graveyard scene – Page 2 – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 779: Our cousin, who always appears at dusk

Vampire Barnabas Collins has stashed his coffin in its old hiding place, the hidden chamber inside the mausoleum where his parents and sister are buried. As dawn approaches, he tells his reluctant sidekick, broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi, that this is the last day he will have to leave the coffin there. The suspicions that had recently surrounded him have cleared, and he will move the coffin back to the basement of Magda’s home, the Old House on the estate of Collinwood, when he next arises.

The graveyard is immersed in a heavy fog. As Barnabas approaches the mausoleum, a familiar voice calls to him. His old nemesis and ex-wife, wicked witch Angelique, implores him to come with her and leave the year 1897. She warns him that he must return to 1969 now, or it will be too late. Barnabas tells Angelique that he has not accomplished the goals for which he came to the past, and that he will not leave until he has done so.

Longtime viewers may be puzzled when Angelique tells Barnabas that she has helped him before. In #757, Angelique did prevent her fellow undead blonde fire witch, Laura Murdoch Collins, from staking Barnabas, but that did not seem to be intended as a service to Barnabas. Rather, it recalled #417, in which Angelique prevented Barnabas’ friend Ben Stokes from staking him and freeing him of the effects of the vampire curse she had placed upon him. She told Ben that she wanted Barnabas to suffer forever, and nothing she says to Laura indicates that she has changed. Indeed, the only time she ever seemed to act out of goodwill towards Barnabas was in #410, when Barnabas was about to rise as a vampire for the first time and she, regretting the curse, tried to stake him herself. Perhaps there is a retcon coming up, in which it will be made possible for Barnabas and Angelique to join forces against some new enemy.

It certainly seems that the show is about to take a new turn of some kind. The major storylines with which the 1897 segment began are all approaching their natural conclusions, and a number of major characters have already been killed off. Longtime viewers will recognize an acknowledgement of these facts, not only in Angelique’s explicit statement that the proper time for Barnabas’ stay in the late nineteenth century is almost up, but also in the doings of another character in the graveyard.

Inveterate prankster Carl Collins suspects Barnabas of being a vampire, and in a dream visitation his late fiancée Pansy directed his attention to the mausoleum. Lurking outside it, he sees Barnabas open the secret panel and go into the chamber where the coffin is kept. Carl declares that “We’ll get him tonight! We’ll get cousin Barnabas… TONIGHT!”

Carl is played by John Karlen, who first appeared on Dark Shadows as the luckless Willie Loomis. It was Willie who, in a misbegotten attempt at jewel theft, inadvertently freed Barnabas to prey upon the living in #210. In consequence, Barnabas bit Willie and enslaved him. When Willie first served him, Barnabas would control him not only by the usual vampiric practices of blood-drinking and telepathic summoning, but also by frequent heavy beatings with his cane. Later, Willie would come to feel that Barnabas was his friend; it was never clear that Barnabas reciprocated this feeling.

Carl first met Barnabas in #706. He introduced himself by holding a gun to Barnabas’ head and threatening to shoot him if he did not admit that his story of being a long-lost cousin from England was a lie. The gun turned out to be loaded with a flag labeled “FIB,” and the whole thing was Carl’s idea of a joke. Barnabas’ icy response, starting with his incredulous tone while asking if “YOU are a COLLINS?,” set the tone for all of his subsequent dealings with Carl, in which his attitude ranged from undisguised contempt to barely disguised contempt. Yet Carl remained convinced that he and Barnabas were going to be great friends, and he even asked Barnabas to be the best man at his wedding to Pansy. Carl is much more enthusiastic about his supposed friendship with Barnabas than Willie is about his, and Barnabas is far more open about his hostility towards him, making the Carl/ Barnabas relationship a spoof of the Willie/ Barnabas one.

Ever since Pansy’s death, Carl’s thoughts about Barnabas have taken a darker cast. When we see him in the mausoleum, watching the panel open, we know that his plan to “get cousin Barnabas” will take him into the chamber where Willie forever lost his freedom. We know, too, that Willie’s misfortune revolutionized the show; when it puts this actor on this set, Dark Shadows is promising to make major changes.

We cut to the drawing room of the great house on the estate. Rakishly handsome Quentin Collins is talking with Magda. As Angelique cursed Barnabas to be a vampire, so Magda cursed Quentin to be a werewolf. Angelique placed her curse because she was upset that Barnabas did not love her and was under the impression she was about to die. Magda placed hers because Quentin had married and then murdered her sister Jenny. Magda did not know then that Jenny had borne twins to Quentin, a son and a daughter. Since the curse is hereditary, Magda has been trying desperately to reverse it ever since she learned of the children’s existence.

The children are still secret from Quentin, and so he does not understand why Magda is trying to help him. When he demands she tell him, she says “I. Did. Not. KNOWWW!” in exactly the same intonation she had used when she first heard about the children in #763. First time viewers don’t know any more than Quentin does what she is talking about- the children are not mentioned today. Magda makes up an obvious lie, saying that she hadn’t known how much Jenny loved him. That isn’t meant to fool the audience, and doesn’t fool Quentin. But when Carl enters, Quentin drops the subject and leaves new viewers in suspense about what Magda now knows that they do not.

Carl knows that Magda lives with Barnabas, and refuses to talk in front of her. She teasingly asks “Mr Carl” if he “don’t like me any more,” and walks out with a bold stride, suggesting that Carl may at some point have shown signs of liking her rather too avidly for her husband’s comfort. Once she is gone, Carl tells Quentin that there is a vampire in their midst. Quentin dismisses this out of hand, telling him that their brother Edward staked a vampire named Dirk and told him about it in vast and gory detail. Carl asks who made Dirk a vampire; Quentin says that it was Laura. No, says Carl, Barnabas made Dirk a vampire, and Barnabas is a vampire himself.

Quentin begins to laugh, but within seconds realizes that there is a great deal of evidence in plain sight to support Carl’s assertion. He agrees to go with Carl to the mausoleum, but we hear his thoughts as he reflects that Barnabas’ efforts to help him are the only hope he has of release from the werewolf curse.

In the mausoleum, Carl wonders aloud where Barnabas came from. Quentin supposes that he was there all along. Carl is horrified at the thought that he is “the real Barnabas- our ancestor! Oh God, that makes it worse!” Quentin orders Carl to open the panel, and Carl obeys. As my wife, Mrs Acilius, points out, John Karlen once again plays the servant’s role.

