Tag: joel crothers

Episode 483: The three faces of Willie

In April 1967, dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis inadvertently freed vampire Barnabas Collins to prey upon the living. Barnabas made Willie his blood thrall, and reduced him to a sorely bedraggled state. As spring turned to summer, Barnabas added Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, to his diet. When Barnabas first held her captive in his house, Maggie was dazed and submissive, but as he tried to brainwash her so that her personality would disappear and that of his lost love Josette would take its place, she began to rebel. Maggie and Willie formed a strange friendship as he did what he could to protect her from Barnabas. Eventually she escaped, and mad scientist Julia Hoffman erased her memory of what Barnabas did to her. When Willie tried to warn Maggie that Barnabas might attack her again, the police jumped to the conclusion that it was he who had abducted her. They shot him. He was declared insane and sent to Windcliff, a mental hospital of which Julia is the director.

A few weeks ago, another mad scientist, Eric Lang, gave Barnabas a treatment that put the symptoms of his vampirism into remission. At the time he was feeding on two women, heiress Carolyn and well-meaning governess Vicki. When Barnabas gained the ability to go around in the sunlight, cast a reflection, and eat solid food, Carolyn and Vicki’s bite marks disappeared. It is unclear whether either of them remembers that Barnabas was a vampire, but their personalities certainly went back to what they were before he bit them. That leaves us wondering about Willie. When Barnabas responded to Lang’s treatment, did Willie revert to the violent personality he had in his first full week on the show, when on Tuesday he menaced Maggie in a barroom, on Wednesday he cornered Vicki in the study at Collinwood, and on Thursday would have raped Carolyn if she hadn’t drawn a gun on him? Did he become some version of the deeply troubled young man who was desperate to help Maggie but powerless to resist Barnabas? Or did he become something else entirely?

Today, in furtherance of Lang’s evil plans, Barnabas wants to free Willie from Windcliff and bring him back to his house on the great estate of Collinwood. Julia has become Barnabas’ best friend, but she is firmly opposed to his association with Lang. So Barnabas lies and tells her that he wants to free Willie because his conscience is plaguing him. Julia knows that isn’t true, and points out that he never visited Willie at Windcliff. Barnabas replies that when he was in the full grip of the curse, he could move about only after dark, and says that he could hardly show up at the hospital to visit Willie in the middle of the night. Julia says that she would have arranged it had he asked. He doesn’t have an answer to this, and she doesn’t fall for any of Barnabas’ other fabrications. But she can’t figure out what he really is doing. She plays along with him, and the two of them go to see Willie at Windcliff.

This is the first time we have seen Barnabas outside of a little orbit composed of Collinwood, the village of Collinsport, and the cemetery north of town. Not only was Barnabas’ ability to travel limited while the symptoms of the curse were manifest, he often lost interest in people when they left the area. So in the fall of 1967 he was obsessively hostile to strange and troubled boy David and obsessively indecisive about Vicki until the two of them went to Boston, at which point he seemed to forget they existed. It’s too bad the set representing the waiting area at Windcliff isn’t more visually striking- Barnabas’ first trip out of the Collinsport area marks a significant change in the character’s possibilities, and it would be good if it came with an image that would stick with us.

While Barnabas waits, a glossy magazine catches his attention. He picks it up and leafs through it. Since we are about to see Willie for the first time in several months, there is a good chance that this little bit of stage business will remind regular viewers of a peculiar remark Barnabas made shortly before the last time we saw Willie. Shifting the blame for his own crimes onto Willie, Barnabas planted Maggie’s ring in Willie’s room. When he came up with this plan, Barnabas remarked that the cheaper sort of tabloids say that criminals sometimes hold onto morbid mementos of their crimes, prompting us to picture Barnabas reading a cheap tabloid. That incongruous image comes to life here:

Julia joins Barnabas in the waiting room. They talk for a moment, then a nurse ushers Willie in.

At first, Willie is silent, a confused look on his face. He walks slowly towards Barnabas. Barnabas asks Willie if he recognizes him. In this moment we pick up exactly where we left off in #329, when Willie was a patient in another hospital and did not remember who Barnabas was.

This time Willie does recognize Barnabas. But as he did at the end of #329, he seems happy and untroubled. He is positively childlike in his eagerness to go back to Barnabas’ house and work for him again. He says that he and Barnabas were friends and that he always enjoyed their time together, a statement that dumbfounds Julia, as it dumbfounds anyone who remembers the show from April to September 1967. Even when Barnabas wasn’t bashing Willie across the face with his cane, Willie was miserable beyond words and hated everything Barnabas forced him to do.

Julia sends Willie back to his room, and Barnabas proclaims that Willie is entirely cured. Julia sarcastically thanks him for his diagnosis, calling him “DOCTOR Collins!” This too harks back to #329, which ended with Willie asking Barnabas if he were a doctor, to which Barnabas replied, “That’s right. I am a doctor!”

Barnabas takes Willie back to his house and tells him that for the time being, he must not so much as go outside by himself. Willie accepts Barnabas’ explanation that many people in the area will have to be prepared for his return before they see him. Willie gladly agrees to stay in the house. Barnabas leaves him alone, and he immediately slips out. He is heading for Maggie’s place.

Maggie’s father Sam is a painter, a fact advertised by the canvases around the cottage they share. When we cut to the cottage, she is making a frame. This is rather an obvious visual metaphor. The last time Willie came to the cottage, he inadvertently framed himself for Barnabas’ crimes against Maggie.

Of course Maggie is horrified to see Willie at the door; of course she demands he leave; of course she threatens him with her hammer when he insists on staying and telling her he is innocent; of course she cries for help when her boyfriend Joe comes to the door; of course Willie runs off when Joe enters. Willie puts himself in the frame again, this time as an ongoing threat to Maggie and all the women of Collinsport.

Joe goes to Barnabas’ house and demands to see Willie. At first Barnabas plays dumb, but Joe doesn’t give an inch. Barnabas then admits that he persuaded Julia to let Willie out of the hospital, but assures Joe that Willie is no longer dangerous and tells him that he will see to it that Willie behaves himself. Joe says that Barnabas has already failed in his responsibility, since Willie just went to Maggie’s house and scared her. Joe says that he will kill Willie if he goes near Maggie again. He repeats that assurance, and his voice is pure steel.

Joe exits the house. We see him outside, walking away. Willie emerges from the shadows with a rifle. He takes aim at Joe and squeezes the trigger. The gun isn’t loaded, so Willie makes nothing more than a click. Apparently that was enough for him. He grins maniacally.

On their Dark Shadows Every Day, John and Christine Scoleri point out that the the gleeful face Willie flashes after he clicks his rifle at Joe is the same expression he showed in the frenzied crimes he committed before he came under Barnabas’ power. They back this observation up with a pair of screenshots, one of Willie immediately after he pretended to kill Joe, one from his last moment before he released Barnabas and lost his freedom:

Indeed, the whole episode replays Willie’s character arc from April to September in reverse. He starts as the crushed little thing we had seen at the end of #329, becomes Maggie’s tormented and misunderstood would-be protector, then ends as the dangerously unstable ruffian who followed seagoing con man Jason McGuire to town. If the episode were a few minutes longer, John Karlen might have had to take a break and let James Hall play the last scene. This recapitulation heightens the initial suspense generated by the question of how Willie would be after Barnabas had lost his vampire powers. Whatever effect the change in Barnabas has had on Willie has certainly not made him less complex or more predictable. We can’t tell when he is being sincere and when he is faking. Based on what we see today, it’s possible he is being sincere the whole time, but that he is just extremely impulsive, and equally possible that everything he does and says is a fake meant to cover up something we don’t yet know enough to guess at.

