Dark Shadows‘ first supernatural menace was undead blonde witch Laura Murdoch Collins, estranged wife of sarcastic dandy Roger. Laura was on the show from December 1966 to March of 1967. During that time, Laura tried to rebuild her relationship with her son by Roger, strange and troubled boy David. David’s well-meaning governess Vicki at first encouraged her charge to go to his mother, but eventually figured out that Laura posed a deadly threat to him. Vicki formed a coalition of characters to help her fight Laura, and eventually rescued David from his mother’s clutches at the last minute.
Now, Roger has come home to the great house of Collinwood after an unexplained absence that had Vicki, his sister Liz, and his distant cousin, old world gentleman Barnabas, terribly worried. Roger happily announces that he has taken a new wife, and presents her to the family.
As it turns out, Roger has a definite type. His new bride is also an undead blonde witch, though at the moment she is wearing a black wig that doubles as a physical representation of the concept “1968.” Her name is Angelique, although she pretends it is Cassandra.
Some critics say that the film 2001: A Space Odyssey would more aptly have been titled 1968: A Bad Year for Hats. As you can see, however, headwear in general was passing through a time of trial in that period. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Vicki and Barnabas recognize Angelique immediately. Vicki came unstuck in time in #365, finding herself in the year 1795, and didn’t make it back to the 1960s until #461. During her nineteen weeks in the late 1790s, Vicki got to know the people who lived at Collinwood in those days, among them Barnabas and Angelique. She saw many horrible things happen to them, and only after being blamed for those catastrophes herself would she realize that they were the consequences of spells cast by Angelique. Due to Angelique’s curse, Barnabas would be a vampire from 1796 until the week after Vicki came back to 1968. Vicki has decided to believe that Barnabas is not the same person she knew in that period, but rather that he is the descendant of that Barnabas Collins. He does not want her to know that he ever was a vampire, and she has resolved not to know that either, even though he used to bite her on the neck and suck her blood.
The battle against Laura was a fairly exciting story, at least in its latter stages. Angelique is a far more dynamic adversary than Laura, and Dark Shadows is much faster-paced and better written than it was then, so a reprise of the structure of that conflict in this new setting would likely be very exciting indeed.
To wage such a battle, Vicki and Barnabas can have no secrets from each other. Many who have been with Dark Shadows from the beginning have been hoping that its original protagonist will eventually become aware of the principal storylines, and this is one of the obvious ways to do it. Vicki can learn that Barnabas was a vampire, can find out that he was the one responsible for all the terrible crimes committed against the women and men and cows of Collinsport in 1967, and can still align herself with him, because she needs his support against Angelique, a more urgent threat. By the time they have vanquished her, not only will the idea of handing Barnabas over to the authorities have lost its salience, but Vicki will doubtless be facing another urgent threat requiring Barnabas’ assistance.
Nothing we see today suggests that such a development is on the horizon. The episode began with Vicki, Barnabas, and Liz worrying about Roger. A couple of weeks ago, Vicki brought a portrait home from an antique store and it had bizarre effects on Roger. The other day, he took the portrait and disappeared.
We can tell that today is not going to be a win for the female characters when Barnabas reacts to Liz’ expression of concern by dismissing her from his presence and she leaves, even though he is in her house. Vicki can tell Barnabas knows more about the situation than she does, and each time he condescends to mete out a little information in response to one of her questions he ends by turning his back to her and explicitly refusing to share anything more.
When Liz first leaves him alone with Vicki, Barnabas sourly remarks “I try to remember… that I must not reproach you for the reasons you’ve given not to marry me.” As Danny Horn shows in a series of screenshots in his post on Dark Shadows Every Day, their body language does not at any point support the idea that Barnabas wants to be with Vicki and she does not want to be with him. Quite the contrary; he withdraws from her, turns from her, and puts physical objects as barriers before her, while she looks at him, follows him, and leans towards him.
This has been Barnabas and Vicki’s dynamic for a long time. By #285, she went so far as to invite herself to a sleepover at his house. Barnabas was a vampire then; he entered the bedroom while she slept and bared his fangs, but couldn’t bring himself to bite her. Time and again, Vicki would all but draw a circle on her neck with the words “Mr Vampire, Bite Here!,” and Barnabas would tremblingly open his mouth, then recoil at the last moment. In #462, he finally sampled her bloodstream. By the end of #466, Barnabas’ vampirism had gone into remission, and that little storyline had evaporated. Now Vicki is vague and confused about what happened between her and Barnabas, and he is afraid he will relapse and bite her again.
Vicki is trapped between two blank walls. On one side Barnabas is excluding her from his life and therefore from active participation in the A story. On the other, she keeps having scenes with her old boyfriend from the 1790s, an unpleasant man named Peter who keeps demanding, for no apparent reason, that she call him Jeff. That habit of his was dead on arrival as a story point, and now that Angelique will be trying our patience by insisting her name is Cassandra, it will become impossibly tedious to have a second character doing the same pointless schtick. As long as she is in this position, Vicki’s prospects for contributing interesting material to Dark Shadows belong to a very low order of probability.
The Rev’d Mr Trask, a cleric of sorts, is convinced that there is a witch in the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood. He is right about this. He is also convinced that the witch is the eccentric Victoria Winters. He is wrong on this point. The real witch is Angelique Collins, wife of the master of the house, the gallant Barnabas. Barnabas, who as a man of the Enlightenment asserts that there are no witches, is hiding Vicki, and has reluctantly agreed to let Trask perform a rite of exorcism, believing that once he is finished he will have to go away and everyone will have to admit that Vicki is innocent.
