Mad scientist Eric Lang has been building a Frankenstein’s monster out of body parts his assistant, a man named Peter who prefers to be called Jeff, has dug up out of the cemetery. Once the body is completed, Lang will “drain the life-force” from recovering vampire Barnabas Collins into it, bringing it to life and freeing Barnabas of vampirism once and for all. The time has come to fasten a head on the creature. Barnabas and Lang decided the other day to cut Peter/ Jeff’s head off and use it. When Peter/ Jeff found out about this, he irritated Lang with a lot of small-minded objections. When Barnabas realized that his friend Vicki was in love with Peter/ Jeff, he had second thoughts and stopped Lang from proceeding with the decapitation.
Lang pulls a gun on Barnabas, leading to several minutes of rather tedious business. Lang finally capitulates to Barnabas’ insistence that they call in a second mad scientist. Barnabas assures Lang that Dr Julia Hoffman can be trusted to keep their secrets. Julia, Barnabas says, “cares for me,” and will be discreet for his sake. He telephones her.
Julia is a permanent houseguest in the great house on the estate of Collinwood. We see her there carrying on a friendly conversation with the newest member of the household. Like Peter/ Jeff, this person has two names. She is Angelique, the wicked witch who made Barnabas a vampire in the first place. She has been telling everyone that her name is Cassandra, and has made her way into the house by marrying sarcastic dandy Roger Collins.
Julia smiles at Cassandra/ Angelique, agrees with everything she says, and talks in a soft, warm voice. She praises her for her honesty, and tells her that honesty is a quality she admires in people. With this, returning viewers have no doubt that Julia knows exactly who she is dealing with. Honesty is a quality Julia finds difficult to tolerate; several times we have seen her having conversations with the scrupulously ingenuous Vicki, and she could barely wait for Vicki to look away from her before she rolled her eyes, squirmed, and showed evidence of physical pain. When Barnabas was still an active vampire Julia once went to him after a conversation with Vicki and offered herself to him as his next victim, apparently a desirable fate if the alternative was having another conversation with Vicki. Angelique/ Cassandra hasn’t known Julia long, but her puzzled facial expressions do hint that she might suspect that her pliant manner and conventional words are an act put on to deceive an enemy.
The telephone rings; as a houseguest, Julia steps aside and lets Angelique/ Cassandra, a member of the family, answer it. We see the grimace on Barnabas’ face when he hears the voice of his bête-noire answer. He asks for Julia. Angelique/ Cassandra hands her the phone, and Barnabas orders her simply to do as he says. She replies, still speaking in the sweet, quiet tone she had been using with Angelique/ Cassandra, “all right.” This is so much unlike her usual self that it can only be an act she puts on when she is in the presence of an extremely deadly foe. Barnabas commands that she come to Lang’s and bring the medallion she uses to perform stupendous feats of hypnosis.
At Lang’s, Julia asks what’s going on. When Barnabas and Lang give her a cover story about Peter/ Jeff having paranoid delusions, she has her back to them and her face to the camera when she assures them that she is accepting their version of events. Again, we can see that she is far too savvy for these two guys to hoodwink.
Julia, unconvinced by the story Barnabas and Lang have given her. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Lang escorts Julia to the room where the sedated Peter/ Jeff is tied up on a bed. Julia orders Lang out of the room. Peter/ Jeff regains consciousness; Julia identifies herself as a friend of Vicki’s come to help him, and he tells her all about the experiment and Lang’s attempt to murder him. After she hypnotizes him into forgetting the preceding five hours, she goes to the laboratory, finds the creature, and confirms Peter/ Jeff’s story. At the sight of the creature, she can’t help but scream.
Grayson Hall’s performance up to this point in the episode has been so masterful that the scream is a terrible letdown. Hall had asthma, and as a result she could not control the quality of her voice when she screamed. This was a major disability for an actress on Dark Shadows.
Julia’s scream brings Lang and Barnabas. Barnabas makes it clear that he is still determined to go through with the experiment. He just wants to make sure the person they decapitate isn’t close to Vicki. Julia staggers out of the lab. She is in the foyer when we hear her interior monologue. She tells herself she cannot be a party to another murder, not even for Barnabas’ sake. She goes into Lang’s front parlor and picks up the telephone to call the police. Lang and Barnabas come to the door of the parlor, find it locked, and pound on it. Lang draws his gun again.
This is the first episode without any cast members who were on Dark Shadows before Barnabas was introduced in #211. This one is so much focused on Julia that faces which would remind regular viewers of what the show was like in those first 42 weeks would just be a distraction, so it’s logical to leave them all out.
Vampire Barnabas Collins arises from the dead, goes to the front parlor of his house, and finds a friend of his passed out drunk in an armchair. The friend, much put-upon servant Ben Stokes, had left the house the night before after saying that he would no longer help Barnabas in his murderous schemes. Barnabas brings this up, but apparently Ben has decided he has nowhere else to go, so he’s back.
Barnabas tells Ben that he has two projects going at the moment. He dropped his cane with its instantly recognizable silver handle in the shape of a wolf’s head at the scene of an attempted murder last night; the victim, a streetwalker named Maude Browning, screamed and someone came running. Barnabas orders Ben to find the cane and bring it back before it leads to his exposure.
The other project is Barnabas’ attempt to take revenge on the Rev’d Mr Trask, a visiting witchfinder who has wrought considerable havoc in town. Barnabas recently discovered he had some magical powers, and he has been using those powers to drive Trask insane. He says that he will stay in the house and cast more spells on Trask while Ben goes to Maude’s room over the feed store to look for the cane.
In his room at a local inn, Trask can’t keep a candle lit. He hears Barnabas’ laughter, and declares that it is the voice of the Devil. Or as Trask calls him, THE DE-VILLL!!!! A knock comes at the door. Trask is fearful, but answers when the knocker identifies himself as naval officer Nathan Forbes.
