Tag: london bridge

Episode 389: Samantha

Like every other episode of Dark Shadows, this one opens with a voiceover delivered by a member of the cast. The voiceovers in the segment of the series set in the year 1795 usually begin thus:

A séance has been held in the great house of Collinwood, a séance which has suspended time and space and sent one girl on an uncertain and frightening journey into the past, back to the year 1795. There, each of the Collins ancestors resembles a present-day member of the Collins family. But the names and relationships have changed, and Victoria Winters finds herself a stranger in a sea of familiar faces. 

The “sea of familiar faces” results from the same actors appearing in the parts of the show set in different periods. The emphasis the show places on this, both by the repeated use of “sea of familiar faces” in one opening voiceover after another and by the hapless Vicki’s (Alexandra Moltke Isles) exasperating habit of telling the characters that they are being played by actors who previously took other parts, gives the audience a reading instruction. Evidently we are meant to compare and contrast each actor’s twentieth century and eighteenth century roles.

The first face we see today is the only unfamiliar one that has bobbed to the surface of the 1795 sea. It belongs to wicked witch/ lady’s maid Angelique, played by Lara Parker. Angelique had a brief fling with young gentleman Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid) some time ago. They met when he first went to the island of Martinique and met her employers, the wealthy DuPrés family.

Angelique and Samantha. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas had fallen in love with the gracious young Josette DuPrés (Kathryn Leigh Scott,) but was convinced Josette could never love him. Barnabas consoled himself in Angelique’s arms until he realized Josette did love him. Barnabas and Josette agreed to marry. Josette came to Collinwood for the wedding, accompanied by her father André (David Ford) and her aunt, the Countess DuPrés (Grayson Hall.) Angelique is the countess’ maid, but also attends Josette.

Angelique used her powers of black magic to make Josette and Jeremiah Collins (Anthony George,) Barnabas’ uncle, conceive a mad passion for each other. Josette and Jeremiah eloped, breaking Barnabas’ heart. Barnabas and Jeremiah fought a duel; consumed with remorse, Jeremiah let his nephew kill him. Even after all that, Barnabas realized he would always love Josette, a fact of which he apprised Angelique. Frustrated to find that she could never have Barnabas, Angelique yesterday announced in a soliloquy that she would punish him by forcing him to watch his beloved little sister Sarah (Sharon Smyth) suffer. At the top of the episode, Angelique is in her room in the servants’ quarters of Collinwood’s manor house with Sarah’s doll and some pins.

We cut to the front parlor, where Sarah is looking up adoringly at her mother Naomi Collins (Joan Bennett,) who is reciting a story. We cut back to Angelique, who drives a pin into Sarah’s doll. In the front parlor, Sarah clutches her chest and cries out in pain. Angelique sticks more pins into the doll, and Sarah cries out again.

In the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s, Joan Bennett plays matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, owner of the great estate of Collinwood, of the Collins family enterprises, and of any other piece of property that they decide to tell a story about. In Liz’ time, the Collins family is much decayed from its eminence in 1795, but she is still the foremost figure in the town of Collinsport, and would have the authority to make just about anything happen. In fact, Liz can rarely bring herself to do very much that pertains to the plot, but when she does speak up we can see that she has great depths.

Naomi, by contrast, is utterly powerless, shut out by her husband, haughty overlord Joshua (Louis Edmonds) even from the management of the house. In today’s pre-title teaser, we see Sarah sitting on the floor of the front parlor, looking up adoringly while Naomi recites a story to her. That Naomi is reciting to Sarah rather than reading to her reminds us of what we learned when first we saw her in #366, that unlike most women in eighteenth century New England Naomi is altogether illiterate. Naomi occasionally bewails her inability to spend her time productively, and often drinks.

Sharon Smyth plays Sarah in 1795. In 1967, she was Sarah’s ghost, a frequent visitor to Collinwood and its environs. Sarah’s ghost was quite a different character than is the living Sarah. The little girl in the white bonnet who showed up in the oddest places and made the oddest remarks was only one aspect of a vast and mighty dislocation in time and space. It was Sarah’s ghost that started Vicki’s “uncertain and frightening journey into the past.”

Miss Smyth* nowadays describes her acting style when she was nine and ten saying “the first word that comes to mind is ‘clueless,'” but that works out surprisingly well for a ghost. It isn’t clear to us how the visible part of the Sarah phenomenon relates to the rest, much less how the whole thing works, and it can’t be clear- if a phenomenon stops being mysterious, it isn’t supernatural anymore. So it is gripping to see that the visible Sarah is herself in the dark about what she represents. That doesn’t work so well for living characters. When Miss Smyth can’t take her eyes off the teleprompter while delivering lines like “Help me, mother! It hurts!,” we can perhaps see one reason why the unfathomably mighty Sarah of 1967 was reduced to such a subordinate role in 1795.

But Miss Smyth’s limitations as a performer were not the only reason this development was inevitable. The whole idea of the supernatural is that something which appears to be very weak is in fact very strong. So children usually have fewer resources at their disposal than do adults, females are less likely to be found in positions of authority than are males, and the dead cannot rival the dynamism of the living. So the ghost of a little girl will of course be an immense force. The Sarah we see in 1795 is not yet a supernatural being, and so it would ruin the irony if even before her death she were already great and powerful.

In the part of the show set in 1967, Liz was one of the few major characters who never saw the ghost of Sarah. Liz was pretty firmly in denial about all reports of paranormal phenomena, and in #348 Sarah would declare that she could appear only to people who were prepared to believe in ghosts. So it is a bit startling for regular viewers to see these two actors together for the first time. Naomi is the same calm, indulgent presence to Sarah that Liz is to the children in her life, suggesting that though “the names and relationships have changed,” Liz and Naomi are two versions of the same person.

If the viewer’s main activity in watching the 1795 segment is contrasting the characters with those played by the same actors in the first 73 weeks, Angelique’s prominence is a puzzle. She is the only one who doesn’t fit into that scheme, yet she has driven all of the action so far. By the end of today’s episode, I think we can see a 1967 character with whom Angelique stands in juxtaposition. That character is Barnabas.

From April to November of 1967, Dark Shadows was largely the story of vampire Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid) and his attempt to impersonate a living man native to the twentieth century. It was so much fun to watch Barnabas scramble to keep this game going that the audience found it easy to put to one side the horrible evil he did and to look for reasons to think of him as good. But if we ever succeeded in doing that, Dark Shadows would be ruined. A deep-dyed villain allows a drama to be less serious overall than it might otherwise be, so that a thoroughly bad Barnabas lightens the tone. Make him relatable, or even forgivable, and everything gets terribly serious again. Yet a nonthreatening vampire is a purely comic character, like Count von Count on Sesame Street. So until they can establish another Big Bad, Barnabas has to be beyond redemption. If he is a lovable guy who just needs help dealing with his neck-biting problem, he has no place on the show, and it has no story left to tell. So they spent the fall systematically kicking away every possible mitigating factor and forcing us to behold Barnabas’ unrelieved evil.

The last hope of redemption for Barnabas in 1967 was his attachment to the late Sarah. Sarah had died when she was about ten, and her ghost started haunting the estate of Collinwood back in June, when Barnabas was holding Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town (Kathryn Leigh Scott,) prisoner in his basement. By November, many people had seen and talked with Sarah, but she had shunned Barnabas, even though he was desperately eager to reconnect with his baby sister. In his speeches about his longing for Sarah and in two moments when a suggestion he might see Sarah distracted him from a murder he was in the middle of committing, we saw the possibility that when Barnabas was finally reunited with her, he would change his ways.

That reunion finally took place in #364. Sarah walks in as Barnabas is strangling his only friend and sometime co-conspirator, mad scientist Julia Hoffman (Grayson Hall.) Barnabas does let Julia go, and has a heartfelt conversation with Sarah. Sarah says that she will not come back until Barnabas learns to be good. We can see just how long that is likely to be when, less than two minutes after Sarah has vanished, Barnabas tells Julia that, while he may not kill her tonight, her existence means no more to him than does that of a moth.

When even a direct encounter with Sarah cannot move Barnabas to find value in human life, we see that what Barnabas wanted when he was yearning for her to come near him was not to renew a relationship in which anything would be expected of him, but was something more like nostalgia. He has moved into the house where he spent his time when he was alive, and has restored it to its appearance in those days. He once persuaded his distant relatives, Liz and the other living members of the Collins family, to attend a party in that house dressed in clothing that belonged to their ancestors of his period and answering to their names. And he cherishes a fantasy that a young woman will discard her personality and replace it with that of Josette, then come to him and live out the life he had once believed he would have, long ago. His wishes for Sarah are of a piece with these attempts to recreate a past world. He wants to reenact the time he had with her, not to face the present alongside her. Barnabas is a damned soul, unable to love, unable to grow, unable to do anything for the first time.

Today, the show pushes Angelique into the same “Irredeemable” category where his reaction to Sarah’s visit had landed Barnabas. Again, it is an interaction with Sarah that represents the last straw. Josette and Barnabas made a sweet couple, but we knew before we ever saw them together that they were not fated to end up together. Jeremiah was likable enough, but we knew that he, too, had a sharply limited future. But Sarah is a child, a particularly adorable one, and is someone we have come to feel we know through her months as a ghost. When Angelique treats her so cruelly, we cannot imagine ever forgiving her.