The actors are uniformly excellent today. John Karlen has to recreate the three faces of Willie in quick succession, and executes each of them clearly and memorably. Almost all of Grayson Hall’s dialogue is expository, but while delivering it she shows us all of Julia’s complicated feelings about Barnabas and lets us into her attempt to solve the riddle of his plans for Willie. Kathryn Leigh Scott is only on screen for a few minutes, beginning with her absorbed in carpentry and proceeding directly to screaming and running around and clutching at her male scene partners, but still makes it clear that Maggie is a strong and level-headed person who has been forced into frantic behavior by circumstances no one should have to face.

In the confrontation with Barnabas, Joel Crothers shows us a new side of Joe. Always loyal, always honest, always hardworking, Joe has up to this point been soft-spoken and self-effacing, deferential towards members of the ancient and esteemed Collins family. The only time he broke that deference was when he spoke some harsh words to matriarch Liz in #33, and he had to get thoroughly drunk to manage that. There is no trace of drink in him now, and he does not regard himself as anything less than Barnabas’ equal. For the first time since Burke Devlin lost his connection with the plot and shriveled so drastically that he ceased to be Mitch Ryan and became Anthony George, Dark Shadows has a plausible action hero in its cast.

The part of Barnabas is especially challenging today; he tries and fails to fool Julia in the beginning and Joe at the end, and in between may or may not have fooled Willie. So Jonathan Frid must show us what it looks like when Barnabas does an unsuccessful job of acting. He chooses to do that by having Barnabas overact. My wife, Mrs Acilius, pointed out that Frid’s own performance in the role of a man who is severely overacting is in fact exceptionally restrained and precise. Frid bobbles his lines as he usually does, but never makes a wrong physical move, and not for one second does he miss the perfect tone for Barnabas’ lines. The result is simply outstanding.

Episode 459: The means to destroy ’em

Like every episode of Dark Shadows, this one begins with a voiceover by a member of the cast. Unlike all the preceding voiceovers, this one is delivered by a man. Thayer David does the honors.

We open in the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood. For the first time in months, Barnabas Collins is there. Barnabas died and rose as a vampire in January, and has been concealing his existence since. But now his secret is known to several people in the house. One of those, his mother Naomi, reacted to the knowledge by taking poison. In his agony, Barnabas is pacing the floor, complaining to his friend, much put-upon servant Ben, that the doctor hasn’t come. Barnabas’ father Joshua comes downstairs and announces that there is no longer any need for a doctor- Naomi has died.

Joshua brings the ill-tidings. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Joshua dismisses Ben and talks with Barnabas. He confesses his doubts that he is able to love anyone. Barnabas tells him that such a disability might save his life- the curse wicked witch Angelique placed on him means that everyone who loves him will die. Joshua says that he must end the curse, and will do so by destroying Barnabas. Barnabas asks if he will drive a stake through his heart. Joshua replies that he found a book in Boston that tells of another way. Come morning, he will fire a silver bullet through Barnabas’ heart.

This is the first we have heard that silver bullets will kill vampires. There is some lore that suggests vampires avoid silver, but we know that doesn’t apply to Barnabas- one of his chief trademarks is a cane with a mostly silver handle. The 1941 film The Wolf Man established silver bullets as a means of killing werewolves, and the Lone Ranger fires silver bullets to knock the guns out of the bad guys’ hands, so I guess they might have come to mind in the 1960s if you were thinking of exotic weaponry.

Barnabas has plans for his final night. It was naval officer/ sleazy operator Nathan Forbes who led Naomi to discover Barnabas’ secret, and who is to that extent responsible for her death. Ben enters to inform Joshua and Barnabas of another item to add to the list of Nathan’s misdeeds. Nathan has evidently apprehended bewildered time traveler Victoria Winters and taken her into town, where she faces death on the gallows after being unjustly convicted of witchcraft. The Collinses knew Vicki to be innocent and had been harboring her since shortly after she escaped from gaol. Joshua and Barnabas are certain that Nathan turned her in solely to collect the reward that has been posted for her capture. Barnabas vows to kill Nathan, and Joshua can’t talk him out of it.

We cut to Nathan in the Eagle tavern, where he is spending the money he sold Victoria for. The Eagle has changed pretty dramatically in the last several weeks. In #419, bartender Mr Mooney greeted a female patron with the announcement that the Eagle did not admit unaccompanied women. Since the Eagle is a public house on the waterfront, the management evidently thought this policy was necessary to keep the place from becoming a headquarters for the sex workers of Collinsport.

Now Mr Mooney is nowhere to be seen, and the only person in the barroom with Nathan is identified in the closing credits as “Barmaid.” She is played by Rebecca Shaw, whom we saw the other day as a streetwalker whom Barnabas was about to bite when good witch Bathia Mapes summoned him away with a magical incantation. She is sitting with Nathan, drinking with him, and flirting with him pretty heavily. A bat squeaking at the window frightens her, and when she catches her breath she announces that she will be leaving him alone in the bar for a bit while she lies down. Nathan replies to that by saying he will see her soon, and she turns to take a look at him, apparently expecting him to follow her to bed. It seems possible she is the same character who was working the docks, now employed in a similar capacity in the Eagle. If this is the person who has taken over from Mr Mooney, the management must have given up the hopes it formerly had for its reputation.

Nathan and the friendly Barmaid. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Once the woman leaves Nathan alone, Barnabas appears. He confronts Nathan about his many crimes. Nathan pulls a gun and tells Barnabas he will take him to the constable and turn him in as the Collinsport Strangler. Barnabas jeers. Nathan shoots, and Barnabas keeps standing there. He declares that Nathan cannot kill him, because he is already dead. He then informs Nathan that he will wait until 9 pm to kill him. Since it is now 8:30, this does not give Nathan a great deal of time.

At 8:45, Nathan appears at Collinwood. He finds Joshua and Ben in the drawing room, and tells them what has happened. They are neither surprised nor sympathetic. Joshua leaves the room, explaining that he would prefer not to see a gruesome murder. Ben is willing to stay for a while. When Nathan asks how Barnabas can be destroyed, Ben decides to have a little fun. He tells him that if he finds Barnabas resting in his coffin after sunrise and drives a wooden stake through his heart, that will take care of it. Ben is quite jolly when he points out that Nathan will be dead long before sunrise, so that this information would seem to be of little practical use to him. Ben then decides that he doesn’t want to watch the murder either, so he also takes his leave of Nathan.

With five minutes to go, Nathan tells himself that Barnabas will not kill him if Joshua is in the room. He finds Joshua in the study. He begs Joshua to stay. As Joshua is refusing, Nathan looks at the wall and sees a crossbow mounted there, with three wooden bolts next to it. Suddenly his cowardice gives way to wild hope. He tells Joshua he will wait in the study for Barnabas. Joshua goes.

Nathan takes a practice shot at the door, then stands waiting. Barnabas does open the door, Nathan does release another bolt, and does strike him in the chest, a bit to the left of the sternum. Barnabas cries out in pain, and as the episode ends it looks very much as if Nathan may have managed to stake him.