Trask believes hapless time traveler Vicki Winters to be the witch. A court has agreed with him, convicting Vicki of witchcraft and sentencing her to hang. Trask tells Nathan that the witch has started tormenting him. Since Nathan testified against Vicki, Trask warns that she might do the same to him next. When Nathan takes Trask’s warning lightly, he responds with some overheated rhetoric. To this, Nathan remarks that it’s never man-to-man with Trask. When he listens to him, he gets the feeling that sitting in a pew and that the rest of the congregation is absent.
Trask then tries to tell Nathan about the terrible visions he has been suffering. While he does so, he hears Barnabas’ voice and sees his hand. Nathan, of course, can neither see nor hear these manifestations.
Lately Nathan has established himself as a rather cold villain, but he used to be a good-hearted sort, though with some glaring personality defects. We catch another glimpse of the friendly Nathan when he tells Trask the trial must have taken a toll on him. He offers to take Trask out of his room and give him a place to rest. Trask responds indignantly to this offer, and demands Nathan leave him alone.
We cut to Ben searching Maude’s room. When Ben leaves, Nathan catches sight of him. Nathan follows Ben back to Barnabas’ house. Nathan stands at the window and eavesdrops as they talk about Ben’s search of the docks and of Maude’s room, of his failure to find the cane, and of the drunken ramblings with which Maude has been confusing the barroom patrons who want her to tell them about the attack she suffered.
When the show was set in 1967, we saw several characters stand at this window and listen as Barnabas held incriminating conversations with his henchmen. Most notably in #274, seagoing con man Jason McGuire eavesdropped as Barnabas handled a box of jewelry and told his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie Loomis of his evil plans for Vicki. As Nathan has become more and more a villain, he has become more and more reminiscent of Jason. The night after Jason listened to Barnabas and Willie, Barnabas killed him. Seeing Nathan in this position, regular viewers will wonder if it implies that his death is as near today as Jason’s was then.
Barnabas and Ben leave the house. Ben suggests they leave Collinsport and go someplace where Barnabas will not be recognized. Barnabas will not hear of it. He moans that the house is the place where he and his lost love Josette were supposed to live and be happy. Ben pleads with him to let go of the memory of Josette. Having seen Barnabas in 1967, we know that this plea will fall on deaf ears. Barnabas calls himself “stupid” for leaving the cane at the scene of the crime; the ever-forthright Ben tells him he’s being more stupid now. None of Barnabas’ twentieth century confederates would have dared say a thing like that to him, making Ben’s boldness a refreshing change for regular viewers.
We cut back to Maude’s room. Nathan is bringing Maude home. She is much the worse for drink. He urges her to stay in her room with the door and window locked, then goes.
A bat squeaks at the window, Maude panics, and Barnabas materializes in the room. He asks her about the cane. She tells him she doesn’t have it, and he strangles her. It’s one of the most brutal on-screen murders we have seen so far.
From Maude’s room, we cut to the door to Trask’s. He stands in front of it and we hear him deliver a monologue in a recorded voiceover. This is the first time we have heard an interior monologue from Trask. He shouts so much that it often seems that if you could read his mind you’d see nothing but all-caps disquisitions about THE ALMIGHTY! and THE DE-VILLL! But in fact, he’s telling himself that Nathan must have been right and that all the visions he saw and voices he heard must have been the result of nervous strain brought on by his hard work during Vicki’s trial. He goes into his room, telling himself to calm down. He looks at his bed, and finds Maude’s strangled corpse sprawled there.
The Rev’d Mr Trask, a cleric of sorts, is convinced that there is a witch in the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood. He is right about this. He is also convinced that the witch is the eccentric Victoria Winters. He is wrong on this point. The real witch is Angelique Collins, wife of the master of the house, the gallant Barnabas. Barnabas, who as a man of the Enlightenment asserts that there are no witches, is hiding Vicki, and has reluctantly agreed to let Trask perform a rite of exorcism, believing that once he is finished he will have to go away and everyone will have to admit that Vicki is innocent.
At the top of the episode, we see Angelique building a house of cards and delivering a soliloquy about her plan to cast a spell to make it look like Trask’s fraudulent ritual has proven Vicki’s guilt. There is an element of suspense as we wonder what the character’s actions will lead to, and an even more powerful suspense as we marvel at the courage it took for the actress to remain calm enough build a house of cards on what is essentially a live television show. Forget the Daytime Emmys, Lara Parker deserved a medal for this feat.
Angelique recites a spell over the house of cards, then sets it on fire. The first time they used an incompletely contained fire on Dark Shadows was in #191, and as a result of that daring experiment a load-bearing beam caught fire and collapsed in the middle of a scene. They finished taping before putting the fire out, and somehow everyone survived. There was also an off-camera fire during a conversation between Barnabas and Vicki in #290, and Jonathan Frid and Alexandra Moltke Isles just kept delivering their lines while we heard fire extinguishers blasting in the background. As a result of an excessive pre-treatment of the cards with lighter fluid, today’s fire burns faster and expels debris over a wider area than had been intended. I suppose a technical term for a rapid fire that expels debris is an “explosion.” Parker keeps up her incantation while this explosion progresses directly in her face. That shows an entirely different kind of courage than she showed with the house of cards, but she exhibits it in an equally rare degree.
Downstairs, Trask is standing at the threshold of the house, doing his own fire ceremony. He draws Vicki’s initials on the doorstep, holds up a dowsing rod, and jabbers for a while. Then he sets fire to the rod. In her room, Vicki sees flames erupting from the floor. She shouts in panic.
Barnabas is upstairs. He hears Angelique shouting “Eye of fire, heart of ice!” Her shouts grow louder and louder as she repeats the phrases faster and faster. My wife, Mrs Acilius, said that the pattern of Angelique’s voice sounded to her like someone having an orgasm. The willingness to risk the laugh that pattern might bring represents a third form of courage; by this point, we would have to admit that whatever we may think of Angelique, Lara Parker was one of the bravest people imaginable.
Barnabas is about to investigate, but then he hears Vicki shouting “Fire!” Between these two shouting women, he goes to the one who doesn’t sound like she’s enjoying herself. By the time he gets to Vicki’s room, she is gone. He sees no sign of fire.
