No episode of Dark Shadows debuted on ABC-TV 56 years ago today, since that was Christmas Day. So in place of an episode commentary, I’ll share a link to Smartphone Theatre’s 2022 production of “The Gift of the Magi,” starring Kathryn Leigh Scott and David Selby.
Tag: kathryn leigh scott
Episode 633/634: Now was the moment, or never at all
Suave warlock Nicholas has had bad news. His boss, Satan, will be recalling him to Hell, and does not plan to send him out to the world of the living again. Satan gave Nicholas two tasks to complete before his time runs out. He is to perform a Black Mass during which he will sacrifice Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town, and afterward take her to Hell with him as his bride. He is also to complete the project he has been working on, forcing mad scientist Julia and old world gentleman Barnabas to resurrect Eve, the mate of Frankenstein’s monster Adam. Yesterday, we saw that Nicholas plans to make Barnabas and Julia use Maggie as the donor of the “life force” that will bring the mate back to life. It was entirely unclear how Maggie could both be sacrificed on Nicholas’ altar and used as the “life force.”
We open today with a reprise of yesterday’s closing sequence, showing Nicholas performing a rite while Maggie lies on his altar. We then cut to the basement of Barnabas’ house, where Eve’s body lies on a bed in a laboratory full of mad science equipment. Barnabas vows to Julia that this is the last time they will ever go through the vivification procedure; she asks “What’s the point of saying that? We’re at Nicholas’ mercy.” The other day, Barnabas confronted Nicholas with some demands, threatening to stop cooperating with his project unless he complied. Nicholas gave some ground in response, suggesting there might yet be some dramatic tension left in his relationship with Barnabas and Julia. But when Julia sounds this note of total defeat she is telling us that their conflict with Nicholas is exhausted, that the Frankenstein story has nowhere to go, and that Barnabas is therefore right and this is the last time we will see them run the experiment.
Julia looks at the body and expresses sympathy for “poor motherless Eve.” “There’s a poem about that,” she says. Indeed there is, and it is an apt reference here. Nicholas’ attachment to the ingenuous Maggie has always been jarringly out of character for him; Ralph Hodgson’s 1913 poem “Eve,” with its juxtaposition of the innocent Eve with the crafty serpent, not only tells a story that is as broadly melodramatic as any episode of Dark Shadows, but also dwells on the incongruity of Eve and the serpent, the sheer strangeness of the fact that they coexist at all. “Here was the strangest pair/ In the world anywhere.”
Yesterday we caught our first glimpse in a long time of a character who, like Maggie, was introduced in the first episode. He was Mr Wells, the innkeeper. Maggie has been with us through all of the show’s transformations, but we hadn’t seen Mr Wells since #61, when Dark Shadows was all about what went on among people while they were drinking coffee together. Seeing him again puts that 1966 show side by side with this dramatization of “The Monster Mash,” and that contrast is as jolting as anything Hodgson manages.
Visitors let themselves into the lab. First comes Nicholas. He is trying to seem cheerful. He comes down the stairs with a bounce in his step and greets Julia and Barnabas with a jokey “Why are my conspirators so reluctant?” He might be trying to evoke the same unholy jollity that we see at the end of Hodgson’s poem, “Picture the lewd delight/ Under the hill tonight/ ‘Eva!’- the toast goes round-/ ‘Eva’ again.” But the imminent prospect of his return to Hell has Nicholas in no jolly mood, and his mask of good cheer falls away the moment Barnabas complains of his untrustworthiness.
It is true that Barnabas’ complaint strikes Nicholas at a most sensitive spot. He tells him that “You seem to specialize in second chances” and gripes that he revived vampire Tom Jennings and left him to do the dirty work of ensuring Tom would never rise again. Giving second chances was the very habit for which Satan reproved Nicholas in #629 when he told him he would soon be returning to Hell. Stung by the echo of his master’s words in Barnabas’ mouth, Nicholas retorts that destroying a vampire must have been “traumatic” for Barnabas, who was until recently a vampire himself. Because of some magical business, Barnabas will revert to that condition if Adam dies, and it is Nicholas’ threat to kill Adam that has compelled him and Julia to assist in his diabolical plan. Having reminded Barnabas and Julia of the source of his power over them, Nicholas composes himself, agrees with Julia that there is no time for quarrels, and leaves the room.
A moment later, Adam enters. Adam hates Barnabas and Julia, believes that Nicholas is his friend, and looks forward to Eve’s resurrection. Barnabas tells Adam he doesn’t want him there, but Nicholas enters with the command “He stays, Mr Collins.” A third visitor follows and shocks Julia and Barnabas even more deeply. It is Maggie.
The rite on the altar dedicated Maggie to Satan, but it did not involve her death. When Julia and Barnabas see that Nicholas has brought Maggie, they declare that they will not go ahead with the procedure. But Maggie declares that she is there of her own free will. Quite calmly, she looks around the laboratory in Barnabas’ basement, and says “I’ve been here so often.” Indeed she has- in May and June of 1967, Barnabas was still a vampire, Maggie was his victim, and he kept her imprisoned in a cell here. Julia used her extraordinary hypnotic abilities to make Maggie forget her ordeal, but this line suggests that she now remembers what Barnabas did to her, and that she is, terrifyingly enough, happy about it.
When Maggie was Barnabas’ prisoner, he was trying to erase her personality and replace it with that of his lost love Josette. Later, the show took us back in time to the year 1795, where we saw Josette when she was alive and realized that she wasn’t on board with Barnabas’ plans then any more than Maggie was in 1967. But it looks like Nicholas has succeeded where Barnabas failed and remade Maggie as a companion fit for a demon. Barnabas is already miserable at being forced to toil in Satan’s cause, and now he goes nuts with jealousy.
Barnabas loudly protests that he will not be a party to the experiment. Nicholas silences him by causing Adam’s heart to beat dangerously fast. Their magic bond gives Adam and Barnabas the connection Alexandre Dumas’ Corsican Brothers had, so that Barnabas also suffers the pain. Julia was originally introduced as Maggie’s doctor, but she long ago betrayed her patient for Barnabas’ sake. She pleads with Maggie to stop Nicholas, but Maggie just smiles and asks “Why should I?” Julia tells her that otherwise Nicholas will kill both Adam and Barnabas. Perfectly relaxed, Maggie responds “Then you stop him. Do what he wants.” Julia capitulates, saying “We’ll use her.”
