Suave warlock Nicholas Blair tells his subordinate, the wicked witch known variously as Angelique and Cassandra, that she has an hour to figure out why her recent attempt to turn Barnabas Collins back into a vampire failed. When she tells him that won’t be enough time, he suggests she spend the hour preparing for her final destruction. At the last minute, her stepson David tells Angelique/ Cassandra about an audiotape message that happens to give her exactly the information she needs.
Angelique/ Cassandra has been an extremely unsympathetic villain, so it is daring to have an episode mostly from her point of view which is suspenseful if and only if we want her to stay around. My wife, Mrs Acilius, says that might have been a reasonable bet when a character as dynamic as Angelique/ Cassandra is played by a performer as appealing as Lara Parker, but it doesn’t pay off today, for two reasons. First, the episode doesn’t have much of a plot. Second, returning viewers will be angry with Angelique/ Cassandra right now. She just subjected us to a three month ordeal called “The Dream Curse,” in which we saw the same dull sequence play out a dozen times, heard it described almost twice as many times, and then found out that there was no point to any of it. We know perfectly well that Angelique/ Cassandra is too interesting to stay off the show for long, so that the “final destruction” Nicholas is threatening will probably last for three weeks at most. But we really do want to see her punished for wasting our time.
This is the first episode in which John Karlen reads the opening narration, and only the third episode in which any male performer reads it. Most cast members have read these narrations more or less in the characters they will play in that day’s episode; Karlen takes his place alongside Kathryn Leigh Scott as one of two who strive to invest the role of Narrator with its own personality.
This was the last of the five episodes credited to director John Weaver. It isn’t hard to find reasons why they wouldn’t have contracted him to do more. There are a number of moments when the action jolts to a standstill for no apparent reason, Humbert Allen Astredo as Nicholas never seems to know what direction he should be facing, and when Angelique/ Cassandra orders the bedraggled Willie Loomis to “Look into my eyes!” we get a shot of him looking past her.
The wicked witch known variously as Angelique and Cassandra is standing in the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood, thinking evil thoughts. The camera zooms out and we see that her stepson, strange and troubled boy David Collins, is standing next to her. She starts to speak her thoughts out loud, saying “You will pay!” David asks “Who will pay?” Angelique/ Cassandra is startled to discover that David is there, and is flustered when she tries to change the subject. She so often delivers incriminating soliloquys while standing out in the open that the comic effect of this scene must be intentional.
Angelique/ Cassandra oblivious to David’s presence.
David asks Angelique/ Cassandra to help him figure out the correct operation of a tape recorder he received some time ago as a present from permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman. After Angelique/ Cassandra refuses to help, he goes upstairs and finds his cousin, heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard, emerging from the long-deserted west wing of the house. He asks Carolyn what she was doing in the west wing. She asks him why he thinks she was in the west wing. When he says he saw her coming out of it, she drops her attempt to evade his question and tells him she was looking for some old family photos to show well-meaning governess Vicki. She has enough trouble remembering this story that it must be obvious to David that it is a lie, but he isn’t interested enough to follow it up. He just wants someone to help him figure out which buttons to push on the tape recorder.
On their Dark Shadows Before I Die, John and Christine Scoleri speak for longtime viewers of the show when they say that it is surprising David needs help with the tape recorder. When the show started, David was two years younger and had the mechanical skill to sabotage his father’s car in a very creditable attempt at patricide. All Carolyn has to do to get the tape going is read the label that identifies the play button. This apparent loss of cognitive function is of a piece with David’s massive loss of narrative function. For the first 39 weeks of Dark Shadows, David was the fulcrum on which every story turned, and actor David Henesy had abundant opportunities to show a level of professional skill that would be remarkable in a performer of any age. But he has been receding into the background for a long time now, and his extraordinary dim-wittedness today marks a low point for him.
Once the tape starts playing, Carolyn makes a hasty exit. David listens to a minute or so of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, hoping it will end and he will hear “something spooky.” His wish is granted when the music abruptly stops, giving way to a voice addressing itself to Julia. The voice rambles about David’s distant cousin Barnabas Collins, saying that if both he and “my creation” live, Barnabas will be all right, but that if “Adam” dies, “Barnabas will be as he was before.” The name “Adam” should mean something to David. He shared a confused and frightening moment with a mysterious man of that name in #495. That man subsequently abducted Carolyn, and is still the object of a police search.