At the top of the episode, we see Angelique building a house of cards and delivering a soliloquy about her plan to cast a spell to make it look like Trask’s fraudulent ritual has proven Vicki’s guilt. There is an element of suspense as we wonder what the character’s actions will lead to, and an even more powerful suspense as we marvel at the courage it took for the actress to remain calm enough build a house of cards on what is essentially a live television show. Forget the Daytime Emmys, Lara Parker deserved a medal for this feat.
Angelique recites a spell over the house of cards, then sets it on fire. The first time they used an incompletely contained fire on Dark Shadows was in #191, and as a result of that daring experiment a load-bearing beam caught fire and collapsed in the middle of a scene. They finished taping before putting the fire out, and somehow everyone survived. There was also an off-camera fire during a conversation between Barnabas and Vicki in #290, and Jonathan Frid and Alexandra Moltke Isles just kept delivering their lines while we heard fire extinguishers blasting in the background. As a result of an excessive pre-treatment of the cards with lighter fluid, today’s fire burns faster and expels debris over a wider area than had been intended. I suppose a technical term for a rapid fire that expels debris is an “explosion.” Parker keeps up her incantation while this explosion progresses directly in her face. That shows an entirely different kind of courage than she showed with the house of cards, but she exhibits it in an equally rare degree.
Downstairs, Trask is standing at the threshold of the house, doing his own fire ceremony. He draws Vicki’s initials on the doorstep, holds up a dowsing rod, and jabbers for a while. Then he sets fire to the rod. In her room, Vicki sees flames erupting from the floor. She shouts in panic.
Barnabas is upstairs. He hears Angelique shouting “Eye of fire, heart of ice!” Her shouts grow louder and louder as she repeats the phrases faster and faster. My wife, Mrs Acilius, said that the pattern of Angelique’s voice sounded to her like someone having an orgasm. The willingness to risk the laugh that pattern might bring represents a third form of courage; by this point, we would have to admit that whatever we may think of Angelique, Lara Parker was one of the bravest people imaginable.
Barnabas is about to investigate, but then he hears Vicki shouting “Fire!” Between these two shouting women, he goes to the one who doesn’t sound like she’s enjoying herself. By the time he gets to Vicki’s room, she is gone. He sees no sign of fire.
Vicki runs out the front door, into Trask’s arms. He shouts “I’ve caught the witch!” and forces her to the ground. He looks delighted that his shtick actually worked, for once.
This moment is an odd inversion of the ending of #191. That episode ends with strange and troubled boy David running out of the burning building where his mother, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, was trying to immolate him, and finding refuge in Vicki’s arms. At that moment, life triumphs over death, and Dark Shadows version 1.0 reaches its conclusion.
When Vicki runs out of the house and into Trask’s arms, death and folly win a victory over life and reason. Nothing comes to a conclusion- the story just gains new layers of complexity. We don’t even go to a commercial break, but get a reaction from Angelique first.
Barnabas talks with Angelique, mystified by what just happened. When he mentions that he heard her in her old room shouting strange words, she lies and says she was in the sewing room. After she leaves, we hear his thoughts- he had searched the sewing room, and knows she is lying. He now believes that there is a witch. He would find it much easier to believe that Vicki, a strange girl who claims to be displaced in time from the year 1967, 172 years in the future, is that witch than to face the prospect that his own wife is, but he can neither overlook the lie she has told nor the sheer improbability that so flagrant a quack as Trask came up with the right answer to any question. He remembers that indentured servant Ben claimed to have been enslaved by the witch, and resolves to find out what Ben can tell him.
We first got to know Barnabas in the months between April and November of 1967, when he was a vampire preying on the living in Vicki’s native time. In those days, he never mentioned Angelique, and there was no indication that he suspected any of the witchcraft we have seen since we embarked on our journey to 1795. Perhaps in the original timeline, when the place Vicki has taken was occupied by a woman named Phyllis Wick, Angelique had to proceed more slowly and carefully, with the result that Barnabas was turned into a ghoul without ever picking up on what was going on. If so, it would be Vicki’s complete failure to adapt to her new time in any way that accelerated the pace of events and thereby exposed Angelique to Barnabas’ suspicions.
Well-meaning governess Vicki is wrongly suspected of witchcraft and needs a place to hide. Young gentleman Barnabas takes her into his house. In her gratitude, Vicki tells Barnabas the truth about herself. She is a time-traveler, yanked back to this year 1795 from her native 1967 by forces she does not understand. Indentured servant Ben enters the room and Vicki leaves. Mystified by her story, Barnabas asks Ben if he thinks Vicki might be a witch after all.
It is exciting when Vicki starts confiding in Barnabas. She has utterly failed to adapt to her new environment, and has none of the abilities she would need to scam her way into a secure place there. She has ended up as an obstacle to story development and an irritating screen presence. If Vicki isn’t going to lie competently, she may as well tell the truth. But that turns out to be a dead end as well- there is no use for Barnabas to make of the information she has given him.
Barnabas doesn’t repeat Vicki’s story to Ben- he just reports that she said something utterly bizarre. What Barnabas does not know, but Ben does, is that there really is a witch in the house- it is Barnabas’ bride-to-be Angelique. Angelique has enslaved Ben, so if he found out Vicki’s secret she would as well, and would be able to use it against her as she frames Vicki for all of her own crimes. Ben proclaims to Barnabas his absolute certainty that Vicki is not a witch, but since he can’t tell anyone about Angelique, this only puzzles Barnabas. Barnabas is further baffled when Ben says he hopes that Barnabas’ marriage to Angelique brings an end to his troubles.
The other day, Angelique tried to solve a problem of her own by raising a corpse from its grave. This was the late Jeremiah Collins, uncle of Barnabas and his best friend until, under the influence of Angelique’s spell, he and Barnabas’ fiancée Josette eloped together. Barnabas responded to that by challenging Jeremiah to a duel. Conscience-stricken, Jeremiah decided to let Barnabas kill him and told Josette that she would be free to marry Barnabas once he was dead.
