Sarcastic dandy Roger, possessed by the spirit of wicked witch Angelique, visits mad scientist Dr Lang. The village of Collinsport was once a whaling center, and Lang is mindful enough of that long-ago history that he collects harpoons. Roger appears to be fascinated by Lang’s collection. He holds one of the finer pieces, admires it, fondles it, and tries to kill Lang with it. At the last moment, the murder is prevented by recovering vampire Barnabas and Julia, who is a scientist as mad as Lang but infinitely more interesting. As is typical of supernatural beings on Dark Shadows, Angelique projects her power through a portrait of herself; the portrait also has some adventures today.
There is a lot of great stuff in this one, as other bloggers have well explained. The 1960s were the heyday of Freudianism in the USA, and in the first year of the show the influence of that school of thought could often be traced in the scripts of Art Wallace and Francis Swann. Patrick McCray documents in his post on The Dark Shadows Daybook that this was an episode where writer Gordon Russell allowed himself to cut loose and have fun with the sillier side of the Freudian approach.
On his Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn focuses on the scene where Barnabas and Julia decide to go and stop Roger. He points out that it is the first conversation they have had about something other than themselves, the first time Barnabas shares with Julia the secret of how he became a vampire, the first time they take heroic action, and the first time they are recognizably friends. It is that friendship that will drive the action of the show from now on.
In their meticulously detailed summary of the action of the episode on their Dark Shadows Before I Die, John and Christine Scoleri capture the effect on the audience of the steady accumulation of one absurdity upon another as the episode goes on. Reading their unfailingly matter-of-fact description of the ever-mounting lunacies we witness in this half-hour is almost as exhilarating as it was watching them in the first place.
Barnabas calls Julia’s attention to the closing cliffhanger. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Dark Shadows often signaled a commercial break by playing an ominous three note motif on the soundtrack. Even in 1968, DUN DUN DUNNNN! was a pretty corny way to punch up your dramatic values. It was even cornier when, as was often the case, it followed a three syllable clausula. So today’s first act ends with vampire Barnabas Collins vowing that he will kill the Rev’d Mr Trask, a visiting witchfinder whose fanatical pursuit of bewildered time-traveler Vicki has helped precipitate many disasters. After Barnabas says Trask is “Going To Die!,” Mrs Acilius and I sang along with the motif- “Going- To- Die!” The missus pointed out that many among the 8-13 year olds who made up so much of the show’s original audience probably sang exactly the same refrain when the episode was first broadcast.
There are a couple of missing transitions in quick succession today. The opening scene between Barnabas and Ben takes place in the Old House on the estate of Collinwood; they take care to show a clock to establish the time of this scene as 4:00 AM. We then cut to the great house on the same estate, where it appears to be dark out. A knock comes at the door; the mistress of the house, Naomi Collins (Joan Bennett,) answers and finds Trask. It isn’t 4:00 AM anymore- Ben enters after a moment, and mentions that the sun is about to set. Inserting a still photo of a daytime scene would have been enough to tell us that many hours have passed, and the lack of that insert really is confusing.
Trask has come demanding the keys to the Old House so that he can gather Vicki’s things and burn them. A different kind of transition is omitted in the scene this demand initiates. Lately, Naomi has become assertive and independent, primarily in her refusal to go along with the persecution of Vicki. She does that for a while in her response to Trask, ordering him to leave, telling him he disgusts her, slapping him in the face, and daring him to hit her. But when Trask threatens to go to her husband, haughty tyrant Joshua, and enlist him against her, she gives in immediately, without any visible change in affect. That is puzzling, and not at all in keeping with Joan Bennett’s usual style. Typically, she makes the most of every chance she gets to show us why she was one of the biggest movie stars of the late 1930s.
Rough patches like these, along with the many many line bobbles from all the actors throughout the episode, make me wonder if writer Gordon Russell was late delivering the script. The show never had more than three credited writers at a time, and there must have been occasions when they couldn’t get the documents to the directors and actors early enough that they could get everything nailed down. It would take considerable thought for any performer to choose the best way to play a brief moment within which Naomi moves from fearless defiance to capitulation. Perhaps the reason she wound up doing nothing was that she didn’t have time to think about the question.
Ben accompanies Trask to the Old House. While Trask goes to Vicki’s old room, Ben meets Barnabas emerging from the basement and apprises him of the situation. We see Trask upstairs and hear Ben and Barnabas’ voices in the distance. Trask reacts, but goes ahead with his mission. He waits until he is downstairs with all of Vicki’s stuff in a bundle before confronting Ben and demanding to know who else is in the house. Ben claims that he was talking to himself. Trask is unconvinced.
Later, we see Trask in his own room at a nearby inn. He hears the rattling of chains and the disembodied voice of Barnabas taunting him. After a while, Barnabas’ hand comes floating towards him. When this happened, Mrs Acilius called out “Got your nose!” We both burst out laughing and were still laughing hard when the closing credits started to roll.
Despite the rough spots and the bad laugh at the end, this installment was a lot of fun. I can’t give it the “Genuinely Good Episode” tag, but we won’t be tempted to skip it if we do another watch-through of the series someday.
It is 1795. In the foyer of the great house of Collinwood, young gentleman Barnabas Collins stands on the staircase, his father Joshua stands on the floor. Joshua forbids Barnabas to marry lady’s maid Angelique on pain of disinheritance; when Barnabas declares he will marry her anyway, Joshua announces that they are no longer father and son.
In 1967, Barnabas will return to Collinwood as a vampire. In that year, in episode #214, he will take well-meaning governess Vicki on a guided tour of the foyer of the old manor house, indicate the staircase there, and say that “On these stairs, a father and son hurled words at each other, words that would lead to the death of the son.” He will then begin laughing maniacally and repeat the words “The death!,” seeing the desperate irony of referring to his own death in the past tense.