Vicki runs out the front door, into Trask’s arms. He shouts “I’ve caught the witch!” and forces her to the ground. He looks delighted that his shtick actually worked, for once.
This moment is an odd inversion of the ending of #191. That episode ends with strange and troubled boy David running out of the burning building where his mother, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, was trying to immolate him, and finding refuge in Vicki’s arms. At that moment, life triumphs over death, and Dark Shadows version 1.0 reaches its conclusion.
When Vicki runs out of the house and into Trask’s arms, death and folly win a victory over life and reason. Nothing comes to a conclusion- the story just gains new layers of complexity. We don’t even go to a commercial break, but get a reaction from Angelique first.
Barnabas talks with Angelique, mystified by what just happened. When he mentions that he heard her in her old room shouting strange words, she lies and says she was in the sewing room. After she leaves, we hear his thoughts- he had searched the sewing room, and knows she is lying. He now believes that there is a witch. He would find it much easier to believe that Vicki, a strange girl who claims to be displaced in time from the year 1967, 172 years in the future, is that witch than to face the prospect that his own wife is, but he can neither overlook the lie she has told nor the sheer improbability that so flagrant a quack as Trask came up with the right answer to any question. He remembers that indentured servant Ben claimed to have been enslaved by the witch, and resolves to find out what Ben can tell him.
We first got to know Barnabas in the months between April and November of 1967, when he was a vampire preying on the living in Vicki’s native time. In those days, he never mentioned Angelique, and there was no indication that he suspected any of the witchcraft we have seen since we embarked on our journey to 1795. Perhaps in the original timeline, when the place Vicki has taken was occupied by a woman named Phyllis Wick, Angelique had to proceed more slowly and carefully, with the result that Barnabas was turned into a ghoul without ever picking up on what was going on. If so, it would be Vicki’s complete failure to adapt to her new time in any way that accelerated the pace of events and thereby exposed Angelique to Barnabas’ suspicions.
Haughty overlord Joshua Collins, master of the estate of Collinwood in this year 1795, has gone missing. His sister, repressed spinster Abigail Collins, is convinced this is the result of witchcraft. One of the Collinses’ house-guests, the Countess DuPrés, agrees with Abigail, and like Abigail is sure that the witch is well-meaning governess Victoria Winters (whom we know as “Vicki.”) Abigail and the countess also blame Vicki’s black magic for the fact that Joshua’s brother Jeremiah and the countess’ niece Josette have apparently eloped, jilting Josette’s fiancé. That sad man is Jeremiah’s nephew and Joshua’s son, Barnabas Collins.
In fact, Vicki is the audience’s point-of-view character. One night in 1967, she was attending a séance, attempting to contact the ghost of Joshua’s ten year old daughter Sarah, when Sarah spoke through her, said she wanted to tell the whole story from the beginning, and yanked Vicki back through time to 1795, while her own governess Phyllis Wick took Vicki’s place at the table. Vicki can hardly tell this story, and the makers of Dark Shadows have decided not to show her being a con artist, or doing anything else interesting. So Vicki flails about, calling attention to the fact that she is profoundly alien to her surroundings.
If Sarah brought Vicki back to her own time so that she could see what happened then, Vicki’s failure to pick up where Phyllis Wick left off would seem to defeat her plan. Surely Phyllis didn’t go around telling everyone she met that they are being played by actors who had other parts in the first 73 weeks of the show, or constantly blurt out information that she learned from reading the Collins family history. Nor did she show up carrying a copy of that history and wearing clothes from 1967. In the first episode of the 1795 arc, we learned that Phyllis’ carriage overturned, that she is missing, and everyone else aboard is dead. If Vicki was going to become a part of what already happened, she should have been found at the scene of that accident, wearing Phyllis’ clothes and suffering a minor injury that left her unable to speak until she figured out when she was and that she had to pretend to be Phyllis.
Today, we begin with a shot of Vicki being silent while her voice plays in the background, thinking that she must somehow keep from verbalizing her every thought. This might not seem like a great challenge, but she hasn’t managed it yet. The countess enters and confronts Vicki about the evil she believes she has done. Vicki can only feign ignorance and run away.
We cut to the lady of the house, Joshua’s wife Naomi. Naomi is an alcoholic, a fact of which we are reminded when virtually every scene she is in begins with a shot of her alone, pouring herself a drink. This scene is no exception.
Abigail enters. After nagging Naomi about her drinking, she denounces Josette for being French and Vicki for being a witch. Naomi likes Vicki and dismisses the idea that she is a witch. She also likes Josette, but can’t deny that she is French.
The countess joins them. She is just as French as her niece, but Abigail is willing to overlook that fault, since they share a desire to persecute Vicki. Naomi resists their arguments.
Unable to persuade Naomi, Abigail goes on her own authority to Vicki’s room. She tells her Naomi wants to see her at once. Vicki asks her if she will be coming along. Abigail says she will stay in Vicki’s room. Vicki says she wouldn’t stay in Abigail’s room without her permission; Abigail replies “You don’t own this house. We do.” As the governess in the house in 1967, Vicki may have had an expectation of privacy in her room, but that is clearly not the case in 1795.
Vicki exits, and Abigail starts to rummage through Vicki’s things. Since she was looking through the family history right before Abigail came in, we expect her to find that book, which would be a pretty hard thing to explain. Before she can, a cat that had been squatting on Vicki’s bed disappears in a puff of smoke and Joshua takes its place.
Returning viewers know that the wicked witch is the countess’ maid Angelique, and that Angelique turned Joshua into a cat last week for reasons of her own. Abigail doesn’t know anything about that, and she is so discombobulated by the experience that she calls her brother “Josh.. ua!” As soon as he stands up, she faints in his arms.
Back in Naomi’s room, she and the countess are questioning Vicki about her life before coming to Collinwood and her many strange utterances since. Vicki pleads amnesia about the first topic and makes feeble responses about the second. Even so, Naomi is satisfied. Then Abigail and Joshua enter.
