josette du pres – Acilius on Dark Shadows

Episode 478: Carried on the wind

Soap operas usually have multiple more or less independent storylines going simultaneously. Dark Shadows had trouble keeping that up, usually having an A story with all the action and a B story that never got off the ground and eventually dried up altogether. Now, in the spring of 1968, they have several equally dynamic arcs going at once. As a result, today’s episode is a bit of a jumble, as we catch glimpses of several loosely related events.

For the nineteen weeks stretching from #365 to #461, well-meaning governess Vicki came unstuck in time and found herself trapped in the 1790s. In that period, she met many people, among them gracious lady Josette and wicked witch Angelique. In the 1960s, one of Vicki’s closest friends is Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town. Like Maggie, Josette is played by Kathryn Leigh Scott. When Vicki saw Josette, she realized that Maggie had some kind of metaphysical connection to her. This was a daring move on the part of the show, since it means that vampire Barnabas was onto something in the summer of 1967 when he abducted Maggie and tried to brainwash her so that her personality would vanish and Josette’s would appear in its place.

Angelique has followed Vicki to 1968. She calls herself Cassandra, wears a black wig, and has married sarcastic dandy Roger, thereby securing residence in the great house of Collinwood. Vicki and Barnabas recognize Angelique/ Cassandra, and each knows that she is a deadly threat to everyone in and around the estate. For her part, Vicki is trying to hide her knowledge from Angelique; Barnabas has taken a different tack, and the other day let Angelique into his house where he proceeded to give her all the information she could possibly need to realize her evil intentions towards him. This is not because Barnabas cannot keep a secret. Vicki has tried to enlist him in the battle against Angelique, but he, now in recovery from the vampire curse Angelique placed on him in the 1790s, does not want Vicki to know the truth about him, and so he will not cooperate with her in any way. It’s only his enemies with whom Barnabas compulsively shares damaging intelligence.

Maggie comes to the great house to have a tea party with Vicki today. Angelique/ Cassandra opens the door, and cannot hide her shock at Maggie’s resemblance to Josette. She so blatantly stares at her that she has to admit that she is unnerved because Maggie looks very much like someone she knew a long time ago.

Vicki comes in, and Angelique/ Cassandra asks her, not in her usual mid-Atlantic accent, but in Lara Parker’s sweetly musical Tennessee voice, if she and Maggie are planning to use the drawing room. Vicki at once offers to use a different space, not only as would be correct for a member of the household staff speaking to one of the family, but in a relaxed and friendly way that betrays nothing of her knowledge of Angelique/ Cassandra’s true identity. While returning viewers know that Angelique/ Cassandra remembers Vicki from the 1790s, the Southern accent is so much more natural than her usual way of speaking that it suggests Vicki has managed to get her to let her guard down to some degree.

While Vicki and Maggie settle into the drawing room, Angelique/ Cassandra goes to a portrait of Barnabas that hangs in the foyer of the great house and delivers a speech to it. She tells the portrait that Maggie is the very image of Josette, and will therefore be the first victim of her latest evil plan. She is going to spam people’s dreams with a series of nightmares, and when the last person has had the nightmare Barnabas will be a vampire again. Evidently the dreamers of Collinsport didn’t have anti-virus programs installed in their brains, because Angelique/ Cassandra expects them all to be helpless before this morphean malware.

In the drawing room, Maggie is too preoccupied with Angelique/ Cassandra’s strange reaction to her to hear when Vicki asks her how she takes her tea. When she tells Vicki that Angelique/ Cassandra was shocked by the sight of her, Vicki amazes her by saying that she is sure she did react that way, and giving her the details of the reaction before Maggie reports them. Maggie asks Vicki to explain how she knew and what it means. Vicki explains nothing.

This is something of a reversal. In #1, Vicki met Maggie. Vicki had just arrived in Collinsport, and went to the diner where Maggie was the waitress. While Maggie served Vicki, she told her that Collinwood was haunted and that it was unwise to go there. Vicki did not at that time believe in ghosts and told Maggie so. Now, Vicki is the one serving the tea, and she is the one who knows far more about the supernatural than does Maggie. At least, far more than is in Maggie’s conscious mind- she has amnesia about her experience as Barnabas’ victim.

Maggie is far more upset by Angelique/ Cassandra’s reaction to her than circumstances would appear to warrant. Vicki’s reticence is understandable, given the extreme complexity and improbability of her story, but she has always been so forthcoming with her friends that when Maggie asks why she is being so mysterious it seems quite likely that Vicki will tell her everything. Together, these two facts suggest to regular viewers that Maggie will eventually hear herself compared to Josette, that the comparison will jar loose the memory of what Barnabas did to her, and that she will go to the authorities. As an audience, we hope Barnabas will get away with his crimes, because the show is most fun to watch when he does. Now that Angelique has come to 1968, we have a morally defensible in-universe reason for this hope. Angelique is even more evil than Barnabas is, and without his active participation there is no hope she can be stopped.

Vicki’s reticence brings up another question. In the months before her journey to the past, she saw a great deal of evidence that Barnabas was a vampire. While in the eighteenth century, she saw so much more that upon her return Barnabas was certain she must have figured out his secret, and bit her to keep her quiet. When his vampirism responded to medical treatment, the symptoms of his bite went away. We wonder what Vicki knew at each stage of the story, and what she remembers now.

One possibility is that she has known everything all along. That would put Vicki in an intriguing position if Maggie’s memory does come back. Vicki originally represented the audience’s point of view; if she turns out to have been aware of Barnabas’ crimes from the beginning, she will put us in the uncomfortable position of wondering what it tells us about ourselves that we are consistently on the vampire’s side.

