Mad scientist Julia Hoffman and suave warlock Nicholas Blair each want to find Frankenstein’s monster Adam before the other does. Julia is sure that occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes knows where Adam is; while he sits at a chessboard and plays both sides of a game, she asks Stokes to tell her. He says he wants answers to some questions of his own, but the audience knows that the information he wants is just what Julia will never tell him.
Nicholas takes a less conventional approach. He raises the ghosts of a couple of the dead men whose corpses supplied the raw materials from which Adam’s body was constructed. One lacks a right arm, the other a head. He asks them where Adam is, and they turn in unison to point with their left arms at the great house of Collinwood. It’s such a smoothly coordinated move that it looks like they must be spending their time in the afterlife starting a boy band.
The Boneyard Boys showing off their signature move, the Postmortem Point. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
The arm donor is played by David Groh, who less than a decade later would become a star as Joe on the sitcom Rhoda. Groh was such a charismatic performer that it’s hard not to think of speaking parts on Dark Shadows that other actors played badly and wonder what would have happened had he played them instead. I went on about that in a comment I left on Danny Horn’s Dark Shadows Every Day in 2020; here, I will just mention that if Groh, instead of the lamentably unaccomplished Craig Slocum, had played ex-convict Harry Johnson, we would probably have seen a red-hot love triangle in which Harry vied with Adam for the affections of heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard.
Earlier in the episode, Adam had asked Stokes why it was not allowed for him to kiss Carolyn. Thayer David makes the most of this scene. Stokes freezes and looks up when Adam starts posing his questions, then seems genuinely shaken when he says that he is inadequate to the task of answering them, since he himself has never raised children. We can see that, in that moment, Stokes feels as incomplete as Adam. It’s touching to see Stokes’ usually supreme self-assurance give way to shamefaced uncertainty. When Stokes tells Adam to put away his budding sexual desires and to concentrate on his books, we catch a glimpse of the tragic side of Stokes’ own celibate, scholarly life.
But not even a father of twenty would be prepared for this situation. In the ten weeks he has been alive, Adam has become fluent in English and able to read with facility; he has the body of a grown man and moves with agility and force. Yet he knows absolutely nothing of human relationships beyond a basic understanding of the words “Friend” and “Kill!” It is hard to imagine that anyone has ever lived who needed the instruction Adam needs now.
Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, expert on the occult, finds himself laboring under the direction of Julia Hoffman, MD. Stokes does not understand why Julia insisted on leaving the long abandoned shack where a very tall, very mysterious man named Adam seemed to be suffocating, he does not understand why Julia has buried her friend Barnabas Collins in an unmarked grave in the woods, and does not understand why Julia has concluded that Barnabas is alive and they must dig him up. Julia tells Stokes she will answer his questions when the exhumation is complete. Stokes keeps digging. They reach a coffin. They open it to find Barnabas. Julia detects a faint “pulsebeat” in his wrist. Before Stokes can raise his questions, Julia says she wants to be alone with Barnabas and reminds Stokes that Adam needs attention.
Back in the shack, Stokes finds heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard with Adam. Earlier, Carolyn was distraught, unable to find a “pulsebeat” in Adam’s wrist, but now he is up and moving, apparently quite well. Stokes says that Julia is on her way, and Adam becomes agitated. He hates Julia and Barnabas, but has never explained to Stokes or Carolyn why. Carolyn decides to hide him in the long-deserted west wing of her family’s home, the great house of Collinwood. Stokes sees many drawbacks to this plan, but can suggest no alternative.
Only Stokes is still in the shack when Julia comes. He will not tell her where Adam has gone, and she will not answer any of his questions. With a smile, he tells her that he looks forward to understanding Barnabas’ secret. At this, she looks uneasy, clearly not welcoming that prospect.
Barnabas was, for 172 years, a vampire. His curse went into remission earlier in 1968, and he has been virtually human since #490, when he took part in an experiment that brought Adam to life as a Frankenstein’s monster. Julia ordered Barnabas’ servant Willie to bury him the other day, because she was afraid he was about to become a vampire again, but yesterday she figured out that Adam’s existence was keeping that from happening.
When Barnabas is unearthed, he is afraid that he has reverted to vampirism. Julia shows him his reflection in her compact mirror, proving to him that he is still human. The first time they did the vampire/ mirror bit was in #288, when Julia saw that Barnabas did not cast a reflection in a compact mirror and thereby confirmed her suspicion that Barnabas was a vampire. That led him to try to kill her. Now they are fast friends, and the same gimmick, with the opposite result, brings them a moment of shared joy.
