julia hoffman – Page 14 – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 497: Acting like ourselves

Mrs Johnson, housekeeper in the principal mansion on the great estate of Collinwood, isn’t herself. She had a nightmare a week ago, and ever since has been plagued with a compulsion to tell its details to strange and troubled boy David Collins. She knows that if she does, David will have the same nightmare, the same compulsion to tell it to some third person, and that if he does that person will suffer the same complex. She doesn’t know that the nightmare is part of a curse sent by wicked witch Angelique, or that at the climax of the curse old world gentleman Barnabas Collins is supposed to revert to the vampirism that afflicted him from the 1790s until last month. But she does know that it is part of something horrible, and she has tried desperately to keep it from continuing.

Mrs Johnson spent a couple of days with her sister in Boston to stay far from David, but she kept having the nightmare there. She has given up, and has come back to Collinwood. She does not go straight home to the great house, but stops first at the Old House in the estate. Barnabas lives there, but it is Barnabas’ friend Julia Hoffman she sees. Julia had passed the dream to her. Julia urges Mrs Johnson not to tell David about it. She replies that she knows she should not tell him, but that she has no more choice in the matter than Julia had in telling her.

This scene will raise a question in the minds of regular viewers. Julia is a medical doctor doubly qualified in hematology and psychiatry; she also has developed a method of hypnosis so powerful that she can virtually rewrite a subject’s memory, confining even very intense recollections to the depths of the unconscious mind, sometimes after an acquaintance of only a few minutes. Why doesn’t she try to hypnotize Mrs Johnson into forgetting the dream? All she actually does is slap her and repeat her command to avoid David.

David turns up. His father has sent him to ask Julia to come to the great house at her convenience. Julia tries to manage the situation by sending Mrs Johnson home first and keeping David in the house for a while. After Mrs Johnson leaves, Barnabas’ servant Willie enters and tells Julia there is an emergency in the basement. David agrees to wait for her to come back, but once she is gone he shouts that he will be playing outside.

We follow David out the front door, and find that Mrs Johnson is there waiting for him. She comes up on him from behind and says she has something to tell him. This scene will startle regular viewers. For nineteen weeks, from #365 to #461, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the 1790s. In that period, Clarice Blackburn played repressed spinster Abigail Collins and David Henesy played Daniel Collins, heir to the Collins fortune. We first saw Daniel in #431, when his Aunt Abigail intercepted him on this very spot and scolded him for playing at the Old House. Abigail was enforcing rules and believed she was acting in Daniel’s best interests; now the same actors invert the scene, showing us Mrs Johnson doing something she knows to be wrong and harmful to David.

Mrs Johnson sneaks up on David. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, isn’t herself. Some emerald earrings mysteriously appeared in her purse the other day, and when she tried them on she got a faraway look on her face, began speaking in a voice different from her own, and a tinkling music played on the soundtrack. Today her boyfriend Joe tells her that he took the earrings and showed them to a jeweler and to the police. The jeweler valued them at $15,000* and the police said that they didn’t match the description of any jewelry that had been reported missing. Maggie was not only irked that Joe had taken the earrings without her permission, as anyone might be, but when he tries to get her to agree that such expensive things don’t just materialize out of thin air her usual level-headedness and cheerful disposition vanish and she becomes childishly defensive. Maggie does not know that Barnabas’ servant Willie placed the earrings in her purse as an attempt to reestablish the connection the two of them had when she was Barnabas’ prisoner in the Old House. As a result of Julia’s hypnosis, she does not even remember what Barnabas did to her. But after she runs Joe off, she is compelled to go to the Old House.

Again, regular viewers will recognize an echo of an earlier episode, in this case one that aired a year ago. When Maggie was Barnabas’ victim in May 1967, she snapped at Joe and drove him out of her house as she does today. Then too, she headed for Barnabas once Joe was gone.

Maggie doesn’t find Barnabas at the Old House. Instead, she sees Willie. Barnabas had framed Willie for his crimes against Maggie, and Willie was confined to the mental hospital Julia runs. Barnabas and Julia have brought him back to the Old House to help with their latest nefarious scheme. Willie had been Barnabas’ blood thrall; it is not clear to the audience just what effect it had on Willie when Barnabas’ vampirism went into remission. When we first see him today, he is playing with an unloaded rifle and grinning maniacally, reminding us of the dangerously unstable ruffian he was before Barnabas first bit him.

Maggie knocks on the door and asks Willie if she can come in. He falls over himself inviting her. He becomes the friend he tried to be to her during her imprisonment. She says she knows that he wasn’t the one who hurt her, and he is overjoyed. She seems blissful. He asks her out on a date; she says that Joe wouldn’t like it. Before Barnabas, Willie propositioned all the young women and threatened all their boyfriends, and at first this approach, like his gleeful handling of the rifle, suggests that dangerously unstable ruffian is back. He assures Maggie that he only wants friendship, but after she leaves he picks the rifle up again and says that Joe will be out of the way soon.

Maggie finds herself strangely at home. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

For her part, Maggie’s behavior does not represent a reversion to her time as Barnabas’ prisoner. Rather, the earrings seem to have done what Barnabas tried to do when he bit her, imprisoned her, and subjected her to a series of role-playing exercises. Her personality is showing signs of giving way to that of Barnabas’ lost love, gracious lady Josette. In #260, Barnabas told Maggie “You are Josette!”; in #370, we saw that he was right, inasmuch as Kathryn Leigh Scott played both characters, as Zita Johanns had played both Helen Grosvenor and Princess Ankh-Esen-Amun in the 1932 film The Mummy, from which Barnabas’ Josettification project was borrowed. The tinkling melody that plays on the soundtrack when Maggie wears the earrings is that of Josette’s music box; this could be a sign that her memory of what Barnabas did to her is coming back, since he forced her to listen to the music box for hours on end. But the voice she speaks in at those times is the voice Miss Scott used as Josette, and her blissfulness reminds us of Josette’s first scenes with her beloved Barnabas, not of Maggie’s captivity in the ghoul’s dungeon.