This glimpse of Evil Maggie is breathtaking for longtime viewers. In #1, Maggie premiered as a wisecracking waitress who was, in the words of the original series bible, “everybody’s pal and nobody’s friend.” Soon, we saw her with her father Sam, the town drunk, and she emerged very clearly as a classic Adult Child of an Alcoholic (ACoA.) In #20, Maggie left behind the short blonde wig she had worn in her first appearances, and from then on she was The Nicest Girl in Town.
When Barnabas first bit Maggie, she went through the phases the vampire’s victim usually experiences, including snappishness towards her loved ones when they try to get between her and the ghoul on whom she is becoming dependent. During her time in Barnabas’ house, her level-headedness and warm-heartedness reasserted themselves, and even when she was in the mental hospital as a psychological wreck after escaping from him she was never far from a display of kindliness. In the eighteenth century flashback, Kathryn Leigh Scott took on the part of Josette. Josette was so unfailingly virtuous that not even Miss Scott could find a way to make her interesting. This brief moment of a Maggie utterly indifferent to the value of human life, even her own, is such an extreme departure that we can immediately see a world of possibilities opening up for her as a character and for Miss Scott as a performer.
Maggie is strapped to a table and Julia and Barnabas get to work. We have seen the procedure often enough that it is far from fresh, but in-universe it is still highly experimental. The equipment doesn’t work as Julia and Barnabas expected; gauges indicate higher readings than they want, and the adjustments that are supposed to bring them down just make them go even higher.
Maggie cries out that she is dying; Eve barely moves. The readings get even worse; Barnabas shuts the apparatus down. Nicholas tries to cast a spell to immobilize Barnabas; he struggles against Nicholas’ power at first, but still smashes the equipment, and soon is free of the spell altogether. Nicholas calls out to his master and pleads “Don’t desert me now!” His powers gone, he runs to Adam and starts trying to choke him, but Adam brushes him aside easily. Nicholas runs away; Barnabas runs after him, saying that he will take the opportunity to kill Nicholas.
Adam is shocked that Nicholas attacked him. He and Julia find that nothing is left of Eve’s body but a skeleton with a wig. Adam sobs, declaring that now he has no one. Adam decides that Barnabas is to blame for Eve’s destruction. He goes upstairs, tells himself that Barnabas “doesn’t deserve to love,” then leaves the house. Later, we see him in the great house of Collinwood. Regular viewers know that Adam has in the past thought of punishing Barnabas by murdering well-meaning governess Vicki, in whom Barnabas does not actually take much interest but whom he frequently claims to love. So we can expect that Friday’s episode will involve some apparent danger to Vicki.
Julia is too busy with Maggie to take any notice of Adam’s doings. The last time Julia ran the experiment, the “life force” donor died. Julia is frightened when she cannot get Maggie to respond to any stimulus. She gives her a shot, and Maggie opens her eyes.
Longtime viewers wonder what Maggie will be like now. If Satan has lost interest in Nicholas, it seems unlikely that the heartless Maggie of a moment ago will stick around. If she returns to her usual sensibilities with her memories of Barnabas’ crimes restored, the show will no longer be able to use the sets representing the houses at Collinwood since Dark Shadows will become a prison drama about the activities of Barnabas and Julia on their respective cell blocks. If she just snaps back to the way she was before she got involved with Nicholas, it will feel like a cheat.
What they actually choose to do is to give Maggie total amnesia. She does not recognize her own name or Nicholas’, refuses to believe she has ever met Julia, and has no idea where she is. Julia tries desperately to reactivate Maggie’s memory. She takes her up to Barnabas’ living room. In a moment longtime viewers will find impossible to believe, Julia takes a music box and plays it for Maggie. She tells her that it once belonged to Josette and that Maggie has heard it many times. Indeed she has- Barnabas forced her to listen to it incessantly during the weeks when he was trying to Josettify her. Julia, who has gone to such great lengths to bury Maggie’s memory of what Barnabas did to her, is now trying to dislodge her recollection of his very worst crimes. When Maggie does not remember the music box, Julia takes her up to Josette’s bedroom, where Barnabas kept her for much of her time as his prisoner. It is simply impossible to imagine what Julia could be thinking at this point.
Meanwhile, Barnabas is skulking in the foliage near the peak of Widow’s Hill. He is eavesdropping on Nicholas, who is pleading with Satan to give him another week to get the Frankenstein project back on track. He dissolves into a process shot depicting flames, and Barnabas smiles the most evil grin anyone has ever managed.
Even though poor motherless Eve is on screen for only a minute or two, doesn’t open her eyes, has no lines, and moves only a couple of fingers and those just barely, they brought Marie Wallace back to play her. That was $333 well spent. Miss Wallace’s presence on screen convinces us that Eve is really dead and that she will not be back. Combined with Maggie’s amnesia, that leaves Nicholas without any connection to an unresolved storyline. The only former underling of his still at large is witch-turned-vampire Angelique, and she had broken from him decisively a couple of weeks ago. When he vanishes, we can accept it as a line drawn under the part of the show in which he was the principal villain.
Eve’s decomposition and Nicholas’ damnation are not the only departures today. This was the final episode directed by John Walter Sullivan. As “Jack Sullivan,” he was credited as an associate director on a great many episodes, from #15 to #549. When John Sedwick left the show in the summer of 1968, Sullivan took over his share of the directing duties, alternating with Lela Swift. He directed a dozen episodes as “Jack Sullivan,” from #504 to #580. He then took the name “Sean Dhu Sullivan,” and directed 50 more. Sullivan was not as accomplished a visual artist as either Swift or Sedwick, and the camera operators had more trouble keeping his episodes in focus than they did either Swift’s or Sedwick’s. But his scenes were never any more confusing than you would have expected, considering the ridiculously convoluted stories the scripts gave him to work with, and he seems to have been as good a director of actors as either of them. The period when he was helming segments happened to be the one when the show had its most explicitly Christian elements, which you might say made him a Sean Dhu for the Goyim,* but I doubt he had anything to do with that.
