When Dark Shadows began in June of 1966, hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell was dating flighty heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard. The two of them were bored beyond words with each other. They only kept going out because Carolyn’s mother, reclusive matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, was determined that they should get together, and neither of them wanted to disappoint her. For months, we were subjected to one scene after another of Joe and Carolyn having nothing to say to each other while we waited for Liz to give up on them.
Joe and Carolyn finally called it quits in #84, and shortly afterward Joe started seeing Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. The audience has been rooting for Joe and Maggie ever since, but because there are too few obstacles to their romance for them to have a storyline of their own, we sometimes go months at a time without seeing them together.
Now, Joe has become the blood thrall of vampire Angelique, and Angelique’s master Nicholas has designs on Maggie. If Nicholas and Angelique were ordinary criminals and she were blackmailing Joe or had hooked him on drugs, this would be an archetypal soap opera situation. The supernatural twist makes it specific to Dark Shadows among the daytime serials of its period, but the story is still so deep in the genre’s wheelhouse that it is no wonder they’ve spent three days in a row luxuriating in it.
There’s a lot of emphasis on bachelor’s quarters this time out. Maggie lives alone, but we see so much of and hear so much about her late father’s paintings today that it feels as if the Evans cottage is still his house and Maggie is still his little buddy. That makes her relationship with Joe feel all the more urgent. She is waiting to make a home with him so that her adult life can begin.
We see Joe’s apartment as well. It is apartment 24, the default number for a Collinsport bachelor pad. Dashing action hero Burke Devlin lived in suite 24 at the Collinsport Inn in the first year of the show, and Humphrey Bogart-esque lawyer Tony Peterson lived in apartment 24, presumably in some other building, in the fall of 1967. Joe is sitting in his apartment 24 and staring at a glass of booze when Maggie knocks on the door. She tells him that his boss called her at home and told her that Joe hasn’t shown up at work lately. If Joe doesn’t call soon, he’ll have to fire him. Joe says he won’t call the boss, since he can no more explain the nature of his trouble to him than he can to Maggie.
We also see Nicholas’ house. Even though he is keeping Angelique on the premises, Nicholas is very much a bachelor. He peers into his magic mirror and sees Willie Loomis, servant to old world gentleman Barnabas Collins. Willie is asleep in his room in Barnabas’ house. The only other time we saw Willie’s room was in #328, when Barnabas framed Willie for terrible crimes he had himself committed against Maggie. Now, Nicholas uses his mirror for a magical video call with Willie. He interrogates Willie about an evil plan of his that is playing out in Barnabas’ house.
On Dark Shadows Before I Die, John and Christine Scoleri caught this screenshot of Nicholas making an unfortunate gesture while he is telling Maggie what he thinks of Willie:
Suave warlock Nicholas Blair is furious with his subordinate, vampire Angelique. He had ordered Angelique to summon her blood thrall, hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell. While Joe was out of the way serving as Angelique’s breakfast, Nicholas would be making time with Joe’s fiancée, Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. Much to Nicholas’ dismay, Joe turned up at Maggie’s house.
Angelique explains that she did summon Joe, but that old world gentleman Barnabas Collins was with him and persuaded him to leave before she could take a bite. Since Nicholas has, for reasons of his own, forbidden Angelique to harm Barnabas, he has no choice but to accept that explanation. Angelique teases him about his interest in Maggie. Nicholas used to be very harsh with Angelique about her lingering human attachment to Barnabas, and she is hugely amused to find him chasing Maggie. Her amusement fades when he tells her that if she doesn’t bring Joe back tonight, he will not allow her to return to her coffin at sunrise.
Back at the Evans cottage, Joe is pleading with Maggie to keep him from leaving. “You’ve got to watch me tonight. Be with me. Don’t take your eyes off me. Don’t let me get away like I did this afternoon. If I start to leave, just take something — hit me over the head. Do anything you have to, to keep me here with you!” He keeps telling her that he needs her, that he belongs with her, and that it is his last chance. He hears Angelique’s voice and yells back to it; Maggie is bewildered.
Joe asks Maggie for two sleeping pills. She says that the pills she has are very strong. He says that if he can be knocked out until morning, he might be all right. It is daytime television and it is 1968, so while Joe sleeps on the couch, she goes into her bedroom and closes the door. Angelique’s voice finally wakes him, and he goes.
Nicholas knocks on the door. He apologizes for disturbing Maggie at 4 AM. He explains that he had a strange feeling she was in danger. She tells him about Joe, and says she is glad Joe is sound asleep on the couch. He breaks the news to her that the couch is vacant. While she is looking away, he allows himself a self-satisfied smile.
Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, was under the influence of vampire Barnabas Collins in May and June of 1967. At the beginning of that period, she spent her days sick in bed at home, and at night regained strength and insisted on going out. When her father Sam and her boyfriend Joe tried to keep Maggie in, her adorable personality vanished and she raged at them.