Barnabas takes a bolt to the chest. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas is the reason the show is a hit, so we can be quite sure he won’t actually die. Still, the episode is good enough that it feels for a moment that he might. The contrast between the prospect of Joshua killing Barnabas in the stately manner he described earlier in the episode and the idea of Nathan killing him is instructive. Had Joshua carried out his plan or even attempted it, the result would have been what Aristotle was talking about in his Poetics when he described the majestic terror of tragedy. It would have been at once horrifying and awe-inspiring to see a father duty-bound to kill his son. But Nathan is a cheap bum, trying only to save himself so that he can live to abuse and exploit more people. When we root against Nathan destroying Barnabas, we do not want only to continue the pleasure of watching the show. We are rejecting a resolution that would be unworthy of what we have seen so far.

Nathan, indeed, is unworthiness incarnate. When he was first on the show, Nathan was a likable rogue, but in recent weeks he has become both cruel and dreary. So cruel that he has tried to arrange the murder of an eleven year old; so dreary that he works through a conspicuously dim-witted, relentlessly unappealing henchman. Many fans complain about Nathan’s turn, and some speculate that the show just ran out of villains sinister enough to be worthy of Barnabas’ vengeance. On that theory, Nathan’s grave crimes are a last-minute, slapdash invention.

I don’t agree. We met Nathan before Angelique came to Collinwood. In those days, there was room for light comedy, for grand gestures, for dashing heroism, for fairy tale whimsy, and for tender romance. But as her curses have done their work, everyone and everything has been ground down. The ceiling has been lowered, and there is no longer space for the bouncy good cheer of the Old Nathan, much less for the Satanic majesty of villains like Angelique or that Rev’d Mr Trask. The whole world is pervaded by cheapness and sordidness now, and growing more so by the minute.

The only grandeur left is in The Tragedy of Joshua Collins. Were Nathan to destroy Barnabas, that grandeur would vanish, not in sublime pity, but with a taunt. That would be a harsh ending indeed.

Episode 443: Masculine details

Naval officer/ sleazy operator Nathan Forbes seemed to have lost his best chance at getting rich quick when his fiancée, fluttery heiress Millicent Collins, discovered that he was already married when they got engaged. Since then, he has figured out that Millicent’s second cousin, Barnabas Collins, did not go to England as the family has been telling everyone, but that he is still lurking about the village of Collinsport and has murdered several people there. Among Barnabas’ victims was Nathan’s wife Suki.

Widower Nathan has a plan to profit from this information. Today, we see the first step in Nathan’s plan. He persuades his henchman, commercial mariner Noah Gifford, to wear a mask, carry Barnabas’ cane, and assault Millicent while he lies in wait. Apparently he will rescue her, and she will tell her family both that Nathan was the hero of the incident and that the attacker carried Barnabas’ instantly recognizable cane.

The whole episode is full of comic moments, and the climactic scene of the assault at the gazebo had my wife, Mrs Acilius, laughing out loud and making comparisons to A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. That reaction shows that Nathan and Noah are a more successful rewriting of Dark Shadows‘ first seagoing con man, Jason McGuire, and his henchman Willie Loomis. Jason was supposed to be a comic villain, but the writers never gave him much that was funny to do or say. Actor Dennis Patrick was such a talented comic that he could pad his part with facial expressions, tones of voice, and gestures that got laughs, especially in his scenes with Willie. But it was never at all clear why he needed Willie, and most of the time he was on camera Jason was grinding the other characters down with a depressing blackmail scheme. But Nathan keeps scrambling to find his way into his marks’ good graces, and he and Noah get up to all sorts of high-jinks. Regular viewers will be happy to see a demonstration of what Jason and Willie might have been had Dark Shadows been able to employ a better writing staff in 1967.

Another major improvement over the period when Dark Shadows was set in 1966 and 1967 is the show’s use of Joel Crothers. He did what he could with the part of hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell, but since Joe’s only note is earnestness he always winds up as less of a character than a function. But Nathan is always working an angle, is never quite predictable, and is tremendously fun to watch. The prospect of seeing Crothers return to the role of Joe is one of the major reasons the audience might want to prolong our stay in the eighteenth century.

Closing Miscellany

Noah remarks on one of the odd quirks of the Collins family when he mentions that the vacant Old House on their property is still full of all sorts of valuable objects. From the first week of the show, we’ve seen that disused parts of their estate are heavily stocked with high-priced antiques. This acknowledgement of the oddness of that fact leaves us wondering if the show is going to change it.

Today marks the only appearance on Dark Shadows of actress Charlotte Fairchild. Fairchild plays a downstairs maid who tells Millicent that a man has brought her a fan. Her angular figure and pale complexion made her a perfect choice to play an eighteenth century servant, and she does a fine job with the dialogue.

Millicent and the downstairs maid. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 441: The subject of vicious gossip

When well-meaning governess Vicki came unstuck in time and found herself in the year 1795, regular viewers of Dark Shadows could expect certain plot points to be resolved before she returned to the 1960s. We would learn how Barnabas Collins became a vampire, and how he wound up trapped in a chained coffin in the secret chamber of the Collins family mausoleum. We would learn how Barnabas’ little sister Sarah died. We would see Barnabas’ lost love, gracious lady Josette, marry his uncle Jeremiah Collins. We would see Josette jump to her death from the precipice atop Widows’ Hill. And we would see Vicki escape from some dangerous situation and find herself back in her own time.

Now, the only items on that list left unresolved are Barnabas’ chaining and Vicki’s return. The show has made it clear to people paying close attention how each of those events will happen, and they could fit them both into one episode. Into any given episode, in fact- they’ve given us all the foundation we need for both stories.

But they aren’t going home to a contemporary setting quite yet. The eighteenth century segment has been a ratings hit, Dan Curtis Productions owns the period costumes, and several fun characters are still alive. So they have decided to restart some storylines they had shut down earlier and to build up some new ones.

The main thing that happens today is the first step towards restarting an apparently concluded story. Fluttery heiress Millicent Collins had shared a series of wonderful comedy scenes with untrustworthy naval officer Nathan Forbes, become engaged to him, and discovered that he was already married to someone else. Since that discovery, Millicent has been grimly determined to exact revenge on Nathan, and the rest of the Collins family has regarded him with icy disdain.

Nathan has made a discovery of his own. He has learned that Barnabas did not go to England, as his family has been telling everyone, but that he is still in Collinsport, and is the serial killer preying on the young women of the town. Last week, he made it clear to the audience he had a plan to turn this information into money, apparently by blackmailing the Collinses. Today, we learn that his plans are more complicated, and involve a renewal of his relationship with Millicent. Late at night, he shows up at the lodgings of a visiting witchfinder, the Rev’d Mr Trask. He asks Trask to take a letter to Millicent.

Trask does not want to let Nathan into his room, since the corpse of a prostitute is sprawled across his bed. She is Maude Browning. Barnabas murdered her in Friday’s episode. As part of his campaign to make life difficult for Trask, he deposited her remains at his place.

Nathan won’t take no for an answer, so Trask throws a blanket over Maude and lets him in. Nathan notices Maude’s arm sticking out from under the blanket and is delighted to think that Trask is not the fanatical ascetic he seems to be. Trask breaks down and starts telling Nathan what happened. He tells him that he was astounded to find Maude’s body on his bed, and he asks him to help get rid of it. Nathan agrees to do so on condition he deliver the letter to Millicent.

The scene is just marvelous. Danny Horn devotes most of his post about this episode on Dark Shadows Every Day to a rave review of it, to which I happily refer you.

