The late Dr Eric Lang built a Frankenstein’s monster with the intention of draining the “life force” from recovering vampire Barnabas Collins into it. Wicked witch Angelique turned Barnabas into a vampire in the first place, and has returned to the scene to thwart this experiment and make Barnabas once more an undead abomination preying upon the living. Angelique struck Lang dead with one spell, and with another has started a “Dream Curse” that has for the moment compromised the ability of the senior mad scientist in town, Barnabas’ best friend Julia Hoffman, to pick up where Lang left off.
In Lang’s laboratory, Julia and Barnabas recap the plot. Under the stress of the Dream Curse, Julia is having trouble controlling her emotions. At one point she refers to her crush on Barnabas. Every time she has mentioned this before, Barnabas has been a huge jerk about it, ridiculing her and reminding him of the crimes they have committed together, including murder. This time, he is warm and kindly. His non-obnoxious response marks a significant change in their relationship.
Lang left an audio message for Julia on his tape recorder. He said that if she does the experiment and Barnabas and the Frankenstein’s monster, whose name is Adam, both live, neither Barnabas nor Adam will be a vampire. But if Adam dies, Barnabas will revert. His recovery is already hanging by a thread, as he feels ever stronger cravings for blood.
Julia and Barnabas play the tape today, but leave the room before it gets to the part with the message. Lang’s voice plays to an empty set. Addison Powell didn’t do a very good job playing Lang on screen, and he’s no better as a voice actor. Powell appeared in a number of feature films, including hits like The Thomas Crown Affair and Three Days of the Condor, but is best remembered for a series of commercials he did in the 1980s as “The Gorton’s Fisherman.” I remember those spots- I thought he was an actual fisherman they’d hired to read copy. Usually I’m uneasy with the idea of taking a job away from an actor, since I know lots of very talented people who have spent years training in that craft, never to make a living at it. But Powell was so bad I wish my original impression had been correct.
Julia has reached out to Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, a scholar of the occult, for help with the Dream Curse. When she met with him yesterday, she did not identify Angelique as the witch. She couldn’t tell him anything about the experiment or about Barnabas’ vampirism without confessing to her many crimes. Today, Stokes is trying to fill in the blanks Julia left so that he can help to oppose the Dream Curse. He calls on Barnabas at Lang’s house. He breaks down Barnabas’ resistance and learns that the witch is Angelique, whom he knows under her alias of Cassandra Blair Collins.
Stokes next calls on Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, at her house. Maggie was the first person to have the dream, and she gives Stokes a detailed description of it. This gives Kathryn Leigh Scott an opportunity to look into the camera and emote, which is always worth seeing.
There are a lot of shots today using mirrors. In their post on Dark Shadows Before I Die, John and Christine Scoleri include several screenshots of these and of ambitious camera angles from other episodes.
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.
Recovering vampire Barnabas Collins hopes that mad scientist Eric Lang will be able to free him of his curse once and for all. Since wicked witch Angelique, who put the curse on Barnabas in the first place, has come back to the great estate of Collinwood, Barnabas found a twelfth century Sicilian talisman with the power to protect against witches and gave it to Lang with instructions that he was to keep it on his person at all times. Several days ago, Angelique drove Lang to the point of death, and he survived only because he managed to touch the talisman at the last moment. Even so, Lang refuses to wear the talisman or even to keep track of it. Now Barnabas is with Lang in his study, whence they discover that the talisman has been stolen. Lang asks Barnabas if he can get another one for him. Barnabas looks at Lang as if he were the world’s stupidest man, and tells him that such objects are extremely rare.