Vicki changes the subject to her boyfriend, a man named Peter. Vicki met Peter in the 1790s, and like Angelique he has followed her into her own time. Also like Angelique, he keeps insisting that he has a different name. He wants to be called Jeff. Unlike Angelique, Peter/ Jeff is amnesiac, is under the control of mad scientist Dr Lang, and brings the show to a screeching halt every time he is on screen. Vicki asks if Peter/ Jeff can rent the spare room in the cottage Maggie shares with her father. Maggie has never met or heard of Peter/ Jeff, and wants more information before she commits to living with him. Vicki doesn’t have anything to tell her, inflaming Maggie’s curiosity to the point where she exclaims “I can’t stand it!”

Peter/ Jeff telephones from Lang’s laboratory, and Vicki gets Maggie to agree to meet him at her house in an hour. Unknown to Vicki, Lang is building a Frankenstein’s monster, and plans to download Barnabas’ personality into the body once it is completed. Peter/ Jeff has dug up graves and fetched body parts for Lang to use, but is tired of that sort of work and is eager to make a fresh start. Unfortunately for him, Barnabas requested that the body look like Peter/ Jeff. So Lang persuades Peter/ Jeff to call Vicki back to say he won’t be available to meet her and Maggie today after all. He then gives Peter/ Jeff a shot to knock him out, straps him to a table, and sets about cutting his head off. Peter/ Jeff comes to and complains about this; Lang, irritated, tells him he can’t very well have expected him to let him live, knowing what he knows.

Maggie has the dream Angelique has sent. It begins with Peter/ Jeff calling on her. Since they went out of their way to tell us Maggie has never seen Peter/ Jeff, this tells first time viewers that this sequence, as is typical of dream sequences on Dark Shadows, comes not from the character’s mind, but is the product of a supernatural agency. In the course of the dream, Maggie hears the sound of Josette’s music box; Barnabas made her listen to this when he was holding her prisoner. This again raises the prospect that Maggie’s memory will return. The rest of the dream is a concerto for fog machine. Technical director Lou Marchand is credited today; presumably he was the soloist. The fog immerses everything so completely that it is anyone’s guess what exactly Miss Scott is doing for most of the sequence.

Episode 430: Do not disturb

Barnabas Collins became a vampire just a few weeks ago, and he doesn’t yet know what powers his new condition has brought him. On the chance that he might be able to raise the dead, he goes to the fresh grave of his ex-fiancée Josette. He whines about how much he misses her until the sound of her sobbing can be heard. She begs him to let her rest. Later, she appears to him in her former bedroom in the Old House on the estate of Collinwood, and shows him that in her ghostly form her face bears the severe disfigurement inflicted when she fell to her death while fleeing from him.

Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The audience is supposed to be in suspense at whether Barnabas will reach Josette. Unfortunately, the show ruins the surprise right at the outset, when Kathryn Leigh Scott delivers the opening voiceover. These monologues are spoken by an actress who appears in the episode, so we know that we will be seeing Miss Scott, and therefore Josette. It’s true that Miss Scott uses a very different voice for the opening monologues than she does for Josette or any of her other characters, but fans will recognize her right off.

Viewers who have been with Dark Shadows from the outset will recognize some connections with earlier episodes. Josette’s sobbing sounds more than a little like the mysterious sobbing heard several times in the basement of the great house of Collinwood in the first months of the show. They strongly hinted that the ghost of Josette was the source of this sobbing, only to give another explanation for it later.

Josette tells Barnabas that “the dead must rest!” This was a catchphrase of one of the funniest characters on the show, the Caretaker of the old cemetery. When we heard it from Josette, my wife and I laughed out loud.

Josette also commands “Do not disturb my rest.” A “Do Not Disturb” sign hung on a tombstone would be an apt symbol of Dark Shadows‘ view of the afterlife, since death on the show is usually about as temporary and as subject to interruptions as a stay at a cheap motel.

When Josette convinces Barnabas that she must not rise from the dead, not because she would have to prey upon the living as he does, but because she is ugly now, Mrs Acilius and I remembered two things. It’s true that when we saw Josette’s ghost in the first 73 weeks of the show, when it was set in 1966 and 1967, her face was almost always at least partly obscured. There were some brief exceptions, but in her most important appearances, when Miss Scott played her in #70 and #126, her face was completely veiled. So perhaps she bears her wounds then as well.

Our other recollection was not of Dark Shadows at all, but of the original Star Trek. And I do mean the original one, the first pilot, shot in 1964. At the climax of that one, our heroes commit themselves to die rather than stay on the planet where they have been trapped, as conditions there are such that no human being could possibly live a worthwhile life. When one woman says she wants to stay behind, they see that she is, contrary to the illusory appearance they have seen so far, severely disfigured. At that, the captain instantly accepts that she is right to stay. No uggoes allowed in space! Usually I’m reluctant to bring up the labels that end in “-ism,” but that ending and this one seem to be examples of looks-ism so extreme that they would be frankly genocidal if taken as a guide to real-world action.

Episode 425: Widows’ Hill

In episode #2 of Dark Shadows, well-meaning governess Vicki first visited the precipice known as Widows’ Hill. She was standing near the edge when high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins crept up on her, breaking his silence with a loud voice in a deliberate attempt to startle her. He tells her that she wouldn’t be the first to jump to her death from Widows’ Hill. The precipice is thus established as a place of danger.

Roger surprises Vicki atop Widows’ Hill.

In #5, Vicki again stood atop Widows’ Hill, and again a man she had never met startled her there. He was drunken artist Sam Evans, and he told Vicki the story of Josette Collins, a grand lady of a previous century who leapt to her death from the cliff.