*This is my only chance to make this joke, please just let me have it.
Episode 598: I thought you might be looking for Adam
Occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes is searching the room in the long-deserted west wing of the great house of Collinwood where heiress Carolyn has been hiding Frankenstein’s monster Adam since #539 in July. Strange and troubled boy David Collins saunters into the room and greets him with a casual “Hello, professor.” When a flustered Stokes makes up a story about Carolyn sending him to the room to look for some old books, David calmly replies, “Oh, I thought you might be looking for Adam.”
We haven’t seen David since #541. The only time we saw him interact with Adam was when they crossed paths in the woods in #495, and in none of the countless scenes featuring Adam cooped up in this dusty little room has David been mentioned. Yet today he tells Stokes that he visited Adam there many times, and that the two of them became great friends. I take that to mean that Ron Sproat, writer of today’s script, wanted to show us a lot of conversations between David and Adam and was overruled by the producers. It’s a major disappointment Sproat didn’t get his way. David Henesy and Robert Rodan would have been a wonderful pairing. David Collins tells Stokes that Adam told him last night that he would be leaving Collinwood before morning, and that he would never return.
Carolyn enters the room and tells David to go. He eavesdrops on her conversation with Stokes. He hears Stokes acknowledge that he is in the room without her permission, confirming that he was lying when he claimed Carolyn sent him there. He stays long enough to hear that Stokes is anxious to find Adam because he is afraid he is in danger. He goes off to look for the big guy.
During Carolyn’s conversation with Stokes, it becomes clear that she does not remember the events of the previous night. Since that night stretched over 13 episodes, that is quite a gap. During it, a mate was created for Adam; Carolyn participated in the first attempt at that procedure as the donor of the “life force.” She did that under the influence of suave warlock Nicholas Blair; Nicholas later enlisted her in another task, after which he erased her memory. Perhaps she forgot everything she did while his spell was upon her. That would explain why she doesn’t remember anything about Adam’s mate or about his passionate goodbye kiss. The show was so much more interesting during the little interval when Carolyn knew what was going on that it is almost as big a disappointment to learn of this mind-wipe as it is to hear that we were denied a chance to see a friendship develop between David and Adam.
David goes to Eagle Hill cemetery to look for Adam. He sees Willie Loomis, bedraggled servant of David’s distant cousin Barnabas Collins, emerge from the old Collins family mausoleum. David hides behind a tombstone until Willie is gone.
David wonders what Willie was doing in the mausoleum. He goes inside, and decides to open the panel to the hidden chamber. There, he finds Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, bound and gagged. He calls her by name, and we cut to commercial.
This situation will be familiar to longtime viewers. In #124, David found his governess, the well-meaning Vicki Winters, bound and gagged in a secret room in the Old House on the estate. That time, he panicked and left Vicki still restrained.
After the commercial break, we spend some time with Willie and Stokes in the Old House, where Barnabas now lives. Thayer David plays Stokes. In #124, he played Matthew Morgan, the crazed handyman who was holding Vicki prisoner. Seeing him in this house with Willie at this point in the episode ensures that those of us who saw it will remember #124 and wonder how David’s response to the situation with Maggie will compare to his failure to help Vicki.
Willie then goes back to the mausoleum and finds David sitting on one of the coffins in the publicly known part. He asks David what he is doing there. David answers in a roundabout way. We start to wonder if he may have reverted to his old form and left Maggie where she was. But he eventually gets around to describing how Maggie behaved when he was untying her. Willie is terribly upset to find that Maggie is gone.
Willie abducted Maggie and locked her up in the mausoleum because Barnabas and mad scientist Julia Hoffman were planning to impose the role of “life force” donor on her. While there, she remembered that in May and June of 1967 Barnabas was a vampire who fed on her, imprisoned her, tried to replace her personality with that of his lost love Josette, and tortured her when she resisted. Willie doesn’t see any way to let her out when she has information like that. In the middle of today’s episode, Kathryn Leigh Scott and John Karlen have a big scene in the mausoleum as Maggie defies Willie and he begs her to be nice to him. They do an excellent job, but it is quite a relief to be out of that dungeon.
Episode 589: He wants it to happen all over again
A terrible script, full of repetitious language and recycled story points, but each member of the cast is in top form. They almost make it feel like we haven’t seen all of this before.
In May and June of 1967, vampire Barnabas Collins imprisoned Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, and tried to brainwash her into thinking she was his his lost love, the gracious Josette. After Maggie escaped from Barnabas, she was in a state of total mental collapse for several weeks. By the time her memory came back in August, Maggie’s psychiatrist, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, had become Barnabas’ accomplice. Julia has a preternatural power of hypnosis, and she used it to block Maggie’s memories before she could expose Barnabas.
Now, Barnabas and Julia are conducting an experiment to build a female Frankenstein’s monster. Once constructed, the new woman is to be the mate to patchwork man Adam. They need an existing woman to donate her “life force” to animate their creation. They were planning to use Maggie. Barnabas’ servant Willie has a crush on Maggie, so when he learned of their intentions he abducted Maggie before they could get at her.
Willie stashed Maggie in the hidden chamber of the old Collins family mausoleum. As it turns out, Barnabas had taken Maggie there to torture her when she was his prisoner, so when she found herself in that setting her memories came back. Maggie made that clear at the end of yesterday’s episode; she and Willie spend most of today’s talking it over. Kathryn Leigh Scott plays Maggie’s horror and John Karlen plays Willie’s panic with admirable intensity.
Barnabas is visiting the great house of Collinwood when his distant cousin Roger tells him that heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard has left the house to spend several days in Boston. Adam is threatening to kill various people unless the experiment is completed soon and Carolyn donates the life force, so Barnabas is alarmed by this news.
Barnabas goes home to the Old House on the estate. He finds Carolyn waiting for him there. She tells him she knows all about the experiment and is eager to serve as the donor. Barnabas is bewildered by her enthusiasm. As Carolyn, Nancy Barrett plays this scene with such gusto that she is electrifying to watch. When Barnabas finds her standing in his front parlor looking at him with total self-assurance the show has what is, as far as I am concerned, its sexiest moment so far.