What only Julia, Barnabas, and Barnabas’ servant Willie know is that Adam is a Frankenstein’s monster created in an experiment that freed Barnabas of the effects of the vampire curse that Angelique/ Cassandra placed on him in the 1790s. The voice on the tape is that of Eric Lang, the mad scientist who began the experiment. Minutes before he died of the effects of one of Angelique/ Cassandra’s spells, Lang recorded this message for Julia. The audience has heard this message approximately a gazillion bajillion times, but until now, the only character to have heard it was Adam, and he could make no sense of it.
Angelique/ Cassandra recently made an unsuccessful attempt to renew Barnabas’ curse, and is desperately searching for the obstacle that prevented it from working. Carolyn’s actual task in the west wing was showing Adam to a hiding place there. So Angelique/ Cassandra is now under the same roof with both the information she needs to identify her obstacle and the person she can remove that obstacle by killing. Things are looking bad for Barnabas and for Adam.
While David is upstairs with the tape recorder, Vicki is sobbing in the drawing room. Suave warlock Nicholas, who is staying in the house in the guise of Angelique/ Cassandra’s brother, enters and asks her what’s wrong. She says that she has just learned that Barnabas is dead. His back to her, Nicholas smiles brightly when he first hears this news, then puts on a sad face and turns to her with sympathetic words. In response, Vicki reveals that she knows all about Angelique/ Cassandra and that she has little patience for Nicholas’ pretensions. Carolyn enters and doubts Vicki’s news. Angelique/ Cassandra is the last to enter. She says that she saw Barnabas alive and well after the time when he is supposed to have been dead. Vicki and Carolyn look at each other, and do not see Nicholas’ look of disappointment. They go upstairs, and Nicholas and Angelique/ Cassandra go into the drawing room.
Nicholas scolds Angelique/ Cassandra for her failure. He addresses her as “dear sister.” He suggests she may not hate Barnabas sufficiently to impose a curse on him. When she denies this, he leans to her ear and teasingly asks if she loves him. He threatens to send her back where she came from if she doesn’t re-vamp Barnabas by midnight, and to focus her mind replaces her arm with a fleshless bone.
Director John Weaver was not much of a visual artist, and in his post about the episode on Dark Shadows Every Day Danny Horn analyzes the dismally inept blocking of the scene between Vicki and Nicholas. Danny also has some unkind words for writer Ron Sproat, but I think those are unfair. It’s true the opening scene between Adam and Carolyn goes on too long, David’s helplessness with the tape recorder is dismal, and Vicki and Carolyn’s reaction to Angelique/ Cassandra’s report that Barnabas is still alive doesn’t make sense. That’s a long enough list of flaws that we might fairly classify Weaver and Sproat as the B-team, not on a par with director Lela Swift and writers Sam Hall and Gordon Russell.
But it is genuinely funny when we first see David standing next to Angelique/ Cassandra, David’s questioning of Carolyn is intelligently written, Lang’s message is for once an actual source of suspense, Vicki’s lines to Nicholas as Alexandra Moltke Isles delivers them show the character’s strength, Nicholas’ teasing Angelique/ Cassandra with her alleged love of Barnabas raises a laugh as it makes them sound like a couple of kids, and the final gag with the arm bone is at once goofy enough to keep up the humor in the episode and startling enough to be effective as a touch of horror. All in all, it’s an enjoyable episode, if not one that fans would be tempted to use to turn their friends on to the show.
This was the second of five episodes credited to director John Weaver. One possible reason he wasn’t contracted to do more is seen in the first minute, when recovering vampire Barnabas crouches down to lift a paper from the floor. The camera lingers on the show’s biggest star in this ungainly posture.
The latest installment of our occasional series of photos, “Sex Symbols of the 1960s.”
The paper is a note in the handwriting of well-meaning governess Vicki. It says that Vicki wants to go away rather than tell Barnabas about a dream she had. It ends with the declaration that Vicki would “rather die” than hurt Barnabas; he jumps to the conclusion that this means she is about to commit suicide, and he rushes off to the great house of Collinwood to stop her.
Barnabas and Vicki know what regular viewers also know, that her dream was no ordinary nightmare, but was the penultimate event in the “Dream Curse” that the wicked witch known variously as Angelique and Cassandra has set as part of her quest to destroy Barnabas. Each of an appallingly long list of characters has the same dream and suffers terrible torment that can be relieved only by telling it to the next person in line, who repeats the process. Vicki knows that when the dream gets back to Barnabas, Angelique/ Cassandra’s goal is supposed to be complete. Vicki thinks that goal is Barnabas’ death; he and we know that it is his relapse into active vampirism.