By today’s episode, the Collinses have moved out of the old manor house without any shocking scenes between Barnabas and Joshua playing out on the stairs there. That isn’t so surprising- that one remark eight months ago was the only reference to the stairs as the site of a fateful quarrel between Barnabas and Joshua, and the writer responsible for that day’s script, Malcolm Marmorstein, has been gone and forgotten since August. Neither today’s screenwriter, Gordon Russell, nor his colleague, Sam Hall, was with the show when Barnabas gave that speech to Vicki, and the third member of the writing staff, Ron Sproat, has been in the background for most of the 1795 segment so far.
But they do go out of their way to put Barnabas on the stairs of the new house for his showdown with Joshua today. It seems likely that they are hoping that at least some viewers will remember Barnabas’ remark in #214 and look for a significance in the connection. They did that sort of thing all the time in the early months of the show. For example, when they were developing a murder mystery about the death of beloved local man Bill Malloy in the last four months of 1966, they would show us a clock face in one episode, then weeks later have a character lie about the time established by that clock. Sproat more or less put a stop to those kinds of wild over-estimations of the audience’s attention span when he joined the writing staff near the end of 1966, but ever since the vampire story began in April of 1967 they had acquired obsessive fans who sent letters and gathered outside the studio. So they do have a reason to try to close the loop on a very long and very slender thread. What might the significance be of this particular nod to Barnabas’ first days on the show?
The 1795 segment began when the ghost of Barnabas’ little sister Sarah took possession of Vicki at a séance in #365, announced she wanted to “tell the story from the beginning,” and hurled Vicki back to her own time as a living being. But it is not simply a flashback explaining what made Barnabas a vampire. Vicki has completely failed to adapt to her new environment, and as a result has made significant changes to the timeline. She is now in hiding, suspected of witchcraft because of her endless stream of bizarre words and actions.
In fact, there is a witch at Collinwood. It is Angelique. Presumably, the first time these events took place Angelique pinned responsibility for her crimes on Sarah’s proper governess, Phyllis Wick. We caught a glimpse of Phyllis in #365; we could tell, not only that she was indigenous to the eighteenth century, but that she was quite cautious about anything that might suggest the paranormal. It would have taken Angelique some time and effort to set Phyllis up as a patsy, while Vicki volunteered for the role without any action at all on Angelique’s part. So maybe Vicki has speeded everything up. Maybe the family was still in the Old House when Joshua disowned Barnabas in the original sequence of events, but Vicki’s blunderings have accelerated matters so that they moved out before the conflict between them came to a head.
There is another puzzle about the writers’ intentions in this episode. It is established that without his inheritance or his position in the family business, Barnabas will be in a most parlous state. In separate scenes, both Barnabas and Joshua talk about the impossibility of Barnabas finding a job in Collinsport. Barnabas tells Angelique they will have to go at least as far as Boston before they can find anyone who will risk Joshua’s displeasure by hiring him. Later, Joshua tells Naomi that Barnabas won’t even be able to reach Boston- he doesn’t have enough money and won’t be able to get enough credit to stay in an inn, and he has no friends who will so much as put him up for a night if they know he doesn’t have an inheritance coming.
Barnabas’ mother, Naomi, has a solution to his financial problems. She gives him the Old House. The Old House is supposed to be a huge mansion, which it takes a very substantial income to maintain. How a man who can’t even afford a room for the night is going to meet those expenses is not made clear.
The frustrating thing about this is that they dwell at such length about the hard realities of dollars and cents immediately before, and then again after, Naomi makes her gift. By the laws of Soap Opera Land, a character who possesses a symbol of wealth such as a mansion does not need an income. We can accept that convention, and do in the 1967 segment, when a moneyless Barnabas occupies the Old House and can pay for all sorts of expensive things. But today they keep rubbing our faces in the implausibility of it.
My wife, Mrs Acilius, suggested they could have presented both themes if they’d dealt with the realistic financial problems in one episode and in a subsequent episode had gone back to the fantasy world. Maybe Joshua disinherits Barnabas on a Friday, he worries about getting a job on Monday, Tuesday we watch someone try to introduce Vicki to the concept of “lying,” Wednesday we see caddish naval officer Nathan woo feather-headed heiress Millicent, Thursday much-put-upon servant Ben Stokes tries to escape from the spell with which Angelique controls him, and then comes another Friday, when Naomi waves her magic wand and gives Barnabas the house. But as it stands, Barnabas talks to Angelique about how they have to go hundreds of miles to eke out a bare subsistence, Joshua talks to Naomi about Barnabas’ impending poverty, and then all of a sudden they remember that none of that matters, sorry sorry we shouldn’t have bothered you with it.
There were times in 1966 and 1967 when Dark Shadows only had one viable storyline, and no readily apparent means of starting others. But now they have several stories in progress, and an abundance of lively characters with whom they can make as many more as they like. There is no need for events in any one plot-line to move so quickly that incompatible themes crash into each other with such an unfortunate result.
Naomi’s gift to Barnabas was legally impossible in 1795. Until 1821, Maine was part of Massachusetts, and married women could not own property in Massachusetts until 1822. Maine did not pass its own Married Women’s Property Act until 1844. The show never brings this up, so it isn’t the same kind of problem as Barnabas’ lack of income.
Still, it does represent a missed opportunity. If Naomi’s family of origin had owned the house, they might have placed it in a trust over which she would have enough influence to deliver it to her son against her husband’s wishes. In fact, the show never makes the slightest allusion to where Naomi came from. If they’d given her relatives of her own, she would have had potential allies in a clash with Joshua and potential goals to pursue independently of him. As it stands, they have put her firmly in his shadow, so that the category of possible stories about Naomi is a subset of stories about Joshua. That’s a sad situation for a character who is capable of the dynamism she shows today, and a criminal waste of the talents of an actress as accomplished as Joan Bennett.
When Dark Shadows debuted in June 1966, it was a Gothic romance in which characters sometimes equivocated about whether they were using the word “ghost” metaphorically to refer to present troubles caused by past conflicts or literally to refer to things that go bump in the night.
That version of the series ended with the story of undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. In Laura’s months on the show, her arc absorbed such major plot elements as the conflict between high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins and local man Burke Devlin, the psychological problems of strange and troubled boy David, David’s relationship with his well-meaning governess Vicki, and the tensions between the ancient and esteemed Collins family and the working class people of the town of Collinsport. By the time Laura went up in smoke in #191 and #192, there was no life remaining in any open narrative thread, and Dark Shadows 1.0 was at an end.