And yet, there were times we felt that way about Barnabas, too. Angelique’s insane fixations are remarkably close to those vampire Barnabas exhibited in 1967, so much so that we keep wondering if whatever she does that turns Barnabas into a vampire will also put her personality into his body. We have come to be attached to the vampire; perhaps we will eventually discover it is Angelique we were watching until Vicki came to the past.

That isn’t to deny that the human Barnabas we have seen so far has points of contact with the ghoul from 1967. He was selfish enough to take advantage of a servant girl in Martinique when he didn’t think he could win the love of the grand lady he wanted and to discard her when he learned he could. He is cowardly enough that it never occurred to him to tell Josette that he had a past with Angelique at a time when doing so could have prevented Angelique casting the fatal spells on her and Jeremiah.

Real as these vices are, they are endemic to soap opera characters. Few daytime serials would have any stories to tell if they were about people who had a gift for monogamy, and we are supposed to find ourselves yelling at the screen “Just tell her!” and “Just tell him!” at regular intervals. Even the power differential between Barnabas the scion of the wealthy Collins family and Angelique the servant girl, problematic** as it would be in real life, is less troubling in the soaps, which take place in worlds where heirs and heiresses marry servants and their relatives all the time. Of course, most viewers know that Barnabas is destined to become a vampire, a metaphor for selfishness, and will be inclined to see in his use of Angelique the seeds of his subsequent damnation. And Angelique has enough lines about Barnabas’ selfishness that even viewers who joined the show during the 1795 segment can’t let him off the hook altogether.

Still, there is a great deal of good in the living Barnabas. We see him at Sarah’s bedside, consumed with worry for his beloved little sister. The doctor has been to see Sarah, and he has nothing to offer. Sarah asks to see her governess Vicki, who is in hiding because a visiting witch-hunter named Trask has blamed her for a series of inexplicable misfortunes that have befallen the house since she showed up in #366. It was Vicki’s own odd behavior that first made her a suspect, and Angelique has taken advantage of Trask’s foolishness to fabricate evidence against Vicki. She has gone into hiding, and Barnabas is helping her.

When Sarah keeps asking to see Vicki, Barnabas promises to bring her. Naomi is surprised to learn that Barnabas knows where Vicki is, and is not at all sure Trask isn’t right about her. But when she sees her daughter with Vicki, she is sure that she is innocent.

Vicki was the audience’s main point-of-view character throughout 1966 and well into 1967. Major story developments took place after Vicki found out what was going on. Vicki was the chief protagonist in the most important story of that period, the crisis represented by undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. Vicki took charge of the household, organized a group to fight Laura, and rescued strange and troubled boy David from the flames when Laura tried to burn him alive. That intelligent, forceful character has been fading ever further into memory in recent months, and we haven’t seen a trace of her in the 1795 storyline. Sarah is happy to see Vicki and says she likes the stories she tells, but she is a passive witness to today’s events. She serves chiefly as a prop, used to demonstrate that the human Barnabas, whatever his faults, is capable of heroic action.

Barnabas’ compassion for Sarah and his valiant defense of Vicki do not negate his vices. As the heir to Collinwood, Barnabas can express his self-regard both by gratifying his urge to treat some women badly and by earning admiration for treating other women well. In her low station, the same trait leads Angelique directly to the “Dark Triad” of Narcissism, Manipulativeness, and Psychopathy. As a vampire, Barnabas will exhibit the same three qualities in abundance, but for now, we still have license to hope for better from him.

As it was so much fun to watch Barnabas trying to pass as a modern man that we wanted to like him even after he had been terribly cruel to Maggie, a character we like very much, it was so much fun to watch Angelique twist Trask around her finger that we wanted to like her. Besides, her desire to remake Barnabas as her lover is understandable for those who have been watching the show and wanting him to be something other than a heartless murder machine. So, perhaps we will wind up liking Angelique after all.

Angelique has bewitched indentured servant Ben Stokes (Thayer David) and forced him to act as her assistant. Ben is devoted to Barnabas and miserable that he has been the instrument of so much evil done to him, but has been powerless to resist Angelique’s commands. When he realizes that Angelique is causing Sarah to sicken and perhaps die, he goes to her room and demands that she stop. He threatens to kill her if she does not relent. In response, Angelique causes him to have a heart attack. She lets his heart start pumping again when he promises to be quiet.

This is the second heart attack a character of David’s has had on screen. The first also prevented a servant in this same house from killing a young woman. That came in #126, when crazed handyman Matthew Morgan had been holding Vicki prisoner here and was about to decapitate her. The ghost of Josette led several other supernatural presences who scared Matthew to death before he could complete his fell purpose. Matthew and Ben are both devoted to the Collinses, and both are led astray so that they become parties to terrible crimes. As the benevolent spirit of Josette put a stop to Matthew’s crimes, so the malign Angelique prevents Ben from putting a stop to her own.

Barnabas drops by Angelique’s room to ask if she has seen Sarah’s doll, which she calls Samantha. He tells her that Sarah is very ill and has asked for the doll. It occurs to Angelique that she has some leverage over Barnabas. She says that she can brew a special kind of tea that might cure Sarah’s symptoms. He asks her to do so. She makes him promise to marry her if she does.

Several times, we have seen that Angelique is flying by the seat of her pants. She had no idea of using Sarah’s illness to gain a hold over Barnabas until he chanced to come into her room. Nor is she thinking ahead- as it stands, the witch-hunters have fastened on Vicki as their suspect, and are not thinking of her. If word gets out that she had the power to cure Sarah’s mysterious ailment and exercised it only after extorting Barnabas’ promise of marriage, that would seem to be proof positive that she is a witch.

In her own bedroom, Sarah sips the tea. At the same moment, Angelique, in the servants’ quarters, pulls the pins from the doll. How exactly Angelique got the timing just right isn’t exactly clear, but she must have had a way- she is perfectly confident when she tells the doll that it has served her well.

*Mrs Lentz now, but it’s strange to say “Mrs” when you’re talking about a ten year old.

**I know people don’t really say “problematic” anymore, but it seems to be the right word here.

Episode 360: You would understand, if you understood

Vampire Barnabas Collins has decided that he will eventually kill his sometime accomplice turned bête-noire, mad scientist Julia Hoffman. Julia has decided that her only possible helper is the ghost of Barnabas’s ten year-old sister, Sarah.

Julia goes to Sarah’s grave in the Tomb of the Collinses and calls to her. She hears the strains of “London Bridge,” then sees Sarah. Sarah tells Julia that she will not help her, because she killed someone she liked, Dr Dave Woodard. Julia tries to put the blame for that crime on Barnabas, but Sarah declares that she helped him. We heard “London Bridge” in the background during the murder scene in #341, so we know that Sarah saw the crime and Julia will not be able to deceive her.

Sarah and Julia, Barnabas’ two sister-enablers. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

In this scene, Sarah says that she cannot act directly against Barnabas. This is a striking moment, because it is the first time Sarah has spoken her brother’s name out loud. Sarah’s statement explains why she watched as Barnabas and Julia killed Woodard, and also why so many of her attempts to protect her friends from him have ended up with them in worse shape than before and Barnabas insulated from all accountability.

When Julia was working with Barnabas, she too made desultory attempts to restrain his worst tendencies, while always protecting him from the consequences of his actions. The dynamic between them mirrored the Bossy Big Sister/ Bratty Little Brother pattern that matriarch Liz and her brother Roger have been modeling from the first day of the series. Seeing Julia with Barnabas’ literal sister, we see that this dynamic has defined the Collinses for centuries.

Episode 348: A matter of fact

We open on a new set, the bedroom of heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard in the great house of Collinwood. Dark Shadows has been in color since #295 in August. Though directors Lela Swift and John Sedwick were both ambitious visual artists, they haven’t been able to do much with color so far. With Carolyn’s bedroom, Swift and the staging team have accomplished one of their first real essays in color. It is composed mostly of shades of yellow, pink, and orange.

The color schemes of the other interiors we’ve seen up to this point run the gamut from sedate to subdued to drab to dank, so we already know we are in a unique space. The only other room in Collinwood that might have matched this one for brightness was the kitchen, but we haven’t seen that since #208.

Carolyn’s young cousin, strange and troubled boy David, lets himself into her room. He touches her, and she awakes with a scream. He explains that he just dropped in to make sure she wasn’t dead. When she turns on the light, the screen is so bright that I reflexively squinted, a reaction I’d never before had to an image on Dark Shadows.

Bright room.

David can’t quite explain why he was afraid Carolyn might be dead, but he does insist that she take an antique toy soldier, saying that she will be safe if she keeps it with her. Carolyn’s mother, matriarch Liz, comes into the room to investigate Carolyn’s scream. Liz wonders what David is doing there. Carolyn hastens to say that he was just making sure she was all right.

David goes, and Carolyn tells Liz she doesn’t think anything can be done for him at home. Liz is reluctant to send him away. Regular viewers will not be surprised by this. We know that Liz took David and his father, her ne’er-do-well brother Roger, into Collinwood at the beginning of the summer of 1966 and summoned her unacknowledged daughter, well-meaning governess Vicki, to come look after David starting with #1 on 27 June 1966, so that her conviction that the family ought to look after him got the whole show started. Nonetheless, Liz is so disturbed by David’s unusual statements and depressive affect that she agrees that he needs residential care.