Barnabas’ interpretation of “I’d rather die than do that” as Vicki saying she is going to kill herself may seem silly to first-time viewers, but those who have been watching Dark Shadows from the beginning will see some grounds for it. In #2, Vicki was standing on the cliff of Widows’ Hill when sarcastic dandy Roger startled her by asking if she was planning to jump; he went on to tell her that she wouldn’t be the first to end her life in that way. In #5, drunken artist Sam saw her in the same place and told her the story of gracious lady Josette, who apparently was the first to do so. In the months that followed, we several times heard of a legend that governesses kept jumping off the cliff. Throughout the first year, Vicki came to be deeply involved with the ghost of Josette. When Barnabas joined the show, Josette was retconned as his lost love, and her suicide as her response to his vampirism. So Vicki’s connection to Josette, her job as a governess, her affection for Barnabas, and her involvement in a crisis about his curse combine to prompt him to think of her as a likely suicide.
When Barnabas gets to the great house, Vicki tells him she did not write the note. They figure out that it was a forgery by Angelique/ Cassandra, meant to bring Barnabas into contact with Vicki so that she would have an opportunity to tell him the dream. Barnabas goes, and permanent houseguest Julia, who is Barnabas’ best friend and partner in crime, talks with Vicki about the dream.
Later, Julia goes to Barnabas’ house, and he tells her that he cannot let Vicki go on suffering for his sake. He says that he will make her tell him the dream to end her suffering. Julia points out that this will make him a vampire again, and he says he will just have to accept that.
Barnabas laments his own past selfishness throughout this scene, but his willingness to revert to vampirism suggests that he has learned nothing. He will not be the only one who suffers if that condition reoccurs. Vicki herself was his victim when his blood-lust went into remission, and there is no telling how many other people he will bite, enslave, and kill if he reverts. That he can strike a noble pose while claiming that he is going to sacrifice himself for Vicki creates an image of total narcissism.
Meanwhile, heiress Carolyn learns that a very tall man named Adam is still alive and is being hunted by the police. Adam abducted Carolyn and held her prisoner in an old shack in the woods some weeks before, but later saved her life. What she does not know is that Adam is a Frankenstein’s monster and that before she met him, he had spent virtually his whole conscious life chained to a wall in a prison cell in Barnabas’ basement. As far as he knew, holding each other captive was just how people behaved. In those days, Adam spoke only a few words, and could not explain this to Carolyn. But she did find a gentleness in him, and even while she was his prisoner she never hated him.
Now, Carolyn is very concerned about Adam’s well-being. She goes back to the old shack in the woods and finds him hiding there. She discovers that he has learned a great many words since she knew him; he confirms that Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes had been harboring him and teaching him. She goes off to get Stokes, promising to bring him back so that he and Adam can reconnect.
In the discussion following the recap of this episode on Dark Shadows Before I Die, Christine Scoleri remarks on Carolyn’s “Frankenfantasy date with Adam.” That was the first I’d seen the expression “Frankenfantasy,” or had thought that enough people harbored erotic feelings about Frankenstein’s monster that such a term would be necessary.
Amused as I am by the word “Frankenfantasy,” I really don’t think it applies to Carolyn. But since she is the only woman with whom Adam has ever had a conversation, it makes sense that he might interpret her behavior that way. As my wife, Mrs Acilius, pointed out, that would continue theme that has been developed among the other male and female characters who interact in the episode. Barnabas sees Julia as a close friend, and she wants him to be her lover. Barnabas and Vicki share a real affection, which he has a vague idea of converting into a romance, but there is zero erotic chemistry between them. If Adam mistakes Carolyn’s earnest friendship for sexual desire, he’ll fit right in.
Unloved Frankenstein’s monster Adam has survived a plunge from the cliff at Widow’s Hill and made his way into the home of blind ex-artist Sam Evans. Sam realizes that Adam is badly hurt and cannot speak much English; with great kindness, he tries to clean and bandage Adam’s wounds.
Sage Timothy Eliot Stokes comes in. Adam, who in his few weeks of life has had little but hostility from humans, is alarmed by the sight of another one, and flees. Stokes explains to Sam who Adam is, and Sam’s sympathy for the big guy only deepens. This retelling of the creature’s encounter with the blind hermit in The Bride of Frankenstein is affectingly done.
Wicked witch Angelique, calling herself Cassandra, has made her way into the apartment of local man Tony Peterson. Tony is agitated by the presence of Angelique/ Cassandra and keeps telling her he wants her to go home to her husband and leave him alone. She tells Tony he is “Quite a Puritan,” reminding us that when Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in New England in the 1790s, actor Jerry Lacy played the Rev’d Mr Trask, a fanatical but utterly inept witchfinder who inadvertently served Angelique’s darkest purposes. Mr Lacy plays Tony quite differently than he did Trask, but Angelique/ Cassandra told Tony in #481 that she chose him as her cat’s paw because he reminded her of Trask. She gets him to strike his cigarette lighter, sending him back into the trance in which he can deny Angelique/ Cassandra nothing.