Back at Collinwood, Mrs Johnson watches David sleep. She tells him she is sorry for what she has done and for what he will suffer. Clarice Blackburn was always good, but she outdoes herself with this speech. It is a beautiful performance.

David has the nightmare. The first several dream sequences in the Dream Curse storyline ended with the dreamer opening a door, seeing something scary, and screaming. David’s goes a step further. There is a gigantic spider web behind the last door he opens. He not only sees it, but is tangled in it when he starts screaming. He awakes, still screaming, and Mrs Johnson holds him.

*Equivalent to $135,796.52 in 2024’s money, according to the CPI Inflation Calculator.

Episode 496: A walking dead man

In the 1790s, wicked witch Angelique turned scion Barnabas Collins into a vampire. When Barnabas realized what she had done to him, he killed Angelique.

In 1967, Barnabas was freed from a long captivity once more to prey upon the living. In 1968, Angelique also returned. Wearing a black wig and calling herself Cassandra, Angelique met sarcastic dandy Roger, ensorcelled him into marrying her, and thereby established herself as a resident of the great house of Collinwood. Wiggéd witch Angelique/ Cassandra found that Barnabas’ vampirism had gone into remission as a result of treatments he had received from mad scientist Eric Lang. She killed Lang before he could complete the process meant to make the cure permanent, but the senior mad scientist in the area, Barnabas’ friend Julia Hoffman, finished his work.

Angelique/ Cassandra and Julia know these facts about each other, but it is unclear how much Angelique/ Cassandra knows about Lang’s process. In particular, when today’s episode begins we do not know whether she has figured out that the main part of it was building a Frankenstein’s monster named Adam and trying to transfer Barnabas’ “life force” into him. Still less do we know whether Angelique/ Cassandra is aware that when Julia took over the experiment she brought Adam to life without killing Barnabas, and that as long as Adam is alive Barnabas will be free of the effects of the vampire curse.

Julia lives at Collinwood as a permanent guest. Today’s episode opens with her and Angelique/ Cassandra coming home, both smiling and chirpy, talking about an exciting conversation they had while they were out together. They had visited Angelique/ Cassandra’s former professor, Timothy Eliot Stokes. Stokes is an expert on paranormal phenomena. In #488 Barnabas told Stokes that Angelique/ Cassandra was a witch and he resolved to join Julia and Barnabas in the battle against her. Julia tells Roger that the exciting conversation she and Angelique/ Cassandra had at Stokes’ home was about the occult.

Considering what these three people know about each other, this conversation would have been fascinating to watch. Julia and Stokes want to probe for Angelique/ Cassandra’s weaknesses; she wants to make sure neither of them has any powers she doesn’t know about, to find out their plans, and if possible to bring them under her influence. Properly written and played by actors as accomplished as Grayson Hall, Lara Parker, and Thayer David, that scene might have been one of the highlights of the whole series. But it doesn’t happen. They just tell us about it in the first 30 seconds of the episode, then move on. It’s one of the major what-ifs of Dark Shadows.

Yesterday Adam escaped from the cell in the basement of Barnabas’ house where he has been confined and met several members of the family who live in the great house. They spend the day recapping that incident. Roger tells Cassandra that Adam seemed to know Barnabas, and she is all ears. It quickly becomes clear that Adam’s existence is news to her, that she is putting everything together, and that Adam is now in grave danger from her.

Angelique/ Cassandra takes in the news Roger has brought her. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 493: What horrors we commit

Recovering vampire Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman brought a Frankenstein’s monster to life the other day. They named him Adam, and are keeping him locked up in the prison cell hidden in the basement of Barnabas’ house. They leave Barnabas’ servant Willie in charge of Adam.

The first two days of the Adam story had their humorous moments as we saw Barnabas and Julia’s farcically total incompetence before the demands of parenthood. Today, Robert Rodan plays Adam as a 6’6″ newborn who is looking for affection and mental stimulation and finds only hostile people and brick walls. Rodan’s commitment to the part is so pure and his face is so expressive that he weighs us down with sorrow for a cruelly neglected child. Moreover, Dark Shadows is so high-concept right now with all of the monsters and black magic and mad science and dream sequences and so on that it is hard to see how it can take a pain that is so raw and make it meaningful for us in a way that will justify showing it.

There are just a couple of moments I want to remark on. In the cell with Adam, Willie smokes a cigarette. He blows smoke in Adam’s face, leading him to freak out, knock Willie unconscious, and flee from the cell to the grounds of the estate of Collinwood.

Outside the great house of Collinwood, Adam finds a toy to play with. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

This isn’t the first time Willie’s smoking has got him in trouble. Willie scattered cigarettes in #210, when he was trying to rob a grave in the old Collins family mausoleum. To his surprise, the coffin he opened held, not the jewels he was looking for, but Barnabas, who seized him by the throat and didn’t let him go until he had bitten and enslaved him. A few days later, in #215, Willie’s old partner in crime, seagoing con man Jason McGuire, asked Willie what he had been doing in the mausoleum. Terrified that Jason might discover Barnabas’ secret and bring the vampire’s wrath down on him, Willie denied he had been there. Jason replied that Willie had a habit of leaving cigarette butts on the edges of things. The same vice that brought Willie to the brink of disaster on that occasion has now caused Adam to panic, and Adam is clearly strong enough to kill a man with a single blow. Smoking is even more hazardous for Willie than it is for the rest of us.

In the great house of Collinwood, housekeeper Mrs Johnson is struggling with her part in “the Dream Curse.” In this curse, a person has a nightmare, is terribly distressed until they can tell a particular person about the nightmare, the person they’ve told then has the same nightmare, and the process repeats until the writers can come up with a less tedious way to fill the time on slow days. Mrs Johnson knows that it will be bad to tell the dream to the next person, and is trying not to. Julia knows all about the Dream Curse, and is herself the person who passed it on to Mrs Johnson.