Joshua remembers nothing about his time as a cat, and is shocked by the news about Jeremiah and Josette’s disappearance. He and Naomi send Victoria downstairs to do some chores, and excuse Abigail and the countess.
Abigail and the countess let themselves into Vicki’s room and start searching through her things. They find the clothes she was wearing when she showed up. In them they discover a charm bracelet. Among the charms is a cartoon devil.
The ladies are horrified by this blasphemous thing. Abigail says that she will write to a clergyman in Salem, Massachusetts, a Reverend Trask. The countess is glad to hear that the Reverend Trask has a way with witches.
We can only wonder whether Abigail and the countess called on the Reverend Trask to investigate Phyllis Wick in the original timeline, and if so, what it was about her that aroused their suspicions. Perhaps Angelique simply chose her as a convenient patsy. Or maybe Phyllis made some decisions that generated an interesting story leading up to it. Either way, it would have been significantly different from Vicki’s woeful blunderings.
Dark Shadows became a hit after vampire Barnabas Collins joined the cast in April of 1967. Displaced from a previous era, Barnabas spent most of his time trying to con people into believing that he was a native of the twentieth century. The difficulties Barnabas encountered in his performance in the role of modern man dovetailed so neatly with those actor Jonathan Frid encountered in his characterization of a vampire that his every scene was fascinating to watch.
The audience’s main point-of-view character for the first year of the show or more was well-meaning governess Vicki. Now Vicki finds herself in a situation like that which made Barnabas a pop culture phenomenon. The ghost of Barnabas’ ten year old sister Sarah has sent Vicki back in time to 1795, when Barnabas and Sarah are both living beings and the vampire curse has not yet manifested on the estate of Collinwood. Vicki and Barnabas have traded places- she is now the time-traveler who must trick everyone into thinking she belongs in their period, while he is her warm-hearted, if uncomprehending, friend.
Unfortunately, the show has not chosen to write 1795 Vicki as a fast-thinking con artist. By the time the Collins family of 1967 met Barnabas, he was wearing contemporary clothing and telling them a story about being their cousin from England. Vicki shows up in her 1967 clothes and carrying a copy of a Collins family history printed in the 1950s. She goes around blurting out information she learned from reading that book and introduces herself to each character by telling them that they are played by actors who had other parts in the first 73 weeks of the show. Vicki’s natterings have convinced two ladies in the manor house, repressed spinster Abigail Collins and visiting aristocrat Countess DuPrés, that she is a witch.
Today, we open with the countess setting a trap to expose Vicki. Haughty overlord Joshua Collins vanished from the front parlor yesterday, in the middle of an argument with his brother Jeremiah. Jeremiah looked away from Joshua for a moment, and when he looked back his brother was gone and there was a small house cat in his place. The countess insists Vicki come into the parlor and reenact Joshua and Jeremiah’s argument. Vicki keeps protesting that the whole idea is silly, but the countess will not be stopped.
The countess imitates Joshua. This is the first time we have seen Grayson Hall play one character mimicking another, and it is hilarious. I suppose it would have ruined the laugh if Vicki had shown that she was in on the joke, but at least it would have provided evidence that Vicki hasn’t left her entire brain in 1967.
The countess tries to get Vicki to speculate on what goes on behind closed doors between Joshua and his wife Naomi. Vicki says that “It’s not my place to judge their marriage,” managing to sound like a dutiful servant, if not like an eighteenth century English speaker. The countess goes on testing Vicki with provocations that seem unconnected with each other, and she tries not to say anything wrong. That goes on until the cat reappears.
Barnabas is Joshua’s son. He enters and sees the cat. Vicki leaves, and Barnabas tells the countess he doesn’t think he has ever seen the cat before. Caddish naval officer Nathan Forbes enters to confer with Barnabas about the search for Joshua. Nathan overhears the countess suggesting to Barnabas that Vicki is a witch and is responsible for making his father disappear.
Nathan finds Vicki. He tries to warn her that the countess suspects her of being a witch. This is the second time we have seen someone explicitly tell Vicki that she will have to do a better job of faking her way through her current situation, after a scene in #367 where the kindly Jeremiah told her in so many words that she would have to make up a better story to tell people about herself. No one had needed to do that for Barnabas when he was lying his way through 1967, and if they had he would have had a stake in his heart before he’d been on the show a week.
At least Vicki tried to absorb what Jeremiah told her in #367. When Nathan tells her today how bad she has made things for herself, she just gets uptight. There have always been times when the writers solved plotting problems by having Vicki do something inexplicable, but now it seems Dumb Vicki is the only side of the character we will be allowed to see.
The countess confronts Vicki again, inviting her to take a lesson in tarot card reading. As the countess probes Vicki for information, we hear Vicki’s voice in a recorded monologue, wondering if she could tell the countess the truth. She may as well- she has pretty well blown any chance she ever had at establishing a false identity for herself.
When the countess asks Vicki where she was trained to be a governess, she says that she was raised in a foundling home in Boston and was trained there. The only false part of this account is that the foundling home was in New York. Changing the location to Boston only makes it that much easier for people based in Maine to check her story and prove it false. When the countess asks when she was born, she says “March 4, 19-” and catches herself. The countess remarks on the strangeness of the slip, and Vicki is conscious enough not to fall into her trap when she invites her to put the wrong digits after “17.”
By the end of their encounter, it should be obvious even to Vicki that the countess suspects her of witchcraft. The countess presses Vicki about her knowledge of the supernatural, telling her that Barnabas regards her as clairvoyant. Vicki tries to dismiss that as “his joke.” When Vicki protests that she does not know why the countess keeps asking her questions about the supernatural, the countess impatiently tells her that she certainly does know. She declares that something terrible is happening in the house, and that she is determined to find out what it is.