In the hidden chamber, the brothers open the coffin, finding the diurnally deceased Barnabas. Quentin tells Carl to hand over the gun he has brought; Carl obeys. Quentin asks Carl if he knows how to get out of the chamber. When Carl says that he does not, Quentin turns the gun on him and forces him to stay. Quentin shuts his brother up in the chamber with the vampire.

Quentin consigns Carl to death by vampire. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

In #384, set in the 1790s, Barnabas shot and killed his uncle Jeremiah. Barnabas and Jeremiah were about the same age, and had been very close; they were often compared to brothers. Barnabas was not yet under a curse when he committed that fratricide; it was an act entirely of his own will. Angelique was also partly responsible; she had cast spells on Jeremiah and on Barnabas’ fiancée Josette, causing them to conceive a mad passion for each other and to run off and get married. Enraged, Barnabas broke from the customs of New England and challenged Jeremiah to a duel. Consumed with guilt, Jeremiah deloped and let Barnabas kill him.

Barnabas’ killing of Jeremiah was murder under the laws which prevailed at the time in Maine, which was until 1821 part of Massachusetts. Indeed, Massachusetts’ anti-dueling act of 1730 provided that anyone who had either been killed in a duel or been put to death for winning a duel would “be given an unchristian burial at a gallows or crossroads, with a stake driven through their body.” Since the audience knows that Barnabas is fated to become a vampire, there is a chilling irony in seeing him volunteer for a staked burial.

Dark as was the shadow the duel cast over the subsequent history of the Collinses, at least Barnabas’ act showed a kind of twisted courage. But when Quentin uses Barnabas as a weapon to kill his brother, he is acting from the most abject cowardice. In the century that they have been subject to black magic, the Collinses have sunk from tragic grandeur to infantile squalor.

Quentin goes to the Old House and tells Magda what he has done. Magda is horrified at another murder. “No! Too many people are suspicious now. We’ve got to stop it or we’ll all be found out!” Since Magda is not a member of the Collins family, she is often the straight man reacting to revelations of their misdeeds and monstrosities. And since she is played by the charismatic Grayson Hall, the audience tends to adopt her point of view. So it is easy for us to forget that she is a functional sociopath. Despite all the killings we know to have resulted from her actions, it is still startling that Magda’s only objection to Quentin’s attempt to murder his brother is that she is afraid of getting caught.

We cut to another scene on the same set. Magda has summoned Angelique to the front parlor of the Old House. She asks Angelique to erase Carl’s memory so that Barnabas will not choose to kill him. Angelique taunts Magda as an “amateur” in the occult arts, and declares that she is done helping Barnabas. Magda says that she has read the Tarot, and that the cards tell her that Angelique loves Barnabas. She renews her plea to prevent the killing of Carl, but Angelique will not yield.

The reference to the Tarot rings a bell for longtime viewers. In the 1790s segment, Hall played the Countess DuPrés, Josette’s aunt. Angelique was introduced in that segment; she was the countess’ maidservant, and appeared to be a beginner in witchcraft. The countess was oblivious to Angelique’s sideline, and in #393 declared her to be an uninteresting woman whom she had known ever since she was an uninteresting child. The countess spent most of her time in the front parlor of the Old House reading the Tarot. That Angelique speaks so haughtily to the Tarot reader and “amateur” witch Magda on the same set highlights the reversal of roles in this segment.

Meanwhile, Carl searches the hidden chamber for a way to escape. He finds that one of the stones in the steps slides and reveals a lever. He turns the lever, opening the panel. He runs out and vows to destroy Barnabas, in the process almost knocking over a large tombstone that wobbles as if it were made of Styrofoam.

In episodes #310-315, made and set in 1967, strange and troubled boy David Collins was trapped in the hidden chamber for a whole week. He never did find the release lever- the ghost of Barnabas’ little sister Sarah finally took pity on him, materializing and showing it to him. The show avoids the implication that David is drastically dumber than his great-great uncle Carl by showing that the stone concealing the lever is already slightly ajar.

Episode 772: Apologies are the Devil’s invention

The opening voiceover plays over this image, a type of visual effect we have not seen before at the beginning of an episode:

A transparent sticker of Barnabas superimposed on the exterior of the Old House. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas Collins has bitten dimwitted servant Dirk Wilkins, turning Dirk into a vampire like himself. Barnabas has been out all night, searching for Dirk’s hiding place. He hopes to expose Dirk and frame him for his own crimes.

Barnabas comes home to the Old House on the estate of Collinwood to find that Dirk seems to be trying to do the same thing to him. There is a blood-drained corpse in an armchair in his front parlor. It is that of Miss Pansy Faye, Cockney showgirl and Dirk’s first victim.

Barnabas’ distant cousins live in the great house on the estate. One of them, prankster Carl Collins, brought Pansy home with the intention of making her his bride. No sooner does Barnabas discover Pansy’s remains than Carl starts banging on the front door, shouting that he wants to speak with her.

Barnabas hides what’s left of Pansy in a secret chamber behind a bookcase, then lets Carl in. Grisly as the circumstances are, one person lying to another about the presence of a third nearby is a stock situation from farce, and John Karlen and Jonathan Frid play the scene with the particular brand of desperate seriousness that only works in farce. Barnabas persuades Carl to go away and search the grounds of the estate.

That takes a few minutes, starting from what the opening voiceover told us in so many words was “an hour before dawn.” In what remains of that hour, Barnabas takes Pansy’s body to a cemetery and buries her in a shallow grave between tombstones, telling her to “rest in peace.”

Barnabas buries Pansy. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas comes home, and finds Carl, who has in the interval not only gone to the great house, the groundskeeper’s cottage, and a house on the estate which is currently occupied by a school, but has also gone into the village of Collinsport and made inquiries about Pansy. A speedy bunch, the Collinses.

Before Barnabas returned to the house, Carl had heard Pansy’s disembodied voice singing the song she had so memorably performed for Barnabas in yesterday’s episode. He had spoken to Pansy’s voice telling her that his grandmother’s will gave him a house to live in and that she could live there with him. This is puzzling for returning viewers. In #714, it was made perfectly clear that the will did not mention Carl at all. Edith Collins left her entire estate to Carl’s sister Judith, and the only one of the brothers who was mentioned was Quentin, who received no money or negotiable assets of any kind but who was guaranteed the right to stay at Collinwood as long as he pleased. Perhaps they are retconning that away, perhaps Carl is lying to Pansy, or perhaps Carl is losing his grip on reality.