We then cut to the great house at Collinwood, where Millicent is studying a layout of Tarot. All the Dark Shadows fansites point out that Millicent misidentifies the Queen of Cups as the High Priestess. This is not the fault it is often made out to be. On Dark Shadows Before I Die, Christine Scoleri reminds us that the Countess DuPrés made the same mistake in #368. Since the countess introduced the Tarot to Collinwood and presumably taught Millicent how to read the cards, it would have been a break in continuity had she called it anything else.

Millicent looks at the cards and addresses the absent Nathan, telling him that she is filled with hatred for him and that he faces certain destruction as punishment for his mistreatment of her. Naomi Collins, mistress of the house, enters and asks Cousin Millicent to whom she is speaking. When she answers that she is talking to Nathan, Naomi tells her Nathan is not there. Millicent replies that he does not need to be present to hear her voice. Since Barnabas was able to magically project his own taunting voice across space into Trask’s hearing in Thursday and Friday’s episodes, this claim of Millicent’s has a curious resonance for returning viewers.

Trask shows up with Nathan’s letter. He wants to meet with Millicent alone in the drawing room to give it to her, but Naomi insists on being present. They stay in the foyer. When Naomi forces Trask to tell them that the letter is from Nathan, Naomi takes it and tears it to pieces. Millicent says that she approves of Naomi’s action, but we can see a flicker in her eye and hear a quiver in her voice that suggest the hatred of Nathan she spoke of a few minutes before may not be quite so undiluted as she would like to believe. Trask leaves the house, Naomi leaves the foyer, and Millicent gathers up the shredded pieces of the letter.

Back in his room, Trask goes to sleep. He has a dream. The dream sequence begins with an image reminiscent of pieces moving in a kaleidoscope.

Trask goes into a dream world. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

That kaleidoscopic pattern was part of a visual effect we saw when Dark Shadows was still set in 1967. That effect introduced scenes that took place in #347, #352, and #354, when mad scientist Julia Hoffman hypnotized Vicki and took her to the Old House at Collinwood. At Collinwood, Barnabas’ helper Carolyn spotted Julia and Vicki, putting Julia in great danger.

The echo of those episodes is startling coming on the heels of the scene we just saw, in which Millicent figures as a student of the countess. Julia and the countess are both played by Grayson Hall, and Millicent and Carolyn are both played by Nancy Barrett. The relationships between their characters are different now, shifted as the colored pieces shift in a turning kaleidoscope. But remembering those earlier episodes, we might remember that what is seen in a semiconscious state might be a message sent to manipulate and deceive, and we certainly remember that people who go to the Old House are in danger from Barnabas.

Trask’s dream brings him face to face with the ghost of Maude, accusing him of having her remains dumped in the sea, so that she cannot rest. She predicts that everyone will learn that her dead body was in his bed. He denies both her accusation and her prediction, but does not convince either her or himself.

The ghost of Maude tells Trask the score. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Another ghost then appears. It is that of Trask’s great supporter, repressed spinster Abigail Collins. Trask tries to tell Abigail that he is innocent of Maude’s charges, but she tells him she has no idea what he is talking about. She wants to tell him that there is a great evil he must destroy. Trask has a vision telling him the evil is lurking in the Old House. He resolves to go there.

All of the acting is excellent in this one. That’s no more than we would expect from most of the cast members we see today, but Vala Clifton’s two turns as the living Maude were pretty bad, so that it is a pleasant surprise that she is so good as Maude’s ghost. The physical space gives her a hard job. She is standing a very few feet in front of Jerry Lacy with only a couple of wispy stage decorations indicating that she is separated from him, but she strikes a pose and maintains a degree of stillness that really does create the sense that she is speaking to him from another realm. She also manages to keep up an ethereal quality while making it clear that Maude is determined to be avenged. I wonder what her first appearances would have been like if she had had more time to rehearse. If they had been as good as this one, Ms Clifton and Maude would be among the more fondly remembered parts of the eighteenth century segment.

Episode 439: Whose cane this is

The opening voiceover is delivered by Vala Clifton, who makes her debut today as Maude Browning, a young lady whose profession it is to make herself agreeable to the gentlemen she meets. This marks the first time since episode #1 that the first voice we have heard was that of someone we had not seen previously. The rule lately has been that the introduction is always delivered by a woman who appears in the episode. Today, that leaves Ms Clifton as the only candidate.

At the top of the episode, vampire Barnabas Collins tells his friend, much put-upon servant Ben Stokes, of his plans for revenge on the Rev’d Mr Trask, a visiting witchfinder responsible for much misery and injustice. When he makes it clear that he plans to murder Trask and to do it in an especially atrocious manner, Ben puts his foot down and says that he will no longer help Barnabas in any way. Barnabas threatens to kill Ben if he doesn’t come back with the implements he has ordered. Ben says that he may as well kill him right away. He stands still and squeezes his eyes shut, evidently expecting Barnabas to accept the invitation. Barnabas does put on his strangling face and move towards Ben, but at the last second he relents.

We then see Ben at The Eagle tavern, demanding “More rum!” Maude is at his table, trying to engage him in conversation. He warns her against going out at night, bringing up Ruby Tate, a woman who died on the docks some nights before. Maude has already said that she arrived in town the day of Ruby’s death, but when she is explaining why she isn’t afraid to go out alone at night she suddenly becomes the expert on Ruby’s ways. “She talked to anyone. I don’t.” This is a delicious little moment, reminding us of all the people we’ve known who make up little stories to persuade themselves that they are immune from the misfortunes that have befallen others.

Untrustworthy naval officer Nathan Forbes enters the tavern accompanied by a man in sailor’s togs. Maude gives up on Ben and leaves his table; she chats with Nathan for a moment, her eyes on the bulge in his pants most of the time. That’s understandable, it’s rather a conspicuous bulge.

Maude leaves the tavern, and Nathan directs his companion to sit with Ben and to get information from him about Barnabas Collins. The man introduces himself to Ben, giving his name as Noah Gifford. Noah claims to be looking for work on the great estate of Collinwood. Ben tells Noah to stay away from there and to go back to the sea. He is drunk enough to mention Barnabas’ name, but doesn’t say much about him. He says that he wishes he could go to sea himself. He says that he likes tea, and wants to go to China to get a nice strong cup of it.

In #363, the ghost of Barnabas’ little sister Sarah mentioned that her father and his friends were always going to China on their ships. When Ben brings up China, regular viewers might remember that, and take it as confirmation that the Collinses were involved in trade with China in the 1790s.

Right before we watched this episode, I was reading an article by Amitav Ghosh in the 23 January 2024 issue of The Nation magazine about trade between the USA and China. Mr Ghosh says that between 1784 and 1804, the USA shipped a wide variety of products to China, but that from 1805 on Americans sold nothing to China but opium. He likens the label “China trade” for that commerce to calling Pablo Escobar’s business “the Andean trade.” Right up to the beginning of the flashback in #365 the show was equivocating on whether Barnabas, Sarah, and the rest of them lived in the eighteenth century or in the 1830s. Choosing 1795-1796 as the setting for this segment turns out to be a way of lightening one of the darker shadows the history we know from our time-band might otherwise have cast over the world of the show.

Nathan’s connection with Noah will sound another echo in the minds of longtime viewers. The first unsavory mariner on the show was seagoing con man Jason McGuire, who spent several months in 1967 blackmailing reclusive matriarch Liz. Jason was accompanied by a henchman, dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis. Nathan at first seemed to be a good-natured and likable fellow, if a bit free with the servant girls and regrettably mercenary in his engagement to marry heiress Millicent Collins. But ever since it turned out that he already had a wife and that she was blackmailing him into splitting Millicent’s inheritance with her, Nathan has been reminding us more and more of the sinister Jason. When he turns up with Noah in tow, the resemblance is complete. We can only wonder if Noah will follow Willie’s lead and get into some kind of terrible trouble at the Collins family mausoleum in the cemetery north of town.