We cut to the Old House on the estate. Vampire Barnabas Collins is sitting in a basement room where mad scientist Julia Hoffman maintains a laboratory. The room is full of electrical equipment, a bit odd since the Old House has no electricity; the laboratory itself is lit by flaming torches. But if we’ve ever seen a Universal Studios production from the 1930s, we know that where you find a mad scientist, you will find electrical currents, so naturally things start buzzing when Julia flips a switch.

Barnabas confined

Julia is trying to implement a medical cure for Barnabas’ vampirism. In the first shot of this scene, we see a visual metaphor for that project. Barnabas, an uncanny being, is confined to a small space in the middle of an elaborate collection of technology. If Julia succeeds, the supernatural will be vanquished altogether and scientific rationality will fill the whole world. The color scheme emphasizes the contrast between Julia’s optimistic goal and the terrain on which she operates. The walls and floor are dominated by the grays and browns of the basement, but the frames and tubing of her equipment are a bright metallic hue, light plays on the glass components, and the intense greens, reds, and blues of the potions are distributed in a slightly unbalanced, lively pattern. The irregular shapes of the frames and tubing emphasize this pattern, and contrast with the solid gray of the floor and the even grid of the brickwork on the walls.

This image not only represents Julia’s plans, but also one of the major themes the show is exploring at this period. Too many characters have encountered too much evidence of supernatural forces and beings for anyone to simply deny that such things exist. But even those who have been most heavily exposed to them keep reverting to a naturalistic frame of reference. Sure, Julia spends all her time hanging around with a vampire and has encountered a couple of ghosts, but she’s determined to ring all of those phenomena around with scientific explanations and technological interventions until they yield to rational control.

Julia’s project has hit its first major setback, as the latest treatment led Barnabas’ hands to age dramatically. He expresses the fear that time will catch up with him, and his apparent age will soon catch up with his actual age, something like 200 years. Julia’s hope that her experiment will not only free Barnabas of his curse, but found a new kind of medicine that will free everyone else of aging and death, will thus be defeated.

Barnabas gives a remarkable little speech about the situation he finds himself in:

I’ve been granted privileges given to few other men… For most men, time moves slowly, so very slowly. They don’t even realize it. But time has revealed itself to me in a very special way. Time is a rushing, howling wind raging past me, withering me in one relentless blast and then continues on. I have been sitting here passively, submissive to its rage, watching its work. Listen. Time, howling, withering.

Writer Joe Caldwell has a fine sense of what actors can do, and this odd little bit of purple prose is right in Jonathan Frid’s wheelhouse. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but the sound of his voice delivering it is so gorgeous it may as well be Shakespeare. Well, maybe not Shakespeare, but Ben Jonson at least.

It is possible to read this speech as a programmatic statement. Daytime soap operas of the 1960s were famously slow-paced; the old joke was that a viewer saw an episode that ended with a character hearing a telephone ring, missed four months of the show, and tuned back in to see the episode that started with the same character saying “Hello.” Even by the standards of the period, the first months of Dark Shadows were notoriously leisurely, with action often as not playing out in real time. When we are watching the 21 episodes centering on Roger’s attempts to find a fountain pen he misplaced, it is indeed the case that “time moves slowly, so very slowly.” But those days are behind us. The show is whipping through plot points at a pace that many prime time series contemporary with it would have had a hard time matching.

If the speech is programmatic, it is also autobiographical on the part of the screenwriter. A fast pace promises excitement for the viewers, but makes life hard for a writing staff that never numbered more than three. Indeed, this is the last episode Joe Caldwell will write for two and a half years. Perhaps he felt the demands of the new pace as “a relentless blast” withering his talents, and had to bow out.

We return to Carolyn’s room. She is in front of her mirror, contemplating the toy soldier. She hears the strains of “London Bridge” playing on a wooden flute, which she has learned is a sign that the ghost of ten year old Sarah Collins is present. Carolyn grew up in this haunted house, so it may not be entirely surprising that her response is to lean back and enjoy the music. But she sits up when Sarah manifests herself in visible form.

Ghost in the mirror

Sarah speaks, and Carolyn sees her reflected in her mirror. The following scene is so extraordinary I’m going to transcribe all of the dialogue:

Sarah: David must have given you that.

Carolyn: Sarah!

Sarah: He told you my name.

Carolyn: Sarah, how did you get in here?

Sarah: Didn’t David tell you?

Carolyn: Tell me what?

Sarah: All about me.

Carolyn: I’m not sure I understand.

Sarah: I think I’m a ghost. Matter of fact, I’m sure I am.

Giving the facts

This is the first time Sarah has described herself in any terms, certainly the first time she has called herself a ghost. Her coyness about herself had left David confused about what she was; it was not until #325 that he finally concluded that she was a ghost. After that, she became more forthright with him. When he wasn’t sure what she was, she would wait until she was out of his line of sight to appear and disappear. But in #327, she fades away while he’s looking right at her.

Coming out to David not only allowed Sarah to relax around him, but has led her to discard her coyness altogether. She is startlingly blunt with Carolyn as this conversation goes on:

Carolyn: B-but- I don’t believe in-

Sarah: Yes you do. Or I wouldn’t have been able to come here. You’re not afraid of me, are you?

Carolyn: No…

Sarah: If you are, I understand.

This is the first confirmation that Sarah can appear only to those who are prepared to believe in her. It’s true that most of the people who have seen and heard her- David; Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town; Maggie’s father Sam; Vicki; Barnabas; Julia; Barnabas’ sometime blood thrall Willie; and local physician Dave Woodard- have either had extensive contact with the supernatural or had reasoned their way to the conclusion that she existed. But she also showed herself to Maggie’s nurse at the mental hospital Julia runs, and we don’t know anything about her background or beliefs. And local man Burke Devlin heard Sarah when she and David were talking in #327. While Burke has had plenty of contact with supernatural beings and in the early days of Dark Shadows, when he was fun, was willing to believe in them, he was at that point tearing around bellowing that there were no such things as ghosts. So this is new and unexpected information.

Carolyn’s denial that Sarah frightens her is given in a trembling voice that shows it to be a lie. Still, she isn’t as frightened as she might be. The other day, in #344, Carolyn was in David’s room when Sarah manifested there, not in the visible form of a little girl, but as the sound of “London Bridge” and as information appearing in David’s mind about Burke’s imminent death. Carolyn was terrified of Sarah when she came that way.

Carolyn: Well, what do you want?

Sarah: Don’t send David away.

Carolyn: How do you know about that?

Sarah: I don’t know, I just do.

At this point, we see Carolyn’s fear fading. She is starting to react to Sarah as if she really were a ten year old girl.

Carolyn urging Sarah to be reasonable.

Carolyn: But Sarah, we have to send David away. It’s the only way we can help him.

Sarah: But if you send David away, I won’t have anyone to play with.

Carolyn: Well, maybe it isn’t good for David to play with you.

Sarah: Why do you say that?

Carolyn: Because it leads him into believing all sorts of things that aren’t true.

Sarah: How do you know they’re not true?

Carolyn: Well, they’re just not, they couldn’t be.

Sarah: He wasn’t lying about me, was he?

Carolyn: No.

Sarah: Well.. then maybe David is acting the way he is because no one will believe him.

Carolyn: But… it isn’t possible.

Sarah: People say I’m not possible, but I am. Why doesn’t that make the rest possible?

Carolyn: Sarah, maybe you don’t know the stories David’s been telling!

Sarah: Why do you think that?

Carolyn: Because they’re too fantastic! And besides, they’ve all been proved false.

Sarah: How do you know they’ve been proved false?

Carolyn: Sarah, are you trying to tell me that Barnabas actually slee-

This exchange is the ultimate example of a character accepting the existence of a particular supernatural being and then snapping back into a frame of reference that does not allow for supernatural beings. Carolyn knows that Sarah is a ghost, and starts arguing with her about how fantastic the world is permitted to be.

There comes a knock at the door. Carolyn turns away from Sarah to look at the door, and when she looks back, Sarah has vanished. Regular viewers know that Sarah was Barnabas’ little sister, that she wants to keep him from doing horrible things to people she likes, but that she will not say anything against him. So when Carolyn says Barnabas’ name, we know that Sarah is about to vanish.

Sarah’s part is an outstanding example of writing to an actor’s abilities, even more so than was Barnabas’ speech. Caldwell knew that Jonathan Frid had a flair for making flowery gibberish appealing, because that is what he has been doing the whole time he’s been on Dark Shadows. What Sharon Smyth has been doing well as Sarah is being a cutie pie and creating a vague and mysterious impression. When she has more than a few lines to deliver, things tend to get very wobbly. Today, she has to maintain a commanding tone and an adult demeanor throughout an extended patch of rapid-fire dialogue. Absolutely nothing we have seen on screen would suggest that she could handle that. But she pulls it off, more than competently. There are a few glances at the teleprompter, but at no point does she break out of the patient and authoritative manner she has to adopt. It is an impressive job of acting by any standard.