In the same episode, strange and troubled boy David Collins mentions the ghosts of “The Widows” to Vicki. Later, we will hear that these are the ghosts of women who jumped to their deaths from Widows’ Hill at various moments in the nineteenth century. In #12, we will learn of “The Widows’ Wail,” a peculiar sound that can be heard in the wind around Widows’ Hill on nights when the ghosts of these sad women are restless. We will hear the Widows’ Wail several times, most effectively in #344, when Vicki is trying to talk her depressing fiancé Burke out of going on an airplane journey from which he will never return, leaving her a widow before she can become a bride.

The association of Widows’ Hill with deadly danger is reinforced in #50, when Vicki and heiress Carolyn look down from it and see the corpse of beloved local man Bill Malloy on the rocks below.

Bill in the water, as seen from the precipice of Widows’ Hill. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

In #75, we hark back to Vicki’s first meeting with Roger. Vicki finds Roger standing on the spot where she had stood when he startled her in #2. She reenacts that scene with the roles reversed. He exclaims angrily that she might have caused him to fall; she reminds him that he had done the same to her. He laughs happily and apologizes. They have a sweet little moment together after that, but his protest shows that she really was in danger then, and that she is none too safe now.

The death of Bill set off a series of events that ended with crazed handyman Matthew Morgan abducting Vicki, holding her bound and gagged in the Old House on the estate of Collinwood, and bringing an ax with the express intention of chopping her head off. At the last moment, he is stopped from decapitating Vicki by the manifested ghosts of Josette, the Widows, and Bill. When Bill appears with Josette and the Widows, it ceases to matter that he died somewhere else and only washed up below Widows’ Hill. Thereafter he is joined with them, and like their deaths, his death belongs to that place.

The Dead of Widows Hill confront Matthew. Josette manifested earlier in the episode, and is represented here by her portrait above the mantel. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

In #266, the Widows briefly reemerged from the supernatural back-world implicit in the action into the story, this time associated with a malign intention towards the characters. Reclusive matriarch Liz heard their voices luring her to throw herself off Widows’ Hill. We haven’t heard about them since then.

Liz dreams of the Widows, calling her to join them. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Josette’s ghost was central to the action from #126 to #191, when she and Vicki together protected David from his mother, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. That Laura posed a danger to David was not clear to the characters in #139 and #140, when Laura startled David while he was at the edge of the precipice on Widows’ Hill. Vicki rescued him, then urged him to go to his mother.

Vicki rescues David. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

In #185, Sam and Vicki visited the Old House, the seat of Josette’s power. Sam saw the portrait of Josette that hangs over the mantel. He asked if she was “the lady who went over the cliff.” Again, we join the image of Widows’ Hill with the concept of danger and the role of David’s protectress. Sam and Vicki came to the Old House to hold a séance. Josette speaks through Vicki at séances, suggesting that in sharing her role with regard to David, Vicki’s personality is coming to merge with that of Josette.

In April 1967, vampire Barnabas Collins succeeded Laura as Dark Shadows‘ resident supernatural menace. Barnabas was too dynamic an adversary for wispy presences like Josette and the Widows to oppose. In #212, he went to the Old House and told Josette’s portrait that her power there was at an end. In #223 and #240, David lamented that the family had lost its tutelary spirit.

With that, Josette ceased to be an active presence. She lost the role of David’s protectress, and with it her link to Vicki. But Josette is still an important element of the show. Instead of a guardian who intervenes in the story, she becomes the object of Barnabas’ obsession. Instead of a companion who acts with Vicki, speaks through her, and inspires her devotion, she becomes Barnabas’ motivation to victimize women, Vicki perhaps to be among them. Vicki’s personality may yet be replaced, not by a merger with Josette’s spirit, but by Barnabas’ insane plan to find a woman he can brainwash into becoming a facsimile of his long-lost, long-dead love.

The transformation of Josette from an active presence to the object of Barnabas’ delusions revolves around Widows’ Hill. In #233, Barnabas tells Vicki and Carolyn a story about Josette’s fatal leap. He says that she threw herself off the cliff to escape a lover with whom she quarreled there. Vicki was a bright person in those days, and she figured out that the lover must have been Barnabas Collins. She believes the Barnabas in question to have been the ancestor of the one she knows, but of course it is the man himself, as he was in that previous century. When Barnabas realizes that Vicki has picked up more information than he intended to disclose, he reacts apprehensively, and seems as if he is thinking about killing her. Barnabas would revise the story of Josette’s death many times, most notably in #345, when told it while standing on Widows’ Hill with his associate, mad scientist Julia Hoffman.

At the end of #365, the visible foreground and the implicit back-world traded places when Vicki came unstuck in time and found herself in the late eighteenth century. When she first arrived in the year 1795, Barnabas and Josette were living beings, as was Barnabas’ little sister Sarah, whose ghost haunted Collinwood in 1967. Sarah is dead and gone now; Barnabas is dead, but as a vampire he is not at all gone. He’s been sucking Josette’s blood, and today he plans to kill her so that she can rise as his undead bride.

Barnabas became the star of Dark Shadows and turned it into a hit with his efforts to scam everyone into believing that he was a living man native to the twentieth century. When Vicki first found herself in 1795, we may have hoped to see her running an equally suspenseful con game. But the show hasn’t given her any such thing to do. Instead, she flailed around helplessly. Lately, she’s taken to telling everyone how and when they will die. That has led to her imprisonment on charges of witchcraft. She told Josette and her aunt, the Countess DuPrés, that Josette would throw herself to her death off Widows’ Hill. The countess has been trying desperately to keep Josette off the hill, and Barnabas doesn’t want her to go there either. But the ghost of wicked witch Angelique tricks her into going there tonight.

Barnabas realizes what has happened. He races to Widows’ Hill. He sees Josette there. Angelique causes Josette to see a gruesome image of a vampiric version of herself, and brings it home that it reflects Barnabas’ plans for her. Barnabas approaches; terrified, Josette flees, and goes over the cliff.

