Adam the Frankenstein’s monster has abducted heiress Carolyn and taken her to an abandoned structure. Carolyn says the structure looks like a root cellar. She doesn’t have a television, or she would have recognized it at once. It’s the old Flintstone place.
Adam was created in an experimental procedure mad scientist Julia Hoffman completed, an experiment that Julia’s late colleague Eric Lang designed to free old world gentleman Barnabas Collins from vampirism. The experiment was a success, but Barnabas and Julia are the world’s worst parents. They have kept Adam chained to the wall of the prison cell in the basement of Barnabas’ house for the first three and a half weeks of his life. As far as Adam is concerned, it is normal for people to confine one another in underground spaces.
The cell was in the basement of the house when Barnabas and his little sister Sarah were growing up there in the eighteenth century; in #260, we found that Sarah had found a secret passage leading out of the cell, suggesting she must have spent a lot of time there in her nine years of life. Perhaps the cycle of abuse that Adam is perpetuating goes back a very long way.
Barnabas is out searching for Adam and Carolyn. Julia is in his house, along with his servant Willie. Julia finds that Willie has had a nightmare and is compelled to tell Carolyn about it. The nightmare is part of The Dream Curse. One person after another has the same dream, which the audience sees dramatized every time. Then that person wrestles with a compulsion to tell the nightmare to someone else. We usually see that, too. Finally, the person does tell the dream, giving a speech to repeat the material to us yet again. This time-waster will go on indefinitely, and is supposed to end with Barnabas reverting to vampirism.
Julia knows all about this. She had the dream herself, and has interacted with others who have had it since. Today, she tries to hypnotize Willie into forgetting the dream.
It is very strange Julia hasn’t tried this before. She has a phenomenal ability to use hypnosis to erase memories, so regular viewers would expect her to turn to that right away. When she starts giving Willie the instructions, kaleidoscopic colors pulse on the screen, suggesting that she will have yet another great triumph. Willie does have a vision of Carolyn in the Flintstone house, so Julia must have unlocked his capacity for extrasensory perception. But he still remembers the dream, and is still driven to tell it to Carolyn.
The sheriff comes by. He tells Julia and Willie about evidence that Adam has a connection with the house. They deny everything. Willie is a panicky mess. He is still upset because of the dream, and the barking of the police tracking hounds outside triggers his memories of the nights when Barnabas’ bloodlust prompted dogs to howl. Julia is able to parry all of the sheriff’s questions and observations, but she is too shaken to produce her usual stream of perfectly plausible lies.
Adam comes to the house. He is hungry, and it is the only place he has ever seen food. The sheriff sees him, threatens to shoot him unless he stops, and opens fire immediately. Adam isn’t killed; in fact, he is so healthy that it takes twenty (20) men to subdue him and take him to gaol.
The sheriff sticks around and tells Julia and Willie that Adam gave them a look of recognition. Julia dismisses that, and the sheriff protests “I’m not a stupid man!” Regular viewers know that he is in fact an utterly stupid man, and that Julia is extraordinarily intelligent. Typically, she wouldn’t need more than five seconds to distract him from whatever was on his mind and get him chasing after an imaginary squirrel. But she is so run down from the ongoing crises that she is reduced to challenging him to “Prove it!”
Mrs Johnson, housekeeper in the principal mansion on the great estate of Collinwood, isn’t herself. She had a nightmare a week ago, and ever since has been plagued with a compulsion to tell its details to strange and troubled boy David Collins. She knows that if she does, David will have the same nightmare, the same compulsion to tell it to some third person, and that if he does that person will suffer the same complex. She doesn’t know that the nightmare is part of a curse sent by wicked witch Angelique, or that at the climax of the curse old world gentleman Barnabas Collins is supposed to revert to the vampirism that afflicted him from the 1790s until last month. But she does know that it is part of something horrible, and she has tried desperately to keep it from continuing.
Mrs Johnson spent a couple of days with her sister in Boston to stay far from David, but she kept having the nightmare there. She has given up, and has come back to Collinwood. She does not go straight home to the great house, but stops first at the Old House in the estate. Barnabas lives there, but it is Barnabas’ friend Julia Hoffman she sees. Julia had passed the dream to her. Julia urges Mrs Johnson not to tell David about it. She replies that she knows she should not tell him, but that she has no more choice in the matter than Julia had in telling her.