Barnabas goes to the great house, and sees wicked witch Angelique/ Cassandra standing on the terrace. She was the one who cast the spell that prompted Julia and Willie to think they ought to bury him, and Julia had told her that he was dead. She is rather surprised when he shows up. He taunts her with the failure of her attack on him, she pretends not to know what he is talking about, and he goes along his merry way. Alone, she vows that she will soon regain her power over Barnabas.
Recovering vampire Barnabas Collins is dead, and this time it seems like he might stay that way. At least it seems so to his friend Julia Hoffman, MD, and his servant Willie Loomis; they’ve buried him, and are talking about what to do next. Julia decides they should tell people Barnabas went on a long trip, and that they themselves should leave the area before dawn. They will go to a sanitarium called Windcliff. Julia will resume her duties as its chief, while Willie will take a job there doing whatever he can handle.
Julia orders Willie to pack his things; he asks if he should pack Barnabas’ things also. Julia is impressed that Willie thinks of this. Perhaps he is remembering his onetime friend Jason McGuire, whom Barnabas killed in #275. Jason was hated by all and was under orders from the sheriff to leave town when he fell afoul of Barnabas, and so it was easy for everyone to assume he had simply gone away. Still, in #277, sarcastic dandy Roger wondered why Jason hadn’t taken his clothes or his shaving kit. No one ever tried to tie up that loose end, but perhaps Willie learned of the problem and made a note of it for the next time he had to conspire to conceal a death.
Willie goes directly from Barnabas’ freshly dug grave to Maggie Evans’ house. Willie has an unwholesome preoccupation with Maggie. Longtime viewers will remember Willie’s menacing approach to her in #202 and #207, before Barnabas got hold of him and turned him from a dangerously unstable ruffian into a sorely bedraggled blood thrall; those who are mindful of the period when Dark Shadows first became a hit will remember May and June of 1967, when Maggie was Barnabas’ prisoner and Willie tried desperately to lessen her suffering; and first time viewers will be startled by the beginning of the scene, when we see Willie peeking through the window at Maggie. When Barnabas’ vampirism went into remission, his former victims tended to return to the personalities they had before he bit them. Willie has not quite become the rapey goon he was in his first two weeks on the show, but neither is he the first man a woman would choose to be alone with.
Willie!
Since she is The Nicest Girl in Town, Maggie has long since forgiven Willie what he did when he first came to Collinsport. And Julia used a magical version of hypnosis on Maggie to induce amnesia covering the whole period of her involvement with Barnabas and to leave her with warm feelings of goodwill for him. But it’s late at night, so when Willie knocks, she is reluctant to let him in. He insists, and she relents.
Willie tells her he will be going away soon to take an exciting new job. Maggie says that she is sure everyone will miss him. At first he repeats the story that Barnabas is going away on a long trip, but then he starts crying. When Maggie asks why, he tells her Barnabas has died. He asks her to keep this secret, but the most she will agree to do is to wait until he leaves town to start talking about it.
Meanwhile, Julia has gone to the great house of Collinwood, where she has been a houseguest for about a year. Before she goes upstairs to pack, she stops and tells Roger’s wife Cassandra that Barnabas is dead.
Julia knows that Cassandra is actually Angelique, the wicked witch responsible for Barnabas’ woes. It would seem that the whole point of covering up Barnabas’ death would be to keep Angelique/ Cassandra from finding out about it. Yet Julia not only goes out of her way to tell her, she also declares to her that she will continue to fight against her.
Angelique/ Cassandra spits out that Julia is in love with Barnabas, to which Julia replies “Not nearly as much as you are.” For some time, the show has been developing the theme that Julia would like Barnabas to be her lover. In their post about the episode on Dark Shadows Before I Die, John Scoleri said “So Julia’s true feelings are finally on the table.” To which Christine Scoleri replied, “Where have you been? Julia’s feelings have been on the table, the wall, the floor…pretty much everywhere for a long time.”
Willie’s visit to Maggie and Julia’s to Angelique/ Cassandra mark a difference between the first year of Dark Shadows and its later phases. When the show started, the characters were too good at keeping secrets, with the result that very little happened. They took this to such an extreme that one of the two principal storylines with which the show began- well-meaning governess Vicki’s attempt to find out who her parents were- died out altogether because reclusive matriarch Liz and her lawyers, the only characters who knew anything about it, would never talk.
Now, the characters involved in the action don’t keep secrets from each other at all, with the result that events comes thick and fast, but it is hard to build complex alliances or to explore nuanced relationships. They still conceal information from Vicki, Liz, Roger, and other characters left over from the early days, rendering them background figures with little to contribute to the story. Video game enthusiasts might call them “NPCs”- non-player characters.
Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, occult expert, enters. Stokes tells Julia that a man named Adam appears to be dead. Julia goes with him to an abandoned shack in the woods where she examines Adam’s body and pronounces him dead. When Stokes tells her that Adam exhibited sharp pains in his neck starting at about 11 PM, that he called out for Barnabas, that his strength appeared to ebb for no apparent reason, and that he then died, Julia’s eyes widen. Suddenly Adam comes back to life. He starts gasping for air and miming a struggle against an invisible barrier just above his face. Julia tells Stokes she will have to go. He protests that she must stay with her patient. What she says next doesn’t mean much to Stokes, and would mean less to a first-time viewer:
JULIA: He is suffocating- I may know why. No, it’s impossible! But it may be that they are the same. Experiment- perhaps Adam is why-
STOKES: What are you talking about?
JULIA: Barnabas- I buried him- alive!
Regular viewers know that Adam is a Frankenstein’s monster created in an experiment begun by mad scientist Eric Lang. Shortly before he died of wounds inflicted by Angelique/ Cassandra, Lang recorded an audiotape in which he explained that as long as Adam lives, Barnabas’ vampirism will remain in remission. Julia has not heard that tape, but the audience has, time without number. We also know that when Barnabas was sealed up in a wall from #512 to #516, Adam experienced the pains that Barnabas suffered. In these lines, we see Julia for the first time beginning to understand the true nature of the connection between Adam and Barnabas.
Stokes’ approach to Julia is as indiscreet in its own way as were Willie’s to Maggie and Julia’s to Angelique/ Cassandra. Adam hates Julia and Barnabas, because they abused him shockingly in his first weeks of life, and forbade Stokes to bring her. Julia’s closing outburst is also an extreme indiscretion, as Stokes is basically a law-abiding person who could not be expected to help Julia and Willie cover up their many crimes. Again, we have come a long way from the days when the show would drop a major story rather than have a recurring character breach attorney-client privilege.
Like the Scoleris, Danny Horn was in good form when blogging about this part of the show. His post on Dark Shadows Every Day about this episode makes a number of penetrating observations about the connections between Julia and Willie’s opening scene at the grave and absurdist plays like Waiting for Godot and Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
A magical bat has bitten recovering vampire Barnabas Collins on the neck and Barnabas appears to have died. Barnabas’ friend Julia and his servant Willie have a conference to discuss their next steps. Barnabas had expected such an attack, knowing that the witch who made him a vampire in the first place has been working to renew her curse. Willie laments the situation, crying out, “Aw, now we’re gonna hear the dogs howlin’ again!” Evidently that’s the bad part.
Barnabas had directed Julia and Willie to drive a stake through his heart once it had stopped beating. They can’t do it. They decide to bury him in the woods instead. Willie mentions a cross; a silver cross inside the lid of his coffin had kept Barnabas immobilized for the 171 years before Willie inadvertently released him to prey upon the living in April 1967, so perhaps that’s how they plan to show mercy to their friend.
Once Willie has dug the grave and put Barnabas’ coffin in it, he and Julia decide to pray. She takes the lead, kneeling and throwing dirt, presumably including stones, onto the coffin. Dark Shadows avoided the topic of religion almost completely until repressed spinster Abigail Collins made her first appearance in #367; she and the Rev’d Mr Trask, introduced in #385, presented a wildly unfair, highly entertaining lampoon of eighteenth century New England Congregationalism. Recently the show has been lurching towards a vaguely friendly attitude towards Christianity. If Julia keeps strewing stones onto the grave once it is filled in, we might think that this friendliness extends to Judaism as well.
Meanwhile, a very tall man named Adam is having a bad time. Adam is a Frankenstein’s monster, and when he was created he drew the effect of the vampire curse from Barnabas. He does not feel the effects of that curse, but he does suffer pain when Barnabas is injured. When heiress Carolyn calls on Adam at the old shack in the woods where he is hiding, she finds that his neck hurts where Barnabas was bitten. When Julia declares Barnabas dead, we cut back to the shack, where Adam has stopped moving. Occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes has joined Carolyn; he feels Adam’s wrist, and in a bit of Collinsport English that is becoming increasingly prominent on the show says that he can find no “pulsebeat.”
Barnabas was bricked up in a wall from #512 to #516, and Adam felt his pain during that period. So it is no surprise to returning viewers that Adam suffers along with Barnabas now. We also have heard countless repetitions of something neither Julia nor Willie has ever heard, an audiotape in which Eric Lang, the mad scientist who created Adam, explains that as long as Adam lives Barnabas will be free of vampirism. So we doubt that Barnabas’ curse will return, and hope that Adam’s suffering will be the clue that leads Julia and Willie to rescue Barnabas from being buried alive. Since Julia and Willie have no idea where Adam is and Adam hates them both, it’s as difficult to see how they could find out what he’s going through as it is to see how Barnabas could get out of the grave any other way. In that difficulty is the suspense with which the episode ends.