The person at Carolyn’s door is Liz. Liz is Dark Shadows‘ queen of denial. Viewers who have been with the show from the beginning have seen a few cracks in her facade of disbelief in the supernatural. In #10, she dozed off in the drawing room and started talking in her sleep about ghosts. When Vicki insisted to her in #127 that she had seen a ghost, Liz said she believed her. And in #280 and #281, Liz reluctantly agreed to participate in a séance, and afterward agreed that Vicki had been possessed by a spirit. But even in those moments Liz was fighting to keep the topic of ghosts at bay, and the rest of the time she has presented a blank wall to any attempt to face facts about the strange goings-on. So it is not surprising that Carolyn tells her mother she was talking to herself while tidying up her room.

Having talked Liz into sending David away, she now has to talk her back out of it. She manages to get her to agree to wait a few days. “London Bridge” plays. Carolyn reacts to it, Liz does not.

In his room, a distraught David is looking at a mobile. Its whimsical black and white markings suggest a puzzle and make a stark contrast with the vivid colors around them.*

Puzzling shapes.
Back to the wall.

Carolyn comes in. She brings the toy soldier and tells David she doesn’t think she will need it. He insists that she will, but she explains that Sarah visited her and now she believes him and knows how to help him. David is horrified by this. He says that Sarah visited Dr Woodard, that Woodard believed him, and that led to his death. He begs Carolyn not to believe him and claims to have been lying. He sobs and clutches her.

Anguished embrace.

Back in the Old House, Julia prepares to give Barnabas another treatment. He snaps at her. She tells him that whatever happens, she wants him to know that she always wished him well. That prompts him to unload a further stream of sour remarks about her competence and intentions. Julia carries out the treatments, only to find that the aged appearance of Barnabas’ hands has spread to his head.

In his post about this episode on Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn puts it well when he says that “This is just good soap opera construction. People that we care about, facing terrible danger, and desperate to help each other.” He’s referring specifically to the scenes between David and Carolyn and Liz, but it applies to everyone. We care not only about the good people in the great house (well, they’ve been relatively good, lately,) but also about Barnabas and Julia, evil people who are the terrible danger David and Carolyn and Liz are facing, but who make the show fun to watch. We care about Sarah too, and she’s desperately trying to accomplish exactly the result we most want to see, an outcome in which David, Barnabas, and everyone else we enjoy watching stays on the show.

*Evidently this mobile was a commercially produced item. One of the commenters on Danny Horn’s Dark Shadows Every Day reports having had one like it as a child.

Episode 344: Listen to the music, listen!

Strange and troubled boy David Collins is sitting on his bed. The ghost of his cousin Sarah is with him, playing “London Bridge” on her flute. She has told him that local physician Dave Woodard is dead, and he is depressed. She explains that she thought she had to tell him.

Sarah says she thinks that Woodard’s death was a terrible one and that it shouldn’t have happened. She denies knowing any more than that, and when David presses her for further information she becomes uncomfortable and vanishes.

David’s aunt, matriarch Liz, comes into his room to break the news to him about Woodard. She is startled to find that he already knows. She is distressed at his attitude of complete resignation. Woodard was the only adult who believed all of the facts about the supernatural menace looming over the great estate of Collinwood and the town of Collinsport that David and Sarah have shared with each other, and when David last saw him Woodard was trying to do something about that menace. David takes Woodard’s death as the end of all hope.

Downstairs, Liz meets her daughter Carolyn and well-meaning governess Vicki. She tells them how sad David is, and Carolyn goes up to see him. She starts talking about imaginary friends, and David asks if she means Sarah. Carolyn says that she doesn’t think Sarah is imaginary, and David replies “You don’t have to pretend. I don’t care.” He isn’t the least bit angry with her- he means exactly what he says when he tells her he doesn’t care how she feels about him.

Viewers who have been with the show from the beginning could see that reaction coming. For the first 24 weeks or so, Carolyn was a flighty heiress, a self-centered young woman who took no interest at all in her little cousin. Since then they have discarded that theme and Carolyn has become a mature and caring person. She and David have had some moments where she has seemed like a big sister. Still, she is still far less involved with him than is Vicki, and David doesn’t have any hopes that even Vicki will listen to him when he tells the truth about the strange goings-on. So when David says “I don’t care,” Carolyn is hit by a freight train that we’ve seen coming for a long time.

This new Carolyn won’t give up on David. She confides that when she was nine years old, she had a friend named Randy, a little boy who always wore a red sweater and who may or may not have existed. Carolyn admits that Randy may have been a ghost, and there is a moment when, as Danny Horn puts it on his Dark Shadows Every Day, “David stands up, and he looks at her, as if they’re really seeing each other for the first time in a long while.” The first time ever, I’d say- David and his father Roger only moved into the house a month or so before the show started, and by that time Carolyn was the character we first saw.

This isn’t the first time the audience has seen this side of Carolyn. In the opening weeks of Dark Shadows, she was one of several characters who had brief conversations with Vicki about the legendary ghosts of Collinwood, and she was the most persistent about laughing those legends off. But before the show had been on the air for five weeks, Carolyn admitted to Vicki that the legends were all true, and that she had tried to downplay them only because she liked Vicki and wanted her to stay.

That development is recapitulated in this scene. Where Vicki had reacted with confusion, telling herself that she ought to be concerned about Carolyn’s mental health but unable to quash a sickly feeling that she might be right, David reacts with wonderment. He is beyond trying to do anything about the horrors that he knows are in progress, let alone appealing to anyone to join him in fighting them, but we can see him absorbing the information that Carolyn is not at all the person she had led him to believe she was.

Once Carolyn stops pretending she does not believe in ghosts, we see why she and the other adults in the family are so insistent about keeping the door shut on the supernatural back-world behind the main action. “London Bridge” starts playing on the soundtrack; Carolyn and David can both hear it. As it goes on, David declares that something terrible is about to happen. It will be an accident- no one will cause it, no one wants it to happen. But it can’t be stopped. Carolyn asks how he knows, and he says he just does.

David communes with the spirits. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The little girl we saw in the opening is Sarah, but in this moment we realize she is not the whole of Sarah. The girl is only one manifestation of an unfathomably vast complex of phenomena. The world in which the action appears to be taking place is a tiny, fragile thing by comparison with forces like Sarah. If the characters stray from their little paths of denial and evasion the whole thing may at any moment dissolve altogether, thrusting the back-world into the foreground and leaving them adrift. After a few minutes of David’s soothsaying, Carolyn protests that “None of this is real, it can’t be!” But it’s too late- she knows that it is all too real, and the world of love affairs and hotels and motorcycles and dress shops and restaurants in which she has spent the last 69 weeks trying to find a place is a dream from which she is already starting to awaken.

Meanwhile, Vicki and her depressing fiancé Burke have declined Liz’ offer to live in the west wing of Collinwood when they are married. Liz had hoped to keep Vicki around so that she could help with David. When Burke asks if he should talk to David, Liz tells him not to bother. Carolyn already talked to him, Liz explains, and so far from calming David down she got herself upset too.

That response would suggest that Liz wants to tranquilize David, not to communicate with him. On the heels of the scene between David and Carolyn, it tells us more. Liz has lived in Collinwood longer than anyone, and she has struggled harder than anyone to keep the non-supernatural fore-world in operation. After Carolyn’s experiment in facing facts comes so close to sweeping the “logical explanations” away once and for all, we can see what Liz is trying to protect by keeping David quiet.

Burke is leaving the house, about to go on a business trip to South America, when David emerges from his room and says goodbye. David’s tone makes it clear that it is a final farewell. Burke keeps telling David that he will come back, but David is certain that Burke will die. Burke is shocked by David’s attitude, and says that perhaps they should live in the west wing after all. Vicki is thrilled by the idea.

Burke and Vicki go to a terrace outside the house. There, they hear the wind whistling through the rocks along the shore. On Vicki’s first night in the house, she heard from Liz’ brother Roger the legend of “The Widows’ Wail,” according to which this sound is a warning from the spirits of the widows who haunt the area. In those days, Vicki had little patience for ghost stories, and the “Widows’ Wail” seemed to be the easiest of all the legends to dismiss. But the wind blows every night, and she’s only heard it make that sound on a handful of occasions, usually right before something terrible happens. She’s also seen multiple ghosts, done battle with a humanoid Phoenix, and encountered what anyone with access to old movies would recognize as evidence that a vampire is operating in the vicinity. So she hears the Widows’ Wail the same way regular viewers of the show do, as the sound of the supernatural back-world blasting through and knocking everything else down.

Vicki hears the Widows’ Wail. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

When Vicki pleads with Burke not to go to South America, he replies “Don’t tell me you’re starting to believe all that stuff!” For months now, Burke has been gaslighting Vicki, pretending that she is crazy for believing in supernatural phenomena, including phenomena he himself witnessed and previously acknowledged. But hearing the Widows’ Wail, which was a prominent topic in the early days, and seeing the black and white imagery of the kinescope, we can remember a more appealing version of Burke. Back then, Burke was one of several longtime residents of Collinsport who used the word “ghost” figuratively in conversation with Vicki, each time prompting her to exclaim “Surely you don’t believe in ghosts!?,” to which he would reply that it was entirely possible that there were literal ghosts at Collinwood. For a moment, we see that Burke, and forget the gaslighting abuser. That moment lasts just long enough that we can share David’s sorrow and Vicki’s terror at Burke’s imminent death.

