In 281 of the posts that follow, I link to comments I made on Danny Horn’s blog, “Dark Shadows Every Day.”
Not all of these comments were absolutely unique. Several times it occurred to me that a Dark Shadows features a number of older sisters who clean up messes that their misbehaving younger brothers make, and that a variety of male-female relationships on the show take on the dynamic of a bossy big sister and her bratty little brother. Danny doesn’t cover the first 209 episodes of the show, when we learn that Roger Collins has managed to squander his entire inheritance, half of the family fortune, and that his older sister Elizabeth Collins Stoddard has gone deeply into debt to contain the damage that his irresponsibility has done to the family business. Elizabeth takes Roger into her house, and alternates between demanding that he reform his ways and enabling his ongoing bad conduct. She takes charge of the raising of Roger’s son David and puts Roger to work in the family business, setting bounds to Roger’s crapulence but also insulating him from its consequences.
My first remarks about this theme were in a comment on episode 565:
Watching this episode, I just realized the main relationship in DARK SHADOWS- Bossy Big Sister/ Bratty Little Brother. Liz and Roger are literally that, and each one’s struggle to safeguard their relationship by keeping the other in the dark about their shameful secrets is the background of every storyline in the first 209 episodes. Carolyn and David become the functional equivalent of a Bossy Big Sister and a Bratty Little Brother, and that’s the development that makes Carolyn a relatable character.
In Julia and Barnabas, we have the supreme example of such a relationship. They fall into it naturally; Julia is used to giving orders, and Barnabas is used to disobeying them. From the moment Julia lit her cigarette on the candles in the old house, she’s been Barnabas’ Bossy Big Sister, pursuing one plan after another meant for his own good. He’s been alternately pouting at her, raging against her, and clinging to her, at once resenting her demands on him and craving her validation for his narcissism. The climax of the episode, when they both know that a he-vampire is roaming about in search of a victim but it occurs to neither Julia nor Barnabas that Julia might be in danger, shows how deeply they have embedded themselves in these roles. Barnabas won’t even let Vicki walk to her car alone, and Julia, hearing the dognoise, understands why. But when Julia tells Barnabas that she will close up the lab and leave shortly after he goes out to join Willie, implying that she’s going to walk all the way back to the Great House by herself, he just leaves. Of course nothing will happen to Big Sis, she’ll always be OK.
That’s also why I don’t see how slashfic positing a sexual relationship between Barnabas and Julia can work. They are so much Bossy Big Sister and Bratty Little Brother that no matter how much time they spent telling themselves that they aren’t actually related, it would still be impossibly weird to try to be something else to each other.
I returned to the theme in a remark about episode 572, where Jonathan Frid gives a line-reading so pouty that I wonder if he was consciously trying to depict Barnabas as a bratty little brother to Julia:
I love the way Jonathan Frid pouts the line “I was afraid your visit would be pointless.” He’s every inch the bratty little brother upset that his big sister went out when he didn’t want her to go.
By episode 648, the idea has moved me to fanfic:
Cavada Humphrey looks quite a bit like Jonathan Frid. I wonder what 1795 would have been like if Barnabas had had an older sister who bossed him around, stood around during his ridiculously childish fits of petulance, occasionally acted as his conscience, and time and again serve as his enabler and protector. It would have been funny to see Grayson Hall’s Countess express disapproval of such a relationship.
Heck, that older sister could have been Sarah. Just because she’s a child in her ghost form doesn’t mean she has to have died at that age. Maybe she comes back in the form in which her relationship to her brother took its permanent shape, when she was about nine and he was about seven. Of course, that possibility is foreclosed at Sarah’s first appearance, when she tells Maggie not to let her “big brother” know she saw her, but I suppose they could have retconned that away with a phony flashback where she says “little brother.”