Three months ago, the wicked witch known variously as Angelique and Cassandra cast a spell that has kept the story going in tight little circles ever since. It is “The Dream Curse.” A character has a nightmare, is compelled to tell it to another person, that person has the same nightmare, and the process repeats. When the nightmare makes its way to well-meaning governess Vicki Winters, she is compelled to tell it to old world gentleman Barnabas Collins. She and Barnabas both know that he is Angelique/ Cassandra’s real target. Vicki thinks the dream will kill Barnabas; he knows that it is meant to turn him back into what he was for 172 years, a vampire.
Vicki is struggling against the urge to tell Barnabas the dream. He knows that she is suffering mightily, and is resigned to his fate. So he shows up at the great house of Collinwood and insists that she tell him the dream. When she resists, he says that “I haven’t loved many things in my lifetime, but, Vicki, I love you.” The last time we heard Barnabas say “I love you” was in #415, when his little sister Sarah died in his arms. We have reason to believe that Vicki knows a lot more about Barnabas than she seems to; for example, she officially believes Barnabas’ story that he is the descendant of Sarah’s brother, but in this conversation she mentions that “the original Barnabas” died before he could have had any children. We also know that her feelings about him are complicated; when she looks at him after his “I love you” we see that she has something she very much wants to say. What that might be, we can only imagine.
Vicki has something to say
Vicki tells Barnabas the dream. After he leaves, permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, MD, sits with Vicki. Julia is Barnabas’ best friend and partner in crime, and she usually has trouble concealing her impatience with the ingenuous Vicki. But today the two women are united in their grief. They share a touching scene that ends when Angelique/ Cassandra enters. Julia slaps Angelique/ Cassandra’s face and storms off. Vicki tells Angelique/ Cassandra she deserves far more than a slap, then walks out as well.
Back in his house, Barnabas takes an evil looking pill. Julia comes in with her medical bag and offers to give him something to stave off the dream. He says that he has already taken a pill to bring sleep on. Further, he tells her that he has ordered his servant Willie Loomis to sharpen a wooden stake. When he has the dream and passes into apparent death, she is to drive the stake through his heart.
In moments of despair, Barnabas has often presented his resignation to reverting to vampirism as his noble self-sacrifice. But this is the first time he has presented a plan to ensure that he will not resume preying on the living. It suggests that there really is something in him other than narcissism. Maybe he knew what the words meant when he told Vicki he loved her.
Barnabas has the dream. It stops short of the climactic moment, and he awakens. He jumps to the conclusion that Angelique/ Cassandra botched her curse and it’s all over. He sends Julia to get Willie. As soon as he is alone, a knock comes at the door. He opens it and goes outside. A bat lowers on him, and he falls to the ground screaming.
This was the last episode of Dark Shadows ABC-TV asked its affiliates to broadcast at 3:30 PM. Starting Monday, it moved to the 4:00 timeslot, suitable for viewing by kids running home from school. In his delightful post about the episode, Danny Horn envisions the show as a patient on a therapist’s couch, talking about its need to leave its tedious recurring dream behind before it makes its big move.
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.
Yesterday, recovering vampire Barnabas opened the door to his closet. Hardworking young fisherman Joe fell out, and Barnabas saw Frankenstein’s monster Adam at the window, laughing menacingly. Adam has many reasons to hate Barnabas, and Barnabas concludes that Adam wants to frame him for the murder of Joe.
A commenter on John and Christine Scoleri’s Dark Shadows Before I Die, posting under the name “Grant,” pointed out that in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s novel Frankenstein the Creature kills someone and frames one of Frankenstein’s closest friends for the crime. The reference seems to be pretty obvious.
Barnabas’ friend, mad scientist Julia, shows up. She finds that Joe is not dead. She says that he has, in a bit of Collinsport English we have heard once or twice before, “a pulsebeat.” She and Barnabas have a long conversation about a variety of topics, several of them highly incriminating, while Joe lies on the floor. Julia goes off to attend to another matter, and Barnabas’ servant Willie comes. Joe is still on the floor while Willie argues against Barnabas’ orders to take Joe to the hospital. Barnabas, who had told Julia that Adam must have “wanted Joe to be found here,” dismisses Willie as “absurd” when he says that Adam is trying to frame them.