This scene will raise a question in the minds of regular viewers. Julia is a medical doctor doubly qualified in hematology and psychiatry; she also has developed a method of hypnosis so powerful that she can virtually rewrite a subject’s memory, confining even very intense recollections to the depths of the unconscious mind, sometimes after an acquaintance of only a few minutes. Why doesn’t she try to hypnotize Mrs Johnson into forgetting the dream? All she actually does is slap her and repeat her command to avoid David.
David turns up. His father has sent him to ask Julia to come to the great house at her convenience. Julia tries to manage the situation by sending Mrs Johnson home first and keeping David in the house for a while. After Mrs Johnson leaves, Barnabas’ servant Willie enters and tells Julia there is an emergency in the basement. David agrees to wait for her to come back, but once she is gone he shouts that he will be playing outside.
We follow David out the front door, and find that Mrs Johnson is there waiting for him. She comes up on him from behind and says she has something to tell him. This scene will startle regular viewers. For nineteen weeks, from #365 to #461, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the 1790s. In that period, Clarice Blackburn played repressed spinster Abigail Collins and David Henesy played Daniel Collins, heir to the Collins fortune. We first saw Daniel in #431, when his Aunt Abigail intercepted him on this very spot and scolded him for playing at the Old House. Abigail was enforcing rules and believed she was acting in Daniel’s best interests; now the same actors invert the scene, showing us Mrs Johnson doing something she knows to be wrong and harmful to David.
Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, isn’t herself. Some emerald earrings mysteriously appeared in her purse the other day, and when she tried them on she got a faraway look on her face, began speaking in a voice different from her own, and a tinkling music played on the soundtrack. Today her boyfriend Joe tells her that he took the earrings and showed them to a jeweler and to the police. The jeweler valued them at $15,000* and the police said that they didn’t match the description of any jewelry that had been reported missing. Maggie was not only irked that Joe had taken the earrings without her permission, as anyone might be, but when he tries to get her to agree that such expensive things don’t just materialize out of thin air her usual level-headedness and cheerful disposition vanish and she becomes childishly defensive. Maggie does not know that Barnabas’ servant Willie placed the earrings in her purse as an attempt to reestablish the connection the two of them had when she was Barnabas’ prisoner in the Old House. As a result of Julia’s hypnosis, she does not even remember what Barnabas did to her. But after she runs Joe off, she is compelled to go to the Old House.
Again, regular viewers will recognize an echo of an earlier episode, in this case one that aired a year ago. When Maggie was Barnabas’ victim in May 1967, she snapped at Joe and drove him out of her house as she does today. Then too, she headed for Barnabas once Joe was gone.
Maggie doesn’t find Barnabas at the Old House. Instead, she sees Willie. Barnabas had framed Willie for his crimes against Maggie, and Willie was confined to the mental hospital Julia runs. Barnabas and Julia have brought him back to the Old House to help with their latest nefarious scheme. Willie had been Barnabas’ blood thrall; it is not clear to the audience just what effect it had on Willie when Barnabas’ vampirism went into remission. When we first see him today, he is playing with an unloaded rifle and grinning maniacally, reminding us of the dangerously unstable ruffian he was before Barnabas first bit him.
Maggie knocks on the door and asks Willie if she can come in. He falls over himself inviting her. He becomes the friend he tried to be to her during her imprisonment. She says she knows that he wasn’t the one who hurt her, and he is overjoyed. She seems blissful. He asks her out on a date; she says that Joe wouldn’t like it. Before Barnabas, Willie propositioned all the young women and threatened all their boyfriends, and at first this approach, like his gleeful handling of the rifle, suggests that dangerously unstable ruffian is back. He assures Maggie that he only wants friendship, but after she leaves he picks the rifle up again and says that Joe will be out of the way soon.