Dark Shadows 2.0 launched in #193 with the introduction of seagoing con man Jason McGuire. Jason was an in-betweener who would tie up the loose ends remaining from the 25 weeks before Laura joined the gallery of characters and facilitate the introduction of Laura’s successor as a major supernatural menace, vampire Barnabas Collins. Jason kept himself busy blackmailing reclusive matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, his sidekick Willie Loomis accidentally released Barnabas, and the show kept dropping hints that when Liz finally stood up to Jason all of the original secrets would be laid bare.
The makers of Dark Shadows didn’t do much advance planning, so they kept Jason on the show for 13 weeks after Barnabas premiered while they tried to come up with some other way to fill the time. When Jason’s plan finally blew up in his face, they even left some of the old secrets still buried, most notably the question of where Vicki originally came from.
Barnabas finally killed Jason in #275, and he hasn’t been mentioned in a while. But he is not forgotten. As we open today, lawyer Tony Peterson has caught heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard in his office, rummaging through his safe. Tony has been dating Carolyn and is clearly very much attracted to her. He invites her to tell him a story that will give him an excuse not to call the police. She has to think fast to come up with one, and what she settles on is a version of the story of Jason and Liz.
Tony knows that Carolyn was trying to steal a notebook that he had put in his safe. This notebook was the property of his newest client, Julia Hoffman, a permanent guest at the great house of Collinwood. Carolyn tells Tony that Julia was blackmailing Liz. The notebook, she claims, is a diary kept by a man with whom Liz had an affair, and it contains proof that the man was Carolyn’s father. Julia knew the man and knew that he was planning to come to Collinwood to squeeze money out of Liz in return for his silence, but he died before he could do so. Julia took the diary and picked up where he left off.
Since Tony’s professional ethics will not allow him to be a party to blackmail, this is the one story that could give him a plausible reason not to report Carolyn’s crime to the police. It also gives him a reason to feel sorry for the Collinses, whom he hated when we first saw him, removing an obstacle to the possibility he might fall in love with Carolyn.
The echo of the Jason/ Liz story in the image of Liz forced to accept a blackmailer as a member of the household offers a great deal more than narrative convenience to regular viewers. The audience knew what Jason was threatening to tell if Liz did not submit to his demands, but the characters did not. One idea that some among them seemed to suspect was that Jason was Vicki’s father and Liz was her mother. Indeed, the makers of the show did plan to explain Vicki’s paternity at the end of the blackmail arc, a plan they abandoned so late that the climactic episode runs some minutes short. When Carolyn brings up the idea of her mother being blackmailed to keep it secret that she bore a child out of wedlock, those of us who have been watching all along will realize that she was among those who suspected that this was the secret that gave Jason his hold over her.
The audience knows that there will be no romance between Tony and Carolyn, because we know that she is Barnabas’ blood thrall. Barnabas sent her after Julia’s notebook, because it contains the records of an experiment in which she tried to cure him of vampirism. It would expose him were it to fall into the hands of the authorities. Since Barnabas wants to rid himself of Julia, perhaps by killing her, perhaps by driving her totally insane, he cannot leave such a document out of his possession.
Dark Shadows has come to as much of a dead end now as it had when Laura’s arc was ending. None of the ongoing stories has room for more than a few steps of further development, and if they keep running through those steps at the current pace everything will be resolved in a couple of days. Bringing up Jason, whose introduction marked the beginning of Dark Shadows 2.0, leads us to wonder if they have something up their sleeves that will launch Dark Shadows 3.0.
Tony takes Carolyn home to Collinwood, where he confronts Julia. He tells her what Carolyn told him. She denies it, and says that she will write a letter entrusting the notebook to him to remain unread unless something happens to her, in which case he will read it and hand it over to the authorities. That satisfies him that he isn’t a party to blackmail, and he agrees to her terms.
For the last couple of days, Barnabas has been using black magic in an attempt to break Julia’s grip on sanity. Her clear thinking and calm demeanor in this scene prove that this attempt has failed. The only open question in the only ongoing conflict is, therefore, whether Barnabas will try to murder Julia. She is such a valuable character that it is hard to feel any real suspense about whether he will succeed in killing her, but there is a chance that he will make an attempt.
David and Vicki have come home from a trip to Boston. David enters the drawing room, sees Julia, and greets her. She can barely pay attention to him long enough to say hello. He asks if she is all right; again, she is clearly not at all focused on him. She excuses herself, saying she has to go to Barnabas’ house.
David’s relationships to the other characters were the engine that drove Dark Shadows 1.0, and when Barnabas began to pose a danger to David that same engine accelerated the pace of Dark Shadows 2.0. Julia has been central to the plot for some time; that she can’t be bothered to take any notice of David tells us that that engine has fallen apart. Whatever they are planning to do next week, David won’t be at the heart of it.
David leaves the drawing room. He gets as far as the foyer. There, he sees his friend, the ghost of Barnabas’ ten year old sister Sarah. He tells Sarah that he has been on a trip. She asks where he went. He says he went to China. “Oh,” she responds, blandly. “You’re not impressed?” “No, my father’s friends used to go to China on their ships.” “Well, I didn’t really go to China. I went to Boston.” “BOSTON!!!” Sarah exclaims. “I went to Boston once!” She’s electrified. It’s adorable beyond belief.
Suddenly, Sarah looks disturbed and says she has to go. David asks why, and she says there is trouble brewing at the Old House. Again, David has been sidelined. If there is going to be any more action, it will have to come from fresh sources.
The Old House is Barnabas’ house, and that’s where we go next. We see Julia arriving there. She tells Barnabas that Vicki is back. He is mildly interested. She then tells him that she has seen Sarah. Barnabas longs to see Sarah, and is tormented that she will appear to others but not to him. He accuses Julia of lying. She insists that she is not, and taunts him with Sarah’s refusal to appear to him. He grabs Julia by the throat. He has done this before as a threat, but this time it looks like he really means to strangle her. Before he can, a wind blows the door open and the candles out, and Sarah walks in. She approaches her brother, glaring at him.