When Willie was first on the show, he was a dangerously unstable ruffian who was determined to rape all the young women and beat up their boyfriends. In #210, he accidentally released Barnabas, who enslaved him and turned him into a nice guy. Now that Barnabas’ vampirism has gone into remission, Willie has taken several steps back to his old ways. He whines that if Joe dies, his fiancée Maggie might turn to him. Barnabas finds this idea “insane,” and Willie tells him that Maggie has recently stopped by the house and talked to him more than once. This is true, and Barnabas’ reaction makes it clear that it is the first time he has heard it. He responds that he is not interested in discussing Willie’s “mental aberrations,” and tells him that if Joe dies he will tell the police about Willie’s interest in Maggie. That leaves Willie no choice but to help get Joe to the hospital.
Julia has gone off to see well-meaning governess Vicki. Vicki is about to have a nightmare that is part of the “Dream Curse.” Three months ago, wicked witch Angelique decreed that one person after another would have the same dream. After Vicki has it, the dream will pass to Barnabas, and Angelique means for it to reactivate his vampirism. Vicki doesn’t seem to know that Barnabas was a vampire, though she has had many clues, as for example when he kept biting her and sucking her blood. I suppose she just thought he had a really aggressive make-out technique. But she does know that Barnabas is supposed to die if he has the dream.
Julia urges Vicki to come with her to Windcliff, a sanitarium she runs, and promises that she will get the best of care there. But she finds that Vicki is resigned to having the dream. Julia reports this to Barnabas, and tells him that she wants to go away with him, far away from Vicki. Vicki can’t pass the dream to Barnabas unless she describes it to him after she has it, and she won’t be able to do that if she can’t find him. Barnabas refuses to go, reminding Julia that those who have the dream suffer terribly until they pass it on to the next person. When he says “You know how I feel about Vicki,” Julia gets a brief closeup, and her reaction reminds us that she is supposed to be harboring an unrequited love for Barnabas. This is rather an easy point to forget. Barnabas and Julia spend all their time together and tell each other all their secrets. Since there doesn’t seem to be any such thing as sexual contact in the world of Dark Shadows, it’s hard to see how her feelings could be much more requited.
Julia urges Barnabas to run away with her.“You know how I feel about Vicki.”
Vampires are metaphors for extreme selfishness, and Barnabas usually plays to type. It is startling that he tells Julia that any part of his motivation for sticking around is his wish to spare Vicki suffering. But he also talks about his long vain struggle against Angelique in terms that immediately make it clear that whatever goodwill he might have for Vicki is a distant third behind his usual ruling passions, self-pity and laziness, but still, her well-being is among his considerations. That sets him apart from her ostensible boyfriend, a man variously known as Peter and Jeff. As Christine Scoleri points out on Dark Shadows Before I Die, Vicki might never have had the dream at all if Peter/ Jeff hadn’t refused to listen to her explanation of the curse and insisted that she stay where he could visit her easily, yet now that she is suffering from the dream and its effects he is nowhere to be seen. Christine speaks for all of us with her summary of Peter/ Jeff’s character- “What a louse!”
Vicki has the dream. Barnabas beckons her into the haunted house attraction where the bulk of it has always taken place before. She keeps telling him that she doesn’t want to have the dream, not for her sake, but for his. She opens three doors that show Halloween gimmicks we’ve seen before, then opens a fourth behind which she sees the Sun. The Sun shrinks into the distance, and she walks through the door, following it. Her face dissolves into an image of the Sun; the Sun dissolves to the exterior of Barnabas’ house. We cut to the interior, looking at the doors. A small dot of Sun appears there. It expands until it fills most of the screen. The doors open, and the Sun gives way to Vicki. She enters, and sees Barnabas lying on the floor by his desk. He is bleeding from two small wounds on his neck.
Part of the dream is a bit of doggerel that has never made much sense. The last lines are “Ahead a blazing light does burn, And one door leads to the point of return.” These lines are almost explained today. Each door exposes a symbol of something that is frightening either to the dreamer or to Barnabas or to both. Vicki isn’t afraid of the Sun, but she knows that Barnabas has a strange and intense relationship with it. In #277, he harangued her about his hatred for the Sun; in #347, he made plans with her to watch the Sun rise, plans which he had to break under very strange circumstances in #349. So now we know that the “blazing light” is the Sun, which vampires cannot withstand.
Of the ten characters who had the dream before Vicki, only strange and troubled boy David, her charge and dear friend, was able to walk through any of the doorways. In his case, he walked into a gigantic spider web and was caught there, just a few feet beyond the entry. But Vicki is on the path that “leads to the point of return,” and she goes to a different set altogether.