Having made it clear that she thinks Vicki is a witch, the countess leaves her alone in the room with the layout of tarot cards she had been studying. Vicki decides to rearrange the cards. She thinks to herself that she will thereby warn the countess of the upcoming tragedies. But the countess will know that the cards are not where she dealt them, and it will be obvious that it was Vicki who moved them. She will know that she is receiving a message, not from whatever realm tarot cards are supposed to access, but from Vicki. If that message foretells disasters that in fact occur, she will only be confirmed in her suspicions. It is difficult to imagine a stupider act Vicki could have committed.
Difficult, but for a writer as imaginative as Sam Hall it is not impossible. In the next scene, Vicki is talking to Barnabas while the countess stands nearby. Vicki tells Barnabas that Joshua will return. She speaks with such assurance that Barnabas takes it as another sign of her clairvoyance, and the countess reacts with horror, hearing the witch declare that she is about to lift her spell.
The moment when Mrs Acilius shouted at the screen, “Vicki, SHUT! UP!” Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Alone with the countess, Barnabas admits that he is starting to think that she may have a point about witchcraft. The countess answers that he is becoming wise.
Closing Miscellany
The asthmatic Grayson Hall has a coughing fit during her scene with Vicki and the tarot cards. It is one of the less amusing bloopers, she really sounds like she’s suffering.
I chuckled a little when Vicki stops at “19-” in giving her birthdate. Alexandra Moltke Isles’ year of birth is given on various websites as early as 1943 and as late as 1949. I think it is only fitting that someone so central to a show like Dark Shadows should be a little mysterious, so I’m glad that all we really know about Mrs Isles’ birth is that it took place on 11 February 194-.
Writer Ron Sproat had his strengths, but was blind to what particular actors could and could not do. Grayson Hall, who played mad scientist Julia Hoffman, had one very conspicuous weakness- she could not control the tone of her voice when she raised it above a normal conversational level. She had asthma, and in the course of her performances she was often required to smoke. As a result, her screams, shouts, sobs, and cackles all came with a terrible croaking sound. This episode consists of very little aside from Julia’s raised voice, and it is a disaster.
Julia’s sometime partner in crime, vampire Barnabas Collins, has turned on her and cast a magic spell meant to drive her crazy. She sees some ghostly apparitions that may or may not be the result of this spell. It’s hard to be sure; at the beginning of the episode, she is in the Collins family tomb having an argument with the ghost of Barnabas’ little sister Sarah, whom regular viewers know to be real. So it’s not like we can say with confidence that anything is in her head.
Julia’s psychological stress gives Sproat an opportunity to adapt a script he wrote for the show that Dark Shadows replaced on ABC’s daytime schedule, a soap opera for teenagers called Never Too Young. The 18 April 1966 episode of that show was almost a one-woman drama, featuring Jaclyn Carmichael as Joy Harmon, who struggles to keep her sanity while home alone.* While nothing supernatural was going on in Never Too Young, Sproat left many elements intact- both start with confrontations reprised from the previous episode, in which the main character is alienated from the person who represented her last hope; each woman beats on a locked door and calls for someone who is absent to come and let her out; each plays Klondike solitaire; each receives a distressing telephone call; each is terrified at the end of the episode when she sees the doorknob turning. Evidently Sproat regarded the script as his finest work, and wasn’t going to allow Grayson Hall’s physical inability to play the part deprive him of the chance to remake it.
As the 22 minutes unfold, Julia progresses from the mausoleum, where she looks disturbed while we hear her speaking calmly in a recorded voiceover, to the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood, where she looks calm while she has a panicked tone in the recorded voiceover, to her bedroom upstairs in the great house, where she both looks and sounds panicked. She’s alone on camera for the great majority of the time, making hideous noises that bring bad laughs.
For over a week, Julia has been trying to escape Barnabas’ wrath. The other day, we heard her ask herself why she didn’t just leave town. There are some strong episodes in this period, but that is such an obvious question that it undercuts them all. This episode is far from strong, and throughout it we are reminded of just how unnecessary it all is. Barnabas decided to kill Julia because she obstructed his plan to seduce well-meaning governess Vicki by planting disturbing images of him in Vicki’s unconscious mind; he had been set on killing strange and troubled boy David because David had caught on to some of his secrets. Julia is alone in the house in part because Vicki and David have gone to Boston for a few days. For all Barnabas knows, David is this very minute telling Vicki everything he wants to hide from her. But as soon as they are off the estate and out of his sight, he stops worrying about them. So all Julia has to do is hop in her car, drive off someplace, and the drama is resolved.
The conflict between Barnabas and Julia is the only story going on Dark Shadows right now. Lawyer Tony Peterson is suing the Collins family business, but when they had a scene about that last week they played it off camera and used the actors’ voices as background noise to cover some of Julia’s doings. Clearly we are not to expect much from that. All Vicki and David have to do to be safe is go to Boston, Sarah is quiet unless murderers come to her tomb and bother her at home, and everyone else is settled in a sustainable situation. So if Julia leaves town, or reconciles with Barnabas, or is killed, it doesn’t seem that the show will have anywhere to go. By all appearances, we are heading directly for a blank wall.
*I learned about this episode from a comment left by “Robert Sharp” on Danny Horn’s Dark Shadows Every Day. He links to the video I embed above.
Vampire Barnabas Collins stops by the great house of Collinwood to talk with well-meaning governess Vicki. Vicki is depressed because her fiancé Burke is missing and feared dead in the Amazon jungle. Barnabas offers to pay for a private search party to look for Burke. Vicki declines this offer, saying that she is sure the Brazilian authorities are doing all that can be done.
One might wonder what would have happened if Vicki had accepted. Barnabas has sold a few pieces of jewelry that he remembered were hidden around Collinwood when he was alive, but he does not appear to have any other source of income, and he has spent a great deal of money fixing up the Old House on the estate. If he were going to pay for a team of investigators to go to South America, presumably the writers would have had to come up with some story about how he got to be so rich.
Vicki starts to cry about Burke. Barnabas reaches out to touch her, and she recoils from him. This startles them both. Vicki is genuinely bewildered by her reaction; she has been very comfortable with Barnabas up to this point. He is hurt, but assures Vicki she need not explain. He backs away, looks at her sadly, and excuses himself. Jonathan Frid and Alexandra Moltke Isles play this scene with real pathos.