Angelique had ordered Jeremiah to plague Josette and Barnabas with angry demands that they stay apart. We could interpret that simply as puppetry on Angelique’s part. But today, Jeremiah is harassing Angelique and refusing her repeated commands to go back to his grave. He says he was at peace in the earth until Angelique disturbed him. He was content with his decision to forfeit his life, but now he has become something he didn’t bargain for. Maybe it’s the indignity of that change that accounts for his change of personality, or maybe he’s just cranky because he can’t get back to sleep.
Regular viewers will think of a third possibility. In the segments of Dark Shadows set in 1966 and 1967, we saw other supernatural beings, such as undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins and the ghosts of Josette and of Barnabas’ little sister Sarah. These beings looked at first glance like humans, but the more we learned about them the clearer it became that each was in fact a complex of multiple entities, some of which operated independently of and occasionally at cross-purposes with others. As a witch, Angelique might also be a composite being. Perhaps each time she casts a spell, she breaks off a little piece of herself and deposits it within the person she is trying to control. If so, the creature she is trying to send away is not simply Jeremiah, but the body of Jeremiah animated by a chunk of the spirit of Angelique. That would explain why the actions of the risen Jeremiah are characterized by three traits that were alien to the living man, but that Angelique has in abundance- single-mindedness, vengefulness, and ineffectiveness.
Barnabas, Ben, and a clergyman are in the front parlor, ready for the wedding. Angelique takes a long time to come downstairs. Barnabas goes up to her room to see what is keeping her. He finds her terribly upset, insisting that they have the ceremony somewhere else. Barnabas looks in her suitcase, which had a moment before held the clothes she removed to put on her bridal gown. Those clothes have vanished, and in their place Barnabas finds a doll belonging to his little sister Sarah and some pins. Had Barnabas ever seen a horror movie, he would know to interpret this as a clue from Jeremiah that Angelique had caused a recent illness of Sarah’s by sticking pins in her doll, but people didn’t get to the cinema in 1795, so it’s another dead end.
Angelique composes herself and says she will be right down for the wedding. Barnabas leaves the room. The door closes itself, and Angelique cannot open it. Jeremiah enters and tells Angelique she must be punished for disturbing the dead. He takes her to his grave, which is open. Angelique raised Jeremiah some days ago- if the grave has been open this whole time, you’d think someone would have noticed and people would be talking about it. Anyway, he puts her in the grave, and from her point of view we see him throwing dirt into it.
Jeremiah dropping dirt onto Angelique, from her point of view. Screenshot by
This is the first live burial we’ve seen on Dark Shadows. It’s true that the POV shot from inside the grave echoes a moment in #248 when Barnabas, who is in 1967 a vampire, shuts his prisoner Maggie Evans in a coffin and we see him through her eyes, but that coffin wasn’t in the ground.
Harking back as it does to that shocking moment from Barnabas’ early days on the show, the image of the reanimated Jeremiah dropping dirt in the grave invites us to make a comparison between Jeremiah and Barnabas. In life Jeremiah was a mild-mannered, good-hearted fellow, as is the living Barnabas. The destructive behavior he has exhibited since Angelique raised him from the dead is not only typical of her, but also of what we saw from the vampire Barnabas in 1967. Again, we wonder if the fate that awaits Barnabas is not only something Angelique will do to him, but if everything we saw of him in the months between April and November was what Angelique was doing disguised as him.
Closing Miscellany
Angelique’s repeated commands to Jeremiah today to “Go back to your grave!” find an echo in one of the great moments in the history of Dark Shadows conventions, when Lara Parker used that line to explain the Dark Shadows house style of acting:
“Go back to your grave!!!!!”
When Vicki tells Barnabas the truth about herself, the camerawork makes Alexandra Moltke Isles’ strabismus impossible to miss. Previously they had taken great care to photograph her from angles that would obscure this condition, but we’re going to get another clear look at it on Thursday. Combined with the lousy lines the scripts have given Vicki since the beginning of the 1795 segment, it is hard not to suspect that there was some kind of deliberate effort behind the scenes to push Mrs Isles aside.
This was the first episode of Dark Shadows broadcast in 1968. The copyright date printed on the screen at the end still says 1967. They were several months late before they stopped putting “1966” there, so I guess we shouldn’t be surprised they didn’t update it for an episode shown on New Year’s Day.
No two performers did more to pioneer what would become the Dark Shadows house style of acting than Thayer David and Lara Parker. When David first appeared as gruff groundskeeper Matthew Morgan in #38, he stood out in a cast of theater actors who tended to play their parts somewhat larger than life by his exceptional intensity. In the 1795 period piece, he brings the same quality to his portrayal of kindly indentured servant Ben Stokes. As wicked witch Angelique, Parker is the first member of the cast to find a kind of ferocity that outdoes even David. Today, the two of them are the main characters in the episode, yet each shows great restraint and understatement. Their performances are admirably precise.
Angelique is maidservant to Countess Natalie DuPrés, a French lady who took her to the island of Martinique when she fled the Revolution. The countess hasn’t been much in evidence, so that Angelique spends most of her time working for her niece Josette, fiancée of young gentleman Barnabas Collins. Before Barnabas and Josette became a couple, he had a brief affair with Angelique, to which Angelique attached great importance. When she finds that Barnabas does not love her and cares only for Josette, she sets about casting spells to ruin their happiness.
Today, Josette opens a gift box to find a skull wearing a wig. She is altogether undone by this. Barnabas confronts Angelique about it. While he does not seem to have any idea that Angelique is a witch, he is sure she is responsible for the nasty surprise. She denies everything, and he has no evidence against her.
