we have not seen Angelique/ Cassandra cast a spell to confuse David’s thinking, this incredible stupidity can do nothing but exasperate the audience.

They don’t even have the excuse that the current writing staff doesn’t know that David used to be interesting. The gimmick of replacing important information on a reel-to-reel tape with an audio signature suggestive of the culprit is a callback to #172, when Laura thwarted parapsychologist Dr Peter Guthrie by replacing an audio recording of a séance with the sound of fire crackling. If they can recall that bit, surely they can remember that David used to have a functioning brain.

In the early days of the show, Vicki was on a quest to find out who her parents were and why they left her at a foundling home when she was an infant. In #60, Vicki stumbled upon a portrait Maggie’s father Sam painted twenty years before of a woman who looked just like her. Vicki wondered if this woman, whose name was Betty Hanscombe, might have been her mother or aunt. Sam gave Vicki the painting then, but it is back in Maggie’s house today, and Nicholas picks it up at one point. We don’t get a very good look at it, but you can buy a reproduction of it on canvas for $25.99 plus shipping from someone on Etsy, it looks nice.