For her part, Maggie’s behavior does not represent a reversion to her time as Barnabas’ prisoner. Rather, the earrings seem to have done what Barnabas tried to do when he bit her, imprisoned her, and subjected her to a series of role-playing exercises. Her personality is showing signs of giving way to that of Barnabas’ lost love, gracious lady Josette. In #260, Barnabas told Maggie “You are Josette!”; in #370, we saw that he was right, inasmuch as Kathryn Leigh Scott played both characters, as Zita Johanns had played both Helen Grosvenor and Princess Ankh-Esen-Amun in the 1932 film The Mummy, from which Barnabas’ Josettification project was borrowed. The tinkling melody that plays on the soundtrack when Maggie wears the earrings is that of Josette’s music box; this could be a sign that her memory of what Barnabas did to her is coming back, since he forced her to listen to the music box for hours on end. But the voice she speaks in at those times is the voice Miss Scott used as Josette, and her blissfulness reminds us of Josette’s first scenes with her beloved Barnabas, not of Maggie’s captivity in the ghoul’s dungeon.
Back at Collinwood, Mrs Johnson watches David sleep. She tells him she is sorry for what she has done and for what he will suffer. Clarice Blackburn was always good, but she outdoes herself with this speech. It is a beautiful performance.
David has the nightmare. The first several dream sequences in the Dream Curse storyline ended with the dreamer opening a door, seeing something scary, and screaming. David’s goes a step further. There is a gigantic spider web behind the last door he opens. He not only sees it, but is tangled in it when he starts screaming. He awakes, still screaming, and Mrs Johnson holds him.
Recovering vampire Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman brought a Frankenstein’s monster to life the other day. They named him Adam, and are keeping him locked up in the prison cell hidden in the basement of Barnabas’ house. They leave Barnabas’ servant Willie in charge of Adam.
The first two days of the Adam story had their humorous moments as we saw Barnabas and Julia’s farcically total incompetence before the demands of parenthood. Today, Robert Rodan plays Adam as a 6’6″ newborn who is looking for affection and mental stimulation and finds only hostile people and brick walls. Rodan’s commitment to the part is so pure and his face is so expressive that he weighs us down with sorrow for a cruelly neglected child. Moreover, Dark Shadows is so high-concept right now with all of the monsters and black magic and mad science and dream sequences and so on that it is hard to see how it can take a pain that is so raw and make it meaningful for us in a way that will justify showing it.
There are just a couple of moments I want to remark on. In the cell with Adam, Willie smokes a cigarette. He blows smoke in Adam’s face, leading him to freak out, knock Willie unconscious, and flee from the cell to the grounds of the estate of Collinwood.
Outside the great house of Collinwood, Adam finds a toy to play with. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
This isn’t the first time Willie’s smoking has got him in trouble. Willie scattered cigarettes in #210, when he was trying to rob a grave in the old Collins family mausoleum. To his surprise, the coffin he opened held, not the jewels he was looking for, but Barnabas, who seized him by the throat and didn’t let him go until he had bitten and enslaved him. A few days later, in #215, Willie’s old partner in crime, seagoing con man Jason McGuire, asked Willie what he had been doing in the mausoleum. Terrified that Jason might discover Barnabas’ secret and bring the vampire’s wrath down on him, Willie denied he had been there. Jason replied that Willie had a habit of leaving cigarette butts on the edges of things. The same vice that brought Willie to the brink of disaster on that occasion has now caused Adam to panic, and Adam is clearly strong enough to kill a man with a single blow. Smoking is even more hazardous for Willie than it is for the rest of us.
In the great house of Collinwood, housekeeper Mrs Johnson is struggling with her part in “the Dream Curse.” In this curse, a person has a nightmare, is terribly distressed until they can tell a particular person about the nightmare, the person they’ve told then has the same nightmare, and the process repeats until the writers can come up with a less tedious way to fill the time on slow days. Mrs Johnson knows that it will be bad to tell the dream to the next person, and is trying not to. Julia knows all about the Dream Curse, and is herself the person who passed it on to Mrs Johnson.