Episode 341: A fatal curiosity

Mad scientist Julia Hoffman and vampire Barnabas Collins are visiting Dr Dave Woodard in his office. Woodard has stolen the notebook in which Julia has recorded the truth about Barnabas and is planning to hand it over to the sheriff. At Barnabas’ insistence, Julia has prepared a hypodermic with a potion that will induce a heart attack. He orders her to give Woodard the lethal injection.

In her reluctance to kill her onetime friend, Julia suggests that Barnabas turn Woodard into a vampire. Julia believes she will soon find a cure for vampirism. So, Woodard will just be one more patient who will benefit from her imminent success. Neither he nor Barnabas receives her brainstorm with any great enthusiasm.

Woodard claims that, even if he became a vampire, he would have free will and would be able to fight Barnabas and destroy himself. He then asserts that Barnabas, too, has the ability to do the right thing. As viewers of drama, we are predisposed to believe that characters whom we hear talking and who have motivations we can understand are at liberty to choose what they will do, so we may believe that Woodard is right. But we haven’t seen any evidence to support his contention.

Julia keeps trying to postpone the killing. Exasperated with her procrastination, Barnabas tells her to hand him the hypodermic. She does so. As he is about to give the shot, Woodard claims to see the ghost of Barnabas’ little sister Sarah. Barnabas is so desperate to see Sarah that he falls for this and lets Woodard go. Julia calls out “Stop him!”

Barnabas is furious that Woodard has hit him at his most sensitive spot. As he regains his grip on Woodard, he jabs him in the shoulder with the needle. While Woodard crumples at his feet, Barnabas picks up on the words Woodard had earlier used to describe him, exclaiming “Loathsome I am, and evil! You can mock me for that, but leave my pain alone!” Even after that exclamation, Barnabas asks Julia if Sarah really was there. We don’t see her, but we do hear the strains of “London Bridge,” a song that has always before told us that Sarah is present.

Barnabas places Woodard’s corpse in the desk chair. He appears to be enjoying himself hugely while he taunts Julia for her squeamishness. He asks her, as a medical doctor, to verify that Woodard is dead; she can’t bring herself even to look at the body. She wants to leave immediately; he asks if she plans to leave the needle on Woodard’s desk. Once she puts the murder weapon in her purse, she again wants to rush out; he asks if she is planning to leave the notebook in Woodard’s pocket.

Even after they return to his house, Barnabas continues tormenting Julia. He tells her she will soon grow accustomed to her new identity as a murderer. She resists the label, and he magnanimously agrees to share half the responsibility for the killing. She says she will stop trying to cure him and go away; he tells her that will no longer be possible. They need each other more than ever now. When he tells her that he is her only friend, she hears Woodard’s voice saying “You no longer have friends.” As those words sound, so do the notes of “London Bridge.”

Barnabas is at his most compelling in these scenes, thanks to the actor who plays him. Jonathan Frid’s style of acting was rather old-fashioned even in 1967, but his achievement today is extraordinary. He takes us on a dizzying ride from horror at the brutal killing of Dr Woodard, to pity for the vastly lonely man longing for his little sister, and back to horror at Barnabas’ glee in bestowing the title of murderer on Julia. I can’t imagine any performer doing a better job.

The killing of Dr Woodard is quite a shock. It is only the second premeditated murder we see on Dark Shadows. Undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins used black magic to cause parapsychologist Peter Guthrie to have a fatal car crash in #186. There’s no magic this time- this is a plain old death by poisoning. We also saw Barnabas kill seagoing con man Jason McGuire, but that was not a premeditated act. Jason opened Barnabas’ coffin at sunset, and Barnabas, apparently by reflex, strangled him. That’s a reflex many of us might understand, I’m certainly not at my best when I first wake up. So when Barnabas wrestles with Woodard and jabs him with the needle, we are entering new territory.

When Julia and Barnabas are back in his house, she throws the needle into the fireplace. The Dark Shadows wiki disapproves of this action:

The destruction of the murder weapon was taken more lightly in this scene than it would have been in real life. The heat from a normal fireplace would not be hot enough to melt glass. The metal needle would have been blackened, and if someone looked through the ashes thoroughly, it would have been discovered. Had the syringe been discovered, Woodard’s death would have been ruled a homicide.

Dark Shadows wiki, episode 341.

I don’t see why the presence of a warmed-over medical sharp in Barnabas’ fireplace would mean that “Woodard’s death would have been ruled a homicide.” The police haven’t made any connection between Woodard’s death and Barnabas’ house. Even if they had, they would have no reason to suppose a hypodermic needle in his fireplace would have anything to do with Woodard. Julia is keeping it quiet that she is a medical doctor, but it isn’t a secret from the authorities. She spends most of her time at Barnabas’ house and is treating him for what she believes to be a rare blood disease, so she’s likely to have all sorts of medical supplies there. It is never specified what the chemical was that caused Woodard’s death, but if it was potassium chloride, it would have had the effects Julia describes and the heat of the fireplace would be sufficient to cause it to disappear without a trace in a little flash of dark purple flame. And of course potassium chloride dissolves in the bloodstream so completely that even a large dose of it cannot be detected in a normal postmortem examination. Unless they had dripped some of it into Woodard’s ashtray, Julia and Barnabas would have no reason to believe that the police would be looking for potassium chloride.

Julia moves to throw her notebook into the fire after the needle. Barnabas intercepts it in a move that looks so much like what you’d see on a basketball court that I count it as a blooper.

“Hoffman goes up, and is DENIED by Collins!” Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

In between the scenes with Barnabas and Julia, there is some stuff with the sheriff and artist Sam Evans. The sheriff ambles into The Blue Whale tavern and finds Sam starting his fourth shot of whisky. They talk about Woodard, and Sam insists they go to his office to look for him. For the first 40 weeks of Dark Shadows, Sam’s alcoholism was a substantial story element, part of the “Revenge of Burke Devlin” arc. When that arc finally dried up in #201, Sam’s alcoholism went away. He’s a social drinker now. Still, he used to be the town drunk, and apparently that’s a higher post than sheriff. The sheriff follows Sam’s orders and accompanies him to Woodard’s office.

They knock on the office door. There is no answer. Sam suggests they break the door down. They haven’t tried to turn the knob, so they have no reason to suppose it is locked. Returning viewers will recall that yesterday Julia just walked into the office, without even knocking, and she and Barnabas did not lock the door behind them. So we can be fairly sure it is not locked. Still, orders are orders, so when the Town Drunk (Retired) says it’s time to break the door down, the sheriff watches him respectfully. Of course the whole set is made of a sheet of plywood, so when Sam “flings himself” against the door, he has to maintain a ludicrous gentleness to keep any part of it standing.

Inside, they find Woodard dead in his chair. Their response is bewildering. At first they are going to call for help, but then decide that because Woodard is dead there is no point. Eventually the sheriff remembers that he ought to call the coroner. They also take turns declaring that they believe Woodard’s death was the result of foul play.

Episode 334: Help the boy

High-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins was the first of Dark Shadows’ icy, calculating villains, and Roger’s son, strange and troubled boy David, was the first of its adorable homicidal maniacs. By the time David’s mother, blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, went up in smoke in #191, well-meaning governess Vicki had converted David from evil to good, and the subsumption of the “Revenge of Burke Devlin” storyline into Laura’s arc had set Roger on the path to becoming occasional comic relief.

Now, bumbling vampire Barnabas Collins combines the roles Roger and David pioneered. Barnabas has been so inept at keeping his secrets that David has learned some of them and is frantically trying to warn the adults about him, but he has shown enough calculation in his damage control that most of the adults receive David’s warnings as signs of mental illness.

The highlights of today’s episode are two sequences in which Roger makes himself remarkably vulnerable to his old nemesis Burke Devlin and family doctor Dave Woodard. Early on, Burke and Woodard are telling him that David is a frightened boy, and Roger answers them with a speech in which he claims that all boys live in constant terror. “I was a child in this house. I was terrified of the darkness in the corners and frightened to walk along the corridors by myself. I used to think that all the people in these Collins portraits… all those dead people… stared at me wherever I went… looked at me with piercing eyes… hated me! Well, I outgrew it, and so will David.” Burke and Woodard simply ignore Roger’s speech- evidently they are true New England men, and cannot imagine talking to each other about their feelings. After Burke and Woodard leave Roger, he looks at the portrait of Jeremiah Collins above the fireplace in the drawing room, and recoils in fear.

Roger, alone with the portrait of Jeremiah Collins, and still scared out of his wits. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

After Burke and Woodard have talked with David a while, they come back to ask Roger’s permission to take the boy to look for a secret chamber he says can be found in the Collins family mausoleum. Roger says in reply that they should forget about looking into tombs and get a psychiatrist who can look into David’s mind. He says that David “is like a person on a thin wire, very high off the ground… Any minute he may fall and plunge downward- out of our reach forever.”

Again, Burke and Woodard don’t react to Roger’s speech at all. Viewers who have been with the show from the beginning, though, will see these two scenes as a significant retcon. For the first 38 weeks of Dark Shadows, Roger openly hated David, was eager to get rid of him, and exploited his troubles for his own advantage. Perhaps the single most shocking scene in the entire series came in #83, when Roger coolly manipulated David into making an attempt on Vicki’s life. But now Roger is a caring father whose concern for David drives him to make the most astonishing emotional displays.