Bride to be. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

For a scene that we’ve been hearing about for all 85 weeks Dark Shadows has been on the air, Josette’s death is not very impressive visually. Since they are going to pan from Josette and Barnabas over to the ghoul version of Josette, they have to put the camera very close to the action. The whole sequence also has to be in a low contrast color scheme for the ghoul version to have its effect. The tight frame and the drab palette make it impossible to create an illusion of space, leaving Jonathan Frid and Kathryn Leigh Scott looking like a couple of people monkeying around in a tiny television studio. At times we see so little of the set that it is not clear what’s happening. We don’t even see the edge of the cliff, blunting the effect of the climactic fall.

The introduction of the living Josette to the ensemble during the 1795 segment reduced the character’s importance in the show’s mythology. That is not any reflection on Miss Scott’s performance, or even of the scripts she had to work with or the direction she had to follow. It is the consequence of the whole idea of supernaturalism. To accept the idea of the supernatural is to believe that what seems to be weak is in fact strong. The dead, to all outward appearances, would seem to be utterly powerless, and the living would seem to have a monopoly on the means of making things happen in the world. But phantoms and revenants and zombies and vampires and the rest are supposed to have overwhelming advantages that we can defeat only by precise application of knowledge that only the rarest sort of people have. Likewise, people who are disadvantaged by the social order of the visible world are supposed to have access to powers in the supernatural realm that leave even the most eminent people at their mercy. So servant girl Angelique brought lofty aristocrats Barnabas and Josette to the very lowest of positions.

As a living person, Josette is charming, kindly, and beautiful. But she is not at all forceful. She cannot be. If she were, her ghost could not have gained the potency it would have in the 1960s. Our acquaintance with the living Josette has been a long anticlimax to the tales of her sovereign haunting of Collinwood. Her death scene is an anticlimax to that anticlimax. Widows’ Hill itself will continue to be a place of danger and death, but Josette will no longer be its patroness in the way she was before this episode.

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 417: Distant laughter

The terrace at the great house of Collinwood is a set where characters often behave as if things are possible that the audience knows won’t happen. Couples make dates we know they will never keep and talk about weddings we know one of them won’t live to see. Today, much put-upon servant Ben sees grand lady Josette there. He urges her to leave Collinwood, and she says she is planning to do so. Ben is overjoyed. He, and he alone, knows that Josette’s lost love Barnabas has become a vampire and is obsessed with her. When Josette talks about leaving, Ben hopes she will escape from the danger Barnabas represents.

The placement of this scene at the terrace is one of several pieces of evidence that Ben’s hopes will be dashed. We have known since #5 that Josette is fated to jump to her death from the precipice known as Widow’s Hill. We learned in #233 that she did this because she saw Barnabas up there and was horrified by what he had become. Josette’s death is such an important part of the show’s backstory that we are sure she will not escape her doom. Moreover, we have seen bewildered time-traveler Vicki try to persuade Josette to go away before it is too late. Everything Vicki has done since arriving in the year 1795 has backfired, so that is another sign that Josette will not leave.

Toward the end of the scene on the terrace, Josette asks Ben if he can hear a sound of distant laughter. He says that he didn’t hear it, and neither did she. He urges her to get some sleep, and they go their separate ways.

After sunrise, Ben goes to the secret chamber in the Collins family mausoleum where Barnabas’ coffin is hidden. Obeying Barnabas’ command, he has brought a stake made of holly wood and a mallet. When he was alive, Barnabas had been a friend and benefactor to Ben. Ben finds it difficult to stake him, but is just about to do so when a loud sound of laughter, punctuated by sharp intakes of breath, comes on the soundtrack. The head of wicked witch Angelique floats onto the screen. This visual effect had been a signature of undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins when she was on Dark Shadows late in 1966 and early in 1967; it is the first time we have seen it since Laura went up in smoke in #191.

Floating head. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

It was Angelique who cursed Barnabas to become a vampire. As her head floats in front of Ben, we hear her recorded voice telling him her curse will be fulfilled. When Ben says she can’t stop him, she points out that the stake and mallet have vanished from his hands. She orders him to leave the chamber. He is to come back tonight and tell Barnabas that they will never escape her power.

In his post about this episode on Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn argues that since Barnabas just killed Angelique in #411, she hasn’t been gone long enough to make her return particularly effective. I agree. Even if the scene were well-conceived and well-executed in every other way, that alone would make it disappointing. But there are some other substantial problems. Angelique regretted the curse she put on Barnabas, and her last mortal act was to try to stake him to keep him from rising as a vampire. Nothing she says today explains the reversal of her attitude.

The repetition of the effect from the Laura story isn’t much of a problem, not only because it has been a long time since they’ve used it, but also because the show had such low ratings when Laura was on that most viewers watching now never saw it then. What is a problem is the execution of the effect. Angelique’s voice is a tinny recording that sounds very bad when she laughs, and they keep sliding the floating head around in the frame trying to square it with Ben’s line of sight. So far from terrifying us, the result simply irritates.

Episode 409: Some of the facts

When well-meaning governess Victoria Winters came unstuck in time and tumbled from 1967 to 1795, she brought with her a copy of the Collins family history. We first saw this book in #45, when flighty heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard read this excerpt aloud:

Jeremiah Collins, sixth generation descendant of the founder of Collinsport. In 1830 married Josette Lafrenière of Paris, France. The construction of Collinwood, the family mansion, was begun the same year.