Julia also has a nearly unlimited power to erase people’s memories with hypnosis, yet she doesn’t try to hypnotize Mrs Johnson into forgetting the dream. The Dream Curse is the product of a spell cast by wicked witch Angelique. Another of Angelique’s spells made Barnabas a vampire. Julia was able to hypnotize Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, into forgetting weeks and weeks of vampiric abuse Barnabas inflicted on her, and Maggie has been her old self ever since. So, if Julia can wipe away one kind of trauma arising from Angelique’s curses, why not another? It seems like it would be worth a try.

Also, Julia is in charge of a mental hospital called Windcliff. She has used Windcliff to stash Barnabas’ victims Maggie and Willie where they wouldn’t attract the attention of the authorities. Regular viewers can hardly fail to wonder why she doesn’t think to commit Adam to Windcliff. If we must have him on the show, it would be easy enough to write a couple of lines of dialogue explaining why it would be impossible to send him away. That they don’t take the trouble to do even that is an insult to the intelligence of the audience and another reason to find the Adam storyline depressing.

Episode 492: Think of a worse place

Mad scientist Julia Hoffman and recovering vampire Barnabas Collins have created a Frankenstein’s monster and named him Adam. Adam is 6’6″ and brawny, he can walk, and he seems to have some degree of understanding of speech. Still, he is only a few hours old, and he knows nothing about the world in which he finds himself. When he throws a tantrum and smashes up lab equipment, Barnabas gets a gun and prepares to shoot him to death. Julia stops him. She injects Adam with a powerful sedative and says they should take him to the basement of Barnabas’ house and lock him up in the prison cell where Barnabas sometimes confines his victims.

Returning viewers will be puzzled by this idea. Julia is in charge of a mental hospital a hundred miles away, and has twice stashed victims of Barnabas’ there and used her powers of hypnosis to mutilate their memories so that they cannot tell the authorities about him. Adam has no memories that would threaten Barnabas’ position; all he needs is care and supervision. Of course, sending him away would stop the story, so if Barnabas suggested it the writers would have to give Julia a line to explain why it wouldn’t be possible. That would be so easy to do that it is very odd they don’t bother to do it.

At one point, Julia says “We must make him trust us.” When Barnabas asks how, she admits that she doesn’t know. I suppose the first step would be to ensure that he never learns anything at all about either of them.

Meanwhile, Barnabas’ old nemesis, wicked witch Angelique, has come back to life. Wearing a black wig and calling herself Cassandra, she has married sarcastic dandy Roger Collins, establishing herself as a resident of the great house of Collinwood and as stepmother to strange and troubled boy David. The other day, David caught Angelique/ Cassandra kissing her cat’s paw Tony. Before he could tell his father what he had seen, Angelique/ Cassandra cast a spell on David leaving him unable to speak or write. Now David’s muteness has become an inconvenience to her, so she casts another spell on him, making him forget everything from the moment before he came upon her and Tony, then restoring his power of speech.

For the first several months of Dark Shadows, David had emotional problems resulting from the hostile atmosphere in which he spent the first years of his life. Roger openly hated David, and in #83 deliberately manipulated him into making an attempt on the life of well-meaning governess Vicki. David’s mother, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, was no better, trying to lure David to his death in the flames which would consume her current form and give her new life.

The only other children on the show until now were Daniel Collins, who like David was played by David Henesy and who was the object of a murder plot by his legal guardian, and Sarah Collins. Sarah was a ghost from #255 to #364, and a living being from #366 to #415. When Sarah was alive, Angelique had abused her very cruelly. Sarah’s big brother Barnabas spurned Angelique’s advances, and Angelique published him by afflicting Sarah with a grave illness. When Angelique placed the curse that made Barnabas a vampire, she declared that it would mean the death of everyone who loved him, and she should have known that as one of those who loved him most dearly Sarah would be among the first to die.

Roger and Angelique/ Cassandra, therefore, are hardly more promising as parents than are Barnabas and Julia. David and Adam might wind up in therapy together some day.

The episode ends with a dream sequence, part of the “Dream Curse” that Angelique decreed would fill time when the writers get stuck. One character after another has the same dream, each time ending with an image that is supposed to suggest some hidden fear that character has. Today’s dreamer is housekeeper Mrs Johnson. Evidently she is afraid of video inserts, because she sees a clip from an educational film about bats. It’s an interesting image, not at all in the thoroughly stagey, vaguely stately visual style director Lela Swift established for Dark Shadows.

And behind Door #3, a Zonk! Thank you for playing “Let’s Make a Nightmare,” we hope you had a good time. Screenshot by *Dark Shadows Before I Die.*

Episode 487: No homicidal tendencies

For its first 38 weeks, Dark Shadows was the story of well-meaning governess Vicki and her attempt to make her way through life on the great estate of Collinwood. One by one, Vicki’s problems were either solved or forgotten. From week 43 on, the show has focused on vampire Barnabas Collins. Barnabas has refused to involve Vicki in his life, leaving her confined to B plots at best.

The current B plot is about Vicki’s relationship with a man named Peter, who keeps trying her patience and ours by pretending to be named Jeff. Peter/ Jeff’s shouting voice, which he uses by default, makes him sound like he is suffering from severe gastrointestinal distress. He has a habit of manhandling people around him, causing them obvious discomfort. These bad habits, and several others, are less the product of the writing or direction than they are symptoms of the casting of Roger Davis as Peter/ Jeff. Alexandra Moltke Isles, like all the other actresses, is so ill at ease when she is in proximity to Mr Davis that it is impossible to believe that Vicki is in love with Peter/ Jeff.

Peter/ Jeff had been connected to the A plot through his boss, mad scientist Eric Lang. Peter/ Jeff has total amnesia. Lang released him from a mental hospital and told him that he was suspected of strangling two women by the waterfront in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. He used Peter/ Jeff as his assistant in an experiment that is supposed to free Barnabas from vampirism. Now Lang is dead, and Peter/ Jeff goes to his house to search for the file on his own background.

There, he meets Barnabas. The two of them display hostility to each other, but the scene fizzles out as it becomes clear that Barnabas has no motivation to oppose Peter/ Jeff’s goals and wouldn’t be in a position to stop him if he did. Peter/ Jeff finds a paper which proves that Lang was lying, and he is not a murderer after all. With that, he and Vicki both lose whatever reason they had to be on the show.