Ben had tried to tell Barnabas and Josette about Angelique, but being under her power, he cannot. But Barnabas could tell Josette the truth about his past with Angelique. Because he does not, she goes on trusting Angelique, giving her full access to her things and to her person, enabling her to cast whatever spell she wishes. Had Barnabas trusted Josette with the truth, they might have been able to fight Angelique. Because he insists on hiding it from her, they are utterly helpless and will lose absolutely everything.
When Dark Shadows started, the 1960s version of the Collins family was isolated from the community, unable to make anything happen, and vulnerable to a wide variety of enemies, all because matriarch Liz and her brother Roger clung desperately to shameful secrets. When those secrets came to light, they lost nothing and found themselves with a new freedom. Now, in 1795, the Collinses are the lords of the town, running a dynamic business, and apparently unassailable in their wealth and prestige. But in Barnabas’ failure to come clean with Josette, we see the beginning of the process that will lead them to the precarious state in which they are trapped in 1966.
Today, Angelique completes a spell that causes Josette to conceive a mad passion for Barnabas’ uncle and best friend Jeremiah. After Josette sneaks into Jeremiah’s room and makes a fool of herself by propositioning him, she runs back to her own room and sobs on the bed. Angelique is there, feigning puzzlement and sympathy, quietly accepting the young mistress’ refusal to tell her what is wrong.
This is the first episode of the 1795 segment not to include time-traveling governess Vicki. While actors Kathryn Leigh Scott, Thayer David, and Anthony George all appeared in the main time frame (debuting in episodes #1, #38, and #262, respectively,) only Jonathan Frid, as Barnabas, is playing a character we had met there. There’s a heavy-handed moment of self-reference today when Josette tells Barnabas that sometimes he is “too modern,” and he thinks about it during a close-up. That close-up goes on so very long that there is no doubt they are giving us reading instructions, telling us that Barnabas, rather than Vicki, is now our point of view character.
Angelique, lady’s maid/ wicked witch, has cast a spell over kindly indentured servant Ben Stokes, making him her slave in an even deeper sense than he was already Joshua Collins’ slave. She gives Ben various tasks in support of her current project, black magic that will make the lovely Josette forget her fiancé Barnabas and conceive a mad passion for Barnabas’ uncle and dear friend Jeremiah. Most notably, she needs an unbroken spider web from an oak tree, and Ben brings her one.
Meanwhile, cousin Millicent Collins has come to the estate of Collinwood. Millicent is giggly, afraid of germs, and very, very rich. Joshua means for his bachelor brother Jeremiah to marry Millicent, a prospect that repels Jeremiah.
Time-traveling governess Vicki enters. When she sees Millicent, Vicki calls her “Carolyn,” because she is played by Nancy Barrett, who plays a character named Carolyn in the parts of Dark Shadows set in the twentieth century. The makers of the show wanted Vicki to keep the audience up to date on the cast members’ resumés, even though it makes all the other characters think she is a lunatic.
Alone with Vicki, Jeremiah confides that he does not want to marry Millicent. Vicki had studied Collins family history when she was living in the 1960s and has an idiotic compulsion to verbalize her every thought, so she declares that Millicent will never marry. Jeremiah remarks that she says the strangest things.
This scene is more tolerable than the others in which Vicki blurts out information she wouldn’t know if she belonged in 1795 because of the casting of Anthony George as Jeremiah. George was a cold actor who kept the audience guessing what was going on inside his characters’ heads. That made him a disaster as the second to play the hot-blooded Burke Devlin, but when we see him as Jeremiah we take his ready acceptance of Vicki’s bizarre behavior as a sign that he has something up his sleeve. If they can stop giving Vicki such tiresome lines, Jeremiah might be a promising love interest for her.
On Wednesday, we met a new arrival from Paris by way of the island of Martinique. She is Angelique, maidservant to the Countess DuPrés and onetime bedfellow of rich young gentleman Barnabas Collins. Barnabas is engaged to marry the countess’ niece Josette, and is anxious to keep Angelique in the background. Angelique does not share either of Barnabas’ goals.
At rise, Angelique meets Barnabas’ uncle Jeremiah in the front parlor of the manor house of Collinwood. She has found a toy soldier and asks Jeremiah about it. When he identifies it as one of the toys Barnabas was most fond of in his boyhood, he volunteers to take it to the playroom himself. She asks to keep it for a while, so that she can study its workmanship. He doesn’t object, and exits. Once she is alone in the parlor, Angelique starts talking to herself. She says that she will use it to cause Barnabas unimaginable pain. This is the first direct suggestion we have seen that Angelique is involved in witchcraft.
Time-traveling governess Vicki enters. She tells Angelique that they should be friends, because they are both servants in the house, and it is a foreign setting to both of them. Angelique asks what Vicki means by describing herself as foreign, since she is an American. Vicki realizes that she can’t tell someone she has just met that she is a time traveler thrust here from 1967 by the ghost of the little girl she is supposed to be educating, and so she mutters something about how Angelique wouldn’t understand. After they part, we hear Angelique musing that Vicki has no idea what she understands. At no point does Angelique show any interest whatever in becoming friends with Vicki.
Later, we see Angelique alone in her room with the toy soldier and Barnabas’ handkerchief. She is talking to herself about her evil plans again when she is interrupted by a knock at the door. She hides the things and answers it. Barnabas enters.
Barnabas renews the effort he made at the end of Wednesday’s episode to friendzone Angelique. Again, she isn’t having it. After he leaves, she takes the soldier and the handkerchief back out and tells them that she has decided to wait for Josette’s arrival to enact her revenge on Barnabas.