On the docks, Barnabas meets Maude. He goes through the same struggle to keep himself from biting her that he had gone through with Ruby in #414. He is so slow to move in for the kill that she has time to scream and attract Nathan’s attention. Barnabas hears someone running towards them, drops his cane, and runs off.

Nathan sends Maude back to the tavern. He finds the cane and recognizes his old friend Barnabas’ signature wolf’s head handle. In the tavern, he asks Maude to describe her assailant. She mentions that the man wore a gold ring with a large black stone. Knowing that Barnabas always wore such a ring, Nathan is convinced that he did not go to England as his family has been telling everyone, but that he is in Collinsport and is the strangler who has been terrorizing the community.

Nathan seemed most virtuous when Barnabas was alive and he was his more or less loyal friend. So it is a jolt that his reaction to the idea that Barnabas might be a serial killer is to tell Ruby that, lucky as she was to escape the Collinsport Strangler, she “may not be the only lucky one tonight.” Since he has not made any move to contact the authorities, there can be little doubt that his luck is not an opportunity to stop the killings, but the discovery of information he can use to blackmail the Collins family out of every penny they have. He has completed his transformation from a good guy with a rakish side into a deep-dyed villain.

Closing Miscellany

As Nathan enters the waterfront scene, we see a sign behind him labeled “Greenfield Inn.” We saw weeks ago that the Collinsport Inn, familiar from the first year of the show, already exists in the 1790s, so evidently this is a different hostelry. In #214, when Barnabas had returned to Collinsport in 1967, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins did mention that any place in town other than the Collinsport Inn where there were rooms for rent would hardly “qualify as a flophouse”; perhaps the Greenfield Inn is the ancestor of one of these frightful places.

Greenfield Inn. Presumably not the front entrance.

Originally broadcast on 29 February 1968, this was the only episode of Dark Shadows to air on a Leap Day. One of the reasons I started the episode summaries this blog when I did is that the calendars for the years 2022-2027 match those for 1966-1971, so that I can post on the 56th anniversary of each original broadcast, matching not only the date but also the day of the week.

Episode 434: No business to run

Some people have conversations relating to the ongoing witchcraft trial of bewildered time traveler Vicki Winters. The trial itself is a waste of time, so a half hour listening to people talk about what might happen during the trial is a grim prospect. Indeed, none of today’s scenes is necessary to the overall development of the plot or of any major themes. Still, they give the actors an opportunity to show us what they can do, and four of the five members of the cast turn that opportunity to good advantage.

The exception is of course Roger Davis as Vicki’s defense attorney Peter Bradford. Mr Davis was usually tolerable when he delivered his lines in a normal conversational tone, but when he had to raise his voice, as characters on Dark Shadows have to do very frequently, the results were painfully bad. Voice teachers sometimes tell their students to sing from way down in their bodies; the more indelicate among them have been known to tell boys’ choirs that “The music escapes from the testicles.” Such a teacher would be displeased with Mr Davis. When he raises his voice, the muscles he is tensing are not those around the pelvic floor, but the sphincters in his buttocks, with the result that he seems to be having difficulty evacuating his bowels. I realize this is rather a distasteful discussion, but the topic is impossible to avoid when you listen to Davis going through one sentence after another, in each case building up to one word and grunting it out loudly. Yesterday, young Daniel Collins mentioned that repressed spinster Abigail’s personality was that of someone suffering from indigestion, and when today we hear Peter ask untrustworthy naval officer Nathan Forbes (Joel Crothers) “Why did you LIE!” or tell him “You already DID!” he sounds so much like someone struggling with constipation that we can think of nothing else.

The episode opens with a long scene between Peter and Nathan. One of Crothers’ great strengths as an actor was his ability to relax. He stays loose and moves fluidly, never stiffening in response to Mr Davis’ muscular tension, much less reacting to his straining sounds with either a giggle or a misplaced expression of disgust.

Nathan and Peter’s scene involves a fistfight, the first we have seen on Dark Shadows since dashing action hero Burke Devlin fought dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis in #207. The fight is well-choreographed and Crothers does a good job falling down and looking like he has been beaten, but that result stretches credibility. Not only was Crothers the taller man, but his easy physicality would have given him a great advantage in hand-to-hand combat against someone as rigid and awkward as Mr Davis.

Peter and Nathan do battle. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

We cut to the drawing room of the great house at Collinwood, where Naomi Collins (Joan Bennett) wants to talk to her husband, haughty tyrant Joshua Collins (Louis Edmonds.) Joshua is moping after the death of his sister Abigail, and doesn’t want to talk to Naomi or anyone else. At first they exchange a few words about Abigail. Naomi doesn’t try to hide her dislike of her late sister-in-law, saying that she led a senseless life. This of course offends Joshua, but Naomi stands her ground.

This part of the conversation includes two lines that are interesting to fans who are curious about the details of the characters’ relationship to their society. When Naomi says that it was because Abigail had too few responsibilities that she became a religious fanatic and a dangerous bigot, Joshua says that she did have some things to do. “She had her church,” he says. Not “the church,” not “our church,” but “her church.” This is not the first indication we have had that Abigail differed from the rest of the family in religion, but it is the most definite confirmation. As aristocratic New Englanders of the eighteenth century, presumably the family would be Congregationalists. Abigail might just have gone to the another, stricter meeting within the Congregationalist fold, or she might have joined a different group.

The other line marks Naomi as a remarkably advanced feminist for her time and place. She says that Abigail was “Like a businesswoman with no business to run.” The concept of “businesswoman” was hardly familiar in the days when this episode is set. Even the word “businessman” was not widely known then- the earliest citation of it in The Oxford English Dictionary dates to 1798, two years after this episode is supposed to be taking place, and its first appearance in the modern sense came several years after that. The same dictionary can find no use of “business-woman” until 1827, and then in only a strongly pejorative sense. But the audience, seeing Joan Bennett on this set, will think of her character matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, who in the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s runs the family’s business enterprises from this room. Naomi is looking towards the future, and she sees Liz.

Edmonds and Bennett are both wonderful in this scene. She is steady and authoritative throughout; he is alternately gloomy, irritated, and sullen. It is as compelling to watch her hold her single mood as it is to watch him navigate from one to the other. Joshua at no point concedes anything to Naomi, and he ends by turning his back on her and going away. But he is not at all in command today, as he has always been in command before. He is hurting too deeply to give orders and compel obedience by the force of his presence.

In the village of Collinsport, Nathan meets with the Rev’d Mr Trask (Jerry Lacy,) visiting witchfinder. The other day, Nathan capitulated to Trask’s blackmail and testified against Vicki. Now he wants Trask to intercede with Joshua and to talk him out of informing the Navy of his many crimes. He tries to sell Trask a bill of goods, claiming that all the things he did wrong were simply the result of his pure and innocent love for fluttery heiress Millicent Collins. The audience knows that this is entirely false, but Trask doesn’t even let him start on it- he responds that “Physical love is beyond my comprehension.” Mr Lacy is an accomplished comic, and he doesn’t fail to get a laugh with this line. Trask realizes that Nathan’s testimony would lose much of its persuasiveness if he were exposed as the scoundrel he is, Trask agrees.

