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.
Acilius on Dark Shadows 