Whether or not we are supposed to doubt Carl’s sanity, Barnabas talks Carl into suspecting that he might have hallucinated Pansy’s voice. Carl leaves, and Barnabas has time to return to his coffin before dawn.

The rest of the episode is taken up with doings at the school Carl had visited. We saw Carl questioning Charity Trask, daughter of the school’s master, the overwhelmingly evil Gregory Trask. The prim Charity was exasperated that Carl kept asking about Pansy after she had already denied having seen her. The scene is an interesting one- Charity and Pansy are such total opposites that it is a shame they never met. It would be amusing to see them juxtaposed.

Charity is engaged to marry Tim Shaw, a teacher at the school. Neither of them is happy about this situation. Tim was in love with Rachel Drummond, another of the teachers, and Charity is Barnabas’ blood thrall. But Gregory blackmailed Tim and bullied Charity into accepting the arrangement.

Charity’s mother, prudish Minerva Trask, does not like Tim or want him as a son-in-law. She urges Charity to set her sights on Carl. Charity says that she would rather marry Barnabas; Minerva says that her instincts are sound, but that she ought not to settle for a cousin of the rich Collinses when one of the brothers is available. Even if they have retconned Carl into owning a house, he is clearly not a rich man, so this reveals that Minerva knows as little about his financial position as she does about the curse under which Barnabas labors.

Charity tries to engage Tim in conversation, and is baffled that he is not willing to talk to her. Indeed, he does not seem like himself at all. Not only is he dismissive with Charity, but when Minerva confronts him he is bold and insolent, a far cry from the broken man we have seen interacting with the Trasks previously. When Charity tells him their engagement is off, he does not express the relief that she and we expect, but puts on a stagey voice we have not heard him use before and marches off to apologize to her mother.

There is a reason for Tim’s behavior. Gregory enlisted warlock Evan Hanley to brainwash Tim so that he would kill Minerva. There is some business with the Queen of Spades, first when Tim mutters the phrase “Queen of Spades,” then when Evan sends him a note on which is scrawled “Queen of Spades,” and lastly when he walks in on Minerva playing solitaire and sees her turn up the Queen of Spades. Many viewers in 1969 would have remembered Richard Condon’s 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate and its 1962 film version. In Condon’s novel, Raymond Shaw became a robot capable of murder when he saw the Queen of Hearts; in the film, the card was the Queen of Diamonds. Many first time viewers, seeing Tim Shaw’s reaction to the Queen of Spades, would have made the connection and understood why he ends the episode by poisoning Minerva’s tea.

Is this your card? Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Tim Shaw differs from Raymond Shaw in that he is under a spell for a long while, including the whole time we see him today, and he can talk and act independently while it operates on him. Raymond simply became catatonic when he saw the card and remained that way until he heard a command. He then executed the command and came back to himself once he was finished. Tim’s behavior may suggest a nod to another literary work, Pushkin’s story “The Queen of Spades.” That tale, which Tchaikovsky turned into an opera and which in 1949 was made into a feature film, is about a timid man who inadvertently kills a powerful woman and loses control of himself as a consequence. Like Tim, Captain Herman is coerced into marrying a woman he does not love. Presented with an opportunity to get out of the marriage, he finds himself making extraordinary efforts to go through with it, efforts which bring about his ultimate downfall.

Episode 724: There has to be truth to make a story

Ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi is at home in the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood when Rachel Drummond, governess to the children in the great house on the same estate, comes to the door. Rachel says that the late Quentin Collins has risen from the dead and attacked her. Quentin was about to bury Rachel in his own disused grave when Magda’s husband Sandor showed up. Sandor fought Quentin, enabling Rachel to escape. Rachel cannot satisfactorily answer Magda’s questions about whether Sandor survived the fight, and Magda will not honestly answer Rachel’s questions about how Sandor knew to come to her aid.

Sandor makes his way back. Magda is overjoyed to see him and throws herself at him with undisguised affection. He responds with his usual grumpiness. At the end, she remembers that they are not alone, and she reverts to their usual form of pretend-quarreling. Their dialogue is great fun, and Grayson Hall and Thayer David make the most of every laugh line:

Magda overjoyed to be reunited with Sandor. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Magda: Oh, the hero!

Sandor: I am all right.

Magda: Oh, my big, bad, bold hero.

Sandor: Oh, shut up. I cannot hit you. My arm is too sore.

Magda: Oh, what a brave man you are.

Sandor: Yes.

Magda: What a brave man to fight a zombie, a brave, foolish man.

Rachel: He is a brave man. Thank you, Sandor.

Sandor: I don’t like to see a beautiful lady getting buried before her time.

Magda: But you could have been killed.

Sandor: Yes, that at least would have made you cry. Get me some hot water. My wrist is beginning to swell.

Magda: Oh, so now, I have to nurse you. It is better he should have finished you!

Sandor and Magda are the first happily married couple we have seen on Dark Shadows, and this scene shows them at their very happiest. It is not only a good bit of comedy, it is quite lovely.

Rachel is bookish and intellectually ambitious, very much the sort of young lady you might expect to find in charge of the education of the children in a wealthy family in the late Victorian age. She tells Sandor that she cannot accept that Quentin has risen from the dead and is roaming about as a zombie, even though she has encountered as much evidence of the fact as anyone could want. When Sandor urges Rachel to believe what she has seen, she asks what she will have to believe in next- “Ghosts? Witches? Werewolves?” Sandor affirms that he believes in all of those things, and Rachel replies that she cannot.

Well might Sandor believe in such beings. He is under the power of the new master of the Old House, Barnabas Collins, a vampire. Barnabas rises from his coffin in the basement at dusk, when Rachel is upstairs sleeping. Barnabas knows that Angelique, the same witch who made him into a vampire in the 1790s, is controlling Quentin and persecuting Rachel. When Quentin turns up in the basement, Barnabas remembers a ceremony he saw on Angelique’s home island of Martinique that reunited a zombie’s soul with his body and made him once more a living man. He sends Sandor to the attic to retrieve a packet of letters he wrote to his uncle Jeremiah in those days, describing the ceremony.

Jeremiah’s name will jolt longtime viewers. Angelique raised Jeremiah from his grave as a zombie in #393. Over the next five episodes he initially did Angelique’s bidding, then turned on her. They never did tell us that Jeremiah had returned to his grave, in spite of Angelique’s phenomenally vehement exhortations to him to do so. It’s too bad Barnabas didn’t remember these letters then, he might have been able to un-kill Jeremiah.