Mad scientist Julia Hoffman must hide her notebook from vampire Barnabas Collins and Barnabas’ blood thrall, his distant cousin Carolyn. The notebook documents Barnabas’ vampirism, and he does not want it to fall into the hands of the authorities. Once he gets hold of it, he plans to kill Julia.
The last time Dark Shadows devoted as much story time to attempts to hide and find an object as they have to this notebook was when high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins was frantically trying to hide local man Burke Devlin’s filigreed fountain pen, a story that dragged on from August to November of 1966. Few remember that storyline fondly, but at least the pen was a unique piece of evidence that might connect Roger to a homicide. The notebook is less satisfactory as a focus of attention, since there is nothing unique about it- Julia could easily have written a hundred documents detailing Barnabas’ secret and stashed them all over the world, and for all Barnabas knows she may have done. There are several strong episodes during this period, but the inadequacy of the notebook as a MacGuffin, combined with the fact that Julia could at any moment hop in her car and drive someplace where Barnabas wouldn’t be able to hurt her, prevents any momentum carrying over from day to day.
There are two important things about this installment. It is the first episode written chiefly by Sam Hall,* who will become far and away the most important member of Dark Shadows‘ writing staff. Hall would write hundreds of episodes, right up to the final one, would write the two theatrical features based on the show that were produced in the early 1970s, and would stick with producer Dan Curtis for years afterward, even contributing a script to the ill-fated 1991 primetime reboot of Dark Shadows. The husband of Grayson Hall, who played Julia, he would develop the show into something as different from its November 1967 incarnation as that version is from the show that premiered in June 1966.
On his blog Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn argued that Hall’s contribution was to see Dark Shadows as, first and foremost, a “mashup” of various stories. The example he gives in his post about this episode are the scenes in the office of Tony Peterson, a local attorney whom Julia has hired to keep the notebook locked up in his safe. Tony is played by Jerry Lacy, who in the 1960s and 1970s was chiefly known for his Humphrey Bogart imitation. He would do that imitation on Broadway in 1969 in Woody Allen’s Play It Again, Sam and again in the 1972 film version of that play; here he is doing it in a 1980 commercial for the Long Beach California Press-Telegram.
In the scenes Danny focuses on, Mr Lacy imitates Bogart as Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe meeting a succession of mysterious women in his office. Grayson Hall plays Julia as a frightened and barely coherent client and Nancy Barrett plays Carolyn as the blonde you’d be a fool to trust, even if she does have a pair of gams that won’t quit. They’re all having a great time with their pastiche of The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, and other staples of the Late Late Show.
I do have to demur from Danny’s claim that Hall pioneered Dark Shadows as a mashup. It was that from #1, when Jane Eyre met the Count of Monte Cristo and they both found Art Wallace trying to remake a script he’d already sold to television twice. Nor is he the first to mash up disparate genres. The story of Burke’s fountain pen led into a police procedural that merged with a ghost story; Burke’s typically soapy conflict with Roger dissolved into the story of Roger’s ex-wife, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, a story which was Dark Shadows’ first and most detailed adaptation of Dracula. The difference in Hall’s approach to mashups is that always before, one of the genres was Gothic melodrama. Today, a vampire story is meeting a film noir, and there are some elements of conventional daytime soap opera in the margins. Hall is letting go of Dan Curtis’ original idea of chasing viewers who read Gothic romances.
We get a clue as to what that might mean for the existing characters when Tony asks Julia if she is afraid of Roger Collins. Julia laughs loud and long at the idea that Roger is any kind of danger. For the first 25 weeks, Roger was indeed a deadly menace, but ever since Laura came through he has been reduced to occasional comic relief. Viewers who find a reminder of Burke’s fountain pen in the business with the notebook will see that even the villainous early Roger is a minor threat compared to the supernatural force Barnabas represents. So we are not to assume that any character or theme surviving from the show’s original conception is safe.
*The credits on screen say Gordon Russell wrote it, but evidently the paperwork from the show demonstrates that Hall did. Also, some of last week’s episodes sounded and felt as much like Hall’s work as this one does, but none of the experts tries to credit him with those, so I’ll defer to the consensus and say that while his influence may have been visible some days ago, this one marks his debut on Dark Shadows as the principal author of a teleplay.
Blonde heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard is under the power of her distant cousin, Barnabas the vampire. She begins today’s episode in the foyer of the great house of Collinwood. She stares at Barnabas’ portrait, lifting her scarf to bare the marks of his fangs to it. She is eager to comply with Barnabas’ commands. He has ordered her to do two things- stop strange and troubled boy David Collins from sounding the alarm about him, and induce well-meaning governess Vicki to become his bride.
Ever since she stopped being a vicious narcissist in February, Carolyn has spent her time trying to protect her family members against threats she didn’t quite understand. She’d been trying to protect David, a first cousin who has come to be something like a little brother to her, when she stumbled upon Barnabas in his lair and became his slave. Her glad willingness to help Barnabas do whatever it takes to silence David shows how complete her subjection to him is.
Today, Carolyn wakes David before 6 AM. David asks “Are you sick or sum’thin?” David Henesy had a real gift for comedy, and Mrs Acilius and I laughed out loud at this line. Carolyn tells David that she does not believe any of the things he has been saying about Barnabas, that she never saw the ghost of ten year old Sarah Collins, and that if he keeps talking about supernatural menaces he will have to be sent to a mental hospital.
David’s reaction will puzzle regular viewers. Last Wednesday, in #348, Carolyn told David she had seen Sarah and was inclined to believe him about the other things. He was horrified. He said that local physician Dr Woodard saw Sarah, believed him, and died as a result. He begs Carolyn to say that she doesn’t believe him and that she didn’t see Sarah, and when she can’t he sobs in her arms. On Friday, David overheard matriarch Liz telling Carolyn he might have to be sent away to an institution, to which Carolyn responded that she had seen Sarah and did not think David was mentally ill. Afterward, David invited Carolyn to believe that he was crazy rather than accept the stories he had told before Woodard’s death. So when Carolyn shows up and tells David that she has decided to disbelieve the things he was desperate she disbelieve, and that the only danger will come if he repeats stories he wasn’t going to repeat anyway, he ought to be happy.