Her reaction mystifies them both
Blonde heiress Carolyn joins Vicki in the drawing room. Carolyn is surprised that Barnabas has already gone. Vicki tells her she is ashamed of herself. She tells Carolyn of her reaction, and of her inability to understand it.
Carolyn has recently become Barnabas’ blood thrall, and is working to advance his goal of winning Vicki’s love. She goes to Barnabas in the Old House. She finds that mad scientist Julia Hoffman is with him. Barnabas dismisses Julia so that he and Carolyn can talk privately. She tells him that she saw Julia and Vicki take a walk earlier in the day. There was nothing unusual about that, but afterward she found that Vicki had no memory of the walk. When she asked Julia about it, she lied to her. Barnabas realizes that Julia, who has extraordinary abilities as a hypnotist, is working to undermine his chances with Vicki. He declares that Julia may have signed her own death certificate.
This episode, like the two before it, is really about the conflict between Carolyn and Julia. We started with a contrast between them. In the pre-title teaser sequence, Carolyn was staring at the portrait of Barnabas in the foyer of the great house while we heard her deliver a pre-recorded monologue about her situation. “Vicki was my friend… but I can no longer have friends… other than you, dear cousin Barnabas.” In #341, Julia helped Barnabas murder her medical school classmate and onetime friend, Dr Dave Woodard. When Julia tried to back out of the murder, saying that Woodard was her friend, Barnabas growled “You no longer have friends.” Before they left the scene of the crime, Julia heard Woodard’s voice echoing “You no longer have friends, Julia.” This statement shattered Julia. When the same thought occurs to Carolyn, her devotion to her role as blood thrall allows her to receive it calmly, even cheerfully.
That gives way to a three-scene with Carolyn, Vicki, and Julia, in which Vicki makes it very clear that she does not remember walking with Julia the day before. Vicki exits, and Carolyn makes it equally clear to Julia that she knows she is up to something. Julia and Carolyn had almost nothing to do with each other until Barnabas bit Carolyn; Julia certainly had no reason to suppose that Carolyn was a likely threat to her. But yesterday and today Julia has found that she is up against a formidable adversary.
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.
Well-meaning governess Vicki has learned that her depressing fiancé Burke probably died in a plane crash yesterday. His body hasn’t been found yet, and she still hopes he will turn out to be alive.
We open with a dream sequence. Vicki finds herself in the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood. She is in the bedroom once occupied by legendary grande dame Josette, restored to its original condition by the house’s current occupant, Old World gentleman Barnabas Collins. Barnabas enters, accompanied by permanent house guest Julia Hoffman. As is usual in dreams, much of it is a rehash of the dreamer’s recent experiences. Vicki had met Barnabas and Julia the preceding night while on a walk and told them that Burke was missing and feared dead. Barnabas told Julia that it was too cold for her to be outdoors and sent her home, then he told Vicki that he was sure she would be a bride soon. These same lines occur in the dream.
The dream deviates from the waking scene in three key ways. First, Barnabas addresses Julia as “Doctor.” In fact, Julia is a medical doctor, a mad scientist who has come to Collinwood with an experimental treatment intended to cure Barnabas of a chronic ailment, vampirism. But Vicki doesn’t know that Julia is a doctor, any more than she knows Barnabas is a vampire. Still less does she know that Barnabas always addresses Julia as “Doctor” when they are alone. That suggests that it is not a normal dream, but is a message from the supernatural.
Second, Julia looks humiliated when Barnabas tells her she is suffering from the cold and orders her to leave. That did happen in yesterday’s encounter, but Vicki didn’t see it. So that is further evidence that the dream is a transmission from worlds beyond.
Third, while Barnabas yesterday encouraged Vicki to believe that Burke was alive, in this dream he shows her a shrouded figure on the bed and identifies it as Burke. He still insists that she will be a bride. When she says that she can never be a bride if Burke is dead, Barnabas adopts a chipper tone and says that he doesn’t see why. She is saying “He is dead, he is dead” and the camera is focused on Barnabas when the dream ends. Evidently the message is something to do with Barnabas being dead, as he is during the daylight hours, and therefore being an unsuitable groom for her.
Later, we cut back to Josette’s room, where we see Julia standing around and hear her thoughts in an extended voiceover. She has resigned herself to spending the rest of her life linked to Barnabas, and has decided that she may as well fall in love with him. For his part, he is still hung up on his long-dead love Josette and believes that Vicki will someday turn into Josette and come to him. Julia is ruminating about this crackpot notion when she senses a ghostly presence. She wonders if it is Josette. Indeed, for 28 weeks, from #70 to #210, Josette’s ghost was the foremost supernatural presence on Dark Shadows, and it was based in the Old House. But Julia resists the idea that it could be her.
In her resistance, we can hear one of the themes the show has been exploring lately. Even characters who have accepted the reality of particular supernatural phenomena don’t have a frame of reference for those phenomena. They keep snapping back to Logical-Explanation-Land and trying to find mundane answers to unearthly questions. Julia is personal physician to a vampire, and even she starts telling herself that she’s being silly to expect to see a ghost.
There is a good deal of noise from off-screen, and Julia finally accepts that there is a ghost in the room. She says aloud that it is not Josette’s ghost, it is a man’s. She thinks it is the ghost of Dave Woodard, her old medical school classmate, whom she and Barnabas murdered a week ago. She is calling out “Dave!” when she hears Vicki in the hallway outside.
Julia calls to Vicki, who joins her in Josette’s room. Vicki tells her that after she left them the night before, Barnabas volunteered to help her restore the west wing of the great house of Collinwood. Vicki wants to accept that offer. Julia becomes angry and says that Barnabas is much too busy to do any such thing, and that if he offered to do it he was only being polite.
Later, Vicki is back in the great house. Barnabas visits her there. When she tells him what Julia said and how agitated she was when she said it, he assures that he sincerely wants to help her with the project, and they speculate that Julia is working too hard.