Or perhaps not. The ceremony is a total failure today, so maybe Barnabas just doesn’t have what it takes to reunite a soul with a body.

When Sandor and Quentin are fighting in the graveyard, we see a tombstone labeled “Laura Murdoch Radcliffe, born 1840.” The Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t have any examples of the phrase “Easter Egg” meaning hidden content of special interest to devotees until 1986, and for that matter this episode aired a few days before Easter began in 1969. So it is doubly premature to call this an Easter Egg. We learned in #181 that a woman named Laura Murdoch Radcliffe died (by fire!) in 1867, with her young son David in her arms; other Laura Murdochs have died that way in other years, and in #187 the residents of the great house decide that Laura Murdoch Collins is likely to take her own young son David to the same fate. The show has been dropping reminders of the Laura story lately, and any longtime viewers who can read this tombstone will appreciate the reference.

I suspect that the original audience for this particular Easter Egg was pretty nearly limited to the set decorators. The inscription is on screen for less than a second, and it is as clear as it is in the capture above for only a small fraction of that time. It’s hard to see even on a modern television; on a 1960s-vintage TV set tuned to an ABC affiliate, many of which had the worst reception in their markets, it must have been totally illegible to something like 99% of the audience. Moreover, it comes at the end of the fight scene, when most eyes were focused on Sandor’s falling figure. Not very many of the few thousand people who might have had a good enough picture to read the inscription would have been looking at it. And most of the audience who were tuning in at this point had joined the show after Barnabas was introduced, the month after Laura went up in smoke, her name unmentioned since. But in the age of streaming and DVDs, we can all appreciate the reference.

Episode 625: Dead man’s wedding

The first time we might have expected to see a wedding on Dark Shadows was in #270, when reclusive matriarch Liz was supposed to marry seagoing con man Jason in the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood. That wedding was called off when Liz, rather than saying “I do,” announced “I killed Paul Stoddard and that man was my accomplice!” It turned out that Liz didn’t actually kill Paul after all. She only stunned him, and he and Jason connived to trick her into thinking she had killed him so that she would give them a lot of money. The two of them buried an empty trunk in the basement of the great house and Jason told Liz that Paul’s corpse was in it. Liz’ refusal to be blackmailed into marrying Jason led to the exhumation of that empty trunk.

The next time there was supposed to be a wedding at Collinwood was in #380, when the show was a costume drama set in the 1790s. Scion Barnabas was supposed to marry the gracious Josette, but wicked witch Angelique cast a spell that caused Josette to elope with Barnabas’ uncle Jeremiah. We did not see their wedding, but we did see Barnabas and Angelique get married in #397. We also saw them on their wedding night, when Barnabas left Angelique in her bedroom and retired to his, without so much as a goodnight handshake between them. As Jason’s attempt to marry Liz ended with the exposure of a vacant coffin, so these marriages led to vacant coffins as well. Barnabas killed Jeremiah in a duel in #384, and Angelique raised him from the dead in #392. It does not appear he ever did go back to his grave. He opened his own coffin in #397 and tried to bury Angelique alive in it.

When Barnabas found out that Angelique was the witch responsible for Jeremiah and Josette’s elopement and all the misery afterward, he tried to kill her, and she retaliated by turning him into a vampire. His coffin was empty every night for a while, but in March 1968, shortly after Dark Shadows left the 1790s and returned to contemporary dress, he became human again. Now Angelique is a vampire, and it is her coffin that is regularly vacant.

Today, another wedding is scheduled for the drawing room of the great house. Well-meaning governess Vicki is supposed to marry an unpleasant man known variously as Peter and Jeff. A mysterious woman with two names of her own, Eve and Danielle, shows up while Peter is smoking on the terrace.

Peter/ Jeff and Eve/ Danielle both lived in the 1790s, and both have come back to life in 1968. Peter/ Jeff is in deep denial about his own status as a revenant, and gets even more obnoxious than he usually is whenever anyone brings it up. Eve/ Danielle remembers him from their previous lives, and is, inexplicably enough, in love with him. She brings him a note that she acquired on a recent trip through time. In Peter’s handwriting, under the salutation “Dear Danielle,” it says that he would rather go to the gallows on the off chance that in some future life he will be with Vicki than go away with Danielle. Somehow, Danielle takes Peter’s willingness to face death in hopes of reunion with Vicki to mean that he should now leave Vicki and go away with her. The logic may escape the viewer, but evidently it convinces Peter/ Jeff. He leaves Collinwood to go dig up his grave. He finds the coffin vacant. It is unclear whether this means he will reunite with Eve/ Danielle, but apparently it convinced him he should not marry Vicki.

Nobody’s home. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Liz’ aborted wedding to Jason marked the end of the blackmail arc, which was itself an extended in-betweener meant to clean up the last non-supernatural stories, introduce the vampire, and give the rest of the cast something to do while Barnabas was settling in. The aborted wedding of Barnabas and Josette marked the end of the part of the 1795 segment in which most of the characters don’t know that there is a tragedy brewing, while Barnabas and Angelique’s wedding told the audience that the preliminaries were over and they were about to explain how Barnabas became a vampire. Vicki and Peter/ Jeff’s attempted wedding today marks another ending. Alexandra Moltke Isles will leave the role of Vicki after the episode coming up on Tuesday. Vicki started moving to the sidelines once undead fire witch Laura went up in smoke in #191, and she has long been a secondary character. But she was the main protagonist for the first 39 weeks of Dark Shadows, and Mrs Isles carried the show very capably during those days. It was disappointing when she moved so far out of the main current of the action, and sad to see her go.

Episode 562: The power of this house

Dangerously unstable ruffian Willie accidentally freed vampire Barnabas from his coffin in #210, and became his sorely bedraggled blood thrall. Barnabas has since been cured of his vampirism, more or less, and when first we saw Willie after that it seemed he might be about to revert to his old ways. But he has settled back into a life under Barnabas’ thumb. Today, he is digging up a grave, planning to steal a body for Barnabas and mad scientist Julia to use in creating a Frankenstein’s monster.

Willie is interrupted in this gruesome task when hardworking young fisherman Joe, walking through the graveyard, spots him and announces that he will be taking him to the sheriff. Joe is pale and has trouble concentrating; at one point he asks Willie about a voice only he can hear. Willie is in such a panic that he doesn’t notice the signs that Joe is ill. When Joe walks off, Willie is still pleading with him not to go to the police.