Had Barnabas’ introduction not brought a new audience to the show, Dark Shadows would probably have been canceled in June 1967. In that case, the final episode would have been #260, and it surely would have ended with Vicki, who was in those days the show’s main character, driving a stake through Barnabas’ heart. That she and the Sun overlap in the same space on the screen suggests that by passing the dream to Barnabas she will fulfill her original destiny and become his destroyer.
When Vicki looks into the parlor and sees Barnabas bloodied and lying on the floor by his desk, we are reminded of #405. In that episode, we saw that Angelique originally turned Barnabas into a vampire by sending a bat to bite him in this room. At that time, he fell, not by his desk, but by the staircase. That’s very close to where Joe was lying for the first half of the episode, so they have to do some rearranging to avoid suggesting an identity between them. Barnabas’ vampirism is so much the foundation of the show’s success that virtually everyone in the audience expects him to relapse sooner or later, but they are being careful not to raise the question of whether Joe will also join the ranks of the undead.
Until the dream, the episode is made up of long scenes with a great deal of dialogue. That isn’t unusual for Dark Shadows. It is unusual that the scenes play out with very little background music. I wonder if director Jack Sullivan decided that a spare sound design would set the right mood for the very ambitious dream sequence. I think it paid off- the dialogue scenes felt slow, but Vicki’s dream achieves the surrealistic quality it needs.
One of the main themes Danny Horn developed on his blog Dark Shadows Every Day was his ridiculously exaggerated impatience with the character of Vicki and his severe bias against Alexandra Moltke Isles’ acting. That gave me something to talk about in his comments section, and was part of the reason I started this blog. Danny’s post about this episode very nearly makes up for his incessant Vickiphobia. He alternates stills of Vicki with epigrams written in her voice, and the result is just magnificent, worth anyone’s while to read.
A stranger comes to the great house on the estate of Collinwood and introduces himself as Nicholas Blair, brother of Cassandra Blair Collins. Cassandra’s husband Roger Collins is shocked; Cassandra had never mentioned that she had a brother. Moreover, she has been missing for the last 24 hours, and Roger is convinced something terrible has happened to her. Roger’s distant cousin Barnabas Collins and Dr Julia Hoffman are also shocked, but for a different reason. They know that Cassandra is actually Angelique, a wicked witch who, in the 1790s, turned Barnabas into a vampire. She recently returned to the world of the living when Barnabas’ vampirism went into remission, and she tried to implement a plan to bring it back in full force. When Angelique/ Cassandra went missing, they hoped it meant that she had been defeated. Nicholas’ arrival replaces their hopes with the fear of new battles.
Nicholas at first assumed that Barnabas was Angelique/ Cassandra’s husband, and told him “I should have recognized you anywhere!” This is a sure sign of trouble- Barnabas, who was in fact briefly married to Angelique in 1796, has not been out of the state of Maine since 1795, and has never been photographed. Nicholas says that he has recently been on Martinique, where Barnabas first met Angelique in the eighteenth century, and that he is a “citizen of the world” with no fixed address. He assures Roger that it is Cassandra’s way to disappear abruptly, and that she is sure to return.
Roger, Julia, Barnabas, and Nicholas in the drawing room.
Roger takes Nicholas to the bedroom he and Angelique/ Cassandra share. He shows Nicholas a portrait of Angelique which returning viewers know to have a mysterious connection with Angelique/ Cassandra’s physical being. Roger leaves the room, and Nicholas talks to the portrait. He asks Angelique if she can hear him, and a musical cue associated with her plays on the soundtrack. The cue cuts out, and Nicholas follows up with another question. Dark Shadows stood out from the daytime soaps of the period in having an orchestral score instead of an organ accompanying the action. The meta-theatrical touch of a character who can hear that score is a major departure. It is something people at the time would have seen in animated shorts from Warner Brothers, but likely not anywhere else. Since the biggest and fastest-growing share of Dark Shadows’ audience at this point was children under the age of 13, there was a risk that adult viewers might take that association with cartoons as a sign that it was time for them to find something else to do with their mid-afternoons.
Back in his own house on the same estate, Barnabas finds his servant Willie Loomis holding a rifle. Willie says that he is afraid that man named Adam will come to the house. Barnabas dismisses that fear and orders Willie to put the rifle away. Willie objects. Barnabas repeats the command and leaves. Willie grumbles, but does as he was told. We see a face peering in at the window.
The face belongs to hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell. Returning viewers know that Barnabas held Joe’s fiancée Maggie prisoner from May to June of 1967 and was extremely cruel to her. When the case was being investigated, Barnabas framed Willie for those crimes. Willie was sent to a mental hospital, and Barnabas had Willie released and brought him back to work for him some weeks ago. Joe thinks that Willie is the perpetrator, and has no patience with him. He knocks on the door and demands Willie let him in.