The whole business with Lang and the talisman is a prime example of what Roger Ebert called Idiot Plot, in which the story would end immediately if the characters showed as much intelligence as the average member of the audience has. If Lang were played by a good actor, he might be able to hold our interest through a few of these inexplicable actions. Both Alexandra Moltke Isles, as well-meaning governess Vicki, and Dana Elcar, as Sheriff George Patterson, were cast as the Designated Dum-Dum in a number of episodes, and each managed to survive longer than one might have expected. Mrs Isles kept the audience on board for Vicki by making us wonder how anyone could absorb the torrent of bizarre information drowning her. Elcar made the sheriff watchable by making speculate he might only be pretending to be clueless. But as Lang, Addison Powell is just dismally bad. Not only does he not invent a way to make Lang seem like he might be secretly smarter than the script makes him out to be, he does not show any sign of ever having acquired even the most basic acting skills. When Lang seems to think Barnabas can take him to Talismans-Я-Us to replace the priceless object he has lost, the audience loses whatever patience it may have had with him.
Lang’s assistant, a former mental patient named Peter who insists on being called “Jeff,” is quitting after months of helping Lang steal body parts from fresh graves. Peter/ Jeff tells Barnabas that he will be staying in town. That’s bad news for Barnabas, but much worse news for the audience. Peter/ Jeff is played by Roger Davis, who is a far more skilled actor than Addison Powell but, if anything, even less pleasant to watch. His characters are either full of rage or insufferably smug, he often manhandles his scene partners, and when he raises his voice he projects, not from the muscles of his pelvic floor, but from his anal sphincters, causing him to sound like he is suffering from severe constipation.
Lang tells Barnabas he needs a new assistant as soon as possible. Barnabas says he knows just the man. He is Willie Loomis. As Peter/ Jeff was a patient in an institution for the criminally insane when Lang found him, Willie is a patient in such an institution now. Willie was Barnabas’ servant for the first months he was in the 1960s, when Barnabas was a vampire rampaging through the village of Collinsport. Barnabas eventually took the heat off himself by pinning some of his crimes on Willie, packing him off to the mental hospital.
Willie was a fan favorite. Largely this was because actor John Karlen was as capable as Addison Powell was inept and as likable as Roger Davis is repellent. But the writers, too, always found fresh ways to make Barnabas’ conversations with Willie interesting, and when mad scientist Julia Hoffman teamed up with Barnabas she and Willie were great fun to watch together. The idea of Willie replacing Peter/ Jeff, in whatever capacity, is something to cheer for.
We cut to the cottage where Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, lives with her father Sam. Maggie is wearing a pair of trousers which may well be the weirdest things ever shown on Dark Shadows. According to a blog called 1630 Revello Drive,* they are based on an article of women’s clothing traditional in India called a gharara. Surely no one in India ever made such things out of this brightly colored floral quilt. If this garment can exist, we would be foolhardy to rule out the possibility of ghosts or vampires or time travel or witches or anything else.
Maggie answers a knock on the door and finds Peter/ Jeff. Vicki had arranged for him to rent a room at the Evans cottage. Shortly after he arrives, Vicki comes. Peter/ Jeff tells her she doesn’t know much about him, and asks what she will do if it turns out he is someone she hates.
The next thing we see after that question is Peter/ Jeff with his shoe, a shoe he wears while robbing graves, on Maggie and Sam’s coffee table. Anyone who saw that might well conclude that Peter/ Jeff is such a clod that any civilized person would be tempted to hate him.
That isn’t an ottoman, buddy.
Again, there are actors who specialize in playing men who are compelling to watch when they do unpleasant things. Dark Shadows hit the jackpot in this regard when it cast Jonathan Frid as the vampire Barnabas. It narrowly missed doing so on other occasions. In the first year of the show, future movie stars Harvey Keitel (in #33) and Frederic Forrest (in #137) showed up as background players. Surely they would have taken speaking parts on the show at this point in their careers, and either of them could have made Peter/ Jeff almost as much of an asset as John Karlen made Willie, even if he did wantonly ruin people’s furniture.