She won’t have to wait long. Josette’s father, André, is entering the parlor, grumbling about the lack of servants at Collinwood. He beckons his daughter, and she follows him into the house. She is played by Kathryn Leigh Scott.
A major cast member of the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s as Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, Miss Scott has played Josette’s ghost more than once. She created the part in #70, when she was the shimmery figure who emerged from Josette’s portrait in the very house we are in today and danced among its pillars. She reprised the part in #126, again in this house, when Josette led the other ghosts in rescuing Vicki from crazed handyman Matthew Morgan. For some months Barnabas, who is in 1967 a vampire, held Maggie prisoner here and tried to replace her personality with that of Josette. Barnabas often seemed convinced that Maggie really was Josette, and when strange and troubled boy David saw Maggie wearing Josette’s dress in #240 he said that her face was “exactly the same” as it was on the many occasions when he had seen Josette’s ghost.
Barnabas’ plan to Josettify Maggie is drawn from the 1932 film The Mummy, in which the undead Imhotep (Boris Karloff) is released from his tomb, holds Helen Grosvenor (Zita Johanns) prisoner, and tries to replace Helen’s personality with that of his lost love Princess Ankh-Esen-Amun. In that movie, there is a flashback to ancient Egypt, where we see that Zita Johanns also plays Ankh-Esen-Amun and we realize that Imhotep’s crazy plan was rooted in some supernatural connection between the two women. The connection between Josette and Maggie has been equivocal until now- Miss Scott was always veiled when she played Josette’s ghost, and stand-in Dorrie Kavanuagh was the one wearing the dress in #240. Moreover, after Maggie got away in #260, Barnabas soon turned his attentions to Vicki, and decided he would try the same gimmick with her. But now we see that Barnabas really was onto something with regard to Maggie, and we wonder where it will lead. I remember the first time we watched the show, my wife, Mrs Acilius, reacted with great excitement to Josette’s entrance in this episode and exclaimed “Of course! Maggie is Josette!”
Vicki spent the first three days of this week telling the actors what parts they played in the first 73 weeks of Dark Shadows, an annoying habit. But there is a reason for it. She knew Barnabas and Sarah as supernatural beings in 1967, so she will recognize them as the same people here. And Josette’s looks reveal her connection to Vicki’s friend Maggie, so she will recognize that. Since only Angelique, of the characters we have met so far in 1795, is played by someone who did not appear previously, the writers are in a difficult position with regard to all of the other members of the company.
I wish they had solved that problem by having Vicki show up in 1795 unable to speak. The suggestion I made in my post about #366 is that she could have materialized in the midst of the accident that upset the carriage bringing the original governess, Phyllis Wick.* Vicki could have sustained a slight injury that left her mute for a week or so, could have had voiceover monologues registering her recognitions of Barnabas, Sarah, and Josette/ Maggie, and would not have had audible monologues when she saw the others. By the time she could talk again, Vicki would know that she was supposed to pretend to be Phyllis Wick.
Clearly Vicki is supposed to get into some kind of trouble in 1795; she is still the heroine, and the first rule of all soap operas is that the heroine must always be in danger. But she is supposed to be seeing the events that started the phase of the Collins family curse that involves Barnabas’ vampirism, and those events did not involve a governess who went around calling people by the wrong names and blurting out information she learned from reading the Collins family history. The logic of the plot requires that whatever trouble Vicki gets into is more or less the same trouble Phyllis Wick would have got into, and the appeal of the character requires that the audience watch to see what kind of con artist Vicki might turn out to be. Both of those imperatives demand that she try to masquerade as Phyllis.
Vicki does manage to keep herself from telling André and Josette that they are being played by the actors who took the parts of Sam and Maggie Evans in other parts of Dark Shadows. She can’t help staring at Josette, however. Josette is quite cheerful when she asks Vicki why she is staring; André, a more conventional aristocrat than his relaxed daughter, is visibly annoyed with Vicki’s impertinence.
There was an opportunity here for Vicki to show some quick thinking. She could have told Josette that Barnabas has gone on at length about her appearance, and that she is amazed at the accuracy of his descriptions. That would have endeared her to Josette as the bearer of the message that her fiancé is very much in love with her, and would have reassured her that, while Vicki is an attractive young woman who lives under Barnabas’ roof, she is not a rival for his affections. As it is, Vicki just mumbles something about not having known she was staring.
Angelique enters. She and Josette rush into each other’s arms and speak French. Miss Scott tells a funny story about that moment. She and Lara Parker had talked about the script and agreed that two Frenchwomen excited to see each other after a long separation ought to greet each other in French, and they persuaded the producer of their point. Only when they got the revised script with the dialogue in French did it dawn on them that neither of them could speak the language. Fortunately, several other members of the cast were fluent in it, and coached them through.
We can see that Josette really regards Angelique as a friend. Viewers who have been with the show from the beginning will remember Josette’s ghost as a powerful and stalwart force for good, and will also know that Maggie is The Nicest Girl in Town. So whatever grievance Angelique may have against Barnabas, and however unjust may be the social system that has exalted Josette and subordinated Angelique, when we see Angelique faking friendship for Josette while planning to make her watch her lover suffer, we know that she is really evil.
Barnabas enters. Josette tells him that her long, difficult journey was worthwhile now that she is with him. This is a very sharp retcon. In #345, mad scientist Julia Hoffman asked Barnabas if Josette ever came to him of her own free will, and he responded with a silent grimace that left no doubt as to the answer. Now, we see that she has gladly sailed from Martinique to central Maine in late autumn to be with him.
Barnabas and Josette are alone, and he wants to kiss her. She is bashful and says that their parents might be upset if they don’t wait for the wedding. He says they might pretend to be, but that in reality it is expected. That is a sweet little conversation, and it ends in a sweet little kiss.