Episode 584: Terribly familiar
Recovering vampire Barnabas and mad scientist Julia are under pressure to create a female Frankenstein’s monster. The process they are using requires draining the “life force” from a woman into a constructed corpse. The other day, Barnabas announced they would force the role of donor onto Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town and one of his former victims. When Barnabas’ servant Willie heard of this plan, he was horrified. Willie has a crush on Maggie, and is determined to spare her this fate.
Now, Willie has abducted Maggie and is hiding her from Barnabas and Julia. Barnabas is worried about what will happen if they cannot find another woman to use in the experiment. Julia says “If worse came to worst, I could do it.” Barnabas points out that only she is prepared to operate the equipment, and that she could not do that if she were serving as donor. She makes a feeble suggestion that their onetime lab tech, an unpleasant man named Peter who prefers to be called Jeff, might run the equipment. Barnabas says that Peter/ Jeff does not have her training. In any case, Barnabas had to fire Peter/ Jeff because he had reason to believe he was trying to sabotage the experiment, so he can scarcely trust him now.
This is not the first time Julia has offered to solve a problem by destroying herself, only for Barnabas to turn her down. In #350, when Barnabas was still a vampire and was desperately thirsty for blood, Julia volunteered herself as his victim. Barnabas was sufficiently moved to address her for the first time as “Julia” rather than with a distinctly contemptuous pronunciation of the title “Doctor,” but he still said the reason he was refusing was that he had use for her medical expertise. Barnabas’ cruel plan for Maggie suggested that he isn’t really any nicer now than he was as a vampire; this echo of that moment would suggest that he hasn’t even stopped seeing Julia, who after all loves him, as a kind of higher servant.
Willie has taken Maggie to the hidden chamber inside the old Collins family mausoleum. It was in this chamber that Barnabas was trapped in his coffin from 1796 until Willie inadvertently freed him to prey upon the living in #210. When she was his prisoner in #248, Barnabas took Maggie to that chamber and shut her up in the coffin there. While Willie tries to assure Maggie that she will be safe as long as she is with him, the memories that Julia used her preternatural powers of hypnosis to erase start coming back.
We see a flashback, not to Maggie’s time at Barnabas’ mercy, but to #283, when she was Julia’s patient at Windcliff Sanitarium. Julia took her on a trip to the old cemetery north of Collinsport, and they went into the mausoleum. Julia did not know about the hidden chamber, and did not understand why Maggie became upset when they were in the publicly known part of the mausoleum. Maggie remembers visiting the mausoleum with Julia, and cannot remember why it frightened her to be there. But the fact that she recognizes the chamber as part of the mausoleum means that her memory of what Barnabas did to her is coming loose.
This creates a truly suspenseful situation. Maggie is an audience favorite with connections to several other characters, and so it seemed unlikely anything Barnabas and Julia did would result in her leaving the show. But if she remembers what they did to her and tells the police about it, they will go to prison. Since Barnabas and Julia are the source of all the action on Dark Shadows, that would mean the end of the series. So her memory coming back sets up a crisis that might be resolved with a significant change.
Perhaps Barnabas and Julia will force Maggie to donate her “life force” with the consequence that her body dies and she wakes up in the newly created woman, who just so happens to look exactly like her but to have a drastically different personality. That seems plausible, since the long-running storyline of her romance with hardworking young fisherman Joe seems to be over, the minor theme of her relationship with her hard-drinking father Sam had been resolved long before Sam died a few months ago, and we have reason to expect her to move out of her house, which has long served as our window into the working class of Collinsport. If Maggie is running out of story, they may very well decide to keep Kathryn Leigh Scott on as another character.
Closing Miscellany
The flashback is not made of tape cut from #283. It couldn’t be- the show was in black and white then, and is in color now. So they recreate it. It’s kind of adorable to see Julia in her old wig.
This was not the episode they intended to shoot. It was the dress rehearsal. Shooting the flashback scene put them so far behind schedule they didn’t have time to do the episode, and they had to send this footage to the network. I believe that is the only occasion they ever resorted to that desperate expedient. The camera is out of focus much of the time and occasionally does not seem to be pointed in the right direction, the microphones are misplaced so that it sounds at one point like Julia is referring to Maggie as “Greg,” booms and other equipment intrude into the shots, and the actors frequently blow their lines. In other words, it is in no way different from any other episodes.
Episode 572: Anyplace else
The Evans Cottage
Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, was under the influence of vampire Barnabas Collins in May and June of 1967. At the beginning of that period, she spent her days sick in bed at home, and at night regained strength and insisted on going out. When her father Sam and her boyfriend Joe tried to keep Maggie in, her adorable personality vanished and she raged at them.
Maggie eventually escaped from Barnabas, and mad scientist Julia Hoffman erased her memory of the ordeal. Since then, Barnabas’ vampirism has gone into remission. Julia has taken up residence at the great house of Collinwood and has become Barnabas’ fast friend.
Julia drops in at Maggie’s house today. Maggie says she is worried about Joe. He has been standing her up for dates, hasn’t reported for work for three days, and won’t answer his phone.
After Julia leaves, Joe comes in through the back door. He is pale, sweaty, and wild-eyed, obviously ill. He faints for a second. Maggie goes to call a doctor. Joe protests against this idea, almost shrieking, and Maggie relents. He asks her to keep him in the house overnight no matter what he says or does; this is very much the sort of thing Maggie used to say when she was falling under Barnabas’ power. Also like Maggie in those days, minutes later Joe announces that he will be leaving the house and that Maggie has no right to keep him from going. Maggie tries to block the door; Joe grabs her, flings her aside violently, and rushes out.
Kathryn Leigh Scott and Joel Crothers do an excellent job with this last bit of business. Yesterday and the day before, there was a fight scene that was so poorly done I couldn’t get a screenshot that didn’t look like a joke. But the choreography is perfect here. The actors really make it look like Joe is throwing Maggie to the floor, and in her closeup at the end of the sequence Miss Scott convinces us Maggie is hurt.
The similarity between Maggie’s behavior in May 1967 and Joe’s now is no coincidence. He is the victim of Angelique, formerly a wicked witch, now a vampire under the control of suave warlock Nicholas Blair.