Sarcastic dandy Roger, possessed by the spirit of wicked witch Angelique, visits mad scientist Dr Lang. The village of Collinsport was once a whaling center, and Lang is mindful enough of that long-ago history that he collects harpoons. Roger appears to be fascinated by Lang’s collection. He holds one of the finer pieces, admires it, fondles it, and tries to kill Lang with it. At the last moment, the murder is prevented by recovering vampire Barnabas and Julia, who is a scientist as mad as Lang but infinitely more interesting. As is typical of supernatural beings on Dark Shadows, Angelique projects her power through a portrait of herself; the portrait also has some adventures today.
There is a lot of great stuff in this one, as other bloggers have well explained. The 1960s were the heyday of Freudianism in the USA, and in the first year of the show the influence of that school of thought could often be traced in the scripts of Art Wallace and Francis Swann. Patrick McCray documents in his post on The Dark Shadows Daybook that this was an episode where writer Gordon Russell allowed himself to cut loose and have fun with the sillier side of the Freudian approach.
On his Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn focuses on the scene where Barnabas and Julia decide to go and stop Roger. He points out that it is the first conversation they have had about something other than themselves, the first time Barnabas shares with Julia the secret of how he became a vampire, the first time they take heroic action, and the first time they are recognizably friends. It is that friendship that will drive the action of the show from now on.
In their meticulously detailed summary of the action of the episode on their Dark Shadows Before I Die, John and Christine Scoleri capture the effect on the audience of the steady accumulation of one absurdity upon another as the episode goes on. Reading their unfailingly matter-of-fact description of the ever-mounting lunacies we witness in this half-hour is almost as exhilarating as it was watching them in the first place.
Barnabas calls Julia’s attention to the closing cliffhanger. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Haughty overlord Joshua Collins and his long-term house-guest the Countess DuPrés have summoned good witch Bathia Mapes to lift the curse that has made Joshua’s son Barnabas a vampire. Meanwhile, Barnabas has bitten his second cousin Millicent and gone to the waterfront to find another victim. Bloggers Danny Horn, Patrick McCray, and John and Christine Scoleri have said so much so well about this episode that I have only a few points to add.
Millicent tells Joshua that it is wrong of him to have “that man who says he is Barnabas” in the house when he does such frightful things. Nancy Barrett’s performance as a woman made insane by her encounter with the undead is achingly beautiful. And her idea that Barnabas is an impostor is an intriguing one. Should Bathia succeed, Barnabas will need a story to account for the several sightings people made of him when he was cursed. That success seems unlikely- if Barnabas is freed from the curse now, what will we find when Dark Shadows stops being a costume drama set in the 1790s and returns to a contemporary setting? But it is something to file away for future use…
Bathia summons Barnabas away from the docks, where he is about to kill a prostitute, by sending the flame from a candle to him. The movement of the flame is an interesting effect, but what most held my attention was the scene between Barnabas and the woman he almost victimizes. Jonathan Frid and day player Rebecca Shaw play this scene in silence, with exaggerated movements, against a heavy musical score. The resulting balletic interlude is a striking departure from Dark Shadows’ previous form.
Barnabas disappoints his partner at the end of the ballet sequence. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Bathia keeps Barnabas in place by showing him a cross from which he recoils. This is the first time we have seen this reaction. Barnabas routinely comes and goes through a cemetery where many of the grave markers are in the shape of the cross, and they don’t bother him a bit.
Not only is it the first time this particular symbol has been a problem for Barnabas, it is the first time Dark Shadows has suggested there might be something to Christianity. The representatives of the faith we have seen so far in the 1790s have been Barnabas’ Aunt Abigail, a disastrously repressed spinster; the Rev’d Mr Bland, of whom the best that could be said was said by the doomed Ruby Tate when she described him to Barnabas as the preacher who looked like a duck; and the Rev’d Mr Trask, a fanatical witchfinder who inadvertently became the handiest tool wicked witch Angelique had at her disposal. The 1960s characters, aside from one fleeting mention of the word “Christmas” in 1966, have not betrayed any awareness that there is such a thing as Christianity.