Maggie eventually escaped from Barnabas, and mad scientist Julia Hoffman erased her memory of the ordeal. Since then, Barnabas’ vampirism has gone into remission. Julia has taken up residence at the great house of Collinwood and has become Barnabas’ fast friend.
Julia drops in at Maggie’s house today. Maggie says she is worried about Joe. He has been standing her up for dates, hasn’t reported for work for three days, and won’t answer his phone.
After Julia leaves, Joe comes in through the back door. He is pale, sweaty, and wild-eyed, obviously ill. He faints for a second. Maggie goes to call a doctor. Joe protests against this idea, almost shrieking, and Maggie relents. He asks her to keep him in the house overnight no matter what he says or does; this is very much the sort of thing Maggie used to say when she was falling under Barnabas’ power. Also like Maggie in those days, minutes later Joe announces that he will be leaving the house and that Maggie has no right to keep him from going. Maggie tries to block the door; Joe grabs her, flings her aside violently, and rushes out.
Kathryn Leigh Scott and Joel Crothers do an excellent job with this last bit of business. Yesterday and the day before, there was a fight scene that was so poorly done I couldn’t get a screenshot that didn’t look like a joke. But the choreography is perfect here. The actors really make it look like Joe is throwing Maggie to the floor, and in her closeup at the end of the sequence Miss Scott convinces us Maggie is hurt.
The similarity between Maggie’s behavior in May 1967 and Joe’s now is no coincidence. He is the victim of Angelique, formerly a wicked witch, now a vampire under the control of suave warlock Nicholas Blair.
After he had asked Maggie to keep him in the house no matter what he said and before he told her he was going to leave no matter what she did, Joe talked to her about going away from Collinsport, far away, going anywhere at all, anywhere from which they would never come back. It’s a poignant moment. Once there were other places for Joe and Maggie, and once there were ways to go there. When art dealer Portia Fitzsimmons called on Sam in this room in #193, Dark Shadows had run out of story. For all we knew, Sam might have gone to New York and taken Maggie and Joe with him, and the show might have reinvented itself to follow them there. But Sam is dead now, Mrs Fitzsimmons is long forgotten, and outside Collinsport there is nothing but a mental hospital. Even Hell seems to be located in a corner of Barnabas’ basement, and Purgatory in the woods outside.
The House by the Sea
Nicholas lives in a house by the sea. Collinsport is a fishing village, so a lot of its people probably live in houses by the sea, but there are two that we have heard referred to as “The House by the Sea,” and this is the second of them.
Barnabas and Julia know that there is a vampire on the loose and are pretty sure that Nicholas is to blame for that fact. Maggie mentioned to Julia that Nicholas will be coming to her house at 5 PM to buy a painting, and so Julia suggests to Barnabas that they go to Nicholas’ at that time and search.
They find the door unlocked. The green screen behind them has an image that makes it look as if the house is floating in the sky. Maggie’s house has always been the place the show has taken us when it wanted to give us a feeling of realistic kitchen sink drama; the effect of this background outside Nicholas’ front door is to tell us that we are leaving that world behind and entering an exotic, paranormal space.
As they enter, Julia has second thoughts about trespassing. Now it is Barnabas’ turn to insist they probe forward.
They split up. Barnabas runs into Joe. The two men ask each other what they are doing there, and each tells a lie about having business with Nicholas. They then take turns ordering each other out of the house. We end with a view of Angelique’s coffin, its lid opening.
This episode features the first appearance on Dark Shadows by an actor of color, and the only speaking part any non-White performer ever had. (CORRECTION: Mr Nakamura, played by Sho Onodera in #903, has a couple of lines.) This fact is made even more depressing because that performer fits so perfectly into the show that a first time viewer would assume she had been a major player from episode #1.
Beverly Hope Atkinson plays an unnamed nurse who meets suave warlock Nicholas Blair when he is trying to make his way into a hospital room occupied by Tom Jennings, a victim of one of Nicholas’ evil schemes. She firmly refuses him admittance. When Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, enters and asks to see Tom, the unnamed nurse smiles brightly and says “Of course, Maggie!” in a tone that makes it sound like they’ve been friends all their lives. She then shuts the door before Nicholas can follow. He asks her why Maggie can go in and he cannot, and she tells him sternly that Maggie has permission from the doctor.
I have a fanfic idea about Atkinson’s nurse that I originally posted as a comment on Danny Horn’s Dark Shadows Every Day. I can’t find it there, but here is a copy of it:
In the first 42 weeks of the show, when the supernatural was in the background and the stories were slow, it would have been easy to have a couple of tea party scenes at the Evans cottage where Maggie and her lifelong friend, Unnamed Nurse, recap whatever is going on. Those scenes could have led to a whole exploration of the tension between the working-class people in the village and the jerks in the big house on the hill. That in turn could have led to the introduction of Unnamed Nurse’s family, headed by Unnamed’s parents, Mr and Mrs Nurse, including her brothers, Young Mr Nurse and Master Nurse, and her sister, Moody Miss Nurse. We could then have seen the ancestors of the Nurse family in each of the flashback segments and analogues of them in Parallel Time.