On his Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn summed this up memorably:

His file from the mental institution had those three magic words: “No homicidal tendencies.” As something to be proud of, that’s a pretty low bar, but he seems happy.

Unfortunately, that basically nerfs Jeff’s entire storyline. He’s not working for Dr. Lang anymore, and the secret that Lang was holding over him — the idea that he might be a murderer — has just dissolved.

This is just throwing a story point away, rather than advancing anything, and Jeff is left at a loose end. He has no job, no family, and no real connection to a story. Now he doesn’t even have homicidal tendencies. It wasn’t much, but it was all he had.

Danny Horn, “Episode 487: Precious Moments,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 24 September 2014

Peter/ Jeff goes to share this news with Vicki. It’s a tribute to Mrs Isles’ acting ability that she makes us believe Vicki is bewildered that Peter/ Jeff thought he had homicidal tendencies. Mr Davis usually seems angry enough to kill someone, as for example at various points in today’s episode when Peter/ Jeff’s joy leads him to wrap his hands around Vicki’s throat, plant a rather painful-looking kiss on her, pick her up, and point her underwear at the camera.

Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die, whose caption was “No homicidal tendencies? Are we sure about that?”

Lip-wrestling isn’t usually a combat sport. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The highlight of this episode is a scene between Julia Hoffman and Timothy Eliot Stokes. Julia is Barnabas’ best friend. She has decided to take over the experiment after the death of her fellow mad scientist Lang. Wicked witch Angelique is trying to prevent her helping Barnabas, and so Julia turns to Stokes, a sage in the ways of the occult.

Stokes is the second such character on Dark Shadows, after the ill-fated Dr Peter Guthrie. Vicki recruited Guthrie into her battle against undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins in #160 and Laura killed him in #185. We haven’t heard about Guthrie since the end of the Laura story, but the show went out of its way to remind him of us when it showed Lang’s death yesterday. Like Guthrie, Lang died as the result of an indiscreet word from housekeeper Mrs Johnson to an undead witch in the drawing room at Collinwood. Also like Guthrie, Lang is a paranormal researcher who is deeply involved with a tape recorder.

While these similarities served to remind us of Guthrie, they also reminded us of the radical differences between him and Lang. Guthrie was as sane and law-abiding as Lang is crazed and lawless. Seeing Stokes today, we recognize him as Guthrie’s successor, and wonder if his fate will be any different.

Julia is deeply troubled because of a dream she had last night. She was so very upset by it that she was up all night chain smoking.* It was no ordinary nightmare, but part of “The Dream Curse,” a piece of mental malware Angelique has sent to infect one character’s mind after another. Julia recaps the Dream Curse to Stokes while looking into a convex mirror. It’s a striking visual.

Julia recaps the Dream Curse. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

It doesn’t look good for Stokes. Angelique is a supercharged force of destruction, and Julia withholds several crucial pieces of information while recruiting him to the fight against her. Julia does not identify Angelique as the witch. She can’t tell him about Barnabas’ vampirism or about Lang’s experiment without incriminating herself in many felonies, including murder. When Vicki was recruiting Guthrie to the fight against Laura, a far less formidable adversary than Angelique, she held nothing back and ensured that her friends gave him their full support. If Stokes is going to survive, he will need more backing than Julia can offer him.

*Fans of Dark Shadows wince when they see Julia smoking; Grayson Hall had asthma.

Episode 486: Endless corridors of trial and error

Today’s cast includes a vampire, a wicked witch, two mad scientists, a Frankenstein’s monster, and an irritable housekeeper. The deadly menace turns out to be the housekeeper.

In a laboratory in a house by the sea, mad scientists Eric Lang and Julia Hoffman are trying to transfer recovering vampire Barnabas Collins’ “life force” into the body of the creature Lang has built for the purpose, a creature Barnabas has named Adam. In the drawing room of the great house atop Widow’s Hill, wicked witch Angelique disrupts that attempt by sticking a pin into a clay figure that she addresses as “Dr Lang.” It is unclear how Angelique attached the clay figure to Lang, though since it has roughly the same acting ability as Addison Powell the pairing seems natural enough.

Lang gasps for air. Julia helps both him and Barnabas. Barnabas gets up from the operating table and declares he will go to the great house and stop Angelique. Lang tries to tell Julia how to carry on his work, but keeps breaking down. While Julia is out of the room getting some heart medicine, Angelique removes the pin from the clay figure. During that moment of relief, Lang is alone in the lab. He turns on his tape recorder and says that if both Barnabas and Adam live, Barnabas will be free of the vampire curse. Adam will drain it from him, but will not suffer from its symptoms. If Adam dies, Barnabas will revert to active vampirism.

Angelique resumes tormenting Lang as Julia returns to the laboratory. Lang cannot keep his breath long enough to tell Julia his message or make it clear that she should listen to the tape. Angelique says that Lang has suffered enough for tonight, and that she will put the pin away. As she is about to do so, the door to the drawing room opens and housekeeper Mrs Johnson comes in. Mrs Johnson startles Angelique, who inadvertently drives the pin through the clay figure, killing Lang.

This is the second death to which Mrs Johnson has contributed. The two cases are very similar. She unknowingly gave undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins the information she needed to cast the spell that killed parapsychologist Dr Peter Guthrie. Guthrie resembled Lang not only in holding a terminal degree, studying the uncanny, and doing battle with an undead witch, but also in his use of a tape recorder. In #170 and #171, Guthrie recorded the audio of a séance; in #172, Laura erased the recording and replaced it with the sound of fire; and in #185, he was on his way to get his tape recorder to use at another séance when Laura cast the spell that killed him. Mrs Johnson is a menace to a very specific kind of person.