Joe insists that Willie tell him what he knows about Adam. Willie tries to evade his questions. When Willie says that Adam dislikes him, Joe responds”that means he knows you.” Joe twists Willie’s arm while repeating his questions. Once Joe releases him, Willie runs off and comes back with the rifle. He points it at Joe and orders him out of the house. Joe complies, but says that he will be back, and that he will be having words with Barnabas.
Later, Willie is in the basement. Some bricks are missing from a wall, exposing a skeleton hanging from the ceiling. Viewers who have been with Dark Shadows all along will recognize the basement of Barnabas’ house as a redress of the set that represented the basement of the main house in the first year of the show. The spot with the missing bricks was where a door stood that was always locked in those days. For the first 54 weeks of Dark Shadows, matriarch Liz thought that her husband’s corpse was buried behind that door. That belief turned out to be mistaken, but now we see that there are indeed human remains in the most similar possible spot. We might wonder what else Liz might have been less wrong about than at first sight appeared.
We watch Willie preparing to fill in the missing bricks, leaving the skeleton in place. After all, judging by Liz’ old way of thinking, that’s what ought to be in a space like that. We hear Willie’s interior monologue. He is making himself laugh with a pun on his own name when a stagehand wanders into the shot.
Uh, hello?
That moment of unintentional humor gives way to a scene rich in intentional comedy. Willie goes upstairs and finds that Nicholas has let himself into the house. Nicholas entrances him and extracts information from him. Willie tells him about a meeting with a ghost- “the one downstairs,” he specifies. Nicholas directs Willie to sit down, to remain in a blissed-out state until he leaves, and then to forget all about their encounter.
Nicholas goes to the basement, looks at the skeleton, and calls it “Reverend Trask!” Willie hadn’t given him this name; evidently he recognizes Trask the same way he recognized Barnabas.
Permanent house-guest Julia Hoffman walks into the great house of Collinwood and greets Roger Collins with a chipper “Good morning, Rodgie!” This is the second time we have heard Roger addressed as “Rodgie.” The first time was in #103, when he called to well-meaning governess Victoria Winters with “Oh, Vicki!” and she responded with “Oh, Rodgie!” That was a disastrous blooper; at that point, Roger was the show’s chief villain and Vicki was supposed to be terrified that he was about to murder her. Roger has long since been rendered harmless, and Julia is in a breezy mood, so “Rodgie” seems appropriate.
Roger’s own mood is anything but cheerful. His wife Cassandra hasn’t been seen since last night, and there is no indication where she might be. He is convinced something must have happened to her, and he calls the police.
Julia knows that Cassandra is actually Angelique, a wicked witch who in the 1790s turned Barnabas Collins into a vampire. Now Barnabas’ vampirism has gone into remission, and Angelique/ Cassandra is determined to revive her curse on him. The other day, Julia and some other people conjured up another personage from the 1790s, the Rev’d Mr Trask, a fanatical but wildly inept witchfinder. Julia hopes that Angelique/ Cassandra’s absence means that Trask has destroyed her.
Barnabas stops by. Julia tells him of her theory. He can’t believe Angelique/ Cassandra is really gone. They go to Barnabas’ house and look in the alcove in the basement where, in 1796, Barnabas murdered Trask by hanging him from the ceiling and bricking him up. Trask’s bones had disappeared when Julia and the others brought him back to life, but are there again now. Julia takes this to mean that he is at peace, not a condition usually associated with hanging from a ceiling in a bricked-up little space, and that Angelique/ Cassandra must therefore have been defeated once and for all. At no point does it occur to them to take Trask’s bones down and give him a more respectful resting place. Apparently they consider human remains a standard part of household decor.
Trask, Julia, and Barnabas.
Back in the great house, Julia finds evidence that Angelique/ Cassandra’s powers are still at work. Matriarch Liz is still under a spell Angelique/ Cassandra cast and believes herself to be Naomi Collins, mother of Barnabas. She believes her brother Roger to be Naomi’s husband Joshua and Julia to be houseguest the Countess DuPrés. Most alarming, Liz has all the knowledge Naomi had in the hour before her suicide. She even mentions to Roger and Julia that Barnabas is “the living dead.” Roger and Liz don’t know that Barnabas was a vampire, and Julia doesn’t want them finding out.
Julia goes back to Barnabas’ house and confers with him about the situation. Barnabas says that Roger knows more about the family history than Liz does, and that if he starts hearing the actual facts there is a great danger he will figure everything out. This is a change- previously the show had always indicated that while Liz took some interest in the Collinses of years gone by, Roger took none.