Joshua comes to meet with Trask. Mr Lacy is a great shouter, and Trask is always on full volume. When he insists that Joshua meet with Nathan and forswear his plan to send a letter to the Navy, he builds Trask into a tower of hypocrisy and repression, and we remember all of the scenes where Joshua has demolished people he disdains, Trask among them. But Joshua is not going to demolish anyone now, not while he is mourning everyone he ever loved. He mutters, frowns, and finally caves in to Trask’s demand. The contrast between the overweening Trask and the fusty Joshua is electrifying to returning viewers.

Joshua then consents to meet privately with Nathan. He tells Nathan that he will keep quiet on condition he secure a transfer to another port as soon as possible. Nathan tells some lies and makes some excuses that impress neither Joshua nor anyone who has been watching the show for any length of time, but again, the actors are fascinating to watch together. The chaos and evil Trask represents has turned the world upside down, weakening the strong Joshua and emboldening the degenerate Nathan.

More bad news awaits Joshua when he goes home. Unhappy as Joshua was with Naomi’s insistence on discussing the faults of his recently deceased sister, he is much more upset when she tells him she has decided to go to court and testify in Vicki’s defense. Joshua is appalled she would do this. He is sure Vicki is to blame for the deaths of both of their children, of both of his siblings, and of various other people, some of whom he cared about when they were alive. He threatens to lock Naomi up in her room to prevent her going to court, but she replies that if he does that she will escape, and he will never see her again. The children are dead and she has no work of her own; she has no reason to stay.

Episode 428: Witness for the defense

Fluttery heiress Millicent Collins thought that she had a bright future to look forward to when she became engaged to young naval officer Nathan Forbes. That prospect shattered when she discovered that Nathan was already married. Making matters worse, Nathan’s wife, Suki, had presented herself to the Collinses as his sister, and he had gone along with this imposture. Suki is now dead, strangled in an apparently empty house, her body discovered by Nathan when no one else was anywhere near and he had a great deal to gain by her death. For some reason, no one seriously suspects Nathan of the murder, but the whole thing rather tends to cast him in a poor light.

Millicent has recently seen her second cousin, Barnabas Collins. Barnabas’ father, haughty tyrant Joshua, has put the word about that Barnabas has gone to England. Like most people in and around the village of Collinsport, Millicent had believed this story. But the other night she spotted Barnabas in the cemetery. Now she is determined to find Barnabas and recruit him to avenge her honor by fighting a duel with Nathan. She is indignant that Joshua and his wife Naomi keep insisting that she did not really see Barnabas, and that he is not available to fight Nathan.

As it happens, Barnabas did not go to England. Joshua invented that story to cover up the fact that Barnabas had died. Joshua believed that Barnabas died of the plague, and that if that became known the men would not show up to work at the family’s shipyard.

Today, Millicent hears for the first time that Barnabas has died. The news comes from an unpleasant young man named Peter, who is acting as attorney for accused witch Victoria Winters. Peter comes to the great house of Collinwood looking for much put-upon servant Ben Stokes, hoping that Ben will testify for Vicki. Millicent is uninterested in Peter’s mission, but asks him to look for Barnabas. Peter has heard that Barnabas is dead, and passes that information along to Millicent. Since she has seen Barnabas with her own eyes, she simply laughs at this.

As it happens, Peter and Millicent are both right. Barnabas is dead, most of the time. At night he rises as a vampire and preys upon the living. No one but his friend Ben knows this.

In her scene with Peter, Nancy Barrett’s Millicent is slightly, cheerfully crazy. She doesn’t get much support from Roger Davis as Peter, and winds up playing the part a little bit bigger than she might have wished. In her next scene, she has a partner who helps her stay on firm ground.

Millicent answers the front door, as she had done when Peter knocked. This time she is appalled to find that it is Nathan. He puts his foot in the door and refuses to leave until she has heard him out.

Nathan spins a tale to Millicent that he and Suki were in the process of divorcing. We know this is false, and Millicent should as well. When they became engaged, Nathan insisted on the earliest possible wedding date. Since Suki did not show up with a final decree, Nathan could not have been sure that the divorce would be official by that date. Of course, we also know that there was no divorce in the offing; Nathan had abandoned Suki, she had tracked him down, and when she found out about Millicent, she planned to force Nathan to send as much of Millicent’s vast inheritance her way as possible.

Millicent doesn’t know about those details, but she is quite sure Nathan is lying. When he tries to embrace her, she takes a letter opener and tries to stab him.

Millicent takes matters into her own hands. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Millicent is not supposed to be particularly brainy, but she is a smart character in every sense that matters. She absorbs the facts presented to her, interprets them reasonably, forms plans, and pursues those plans by means which, if her interpretations are correct, might well succeed. She believes, correctly, that Nathan has mistreated her and made her look like a fool. She believes, as a young lady of the late 18th century well might, that matters can be set right only by Nathan’s violent death. Having seen Barnabas and knowing that he once fought a duel, she hoped that he would be her avenger. Since Barnabas is being kept from her for no reason she can fathom, she has decided to take matters into her own hands. Her actions may not be the optimal response to the situation, but we can follow her train of thought at each point and are in suspense as to what it will lead her to do next.

Joshua interrupts Millicent before she can accomplish her purpose. He sends her out of the room and confronts Nathan. He tells Nathan he will soon inform the Navy department of what he has done, and that he is sure they will share his eagerness to resolve the issue discreetly. Joshua’s horror of scandal, which we have seen many times, most spectacularly in his cover-up of Barnabas’ death, explains his willingness to believe that Nathan is innocent of Suki’s murder. There would be no way to settle that entirely out of the public eye.

Joel Crothers brought a great deal of wholesome charm to the role of the scoundrel Nathan. We are impressed when Millicent does not give him an inch, even though we can see that she is tempted to do so. We can understand why Joshua several times seems to have to remind himself that he disapproves of Nathan. When, as Joshua, he says he does not believe Nathan killed Suki, Louis Edmonds gives a little smile which flashes real affection for the man he is condemning. It is a testament to Crothers’ talent that his partners are able to achieve these subtle effects in the scenes they share with him in the drawing room.

We cut to the cemetery, where Ben is digging a grave in a heavy fog. Peter shows up to shout at him about testifying for Vicki. Thayer David answers him with an impressive simplicity. Roger Davis is as loud and monotonous as he usually is, but David’s Ben doesn’t waste the tiniest energy on any uncalled-for displays with his voice or face or gestures. It really is a master class in acting under difficult circumstances.

Joshua shows up and shoos Peter away. Joshua insists on going with Ben into the secret chamber where Barnabas’ coffin is hidden. The other night he went into the chamber alone, opened the coffin, and found it empty. Today he goes in with Ben and opens the coffin again. Unaware of the vampire curse, he is as shocked to find the body there as he had earlier been to find it missing.

Episode 420: A man’s position in society

One of the most story-productive relationships in the first 40 weeks of Dark Shadows was that between reclusive matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard and her brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins. Having squandered his entire inheritance, Roger lived as a guest in Liz’ house and drew a salary from her business. She tried to order him to rein in his bad behavior, but time and again wound up shielding him from accountability. When she does that, she reduces herself from authoritative to bossy.