After he had asked Maggie to keep him in the house no matter what he said and before he told her he was going to leave no matter what she did, Joe talked to her about going away from Collinsport, far away, going anywhere at all, anywhere from which they would never come back. It’s a poignant moment. Once there were other places for Joe and Maggie, and once there were ways to go there. When art dealer Portia Fitzsimmons called on Sam in this room in #193, Dark Shadows had run out of story. For all we knew, Sam might have gone to New York and taken Maggie and Joe with him, and the show might have reinvented itself to follow them there. But Sam is dead now, Mrs Fitzsimmons is long forgotten, and outside Collinsport there is nothing but a mental hospital. Even Hell seems to be located in a corner of Barnabas’ basement, and Purgatory in the woods outside.
The House by the Sea
Nicholas lives in a house by the sea. Collinsport is a fishing village, so a lot of its people probably live in houses by the sea, but there are two that we have heard referred to as “The House by the Sea,” and this is the second of them.
Barnabas and Julia know that there is a vampire on the loose and are pretty sure that Nicholas is to blame for that fact. Maggie mentioned to Julia that Nicholas will be coming to her house at 5 PM to buy a painting, and so Julia suggests to Barnabas that they go to Nicholas’ at that time and search.
They find the door unlocked. The green screen behind them has an image that makes it look as if the house is floating in the sky. Maggie’s house has always been the place the show has taken us when it wanted to give us a feeling of realistic kitchen sink drama; the effect of this background outside Nicholas’ front door is to tell us that we are leaving that world behind and entering an exotic, paranormal space.
As they enter, Julia has second thoughts about trespassing. Now it is Barnabas’ turn to insist they probe forward.
They split up. Barnabas runs into Joe. The two men ask each other what they are doing there, and each tells a lie about having business with Nicholas. They then take turns ordering each other out of the house. We end with a view of Angelique’s coffin, its lid opening.
Episode 563: A kind of magician
Beverly Hope Atkinson
This episode features the first appearance on Dark Shadows by an actor of color, and the only speaking part any non-White performer ever had. (CORRECTION: Mr Nakamura, played by Sho Onodera in #903, has a couple of lines.) This fact is made even more depressing because that performer fits so perfectly into the show that a first time viewer would assume she had been a major player from episode #1.
Beverly Hope Atkinson plays an unnamed nurse who meets suave warlock Nicholas Blair when he is trying to make his way into a hospital room occupied by Tom Jennings, a victim of one of Nicholas’ evil schemes. She firmly refuses him admittance. When Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, enters and asks to see Tom, the unnamed nurse smiles brightly and says “Of course, Maggie!” in a tone that makes it sound like they’ve been friends all their lives. She then shuts the door before Nicholas can follow. He asks her why Maggie can go in and he cannot, and she tells him sternly that Maggie has permission from the doctor.
I have a fanfic idea about Atkinson’s nurse that I originally posted as a comment on Danny Horn’s Dark Shadows Every Day. I can’t find it there, but here is a copy of it:
In the first 42 weeks of the show, when the supernatural was in the background and the stories were slow, it would have been easy to have a couple of tea party scenes at the Evans cottage where Maggie and her lifelong friend, Unnamed Nurse, recap whatever is going on. Those scenes could have led to a whole exploration of the tension between the working-class people in the village and the jerks in the big house on the hill. That in turn could have led to the introduction of Unnamed Nurse’s family, headed by Unnamed’s parents, Mr and Mrs Nurse, including her brothers, Young Mr Nurse and Master Nurse, and her sister, Moody Miss Nurse. We could then have seen the ancestors of the Nurse family in each of the flashback segments and analogues of them in Parallel Time.
At some point in my musings about this idea, I decided the family should be named “Wilson” (if I had a reason for this, I’ve forgotten it, but I now think of Atkinson’s character as Nurse Wilson,) and that in a flashback segment we should learn that they are descended from free persons of color who settled in Collinsport before the Civil War and were the first proprietors of the Collinsport Inn. Some wicked deed by a member of the Collins family knocked them out of the entrepreneurial class long ago, and they’ve been working their way back up the socio-economic ladder ever since.
We met Maggie in #1 as the waitress at the diner in the Collinsport Inn. She, her late father Sam, and her fiancé, hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell, have been Dark Shadows‘ main representatives of the people in the village. Her house, the modest counterpoint to the mansions on the Collins family’s great estate, has been familiar to us from the beginning, and is the place where we have seen most vividly what the Collinses’ doings have meant for the people who work for their businesses and live in their town. So, as a frequent visitor there, the nurse could have given a whole new dimension to the drama, showing that it isn’t just one family whose lives hang in the balance, but that a whole community is exposed to the consequences of what happens on the hill.
The Blue Whale
Joe is sitting alone at a table in the Blue Whale tavern, and he looks terrible. He’s pale and fidgety, looking around and periodically jumping up to peek out the window.
Maggie comes in and joins Joe. At first she is angry with him- he stood her up last night, without so much as a telephone call. She sees how upset he is and her anger is mixed with worry. He pounds on the table while the camera is tight on her. Her startled reaction reminds us of the early months of the show, when Sam was a self-pitying drunk and Maggie was a sophisticated portrait of an Adult Child of an Alcoholic.
After that moment, Maggie gets very quiet. When Joe says with alarm that it is getting dark, she responds that “It usually does, at this time of day.” It’s inherently funny to hear someone make that kind of matter-of-fact statement in response to an inexplicably intense remark, but also poignant to those of us who remember Maggie’s early interactions with Sam. From childhood on, simple rationality must have seemed to Maggie like a joke in the face of the overpowering irrationality at the center of her life.
As it happens, Joe is indeed exhibiting addicted behavior. But he isn’t hooked on alcohol. Instead, he is under the power of a vampire. Angelique, who was once the wicked witch who first made Barnabas Collins a vampire, found herself reduced to bloodsucker status when she displeased Nicholas. At Nicholas’ direction, she bit Joe the other day, and now Joe is desperate to hear her summons and report for another bite. She does call, and he does dash out, leaving a bewildered Maggie behind.