In the scene between Roger’s speeches, David told Burke and Woodard about two vacant coffins he has seen. Woodard, who is inclined to believe David is onto something, can’t help but try his hand at psychotherapy, and asks David if he isn’t terribly afraid of coffins. Again, long-time fans will remember that matriarch Liz went eighteen years without once willingly leaving home, because she thought that the murdered body of her husband Paul Stoddard was buried in the basement. In #275, it turned out that Stoddard’s supposed grave held only an empty trunk. Burke was there when that came to light, and Woodard probably knows about it too. So he might well imagine that David would have a lot of unresolved feelings surrounding the image of a vacant coffin. The Liz-is-a-recluse story was a dud from the beginning, so it is understandable it hasn’t been referenced in months, but it’s a shame Woodard doesn’t have the chance to clue new viewers into what may well be on his mind.

Also in that scene, David tells Burke and Woodard he will have to break a promise he made to his friend, the ghost of ten-year-old Sarah Collins. When he says this, the wind blows the window to his room open, and the strains of “London Bridge” play on a wooden flute. When David asks the men if they can hear the music, they make it clear that they can. He tells them that it is Sarah objecting that he ought not to share her secret, but that he has no choice.

He takes them to the Tomb of the Collinses, where Sarah and her parents are buried. He tries to open the panel to the secret chamber, but it has been locked. When Burke and Woodard tell him they don’t believe that there is a secret chamber, he finds Sarah’s flute on her mother’s crypt. This is enough to convince Woodard that there is something to David’s story.

In life, Sarah was Barnabas’ sister. Her current relationship to Barnabas echoes Liz’ relationship to Roger, and the relationship developing between Barnabas and mad scientist Julia Hoffman. She tries to prevent him from committing crimes, but she will not allow him to be caught once he has committed them. At the moment, the crime Barnabas is busiest committing is an attempt to spread the idea that David is insane and to trick the adults into giving him inappropriate psychiatric treatment. So Sarah leaves her flute where it will give David’s doctor evidence that he is not ill at all. On the other hand, Barnabas has reason to fear that if the secret chamber becomes generally known, he will be exposed and destroyed. So she swears David to secrecy about it, and is upset when he is going to violate that secrecy. The usual Dark Shadows dynamic, seen in both the Liz/ Roger and Julia/ Barnabas relationships, is that of Bossy Big Sister and Bratty Little Brother; Sarah is Barnabas’ little sister, and she isn’t exactly bossy, but the end result is similar.

Episode 327: Snap! Like that.

For the last eight weeks, Dark Shadows has been presenting a riddle about strange and troubled boy David Collins. In #288, he wondered if mysterious little girl Sarah might be a ghost. Since then, he has seen her several times, and every time she has given fresh evidence to corroborate that hypothesis. When he isn’t with Sarah, David is either looking for her or fielding questions from adults who are anxious to make contact with her, and in the course of every search and every question he finds still more reason to suppose that she is a ghost. David had always been the first character to believe in ghosts, yet he kept resisting the obvious conclusion that Sarah was one.

Friday, David had a dream in which Sarah told him that she died when she was ten years old. In that same dream, David saw his cousin Barnabas rise from a coffin, greet Sarah warmly, and threaten him with his cane. Yesterday, David woke up and told his well-meaning governess Vicki that he now understood everything about Sarah, because he knew that she was a ghost. Vicki listened carefully to his dream. Much to his frustration, she tried to talk him out of taking it literally. But today, when David is out of earshot, Vicki twice shows the other adults that she regards David’s dream with the utmost seriousness.

In the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood, mad scientist Julia Hoffman tries to hypnotize David so that he will stop making trouble for her co-conspirator Barnabas. Before she can induce the trance, David recognizes her medallion as the one a faceless woman held before his face in the dream. He flees from Julia and calls out for Vicki.

Vicki and matriarch Liz ask Julia what happened. Julia tries to play dumb, but Vicki recognizes her medallion both as the one David described when he was telling her about his dream and as the one Julia showed her and Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, when she dropped in on them at Maggie’s house in #298. During that visit, Vicki briefly left Julia and Maggie alone together. Before she left the room, Maggie was about to remember who abducted her and held her prisoner; after she came back, Maggie’s amnesia had returned in full force. During the interval, Julia had used the medallion to do a little emergency hypnosis, restoring the memory block that keeps Maggie from identifying Barnabas as her captor and as a vampire. Julia has reason to squirm when she realizes that Vicki has connected the medallion both with that incident and with David’s dream.

Vicki goes to David’s room to again try to talk him out of a supernatural reading of his dream. She finds him gazing into his crystal ball, looking for Sarah. He pleads with her to allow him to go look for Sarah. She resists, but he tells her that he saw Sarah in the crystal ball and that it won’t take him long to find her. He promises to tell Vicki what he and Sarah talk about. She lets him go, on condition that he be back within an hour.

The riddle of David’s long refusal to acknowledge that Sarah is a ghost is matched by the riddle of Vicki’s attitude. She has seen and interacted with ghosts on many occasions, a fact that is no secret from David. Both her recognition of Julia’s medallion and her acceptance of David’s claim to have seen Sarah in the crystal ball show that she knows she is operating in a world where supernatural forces are at work. Yet she keeps urging David back into “logical explanation”-land. Perhaps she has read Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw,” and doesn’t want there to be any ambiguity about whether the boy saw the ghosts himself or his crazy governess put the idea into his head.

David goes to the woods, hears the familiar strains of “London Bridge,” and sees Sarah. She tells him that she knows he saw her in his crystal ball. When he asks how she knows he was looking into his crystal ball, she answers only “I know lots of things.” He asks her about his dream; apparently that is not among the things she knows about, because it all comes as news to her. David tells her that in his dream, she told him that she was very sick when she was ten years old. She excitedly replies “That’s true!” He then says that she told him she died of that sickness. Even now, after the dream, after telling Vicki that Sarah is a ghost and shouting with frustration when she won’t agree, he follows up the idea that Sarah has died with “That isn’t true, is it, Sarah?”

Before Sarah can answer, Vicki’s depressing boyfriend Burke lumbers onto the scene. He hears David and Sarah’s voices and shouts “David!” Sarah then becomes alarmed and declares she has to go away. David asks her to stay, and goes to tell Burke to wait. By the time they turn around, Sarah has vanished.

Burke used to be an interesting character, back when he was a dashing action hero played by the charismatic Mitch Ryan. In fact, he was the one who gave David the crystal ball in the first place, back in #48. But he hasn’t had much to do on the show since his major storyline evaporated in #201, and now he is played by Anthony George, an actor whose cool, understated approach was the exact opposite of Ryan’s tendency to red-hot, larger than life reactions. In the scripts written by Ron Sproat, the part of Burke still depends on Ryan’s strengths, and George is entirely at sea with it. Today, Gordon Russell’s script takes advantage both of George’s actual abilities and of the dimwitted impression he has made previously.

David tells Burke that he doesn’t think Sarah will talk to anyone other than him from now on, not because she is shy, but because she doesn’t want anyone else to know that she is a ghost. Burke gives David a smug little speech about how foolish it is to believe in ghosts. David asks how Sarah got away so fast. Burke admits he doesn’t know. David gives Burke some details about Sarah’s way of vanishing into thin air, and he is left speechless.

“You don’t know much about Sarah, do you?” Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Back in the drawing room, Burke tells Vicki and Liz that David thinks Sarah is a ghost. Liz reflexively asks if he ought to be taken to a doctor. Burke suavely says that he doesn’t believe it is as serious as all that, that David is just letting his imagination run away with him.

Vicki speaks up. She says that she disagrees with Burke on two points. First, she thinks the matter is very serious. Second, she doesn’t believe it has anything to do with David’s imagination. Sarah really is a ghost.

Burke starts giving another sanctimonious speech about how one oughtn’t to believe in ghosts. Some weeks ago, Sproat and recently-departed, never-lamented writer Malcolm Marmorstein had given Burke some angry speeches in which he demanded Vicki stop taking the supernatural seriously. Those speeches would have marked Burke as bad news had Mitch Ryan delivered them, but at least they might have suggested that he was going to become an interesting villain- coming from an actor as cold as Anthony George, they were just pointless nastiness. Vicki’s attempts to comply with Burke’s gaslighting campaign also did a lot of damage to her character in the audience’s eyes, presenting her as weak-willed and empty-headed.

But today, Gordon Russell doesn’t write Burke as a loudmouth or Vicki as an aspiring doormat. Instead, he lets George make a reasonable-sounding case in the quiet, detached manner in which he excelled, and he has Vicki surprise him with an equally quiet but unyielding disagreement. She tells Burke to hire all the private investigators he likes to use and tell them to search for Sarah. If they can produce the girl in the flesh, she will admit that she is mistaken. But she tells Burke that won’t happen, because “David is right- that little girl is a ghost.”