Bathia commands the spirit of Angelique to speak to them through Barnabas. When Angelique was first on the show, she very conspicuously kept doing many of the weirdest things Barnabas was in the habit of doing in 1967. So Barnabas exasperated his henchmen by fixating on well-meaning governess Vicki but refusing to bite her, insisting that Vicki would eventually come to him “of her own will.” Angelique exasperates her thrall, much put-upon servant Ben, by casting spells on everyone but Barnabas when her goal is to win Barnabas’ love, insisting that Barnabas would eventually come to her “of his own will.” When in 1967 Barnabas sends his thrall Carolyn to steal an incriminating document and she asks what will happen if she is caught, he replies “See that you don’t get caught.” When Angelique sends Ben to steal a hair ribbon from Abigail and he speaks of what will happen if he is caught, she replies “See that you don’t get caught.” Moments like these suggest that the vampire Barnabas is not simply cursed by Angelique, but possessed by her. Perhaps it was Angelique, wearing Barnabas’ body as a suit, that we saw in 1967, not the son of Joshua and Naomi at all.
This fits with the general idea of the supernatural developed in the first 73 weeks of Dark Shadows. The first supernatural menace on the show was undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, who was on from December 1966 to March 1967. Laura was a complex of beings, made up of at least two material bodies and an indeterminate number of spirits, some of which seemed to be unaware of the other parts of the system and pursuing goals incompatible with theirs. From June to November of 1967, the ghost of Barnabas’ little sister Sarah kept trying to contain the damage her big brother was doing to the living characters. Sarah too turned out to be a complicated sort of phenomenon, and the form in which she visited people when they were awake was unaware of and at odds with the form in which she visited them in their dreams. If we go by Laura and Sarah, we would have to assume that supernatural beings are multifarious and fissiparous. So perhaps each time Angelique casts a spell, she splits a bit off of herself and the fragment springs up as another version of her, functioning independently of the rest. In that case, the vampire Barnabas is an avatar of Angelique. When Bathia compels Angelique to speak, she is compelling one of the Angeliques to drop a mask.
The given name “Bathia” is rare; the only person with it who ranks higher in Google search than Bathia Mapes is a musicologist named Bathia Churgin. Professor Churgin was born in New York in 1928, went to Harvard, and taught in the USA until she moved to Israel in 1970. So it is possible that someone connected with Dark Shadows may have heard of Professor Churgin and named Bathia Mapes after her, either as a tribute or just because the name stuck in their mind.
The surname “Mapes” is somewhat less rare; apparently “it is borne by around one in 903,601 people.” In 1963 and 1965, Frank Herbert published two novels that were later issued together under the title Dune; there is an elderly woman with a mystical bent named The Shadout Mapes in those. I’ve never taken much interest in Dune, and owe my awareness of this to comments on Danny Horn’s blog (from Park Cooper here and from “Straker” here.) There doesn’t seem to be much doubt that Bathia’s family name is a nod to The Shadout Mapes; whether it was Sam Hall or another of the writers or someone else who worked on Dark Shadows or one of their kids who had read Dune, I cannot say.
Yesterday, haughty tyrant Joshua Collins found out that his son Barnabas is a vampire. Today, he shoots Barnabas in the chest and learns that vampires can’t be killed by gunshots. So Joshua insists that Barnabas come with him to a place where he can be kept until they figure out a way to lift his curse.
Barnabas is always making plans that fail spectacularly the moment they come into contact with reality. Today, Joshua shows that Barnabas inherited his planning abilities from him. The hiding place Joshua chooses for Barnabas is not one of the underground prison cells on the estate or a cabin off in the woods somewhere, but the many-windowed room on top of the tower in the center of the great house. No one in the house can avoid seeing the light of the candle Joshua carries up there.
The tower at Collinwood.
The tower room has been vacant up to this point, so when Joshua returns to the drawing room his wife Naomi meets him with questions about why there was a light there. He is reduced to insisting that she didn’t see what she clearly knows she saw.