Julia joins them. She is carrying flowers and in an abashed mood. She apologizes to Vicki for raising her voice and says that she must have been working too hard. Vicki goes to get a vase, leaving Julia and Barnabas alone in the drawing room.
Barnabas demands that Julia put her feelings to one side and approach their relationship simply as one of doctor and patient. He doesn’t ignore her feelings, nor does he make the slightest attempt to be gallant about them; he speaks of her attraction to him as if it were a mildly ridiculous offense against good manners. I suppose if someone treated you that way, it would be relatively easy to get over your unrequited passion for them, but Julia is stuck with Barnabas. When he tells her to stop being foolish and keep their relationship simple, she says that it is too late for that. Barnabas understands that as a reference to their murder of Woodard, which has indeed cut her off from any other potential life partner for the foreseeable future.
This whole conversation is conducted in loud stage voices with the doors wide open. Vicki walks in as Barnabas and Julia are in the middle of a fairly incriminating topic. She is sufficiently absorbed in her worries about Burke that it is believable that her only reaction would be a startled look after she enters the room and sees Barnabas and Julia in an intense confrontation, but they really are being remarkably careless.
Vicki finds that the flowers, which were in full bloom when she left the room a few minutes before, are now dead and shriveled. Barnabas had held the flowers briefly; evidently the vampire’s touch drained them of life. He squirms and looks up, the picture of someone embarrassed by his failure to control a bodily function in a social setting.
Looks like David Ford isn’t the only one whose metabolism creates awkward moments.
Back in the Old House, Barnabas and Julia are in the basement laboratory. She is preparing to give him an injection. He wants her to accelerate the treatments so that he can woo Vicki now, while she is lonely and confused. In case Burke does come back, Barnabas wants to have established a foothold from which to compete with him for Vicki’s affections. Julia is nervous, fumbling with the needle and complaining about the way Barnabas is looking at her. When she is about to give him the shot, he stops her, telling her that he suspects her jealousy will lead her to do something to harm him. He warns her against any such attempt. After this last moment of unrelenting hostility, we end with a closeup on Julia, her lower lip trembling.
Strange and troubled boy David Collins was, for the first 39 weeks of Dark Shadows, the character most intimately connected to the supernatural back-world of ghosts and uncanny phenomena that would occasionally peek through the main action of the show. That changed in #191, when he chose life with well-meaning governess Vicki over death with his mother, humanoid Phoenix Laura Murdoch Collins. After that, he had little memory of his mother, and none at all of the paranormal experiences he had during her time with him on the great estate of Collinwood.
Not that David lost his connection to the supernatural all at once. When he first met his cousin Barnabas in #212, he cheerfully asked him if he was a ghost, and was disappointed to hear that he wasn’t. In #288, he speculated that his friend, mysterious little girl Sarah, might be a ghost, and he has taken it in his stride every time he has seen Sarah do something only a ghost could do. In #310, he took out his crystal ball, a gift he had received in #48 and hadn’t used since #82, and peered into it to try to find Sarah. He did see her in it, too.
Yet David seems to be resisting the idea that Sarah is a ghost, and indeed to be shying away from the whole concept of the supernatural. When she led him to the secret chamber in the Collins mausoleum in #306, she told him that the empty coffin there once had a body in it, but that the body got up and left. David objected that the dead don’t walk away, and was incredulous when she assured him that sometimes, they do. When David was trapped in the chamber in #315, Sarah materialized there and showed him how to get out. He had called on her to come, and was facing away from the only door when he did so, indicating that he knew she could pass through the walls. Yet when she did, he demanded a naturalistic explanation for her entrance, and when she vanished he asserted that she must be hiding in the chamber somewhere.
Now, David is terrified of Barnabas, much to the puzzlement of the adults he lives with. In the opening scenes, he is staring at the portrait of Barnabas in the foyer of the great house, and we hear Barnabas in voiceover, delivering the lines with which he frightened David in #315. He screams with terror, bringing his aunt Liz. She sees that David is upset, but he hurries away from her, upstairs to his bedroom.
There, we hear his thoughts in another voiceover. He remembers the events of #310, when he discovered that Barnabas and his servant Willie knew about the secret chamber in the mausoleum. In his agitation, he calls out to Sarah. He hasn’t admitted to himself that Sarah is a ghost, but evidently he expects her to materialize out of thin air. Sarah doesn’t come, but Vicki does, asking who he was talking to.
After David says he wants to work on his stamp collection, Vicki goes downstairs and finds Liz putting her coat on. She says that David is afraid of Barnabas for some reason, and that she is going to Barnabas’ house to ask him to help put the boy’s fears to rest. She says that David is more disturbed than he has been since his mother Laura was around; this is the first direct reference to Laura in months.
There is a knock on the front door. It is Barnabas, saving Liz the trip. Liz and Vicki explain how fearful David is, and Barnabas offers to have a talk with him.
Liz ushers Barnabas into David’s room. Once the door is closed on the two of them, Barnabas questions David aggressively about Sarah and the secret chamber in the mausoleum. He asks him if Sarah told him about her family, twice mentioning her brother. When David says that Sarah hasn’t told him anything about herself, Barnabas accuses him of lying. He sits next to David on his bed. David doesn’t know that Barnabas is a vampire, but if he did he couldn’t look much more uncomfortable than he does when Barnabas assumes this position.
Barnabas sitting with David on his bed.
Barnabas tells David repeatedly that he knows he was in the secret chamber. David denies it, Barnabas again tells him he is lying, and to prove it shows him the knife he left there.
Barnabas confronts David with his knife
A knock comes at the door. It is Vicki. Vicki adores Barnabas, and the smile she wears when she enters the room shows her certainty that a heart-to-heart talk with him will have relieved David’s anxiety.