It was at the Blue Whale that we first met Joe, back in #3. Then, he was an upstanding young man who indignantly rejected the attempts of one of the Collins family’s sworn enemies to bribe him into spying against them. We’ve seen him in the tavern many times since then, always as the doughty representative of the wholesome and intelligible world against the sinister and supernatural. For example, in #215 it was a deeply troubled Joe who brought the news to Maggie and others at the Blue Whale that the cows on his uncle’s farm had been somehow drained of blood, news which turned out to be the first sign of vampirism in the area. This is the first time we’ve seen the Blue Whale since #358, back in November, and the first time a scene has closed with the formerly very familiar Blue Whale jukebox dance tunes in even longer than that. Longtime viewers see a loop closing. Joe leaves the place where he has most often shown himself as one who dwells in the daylight and goes down to the deepest dark.
Once Joe is gone, Nicholas enters. He engages Maggie in conversation, and talks his way into the seat Joe vacated. Soon he is doing magic tricks for her and she is agreeing to have dinner with him. He brings up the idea of staying out all night, and she seems amenable. Where is her old friend the nurse when you need her?
The Fix
Joe lets himself into Nicholas’ house, a place by the sea that he is renting from the Collinses. Angelique is there. Joe laments his dependency on her, and asks if she was the one who attacked Tom, whom he identifies as his cousin. Perhaps the son of the uncle whose cows fell victim to Barnabas long ago! She doesn’t bother to deny it. She tells him that they will both visit Tom tonight. She bites Joe.
Joe visits Tom, who has emerged from the coma in which Angelique’s first bite left him. He tells Joe all about Angelique’s attack on him. He says he knows how bizarre the story sounds, but that he hopes that if he has Joe to vouch for him he will be able to make the police take it seriously. Joe gives Tom a few perfunctory assurances, then opens the window. Joe explains that he is doing this because it is hot in the room. Tom does not agree that it is hot, but Joe insists, and Tom is too ill to argue long.
Joe leaves, and we jump forward to 2 AM. The window is still open- apparently no nurse was on duty. Perhaps the hospital thought Beverly Hope Atkinson’s character did such a good job on the day shift that the patients could just cruise along through the night. We hear a bat squeaking, and Angelique appears. She bites Tom.
In Barnabas’ first weeks on Dark Shadows, the show made heavy use of the idea that vampires can enter a lodging only when they have been invited. For example, he went to the diner after hours so that Maggie would have to invite him in, and later went to her house and stood just outside the front door for a noticeably long time before she explicitly asked him to enter. They haven’t done anything with that idea in a long time, but neither have they very clearly contradicted it. Perhaps Joe’s opening of the window is the invitation Angelique needs to make her way into the hospital.
Episode 528: Old girl
In his post about this episode on Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn remarks on the recapping that permeates the dialogue and reckons it as writer Sam Hall’s critique of the ongoing storylines. That assessment will be familiar to those who, unlike Danny, have been watching the show from the beginning. When Ron Sproat joined the writing staff in October 1966, his first several scripts featured a systematic inventory of the available narrative material, with each plot very explicitly marked as suitable or unsuitable for further development.
In its first year, very little happened on Dark Shadows; now, it has swung to the opposite extreme, and there is a climax at every commercial break. But the result is oddly similar. They don’t take the time to explore the overall situation, so that little seems to be at stake even when a spectacular event takes place. No matter how much happens per minute of screen time, it feels like the pace is slow. We see suave warlock Nicholas in the gazebo on the grounds of the estate of Collinwood summoning his subordinate, the wicked witch known variously as Angelique and Cassandra, and hear him complain that she has spent weeks attempting to do what she should have accomplished in minutes. Thus Hall assures us that the pace will be picking up.
Angelique/ Cassandra comes to the gazebo, to which Nicholas refers as a “ga-ZAY-bo” in a bit of Collinsport English Angelique/ Cassandra herself introduced in #489. There, the two of them quarrel about her dilatory approach. They stand behind columns and look like debaters at podiums.
Danny Horn’s commenter “lakeplacidskater” made an interesting observation about the moment screenshotted above:
Maybe I’m reading too much into the set design, but in one of the photos Angelique and Nicholas are sperated by a statue of a Goddess (I assumed Venus). Wouldn’t it be awesome if it was Venus and that statue between them was to represent Angelique’s love for Barnabas blocking her efforts at villainy? More likely that the shot just looked better composed with the statue in the middle but how awesome if it was meant to be subtle symbolism! 🙂
“lakeplacidskater,” posted 25 February 2015 on Danny Horn, “Episode 528: This Tawdry Affair,” 21 November 2014.*
The statue appears to me to represent not Venus, but a harvest goddess. She is fully clothed, and there is a sack at her feet which seems to be full of grain. That makes a lot less sense than does the suggestion “lakeplacidskater” made. The Collinses derive their wealth from fishing and shipping, not from farming, so it is surprising that they would put a symbol of agriculture in such a prominent place. Perhaps she stands for wealth in general, but not for so much wealth that the family could afford to commission a statue of a sea goddess. And neither a bountiful harvest in particular nor wealth in general is any sort of obstacle between Nicholas and Angelique/ Cassandra. I suppose the visual metaphor might be emphasizing the image of the two of them as debaters, with the goddess serving as moderator.
Nicholas dominates Angelique/ Cassandra thoroughly and rather cruelly. Viewers who remember her from the portion of Dark Shadows set in the late eighteenth century may be taken aback by this. In those days, her power often seemed to be limited only by her own carelessness. That made for something of a shapeless narrative, since no one could oppose her effectively. Not only does Nicholas reduce her to a lowly state today, but he himself bungles a simple task when he sets out to do something nasty to well-meaning governess Vicki. Thus we see that the villains will have their work cut out for them.
Later, Vicki is in bed at her friend Maggie’s house. She has gone there to escape a curse Angelique/ Cassandra has placed that has caused several people to have the same nightmare. Since Maggie was at home when she was the first person to have the nightmare, and Vicki’s boyfriend Peter was sleeping there when he had it, it is hard to understand why Vicki thinks it is a place of safety.