At some point in my musings about this idea, I decided the family should be named “Wilson” (if I had a reason for this, I’ve forgotten it, but I now think of Atkinson’s character as Nurse Wilson,) and that in a flashback segment we should learn that they are descended from free persons of color who settled in Collinsport before the Civil War and were the first proprietors of the Collinsport Inn. Some wicked deed by a member of the Collins family knocked them out of the entrepreneurial class long ago, and they’ve been working their way back up the socio-economic ladder ever since.
We met Maggie in #1 as the waitress at the diner in the Collinsport Inn. She, her late father Sam, and her fiancé, hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell, have been Dark Shadows‘ main representatives of the people in the village. Her house, the modest counterpoint to the mansions on the Collins family’s great estate, has been familiar to us from the beginning, and is the place where we have seen most vividly what the Collinses’ doings have meant for the people who work for their businesses and live in their town. So, as a frequent visitor there, the nurse could have given a whole new dimension to the drama, showing that it isn’t just one family whose lives hang in the balance, but that a whole community is exposed to the consequences of what happens on the hill.
The Blue Whale
Joe is sitting alone at a table in the Blue Whale tavern, and he looks terrible. He’s pale and fidgety, looking around and periodically jumping up to peek out the window.
Maggie comes in and joins Joe. At first she is angry with him- he stood her up last night, without so much as a telephone call. She sees how upset he is and her anger is mixed with worry. He pounds on the table while the camera is tight on her. Her startled reaction reminds us of the early months of the show, when Sam was a self-pitying drunk and Maggie was a sophisticated portrait of an Adult Child of an Alcoholic.
After that moment, Maggie gets very quiet. When Joe says with alarm that it is getting dark, she responds that “It usually does, at this time of day.” It’s inherently funny to hear someone make that kind of matter-of-fact statement in response to an inexplicably intense remark, but also poignant to those of us who remember Maggie’s early interactions with Sam. From childhood on, simple rationality must have seemed to Maggie like a joke in the face of the overpowering irrationality at the center of her life.
As it happens, Joe is indeed exhibiting addicted behavior. But he isn’t hooked on alcohol. Instead, he is under the power of a vampire. Angelique, who was once the wicked witch who first made Barnabas Collins a vampire, found herself reduced to bloodsucker status when she displeased Nicholas. At Nicholas’ direction, she bit Joe the other day, and now Joe is desperate to hear her summons and report for another bite. She does call, and he does dash out, leaving a bewildered Maggie behind.
It was at the Blue Whale that we first met Joe, back in #3. Then, he was an upstanding young man who indignantly rejected the attempts of one of the Collins family’s sworn enemies to bribe him into spying against them. We’ve seen him in the tavern many times since then, always as the doughty representative of the wholesome and intelligible world against the sinister and supernatural. For example, in #215 it was a deeply troubled Joe who brought the news to Maggie and others at the Blue Whale that the cows on his uncle’s farm had been somehow drained of blood, news which turned out to be the first sign of vampirism in the area. This is the first time we’ve seen the Blue Whale since #358, back in November, and the first time a scene has closed with the formerly very familiar Blue Whale jukebox dance tunes in even longer than that. Longtime viewers see a loop closing. Joe leaves the place where he has most often shown himself as one who dwells in the daylight and goes down to the deepest dark.
Once Joe is gone, Nicholas enters. He engages Maggie in conversation, and talks his way into the seat Joe vacated. Soon he is doing magic tricks for her and she is agreeing to have dinner with him. He brings up the idea of staying out all night, and she seems amenable. Where is her old friend the nurse when you need her?
The Fix
Joe lets himself into Nicholas’ house, a place by the sea that he is renting from the Collinses. Angelique is there. Joe laments his dependency on her, and asks if she was the one who attacked Tom, whom he identifies as his cousin. Perhaps the son of the uncle whose cows fell victim to Barnabas long ago! She doesn’t bother to deny it. She tells him that they will both visit Tom tonight. She bites Joe.
Joe visits Tom, who has emerged from the coma in which Angelique’s first bite left him. He tells Joe all about Angelique’s attack on him. He says he knows how bizarre the story sounds, but that he hopes that if he has Joe to vouch for him he will be able to make the police take it seriously. Joe gives Tom a few perfunctory assurances, then opens the window. Joe explains that he is doing this because it is hot in the room. Tom does not agree that it is hot, but Joe insists, and Tom is too ill to argue long.
Joe leaves, and we jump forward to 2 AM. The window is still open- apparently no nurse was on duty. Perhaps the hospital thought Beverly Hope Atkinson’s character did such a good job on the day shift that the patients could just cruise along through the night. We hear a bat squeaking, and Angelique appears. She bites Tom.