Joshua realizes Naomi saw the light.
There are a couple of interesting visual echoes today. Naomi and Joshua are played by Joan Bennett and Louis Edmonds, who in the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s play reclusive matriarch Liz and her brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger. Liz was standing at this window when we first saw her in episode #1. Roger approached her there and whined to her about her decision to hire well-meaning governess Vicki. The selfish, cowardly, weak-willed Roger represents the ultimate destination of the path on which Joshua’s habit of denial and concealment has set the family. Joshua’s absurd insistence that Naomi did not see a light in the tower puts him in a position as ridiculous and contemptible as any that Roger brings upon himself.
From episode #1.
In their post about this episode on Dark Shadows Before I Die, John and Christine Scoleri point out that the tower looks very much like the one in F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu. That movie was not widely available in the 1960s, but books about film history were finding a mass audience in those days, and some of them would have had stills from it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nathan Forbes, naval officer and scoundrel, goes to the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood and finds his estranged wife Suki dying. With her last breath, Suki gasps out the name “Barnabas Collins.”
Nathan goes to the great house and informs the master of the estate, haughty tyrant Joshua Collins, of what he has found. Joshua accompanies Nathan to the Old House. Suki told the Collinses that she was Nathan’s sister, lest she disrupt Nathan’s engagement to fluttery heiress Millicent Collins, a second cousin of Joshua. Suki had planned to force Nathan to divert a large percentage of Millicent’s vast wealth to her. Unaware of the true nature of Suki’s relationship to Nathan, Joshua is only mildly suspicious that Nathan might have murdered her.
Nathan brings up the fact that in her dying words Suki named Joshua’s son. This irritates Joshua, who reminds Nathan that Barnabas has gone to England. Nathan tells Joshua that he thought he saw Barnabas the other night, from a distance, in the dark. Considering that the most Nathan could have been sure he saw under those conditions was Barnabas’ coat, no one would be impressed by such an account. It’s an unusual coat, but there’s nothing to prove Barnabas didn’t get rid of it and wear a new one to England. Joshua is particularly bland about Nathan’s thought that he may have seen Barnabas, since he made up the story that Barnabas went to England to conceal the fact that he died. Joshua believes that Barnabas died of the plague, and that if that news got out the men wouldn’t show up to work at the family’s shipyard. So he does not share Nathan’s suspicion that Barnabas may have had something to do with Suki’s death.
What we know that Joshua does not is that after his death, Barnabas became a vampire. Suki discovered him in the Old House, and he was indeed the one who murdered her. But so far as anyone can tell, Nathan is the only suspect, and whoever learns that Suki was actually his wife will have to regard him as something more than a suspect.
Joshua and Nathan are about to search the house when the gracious Josette comes staggering downstairs. Josette had come to Collinwood to marry Barnabas, had been put under a spell that caused her to marry Barnabas’ uncle Jeremiah instead, and was miserable when both Barnabas and Jeremiah were dead. Now Barnabas has bitten Josette and is planning to kill her and raise her as his vampire bride.
When Suki was killed, everyone around the estate was involved in a search because Josette had gone missing. Joshua and Nathan are shocked to find her here, and even more shocked by her physical condition. She reaches the foot of the stairs, says Barnabas’ name, and collapses.
Joshua and Nathan bring Josette back to the great house. Joshua orders his wife Naomi to look after Josette; Nathan tells Millicent that Suki is dead. When Naomi asks Joshua if Josette said anything when they found her, he lies, concealing Barnabas’ name. Naomi knows as much about Barnabas’ death as Joshua does; that he lies to her suggests that he himself is unsure what to make of the situation.
Millicent decides to make herself useful. She goes through Suki’s papers, looking for the address of the maiden aunt in Baltimore whom Suki told her was the only living relative she and Nathan had. While Nathan tries frantically to stop her, Millicent finds Suki and Nathan’s marriage certificate. She bursts into tears and runs away. The comedy portion of the Millicent and Nathan story has ended.