Julia also has a nearly unlimited power to erase people’s memories with hypnosis, yet she doesn’t try to hypnotize Mrs Johnson into forgetting the dream. The Dream Curse is the product of a spell cast by wicked witch Angelique. Another of Angelique’s spells made Barnabas a vampire. Julia was able to hypnotize Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, into forgetting weeks and weeks of vampiric abuse Barnabas inflicted on her, and Maggie has been her old self ever since. So, if Julia can wipe away one kind of trauma arising from Angelique’s curses, why not another? It seems like it would be worth a try.
Also, Julia is in charge of a mental hospital called Windcliff. She has used Windcliff to stash Barnabas’ victims Maggie and Willie where they wouldn’t attract the attention of the authorities. Regular viewers can hardly fail to wonder why she doesn’t think to commit Adam to Windcliff. If we must have him on the show, it would be easy enough to write a couple of lines of dialogue explaining why it would be impossible to send him away. That they don’t take the trouble to do even that is an insult to the intelligence of the audience and another reason to find the Adam storyline depressing.
In November 1967, Dark Shadows was very rapidly running out of stories to tell. Rather than introduce new characters and new complications to solve this problem, they kept killing off existing characters and foreclosing possible developments, making it impossible not to notice that they were speeding directly towards a blank wall. In #365, they did something no one could have seen coming. Rather than crashing into the wall, they passed right through it and relaunched the show as a costume drama set in the 1790s. The result was a triumph, nineteen weeks of high drama, low farce, lurid horror, pointed satire, and authentic tragedy. Now they are back in contemporary dress, and we are waiting to see what comes next.
Before the costume drama insert, mad scientist Julia was trying to keep well-meaning governess Vicki from falling into the clutches of vampire Barnabas. Julia’s efforts pitted her against many opponents. Vicki regarded Barnabas as a friend, actress Alexandra Moltke Isles was eager to get into the main storyline, the fans wanted to connect the show’s original point of view character with its breakout star, and the writers needed a fresh story to tell. But by repeatedly hypnotizing Vicki and making her subconsciously aware of Barnabas’ horrible secret, Julia was able to hold the line until Vicki disappeared into the 1790s and took the audience, the writers, and Mrs Isles with her.
At the top of today’s episode, Julia is hypnotizing Vicki again. Vicki is in bed, and Julia is extracting memories of her visit to the late eighteenth century, using a post-hypnotic suggestion to sequester those memories from her conscious mind.
Vicki has a dream in which the ghost of Jeremiah Collins, who befriended her in 1795, warns her about Barnabas. The ghost’s voice is provided by Addison Powell, whom Danny Horn named on his great blog Dark Shadows Every Day as “THE WORST ACTOR EVER TO APPEAR ON DARK SHADOWS.” I can think of two or three who might finish ahead of Powell in the contest for this title, but his voice performance today is indeed amazingly bad. He delivers his lines on a single shrill note throughout, and has a lot of trouble managing his breath. I suppose his attempts to get through long speeches without inhaling make sense for someone who just emerged from his grave, but the consequent lack of emphasis on any particular words or phrases and the intermittent gasps each time he runs out of oxygen do keep him from establishing the sense of mystery and terror that the scene calls for.
We then cut to the terrace outside the house, where we see Barnabas approaching the door. Julia meets him, with a new haircut.
This is Grayson Hall’s actual hair; the wig she was wearing in the first scenes had been part of Julia’s costume from her first appearance, in #265. The last time an actress was freed from a wig to perform under her own hair was when Maggie Evans’ tight little blonde hairpiece gave way to Kathryn Leigh Scott’s reddish brown tresses in #20. With that, the wised-up waitress who was everybody’s pal and nobody’s friend became The Nicest Girl in Town. Longtime viewers who remember Maggie’s transformation will recognize what is happening today, when the same device marks a reset of a character. Julia, who yesterday was precisely as hostile to Barnabas and as helpless before him as she was when we left off in November, is today both willing to cooperate with him and very much in control of the situation. He even goes down on one knee to beg her to help him find out what Vicki learned during her sojourn in the eighteenth century. She promises nothing.
After another visit to Vicki in her room, Julia assures Barnabas that she can use her mastery of hypnosis to cordon off any memories Vicki may have that might pose a threat to him. Unconvinced, Barnabas decides to take matters into his own hands.