Barnabas comes to the great house and threatens Angelique, calling her by the name “Cassandra,” the alias under which she has married sarcastic dandy Roger Collins and found a place in the house. At first he says he will burn her if Lang dies. She pretends not to know what he’s talking about, and says that she will expose him as a madman. He looks at her neck and leans in, a sign that his vampire urges are coming back. The telephone rings, and Mrs Johnson enters. Angelique/ Cassandra explains their compromising position by claiming that she was fainting; with that, she shows that her threat to air her complaints is a bluff, since she could easily have demanded Mrs Johnson call the police.

Barnabas is getting thirsty. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Mrs Johnson says the call is for Barnabas. It is Julia reporting Lang’s death. Barnabas makes some grim remarks to Angelique/ Cassandra, then goes back to the laboratory and talks with Julia. She is distraught, but agrees to pick up where Lang left off.

We end with a dream sequence. Angelique has loosed a “Dream Curse” on the people of Collinsport. One after another, they have the same basic dream, in each case beginning with an appearance by the next person to have the dream beckoning them into a haunted house attraction and ending with a door opening to expose something the previous dreamers didn’t see. Julia’s dream begins with Mrs Johnson, telling us she will be the next up. It proceeds with her walking through a foggy room, including a clear shot of the fog machine. It ends with the sight of a skeleton wearing a wedding dress and the sound of Angelique’s distinctive laugh, telling us that the position Angelique has gained by marrying Roger is particularly dangerous to Julia. Since Julia lives in the same house as Angelique and they know all about each other, this is not exactly a major revelation.

Featuring a very special appearance by the fog machine. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The dream involves the beckoner’s voice reciting a little bit of doggerel. As it goes on, some beckoners say “through endless corridors by trial and error,” others say “through endless corridors of trial and error.” I prefer “of trial and error.” That implies that the corridors are themselves made up of decisions people have made and of the consequences of those decisions. Saying that the characters are moving through the corridors “by trial and error” means that the corridors exist whether anyone engages with them or not. We saw Angelique start the curse, so we know it isn’t something that has been out there in reality all along, and it expresses itself in dreams, not in anything that persists when people stop paying attention to it. Besides, the whole idea of drama is to show decisions and their consequences, so “of trial and error” is better on every front.

Episode 485: His last night on Earth as himself

Mad scientists Julia Hoffman (Grayson Hall) and Eric Lang (Addison Powell) are conferring in Lang’s lab. Lang is putting the finishing touches on a Frankenstein’s monster into which he plans to transfer the “life force” of recovering vampire Barnabas Collins. Julia, Barnabas’ best friend, has been opposed to this experiment, but now has accepted that she can’t stop Barnabas and Lang from going through with it. She volunteers to assist.

Lang is having trouble concentrating because of a nightmare he had last night. Unknown to him, the nightmare was part of the Dream Curse, a dead end storyline about wicked witch Angelique sending a dream that each of a series of people will have. When the last person has the dream, Barnabas is supposed to revert to full-on vampirism.

Lang tells Julia about his nightmare. He says that she was in it. When he tells her that she did not speak, she smiles comfortably and says that that was proof that it was a dream. This is not only a genuinely funny line as Grayson Hall delivers it, but it is an extraordinary moment of self-awareness from Julia, a character who usually exists at the outer edge of heightened melodrama. It’s a shame that Addison Powell doesn’t know how to get out of Hall’s way for the half second it would take for it really to land with the audience.

Barnabas and his ex-blood thrall Willie are at home in the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood. Willie is smirking and Barnabas is rigid with embarrassment while the dogs howl outdoors. Willie laughs a little as he makes a remark about how Barnabas hasn’t changed as much as he thought he had. This exchange reminds us of the moment in #346 when Julia and well-meaning governess Vicki noticed that some fresh flowers Barnabas touched had died and shriveled up. Like the howling of the dogs when Barnabas feels bloodlust, the shriveling of the flowers was a consequence of his vampirism, effectively a bodily function that he cannot control. He squirmed when Julia and Vicki looked at him then, and he is stiff and flustered when Willie laughs at him now.

Willie is amused by Barnabas’ incontinence. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas orders Willie to take a letter to matriarch Liz at the great house on the estate. It will explain that he is going away on a long trip, and that Adam Collins, a young cousin from England, will be coming to stay in the Old House. Willie is alarmed by this.

Willie asks what Barnabas will do if Liz won’t let him stay in the Old House when he is in the form of Adam. Barnabas is sure she will, and dismisses Willie’s doubts. This is an interesting sequence to regular viewers. The show has never made it clear whether Liz still owns the house or has signed it over to Barnabas. A whole year ago, in #223, Liz was talking to strange and troubled boy David as if the Old House and its contents were Barnabas’ legal property. Since then, there have been moments that tend to confirm that impression, as when Barnabas takes Liz’ keys to the house away from David and does not give them back to her, and other moments that conflict with it. Willie’s question and Barnabas’ response would seem to prove that the house still belongs to Liz.

Another question we might ask is why Barnabas doesn’t go to Liz himself. Certainly she will be unhappy that he went away without saying goodbye to her. Moreover, when he showed up at the great house in April 1967, Barnabas told Liz that he was the only survivor of the English branch of the family. Liz will be skeptical if another member of this imaginary branch presents himself and expects to take possession of a big mansion on her property. She has had unpleasant experiences with Willie, so much so that a letter he delivers seems unlikely to allay that skepticism.

When Willie gets to the great house, Angelique herself opens the door. She is living there under the name Cassandra. She has cast a spell on Liz’ brother, sarcastic dandy Roger, and married him so that she will have a residence at Collinwood while she works to restore Barnabas’ curse to its full potency. Showing his typical degree of strategic ability, Barnabas has not bothered to tell Willie about any of this.

Angelique/ Cassandra ushers Willie into the drawing room, sits him down, and chats with him. Willie answers her questions about Barnabas, not realizing that he has any more reason to be discreet with her than with anyone else. He tells her that Barnabas has been spending his days with Lang. Angelique/ Cassandra already knows that it was Lang who gave Barnabas the treatments that put his vampirism into remission and that Lang is preparing further treatments for him. Barnabas should know that she knows this, since she went to Lang’s house and tried to kill him. Willie also tells her that sometimes Barnabas doesn’t seem to have changed as much as you might expect. Angelique/ Cassandra’s reaction makes it clear this is new information to her, and that it might help her in her efforts.