Angelique is back in her room. She twists Barnabas’ handkerchief around the neck of his toy soldier.
The episode ends with Barnabas on the floor, apparently asphyxiating, while Josette looks on in horror.
Wednesday, Barnabas made it clear that he had his affair with Angelique because he didn’t think Josette could love him. That gives Angelique a perfectly understandable motive for seeking revenge on him. A rich man exploited his position to trifle with her, a servant, giving no thought to her feelings or interests.
The selfishness and entitlement Barnabas exhibited thereby is jarring in the mild-mannered, apparently egalitarian fellow we have seen so far this week, but it fits perfectly with his behavior as a vampire in 1967. Seen from another angle, his behavior is consistent with everything the Collinses have done to get themselves in trouble since we first met them. He was tempted to take advantage of Angelique because he had underestimated his own lovability and despaired of making a real connection with Josette.
Barnabas is still underestimating himself and Josette now. Never once does it occur to him to come clean to her about what he did with Angelique. While Josette would no doubt be saddened to learn that her beloved fiancé had dallied with her pet servant, as a rich French girl from Martinique she has after all lived her whole life among wealthy men surrounded by enslaved women, and so could hardly have been shocked by what Barnabas had done. Surely she would have decided to go ahead with the wedding, and she would have known to be wary of Angelique.
By failing to trust Josette with the truth about his misdeeds, Barnabas puts her and himself at Angelique’s mercy. We think of 1966, when matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard and her brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins, were both prisoners of shameful secrets they dared not share even with each other. In 1967, when those secrets were finally laid bare to the whole world, Liz and Roger found they were free to go on about their business as if nothing had happened. In Barnabas’ petrified silence, we see all of the shadows that have kept his relatives in darkness for so long.
*Whom Dorrie Kavanaugh played in her brief appearance at the end of #365.
In 1966 and 1967, supernatural menaces Laura Murdoch Collins and Barnabas Collins would often be seen staring out the windows of their houses on the great estate of Collinwood, sending psychic energy towards the targets of their sinister plans. In 1795, Barnabas is neither supernatural nor menacing, but we already see him peering out one of those windows. He is not projecting bad vibes into the world, but is worried about his beloved fiancée, Josette DuPrés. She is supposed to arrive soon, in fact was supposed to arrive some time ago. Now there is a storm, and he hopes she is not at sea.
The audience’s main point-of-view character in 1966 and for most of 1967 was well-meaning governess Vicki. Now Vicki has come unstuck in time, and found herself in this extended flashback to the eighteenth century. Since she will know Barnabas and regard him as a close friend in the 1960s, she is at her ease talking to him now. Although she is a member of the staff in his family’s house in a period when it was customary for masters to summon their servants with bells and communicate with them only in direct commands, Barnabas is a remarkably genial and democratic sort who welcomes her casual manner.
Vicki has already annoyed the audience several times by blurting out information that makes it obvious to the other characters that she does not belong in their world. She does that again in this scene. Barnabas is worried something may have happened to Josette, and Vicki tells him that she will arrive safely. He is surprised by the assurance with which she delivers this prediction, and asks if she is clairvoyant. She realizes that she has been indiscreet, and denies that she is. He is unconvinced.
Barnabas’ father, haughty overlord Joshua Collins, enters. He is appalled to find his son socializing with a servant. He dispatches Vicki to the nursery to look after her charge, his young daughter Sarah. He demands to know why Barnabas is not tending to his own duties at the family’s shipyard. They begin to quarrel, when a knock comes at the door.
Barnabas opens the door to find a woman named Angelique, whom he identifies as maid to Josette’s aunt, the Countess DuPrés. Angelique says that the countess was on her way to Collinwood, but that her carriage is stuck in the mud. Joshua orders Barnabas to send a footman to rescue her. Angelique is the first character we have met in 1795 who is not played by a performer we have seen in the first 73 weeks of the show.
Joshua goes to his wife, Naomi. Naomi is an alcoholic, a fact of which we are made aware because almost her every scene begins with a shot of her drinking alone. That’s what she is doing before Joshua finds her. He scolds her for her drinking; she complains that he doesn’t allow her to do anything else. She can’t even pass the time with a book- we saw Monday that Naomi is completely illiterate.
Naomi’s alcoholism is both a nod to the concern of first-wave feminism with the atrophy of the elite housewife, and a suggestive side-light on Barnabas as we knew him in the 1967 segment. Then, Barnabas abducted Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, and tried by more or less magical means to replace her personality with that of Josette. For the first 40 weeks of Dark Shadows, Maggie’s father’s alcoholism had been a substantial story element, and she would always retain a number of classic Adult Child of an Alcoholic (ACoA, in the lingo of the recovery movement) characteristics, such as beginning utterances with a little laugh to prove that she is happy. Now that we know that Barnabas is also an ACoA, we can wonder if that shared experience was part of the reason he was drawn to Maggie.
The countess arrives. Since she is played by Grayson Hall, who also plays mad scientist Julia Hoffman in the parts of the show set in the 1960s, Vicki blurts out “Julia!” when she sees her. Hall had also been nominated for an Academy Award for her performance as Judith Fellowes in the 1964 film Night of the Iguana; if Vicki is going to keep the audience up to date on the cast’s resumes, it would have been more interesting if she’d exclaimed “Judith!” Vicki explains that the countess looks like someone she once knew who was named Julia, a remark which irritates the countess, who would like to think her appearance is distinctive. Vicki has certainly not made a favorable impression on this grand lady.
Joshua tells the countess he is surprised that “You still affect a title” when “France has followed our example and become a republic.” His pride in this development, after the Terror and in the bloodiest year of the wars in the Vendée, marks Joshua as a member of the Jeffersonian party in US politics. The Federalists and others had long since turned against the French Revolution by that year.