Well-meaning governess Vicki has made her way to Stokes’ apartment. It was Vicki who took Dark Shadows back in time to the 1790s, when she came unstuck in time during a séance in #365. It seemed at the beginning of the costume drama segment that Vicki would regain the position she held in the first months of the show as our point of view character, that she would again provide the emotional anchor of the show in her scenes as governess alone with the young children of the house, and that she would drive the action as she had to think on her feet and come up with plausible lies to secure a place in an unfamiliar century. As it happened, she did none of those things. She was shut out of all the main action, was never seen giving a lesson to either of her charges, and when she was on camera spent her time telling everyone she met that they were played by an actor who had another part in the first 73 weeks of the show. Long before Vicki came back to the 1960s in #461, the character had become all but insupportable.
The action now revolves around recovering vampire Barnabas Collins, and Barnabas steadfastly refuses to include Vicki in his life. Faced with that blank wall, Vicki has spent some time hanging around with a man named Peter whose only story point is that he wants to be called Jeff. This does not make for much drama. Vicki learned a great deal in the 1790s, and recognized Angelique/ Cassandra as soon as she showed up in 1968. But she can’t fight her by herself, and so she has responded to Barnabas’ aloofness by trying to forget what she knows.
Stokes has called Vicki to his apartment to enlist her help against Angelique/ Cassandra. Longtime viewers will remember that Vicki led the fight against Dark Shadows’ first supernatural menace, undead blonde witch Laura Murdoch Collins, and that for support in that battle she was the one who recruited the services of the show’s first sage, parapsychologist Peter Guthrie. This much diminished Vicki is now subordinated to the sage. He calls her in, he commands her to tell her story, he tells her that her story is true, and he requires her services. He shows her a silhouette of Trask and insists she overcome her reluctance to look at it. When a knock comes at the door, he even sends her out the back way and tells her that his next visitor must not know of her connection with him, as if he were dismissing a prostitute.
Stokes tells Vicki he can’t afford to be seen with her.
Oddest of all, Stokes already seems to know everything Vicki does before they talk. In #507, he laid out a theory that would be plausible to someone who knew exactly what Vicki knows about the strange goings-on, but not to anyone who knows one thing more or less than she does. Yet today we see that he is talking with Vicki about them for the first time. It is unclear what he could learn from her, or what contribution she could make to his efforts.
The visitor from whom Stokes wants to hide Vicki is Tony, giving his name as “Arthur Hailey,” perhaps in honor of the novelist whose Airport was topping the bestseller lists when the episode was made. Stokes is quite relaxed around Tony, offering him first brandy and then cheese. Tony accepts both. He exclaims “I like cheese!” in an awkward voice that makes it clear we are listening, not to Jerry Lacy’s acting, but to Tony’s. While Stokes is out of the room fetching the cheese, Tony sprinkles a powder Angelique/ Cassandra gave him into Stokes’ glass. Tony looks away from the table before they take their drinks. When they do, it is Tony who chokes and collapses, not Stokes.
This is the second time we’ve seen that staple of farce, “The Old Switcheroo.” In #402, Barnabas tried to poison Angelique, and had to think fast when she passed her glass to his mother. That use of the trope confirmed that, while Barnabas is undeniably a villain, he is a comic villain who endears himself to us as we watch him scramble through one failed scheme after another, while Angelique is a menace to be taken seriously. Now, Angelique has settled in for the long term, and the show will quickly run out of characters if she maintains the kill rate she had in the eighteenth century. They have to dial her threat level down considerably. One way of doing that is to give her a henchman who is, most of the time, unaware of her power over him, and who is consistently luckless when she activates him; another is for her to use comically unreliable means to pursue her evil ends. She does not yet cut the Wile E. Coyote-esque figure that Barnabas does, but neither is she in imminent danger of vaporizing the whole story and leaving ABC with thirty minutes of dead air on weekday afternoons.
This was the first episode directed by John Weaver. Except for one week in March 1968 when executive producer Dan Curtis took the helm, directing duties for the first 497 episodes of Dark Shadows alternated between Lela Swift and John Sedwick. Now Sedwick is about to leave the show. Associate director Jack Sullivan stepped up to direct #504 and will direct dozens more; Weaver, an associate director on some early episode, will only be credited as director four times before leaving in July. Several more directors will have similarly brief stints as fill-ins before Henry Kaplan joins the show as Swift’s alternate in December.
Dark Shadows Commentary 