As Josette, Kathryn Leigh Scott has some scenes in bed today, adding to many such scenes she has already had. Her character in the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s is Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. Maggie also spends a lot of time in bed. In their post about this episode on Dark Shadows Before I Die, John and Christine Scoleri speculate that Miss Scott must have been the best-rested member of the cast, and append an album of screenshots from 22 scenes we have seen so far where Miss Scott was in bed to substantiate their case.
We open on a set we haven’t seen since #180, the archives of the old cemetery north of town. There, a scene plays out between two actors who aren’t really on the show. Daniel F. Keyes created the role of the Caretaker of the cemetery; Robert Gerringer took over the role of Dr Dave Woodard some months ago and did as much with it as anyone could. But neither of those men was willing to cross a picket line and break the National Association of Broadcast Engineers and Technicians strike, and so they were replaced with a couple of stooges.
The stooges are both terrible. Patrick McCray, Danny Horn, and John and Christine Scoleri all go into detail documenting non-Woodard’s incompetence, but the non-Caretaker is just as bad. Patrick McCray memorably described the Caretaker, in Keyes’ realization, as a “refugee from the EC comics universe.” This fellow has none of Keyes’ zest or whimsy; he simply recites his lines.
At one point, the non-Caretaker tells non-Woodard that it will take some time for him to locate the document he is asking about. Non-Woodard replies “Take your time!” We then have about ninety seconds of the non-Caretaker sorting through papers. The show is moving away from the real-time staging that had often marked its earlier phases, so this comes as a surprise.
The episodes in which the archive set was introduced included a lot of talk about the geography of the cemeteries around the town of Collinsport. They told us that the old cemetery north of town was the resting place of the Stockbridges, Radcliffes, and some other old families, but that most of the Collinses were buried in their own private cemetery elsewhere. They also mentioned a public cemetery closer to town where the remains of less aristocratic Collinsporters might be found. In today’s opening scene, non-Woodard tells the non-Caretaker that they had met previously in Eagle Hill Cemetery. Eagle Hill is the name now associated with the old cemetery north of town. So perhaps this building, which also houses a tomb in which several of the Stockbridges were laid to rest, is not in Eagle Hill Cemetery, but one of the others.
Reading roomStacksThe Tomb of the Stockbridges.
In his last few episodes, Robert Gerringer had a couple of scenes in which he and David Henesy established a close relationship between Woodard and strange and troubled boy David Collins. Today, non-Woodard sits on the couch in the drawing room at Collinwood and tells David he has come to believe everything he has been saying, including the stories that have led the other adults to call in a psychiatrist. As my wife, Mrs Acilius, pointed out, that would have been a great payoff from Gerringer’s earlier scenes if he had been in it. It might have been effective enough if any competent actor had played the part of Woodard. Certainly Mr Henesy’s performance gives non-Woodard plenty to respond to. But he barks out his lines as if they were written in all-caps with randomly distributed exclamation points. It is a miserable disappointment.
There is also a scene where David’s father, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger, tries to convince his sister, matriarch Liz, that they ought to send David to military school. This both harks back to the first 39 weeks of Dark Shadows, when Roger openly hated his son and jumped at every chance to send him away, and illustrates the changes that have taken place since then, as Liz acknowledges that Roger is motivated by a sincere concern for David’s well-being. The scene is intelligently written and exquisitely acted. The high caliber of their work makes it all the more distressing to see Joan Bennett and Louis Edmonds on a scab job. David Henesy was ten years old, and had a stereotypical stage mother, so you can excuse his presence and marvel at his accomplished performance. But these two old pros don’t have any business on the wrong side of a strike.