The scene raises yet another question. Barnabas had expressed the hope that once the experiment was complete, Angelique would see that his old body was dead, would assume that meant that he no longer existed in any form, and that she would then go away and leave him alone. But he knows that she knows about Lang, and now he is planning to come back to Collinwood, where she lives, as another “cousin from England.” The question is this- how dumb does Barnabas think Angelique is?

Back in the lab, Lang and Julia are preparing for the experiment. Barnabas shows up. When he talks with the doctors, his face is reflected in the mirror above Lang’s creature. Not only does this suggest the idea of his personality moving into the creature’s body, it also reminds us that until Lang gave him his first course of treatment, Barnabas did not cast a reflection. The whole idea of Barnabas’ reflection will remind longtime viewers of #288, when Julia first confirmed her suspicion that Barnabas was a vampire by peeking at the mirror in her compact and not seeing him. That draws a contrast between Lang, whose initial success with Barnabas appears to be leading to disaster because his impersonal, hyper-masculine approach leaves him unable to recognize the threat Angelique poses, and Julia, whose own attempts to cure Barnabas of vampirism did not match Lang’s spectacular results, but whose femininity, as symbolized by the compact, represents a fighting chance against the forces that really govern this universe.

Barnabas reflected above Adam. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas takes his place on a bed. He tells Julia he is glad she is with him, and she smiles at him with the sad tenderness of someone saying a final farewell to a loved one. As with her self-deprecating joke in the opening part of the episode, this smile shows a new side of Julia. For a time in October 1967 she tried to launch a romance with Barnabas, and he rejected her. Hall played Julia’s unrequited love in the same larger-than-life style that the rest of her action called for. Her feelings seemed to be an outgrowth of despair- she was by that point so deeply entangled with Barnabas that there was little hope she could ever make a life with anyone else, so even though he was an active vampire, she had little to lose by committing herself to him. But this sweet little exchange is played so gently that it opens a window on a more complex inner life for Julia.

As Lang starts the experiment, we cut to Angelique in the drawing room at Collinwood. She is talking to a clay figure, calling it “Dr Lang,” and saying that it cannot overcome her powers, for they were a gift to her from the Devil himself. She jabs at the clay figure. In the lab, Lang writhes in pain, interrupting the experiment.

It was not until #450 that Dark Shadows let on that there might be anything to Christianity. In that episode, good witch Bathia Mapes held Barnabas at bay by showing him a cross. Up to that point, Barnabas had many times strolled comfortably through the old cemetery north of town, where half the grave markers are in the shape of the cross, and they hadn’t bothered him a bit. The only representatives of the faith who figured in the story were repressed spinster Abigail Collins and fanatical witchfinder the Rev’d Mr Trask, both of whom were fools whom Angelique easily twisted to her own purposes. Now we have a character named Adam, a New Adam through whom a resurrection is supposed to take place, and he is wearing a headpiece that is photographed to look like a crown of thorns. Angelique’s reference to the Devil suggests that she can be defeated only through the aid of a being more powerful than the Devil, and since we haven’t heard about Ahura-Mazda or any other non-Christian deities who represented a supreme principle of good pitted against an otherwise irresistible evil, it looks like we’re drifting Jesus-ward.

The New Adam, in whom all are made alive, wears his crown. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

It is daring to take that direction, even if it is only for a little bit. Vampire legends are pretty obviously an inversion of the Christian story, in which a man comes back from the dead, not having destroyed the power of death once and for all, but only to die again every time the sun rises. While Jesus feeds us with his body and blood in the Eucharist and thereby invites us to share in his eternal life, the vampire feeds himself on our blood and thereby subjects us to his endlessly repeated death. That’s why Bram Stoker’s Dracula has all those crosses and communion wafers, because it is a religious story of the triumph of the promise of resurrection in Christ over the parody of that resurrection that the vampire has settled for. It also explains why Dark Shadows so studiously avoided Christian imagery for so long. Christianity is such a powerful part of the culture that once you let any of it in, it tends to take over the whole story.

There are many reasons the makers of the show would want to avoid that fate. Not least is the tendency of religions to fracture and stories based on their teachings to become sectarian. Dracula itself is an example of that; the vampire is a Hungarian nobleman from Transylvania, connected with the Szekely clan. There really was such a clan, and like other Hungarian nobles in Transylvania its members were Calvinists, supporters of the same version of Christianity that Abigail and Trask represented. Stoker was a Roman Catholic from Ireland, a country where most Protestants are Presbyterians, a tradition that grew out of Calvinism, and so his depiction of the vampire is clearly driven by sectarian animus. The Collinses have an Irish surname, settled in New England when that region was officially Calvinist, and did very well there. So it would be easy to present their troubles as a cautionary tale about Calvinism. That would seem to be a surefire way to shrink the audience drastically. Not only are there millions of Calvinists whom it would offend, there are billions of people to whom Calvinism means nothing at all, and they would be utterly bored by a denunciation of it.

The episode is daring in several other ways as well. When Barnabas and Willie were first on the show, ABC-TV’s office of Standards and Practices kept worrying that viewers might interpret their relationship, which was founded on Barnabas’ habit of sucking on Willie and swallowing his bodily fluids, as somehow homosexual. Not only is the scene between them at the Old House reminiscent of the scenes that attracted memos from that office in the spring and summer of 1967, but the whole idea of Barnabas draining his “life force” into the body of Adam would seem to invite the same concerns.

The experiment scene would only intensify such concerns. The experiment is a medical procedure that is supposed to bring a new life into the world, which by 1968 was how Americans usually thought of the process of birth. Barnabas is the patient, he is lying down, and the doctors sedate him. Thus he takes on all the medicalized marks of a mother-to-be. Julia asked Lang if the process would be painful for Barnabas; he does not disappoint, but ends the episode screaming in response to labor pains. Not only does turning Barnabas into Adam’s mother invert the expected gender performance, but it also introduces a homosexual side to Barnabas’ relationship with Lang, who is Adam’s other parent.