As it happens, Joe is not on his way to the sheriff’s office. He has been bitten by Angelique, formerly the wicked witch who made Barnabas a vampire, now a vampire herself. He is answering her summons. Were Willie not so terrified of the sheriff, perhaps he would have recognized a fellow sufferer of his old affliction.

Joe has been on Dark Shadows from the beginning, long before Willie and Barnabas joined the cast. For his first 112 weeks, he was the show’s most straightforward specimen of Healthy Man. His only foible was his tendency to lose track of his plans when he had the chance to help a neighbor. Now Angelique has transformed him into an addict desperate for a fix.

Joe needs a fix. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Joe and Willie represented opposite extremes of personality before they were bitten, and actors Joel Crothers and John Karlen were similarly remote from each other in their approaches to their work. Karlen used techniques like those popularized by Marlon Brando and James Dean to throw himself into a depiction of Willie’s emotions that could be compelling no matter how stale the dialogue he was given. Crothers could overcome weak lines as well, but he did it with a manner as precise and deliberate as Karlen’s was volatile and intense. For example, today he says “There are places I should be, other places,” which may not look like much in print, but his delivery shows a deep poetry in it.

Joe goes to Angelique in the house by the sea where she is staying. He wrestles with his compulsion to submit to her bite; she assures him that he will soon forget everything else in his life, including his love for his fiancée Maggie. Regular viewers will hear an unexpected echo in this; Maggie is played by Kathryn Leigh Scott, who in the part of Dark Shadows set in the 1790s played gracious lady Josette. It was her frustration that Barnabas loved Josette and not her that led Angelique to cast the spells that caused disaster in those days, culminating in her transformation of Barnabas into a vampire.

Joe awakens after the bite and tells Angelique about his encounter with Willie. Angelique’s master Nicholas appears. He instructs Joe to tell him what happened in the graveyard, and dismisses Angelique. We see Joe’s old gallantry one last time as he tells Angelique she doesn’t have to take orders from Nicholas. She tells him she does, and leaves him alone with Nicholas.

Nicholas tells Joe that he controls Angelique, and therefore controls him. Joe tells him he did not stop to tell the sheriff about Willie. It is Nicholas who wants a Frankenstein’s monster and has set up the scheme that is forcing Barnabas and Julia to try to make one, and so he is relieved to hear that. Nicholas gives Joe an order we do not hear.

Meanwhile, Willie is back at Barnabas’ house, still in a state of panic. Barnabas asks what is wrong, and he tells him that Joe found him digging up a grave and said he would go to the police. Willie wants to leave town at once, but Barnabas refuses.

Barnabas is figuring out how he can dump responsibility for the whole mess on Willie when a knock comes at the door. Thinking it is the sheriff, he sends Willie upstairs, telling him that if he talked to them he would only make it worse. It turns out to be Joe, come to tell Barnabas what he saw and explain that he decided that, since Willie saved his life a while ago, he won’t go to the police after all. Barnabas is very quiet and very courtly, sounding for all the world like Boris Karloff. After Joe leaves, Willie enters, jubilant to be off the hook. Barnabas is troubled by Joe’s obvious ill-health.

Back in the house by the sea, Nicholas tells Angelique that he has received some alarming news from the hospital. The victim of her first bite, easygoing electrician Tom, is coming out of his coma. If Tom tells what he knows, Nicholas and Angelique will be exposed. Angelique has only been a vampire for a short time, and is unsure of her powers. But Nicholas has demonstrated sufficient ability that it is difficult to see Tom as much of a threat to him. The episode thus ends without any particular suspense.

Episode 392: This great democracy of yours

In episode 368/369 of Dark Shadows, haughty overlord Joshua Collins of Collinsport, Maine told his house-guest, the Countess DuPrés, that he was surprised she still chose to “affect a title,” since in this year of 1795 “France has followed our example and become a republic.” After the countess handed Joshua his head, he fumed to his wife Naomi that her snobbish Old World ways offended him, since he is such a devout believer in human equality.

It was immediately clear to any viewer that Joshua was being hypocritical. He tyrannizes his family and treats his servants as domestic animals that have unaccountably, and rather inconveniently, gained the power of speech. When he says that all men are equal, he means that he, personally, is the equal of anyone in a sufficiently lofty position, and the superior of everyone else.

Audience members who know something about the history of the late eighteenth century in the USA and France will find more to savor in Joshua’s preposterous position. By 1795, the French Revolution had gone through its most radical phases, and was anathema to everyone in the USA other than some of the nascent political tendency led by Thomas Jefferson, a tendency known in the southeast and New England as the Republican Party and in the middle states and the west as the Democratic Party. When Joshua says with great satisfaction that “France has followed our example and become a republic,” he is identifying himself with the most militant factions of the Jeffersonian party, and when he tells Naomi that “all men are equal” he is echoing the most famous passage of Jefferson’s most celebrated writing.

Ridiculous as it is to hear Joshua invoke the egalitarian rhetoric for which Jefferson was so well known, as a major landowner in a rural area far removed from the major cities he was perfectly typical of the most important backers of the Democratic/ Republicans. Jefferson himself was a member of this category, and he displayed both a remarkably sophisticated understanding of the leftwardmost theorists of the French Revolution, as demonstrated for example in the edition of the works of Destutt de Tracy that he prepared for publication in 1817, and a dismally cruel approach to his livelihood as a slave-holding planter.

When Dark Shadows was on the air in 1966-1971, the party that traced its origins to Jefferson was undergoing a revolution of its own. The coalition he forged between working-class groups in the north and rich slave-owners in the south had been an inspiration to the Democratic Party from the days before the Civil War right through the presidencies of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. After World War Two, the African American freedom movement finally scrambled this unlikely coalition, winning Black southerners the vote and challenging the dominance the heirs of the slave-owners had long held in the Democratic Solid South. Thoughtful Americans, seeing this change, might well think back to the origins of the Democratic Party and to the ridiculous incongruity of Jefferson’s soaringly egalitarian words coming out of his and other oligarchic mouths.

At the top of today’s episode, Joshua is very thorough about betraying all of Jefferson’s ideals. He tells Naomi that the common folk of the town must not know that their son Barnabas killed his uncle Jeremiah in a duel. Naomi replies that everyone already knows; Joshua insists that they do not, and declares that they will believe what he tells them to believe.