Barnabas appears in Vicki’s room. She awakens and is surprised to find him at her bedside. She recoils from him as she had been doing in November, when Julia had made her unconsciously aware of his true nature, but, again as she had done in those days, she overcomes her aversion and turns to him. He tells her to come to him. She hesitates, but does. He tells her he can give her peace and make it seem that everything that is distressing her is far away. She embraces him and asks him to do so. It looks very much like a seduction. Considering that Vicki kept embracing Barnabas and pushing her neck towards his teeth before Julia started hypnotizing her, it is an overdue one. Barnabas opens his mouth. He displays the same inner struggle he has shown on previous occasions when he had the chance to bite Vicki, but is still bending his head towards her neck when we fade out for the closing credits.
Matriarch Liz and her brother Roger come to the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood. They have news for Liz’ daughter Carolyn. Roger’s son, strange and troubled boy David, will be going to Boston for a few days with his well-meaning governess Vicki. Liz and Roger suggest Carolyn go with them. She refuses, but cannot give a reason. They tell her about the wonderful parties full of men her own age “Aunt Catherine,” a person we have never before heard mentioned or hinted at, will give for her in the city, and point out that she has no social life at all around Collinwood. Carolyn continues to refuse, and leaves the room.
Liz and Roger talk about how uncharacteristically Carolyn has been behaving of late, and Roger hopes there isn’t anything wrong with her. What they don’t know but returning viewers do is that Carolyn was recently bitten by a vampire and is now his eagerly devoted blood-thrall. They don’t even know that there is a vampire, much less that it is their distant relative and close neighbor Barnabas. But Carolyn’s demeanor has changed so drastically since she fell under Barnabas’ power that everyone has been remarking on it.
The only resident of the great house who knows what has happened to Carolyn is permanent house-guest Julia Hoffman. Liz and Roger think Julia is an historian researching the old families of New England, but in fact she is a mad scientist who has come to the estate to attempt to cure Barnabas of vampirism. He has given up on her treatments, but has agreed that she might stay on to help guard him during the day.
Carolyn has discovered that Julia is working at cross-purposes with Barnabas. He wants to win Vicki as his bride. In episodes #347 and #352, Julia hypnotized Vicki, took her to Barnabas’ house, and showed her items that suggest the grisly fate that Barnabas has in store for her. Vicki does not consciously remember these trips, but she has begun to react to Barnabas with fear.
Today, for the third time in two weeks, we see Julia hypnotize Vicki. Again she shows Vicki the same pieces of antique crystal; again she tells her to “find the center” of the crystal; again we hear a tinkling sound and see a kaleidoscope-like image; again she takes her to Barnabas’ house; again she does a show-and-tell, this time with the coffin Vicki will spend her days in when she and Barnabas are resting up from their nights together preying upon the living; again she takes Vicki back to the drawing room, and says “You will never remember.” This ritual stretches out over a period of several minutes.
The difference is that this time, Carolyn has followed them to Barnabas’ house and eavesdropped on their entire conversation.
When Carolyn reports Julia’s actions to Barnabas, he says that Julia must be punished. Carolyn brightens and with a big smile asks “Are you going to kill her?” He says that he might do something to her that will be far worse than that. Unfortunately, we don’t see Carolyn’s reaction to this news.
It is rather odd that Julia wasn’t on the lookout for Carolyn. Yesterday the two of them clashed repeatedly as Carolyn made it clear she did not think Julia was sufficiently subservient to Barnabas, and in Act One of today’s episode Julia accuses Carolyn of following her. All Carolyn does to throw Julia off her trail is say that she is going into town for a couple of hours. Julia simply takes that at face value- she doesn’t even bother to see if Carolyn’s car is gone before she takes Vicki to Barnabas’ house.