Somebody ought to be there telling Barnabas he’s doing great and urging him to push. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Christian imagery and gender-nonconformity would have been rather a queasy combination for most Americans in 1968. That’s unusual, in historical terms. Before modern times, Christians didn’t hesitate to discuss ways that familiar gender roles break down in the relationship of humans to Christ. The “Fathers of the Church,” the prominent Christian intellectuals of the fourth and fifth centuries, talked about that all the time, going into depth not just with the image of the Church as the Bride of Christ but of each human soul, whether male or female, as one of Jesus’ wives, and of the physical contact between humans and Jesus in the Eucharist as a consummation of their marriage.

For their part, Calvinists tended to be skeptical of the physical aspect of the sacraments, but that didn’t mean that they shied away from conjugal metaphors to describe the relationship between the soul and Jesus. John Donne, like most priests in the Church of England in the 16th and early 17th centuries, was basically a Calvinist, yet his sonnet “Batter my heart, three-person’d God” is one of the most vivid and uncompromising statements of the ancient idea of an erotic dimension to Christian life that transcends the binaries between masculine and feminine, male and female. That tradition makes today’s conjunction of Christian and homoerotic themes all the bolder- imagine if Dark Shadows wrote itself into a corner where they had no choice but to explain nuptial imagery and mystical eroticism in the writings of Saint Ambrose. The whole audience could fit into a seminar room.

Closing Miscellany

Lang and Julia wear white lab coats. This is the first time Julia has worn a white coat. Her previous lab coat was light blue, which looks white on the black and white TV sets most households had in 1968, but now that the show is being produced in color they are buying costumes and props for color televisions.

The idea of a machine that would cause a person to go to sleep in one body and wake up in another was a big deal on TV in the 1960s. Just today I saw this screenshot from The Avengers on Tumblr:

This episode marks the first appearance of Robert Rodan. When Adam was a nameless heap of flesh under a blanket, he was played by a stand-in named Duane Morris. Rodan had a few small parts on TV shows in 1963 and 1964 and was in a couple of commercials between 1964 and 1968. Adam was his first, and last, recurring role on a series. In 1969, he appeared in a little-seen feature film called The Minx, then spent the rest of his life selling real estate in Southern California.

Episode 484: Not so much for you as for me

Recovering vampire Barnabas Collins has brought his former blood thrall Willie Loomis home to the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood. Willie had been confined to a mental hospital during the several months that have passed since Barnabas framed him for crimes he himself committed against Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. The chief of the mental hospital, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, is now Barnabas’ best friend, and he talked her into releasing Willie to him.

Today, Barnabas tells Willie he is going to send him back to the hospital for the rest of his life. Barnabas is furious that the first thing Willie did after promising not to leave the Old House without him was to sneak off and go to Maggie’s house. Barnabas found out about this when Maggie’s boyfriend Joe came to the Old House and told him about it. Joe also told Barnabas that he would kill Willie if he ever again saw him anywhere near Maggie.

Yesterday, it was impossible to tell what was going on in Willie’s mind. At one point he seemed to be in a childlike state, remembering nothing of his time with Barnabas and believing that they had been friends. When he went to Maggie he seemed to have reverted to the way he was when Barnabas was holding Maggie prisoner in the Old House and Willie was desperately trying to spare her the worst. At the end of the episode he pointed an unloaded rifle at Joe and squeezed the trigger, grinning maniacally when he heard the click. Perhaps two of those attitudes were fakes meant to cover the third, or perhaps his personality really is unstable and was fluctuating as the episode went on.

Barnabas has concluded that Willie’s childlike friendliness is a fake and that he is exactly the same as he was when he lived with him. So he gets impatient with Willie when he doesn’t seem to remember that he was a vampire. He talks to Willie as if he remembers everything. He tells him that he can go around in the daytime now, but that he is not really free of the curse yet. He persuaded Julia to release him so that he could help with an experiment that will complete the cure.

Julia enters in time to hear that, and reacts angrily. The experiment is the work of another mad scientist, Eric Lang. Julia is opposed to the experiment and had no idea Barnabas was planning to use Willie to further it. She and Barnabas stand on either side of Willie and argue. At the end of their argument, Willie says he will do whatever Barnabas and Lang say.

Lang comes to the Old House. Julia tells him that Willie was Barnabas’ victim, and says he has hidden resentments against Barnabas that will likely surface and prompt him to sabotage the experiment. This is interesting as an explanation of Willie’s visit to Maggie, which was after all one of the most self-destructive things he could possibly have done. However much damage Willie did to himself by going to Maggie’s house, he also subjected Barnabas to considerable embarrassment and inconvenience. So maybe Willie’s puzzling behavior yesterday was the result of a neurotic complex, unconscious hostilities towards Barnabas combined with feelings of guilt that drove him to actions he himself couldn’t have explained. On this interpretation, Barnabas is accidentally functioning as Willie’s therapist. By modeling the conversations they used to have when Barnabas was a vampire and Willie was his blood thrall, Barnabas is helping Willie recover his memory.

The rest of the episode is taken up with a dead end story called the Dream Curse. This consists of frequent repetitions of an acting exercise that gives each cast member an opportunity to show what they can do when they don’t have many lines and just have to emote. Unfortunately, this time it is Lang’s turn to run through the exercise, and Addison Powell’s abilities as an actor were severely limited. He’s pretty nearly unbearable.

There are two things going on while Powell is shouting and stumbling around that I want to mention. Julia appears to him at the beginning of the sequence, and she makes a series of delightful little balletic movements with her arms. There is no apparent reason in the story for her to turn into a ballerina, but those movements are more worth watching than anything we’ve seen from
Powell.

At the end of the sequence, Lang opens a door and is greeted by a headless body with a turtleneck sweater. The men in the segments of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s all wear either neckties or turtlenecks, and lately the turtlenecks have been getting ever more prominent. I suppose it was just a matter of time before a character appeared whose turtleneck replaced his head altogether.