Right up to the last few weeks before Vicki left for the past in November 1967, Dark Shadows kept equivocating about whether Josette, Jeremiah, and the rest of them lived in 1830 or in the late 18th century. The name “Lafrenière” was not mentioned again after #45, but neither was any other surname given for her birth family until the name “DuPrés” was introduced during the 1795 segment. Likewise, #45 is the only time we hear that Josette was from Paris. Her association with the island of Martinique is established in #239, when the vampire Barnabas Collins tells his victim Maggie that he met Josette there and taught her English on the journey to Collinsport, where she was to marry Jeremiah. That Josette was the daughter of the richest French planter on Martinique, a condition that in 1795 in our time-band characterized the lady who would become the Empress Josephine, is something the show commits itself to during the flashback segment.

These were only a few of the myriad revisions and retcons the show went through in regard to Barnabas and Josette’s time as living beings. Today, Josette and her aunt, the Countess DuPrés, go through the book and remark on its many inaccuracies. The episode ends with a shock when they realize that at least one of these inaccuracies is the result of a conscious decision by haughty overlord Joshua Collins to falsify the record of events.

Josette and the countess read The Book. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

I was going to write about how meta this all is, but then I reread Danny Horn’s post about the episode on Dark Shadows Every Day and found that he had already done it. I would just add that the very idea of traveling back in time is a metaphor for rewriting, so that the whole storyline is an exercise in self-reference by the writers and producers.

This episode features the death of Barnabas Collins. Barnabas has been the show’s main draw for a long time, but he was already dead when we met him in April 1967, and he’s been dying for the last four days of this flashback, so that’s less of a milestone than it might seem. The event is presented as another exercise in continuity. In #345, vampire Barnabas told mad scientist Julia Hoffman that before his death he had vowed to Josette that he would someday return to her. Indeed, Josette is at his bedside in his last moments as a human, and he does make that vow.

Barnabas dies. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas accompanies his vow with a plea for Josette to wait for him. That, too, is a continuity moment. Josette is played by Kathryn Leigh Scott, who also played Maggie. When Barnabas returned as a vampire in 1967, he kept Maggie prisoner and tried to replace her personality with that of Josette. Whatever the living Barnabas may have been thinking in his last moments, the vampire Barnabas expected to find Josette waiting for him, 172 years after his death, and that expectation motivated the first major crime we saw him commit.

Episode 392: This great democracy of yours

In episode 368/369 of Dark Shadows, haughty overlord Joshua Collins of Collinsport, Maine told his house-guest, the Countess DuPrés, that he was surprised she still chose to “affect a title,” since in this year of 1795 “France has followed our example and become a republic.” After the countess handed Joshua his head, he fumed to his wife Naomi that her snobbish Old World ways offended him, since he is such a devout believer in human equality.

It was immediately clear to any viewer that Joshua was being hypocritical. He tyrannizes his family and treats his servants as domestic animals that have unaccountably, and rather inconveniently, gained the power of speech. When he says that all men are equal, he means that he, personally, is the equal of anyone in a sufficiently lofty position, and the superior of everyone else.

Audience members who know something about the history of the late eighteenth century in the USA and France will find more to savor in Joshua’s preposterous position. By 1795, the French Revolution had gone through its most radical phases, and was anathema to everyone in the USA other than some of the nascent political tendency led by Thomas Jefferson, a tendency known in the southeast and New England as the Republican Party and in the middle states and the west as the Democratic Party. When Joshua says with great satisfaction that “France has followed our example and become a republic,” he is identifying himself with the most militant factions of the Jeffersonian party, and when he tells Naomi that “all men are equal” he is echoing the most famous passage of Jefferson’s most celebrated writing.

Ridiculous as it is to hear Joshua invoke the egalitarian rhetoric for which Jefferson was so well known, as a major landowner in a rural area far removed from the major cities he was perfectly typical of the most important backers of the Democratic/ Republicans. Jefferson himself was a member of this category, and he displayed both a remarkably sophisticated understanding of the leftwardmost theorists of the French Revolution, as demonstrated for example in the edition of the works of Destutt de Tracy that he prepared for publication in 1817, and a dismally cruel approach to his livelihood as a slave-holding planter.

When Dark Shadows was on the air in 1966-1971, the party that traced its origins to Jefferson was undergoing a revolution of its own. The coalition he forged between working-class groups in the north and rich slave-owners in the south had been an inspiration to the Democratic Party from the days before the Civil War right through the presidencies of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. After World War Two, the African American freedom movement finally scrambled this unlikely coalition, winning Black southerners the vote and challenging the dominance the heirs of the slave-owners had long held in the Democratic Solid South. Thoughtful Americans, seeing this change, might well think back to the origins of the Democratic Party and to the ridiculous incongruity of Jefferson’s soaringly egalitarian words coming out of his and other oligarchic mouths.

At the top of today’s episode, Joshua is very thorough about betraying all of Jefferson’s ideals. He tells Naomi that the common folk of the town must not know that their son Barnabas killed his uncle Jeremiah in a duel. Naomi replies that everyone already knows; Joshua insists that they do not, and declares that they will believe what he tells them to believe.

The *philosophe* in his salon. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

One of the major themes of Jefferson’s correspondence, as indeed of Destutt de Tracy and other Enlightenment philosophes, was what Karl Marx, a close reader of Destutt de Tracy, would call “false consciousness,” the tendency of the oppressed classes to see the world in categories generated by the ruling class, and that if false consciousness were erased the oppressed would rise up and sweep away all manner of social evils. Joshua’s determination to keep the working people of Collinsport in the dark about what is happening on the estate of Collinwood puts him at the opposite extreme from the beliefs his leader Jefferson professed. In his own life, Jefferson himself set about enforcing regimes of lies on more than one occasion, as for example when he used his office as president of the United States to cover up the crimes of General James Wilkinson. Even viewers who hadn’t read Jefferson’s letters and who were unaware of Jefferson’s less inspiring actions may well have known, in 1967, that the confidence which the Declaration of Independence expresses in what will happen if “the facts be submitted to a candid world” sat uneasily with the lies on which slavery in particular and white supremacy in general rests.