In Barnabas’ first weeks on Dark Shadows, the show made heavy use of the idea that vampires can enter a lodging only when they have been invited. For example, he went to the diner after hours so that Maggie would have to invite him in, and later went to her house and stood just outside the front door for a noticeably long time before she explicitly asked him to enter. They haven’t done anything with that idea in a long time, but neither have they very clearly contradicted it. Perhaps Joe’s opening of the window is the invitation Angelique needs to make her way into the hospital.
Dangerously unstable ruffian Willie accidentally freed vampire Barnabas from his coffin in #210, and became his sorely bedraggled blood thrall. Barnabas has since been cured of his vampirism, more or less, and when first we saw Willie after that it seemed he might be about to revert to his old ways. But he has settled back into a life under Barnabas’ thumb. Today, he is digging up a grave, planning to steal a body for Barnabas and mad scientist Julia to use in creating a Frankenstein’s monster.
Willie is interrupted in this gruesome task when hardworking young fisherman Joe, walking through the graveyard, spots him and announces that he will be taking him to the sheriff. Joe is pale and has trouble concentrating; at one point he asks Willie about a voice only he can hear. Willie is in such a panic that he doesn’t notice the signs that Joe is ill. When Joe walks off, Willie is still pleading with him not to go to the police.
As it happens, Joe is not on his way to the sheriff’s office. He has been bitten by Angelique, formerly the wicked witch who made Barnabas a vampire, now a vampire herself. He is answering her summons. Were Willie not so terrified of the sheriff, perhaps he would have recognized a fellow sufferer of his old affliction.
Joe has been on Dark Shadows from the beginning, long before Willie and Barnabas joined the cast. For his first 112 weeks, he was the show’s most straightforward specimen of Healthy Man. His only foible was his tendency to lose track of his plans when he had the chance to help a neighbor. Now Angelique has transformed him into an addict desperate for a fix.
Joe and Willie represented opposite extremes of personality before they were bitten, and actors Joel Crothers and John Karlen were similarly remote from each other in their approaches to their work. Karlen used techniques like those popularized by Marlon Brando and James Dean to throw himself into a depiction of Willie’s emotions that could be compelling no matter how stale the dialogue he was given. Crothers could overcome weak lines as well, but he did it with a manner as precise and deliberate as Karlen’s was volatile and intense. For example, today he says “There are places I should be, other places,” which may not look like much in print, but his delivery shows a deep poetry in it.
Joe goes to Angelique in the house by the sea where she is staying. He wrestles with his compulsion to submit to her bite; she assures him that he will soon forget everything else in his life, including his love for his fiancée Maggie. Regular viewers will hear an unexpected echo in this; Maggie is played by Kathryn Leigh Scott, who in the part of Dark Shadows set in the 1790s played gracious lady Josette. It was her frustration that Barnabas loved Josette and not her that led Angelique to cast the spells that caused disaster in those days, culminating in her transformation of Barnabas into a vampire.
Joe awakens after the bite and tells Angelique about his encounter with Willie. Angelique’s master Nicholas appears. He instructs Joe to tell him what happened in the graveyard, and dismisses Angelique. We see Joe’s old gallantry one last time as he tells Angelique she doesn’t have to take orders from Nicholas. She tells him she does, and leaves him alone with Nicholas.
Nicholas tells Joe that he controls Angelique, and therefore controls him. Joe tells him he did not stop to tell the sheriff about Willie. It is Nicholas who wants a Frankenstein’s monster and has set up the scheme that is forcing Barnabas and Julia to try to make one, and so he is relieved to hear that. Nicholas gives Joe an order we do not hear.
Meanwhile, Willie is back at Barnabas’ house, still in a state of panic. Barnabas asks what is wrong, and he tells him that Joe found him digging up a grave and said he would go to the police. Willie wants to leave town at once, but Barnabas refuses.
Barnabas is figuring out how he can dump responsibility for the whole mess on Willie when a knock comes at the door. Thinking it is the sheriff, he sends Willie upstairs, telling him that if he talked to them he would only make it worse. It turns out to be Joe, come to tell Barnabas what he saw and explain that he decided that, since Willie saved his life a while ago, he won’t go to the police after all. Barnabas is very quiet and very courtly, sounding for all the world like Boris Karloff. After Joe leaves, Willie enters, jubilant to be off the hook. Barnabas is troubled by Joe’s obvious ill-health.
Back in the house by the sea, Nicholas tells Angelique that he has received some alarming news from the hospital. The victim of her first bite, easygoing electrician Tom, is coming out of his coma. If Tom tells what he knows, Nicholas and Angelique will be exposed. Angelique has only been a vampire for a short time, and is unsure of her powers. But Nicholas has demonstrated sufficient ability that it is difficult to see Tom as much of a threat to him. The episode thus ends without any particular suspense.