If we remember Vicki’s earlier attempts to submit to Burke’s gaslighting, this scene answers the riddle about her. She knows that there are a lot of Burkes and a lot of Lizzes in this world, and that if you want to get along with them you have to be able to present yourself as someone who doesn’t believe in ghosts. She is trying to teach David how to play the role of the practical-minded fellow who takes it for granted that what we can see in the plain light of day is all we have to concern ourselves with. If she and the other adults can shelter him from enough of the uncanny doings that she knows full well are afoot all around them, perhaps he might get through his childhood actually being something like that fellow. It worked out that way when David’s mother, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, came to Collinwood to claim him- the storyline around her drew him deeper and deeper into the world of the occult, but once Vicki had rescued him and it was all over he didn’t remember anything about that side of it.

Upstairs, David is trying to sleep. Sarah appears in the corner of his room, lit from below. Laura stood on the same spot, in the same lighting, when she visited David while he slept in #150. His mother had called his name in a whispering voice and had a subtle message for him, but Sarah yells “David!” and says she’s ready to answer more questions.

“You said you had more questions to ask me.” Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

David doesn’t ask her if she died. Perhaps when he told Burke that she doesn’t want anyone to know that she is a ghost, he meant that he has realized it is a sensitive subject for her. He does ask about the coffin he saw in his dream. She says she doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He says it was in a room that he felt he’d been in before, and she says maybe it was. He says he doesn’t know where it is, and she tells him that’s good- she doesn’t want him going anywhere near it.

David keeps talking about the coffin, and it dawns on him that it is in the basement of Barnabas’ house. She insists that he stay away from Barnabas’ house, that it isn’t safe for him there. She won’t answer any of his questions about that, but she keeps insisting that he stay away from Barnabas’ house.

David asks Sarah if Barnabas’ servant Willie really was the man who abducted Maggie, as the police think. Sarah answers, “Oh no, poor Willie only went to Maggie’s house to warn her.” David asks what he was trying to warn Maggie of, and Sarah says that she has to go away. She repeats that he must stay away from Barnabas’ house. He pleads with her to stay, but she dematerializes in front of him. This is the first time we’ve seen a ghost vanish in this way since #85, when the ghost of Bill Malloy appeared to Vicki, sang a sea shanty, and then disappeared. It’s also the first time Sarah has let David see her dematerialize. Evidently, she’s more relaxed about these things now that she’s out to him.

Closing Miscellany

There is a particularly funny blooper 14 minutes and 20 seconds into the episode, when Burke comes out of the door that leads to the bedrooms at Collinwood, an off-camera voice calls out “Go in!,” he turns around, goes back in the door, then comes out again with exactly the same expression on his face.

Burke and Vicki have a little conversation about why Julia spends so much time at Barnabas’ house. Burke guesses Julia might have “a mad crush on Barnabas.” Vicki reacts as if this is absurd. The same idea had occurred to Julia’s old acquaintance Dave Woodard, MD, in #324, and Julia had been delighted to find that she had inadvertently acquired a cover story. That Burke came up with the notion independently leads us to wonder if we will be hearing more about it, and that Vicki regards it as so self-evidently preposterous reminds us of the times she has seemed more interested in Barnabas than in Burke. Perhaps the Vicki/ Burke/ Barnabas love triangle has a future after all.

Episode 322: Trust games

Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, suffered from a mysterious illness beginning in episode #227; she was missing and feared dead beginning in #235; her father Sam found her on the beach in a state of complete mental and physical collapse in #260; she was confined to a sanitarium run by mad scientist Julia Hoffman until the permanently nine year old ghost of Sarah Collins helped her escape in #294; and in #295, Julia hypnotized her and induced a profound amnesia covering all of these events.

The author of Maggie’s woes is vampire Barnabas Collins, currently resident in the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood. Julia has come to Collinwood disguised as an historian studying the old families of New England. Her true goal is to cure Barnabas of vampirism. In the course of that project, she has time and again shown an extraordinary callousness towards Maggie. She keeps trying to dissuade Barnabas from killing Maggie, but whenever it looks like he might do it anyway she exclaims that he will ruin all her work.

Today, Barnabas has heard that Maggie’s amnesia is lifting, and he has resolved to go through with the murder. He opens the door of his house to depart for his fell mission, only to see Julia standing before him.

Julia tells Barnabas he will ensure his own destruction if he kills Maggie. Barnabas says that he won’t be caught, and Julia laughingly agrees that he could easily get away with the crime. But she claims to have left a letter with a friend that will be opened and sent to the authorities in case either she or Maggie dies. Barnabas acquiesces in Julia’s insistence that he let Maggie live unless her memory does come back. Yesterday, she thought that she had persuaded Barnabas and was so impressed with herself that his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie could barely get through to her that he was setting out to kill Maggie. When Barnabas tells her that she has again gained “the upper hand” at the end of this scene, she flashes another look of self-satisfaction.

Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Julia leaves the Old House for the great house on the same estate, where she is the guest of the living members of the Collins family. There, Willie is waiting for her on the terrace. She tells him of her success at deceiving Barnabas, relishing the details and exulting when she tells him that Barnabas was frightened when she told him about the letter.

Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Willie is unconvinced that Barnabas really believed Julia, and in a lengthy interior monologue debates with himself about what he can and will do. He grows more and more miserable as he contemplates the prospect that he will continue to serve Barnabas while he kills everyone around him.

Barnabas has his own long interior monologues. He ruminates on Julia’s story about the letter and is sure that she would not expose him and give up her project simply because he had murdered Maggie. He does think that she might have taken some sort of precaution to protect her own life, but remembers that Julia said nothing about a letter on the previous occasions when he threatened to kill her. He concludes that she was lying, and sets out to complete his task. Before he can leave the house, “London Bridge” plays on the soundtrack, indicating that Sarah is present. In life, Sarah was Barnabas’ beloved baby sister, and he is desperate to see her again. He transforms instantly from a remorseless murder machine to a lonely man pleading for his dear little one to come to him.

Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Unknown to Barnabas, Julia, or Willie, the story that Maggie’s amnesia is lifting is false. Her friends have spread it to bait a trap. They hope that her abductor will hear it, panic, come to the Evans cottage, attract the attention of the many police officers hiding on the lawn, and then… it gets kind of fuzzy what they hope will happen at that point, but it is supposed to end the threat to Maggie.

Maggie’s boyfriend Joe shows up today with an antique doll. He says that before he came within twenty feet of the front door he was surrounded by police. Sam happily says that they would have shot Joe if he hadn’t come out of the house to vouch for him. Having told Maggie that the police are so trigger-happy that they will shoot anyone approaching the front door, Sam urges her to go to sleep. Apparently that is the sort of news that is supposed to bring sweet dreams.

We see two policemen on the lawn. They see a figure approaching the house. He is creeping in the darkness, not going towards the front door as Joe had done, nor is he carrying an antique doll. So they wait to see where he’s heading.

Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

A shadow appears in the French windows of Maggie’s bedroom. We hear the police cry “Halt!”

Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The figure retreats from the windows, complying with that command. Evidently the reason they wanted him to stop was that they weren’t sure they could hit a moving target, because as soon as he does they open fire. A policeman comes into Maggie’s room and tells her she doesn’t have to worry any more, because they shot the man in the back at least five times.

So now we know what the plan was. Wait until someone wanders onto the Evans property, shoot him, and declare him to be the man who abducted Maggie. Case closed!

The episode leaves us in suspense as to who the police shot. Barnabas is presumably still at home pining for Sarah. The figure at the window didn’t look like Julia, and the policeman who enters refers to the victim as “he.” Joe and Sam are in the room with Maggie, and the police probably would have noticed if they’d shot one of their own men. So the only character who appears in the episode and is not accounted for is Willie. He wanted to warn Maggie, but thought he would be unable to do so. Perhaps he overcame Barnabas’ power and tried to go to her, or perhaps we will learn tomorrow that the man who has been shot is some other luckless schlub.

Episode 318: What can a little girl know?

In the outer room of the Tomb of the Collinses, Sam Evans and Dr Dave Woodard recap the story so far. In the hidden chamber on the other side of the wall, vampire Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman eavesdrop on their conversation. When they hear how close Evans and Woodard have come to discovering their terrible secrets, Julia squirms and Barnabas looks shocked.

Busted.

When Dr Woodard mentions that Julia had used the word “supernatural” in a conversation with him, Barnabas nearly blows their cover. He grabs Julia by the throat and she lets out a yelp. Sam hears this, Woodard does not. Woodard suspects that there are ghosts at work in the area, but he cannot believe that Sam’s hearing is better than his, so he dismisses the idea.* He notices the plaque marking the burial site of Sarah Collins, 1786-1796, and says out loud that the little girl named Sarah whom everyone has been looking for lately is the ghost of that Sarah.

Evans and Woodard leave the tomb, and Barnabas resumes raging at Julia. He opens his old coffin and pushes her head into it, asking if she wants to spend eternity confined there. She talks him down with warnings of what would happen were he to kill strange and troubled boy David Collins.

Woodard goes to the great house of Collinwood, where he questions David. Woodard is much more forthcoming with what he knows than he has been in any previous conversation. David listens closely, trying to find out what he knows. But Woodard’s questions are all about David’s friend, Sarah. David doesn’t know that answers to many of Woodard’s questions, and Sarah has sworn him to secrecy about much of what he does know. So the only new piece of information Woodard learns from David is that Julia was lying to him the other day when she said that she hadn’t given much thought to Sarah. David tells him that she asks him about her all the time.