The countess tells Joshua that it is precisely because France has become a republic that she chooses to live on the island of Martinique. That answers a question that some fans ask about Angelique- why is she white? If the DuPrés family lives on Martinique and are major sugar planters there, they must hold a great many African people in slavery. When we hear that they are bringing a servant with them, we expect that servant to be Black. When we learn that the the countess is an emigré, we realize that she brought Angelique with her from France.
The countess may solve one puzzle for us in her exchange with Joshua, but she presents us with another. Josette’s father André is the countess’ brother, yet he is never referred to as a count. Indeed, when he appears, we will see him answer to “Mr DuPrés.” Perhaps he renounced his title, as many French aristocrats did during the Revolution.
Whatever the explanation, “DuPrés” would seem to represent a missed opportunity. When Josette was first mentioned, in the early months of Dark Shadows, her maiden name was given as “LaFrenière.” It would have been a nice touch to have kept that name for Josette and her father, and to have reserved “DuPrés” as the name of the countess’ late husband.
“LaFrenière” had been a perfect choice because of its class ambiguity for a show about an aristocratic family in the state of Maine- it was originally the family name of the barons of Fresnes, and could therefore be a sign of a senior order of nobility, but is also a very widespread name in Quebec. So “Josette LaFrenière” might either have been a French noblewoman who deigned to marry into the mercantile Collins family at the apex of their prestige, or a working class girl from the north who eloped with the boss’ son.
The choice of Martinique as Josette’s place of origin might add a new twist to this class ambiguity. The Empress Josephine grew up there as a member of the untitled but ancient Tascher family, who, like the fictional DuPrés family, owned an enormous sugar plantation on the island. The Taschers of Martinique went back and forth between Martinique and metropolitan France, and Josephine herself was living there in 1779 when she married her first husband, the Vicomte de Beauharnais. Josephine herself was in prison when the vicomte was guillotined in 1794, one of the last to die in the Reign of Terror, and she was freed just a few days later. The next year, she recovered her husband’s property, and a year after that married the young general Napoleon Bonaparte. It seems likely that the similarity between the names “Josephine” and “Josette” was writer Sam Hall’s inspiration for placing Josette’s origins on Martinique. Association with a figure who was at once a grand lady and an example of very steep upward social mobility could synthesize the two possible Josettes LaFrenière into a single figure.
Had they developed the story of the family’s relationship with the town of Collinsport more richly in Dark Shadows 1.0 and 2.0, they could have used this ambiguity to build up suspense that would be resolved today, in the third episode of Dark Shadows 3.0. Since they did so little with that theme in those days, when the story was moving very slowly and it would have been relatively easy to fit just about anything in, I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that they drop it so completely at this period of the show, when the story is flowing at a breakneck speed.
The countess’ lofty aristocratic manner stings Joshua. Alone with Naomi, he loudly proclaims his belief that all men are equal. We already know enough about Joshua’s tyranny over his household that this absurd little speech must be an intentional spoof of the rich landowners who supported the Jeffersonian party in the early decades of the Republic. Again, this would be funnier and more poignant if the show had done more with social class in its first 73 weeks.
Barnabas sees the countess dealing out tarot cards. He tells her she is too sophisticated for them, and is reluctant to sit with her while she uses them to read his fortune. The moment she says that the cards suggest a connection between him and the concept of infinity, his skepticism evaporates instantly and he excitedly asks if that means he will live forever. The countess cautions that his jubilation at this idea may be misplaced. She notices the “Wicked Woman” card, and takes a significant look at Vicki. Evidently the audience is not alone in objecting to Vicki’s brainless nattering about what the show used to be like.*
Angelique comes to Barnabas’ room. It turns out the two of them had a brief affair when he was first on Martinique, and she expects to resume it. He is not at all pleased at her attentions.
Not how every man would react to a passionate embrace from Lara Parker… Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Barnabas explains that he was already falling in love with Josette when he and Angelique had their fling, but that he didn’t really know her. He couldn’t believe that she would reciprocate his feelings, and consoled himself by dallying with Angelique. This explanation goes over with her about as well as you’d expect, and she storms out of the room, vowing that she will get her way in the end.
We know that the tarot cards are giving accurate information, because the show leans heavily on the uncanny and they wouldn’t have spent so much time on a gimmick that wasn’t meant to advance the plot. We also know that Vicki is not the Wicked Woman the countess is looking for. That leaves Angelique, and we can assume that her wickedness will express itself in some supernatural action taken to avenge herself on Barnabas. Since we know that Barnabas will become a vampire, we wonder if it is Angelique who makes him one.
Closing Miscellany
I usually refer to surviving cast members with courtesy titles and to deceased ones by surname alone. So Alexandra Moltke Isles is “Mrs Isles,” which has been her professional name for 56 years, David Henesy is “Mr Henesy,” Nancy Barrett is “Miss Barrett,” etc, while Jonathan Frid, Joan Bennett, Louis Edmonds, and Grayson Hall are just “Frid,” “Bennett,” “Edmonds,” and “Hall.” Until last month, I’d been looking forward to saying lots of things about “Miss Parker” and her portrayal of Angelique, but Lara Parker died on 12 October 2023. So she’s just going to be “Parker,” and I’m going to be sad about it.
Artist Teri S. Wood has created a number of short animations about Angelique and Barnabas. This one is based on their two-scene at the end of today’s episode:
Patrick McCray has a post about this episode that mystifies me. He writes that “After seven months of hearing about Angelique, today, she enters. So, no pressure Lara. You only have to live up to a half year of build-up.” Uh, what? There has been absolutely no reference to Angelique on the show before today. I can think of an interpretation of the story that might retroject Angelique into episodes #211-365, and I will talk about it next week. But I don’t think it is an interpretation Patrick would favor.