In the summer of 1967, the relationship between mad scientist Julia Hoffman and vampire Barnabas Collins began to follow the same dynamic of Bossy Big Sister/ Bratty Little Brother. Appealing to her professional standing as a medical doctor doubly qualified in hematology and psychiatry and to her situational awareness as a native of the twentieth century, she makes efforts to convince him that not every problem has to be solved by murder. When he disregards her advice and kills people anyway, she covers up for him. Realizing that she is stuck with Barnabas for the rest of her life, Julia tries to drum up a romantic relationship with him, but he is not interested. Eventually, she will come to be “like a sister” to him in more senses of that phrase than she would like. In the years to come, we will even see storylines in which the two of them explicitly masquerade as siblings.

Dark Shadows took a break from its contemporary setting and began an extended stay in the late 18th century beginning in November 1967. We’ve already caught a glimpse of the Bossy Big Sister/ Bratty Little Brother dynamic in this period, when haughty overlord Joshua Collins found himself taking orders from his sister, repressed spinster Abigail. Today, we take a bit of a self-referential turn as a character decides to deliberately mimic this trope.

Caddish naval officer Nathan Forbes has talked fluttery heiress Millicent Collins into marrying him. Millicent is very rich and beautiful, Nathan is charming and handsome, and there are many reasons to think they might make a happy couple. There is one small problem. A very small problem, really; not more than five feet tall and well under 100 pounds. It is Nathan’s current wife, Suki. Suki has found out what Nathan is up to, and wants a cut of his take. To his surprise and discomfort, she shows up today at the great house of Collinwood and introduces herself to Millicent as Nathan’s sister.

The Millicent/ Nathan story has been a lot of fun so far, and Suki is just fantastic. Actress Jane Draper gives a performance as big as her body is small, and Suki instantly sees through Nathan’s every lie, which is to say his every utterance. She dominates every scene she is in.

Suki has Nathan where she wants him. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Yesterday, Suki walked in on Nathan at The Eagle tavern and took charge of the place. Today, she is in command of the drawing room at Collinwood. Nathan and Millicent serve up one straight line after another, every one of which Suki answers by saying something unexpected and exciting.

Suki looks out the window and sees Barnabas looking in. She doesn’t know who he is, much less that he is a vampire, but she can recognize a miserable creep when she sees one. He throws her off her form, and we dissolve to an upstairs bedroom.

The rest of the episode is a scene where Barnabas lets himself into the bedroom occupied by his ex-fiancée, the gracious Josette. He tells Josette they can never be together again, but won’t explain why. She says she wants to be with him no matter what. He bites her. They’ve been telegraphing this scene all week. It’s a complete anticlimax, and it does nothing to make up for Barnabas interrupting our time with Suki.

For a show that plundered story ideas from virtually everywhere, Dark Shadows was remarkably wary of lifting anything from the Bible. Suki’s claim to be Nathan’s sister is something of an exception. It reminds us of Abraham, who twice in Genesis passes off his wife Sarai/ Sarah as his sister and then recommends that his son do the same with his wife Rebecca. The 1795 flashback is supposed to explain the origin of the accursed Collins family for us, to answer the question “Who are Barnabas’ kin?” as Genesis answers the question “Who are Joseph’s kin?” So Suki is in tune with the rationale of the segment when she draws on that book. While Genesis explains and justifies a patriarchal order of society, so that Sarah and Rebecca just go along with Abraham’s loony schemes, daytime serials are aimed at a mostly female audience and need self-starting female characters. So it is only to be expected that the gimmick will be at Suki’s initiative this time.

Episode 419: Collins as in Collinsport?

When gallant gentleman Barnabas discovered that his wife Angelique was a wicked witch who had been casting spells to ruin the lives of everyone he knows, she forbade him to disclose this information. If he did, she would kill his true love, the gracious Josette.

Now, Angelique has turned Barnabas into a vampire. When he found out about this, he killed her. Sadly, that didn’t take. For the last few days Angelique’s disembodied head has been floating around foiling all of Barnabas’ attempts to contain the damage he has been doing.

Today, we open in the Collins family mausoleum. Barnabas’ coffin is hidden in a secret chamber inside the mausoleum. He and Josette are in the publicly-known outer chamber, where she found him yesterday. He pleads with her to leave him and forget she ever knew him, but will not tell her why. Angelique has made it obvious that she is already working to kill Josette, so obvious that Barnabas and his friend Ben were talking about it yesterday. So Barnabas has no reason to withhold any information from Josette, and every reason to tell all. But he continues to keep everything back that might persuade her to flee from him. This does fit with his pattern of behavior- half the reason they are in this situation is that Barnabas wouldn’t tell Josette that he and Angelique had had an affair long ago. But it is still frustrating.

Back in the great house of Collinwood, Josette runs into the two characters who have been keeping the show watchable for the last couple of weeks, fluttery heiress Millicent Collins (Nancy Barrett) and caddish naval officer Nathan Forbes (Joel Crothers.) After a series of delightfully played comedy scenes, Millicent and Nathan have become engaged. They break their happy news to Josette. She is so preoccupied with her encounter with Barnabas that she barely reacts.

Nathan leaves. In the drawing room, Josette tells Millicent that she saw Barnabas tonight. Millicent knows that, according to Barnabas’ parents, Barnabas has gone to England. She is therefore certain that Josette could not have seen Barnabas, and she patiently explains this impossibility to Josette. The difficulties Millicent knows about are nothing to what Josette knows- she saw Barnabas die.

Millicent lost at the threshold of thought. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

In the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s, Nancy Barrett plays another heiress, Carolyn Collins Stoddard. In those same parts of the series, Joel Crothers plays hardworking young fisherman Joe. In 1966, Carolyn and Joe were dating each other for no reason they could discern, and the audience was afflicted with scene after scene of them out on dates staring at each other in boredom. Millicent and Nathan are as much fun to watch together as Carolyn and Joe were dull. They are pursuing objectives we can understand, and we can also be sure that their plans will not work out as they expect.

Nathan is clever, charming, and unscrupulous. He was uninterested in Millicent until he found out she was rich, then immediately began an assiduous pursuit of her hand and her inheritance. In addition to greed, he has also shown a keen eye for opportunities to bed the women on the household staff. When his naval career is threatened by the villains, he shows no sign of courage. Yet we have also seen him behave admirably, even heroically, in trying to help bewildered time-traveler Vicki. And when Barnabas was alive, Nathan was a trustworthy friend to him. So for all we know, by the time he gets his hands on Millicent’s money, this complex man might have fallen in love with her and made up his mind to be a good husband.

Millicent is not a “smart character” in an IQ-test sense, but her limitations translate into an accidental wisdom. Her ideas of life have been shaped by plays she has seen and novels she has read, leading her to think she is a character in a florid melodrama. But of course that is exactly what she is, and so her behavior is, if anything, more situationally appropriate than are the actions of the more superficially rational people around her. Certainly it is jarring when Josette starts telling Millicent about Barnabas, when she knows that Barnabas wants to keep his presence secret. Considering what will happen to Josette if she keeps approaching Barnabas, Millicent does quite the sensible thing when she insists on leaving the official story alone.

Nathan has gone to the local tavern. In the 1960s, this same set will be a tavern known as The Blue Whale. Joe will be a regular customer, and the man who will preside behind the bar is played by actor Bob O’Connell. In #319, a character pretending to be drunk called the bartender “Bob-a-roonie,” leading fans of the show to call the character “Bob Rooney,” a name never used in the series.

Now, in 1796, the tavern is called The Eagle. Bob O’Connell again plays the man who pours the drinks. His name is Mr Mooney. “Mooney” sounds enough like “Rooney” that I wonder if the “Bob Rooney” gag circulated among the production staff. Mr Mooney gets more lines today than Bob the bartender ever did, and his name is listed in the credits for the first time at the end of his 57th episode.