Hardworking young fisherman Joe has always been at his most appealing when he is going out of his way to help a new friend. My favorite example is #58, when strange and troubled boy David asks him for help deciphering a set of tide tables. He drops everything and is completely absorbed in the task.
Friday, we saw Joe’s impulse to help turned against him. Vampire Angelique claimed to be a prisoner of the suave and mysterious Nicholas. He wanted to take her straight to the sheriff’s office, but agreed to let her rest her head on his shoulder first. With that, she bit him, and he was enslaved.
Today, old world gentleman Barnabas pays a call on Joe. Barnabas was a vampire himself for 172 years, and he knows that a vampire is operating in the area. He is deeply disquieted by what he sees of Joe, but does not attempt to diagnose his condition.
Barnabas came to the 1960s when dangerously unstable ruffian Willie opened his coffin in #210. Willie hoped to steal jewels, but was instead bitten and enslaved, becoming a sorely bedraggled blood thrall. Now that Barnabas’ curse has gone into remission, he controls Willie without supernatural means. He wants Willie to dig up corpses so that he and his friend, mad scientist Julia, can build a Frankenstein’s monster. On Friday, Willie tried to refuse, and Barnabas extorted his agreement by describing a scenario in which Maggie, the girl on whom Willie has a crush, might be killed if Barnabas and Julia do not complete their grotesque plan. Willie protests again today that he cannot “rob a grave.” Well he might protest- all of the trouble going on now started the last time he tried it.
The sun goes down, and we return to Nicholas’ house. Angelique rises. She hasn’t been a vampire long, and doesn’t know how to summon Joe until Nicholas tells her. From November 1967 to March 1968, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the 1790s, and Angelique was a wicked witch. Her spells, including the one that made Barnabas a vampire, so often misfired that it seemed she was new to witchcraft. Viewers who remember that phase of the show and see her today will be quite sure that Barnabas was the first vampire she ever made, and that she is on altogether unfamiliar ground.
While Joe is responding to Angelique’s summons, he crosses paths with Willie in the cemetery. The episode ends with Joe announcing he will take Willie to the sheriff. In itself, that doesn’t produce much suspense. We know that he has no choice but to go directly to Angelique. But since Nicholas is ultimately behind both Angelique’s vampirism and Barnabas and Julia’s attempt to stitch a person together, it does suggest that his skill at manipulating events might ultimately prove to be as faulty as is Angelique’s. Perhaps the next time Nicholas’ pawns bump into each other, there will be consequences that he cannot control.
Barnabas Collins may not be a vampire these days, but he’s still at his best when he gets to be an absolute bastard. He has such an opportunity today. His bedraggled servant Willie Loomis has been refusing to steal corpses from their graves so that Barnabas and mad scientist Julia Hoffman can build a mate for Frankenstein’s monster Adam. At first Barnabas threatens to have Julia recommit him to the psychiatric institution she runs; Willie says he would rather spend the rest of his life as a mental patient than dig up dead bodies, and Julia tells him she won’t send him back to the institution in any case.
When Barnabas learns of this, he gets a sinister gleam in his eye and tells Willie that if Adam finds out Willie is refusing to help in the project, he might kill Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, on whom Willie has a crush. As Barnabas presses this idea on Willie, he seems more and more pleased with himself, and Willie becomes more and more distraught. When Willie finally caves in and agrees to do what he wants, Barnabas looks as happy as we have ever seen him.
Maggie is engaged to marry hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell. Joe has received a note asking him to call at the home of the suave and mysterious Nicholas Blair shortly after sundown. When he does, a woman named Angelique meets him and tells him Nicholas will be back soon. She tells Joe that Nicholas is holding her prisoner. As Barnabas shows to his best advantage when he is a cold villain, so Joe shows to his when he suddenly finds himself with a chance to help a new friend. He is great right up to the moment when Angelique embraces him and reveals the vampire fangs with which she will bite him.
Yesterday, recovering vampire Barnabas opened the door to his closet. Hardworking young fisherman Joe fell out, and Barnabas saw Frankenstein’s monster Adam at the window, laughing menacingly. Adam has many reasons to hate Barnabas, and Barnabas concludes that Adam wants to frame him for the murder of Joe.
A commenter on John and Christine Scoleri’s Dark Shadows Before I Die, posting under the name “Grant,” pointed out that in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s novel Frankenstein the Creature kills someone and frames one of Frankenstein’s closest friends for the crime. The reference seems to be pretty obvious.
Barnabas’ friend, mad scientist Julia, shows up. She finds that Joe is not dead. She says that he has, in a bit of Collinsport English we have heard once or twice before, “a pulsebeat.” She and Barnabas have a long conversation about a variety of topics, several of them highly incriminating, while Joe lies on the floor. Julia goes off to attend to another matter, and Barnabas’ servant Willie comes. Joe is still on the floor while Willie argues against Barnabas’ orders to take Joe to the hospital. Barnabas, who had told Julia that Adam must have “wanted Joe to be found here,” dismisses Willie as “absurd” when he says that Adam is trying to frame them.