The *philosophe* in his salon. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

One of the major themes of Jefferson’s correspondence, as indeed of Destutt de Tracy and other Enlightenment philosophes, was what Karl Marx, a close reader of Destutt de Tracy, would call “false consciousness,” the tendency of the oppressed classes to see the world in categories generated by the ruling class, and that if false consciousness were erased the oppressed would rise up and sweep away all manner of social evils. Joshua’s determination to keep the working people of Collinsport in the dark about what is happening on the estate of Collinwood puts him at the opposite extreme from the beliefs his leader Jefferson professed. In his own life, Jefferson himself set about enforcing regimes of lies on more than one occasion, as for example when he used his office as president of the United States to cover up the crimes of General James Wilkinson. Even viewers who hadn’t read Jefferson’s letters and who were unaware of Jefferson’s less inspiring actions may well have known, in 1967, that the confidence which the Declaration of Independence expresses in what will happen if “the facts be submitted to a candid world” sat uneasily with the lies on which slavery in particular and white supremacy in general rests.

Joshua begins dictating to Naomi a fictitious story that sounds oddly familiar to regular viewers. Before well-meaning governess Vicki was plunged into her uncertain and frightening journey into the past, we had heard several versions of the Collins family history, none of which resembles the events that we have actually seen play out so far. As Joshua tells Naomi what he has decided people should believe, for the first time the outlines of the Collins family history published in the 1950s come into view. That history is not only sustained by false consciousness, but has its origins in a brazen lie.

Joshua is busy fabricating when Naomi interrupts him with more bad news. Barnabas has decided to marry Angelique, maid to the Countess DuPrés and to the countess’ niece, Barnabas’ former fiancée Josette. The great egalitarian Joshua is thunderstruck that his son would fall into the clutches of an “adventuress.”

Joshua sends Naomi to fetch Barnabas. He thunders his disapproval of the marriage, and Barnabas stands his ground.

Later, we see Josette in the cemetery, at Jeremiah’s grave. Barnabas spots her, and wonders whether he should tell her about his engagement to Angelique. He doesn’t want her to hear of it from someone else, as she surely will very soon. But the place could not be less appropriate. He approaches her; they have an awkward little talk, in the course of which he urges her to hate him for killing her husband. She says she cannot. She tells him not to say any more. He is helpless.

Angelique arrives and tells Josette that her carriage is waiting. Josette invites Barnabas to ride back to the manor house with them; he declines. Josette leaves the two of them alone for a moment; with a note of jealousy that belies her agreement to a sham marriage to a man who will always love Josette, she asks Barnabas if she interrupted something. He says that she did not. That’s true- he had already given up the idea of telling her about their engagement when Angelique joined them.

Back in the manor house, Joshua summons Angelique to the front parlor, where he offers her $10,000 to relinquish her claim on Barnabas and go back to the island of Martinique. It is difficult to compare prices between 1795 and 2023; to get a sense of proportion, we might remember that when Joshua offered Vicki a job as governess to little Sarah Collins in #367, he offered her a salary of $4 a week, and that this was rather a generous rate of pay for the position. So it would take even an upper servant 2500 weeks, that is to say almost fifty years, to earn the amount of money Joshua is offering Angelique.

Angelique refuses Joshua’s bribe. He says he is prepared to offer more, but when he sees that she is firm in her refusal he switches to threats. Naomi intervenes and says that she does not want to break ties. With Naomi’s promise of friendship, Angelique agrees to wait until the mourning period for Jeremiah is complete before marrying Barnabas.

What returning viewers know that Joshua, Naomi, Barnabas, the countess, and Josette do not is that Angelique is not only a maid, but is also a witch. It was under her spell that Josette, though in love with Barnabas, conceived a mad passion for Jeremiah, that Jeremiah, though a loyal friend to Barnabas, reciprocated that passion, and that the two of them, though they struggled with their consciences, eloped. That elopement prompted the jilted Barnabas to challenge his uncle to a duel, and his bewilderment at his own actions prompted Jeremiah to delope and let Barnabas kill him. Angelique and Barnabas had had a brief romantic fling before he became engaged to Josette, and she believed that once Josette was out of the way Barnabas would return to her.

It hadn’t quite worked out that way. In her frustration at Barnabas’ continued preference for Josette, Angelique cast a spell on Sarah, sickening her and threatening her life. When she saw how upset Barnabas was by his little sister’s illness, Angelique said that she could cure it, and extorted his promise to marry her if she did so. She released Barnabas from that promise in #390/391. When he told her that Josette would always come first for him, even though he knew there could never again be anything between them, she said she would marry him anyway. Apparently thinking he wouldn’t be likely to find another woman willing to enter a sham marriage on that basis, Barnabas proposed, and Angelique accepted.

In their conversation in the parlor, Joshua tells Angelique that he knows about the promise she extorted from Barnabas with her ability to cure Sarah. Evidently Barnabas told Naomi about that. There are those in the house who believe that witchcraft is afoot; indeed, Vicki is in hiding, having been accused as the witch. This story would seem to be proof positive that Angelique, not Vicki, is the guilty party, and she does widen her eyes when Joshua brings it up. But he and Naomi don’t make the connection.

Back in the graveyard, Angelique is holding a miniature coffin and casting a spell.

Where did she get that miniature? Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

In her bedroom, Josette hears Angelique’s disembodied voice, saying that Jeremiah is not dead. She runs to the front door, where Naomi sees her. Unable to dissuade her from going out in the night, Naomi follows Josette to Jeremiah’s grave. Josette keeps hearing the voice; Naomi does not hear it. But when Jeremiah’s hand bursts out of the soil, both women see it.

Jeremiah waves to the ladies. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

In the parts of Dark Shadows set in the twentieth century, Joan Bennett played matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Of all the major characters, Liz was the most reluctant to acknowledge the existence of supernatural forces, and she was the one who was least likely to see the evidence of such forces that abounded in the world around her. So when we see her as Naomi watching Jeremiah’s hand reaching out of his grave, it is the first time we have seen her react to an incontrovertible sign of the paranormal. It makes us wonder how far back in the Collinses’ past the roots of Liz’ denial extend.

Episode 154: Died by fire!

Eventually, Dark Shadows became the kind of pop culture phenomenon that even people who never saw the show couldn’t really avoid. Most such things spawn catchphrases that become widely familiar and remain so for years. Think of Star Trek with “Beam me up!” or “Warp speed.” To my knowledge, Dark Shadows was an exception to that, with no phrases or expressions spreading beyond its fans. But if it had already been a hit when today’s episode aired, I think a character we meet in it would have been the source of two catchphrases. That character is Cemetery Caretaker, played by Daniel F. Keyes.