Julia comes in and tries to stop Woodard questioning David. He ignores her and asks another question, then warns him to stay away from the Tomb of the Collinses. When he tells David that whatever secret Sarah told him about the tomb is also known to someone else, and that that other person is very dangerous, David is horrified. When he was trapped in the hidden chamber last week, Barnabas and his servant Willie entered. David hid from them in Barnabas’ old coffin and eavesdropped on a conversation in which Barnabas dropped a huge number of clues about his secrets. Since Woodard started his questioning of David with a reference to the unknown person who has been terrorizing the area since April, David now has reason to believe that Barnabas is that person.

David leaves the room, and Woodard asks Julia what she was trying to prevent him from finding out. She refuses to answer any of his questions. She hears the sound of dogs howling, and knows that it means Barnabas is getting ready to kill someone. Knowing that she has very little time to try to prevent David’s murder, she cannot focus on Woodard’s questions. For once, she can’t think of any lies that will hold him off. Her reason for being in town, so far as Woodard is concerned, is that she is a doctor treating Sam Evans’ daughter Maggie, Barnabas’ former victim. When she won’t answer his questions, he takes her off Maggie’s case.

Julia goes to Barnabas’ house. She finds him on his way out the door, on a mission to kill David. She opposes him, and he declares that nothing can stop him. At that, the wind blows the doors open. It extinguishes some of the candles in the room. The strains of “London Bridge” begin playing, and Barnabas and Julia realize that Sarah, who in reality is the permanently nine year old ghost of Barnabas’ little sister, is in the room. Barnabas cannot leave. Julia says with satisfaction that nothing can stop him- “except one little girl.”

The whole episode is very strong from beginning to end. Julia is usually so much in charge that the only suspense is what she will choose to do, but throughout this one she is scrambling to bring Barnabas under control. When her final attempt fails, Sarah’s intervention comes as a thrilling surprise.

The performances of both Jonathan Frid and Grayson Hall stand out today. Hall is as powerful a presence playing a character who controls nothing as she usually is playing a character who controls everything. And few could match Frid’s ability to appall us with Barnabas’ plan to kill a ten year old and seconds later to elicit tears by calling out to his beloved little sister.

*My wife, Mrs Acilius, put it that way.

Episode 311: Attached to children

Both Danny Horn and Patrick McCray wrote fine blog posts about this episode. I have a few things to add to what they’ve said.

When vampire Barnabas Collins and his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie approach the Tomb of the Collinses, strange and troubled boy David hears them talking about mysterious little girl Sarah. Since Sarah had made him promise to keep her connection to the place secret, he opens the panel to the concealed chamber she had shown him and hides there. To his horror, he hears Barnabas order Willie to open the panel. Still trying to keep Sarah’s secret, he hides in the coffin in the center of the chamber while Willie and Barnabas walk around it. He hears them talk about Barnabas’ relationship with Sarah and Willie’s discomfort with the chamber.

They don’t mention that Barnabas is a vampire, or that he was the one who imprisoned Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl In Town. But they say enough that David should be able to figure out all of Barnabas’ secrets. Once he has heard Barnabas say that he was left to comfort Sarah after their dog was put down, it isn’t much of a leap to conclude that Sarah is his little sister. And once he’s heard Barnabas ask Willie if he is frightened by the “contents” of the chamber, he should know that there is something in there more than can be seen at a first glance.

In episodes #301 and #306, we were reminded of Jason McGuire, whom Barnabas killed and forced Willie to bury in the floor of this chamber. We also saw the chamber itself in #306, so that regular viewers would be sure to think of Jason’s grave. If David should repeat Barnabas’ comment about the chamber’s “contents” at the right time, Jason might yet be exhumed. So Barnabas has created an extreme danger to himself with his big mouth. Since it does not seem that Dark Shadows could continue if either Barnabas or David were to destroy the other, we are in suspense as to how they will get out of this situation.

After Barnabas and Willie leave, David gets out of the coffin and finds he cannot open the panel from the inside. Willie had used a gadget hidden in the stairs to open it, the first time we have seen this device. As David starts to panic, he hears the strains of Sarah’s signature tune, “London Bridge.” He turns away from the panel, looks at the blank walls of the chamber, and starts calling on Sarah.

In his post, Danny Horn asks “Has David just figured out that Sarah’s a ghost?” I think it’s more complicated than that. In #288, David happily considered the possibility that Sarah might be a ghost, and throughout the series he has been on easy terms with several ghosts. So I think he has assumed she was a ghost all along, and was just too tactful to bring it up when he was talking with her.

Back in the great house of Collinwood, well-meaning governess Vicki is on the terrace, worried about David’s disappearance. Barnabas peeks at her through the gate, as he would do if he were not allowed to look at her. Then he just walks up and starts a conversation with her, leaving us to wonder what the whole peeping-Tom act was about.

Vicki is so concerned for David that she starts crying. Barnabas tells her to put her head on his shoulder, which she does. He seems to be trying to restrain himself, but she has such a long, pretty neck, and it’s right there, and he’s so very thirsty…

Snack time. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Patrick McCray says of this moment:

As Barnabas lunges in to bite her, my concern and sympathy is challenged as I ponder her almost athletic lack of awareness. Of course, I’ll inevitably side with the person getting her throat ripped out… but it won’t stop me from wondering why she’s practically painting a landing strip on her neck. Vicki? You have a generation of young people idolizing you.

Today, the discussion isn’t even a metaphor. No, she’s not asking for it. No one is. So, what is the message that we’re supposed to take away from a dangerous conversation like this? For a person constantly asking questions about everything — and never understanding what she hears — Vicki is the picture of unawareness. Evil is evil. An attack is an attack. And awareness is power. Ironic that her would-be attacker, Barnabas, is frequently even more unaware than is she. However, if anyone on a soap paid attention at all, the stories would last ten minutes. But that’s the point. The more the characters lack focus, the more we learn its value. David is the most aware character on the show, and in this episode, he learns the most he ever will in one night. Pity it’s from inside a coffin.

That part of the discussion is too much metaphor to ignore.

Patrick McCray, “The Dark Shadows Daybook: August 22,” The Collinsport Historical Society, 22 August 2018.

Again, I think it’s a more complicated. I think we have to analyze Vicki’s behavior at three levels of intentionality. First, there’s the in-universe level, the sort of analysis of her motives another character in the same story might give if they had the same information we do. If that character saw Vicki’s depressing fiancé Burke angrily telling her she was crazy for saying that she had seen and heard things that we have also seen and heard, refusing to give her even the most basic information about himself and airily dismissing her questions as a morbid preoccupation with “the past,” and telling other people that her imagination will “run wild” unless he monitors and controls her, they might very well think that Vicki is tired of Burke’s abusive ways. To that character, there would be nothing “athletic” about Vicki’s failure to suspect Barnabas- it is perfectly natural for her to want to think the best of a man who has always been pleasant and respectful to her, unlike the blatant villain she is supposed to marry.

The second level of intentionality is of Vicki’s usual function in the narrative. Up to this point, every storyline has come to its climax when Vicki found out what was going on. She is still the audience’s main point of view character, and as such she naturally tends towards the center of the action. All of the action lately has been in the vampire story, so we expect her to involve herself deeply in it. In the first weeks, when it was possible that Barnabas, as the second in a parade of supernatural nemeses, would be destroyed and make way for a third as undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins had made way for him, we expected Vicki to be the one who drive the stake into his heart. Now that it is clear he is on the show for the long haul, we are expecting Vicki to become his victim, and presumably to become a vampire herself. As the protagonist, she is actively working to get more deeply involved with Barnabas. She hasn’t yet resorted to “painting a landing strip on her neck,” but she did invite herself to spend the night at Barnabas’ house in #285 and #286, and it wasn’t her fault she left in the morning still having all her blood.

Vicki the unappreciated fiancée wants only a friend who will respect her; Vicki the protagonist wants to be part of the main story. The tension between the incompatible goals of these two aspects of Vicki is expressed in the third level of intentionality, which Alexandra Moltke Isles expresses in the choices that make up her performance. Mrs Isles takes every opportunity to show that Vicki is more strongly drawn to Barnabas than to anyone else, most definitely including Burke. That attraction brings the character back to life. After a few days when she was trying to submit to Burke’s abuse and ignore “the past,” Barnabas asks her to intercede with Burke on his behalf and she comes roaring back, an assertive character who will not give an inch even when Burke makes some good points.

It is the sight of this strong Vicki that introduces a conflict into the audience’s feelings. On the one hand, we don’t want to lose her, and if she does not become a vampire, it’s hard to see a future for her on the show. On the other, it would be a terrible betrayal for Barnabas to repay her trust in him by doing such a thing to her. All the more so because we’ve spent so much time seeing Vicki become close to David, and if she follows the pattern set in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, vampire Vicki will be a threat to all children.

Our sadness at that betrayal would be a deep emotion of exactly the kind soap operas are supposed to create. That so shocking a crime would lead to a more meaningful and more suspenseful story and a richer part for our favorite character would guarantee that we would surprise ourselves by forgiving Barnabas for it and cheering when he and Vicki become a couple. So, I think a savvy audience watching Dark Shadows up to this point would have to expect to see just that story play out.