We cut back to the great house and see Liz sitting at the desk in the drawing room. She is putting a note in an envelope addressed to “Joshua.” Regular viewers saw Naomi sit at this same desk and put a note in just such an envelope in #458. As Naomi did then, Liz pours a snifter of brandy, takes a container from the desk drawer, pours a powder from the container into the brandy, then drinks it. She again follows Naomi’s lead when she goes upstairs.
Barnabas and Julia enter. Julia asks exactly what Naomi did before she died. He starts telling the story, and she finds the note. Barnabas says Naomi died in the tower room; they go there, and find Liz. She talks to Barnabas as if she were Naomi and he were her accursed son. She collapses in his arms, as Naomi did in 1796.
We open with a reprise of yesterday’s close, with mad scientist Julia Hoffman and servant Willie Loomis in the basement of the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. They hear a sobbing in the air; Julia knows it is the sound of the ghost of gracious lady Josette. Yesterday, the sobbing sounded like Kathryn Leigh Scott, who played Josette in the part of Dark Shadows set in the 1790s; today, it is a recording used in the early months of the series when a mysterious sobbing was heard coming from the basement of the great house on the estate. That sobbing was implied at that time to be Josette also, but in #272 it turned out to be matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Using the same recording for Josette, and playing it on a redress of the set used for the basement at the great house, would seem to be a way of admitting to longtime viewers that it was a mistake to resolve the Mystery of the Sobbing Woman that way.
The performer on the old recording is Florence Stanley. Stanley would become nationally famous in the 1970s as Bernice, wife of Sergeant Fish on Barney Miller and later on a spinoff series titled Fish. Fish was played by Abe Vigoda, who will later appear in a couple of episodes of Dark Shadows. I doubt very much Stanley and Vigoda ever talked with each other about their experiences on the show, but it makes me happy that they were both alums.
Abe Vigoda and Florence Stanley as Phil and Bernice Fish.
Julia figures out that recovering vampire Barnabas Collins has been bricked up behind a wall in the basement by the vengeful spirit of eighteenth century witchfinder the Rev’d Mr Trask. She orders Willie to chisel away the bricks and rescue Barnabas. Willie is confused and frightened by what Julia has told him, and resists her command. As he chips away, he is interrupted first by a strange, sudden chill and then by the feeling of a hand on his shoulder. Julia conjured Trask up at a séance held on this spot a few days ago. But she at first refuses to acknowledge that he can be a real obstacle to Willie’s compliance with her commands, so she tells Willie to “shut up!” and get back to work. When Trask becomes visible to them both, Julia has no choice but to address herself to him.
Julia tells Trask that, as a man of God, he must know that murder is wrong. This changes nothing; evidently Trask’s moral theology has evolved considerably since his physical death. Then she tells him that if he wants to correct a terrible mistake he made in life, he should forget about Barnabas and turn to the witch he hunted then, who now calls herself Cassandra Collins and lives at the great house on the estate. Again, no change. When Julia says that Cassandra is the one who ultimately caused Trask’s own misfortunes and that if he is going to take revenge on someone, it should be her, he disappears and the cold, clammy feeling of a ghostly presence goes with him. Willie gets back to work, and they get Barnabas out of his predicament in the nick of time.
In the great house, Cassandra plays a scene with Elizabeth. Cassandra has caused Elizabeth to be obsessed with death, and now causes her to believe she is one of her own collateral ancestors, Naomi Collins, who died in 1796. Cassandra leads Elizabeth to Naomi’s tomb and shows her the stone wall plates inscribed with the dates of the people buried there.
Cassandra does some more spellcasting to deepen Elizabeth’s misery and confusion. Elizabeth resists and runs out; Cassandra laughs gleefully. Her laughter stops when Trask appears to her, a torch glowing in his hand. He tells her that she is the witch, and that he has come to burn her. He commands “Burn, witch, burn!” and she bursts into flames.
The scene in the basement is great fun, as is Cassandra’s confrontation with Trask. But the parts with Cassandra and Elizabeth drag. This is the second time Elizabeth has moped around hopelessly and thought of nothing but death; the first time was a year ago, in late June and early July 1967. It was deadly dull then, and is no better now. The show simply does not know what to do with Elizabeth, and usually wastes the great talents of Joan Bennett.
There are a couple of famous production faults at the tomb. When they get there, the plate over Naomi’s casket still reads “born, 1761; died, 1821,” as it did before the show settled on the 1790s as the decisive period. When Cassandra causes Elizabeth to see the tomb as incomplete and still awaiting Naomi’s interment, the inscription is covered by a piece of cardboard painted to match the stone and clumsily pasted on it.
Dark Shadows Commentary 