Joshua begins dictating to Naomi a fictitious story that sounds oddly familiar to regular viewers. Before well-meaning governess Vicki was plunged into her uncertain and frightening journey into the past, we had heard several versions of the Collins family history, none of which resembles the events that we have actually seen play out so far. As Joshua tells Naomi what he has decided people should believe, for the first time the outlines of the Collins family history published in the 1950s come into view. That history is not only sustained by false consciousness, but has its origins in a brazen lie.

Joshua is busy fabricating when Naomi interrupts him with more bad news. Barnabas has decided to marry Angelique, maid to the Countess DuPrés and to the countess’ niece, Barnabas’ former fiancée Josette. The great egalitarian Joshua is thunderstruck that his son would fall into the clutches of an “adventuress.”

Joshua sends Naomi to fetch Barnabas. He thunders his disapproval of the marriage, and Barnabas stands his ground.

Later, we see Josette in the cemetery, at Jeremiah’s grave. Barnabas spots her, and wonders whether he should tell her about his engagement to Angelique. He doesn’t want her to hear of it from someone else, as she surely will very soon. But the place could not be less appropriate. He approaches her; they have an awkward little talk, in the course of which he urges her to hate him for killing her husband. She says she cannot. She tells him not to say any more. He is helpless.

Angelique arrives and tells Josette that her carriage is waiting. Josette invites Barnabas to ride back to the manor house with them; he declines. Josette leaves the two of them alone for a moment; with a note of jealousy that belies her agreement to a sham marriage to a man who will always love Josette, she asks Barnabas if she interrupted something. He says that she did not. That’s true- he had already given up the idea of telling her about their engagement when Angelique joined them.

Back in the manor house, Joshua summons Angelique to the front parlor, where he offers her $10,000 to relinquish her claim on Barnabas and go back to the island of Martinique. It is difficult to compare prices between 1795 and 2023; to get a sense of proportion, we might remember that when Joshua offered Vicki a job as governess to little Sarah Collins in #367, he offered her a salary of $4 a week, and that this was rather a generous rate of pay for the position. So it would take even an upper servant 2500 weeks, that is to say almost fifty years, to earn the amount of money Joshua is offering Angelique.

Angelique refuses Joshua’s bribe. He says he is prepared to offer more, but when he sees that she is firm in her refusal he switches to threats. Naomi intervenes and says that she does not want to break ties. With Naomi’s promise of friendship, Angelique agrees to wait until the mourning period for Jeremiah is complete before marrying Barnabas.

What returning viewers know that Joshua, Naomi, Barnabas, the countess, and Josette do not is that Angelique is not only a maid, but is also a witch. It was under her spell that Josette, though in love with Barnabas, conceived a mad passion for Jeremiah, that Jeremiah, though a loyal friend to Barnabas, reciprocated that passion, and that the two of them, though they struggled with their consciences, eloped. That elopement prompted the jilted Barnabas to challenge his uncle to a duel, and his bewilderment at his own actions prompted Jeremiah to delope and let Barnabas kill him. Angelique and Barnabas had had a brief romantic fling before he became engaged to Josette, and she believed that once Josette was out of the way Barnabas would return to her.

It hadn’t quite worked out that way. In her frustration at Barnabas’ continued preference for Josette, Angelique cast a spell on Sarah, sickening her and threatening her life. When she saw how upset Barnabas was by his little sister’s illness, Angelique said that she could cure it, and extorted his promise to marry her if she did so. She released Barnabas from that promise in #390/391. When he told her that Josette would always come first for him, even though he knew there could never again be anything between them, she said she would marry him anyway. Apparently thinking he wouldn’t be likely to find another woman willing to enter a sham marriage on that basis, Barnabas proposed, and Angelique accepted.

In their conversation in the parlor, Joshua tells Angelique that he knows about the promise she extorted from Barnabas with her ability to cure Sarah. Evidently Barnabas told Naomi about that. There are those in the house who believe that witchcraft is afoot; indeed, Vicki is in hiding, having been accused as the witch. This story would seem to be proof positive that Angelique, not Vicki, is the guilty party, and she does widen her eyes when Joshua brings it up. But he and Naomi don’t make the connection.

Back in the graveyard, Angelique is holding a miniature coffin and casting a spell.

Where did she get that miniature? Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

In her bedroom, Josette hears Angelique’s disembodied voice, saying that Jeremiah is not dead. She runs to the front door, where Naomi sees her. Unable to dissuade her from going out in the night, Naomi follows Josette to Jeremiah’s grave. Josette keeps hearing the voice; Naomi does not hear it. But when Jeremiah’s hand bursts out of the soil, both women see it.

Jeremiah waves to the ladies. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

In the parts of Dark Shadows set in the twentieth century, Joan Bennett played matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Of all the major characters, Liz was the most reluctant to acknowledge the existence of supernatural forces, and she was the one who was least likely to see the evidence of such forces that abounded in the world around her. So when we see her as Naomi watching Jeremiah’s hand reaching out of his grave, it is the first time we have seen her react to an incontrovertible sign of the paranormal. It makes us wonder how far back in the Collinses’ past the roots of Liz’ denial extend.

Episode 388: Someone else you love

Gracious lady Josette DuPrés left her home on the island of Martinique to marry her fiancé, young gentleman Barnabas Collins. She is Mrs Collins now, but not Mrs Barnabas Collins.Her aunt’s maid, Angelique, is a wicked witch who wants Barnabas for herself. To that end, she cast one spell to cause Josette to conceive a mad passion for Barnabas’ uncle and dearest friend, Jeremiah Collins, and another to cause Jeremiah to reciprocate her feelings. On what was supposed to be the night of Josette’s wedding to Barnabas, she ran off with Jeremiah. The two of them married. When they returned to the estate of Collinwood, Barnabas challenged Jeremiah to a duel. Remorseful, Jeremiah let Barnabas shoot him. Now, he is hovering at the point of death.