Under the influence of the ghost of Josette Collins, well-meaning governess Vicki has ordered her boyfriend, instantly forgettable lawyer Frank, to take her to a graveyard out in the country someplace. Vicki knocks on the door of a building there, and at length an aged figure in a celluloid collar and wire-frame glasses opens the door. He stands mute for the first minute Vicki and Frank talk to him. When he finally starts speaking, he asks them if they are alive.

Frank doesn’t show any surprise at the question. You wouldn’t really expect him to- with his personality, he must get that a lot. He assures the caretaker that yes, he and Vicki are alive. The caretaker explains that he often hears knocking at the door, but it is usually the unquiet spirits of the dead.

Some months from now, the caretaker will introduce his second memorable phrase, “The dead must rest!” At this first appearance, we learn why they must. If the dead aren’t resting, they’re going to be keeping him awake all night, and he has things to do in the morning.

Frank tells the caretaker that they are lost. Vicki contradicts him and insists that this is where she is supposed to be. Frank apologizes for bothering him and tries to go; Vicki insists on staying. The caretaker lets them into the building.

Inside, Vicki and Frank find a strange combination of archive and mausoleum. By the standards of Dark Shadows, it’s a big, elaborate new set, a definite sign that something important is happening.

The front room of the caretaker’s building

Vicki keeps talking about how fresh the air is, and how full of the scent of jasmine. The caretaker is bewildered by her words, and Frank says the only scents he can detect are must and mold. The audience knows that the scent of jasmine is a sign that the ghost of Josette Collins is trying to attract a character’s attention.

Vicki declares that the source of the scent is in a connected room. The caretaker is reluctant to let Vicki and Frank into that room. He says that it is the final resting place of those members of the illustrious Stockbridge family* who died particularly gruesome deaths. Vicki pleads with him, and he gives in. He does insist that while in the crypt, they must be very quiet- “So quiet, even they can’t hear.”

The caretaker talks in a not-particularly hushed stage voice the entire time they are in the crypt, so he must not think the dead have such great hearing after all. He tells the stories of the crimes and accidents that took the lives of each of the people whose remains lie behind the large stone plaques on the wall. When he comes to the last of them, L. Murdoch Stockbridge, Frank interrupts him. “L. Murdoch! I’ve seen that name on legal documents around the office a hundred times!” Frank is handling the divorce of high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins from his mysterious and long-absent wife, Laura Murdoch Collins.

Frank asks about L. Murdoch Stockbridge. The caretaker doesn’t know what the L. stood for. He does know that she was a woman, and he can describe the circumstances of her death. One night in 1767, a candle set the curtains around her bed ablaze, and she burned to death. Such remains as are in the niche are little but ashes. He says, and then repeats, “L. Murdoch Stockbridge died by fire! L. Murdoch Stockbridge died by fire!” Once Vicki learns about L. Murdoch Stockbridge, the scent of jasmine disappears and she is in the same dank musty space as Frank and the caretaker.

It’s been three years since Mrs Acilius and I first saw these episodes, and I can still make her laugh by putting on an old man voice and saying “Died by fire!” Sometimes we find ourselves in situations where everyone is being very serious, and someone mentions that a person “died by fire.” I glance at her, and find her biting her lip to keep from laughing out loud. That’s why I say that if Dark Shadows had been at the peak of its popularity in January of 1967, “Died by fire!” would have been one of the great pop culture catchphrases of the period.

Back at the great house of Collinwood, wildly indiscreet housekeeper Mrs Johnson comes into the drawing room while Roger is at his usual station, leaning on the cabinet where the brandy is kept and draining a snifter. She asks him if she can bring him anything. Those are the words, but the voice spells out a stern sermon about the evils of alcohol. Roger goes to sit down, saying nothing of consequence but saying it in a way that makes clear he dislikes and resents her.

Laura enters. Roger sends Mrs Johnson off to make coffee. Alone in the drawing room, Roger and Laura argue about all the things they have been arguing about since she returned from her long absence. There is no new information in the dialogue, but it is good to see another side of Roger. Lately we’ve seen him almost exclusively as the bratty little brother of reclusive matriarch Liz, and his interactions with other characters are dominated by the narcissism that is most fully expressed in his scenes with Liz. When he is the unloving father of strange and troubled boy David, the unsettlingly flirtatious uncle of flighty heiress Carolyn, the cowardly foe of dashing action hero Burke Devlin, or the malign co-conspirator of drunken artist Sam Evans, we see vices that we can trace back directly to his certainty that Liz will always shelter him from the consequences of his actions, whatever they may be. When he stands up to Laura in this scene, we see that there is a semi-functional adult somewhere inside Roger.

Roger and Laura realize that Mrs Johnson has been eavesdropping on their conversation. They are worried about what she might have heard. They do not know what regular viewers know, that she is a paid agent of Roger’s enemy Burke, placed in the house to spy on the Collinses. They do know that she has a big mouth, though, and since the last words they spoke were about a crime they want to keep covered up that’s enough to give them pause.

Frank brings Vicki home to Collinwood. Standing outside the front door, they remark on the caretaker’s frequent muttering of “died by fire! Died by fire!”

Vicki reviews all of the strange occurrences that have taken place since Laura’s return. She sums up the whole course of any story about people investigating the supernatural- “It seems connected- and yet so unconnected.” By the laws of nature as science describes them, by the ordinary logic of waking life, none of the events she lists means anything. It’s only after you accept the idea that uncanny forces are at work that they form a pattern pointing to Laura. The audience can accept that, because we can hear the theremin on the soundtrack. Vicki and Frank have a harder time.

Frank tells Vicki he has to get home. She invites him in for a drink. He replies “You make it a stiff one, and you’re on!” That’s what you need before a long drive on dark, winding roads, to get tanked up on a lot of booze. They open the doors and walk into the house. The camera dwells on them as they make this procession. As they had gone through doors that led to L. Murdoch Stockbridge, now they go through the doors that lead to L. Murdoch Collins.

Vicki and Frank join Roger and Laura in the drawing room. The men drink brandy, the women sip coffee. Vicki asks Laura about her family background, claiming that David is curious about it. Laura responds merely that her family is a distinguished one and had been in the area for a long time.