When Willie was first on the show, he was a dangerously unstable ruffian who was determined to rape all the young women and beat up their boyfriends. In #210, he accidentally released Barnabas, who enslaved him and turned him into a nice guy. Now that Barnabas’ vampirism has gone into remission, Willie has taken several steps back to his old ways. He whines that if Joe dies, his fiancée Maggie might turn to him. Barnabas finds this idea “insane,” and Willie tells him that Maggie has recently stopped by the house and talked to him more than once. This is true, and Barnabas’ reaction makes it clear that it is the first time he has heard it. He responds that he is not interested in discussing Willie’s “mental aberrations,” and tells him that if Joe dies he will tell the police about Willie’s interest in Maggie. That leaves Willie no choice but to help get Joe to the hospital.
Julia has gone off to see well-meaning governess Vicki. Vicki is about to have a nightmare that is part of the “Dream Curse.” Three months ago, wicked witch Angelique decreed that one person after another would have the same dream. After Vicki has it, the dream will pass to Barnabas, and Angelique means for it to reactivate his vampirism. Vicki doesn’t seem to know that Barnabas was a vampire, though she has had many clues, as for example when he kept biting her and sucking her blood. I suppose she just thought he had a really aggressive make-out technique. But she does know that Barnabas is supposed to die if he has the dream.
Julia urges Vicki to come with her to Windcliff, a sanitarium she runs, and promises that she will get the best of care there. But she finds that Vicki is resigned to having the dream. Julia reports this to Barnabas, and tells him that she wants to go away with him, far away from Vicki. Vicki can’t pass the dream to Barnabas unless she describes it to him after she has it, and she won’t be able to do that if she can’t find him. Barnabas refuses to go, reminding Julia that those who have the dream suffer terribly until they pass it on to the next person. When he says “You know how I feel about Vicki,” Julia gets a brief closeup, and her reaction reminds us that she is supposed to be harboring an unrequited love for Barnabas. This is rather an easy point to forget. Barnabas and Julia spend all their time together and tell each other all their secrets. Since there doesn’t seem to be any such thing as sexual contact in the world of Dark Shadows, it’s hard to see how her feelings could be much more requited.
Julia urges Barnabas to run away with her.“You know how I feel about Vicki.”
Vampires are metaphors for extreme selfishness, and Barnabas usually plays to type. It is startling that he tells Julia that any part of his motivation for sticking around is his wish to spare Vicki suffering. But he also talks about his long vain struggle against Angelique in terms that immediately make it clear that whatever goodwill he might have for Vicki is a distant third behind his usual ruling passions, self-pity and laziness, but still, her well-being is among his considerations. That sets him apart from her ostensible boyfriend, a man variously known as Peter and Jeff. As Christine Scoleri points out on Dark Shadows Before I Die, Vicki might never have had the dream at all if Peter/ Jeff hadn’t refused to listen to her explanation of the curse and insisted that she stay where he could visit her easily, yet now that she is suffering from the dream and its effects he is nowhere to be seen. Christine speaks for all of us with her summary of Peter/ Jeff’s character- “What a louse!”
Vicki has the dream. Barnabas beckons her into the haunted house attraction where the bulk of it has always taken place before. She keeps telling him that she doesn’t want to have the dream, not for her sake, but for his. She opens three doors that show Halloween gimmicks we’ve seen before, then opens a fourth behind which she sees the Sun. The Sun shrinks into the distance, and she walks through the door, following it. Her face dissolves into an image of the Sun; the Sun dissolves to the exterior of Barnabas’ house. We cut to the interior, looking at the doors. A small dot of Sun appears there. It expands until it fills most of the screen. The doors open, and the Sun gives way to Vicki. She enters, and sees Barnabas lying on the floor by his desk. He is bleeding from two small wounds on his neck.
Part of the dream is a bit of doggerel that has never made much sense. The last lines are “Ahead a blazing light does burn, And one door leads to the point of return.” These lines are almost explained today. Each door exposes a symbol of something that is frightening either to the dreamer or to Barnabas or to both. Vicki isn’t afraid of the Sun, but she knows that Barnabas has a strange and intense relationship with it. In #277, he harangued her about his hatred for the Sun; in #347, he made plans with her to watch the Sun rise, plans which he had to break under very strange circumstances in #349. So now we know that the “blazing light” is the Sun, which vampires cannot withstand.
Of the ten characters who had the dream before Vicki, only strange and troubled boy David, her charge and dear friend, was able to walk through any of the doorways. In his case, he walked into a gigantic spider web and was caught there, just a few feet beyond the entry. But Vicki is on the path that “leads to the point of return,” and she goes to a different set altogether.