But David goes to pieces. He is as upset by Carolyn’s newfound disbelief as he was a few days ago by her belief. The actors do such a good job with the material that I am reluctant to complain about it, but if people are going to be watching the show every day the writers really should keep track of what’s in each other’s scripts.
As David is the functional equivalent of a brother to Carolyn, so Vicki is the equivalent of a sister. In fact, Art Wallace’s original story bible for Dark Shadows, titled “Shadows on the Wall,” called for a story that would climax with the revelation that Vicki was Carolyn’s half-sister, the daughter of Carolyn’s father Paul Stoddard. Well before the show went into production, the part of Vicki had been cast with Joan Bennett-lookalike Alexandra Moltke Isles, setting up the hints that run heavily throughout the first 92 episodes that Vicki is Liz’ daughter by some man other than Paul. Whichever half of her genealogy Vicki has in common with Carolyn, Liz has been tacitly treating her as a daughter all along. Liz has referred to Vicki and Carolyn as “the girls” for a long time, and now she is even encouraging Vicki to restore the west wing of the great house, which sounds very much like a project a person undertakes on something she is set to inherit. For a time Carolyn showed some resentment and jealousy towards Vicki, but the last clear indication of that was in #263. Since then, Carolyn has been treating Vicki as if she had always known her as a sister.
The enthralled Carolyn is as happy serving Vicki up to Barnabas as she was betraying David for his sake. Or she would be, if she had the chance.
Barnabas’ co-conspirator, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, is staying in the house. Julia has been passing herself off as an historian studying the old families of New England while secretly trying an experimental treatment meant to cure Barnabas of vampirism. That treatment reached an impasse before Barnabas bit Carolyn, and he has decided to discontinue it. Yesterday, Julia persuaded Barnabas to let her stick around to help guard him when he lies in his coffin during the day.
A few days ago, in #347, Julia hypnotized Vicki and showed her Barnabas in his coffin. By a post-hypnotic suggestion, she kept Vicki from consciously remembering what she had seen, but left her with an emotional aversion to Barnabas. That hypnosis gag is reenacted today, with Julia taking Vicki to the room in Barnabas’ house which he has prepared for her when she becomes his bride. There, she tells Vicki the details of Barnabas’ plans for her. Again, she gives a post-hypnotic suggestion confining this knowledge to her subconscious mind.
The difference between #347 and today is that Carolyn is working for Barnabas now. In that one, Julia had free rein to take hypnotized governesses in and out of Barnabas’ house all day long, without a care in the world. But now, Carolyn is watching. Even before Julia did her thing with Vicki, Carolyn confronted her and asked a series of pointed questions. That scene set up an interesting take on the whole idea of a relationship triangle- Carolyn and Julia are in conflict over Barnabas’ attentions, though neither is going to be his lover in any conventional sense. Triangles are so important in soap operas that this clash calls our attention to how Dark Shadows is rewriting the rules of the genre.
Carolyn sees Vicki and Julia leave the house. After they have returned, she asks Vicki about the walk she and Julia took. Vicki doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Carolyn says that she saw them down by Barnabas’ house, implying that she followed them. Vicki is still baffled. In a recorded voiceover monologue, Carolyn wonders why Vicki would lie. She concludes that she wouldn’t, and that Julia must be up to some kind of hocus-pocus.
Carolyn then asks Julia about her walk with Vicki. Julia feigns ignorance. Carolyn says she saw them leave the house together. Julia is defensive, but Carolyn waits patiently for an answer. Julia claims that they just stepped outside the door for fresh air, and Carolyn leaves it at that. Julia exits, and Carolyn ends the episode as she began- staring at the portrait of dear cousin Barnabas.
We open on a set we haven’t seen since #180, the archives of the old cemetery north of town. There, a scene plays out between two actors who aren’t really on the show. Daniel F. Keyes created the role of the Caretaker of the cemetery; Robert Gerringer took over the role of Dr Dave Woodard some months ago and did as much with it as anyone could. But neither of those men was willing to cross a picket line and break the National Association of Broadcast Engineers and Technicians strike, and so they were replaced with a couple of stooges.
The stooges are both terrible. Patrick McCray, Danny Horn, and John and Christine Scoleri all go into detail documenting non-Woodard’s incompetence, but the non-Caretaker is just as bad. Patrick McCray memorably described the Caretaker, in Keyes’ realization, as a “refugee from the EC comics universe.” This fellow has none of Keyes’ zest or whimsy; he simply recites his lines.
At one point, the non-Caretaker tells non-Woodard that it will take some time for him to locate the document he is asking about. Non-Woodard replies “Take your time!” We then have about ninety seconds of the non-Caretaker sorting through papers. The show is moving away from the real-time staging that had often marked its earlier phases, so this comes as a surprise.
The episodes in which the archive set was introduced included a lot of talk about the geography of the cemeteries around the town of Collinsport. They told us that the old cemetery north of town was the resting place of the Stockbridges, Radcliffes, and some other old families, but that most of the Collinses were buried in their own private cemetery elsewhere. They also mentioned a public cemetery closer to town where the remains of less aristocratic Collinsporters might be found. In today’s opening scene, non-Woodard tells the non-Caretaker that they had met previously in Eagle Hill Cemetery. Eagle Hill is the name now associated with the old cemetery north of town. So perhaps this building, which also houses a tomb in which several of the Stockbridges were laid to rest, is not in Eagle Hill Cemetery, but one of the others.
Reading roomStacksThe Tomb of the Stockbridges.