Not sure what this guy’s deal will turn out to be, but he’s already more appealing than Lang.

Episode 483: The three faces of Willie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Episode 481: Every time, it will be the same story

Dr Julia Hoffman is in the front parlor of the house of her fellow mad scientist, Eric Lang. She is on the telephone, asking the operator to connect her with the police. Even though she has lived in the Collinsport area for months now, she is still surprised that the sheriff’s office doesn’t have an emergency number.

Julia locked the door to the parlor; Lang is outside it with a gun, and recovering vampire Barnabas Collins is knocking and calling her name. They want to stop her reporting to the police that Lang is building a Frankenstein’s monster with body parts retrieved from the cemetery, and that he was planning to cut a living man’s head off to use as the last piece of the creature. Lang plans to bring the body to life by draining Barnabas’ “life-force” into it. Barnabas hopes this will free him of the vampire curse once and for all, and is desperate to complete the experiment.

Barnabas shouts that Julia should remember “someone.” When he can’t come up with the name, Lang prompts him with a yell of “Dave Woodard!” Barnabas and Julia killed local physician Dave Woodard in #341; Julia hangs up the phone, realizing that if the operator ever does manage to find a police officer any investigation of Lang would likely expose her as a murderer.

Barnabas has told Lang a great deal about himself. For example, in #467, Lang was the first person Barnabas told that his vampirism was the result of a curse placed on him by wicked witch Angelique. So returning viewers can believe that Barnabas might have confided in Lang about the murder of Dr Woodard. But it would be strange for him to have done so off-screen. And just Friday, Barnabas explained to Lang that the reason he thinks Julia can be trusted with the secret of the experiment is that she has a crush on him.* He hasn’t had much time to share more information with Lang since then, and if Lang had already known that Julia couldn’t call the cops without exposing herself to a murder charge Barnabas wouldn’t have needed to mention her crush on him. The likeliest explanation is that the loud and clear exclamation of “Dave Woodard!” is not Lang prompting Barnabas at all; rather, it was Addison Powell prompting Jonathan Frid. The result is a blooper that seriously confuses the relationships among Lang, Barnabas, and Julia. It’s early enough in the episode that it really is odd they didn’t stop tape and start over.

At any rate, they never mention Woodard again. He was introduced early in the vampire storyline. He was the counterpart to Dr John Seward, the physician in Dracula who realizes that all the patients who are suddenly showing up with puncture wounds on their necks and massive blood loss need care he is not trained to provide, and calls in his old med professor, Dr Van Helsing. Julia was the Van Helsing analogue, but she wound up siding with the vampire and killing her onetime friend. It is appropriate that the last reference to Woodard comes in this, the second episode of Dark Shadows with no cast members introduced before Barnabas. From now on, the daylight world Woodard represented and tried to restore is no longer present even as a memory.

Julia lets Barnabas and Lang into the parlor, and asks Lang to promise that he won’t kill anyone. He gives such a promise. She is unconvinced, but agrees not to call the police. She also tells Lang she will continue to oppose the experiment.

On the terrace of the great house of Collinwood, Barnabas and Julia talk about Lang’s experiment. Angelique, wearing a black wig and calling herself Cassandra, lives in the house as the wife of sarcastic dandy Roger, and the terrace is surrounded by trees, fences, and other prime screens for eavesdroppers. Barnabas and Julia know this well, as each of them has eavesdropped on important conversations here themselves.

Of course Angelique/ Cassandra comes by and hears everything. Barnabas does catch her, grab her, call her by her right name, and vow that she won’t stop him. After he lets her go, he moans to Julia that it was foolish of them to discuss their plans there. That underlines the foolishness of an idea key to the plan, that after Lang’s creature has been animated Angelique will never realize that Barnabas is dwelling within it and place a fresh curse on it. Barnabas assumes that Angelique, who has transcended time itself to pursue him, will just give up and go away once she sees that his original body is dead, and won’t have any questions about the new guy living at his doctor’s house.

Angelique summons her new cat’s paw, lawyer Tony Peterson. Jerry Lacy plays Tony. From #365 to #461, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the 1790s. In that phase of the show, Mr Lacy played the Rev’d Mr Trask, a fanatical witchfinder who inadvertently gave Angelique a great deal of assistance in her campaign to destroy the Collins family and those close to them. Most of the characters in the 1790s segment represent a commentary of some kind on the characters the same actors play in the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s. Tony and Trask have seemed to be an exception. In 1967, Tony was introduced through his profession and served mainly as an instance of Mr Lacy’s famous Humphrey Bogart imitation. Trask did end up functioning as a lawyer in a witchcraft trial, and his lunatic shouting about “THE ALMIGHTY!!” and “THE DE-VILLLL!!!!” were occasionally suggestive of what Bogart might have ended up doing if Captain Queeg’s testimony before the court-martial in The Caine Mutiny had gone on for nineteen weeks. Otherwise, there didn’t seem to be any fruitful points of comparison between the two.

Angelique tells Tony that the reason she chose him as her servant was that he reminded her of Trask. She orders him to go to Lang’s and steal a talisman that can guard against witches. At that, Tony shouts “Against you!,” and he sounds very much like Trask. Perhaps we are to think that a secular education and a steady diet of Hollywood movies could have turned the farcically warped Trask into a basically reasonable fellow like Tony, but that there is no strength in those things to stand up to a force like Angelique.

Angelique zaps Tony. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The talisman was a gift to Lang from Barnabas. Lang refuses to keep it on his person, even though it saved his life to clutch it when Angelique was making his heart beat so fast it was about to burst. Lang shows up at Barnabas’ house, under the false impression he received a telephone call from Barnabas. Barnabas, who has no telephone in his house, explains to Lang that Angelique has lured him away. When he learns that Lang has left the talisman in his desk drawer at home, he insists on accompanying him back there.

It is too late. Tony has already stolen the talisman and delivered it to Angelique. She looks at it and says that Lang will not be able to save either Barnabas or himself. Presumably, not even by reminding him of his lines.

*My wife, Mrs Acilius, pointed this out.