O’Connell did a lot of very good work in those first 56 appearances. He was especially good with facial expressions that showed he had overheard enough of a conversation to think he ought to be more aggressive about refusing to serve drinks to customers before they lose all sense, but not enough to have anything substantial to report to the police. I’m sorry to say that his delivery of dialogue today is not on that level. Partly that’s because he has to put on some kind of Anglo-Celtic accent that he is none too sure of. But that isn’t the only problem. He delivers his lines much too fast and too loud, and does not modulate his voice in response to anything his scene-mates do. He isn’t interacting with the others at all, just waiting for his cues and making sure the microphone picks up the words. His scene is a major letdown for Bob the bartender fans everywhere. O’Connell’s previous successes as a working guy who knows more than others assume he does leave me wishing they could have done another take of the scene with some fresh guidance from the director.

Fortunately, the same scene introduces one of the most magnificent characters in all of Dark Shadows. She walks in, tells Mr Mooney she’s with Nathan, and gives her name as Suki Forbes. That’s Forbes as in “Mrs Nathan Forbes.”

Suki takes command. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Nathan tries out a series of lies on Suki, each of which she bats away effortlessly. He offers to pay her to leave town; she lets him go collect his money, while she stays in the tavern and gets all the relevant information from Mr Mooney. Nathan has been away for about ten seconds by the time Suki finds out he plans to marry into the family that owns the town. She is quite pleased by the prospects this introduces.

Suki thinks of how much she might earn by pimping Nathan out. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Our hopes that Nathan would eventually make Millicent happy are thus reduced to a very low order of probability. Regular viewers are again reminded of Carolyn, in this case of Carolyn’s absentee father Paul Stoddard. Paul was a charming, dishonest, and cruel man who married Carolyn’s mother Elizabeth only for her money.

We haven’t seen Paul, and know very little about his background. What we do know is that he was not from the village of Collinsport, had no money of his own, and that his best friend was a merchant seaman named Jason McGuire. We got to know Jason quite well when he showed up and blackmailed Liz for a long dull stretch of the show. Poor men would have few opportunities to meet young women of Liz’ lofty station, and even fewer means of persuading them they were acceptable marriage partners. Since the marriage took place in 1945 or 1946, when a sizable fraction of American men were on active duty in the armed forces, and since Paul was connected to Jason and therefore to the sea, it would seem likely that Paul was a Navy officer. After all, an officer’s uniform can get a man admitted to any social circle, as Nathan illustrates. So the miserable marriage that Liz endured might have echoed a similarly ill-conceived match a collateral ancestor of hers made in the late 18th century.

Suki is played, sensationally, by Jane Draper. In his June 2014 post about #420, Danny Horn wrote that Ms Draper was “a bit mysterious.” The lady herself saw that post and commented on it in August 2020. She wrote:

Hi
I am the Jane Draper who played Suki on Dark Shadows! Thought I’d be on it longer but got killed off by Barnabas. I worked on Broadway, film and this soap opera. Now, I play Bluegrass, always my passion, on guitar and upright bass. Born in Illinois, grew up mostly in Southern Indiana and moved to NYC in my teens.

thank you for your kind words.

Jane Draper, comment left 13 August 2020 on “Episode 420: The Stalking Dead,” Dark Shadows Every Day.

Episode 403: Eyes to follow him wherever he goes

In April 1967, Dark Shadows had the smallest audience of any of the 13 daytime serials on the three major broadcast networks in the USA. With cancellation looming and nothing to lose, the show introduced vampire Barnabas Collins to its cast of characters, and quickly jumped in the ratings, becoming the first genuine hit of any kind on ABC’s daytime schedule. Since Barnabas was the show’s one selling point, there were long stretches when he was in every episode, and almost every scene.

In November, the show went back in time to the year 1795, when Barnabas was alive and kindly. When the 1795 segment began, Barnabas was close to his uncle, the equally kindly Jeremiah Collins. Jeremiah was cleverer than Barnabas. So, while Barnabas merely showed a benign politeness to bewildered time-traveler Vicki, Jeremiah caught on that she was radically out of place and tried to coach her in the con games she would have to master to survive in her new surroundings. Even so, Jeremiah was dull, and were it not for our knowledge of what he was doomed to become, the living Barnabas would have been even duller. While in 1795, Dark Shadows has to explain not only how Barnabas falls under his curse, but also show how he becomes interesting.

Yesterday, we saw Barnabas in one of the modes in which he was most consistently interesting in 1967, that of comic villain. He’d found out that his wife Angelique was a witch and that by her evil spells she is the source of all the misery that has recently engulfed the great estate of Collinwood, and his response to that information was to make a series of farcically unsuccessful attempts to murder her. At the top of today’s episode, Angelique makes it clear that she is peeved with him about this, and she insists that he stop. She also makes it clear that she will use her magical powers to force him to spend the rest of his life being a dutiful husband, however much he hates her.

Outside the great house on the estate, feather-headed heiress Millicent is talking with caddish naval officer Nathan. It is late and Millicent is worried about the impropriety of being alone with Nathan. It is a charming scene, not least to regular viewers who remember the first months of the show, when the same actors were trapped in a pointless storyline as a couple who were so bored with each other they couldn’t muster the energy to break up. Millicent and Nathan, by contrast, are attracted to each other, zestful, and full of ideas. Millicent’s ideas are mostly silly and old-fashioned, while Nathan’s are mostly concerned with getting his hands on her money. Nancy Barrett and Joel Crothers make the most of these roles. As Nathan, Crothers plays a man who is pretending to be dashing and heroic, but who time and again betrays signs that he is cowardly and venal. As Millicent, Miss Barrett adopts an unmistakably stagy diction, articulating each word with great distinctness. Thus she tells us that Millicent has derived her ideas about life from watching melodramatic plays.

Barnabas comes upon Nathan and Millicent. Seeing him, Millicent exclaims “I’m ruined!” Neither man even acknowledges that she has said this. This is a laugh-out-loud moment, but Millicent is onto something- she really is a character in a melodrama.

Barnabas asks Millicent to help him meet Josette while Nathan and the Countess look on. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas is desperate to confer with the gracious Josette. He was engaged to marry Josette until Angelique’s spell put them asunder. Josette’s aunt, the Countess DuPrés, is furious with Barnabas for trying to see her. He tells her that Josette is in great danger and will be safe only if she leaves Collinwood tonight. He refuses to explain the nature of the danger. It’s true Angelique threatened to kill Josette if Barnabas exposed her as the witch, but the warning he is already giving would by itself seem to be enough to provoke that. He might as well tell everything he knows- at least then there would be a chance he would persuade the countess and enlist her as an ally.

Again, regular viewers will see something in the exchange between Barnabas and the countess that those watching the show for the first time may miss. The countess is played by Grayson Hall, who in some of the parts of Dark Shadows set in the twentieth century plays mad scientist Julia Hoffman. Julia knows that Barnabas is a vampire, has made herself complicit in some of his crimes, and wants to be close to him. When we see Barnabas failing to make a connection with the countess, we are reminded that one of the most interesting things about him in 1967 was his relationship with Julia.

They didn’t have camera drones in 1795, so Angelique comes up with the next best thing- she casts a spell that causes a bat to watch Barnabas. The bat isn’t subtle- the sight of it alarms Barnabas and terrifies Millicent. But perhaps that’s the point- Angelique wants Barnabas to know he cannot escape her.