We open with Angelique in Barnabas’ room, massaging his forehead. She wants him to say that he hates Josette. He says “I hate her!,” but can’t bring himself to say “I hate Josette.” He kisses Angelique and agrees to visit her room in the servants’ quarters later.

The results of Angelique’s magical activities have not gone unnoticed. Some members of the household believe there is a witch at work among them, and have called a professional witch-hunter named the Rev’d Trask to conduct an investigation. No one suspects Angelique- Trask and his supporters have fastened on recently arrived governess Victoria Winters. Vicki is in hiding, and Barnabas and his friend, caddish naval officer Nathan Forbes, have been helping her.

Downstairs in the manor house, Trask is questioning Josette. When he raises the possibility that she may have been the victim of demonic influence and therefore not responsible for her recent actions and their tragic consequences, she is intrigued. But she cannot take the escape he offers. She insists that she is responsible for her actions. Even so, she allows Trask to begin an exorcism.

Barnabas interrupts the ceremony. He makes no secret of his contempt for Trask. When Trask tells him that Josette has been under the control of forces alien to herself, Barnabas demands Josette tell him what she did that she did not want to do. She will not say anything to suggest disloyalty to Jeremiah. “He is my husband, and he is dying. That is all that matters.” When Barnabas asks if she loves him, she says yes. He asks if she married him because she loved him, again she says yes. She says she wishes things had been different; he asks what she could wish different, if she has married the man she loves. She cannot answer.

Barnabas is back in his room, looking depressed. Angelique enters and asks why he didn’t come to her. He says that it can’t work between them. He still loves Josette, in spite of everything. She asks what Josette told him to make him feel that way. He says that all she said was that she is married to Jeremiah and loves him.

Angelique is devoted to manipulating people, and cannot believe Josette did not somehow trick Barnabas into loving her. But we can see that Barnabas is responding to Josette’s attempt to do her duty to Jeremiah. He does not believe in magic, and is convinced that Josette and Jeremiah willfully betrayed him. But he knows virtue when he sees it, and in Josette’s attempt to be a good wife to the dying Jeremiah he recognizes the trustworthy partner with whom he had expected to share his life.

Barnabas asks Angelique if it is still possible for them to be friends. She notices a doll on a shelf, a favorite plaything of Barnabas’ ten-year old sister Sarah. She takes the doll, saying she will return it to Sarah.

Angelique finds the doll. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Back in her room, Angelique talks to herself. She says that she will punish Barnabas for spurning her. This time, she will not cast a spell on Josette. Instead, she will use her powers to make Sarah suffer. Barnabas will watch Sarah suffer, Angelique proclaims, and that will be the hardest experience of his life.

Angelique is a fun character, and up to now the roots of her behavior in her unrequited love for Barnabas have made it possible for us to sympathize with her. But we’ve known Sarah since she first showed up as a ghost in #255, back in June. She is adorable, and the doll Angelique is planning to use against her was something she used in lifesaving good deeds back in the summer. There is nothing sympathetic about a threat to hurt her. With her final scene today, Angelique crosses into very dark territory.

Episode 383: Between men now

In 1966 and the early weeks of 1967, the Collinsport Inn was an important place on Dark Shadows. The restaurant there, presided over by Maggie Evans (Kathryn Leigh Scott,) The Nicest Girl in Town, was a place where people could meet each other unexpectedly and characters new to town could be introduced. Dashing action hero Burke Devlin (Mitch Ryan) lived in a suite at the inn, and the place often represented his territory, the base from which he conducted his war against the ancient and esteemed Collins family.

The sign. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

We haven’t seen Burke’s room since #206, at which point he had given up his vendetta against the Collinses and proceeded far down the road to irrelevance. We haven’t seen the restaurant since vampire Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid) met Maggie there in #221. By the time Anthony George took over the part of Burke in #262, Burke seemed to live in the Blue Whale tavern. He made business calls from the pay phone there, and in one episode apparently stayed behind when the bartender locked the place up for the night.

The inn makes a return appearance at the top of today’s episode. It is 1795, and Jeremiah Collins (Anthony George) is sharing a suite with Josette DuPrés (Kathryn Leigh Scott.) They are on their honeymoon.

Jeremiah and Josette eloped from the estate of Collinwood on the night when Josette was supposed to marry Jeremiah’s nephew, kindly gentleman Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid.) Josette truly loved Barnabas and Jeremiah was his dearest friend, but they were under a spell cast by wicked witch Angelique, who wanted Josette out of the way so she could have Barnabas for herself. The power of the spell waxes and wanes. When Josette and Jeremiah are in the grip of it, a trident shaped mark appears on their hands; when they return to their senses, the mark disappears.

Tridents showing. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

When the episode begins, the tridents are showing, and the newlyweds are inflamed with passion. Shortly after, Josette’s mark is gone, Jeremiah’s still showing. She is filled with regret, he is still ardent.

Back in the manor house of Collinwood, Barnabas has a conversation with Josette’s father André and his own father Joshua. He resists André’s suggestion that Josette and Jeremiah must have left together, and resists even more strenuously Joshua’s declaration that they did so because they are the victims of witchcraft. Joshua says that his sister Abigail and André’s sister, the Countess DuPrés, found a blasphemous trinket in the quarters of governess Victoria Winters, and that a witch-hunting divine, the Reverend Trask, is coming to investigate the matter. Barnabas is appalled at the notion of an inquiry into witchcraft, and vows to defend Victoria if Trask comes. Joshua forbids him to do so.