This blitheness is not typical of Julia, who is one of the smartest and most cunning characters on the show. Still, it may make sense to viewers who have been with Dark Shadows from the beginning. Neither the flighty heiress we saw in 1966 nor the determined if feckless protector of family we have known since February of 1967 is the sort of person Julia would be inclined to take seriously. Julia is a medical doctor fully qualified in two unrelated specialties, hematology and psychiatry, and when we first saw her she was the director of a sanitarium. In the eyes of someone with such a formidable professional background, a young woman with a fashionable hairdo, a big wardrobe, and no formal education who has never lived anywhere but in a country house outside a fishing village in central Maine must be easy to underestimate. This pretty little hick might be the doctor’s undoing.
The reference to “Aunt Catherine” is a bit of a riddle. We have never heard of any member of the Collins family who lives anywhere but Collinwood, and considering that both Liz’ marriage and Roger’s ended in something rather more disturbing than a run-of-the-mill homicide, neither is likely to have kept in touch with the former in-laws. If the writers and producers were not intending to bring Aunt Catherine on screen or to mention her again, as they do not in fact do, then it would have been just as easy to make up some name that a rich Bostonian might have and say that the glamorous parties and eligible bachelors are waiting for Carolyn at Mrs Broadbottom’s house. So Aunt Catherine joins the “House by the Sea” in the “I wonder where that was supposed to lead” category.
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.
In the great house of Collinwood, well-meaning governess Vicki is worried about her depressing fiancé Burke, who is missing and feared dead after a plane crash in Brazil. Permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman enters and shows her a piece of crystal. Julia says that she thinks the crystal might have been part of a chandelier that hung in the foyer of the long-abandoned west wing of the house. Vicki plans to restore the west wing and hopes to live there with Burke, so this is of interest to her.
Julia tells Vicki to peer into the center of the crystal. As she complies, Julia stares directly into the camera and continues to give instructions. The Federal Communications Commission was very nervous about hypnosis in the 1960s, so much so that even indirect references to the process would draw memos from the television networks’ Standards and Practices offices warning producers that they must not put anything on the air that could hypnotize the audience. Apparently ABC’s Standards and Practices office wasn’t vigilant enough about the daytime dramas, because after a while we hear the tinkling sound Julia tells us we will hear and instead of the picture we see a kaleidoscope effect. By the time we come out of the trance, Julia and Vicki are in the basement of the Old House on the estate.
The Old House is home to Old World gentleman Barnabas Collins. Vicki sees a coffin in the basement, and Julia orders her to open it. After a long display of reluctance, she does. She finds Barnabas inside, apparently dead. Julia shows her the crystal again. Once more the screen shows the kaleidoscope pattern, and next thing we know Julia and Vicki are returning to the drawing room of the great house.
There, Vicki is about to say that she wants to show the crystal to her dear friend Barnabas, only to find that she has an unaccountable difficulty bringing herself to say Barnabas’ name. Later, Barnabas comes to the house and asks Vicki to watch the sunrise with him. He is diffident about the invitation, and she is uncomfortable with him. Actor Jonathan Frid may have had some difficulty with Barnabas’ lines at this point, but if so, his stumbles dovetail so well with Barnabas’ own display of shyness that they don’t hurt the scene.
Vicki overcomes her discomfort and agrees to meet Barnabas at dawn. He is about to shake her hand when she notices that there is something wrong with his hand. He looks at it and is shocked. He says something about having injured it this morning. She pleads with him to stay and let her put something on his hand, but he rushes out.
Unknown to Vicki, Barnabas is a vampire and Julia is a mad scientist trying to turn him back into a human. The night before, Julia had given him an accelerated treatment that initially caused numbness in his hand, but that later gave him such a sense of well-being that he thought he would be free of his curse by the time the sun came up. After leaving Vicki, he returns to Julia’s laboratory in the basement of his house and shows her his hand, which has aged enormously.
Also unknown to Vicki, Barnabas has designs on her and sees Burke’s absence as a sign that he should move quickly to win her affections. That’s why he ignored Julia’s objections and insisted on the accelerated treatment. In the last few episodes, the show has put heavy emphasis on Julia’s wish to start a romance of her own with Barnabas and his scornful response to this wish; perhaps she took Vicki to Barnabas’ coffin to keep her from becoming a rival for his affections. Or perhaps her motives were altruistic- even if Barnabas weren’t a vampire, there would still be plenty of reasons why a woman would be well-advised to steer clear of him.