We have several closeups of the face of the clock while Vicki goes to sleep. It’s an Ingraham eight day clock, apparently they wanted to make sure we knew that. When Vicki finally nods off, Angelique/ Cassandra materializes in the room with a jar of rose water that is supposed to make Vicki have the nightmare. Ever since the days when humanoid Phoenix Laura Murdoch Collins was on the show, we’ve been seeing undead witches materialize in people’s bedrooms while they sleep. This time, Maggie walks in and sees Angelique/ Cassandra. She screams at the sight. All of the women in the cast were required to scream frequently, so frequently that fans become connoisseurs of screaming. Kathryn Leigh Scott was one of the better screamers, not far behind Clarice Blackburn, so that makes for a satisfying ending.
*I can’t help but point that when “lakeplacidskater” left her post, all the members of the cast were still alive. Humbert Allen Astredo would die in 2016 and Lara Parker in 2023; Alexandra Moltke Isles, Roger Davis, and Kathryn Leigh Scott are still with us.
Episode 518: How to speak to people
We open in a hospital room where Sam Evans is in bed, wearing dark glasses. This would tell a first time viewer that Sam is blind, and also that he’s reckless about his glasses.
Sam is begging his daughter Maggie to bring her friend Vicki around so he can tell her about a dream he just had. Vicki shows up and invites Sam to tell her the dream. This leads to a dramatic musical sting and a cut to the opening title. The first time viewer, still worried that Sam might nod off and break his glasses, will be unlikely to see why Vicki’s willingness to listen to Sam’s dream should be a concerning development.
Sam starts to describe his dream. A knock on the door interrupts him. It is Timothy Eliot Stokes. Stokes orders Vicki out of the room. Stokes is wearing a suit, not a white coat, and is addressed as “Professor.” So it should be clear to the first-time viewer that he is not a medical doctor, has no authority in the hospital, and is not particularly close to Vicki, Maggie, or Sam. The women resist his commands, but when it becomes clear he won’t back down they humor him.
In the corridor outside Sam’s room, Vicki tells Stokes “I hope you have some explanation.” He replies “The situation required drastic action.” “Is that all you have to say?” “No, I might add you should be grateful to me.” Thus the first-time viewer learns that Stokes does not feel obligated to be polite to young, pretty women.
Stokes tells Vicki that “Your recent experience in the past has taught you some rather frightening things about witchcraft.” Vicki agrees with this statement. Maggie turns away and looks out into space, wondering what the heck these lunatics are talking about. At last the first-time viewer has an on-screen representative.
Stokes describes a “Dream Curse,” in which a series of people all have the same nightmare. Each dreamer is compelled to tell the nightmare to a particular person who appeared in it. That person then has the nightmare, featuring a third person, and awakens with the same compulsion to tell the nightmare to that person, keeping the cycle going. Vicki declares that she doesn’t know what Stokes is talking about, but Maggie seems to. Vicki grudgingly agrees not to go into Sam’s room, but refuses to leave the corridor.
Returning viewers know that Maggie was the first to have the nightmare. It will also stretch their credulity that Vicki hasn’t heard about it. Maggie is one of Vicki’s dearest friends, and the nightmare was a terrifying experience that weighed on her for quite some time. The person Maggie passed the nightmare to was Vicki’s boyfriend Peter, who prefers to be called Jeff. Not only has neither Maggie nor Peter/ Jeff told Vicki about the nightmare, neither has any of the three people who have already had the nightmare and who live with her in the great house of Collinwood. These are heiress Carolyn, whom Vicki has addressed as “my best friend”; strange and troubled boy David, who is Vicki’s charge in her job as governess and who feels very close to her; and housekeeper Mrs Johnson, who habitually tells everyone everything she knows.
It will also be strange to those who have been watching the show that Stokes does not tell Vicki the key thing about the Dream Curse, that it is aimed at old world gentleman Barnabas Collins. Vicki is extremely fond of Barnabas; Stokes knows this, because in #509, he told her that he was doing battle with a witch whose goal was to kill Barnabas, and she was most eager to help him. If he told her that by listening to Sam’s account of the dream she would be bringing Barnabas one step closer to death, surely he would have persuaded her to go home. But, as my wife Mrs Acilius pointed out while we were watching the episode, that would let Vicki back into the story. Stokes, like Barnabas and several other major characters, is working to keep Vicki from becoming relevant to any ongoing plot.
Stokes has to leave the hospital to attend to another matter. While Maggie was leading the way out of the hospital room, he looked out the window and saw a man looking in. The man is Adam, a very tall, phenomenally strong, peculiarly inarticulate fellow whom Stokes met at Sam and Maggie’s cottage a few days ago. Stokes is eager to get to know Adam. He lets himself into the cottage and waits there until Adam comes by. Adam is confused to find him there, but Stokes quickly persuades him to come home with him. Stokes promises to give him food and become his friend. The two of them are quite cheerful as they walk out the front door.
The camera repeatedly focuses on a stickpin Stokes dropped on the rug, suggesting that he will get in trouble for having let himself into the cottage without Maggie’s permission. That suggestion is clearer to the first-time viewer than to those who know what’s been happening. Stokes had been in the cottage with Sam not long before, and could easily claim to have dropped the stickpin on that occasion.
Back in the hospital corridor, Vicki hears Sam crying out in agony. She goes to his room. Maggie joins her there, and Sam starts describing the nightmare. Maggie recognizes it as the one that caused her such distress when she had it, and her eyes dart to Vicki. She tells Vicki she doesn’t have to stay. Vicki insists, and a look of panic starts to form on Maggie’s face. Sam doesn’t get far into the nightmare before he dies.
Returning viewers will remember that the luckless Willie Loomis was interrupted in his attempt to tell Carolyn the nightmare in #506, and that when she next went to sleep she could have only the part of the nightmare he had described. So we wonder if Vicki will have the same problem.
We may wonder about something else. Stokes, as an expert on witchcraft, has several times said that a Dream Curse is designed to “end with a death.” We may wonder if Sam’s death will end it before it gets to Barnabas.