Nor does Jonathan Frid. When non-Woodard goes to confront Barnabas, there are moments when Frid seems to be showing his own irritation with his scene-mate more than his character’s with his adversary. As well he might- neither man knows his lines particularly well, but even when Frid stops and looks down he expresses emotions Barnabas might well be feeling, and he is fascinating to watch. When non-Woodard doesn’t know what words he’s supposed to bark, he drifts away into nothing. But it serves Frid right to have to play off this loser- by this point, he knows full well that without him the show wouldn’t be on the air. He had no excuse at all for crossing that picket line.
The cemetery’s combination archive/ tomb was a prominent part of the storyline of undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. That storyline approached its climax in #183 when Peter Guthrie, PhD, confronted Laura in her home about being “The Undead,” prompting her to kill him. An episode beginning on that set and ending with someone holding a doctoral degree confronting an undead menace would seem to be an obvious callback to that story. Guthrie’s confrontation had a point- he wanted to offer to help Laura find a place in the world of the living if she would desist from her evil plans, an idea which Woodard’s old medical school classmate Dr Julia Hoffman picked up in her quest to cure Barnabas of vampirism. By contrast with Guthrie and Julia, Woodard is just being a fool.
Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, has escaped from vampire Barnabas Collins, but not before Barnabas put the zap on her brains. She is being treated at Windcliff Sanitarium, under the care of Dr Julia Hoffman.
Dr Hoffman’s old acquaintance Dr Dave Woodard shows up with Maggie’s father Sam and boyfriend Joe. Woodard and Hoffman are Dark Shadows ‘ current versions of Bram Stoker’s Dr John Seward and Professor Abraham Van Helsing. As Seward called Van Helsing in when he needed help solving the mystery he encountered treating the victims of Count Dracula, so Woodard has called the expert Dr Hoffman in to help him solve the mystery he has encountered treating Barnabas’ victims. As Van Helsing refuses to answer any of Seward’s questions when they first start working together, so today Dr Hoffman refuses to answer any of Woodard’s questions about the case. There is one departure, in that Dr Hoffman combines Seward’s occupation as chief physician at a sanitarium with Van Helsing’s role as mysterious expert from out of town.
Dr Hoffman tells Dr Woodard that she believes it will be bad for Maggie to see Sam and Joe, but she consents to the visit as a way of discouraging them from trying to come back. When Sam and Joe join them in her office, she attends to her aquarium. In the post about this episode on Dark Shadows Before I Die, Christine Scoleri points out that this is a rather direct way of telling us that there is something fishy about Dr Hoffman.
When Sam and Joe go to Maggie’s room, she has a mad scene. She starts singing “London Bridge,” gets to an obscure verse running “Take the key and lock her up,” and starts screaming “Lock her up!” over and over. It’s magnificently terrifying.
In his post on Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn raves about Grayson Hall’s performance as Julia Hoffman. Rightly so, she will quickly make herself indispensable to the series. He includes a lot of screenshots of her face, showing the wide variety of expressions she uses. I have a more complicated response to this aspect of her style.
As many screenshots as Danny gives of Grayson Hall’s face in his post, I presented even more screenshots of Lovelady Powell’s face in my post about #193, where Powell plays art dealer Portia Fitzsimmons. What impressed me about Powell’s performance is that she takes one of the most basic rules of screen acting- choose one of your eyes and look at your scene partner only with it- and builds a whole character around it. Her left eyelid is all she needs to command the stage and leave an indelible impression.
Hall was at the opposite extreme. She ignores the one-eye rule, and virtually every other piece of guidance professionals give about how to create a character on camera. She uses every muscle at every moment. Her broad, stagy approach works well for Dark Shadows, and the three actors with whom she shares her shots today stay out of her way. Still, she does make me miss Powell’s dominating simplicity.
With Julia’s introduction, all of the actors in the photo I use as the header for this blog have joined the cast of Dark Shadows. There is also a version of the picture where the actors are frowning.
Gloom in the shadows
Here’s the smiley version. I’ve marked each player with the number of the first episode in which s/he appeared:
Acilius on Dark Shadows 