Roger tells Frank that he will be hearing from Lieutenant Riley of the state police tomorrow. Laura objects that she doesn’t want to talk about Riley’s message, Roger says there won’t be any conversation- he will simply announce the lieutenant’s laughable news. The authorities in Phoenix, Arizona are convinced that a charred corpse found in Laura’s apartment there is hers, and that she died when the apartment building burned to the ground. Vicki looks at Laura, and with a strange smile says “Laura Murdoch Collins died by fire.”

*The caretaker was deeply versed in the lore of the Stockbridge family, and told Vicki and Frank that most of the graves in this eighteenth century cemetery were theirs. Yet he showed no glimmer of recognition when Vicki mentioned Josette Collins to him. That suggests that the Stockbridges were leading citizens of the area before the Collinses rose to prominence.

It might be interesting if someone would write a story in which the first Collinses were servants of the Stockbridges who got rich by doing their dirty work. Maybe the first and darkest shadow of all was that some colonial Collins scabbed on his fellow employees when they were trying to get a fair deal from the Stockbridges. I’m not up on Dark Shadows fanfic, for all I know there may be whole novels out there on this theme.

Episode 153: To be a dead woman

High-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins had some bad news several weeks ago when he learned that his estranged wife, the mysterious and long-absent Laura, had come back to town. His consternation turned to joy when he learned that Laura wanted to divorce him and leave with their son, strange and troubled boy David.

The one obstacle in the path of the divorce is Roger’s sister, reclusive matriarch Liz. Roger has squandered his entire inheritance and has no inclination to make himself useful enough to anyone to earn a living. He therefore lives as a parasite on Liz, living as a guest in her house and drawing an income from a sinecure with her business. Liz distrusts Laura and sees in David the only hope that the family name will continue. She is determined to prevent Laura from taking David, and Roger has to appease her.

Today, Liz is disturbed that the authorities in Phoenix, Arizona keep insisting that Laura is dead. She lived in an apartment there which burned to the ground. The medical examiners in Arizona have now inspected the charred remains of a woman found inside, and the dental records are a perfect match for Laura’s. Lieutenant Dan Riley of the Maine state police shows up to inform everyone of this fact and to convey Arizona’s request that Laura submit to a physical.

Riley has some rather peculiar mannerisms. When Roger answers his knock to let him into the great house of Collinwood, he finds him standing at the door, staring off into space at a right angle to him. I’ve answered many a door in my day, and I don’t believe I have ever found anyone on the other side presenting his profile to me in this way. It is truly an odd thing to see. I suppose director John Sedwick must have told him to do that in order to make some kind of point, but I can’t for the life of me imagine what that point might be.

Roger is dismayed that the bizarre situation created by Arizona’s insistence that his wife is dead threatens to postpone his final farewell to Laura and David, but he does see the funny side of it. He and Liz take Riley to the cottage where Laura is staying. Before Riley can start talking, Roger asks Laura how it feels to be dead. The show has been giving us lots of clues that Laura is a revenant of some kind, and both Liz and David’s well-meaning governess Vicki have taken note of some of these clues. Laura’s shock when Roger puts that question to her strikes her silent for a whole commercial break. When they come back and we find him teasing her with the news from Phoenix, we might wonder if she’s about to betray herself- “I haven’t been dead for weeks, not altogether anyway!” But instead she just sputters and postures, behaving as if offended. Roger is puzzled by this reaction, and asks what happened to her sense of humor. Apparently his comments are the sort of joke that used to make her laugh.

Riley does not doubt that the Arizona authorities have made a mistake and that Laura in fact is the person everyone in the town where she grew up, including her husband, her ex-fiance, her disapproving sister-in-law, and the sheriff, has taken her to be. He simply asks them to play along and help his colleagues in Arizona to complete the routine tasks required of them. Among the questions she answers correctly is that it was her idea to name her son “David Theodore Collins.” Roger had wanted to name him “Charles Andrew Collins,” after some of his ancestors, but she insisted on calling him “David,” a name no previous Collins had ever borne. At Roger’s instance, Laura agrees to go to a doctor so that Riley will be able to send the Arizona officials the paperwork they need.

After Liz and the policeman have left Laura alone, Roger asks her what she isn’t telling about the fire in Phoenix. She is alarmed that he might attach some weight to the identification of the body as hers. He at once dismisses that as too ridiculous for words, but says that he is sure she knows more about the dead woman than she is telling. She won’t budge from her denials, and he tells her that while he will be glad to publicly support any lie it might be useful for her to tell, they really ought to share the truth in private.

That evening, Vicki is on a date with Roger’s lawyer, instantly forgettable young Frank Garner. She tells Frank she is glad that David is warming to Laura. He says that there are so many unanswered questions about Laura that he fears Vicki’s attitude towards her is excessively charitable. He does not think that Vicki or anyone else really knows enough about Laura to be sure that she ought to be trusted with David’s care.

After dinner, Vicki is a passenger in Frank’s car. We are introduced to this fact by a shot of a car’s headlights coming at us, a shot previously used in an early promo for Dark Shadows.

While Frank is droning on about who knows what,Vicki looks off in the distance and smiles broadly. Frank sees this big smile, recognizes that nothing he is saying could elicit so vivid a reaction, and objects to her ignoring him. She says that the scent of jasmine is all around. He says he doesn’t smell anything.

The scent of jasmine has been established as the sign that the ghost of Josette Collins is present. Josette has been trying to warn everyone that Laura poses a threat to David, and Vicki is especially susceptible to communication from her. So regular viewers will know that Vicki is now acting under instructions from Josette.

Vicki starts issuing commands. She orders him to take the next right turn, then a left, and finally to stop in the middle of a field. When Frank asks whether she has ever been there before, she says no. When he asks if she knows where they are, she says no. When he asks why she keeps giving these orders, she says that “It is where I am supposed to be.” He realizes that they are in a cemetery.

Vicki jumps out of the car and runs up to the door of a small building. She knocks furiously at the door. Frank comes running after her, asking her what she is doing. Again, she will only say that it is where she is supposed to be. When she knocks, he tells her no one can possibly be in there. It is a chapel or some other kind of public building, there is no public event taking place in the cemetery, and it is long after regular business hours. Vicki listens to him and starts to move away from the door. Then, she sees the door handle turn. She and Frank watch as the door opens.

Dark Shadows never had much of a budget for sets. Every time we see a new one, even one as modest as this, it is a sign that something important is about to happen.