In his last few episodes, Robert Gerringer had a couple of scenes in which he and David Henesy established a close relationship between Woodard and strange and troubled boy David Collins. Today, non-Woodard sits on the couch in the drawing room at Collinwood and tells David he has come to believe everything he has been saying, including the stories that have led the other adults to call in a psychiatrist. As my wife, Mrs Acilius, pointed out, that would have been a great payoff from Gerringer’s earlier scenes if he had been in it. It might have been effective enough if any competent actor had played the part of Woodard. Certainly Mr Henesy’s performance gives non-Woodard plenty to respond to. But he barks out his lines as if they were written in all-caps with randomly distributed exclamation points. It is a miserable disappointment.
There is also a scene where David’s father, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger, tries to convince his sister, matriarch Liz, that they ought to send David to military school. This both harks back to the first 39 weeks of Dark Shadows, when Roger openly hated his son and jumped at every chance to send him away, and illustrates the changes that have taken place since then, as Liz acknowledges that Roger is motivated by a sincere concern for David’s well-being. The scene is intelligently written and exquisitely acted. The high caliber of their work makes it all the more distressing to see Joan Bennett and Louis Edmonds on a scab job. David Henesy was ten years old, and had a stereotypical stage mother, so you can excuse his presence and marvel at his accomplished performance. But these two old pros don’t have any business on the wrong side of a strike.
Nor does Jonathan Frid. When non-Woodard goes to confront Barnabas, there are moments when Frid seems to be showing his own irritation with his scene-mate more than his character’s with his adversary. As well he might- neither man knows his lines particularly well, but even when Frid stops and looks down he expresses emotions Barnabas might well be feeling, and he is fascinating to watch. When non-Woodard doesn’t know what words he’s supposed to bark, he drifts away into nothing. But it serves Frid right to have to play off this loser- by this point, he knows full well that without him the show wouldn’t be on the air. He had no excuse at all for crossing that picket line.
The cemetery’s combination archive/ tomb was a prominent part of the storyline of undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. That storyline approached its climax in #183 when Peter Guthrie, PhD, confronted Laura in her home about being “The Undead,” prompting her to kill him. An episode beginning on that set and ending with someone holding a doctoral degree confronting an undead menace would seem to be an obvious callback to that story. Guthrie’s confrontation had a point- he wanted to offer to help Laura find a place in the world of the living if she would desist from her evil plans, an idea which Woodard’s old medical school classmate Dr Julia Hoffman picked up in her quest to cure Barnabas of vampirism. By contrast with Guthrie and Julia, Woodard is just being a fool.
Gordon Russell’s script contains an interesting scene. A psychiatrist brought in to examine strange and troubled boy David Collins gives a little speech attributing David’s fear of his cousin Barnabas to various unresolved traumas he has recently experienced. This speech sounds very plausible to the adults who listen to it, and might go some way towards explaining the appeal of Dark Shadows to its audience. But we know that David’s fears are entirely rational and that Barnabas really is a vampire. When the psychiatrist mentions that Barnabas had fangs in one of David’s dreams, family doctor Dave Woodard catches up with us and realizes that Barnabas really does have fangs and that he used them to inflict bite marks on some of his patients.
Episode 335 of Dark Shadows was a scab job done during the October 1967 National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians strike. In March of that year, at a time when Dark Shadows was at rock bottom in the ratings, the actors stayed out in support of the announcers and newscasters when they went on strike, and the show survived even though it went dark by the time the strike ended. Now, the vampire story is pulling in more viewers every week, making it a valuable property to ABC. But it is at this time that executive producer Dan Curtis told the cast that he would pay their union fines if they crossed the NABET picket line, and most of them did, with network executives and their stooges handling the equipment.
Sad to say, only two cast members did the right thing by the technicians. Robert Gerringer, who played Woodard, was one of those. Even if he had been a good actor, the scab stealing food from the mouths of Robert Gerringer’s children wouldn’t have been able to deliver on the moment when Woodard figures out that Barnabas is a vampire- we need Gerringer for that. He is the person we’ve grown used to seeing in the part, and his self-consciously soap operatic style of acting sets him apart from the rest of the cast and highlights the weirdness of this story playing out on a daytime serial in 1967.
But the scab isn’t a good actor. His most memorable moment comes when Joan Bennett, as matriarch Liz, bobbles a line, and he corrects her. She flashes a look of anger, but what does she expect? What she is doing is no better than what he is- if anything, it’s worse, because she was a big star and could have called a halt to the whole filthy disgrace if she’d lived up to her obligations as a member of AFTRA.
I’m writing this in September 2023, month three of the SAG-AFTRA actors’ strike and month five of the Writer’s Guild of America strike, so I’m even angrier about the whole thing than I usually would be. But I always find it hard to watch material produced under these conditions.
The character of Maggie Evans wasn’t in any of the episodes produced during the strike, so Kathryn Leigh Scott wasn’t involved in breaking it. She is walking a picket line today, and in her column she wrote about the particular issues at stake in the 2023 strikes. Different matters hung in the balance in 1967, but it’s always true that we live in a society, for the love of God, and if working people don’t stick together they don’t have anything.
For the last eight weeks, Dark Shadows has been presenting a riddle about strange and troubled boy David Collins. In #288, he wondered if mysterious little girl Sarah might be a ghost. Since then, he has seen her several times, and every time she has given fresh evidence to corroborate that hypothesis. When he isn’t with Sarah, David is either looking for her or fielding questions from adults who are anxious to make contact with her, and in the course of every search and every question he finds still more reason to suppose that she is a ghost. David had always been the first character to believe in ghosts, yet he kept resisting the obvious conclusion that Sarah was one.
Friday, David had a dream in which Sarah told him that she died when she was ten years old. In that same dream, David saw his cousin Barnabas rise from a coffin, greet Sarah warmly, and threaten him with his cane. Yesterday, David woke up and told his well-meaning governess Vicki that he now understood everything about Sarah, because he knew that she was a ghost. Vicki listened carefully to his dream. Much to his frustration, she tried to talk him out of taking it literally. But today, when David is out of earshot, Vicki twice shows the other adults that she regards David’s dream with the utmost seriousness.
In the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood, mad scientist Julia Hoffman tries to hypnotize David so that he will stop making trouble for her co-conspirator Barnabas. Before she can induce the trance, David recognizes her medallion as the one a faceless woman held before his face in the dream. He flees from Julia and calls out for Vicki.