Had Barnabas’ introduction not brought a new audience to the show, Dark Shadows would probably have been canceled in June 1967. In that case, the final episode would have been #260, and it surely would have ended with Vicki, who was in those days the show’s main character, driving a stake through Barnabas’ heart. That she and the Sun overlap in the same space on the screen suggests that by passing the dream to Barnabas she will fulfill her original destiny and become his destroyer.
When Vicki looks into the parlor and sees Barnabas bloodied and lying on the floor by his desk, we are reminded of #405. In that episode, we saw that Angelique originally turned Barnabas into a vampire by sending a bat to bite him in this room. At that time, he fell, not by his desk, but by the staircase. That’s very close to where Joe was lying for the first half of the episode, so they have to do some rearranging to avoid suggesting an identity between them. Barnabas’ vampirism is so much the foundation of the show’s success that virtually everyone in the audience expects him to relapse sooner or later, but they are being careful not to raise the question of whether Joe will also join the ranks of the undead.
Until the dream, the episode is made up of long scenes with a great deal of dialogue. That isn’t unusual for Dark Shadows. It is unusual that the scenes play out with very little background music. I wonder if director Jack Sullivan decided that a spare sound design would set the right mood for the very ambitious dream sequence. I think it paid off- the dialogue scenes felt slow, but Vicki’s dream achieves the surrealistic quality it needs.
One of the main themes Danny Horn developed on his blog Dark Shadows Every Day was his ridiculously exaggerated impatience with the character of Vicki and his severe bias against Alexandra Moltke Isles’ acting. That gave me something to talk about in his comments section, and was part of the reason I started this blog. Danny’s post about this episode very nearly makes up for his incessant Vickiphobia. He alternates stills of Vicki with epigrams written in her voice, and the result is just magnificent, worth anyone’s while to read.
In the eighteenth century, wicked witch Angelique loved scion Barnabas Collins. He betrayed her in those days, rejecting her in favor of the gracious Josette, and ever since she has been casting deadly spells on him and everyone close to him. Today she encounters him in the woods. After a brief confrontation, she is left thinking about the feelings of love for him that still linger in her and undermine her killing power.
A few months ago, Frankenstein’s monster Adam imprinted on Barnabas when he saw him at the moment he came to life. Barnabas betrayed Adam’s filial love time and again, chaining him to a wall in a windowless basement cell, leaving him alone for all but a few minutes a day, and entrusting his care to his abusive servant Willie. When Barnabas beat Adam with his cane to stop him retaliating against Willie, Adam’s love turned to hate and he adopted “Kill Barnabas!” as his motto.
Today, well-meaning governess Vicki stops by Barnabas’ house to update him on the progress of Angelique’s latest attempt to destroy him. Vicki is to be the next to have a nightmare that Angelique has sent to a series of people, and after she has it she will pass it to Barnabas. Vicki doesn’t know that Barnabas was a vampire from the 1790s until 1968, much less that Angelique is trying to turn him back into one, but she does know that if Barnabas has the nightmare he is supposed to die as a result.
While Barnabas and Vicki confer, Angelique raises the ghost of Sam Evans from his grave. Sam was supposed to tell Vicki the nightmare, causing her to have it, but died before he could do so. Sam resists Angelique’s commands, but finds that Angelique can prevent him from returning to his grave. His soul needs rest, so he complies.
Back at Barnabas’ house, the sound of a gunshot interrupts the conversation. Barnabas goes out to investigate while Vicki waits in the parlor. Sam materializes there. Evidently his need to rest is quite urgent, since he sits down in an armchair while he talks to Vicki. The dead must rest! Or at least take a load off, it’s very tiring being dead apparently.
Vicki pleads with Sam not to tell her the dream, since she does not want to bring death to Barnabas. Sam says that in Barnabas’ case, death might come as a welcome relief. He declines to explain to Vicki what he means, but longtime viewers will be intrigued. Sam now knows about Angelique, so presumably he knows about Barnabas’ vampirism as well. Sam was the father of Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town, whom Barnabas attacked, imprisoned, tried to brainwash into thinking she was Josette, and set out to kill when his brainwashing plan failed. If Sam knows about that part of Barnabas’ career, you’d think he would be a bit more peeved with him than he seems to be. At any rate, Vicki can’t stop Sam telling her the dream. When Barnabas comes back, she tells him what happened, and tells him she is already tempted to tell him the dream. She must go far away for his sake.
Many people have already had the dream, and none of them had the compulsion to tell it until they awoke from it. Vicki’s relationship to Barnabas is an odd one; shortly after his attempt to Josettify Maggie failed, he decided to repeat the experiment with her. Yet he never made much of an effort to get close to her, even though she time and again went out of her way to present him with opportunities to have his way with her. She even invited herself to his house for a sleepover in #285, only to have him back off the opportunity to suck her blood. He finally bit her in #462, only for his vampirism to be put into remission less than a week later. In this scene, Vicki keeps looking at Barnabas with wide, longing eyes, while he reacts coolly. So perhaps Vicki’s compulsion suggests that her attachment to Barnabas causes the Dream Curse to affect her differently.