That would represent a stinging defeat for the witch. Sam was once a fairly important character, but long ago receded to the margins of the show. He made his debut in #5, and has been played by David Ford since #35. Originally he was a tormented alcoholic, driven to drink by his part in the injustice done long ago to dashing action hero Burke Devlin. Burke’s storyline fizzled out completely in #201, and since then Sam has made only intermittent appearances, mostly as support for Maggie, who is herself usually a secondary character. To launch an attack on the show’s breakout star and hit a tertiary player would be quite embarrassing to any villain. Maybe the witch’s next plan will wind up falling on Bob the Bartender, and the one after that will hit one of the sheriff’s feeble-minded deputies.
Kathryn Leigh Scott tells some stories about Sam’s death scene that do not fit with what is on the tape. In her 1986 book My Scrapbook Memories of Dark Shadows, she writes about the teleprompter falling over and making a loud noise and Ford shouting “Where is it!?” In appearances at Dark Shadows conventions, she has said that the lines Ford improvised to replace the ones he couldn’t read ran over time, and that in her desperation to get to the next break she pushed a pillow on his face and nearly smothered him while saying “Don’t die, Pop!” In his post on Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn says that Miss Scott’s “anecdote was entirely made up. None of that happened.”
I reserve judgment. Maybe the episode we have is a second take. It runs unusually smoothly up to Sam’s death scene, as if the cast had had more practice with its parts than usual. We know that, in spite of all the spectacular bloopers and other production errors they left in, they did sometimes start over, and the incidents Miss Scott described might well have been enough to warrant that.
Episode 515: A word you’re saying
A lot of wonderful acting in this one. We start off with Willie Loomis (John Karlen,) staggering into the cottage Maggie Evans (Kathryn Leigh Scott) shares with her father Sam (David Ford.) Yesterday, Maggie’s boyfriend Joe beat Willie up. Maggie invites Willie in, comforts him, tries to treat his wounds, and agrees to drive him home. Joe had excellent reasons for insisting Willie stay away from Maggie, and those reasons might lead returning viewers to react to the beginning of the scene with frustration. But Karlen and Miss Scott are so good together that they very smoothly defuse that frustration, and we soon find ourselves as absorbed in the scene as we were in the many scenes the same actors shared in May and June of 1967, when Maggie was the prisoner of Barnabas the vampire* and Willie, as Barnabas’ slave, was trying desperately to reduce her suffering.
A very tall man named Adam (Robert Rodan) comes to the open front door and announces “Willie bad!” Maggie has no idea who Adam is. Adam enters the cottage and clarifies his intention with a declaration of “Kill Willie!” Willie tries to talk Adam out of this plan, and reminds him of the good times they had together. Maggie tells Adam that Willie is hurt, and Adam looks concerned when he responds “Willie hurt?” Rodan gets the same flicker of light into Adam’s eyes that you might see in the eyes of a toddler who is intrigued to hear that someone is having feelings he wouldn’t have expected them to have. Before long, though, Adam is angry again. Maggie takes a hammer and tries to hit Adam, leading Adam to state a new plan- “Kill Maggie!”
Sam comes home. Sam befriended Adam during a trip Maggie recently took out of town. He tells Maggie to stand behind him. She does, and he talks to Adam about their friendship. Adam agrees that Sam is his friend and that he would never hurt him, but he refuses to agree when Sam tells him that Maggie is also his friend. Maggie makes a move that confuses Adam. Trying to get at her, Adam hits Sam very hard. Adam sees that he has knocked Sam down, and he runs away.
We see Adam in the woods, and for the first time hear his voice in a pre-recorded monologue telling us his thoughts. “Afraid! Adam afraid! Adam bad! Adam hurt friend!” Rodan’s acting is more than sufficient to enable us to figure out that this was what Adam was thinking even without the monologue, but he does such a good job of voice acting that I don’t really begrudge it. Crude as the lines are, Rodan simultaneously expresses fine shades of fear and guilt through them.
Willie and Maggie have another scene in the Evans cottage. She is stern with him now, demanding to know what Willie knows about Adam. Willie denies that he knows anything, and she points out that when he was trying to calm Adam he appealed to several facts from their previous acquaintance. Willie tells a story to cover that up, essentially the same story Barnabas made up to tell the sheriff in #505. Maggie is a lot smarter than the sheriff- that isn’t saying much, chewing gum is a lot smarter than the sheriff- and even he didn’t buy this line when Barnabas was pushing it. She tells Willie in a firm tone that she will continue to ask questions until she gets answers she can believe. She explicitly tells him she will ask Barnabas. Maggie’s firmness and Willie’s barely controlled panic make for another gripping encounter.
Willie goes back home to Barnabas’ house. Barnabas’ best friend Julia Hoffman (Grayson Hall) is there. Willie tells Julia they have to find Adam before the police do, since he now knows enough words to get them all in a lot of trouble. Usually when Julia and Willie have their staff conferences, she is firmly in charge and full of ideas. But she is at a complete loss today. She has no idea how to capture Adam, and she doesn’t know where Barnabas is.
What’s more, Julia has just seen a ghost. She heard sobbing coming from the basement, and when she went down there she saw a woman in white whom she recognized as Josette Collins, deceased. Josette dematerialized in front of her. Now the sobbing starts back up, and Julia accompanies Willie to the basement.
Josette is already gone when they get there. Julia tells Willie what she saw earlier. She figures out that Barnabas is bricked up behind the wall where Josette’s ghost had stood. She explains her reasoning in terms that viewers who have seen the last several episodes will be able to follow, but which don’t make a bit of sense to Willie. His sharp befuddlement and her vague certitude make for a laugh-out-loud funny scene.
In the early months of the show, several characters heard a sobbing woman in the locked room in the basement of the great house of Collinwood. It was strongly implied in a number of those episodes that the woman was the ghost of Josette. In #272, matriarch Liz said that she herself was the one who did the sobbing. That didn’t fit very well with what we had seen, but by that point the show had reconceived Josette as part of Barnabas’ story and stopped involving her ghost in the action. Longtime viewers have a strong reminder of the “Sobbing Woman” story today, since Barnabas’ basement is a redress of the set used for the basement of the great house and the alcove where he is walled up is in the same place as the door to locked room in basement of great house.
*Maggie has amnesia about all that, and thinks Barnabas is her friend. His vampirism is in remission now.
Dark Shadows Commentary 