Vicki and matriarch Liz ask Julia what happened. Julia tries to play dumb, but Vicki recognizes her medallion both as the one David described when he was telling her about his dream and as the one Julia showed her and Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, when she dropped in on them at Maggie’s house in #298. During that visit, Vicki briefly left Julia and Maggie alone together. Before she left the room, Maggie was about to remember who abducted her and held her prisoner; after she came back, Maggie’s amnesia had returned in full force. During the interval, Julia had used the medallion to do a little emergency hypnosis, restoring the memory block that keeps Maggie from identifying Barnabas as her captor and as a vampire. Julia has reason to squirm when she realizes that Vicki has connected the medallion both with that incident and with David’s dream.
Vicki goes to David’s room to again try to talk him out of a supernatural reading of his dream. She finds him gazing into his crystal ball, looking for Sarah. He pleads with her to allow him to go look for Sarah. She resists, but he tells her that he saw Sarah in the crystal ball and that it won’t take him long to find her. He promises to tell Vicki what he and Sarah talk about. She lets him go, on condition that he be back within an hour.
The riddle of David’s long refusal to acknowledge that Sarah is a ghost is matched by the riddle of Vicki’s attitude. She has seen and interacted with ghosts on many occasions, a fact that is no secret from David. Both her recognition of Julia’s medallion and her acceptance of David’s claim to have seen Sarah in the crystal ball show that she knows she is operating in a world where supernatural forces are at work. Yet she keeps urging David back into “logical explanation”-land. Perhaps she has read Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw,” and doesn’t want there to be any ambiguity about whether the boy saw the ghosts himself or his crazy governess put the idea into his head.
David goes to the woods, hears the familiar strains of “London Bridge,” and sees Sarah. She tells him that she knows he saw her in his crystal ball. When he asks how she knows he was looking into his crystal ball, she answers only “I know lots of things.” He asks her about his dream; apparently that is not among the things she knows about, because it all comes as news to her. David tells her that in his dream, she told him that she was very sick when she was ten years old. She excitedly replies “That’s true!” He then says that she told him she died of that sickness. Even now, after the dream, after telling Vicki that Sarah is a ghost and shouting with frustration when she won’t agree, he follows up the idea that Sarah has died with “That isn’t true, is it, Sarah?”
Before Sarah can answer, Vicki’s depressing boyfriend Burke lumbers onto the scene. He hears David and Sarah’s voices and shouts “David!” Sarah then becomes alarmed and declares she has to go away. David asks her to stay, and goes to tell Burke to wait. By the time they turn around, Sarah has vanished.
Burke used to be an interesting character, back when he was a dashing action hero played by the charismatic Mitch Ryan. In fact, he was the one who gave David the crystal ball in the first place, back in #48. But he hasn’t had much to do on the show since his major storyline evaporated in #201, and now he is played by Anthony George, an actor whose cool, understated approach was the exact opposite of Ryan’s tendency to red-hot, larger than life reactions. In the scripts written by Ron Sproat, the part of Burke still depends on Ryan’s strengths, and George is entirely at sea with it. Today, Gordon Russell’s script takes advantage both of George’s actual abilities and of the dimwitted impression he has made previously.
David tells Burke that he doesn’t think Sarah will talk to anyone other than him from now on, not because she is shy, but because she doesn’t want anyone else to know that she is a ghost. Burke gives David a smug little speech about how foolish it is to believe in ghosts. David asks how Sarah got away so fast. Burke admits he doesn’t know. David gives Burke some details about Sarah’s way of vanishing into thin air, and he is left speechless.
Back in the drawing room, Burke tells Vicki and Liz that David thinks Sarah is a ghost. Liz reflexively asks if he ought to be taken to a doctor. Burke suavely says that he doesn’t believe it is as serious as all that, that David is just letting his imagination run away with him.
Vicki speaks up. She says that she disagrees with Burke on two points. First, she thinks the matter is very serious. Second, she doesn’t believe it has anything to do with David’s imagination. Sarah really is a ghost.
Burke starts giving another sanctimonious speech about how one oughtn’t to believe in ghosts. Some weeks ago, Sproat and recently-departed, never-lamented writer Malcolm Marmorstein had given Burke some angry speeches in which he demanded Vicki stop taking the supernatural seriously. Those speeches would have marked Burke as bad news had Mitch Ryan delivered them, but at least they might have suggested that he was going to become an interesting villain- coming from an actor as cold as Anthony George, they were just pointless nastiness. Vicki’s attempts to comply with Burke’s gaslighting campaign also did a lot of damage to her character in the audience’s eyes, presenting her as weak-willed and empty-headed.
But today, Gordon Russell doesn’t write Burke as a loudmouth or Vicki as an aspiring doormat. Instead, he lets George make a reasonable-sounding case in the quiet, detached manner in which he excelled, and he has Vicki surprise him with an equally quiet but unyielding disagreement. She tells Burke to hire all the private investigators he likes to use and tell them to search for Sarah. If they can produce the girl in the flesh, she will admit that she is mistaken. But she tells Burke that won’t happen, because “David is right- that little girl is a ghost.”
If we remember Vicki’s earlier attempts to submit to Burke’s gaslighting, this scene answers the riddle about her. She knows that there are a lot of Burkes and a lot of Lizzes in this world, and that if you want to get along with them you have to be able to present yourself as someone who doesn’t believe in ghosts. She is trying to teach David how to play the role of the practical-minded fellow who takes it for granted that what we can see in the plain light of day is all we have to concern ourselves with. If she and the other adults can shelter him from enough of the uncanny doings that she knows full well are afoot all around them, perhaps he might get through his childhood actually being something like that fellow. It worked out that way when David’s mother, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, came to Collinwood to claim him- the storyline around her drew him deeper and deeper into the world of the occult, but once Vicki had rescued him and it was all over he didn’t remember anything about that side of it.
Upstairs, David is trying to sleep. Sarah appears in the corner of his room, lit from below. Laura stood on the same spot, in the same lighting, when she visited David while he slept in #150. His mother had called his name in a whispering voice and had a subtle message for him, but Sarah yells “David!” and says she’s ready to answer more questions.