He also talks about David Ball’s method of reading plays from the ending back to the beginning and then from the beginning forward, so that the ending comes to seem implicit in everything else. He allows that Dark Shadows has more than one ending, but I would say he doesn’t go far enough. I’d say the series has ten endings. The first came in #191, when Laura went up in smoke while her son David found refuge in Vicki’s arms. That ending defined Dark Shadows 1.0 as the story of David’s escape from his evil, undead mother Laura, and his adoption of Vicki as his new, life-affirming mother. The second came in #364, when Barnabas met the ghost of his little sister Sarah, she commanded him to be nice to the living, and he went right on with his murderous plans. That ending defined Dark Shadows 2.0 as the story of Barnabas’ irredeemable evil.
Two of the other endings will feature Angelique dying in Barnabas’ arms, and Patrick suggests that those make the whole show the story of their relationship. I don’t buy it at all. Each of the ten parts is about what it is about, and even those two episodes with Angelique dying derive more dramatic charge from other moments.
*Making connections with the first 73 weeks is my job!
There never was an episode #131 of Dark Shadows. They made a point of giving numbers divisible by 5 to episodes that aired on Fridays, so on days when the show was not broadcast-as it was not broadcast on 26 December 1966- they just skipped the number that would have been used had it run that day.
Since that preemption was the result of Christmas-related programming,* this seems like the place to promote 2021’s big Dark Shadows Christmas event, a dramatic reading of the Orson Welles version of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol by ten surviving members of the original cast. Surviving at that time- it turned out to be Mitchell Ryan’s last performance before his death on 4 March 2022; Christopher Pennock had been involved in the early stages of the production, but he would die in February of 2021.
It is irresistible viewing for Dark Shadows fans. It makes extensive use of music from the show- rather too extensive for my taste, but Mrs Acilius liked it, and from what I gather she appears to be in the majority.
The acting is quite good. I was especially impressed by James Storm’s portrayal of Bob Cratchit. I had never seen Mr Storm in anything but Dark Shadows, where he was cast in the preposterously unplayable role of Gerard Stiles, so it was amazing to me to see what he could do when he had something to work with.
Another pleasant surprise was Alexandra Moltke Isles as the Ghost of Christmas Present. Readers of this blog know that I have a high opinion of Mrs Isles’ abilities, but this was her first part in 53 years. I held my breath to see how many steps she had lost in that interval. As it became clear that she could go as deep into her character as ever and pull up a treasure trove of dramatic insight, I was thrilled.
Mrs Isles appeared at one or two Dark Shadows conventions early in the 1980s. During the unpleasantness, she couldn’t very well make herself available for any event where she would be expected to take questions from the floor, but from time to time she sent greetings on video that would be played at conventions. And she sat for several interviews about Dark Shadows over the years. So you can’t say she made herself a complete stranger, but it is still quite a novelty to see her in this setting.
Many longtime fans describe Mrs Isles as the cast member who was least friendly to them when the show was in production, and there may be a reason for that. In the Q & A, she responds to the question about her first encounter with fandom by telling a story about a girl jumping her on the street and trying to rip her hair out of her head. After that introduction, it is remarkable that she’s been around as much as she has.
The person who had been absolutely disconnected from fandom the longest was David Henesy. He stuck with acting for a few years into the 1970s, but never attended a convention or had any connection with any Dark Shadows themed public events until a cast reunion on Zoom in October 2020. His performances as the child characters (he’s by far the youngest member of the cast, a mere 65 years old at the time of taping) are as letter-perfect as was his work in the series.
*A football match, but a football match usually held at Christmas-time.
Looking for David in the basement of Collinwood, Vicki encounters caretaker Matthew Morgan. No one has bothered to tell Matthew that a new person will be coming to the house, so he assumes she is a burglar and confronts her accordingly. Liz shows up, telling Matthew that Vicki belongs in the house and telling Vicki that she doesn’t belong in the basement.
In week one, Liz refused all requests for information about who Vicki was and why she hired her to be David’s governess. But at least she had told the other members of the household that Vicki would be coming. She hasn’t told even that to Matthew, notwithstanding the fact that, as she will explain to Vicki in this episode 13, Matthew is a “strange and violent man.” By taking the job and living in the house, Vicki, our point of view character, has made herself dependent on Liz; we the audience are also dependent on Liz, in that the stories in these first months all revolve around actions Liz will or won’t take. So it’s doubly unnerving that she is so very stingy with information.
George Mitchell, who plays Matthew here and in his next few appearances, is the sort of actor we often see in the first 42 weeks of the show. He is essentially a miniaturist, who builds a character one finely etched mannerism at a time. His successor in the role, Thayer David, worked at the opposite extreme, becoming the first exponent of the Dark Shadows house style of acting (often called “Go Back to Your Grave!” because of Lara Parker’s explanation of it.) Without that style, the show wouldn’t have become what it did in the period which people remember, so I can’t regret the recasting. But I do wish we could somehow see what it would have been like had George Mitchell carried the character through his whole arc of development. He could have played something I think Art Wallace could have written, a closely observed, sensitively explored psychological study.
There’s another what-might-have-been moment when Vicki tries to make friends with Matthew. He introduces himself to her with a gruff “Morgan! Matthew Morgan!” To which she replies, mimicking his down-east accent, “Wintahs! Victoria Wintahs!” It isn’t much of a joke, and Matthew isn’t amused. But it’s hard not to wonder what Vicki might have become if she’d been allowed to make the occasional joke as the series went on.
Dark Shadows Commentary 