I revisited these points a few times- Danny’s blog consists of over a thousand posts, one each for episodes 210-1245, plus a few dozen about properties related to Dark Shadows, and each post has its own discussion thread. So it isn’t bad netiquette to repeat yourself a bit from one thread to another- there is always a chance someone who didn’t see a comment previously posted elsewhere will take an interest when you post a similar one. But I did try to keep from making a bore of myself to those who read everything.
I could have mentioned some other bossy big sister/ bratty little brother combos. In a comment on the 1897 storyline, I alluded to the relationship between Judith Collins Trask and her feckless younger brothers. Judith’s arc doesn’t really allow her to be a bossy big sister to any of her three bratty little brothers. But each of them does find himself attached to at least one woman who is stronger than he is, and who might well treat him as Elizabeth does Roger and as Julia does Barnabas.
It’s a shame Terry Crawford wasn’t a more accomplished actress in the 1960s- in the scripts Beth fluctuates between indulging Quentin in his every vice and insisting that he clean up his act. That’s the bossy big sister/ bratty little brother dynamic we’ve seen so many times, but unlike any previous pair who have enacted it Beth and Quentin are lovers and are not social equals. It would be interesting to explore the dynamic in that context, but Ms Crawford’s performance is so wooden that you sometimes have to think about her scenes after it is over and call to memory the dialogue and the visual composition before it strikes you what the point was.
Pansy Faye isn’t on the show very long, unfortunately but she’s clearly in the driver’s seat in her relationship with her thoroughly clownish husband Carl Collins. And Edward Collins is much the weaker personality in his connections with both his estranged wife Laura and with Kitty Soames. So each of those men was looking for a woman who was forceful enough to take charge of him, but indulgent enough to allow him to continue in all his established habits.
I also made only one brief reference to the bossy big sister/ bratty little brother dynamic in the discussions of the 1840 storyline. That’s rather odd- after all, in that one Julia actually presents herself to the family as Barnabas’ sister, and he is forced to go along with the pretense.
I did not refer to the theme in my comments on posts about “The Haunting of Collinwood” by the ghost of Quentin, and I made only a single reference to it in my comments on posts about the “Re-Haunting of Collinwood” by the ghost of mini-Quentin Gerard. Indeed, that single reference is to Julia’s failure to focus her bossiness on Barnabas. I dropped the ball there, I think- the relationship between David and Amy in the original “Haunting of Collinwood” is at its most interesting when it mixes elements of the bossy big sister/ bratty little brother dynamic with other types of interaction, while the bland, lifeless relationships between David and Hallie on the one hand and between Tad and Carrie on the other in the “Re-Haunting of Collinwood” could benefit from some kind of structure.
I also left the theme unmentioned in my comments regarding the show’s dying days, the 1841 Parallel Time storyline of episodes 1199-1245. That’s understandable- the show did not develop any bossy big sister/ bratty little brother relationships in that period. But there was an implicit one- Miss Julia Collins was the sister of Justin Collins, and she had functioned as head of the household during his years of madness. Justin dies a few episodes into the story, without sharing a scene with Julia, and she is left as a bossy big sister with no bratty brother to whom she can attach herself. Meanwhile, Bramwell is a thoroughly bratty man with no big sister. It’s rather sad for the loyal audience, having enjoyed so many scenes in which Grayson Hall and Jonathan Frid had enormous fun with the bossy big sister/ bratty little brother pattern, seeing them drift separately through these dreary episodes.
The closest we get to a bossy big sister/ bratty little brother scene in the dying days of the show is also the one genuinely irresistible moment of that segment. In episode 1215, Flora Collins (Joan Bennett) and her son Morgan (Keith Prentice) are walking through the woods on their way to Biddleford’s Creek. He whines about the pointlessness of the trip, she scolds him, and we get a brilliant little glimpse of what their relationship must have been like since he first learned to talk. That authoritative mother/ whiny son moment left me, not only wanting more such scenes between them, but also wishing it had been presented in contrast with a bossy big sister/ bratty little brother relationship elsewhere in the show.
Acilius on Dark Shadows 