David doesn’t ask her if she died. Perhaps when he told Burke that she doesn’t want anyone to know that she is a ghost, he meant that he has realized it is a sensitive subject for her. He does ask about the coffin he saw in his dream. She says she doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He says it was in a room that he felt he’d been in before, and she says maybe it was. He says he doesn’t know where it is, and she tells him that’s good- she doesn’t want him going anywhere near it.
David keeps talking about the coffin, and it dawns on him that it is in the basement of Barnabas’ house. She insists that he stay away from Barnabas’ house, that it isn’t safe for him there. She won’t answer any of his questions about that, but she keeps insisting that he stay away from Barnabas’ house.
David asks Sarah if Barnabas’ servant Willie really was the man who abducted Maggie, as the police think. Sarah answers, “Oh no, poor Willie only went to Maggie’s house to warn her.” David asks what he was trying to warn Maggie of, and Sarah says that she has to go away. She repeats that he must stay away from Barnabas’ house. He pleads with her to stay, but she dematerializes in front of him. This is the first time we’ve seen a ghost vanish in this way since #85, when the ghost of Bill Malloy appeared to Vicki, sang a sea shanty, and then disappeared. It’s also the first time Sarah has let David see her dematerialize. Evidently, she’s more relaxed about these things now that she’s out to him.
Closing Miscellany
There is a particularly funny blooper 14 minutes and 20 seconds into the episode, when Burke comes out of the door that leads to the bedrooms at Collinwood, an off-camera voice calls out “Go in!,” he turns around, goes back in the door, then comes out again with exactly the same expression on his face.
Burke and Vicki have a little conversation about why Julia spends so much time at Barnabas’ house. Burke guesses Julia might have “a mad crush on Barnabas.” Vicki reacts as if this is absurd. The same idea had occurred to Julia’s old acquaintance Dave Woodard, MD, in #324, and Julia had been delighted to find that she had inadvertently acquired a cover story. That Burke came up with the notion independently leads us to wonder if we will be hearing more about it, and that Vicki regards it as so self-evidently preposterous reminds us of the times she has seemed more interested in Barnabas than in Burke. Perhaps the Vicki/ Burke/ Barnabas love triangle has a future after all.
In the outer room of the Tomb of the Collinses, Sam Evans and Dr Dave Woodard recap the story so far. In the hidden chamber on the other side of the wall, vampire Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman eavesdrop on their conversation. When they hear how close Evans and Woodard have come to discovering their terrible secrets, Julia squirms and Barnabas looks shocked.
Busted.
When Dr Woodard mentions that Julia had used the word “supernatural” in a conversation with him, Barnabas nearly blows their cover. He grabs Julia by the throat and she lets out a yelp. Sam hears this, Woodard does not. Woodard suspects that there are ghosts at work in the area, but he cannot believe that Sam’s hearing is better than his, so he dismisses the idea.* He notices the plaque marking the burial site of Sarah Collins, 1786-1796, and says out loud that the little girl named Sarah whom everyone has been looking for lately is the ghost of that Sarah.
Evans and Woodard leave the tomb, and Barnabas resumes raging at Julia. He opens his old coffin and pushes her head into it, asking if she wants to spend eternity confined there. She talks him down with warnings of what would happen were he to kill strange and troubled boy David Collins.
Woodard goes to the great house of Collinwood, where he questions David. Woodard is much more forthcoming with what he knows than he has been in any previous conversation. David listens closely, trying to find out what he knows. But Woodard’s questions are all about David’s friend, Sarah. David doesn’t know that answers to many of Woodard’s questions, and Sarah has sworn him to secrecy about much of what he does know. So the only new piece of information Woodard learns from David is that Julia was lying to him the other day when she said that she hadn’t given much thought to Sarah. David tells him that she asks him about her all the time.
Julia comes in and tries to stop Woodard questioning David. He ignores her and asks another question, then warns him to stay away from the Tomb of the Collinses. When he tells David that whatever secret Sarah told him about the tomb is also known to someone else, and that that other person is very dangerous, David is horrified. When he was trapped in the hidden chamber last week, Barnabas and his servant Willie entered. David hid from them in Barnabas’ old coffin and eavesdropped on a conversation in which Barnabas dropped a huge number of clues about his secrets. Since Woodard started his questioning of David with a reference to the unknown person who has been terrorizing the area since April, David now has reason to believe that Barnabas is that person.
David leaves the room, and Woodard asks Julia what she was trying to prevent him from finding out. She refuses to answer any of his questions. She hears the sound of dogs howling, and knows that it means Barnabas is getting ready to kill someone. Knowing that she has very little time to try to prevent David’s murder, she cannot focus on Woodard’s questions. For once, she can’t think of any lies that will hold him off. Her reason for being in town, so far as Woodard is concerned, is that she is a doctor treating Sam Evans’ daughter Maggie, Barnabas’ former victim. When she won’t answer his questions, he takes her off Maggie’s case.
Julia goes to Barnabas’ house. She finds him on his way out the door, on a mission to kill David. She opposes him, and he declares that nothing can stop him. At that, the wind blows the doors open. It extinguishes some of the candles in the room. The strains of “London Bridge” begin playing, and Barnabas and Julia realize that Sarah, who in reality is the permanently nine year old ghost of Barnabas’ little sister, is in the room. Barnabas cannot leave. Julia says with satisfaction that nothing can stop him- “except one little girl.”
The whole episode is very strong from beginning to end. Julia is usually so much in charge that the only suspense is what she will choose to do, but throughout this one she is scrambling to bring Barnabas under control. When her final attempt fails, Sarah’s intervention comes as a thrilling surprise.
The performances of both Jonathan Frid and Grayson Hall stand out today. Hall is as powerful a presence playing a character who controls nothing as she usually is playing a character who controls everything. And few could match Frid’s ability to appall us with Barnabas’ plan to kill a ten year old and seconds later to elicit tears by calling out to his beloved little sister.
Acilius on Dark Shadows 