Smiling Vicki, sure everything will be all right
Vicki sees that David is still frightened, and her smile gives way to a look of confusion. Vicki was originally the audience’s point-of-view character; the audience is now composed chiefly of people who have tuned in wanting to see how they were going to fit a vampire into a daytime soap opera, and so of course she has to be Barnabas’ biggest fan at Collinwood. She and Barnabas leave David’s room together, and Barnabas wishes David “Pleasant dreams…”
We see David tossing in bed. He is talking in his sleep, calling out to Sarah. In yet another voiceover, we hear his dream. It is a bit of conversation from #306, when Sarah told him about the empty coffin.
We then see the beginning of another dream. It takes place amid a composite of decorations from the cemetery set and from the set representing Barnabas’ basement. David at first appears in a corridor like the ones we saw in the basement in #260.
The fog machine is working hard today.
He then encounters a faceless woman whom regular viewers will recognize as Barnabas’ co-conspirator, mad scientist Julia Hoffman.
David sees the faceless woman.
We see that she is wearing Julia’s wig and frock and holding the jeweled medallion she uses to hypnotize people:
Julia’s identifying marks.
David flees from the faceless woman, saying he has to find Sarah. He finds himself behind a grating like the one on the door to the Collins mausoleum:
Entering the tomb
He walks up a few stairs, and sees Sarah.
David finds Sarah
When David tells Sarah that she is hard to find, she denies it, saying that she is easy to find if you know where she is. David does not respond to this characteristically cryptic remark, but complains that she won’t tell him anything about herself. She asks what he wants to know, and says he wants to know who she is and where she comes from. She tells him:
Sarah: That’s easy. I was born the same place you were. I lived in a house on a hill until I was nine years old. Then I got very sick. Everyone came to see me, and they were very sad.
David: Because you were sick?
Sarah: No, because I died. I died, and everyone brought such pretty flowers.
“I died that time. I died, and everyone brought such pretty flowers.”
When David asks why she is around now if she died then, she tells him she doesn’t really know. All she knows is that she is looking for someone. David asks who that might be, and Sarah says she will show him. Suddenly he becomes frightened and does not want to go with her. She insists. She takes his hand and leads him.
Sarah leading David to her secret
The camera follows the children on their journey across the set. At first Sarah takes David down some stairs, leading him from depths to depths:
Sarah leads David down into the depths
The set is now unmistakably Barnabas’ basement, though with more candelabra casting more intricate shadows on the walls than we have seen there:
Vergil and Dante, junior edition
At last Sarah stops and looks straight ahead. They have reached their destination.
David is bewildered by the sight.
They see a coffin. David asks if this coffin is empty, as was the one in the secret chamber. Sarah tells him no. This one has a body in it. The lid starts to open. David points in astonishment, while Sarah looks on serenely.
The lid begins to open.
Barnabas rises from the coffin.
Barnabas rises.
David recognizes Barnabas and is stunned. Sarah has eyes only for her big brother.
David stunned.
Barnabas stands. He turns, and sees Sarah. He is glad to see her.
David watches Sarah’s reunion with Barnabas.
Barnabas notices David. He turns to follow him.
Barnabas blocks David from our view and from Sarah’s.
As Barnabas follows David, Sarah simply watches.
Sarah watching big brother.
Barnabas follows David through another corridor. The shadows on the wall and floor form a design suggesting David is caught in a web. Readers of Gold Key comics’ Dark Shadows series will recognize the bend of Barnabas’ knees and the angle of his cane in this shot as their usual depiction of him:
David caught in Barnabas’ web.
David’s back is to the wall and Barnabas closes in on him.
Cornered.
Barnabas raises the cane he used to block David’s escape in #315 and which regular viewers several times saw him use to beat Willie. We zoom in on the wall, where we see the cane’s shadow rise and fall while we hear David cry out in distress.
Sarah’s fixation on Barnabas and her passivity when Barnabas follows David mark a pivotal moment in her development. She looks and sounds like a friendly little girl, and we have seen her rescue people from danger. She usually seems like a cross between Caspar the Friendly Ghost and the Powerpuff Girls. But she is not that at all. She is a symptom of the same curse that has brought Barnabas forth to prey upon the living, and she is leading David ever deeper into a world where only the dead belong. The show has given us no reason at all to think that she can bring him back to the realm of the living.
Even if Sarah wants to save David, she may still represent a deadly threat to him. We saw this in the Laura story. When Laura tried to lure David into the flames, she told him that he, like her, would rise from the ashes and live again. We had heard her say things like this before, and she may well have believed it to be true. But unknown to her, we saw a séance in which David spoke with the voice of a son Laura had in one of her previous incarnations. She had burned him with her, but while she gained a new life in the flames, he had become one of the unquiet spirits of the dead. Perhaps Sarah, too, is unwittingly leading David to his death.
Closing Miscellany
When Liz leads Barnabas into David’s room, she tells David that “Unc- Cousin Barnabas” wants to have a man-to-man talk with him. In later years, Jonathan Frid would refer to his character as “Uncle Barnabas” when he talked with interviewers about how the Collinses responded to him. I wonder if Joan Bennett’s blooper is a sign that he was already calling him that at this time.
There is a slight puzzle in Sarah telling David she was “born in the same place” he was. We’d heard in the early episodes that Laura and Roger never spent a night together in Collinwood as man and wife- the day of their wedding, they went to their new home in Augusta, Maine, and David was born a few months later. Perhaps Sarah’s remark is a retcon, and we are now to think of David as having been born at Collinwood. Or perhaps Sarah really was born where Augusta would stand- we know that her birth year was 1786, and that was the year the settlement that would become Augusta saw the establishment of its first public whipping post. Maybe her parents wanted to go there to celebrate the occasion.
When Sarah tells David she lived on the hill until she was nine, she interrupts herself and shouts “Ten!” This is an odd little blooper. Just a few days ago, David told Barnabas that Sarah was ten, and Barnabas jumped down his throat asking if she wasn’t “almost ten?” Now Sharon Smyth has been on the show long enough to have celebrated a birthday, and they aren’t done with Sarah yet. So they are retconning Sarah as having made it to ten.
Acilius on Dark Shadows 