Back at the grave, Angelique asks Sam’s ghost whether he told Vicki the dream. He said he did. She heaves a sigh of relief and exclaims “Excellent!,” and lets him go back to his grave. She doesn’t ask any follow-up questions or require any evidence. Clearly she couldn’t read Sam’s mind, or she wouldn’t have had to ask the question in the first place. So he could just as easily have gone off to haunt someone else, then lie to her.
We cut back to Barnabas’ house. Evidently he went somewhere after Vicki left, because he is walking in the front door. He looks around, apparently sensing a presence. He calls for Willie and gets no response. He opens a closet door, and hardworking young fisherman Joe falls out, unconscious. He hears a loud dirty laugh and sees Adam at the window, jeering at him.
This episode marks the final appearance of Sam Evans and of actor David Ford. Ford brought a fresh energy to the show when he took over the part of Sam from the execrable Mark Allen in #35, prompting blogger Marc Masse to discern what he called “The David Ford Effect” in the brightened performances of all the cast in the weeks that followed. But ever since the major storyline he was part of fizzled out in #201, Sam has been at the outer fringes of the plotlines, and Ford has been coasting. He inhabits his characters comfortably enough that he is always pleasant to watch, but it’s easy to forget the verve he originally brought to the show.
A few months after leaving Dark Shadows, Ford would join many other Dark Shadows alumni in the original Broadway cast of the musical 1776. He played John Hancock on Broadway and in the 1972 movie, and John Dickinson in the national touring company. I’ve been in the habit of watching the movie every year on or around the Fourth of July since the 1980s, and so it’s oddly fitting that Ford should depart Dark Shadows early in July. Fitting too that Sam Evans’ grave should be decorated with what looks to be a red, white, and blue floral wreath.
It’s the wee hours of the morning, and hardworking young fisherman Joe comes to his fiancée Maggie’s house. Maggie had telephoned Joe and asked him to come right over. Joe can’t imagine what Maggie wants. In the chaste world of Dark Shadows, there is no word for “late night booty call.”
Joe finds Maggie and her friend Vicki waiting for him in their nightgowns. Maggie tells him that she had heard a noise in the bedroom where Vicki is staying, that she went in to investigate, and that she saw a ghost whispering into Vicki’s ear. Vicki tells him that she is staying at Maggie’s house to escape the power of a witch who is trying to make her have a nightmare that Maggie and others have already had, and that if she does have the nightmare it will spell doom for Barnabas Collins, who hasn’t been on the show for a week and a half. Joe gets more and more befuddled as the women go on about these matters. When they mention occult expert Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, Joe perks up. Stokes is a topic on which he has a definite opinion. He thinks Stokes broke into Maggie’s house while she was away mourning for her father Sam, that he is harboring a fugitive named Adam who was involved in Sam’s death, and that he is in general a slippery sort. When Vicki says she is planning to call on Stokes the following day, Joe insists on accompanying her.
Stokes is slow to answer the door when Joe and Vicki knock. Vicki tells Stokes about her experience the night before, and Stokes replies that he can do nothing for her unless she leaves the town of Collinsport.
Joe finds some beginning reader’s flashcards and asks Stokes what he is doing with them. Stokes claims to be tutoring a three year old nephew in reading. Joe hears footsteps in the back bedroom. He wants to go to investigate, as Maggie had investigated sounds in her back bedroom, but Stokes denies him permission, claiming that there are cleaning people working in there. Joe seems to suspect what the audience already knows, that neither the nephew nor the cleaning people exist and Adam is in the bedroom.
Thus compromised, Stokes is off his guard when Joe reaches into his pocket and takes out a stickpin bearing the monogram “S.” Stokes confirms that it is his, and Joe says it was found in Maggie’s living room. Stokes suggests he dropped it there when he visited Sam. Joe argues this could not have been so, and Stokes is compelled to accept his reasons. He claims to have let himself into Maggie’s house through the unlocked door hoping to find her and offer his condolences, and that when he found no one home he left right away.
Later, Joe lets himself into Maggie’s house and grabs a rifle. Maggie asks him what he is doing. He refuses to explain himself and insists on going away with the weapon. She objects quite forcefully, as one would expect, but cannot stop him. Throughout the first 106 weeks of the show, Joe has been an unfailingly kindly and conscientious fellow; longtime viewers will therefore be as shocked as Maggie is to see Joe behaving in this way.
Joe returns to Stokes’ place. Stokes is unsettled to see him with a gun. Joe declares that he has come to conduct a thorough search for Adam. Stokes orders him out of the house. Joe refuses to go, and Stokes threatens to call the police. Joe encourages him to call them. The two start to scuffle, and Adam bursts in from the bedroom. Joe points the gun at Adam, and Stokes urges him to put it down. Joe and Adam both run out the door. Stokes is looking on and urging Joe not to fire when we hear a shot.
Dark Shadows Commentary 