Barnabas’ reaction to the idea of a witchcraft trial, coupled with what we have seen of him so far in the 1795 segment, looks like a retcon. In #358, only a week and a half before we began this uncertain and frightening journey to the past, vampire Barnabas told a story about studying witchcraft under a warlock on Barbados who taught him “the secret magic number of the universe.” Events are moving so fast that it doesn’t look like Barnabas will have time to sail to the Caribbean before he becomes a vampire, and he won’t be crossing any waters after that. But now he is a man of the Enlightenment, who scoffs at the idea of witchcraft today as he scoffed at the tarot when the countess introduced him to it in #368/369.

Jeremiah returns to the house. There is an exquisite little scene with a servant, Riggs, who is uncomfortable at the sight of the disgraced Mr Jeremiah. Riggs stands in for the establishment of Collinwood and the whole working class of the town of Collinsport, and in his reaction we see the disquiet that bad news from the big house on the hill would spread among the people whose livelihoods are at stake when trouble comes to the family there. Riggs makes haste when Jeremiah tells him to go out and fetch Joshua.

When Riggs is gone, Josette enters. The audience sees that the mark is gone from Jeremiah’s hand, and Josette can tell that his passion for her is gone. She tells him that he no more loves her than she loves him. He begins with a protest against this remark, but ends by saying that they must be kind to each other.

Joshua and André enter. André embraces his daughter and tells her everything will be all right; Joshua looks at his brother with distaste and demands an explanation.

Jeremiah says that he and Josette are married. He further says he realizes they are not welcome, and that they will return to the inn. This raises the prospect of a recreation of the early days, with the inn as a territory separate from and opposed to Collinwood. Joshua rejects the idea at once. He will not have the scandal of Jeremiah and his new wife living in town because they have been estranged from the rest of the Collinses. He decrees that they will live at Collinwood and put on a happy face for the townsfolk.

Barnabas enters. Joshua tells him that Jeremiah and Josette are married. He refuses to believe it until Josette confirms it herself. He takes the glove from Jeremiah’s hand and slaps him in the face. He gives him a choice of weapons.

Dueling may have been as alien to the ideals of the Enlightenment as were Barbadian warlocks, but so too is Joshua’s plan of forcing the whole family to commit itself to a massive lie in order to preserve its hereditary privileges. Joshua, the proud apostle of Jeffersonian republicanism, is simply being a hypocrite, but Barnabas is a more complicated figure. Seeing his every hope turned to dust before him, his ideals have become useless. He has only a moment to choose among the evils the Enlightenment had promised to stamp out, and he chooses the most macho one available.

Joshua forbids the duel, but Barnabas disregards his father’s authority and insists on it. In 1795 and for some time after, dueling was widely practiced in much of the United States, and particularly in the South and West a gentleman lost face if he refused a challenge. No such stigma attached in New England, where dueling was condemned by law and religion. Had Joshua or Jeremiah gone to the police, Barnabas would have been arrested. In 1719, Massachusetts, of which Maine was a part until 1821, passed a law making it an offense punishable by a fine of £100 (equivalent to about $7000 today) to challenge someone to a duel. Massachusetts law already considered it murder to kill someone in a duel, and prescribed death by hanging as punishment. Of course, Joshua’s declaration that Jeremiah and Josette will live in the house and the family will present a “united front” to deter scandal makes it clear he will never turn his son over to the police, and the pattern of cover-up with the support of law enforcement we saw among the Collinses in 1966 and 1967 leads us to doubt that anything a member of the family does will ever be a matter for the courts to judge.

There is a missed opportunity in the show’s lack of interest in Massachusetts’ actual laws about dueling. The 1719 law was amended to be even stricter in 1730. Among the provisions added to the law at that time was a requirement that anyone who had either been killed in a duel or been put to death for winning a duel would “be given an unchristian burial at a gallows or crossroads, with a stake driven through their body.” Since the audience knows that Barnabas is fated to become a vampire, there is a chilling irony in seeing him volunteer for a staked burial.

Episode 380: No end to your tricks

Indentured servant Ben was unhappy enough when he was under the rule of haughty overlord Joshua Collins. He has now found himself doubly enslaved, still subject to the Collinses, but also under a spell cast by lady’s maid/ wicked witch Angelique that compels him to do her bidding. At least Joshua isn’t bothering him these days- Angelique has, for reasons of her own, turned him into a cat. In Angelique’s room, Ben wields a hatchet, gleefully preparing to decapitate the cat formerly known as Joshua.

Angelique enters and forbids Ben from committing this act of felicide. Ben is disappointed. When his arguments make no impression on her, he whines “Ple-e-e-ase!” Thayer David gets the full comic value out of that, Mrs Acilius and I laughed out loud.

Angelique’s main business is preventing Joshua’s son Barnabas from marrying the gracious Josette. To that end, she orders Ben to steal some things. When he protests that it will be the end of him if he is caught, she tells him to see to it that he isn’t caught.

In the parts of the show set in 1967, Barnabas is a vampire. We have heard him use the very words Angelique uses here when telling people who were under his power not to be caught, most recently with his distant cousin/ blood thrall Carolyn in #362. The echo is so specific and of so recent an episode that we can’t help but wonder if Angelique’s witchcraft will not only turn Barnabas into a vampire, but will deposit her personality in his body.

Barnabas and Josette’s wedding is supposed to be held in the front parlor of the manor house. When the bride doesn’t come downstairs, her father, André DuPrés, asks his sister, the Countess DuPrés, if he should look for her. She agrees that he should. This is an odd little moment, suggesting that the Bossy Big Sister/ Bratty Little Brother dynamic we have seen among the Collinses of the 1960s may have been familiar in the House of DuPrés in 1795.

André goes up to Josette’s room. He shouts her name, looks for her in the linen chest at the foot of her bed, and shouts for her some more. He reports her absence to the party downstairs. Angelique lifts a flute of champagne, silently toasting her triumph.