maggie evans – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 1108: The Nicest Girl in Town

In episode #1 of Dark Shadows, first broadcast 27 June 1966, Victoria Winters came to the great house of Collinwood to serve as governess to strange and troubled boy David Collins. On her way, Vicki stopped at the Collinsport Inn and had a meal at the diner there. Her waitress was Maggie Evans, a young woman with short blonde hair whom the original story bible identified as “everybody’s pal and nobody’s friend.” Maggie opened their conversation by telling Vicki that she was a “jerk- J-E-R-K” for going to live at Collinwood. Maggie told Vicki that the great house would turn her long black hair gray in two months. When Vicki said she would go there anyway, Maggie offered her a “piece of apple pie on the house- and I won’t take no for an answer.”

Maggie lays it on the line for the new jerk.

Maggie was the chief representative of Collinsport’s working class in the show’s first months. The diner was a meeting place for a variety of characters, so we saw her wait on all sorts of people. She shared her home, “The Evans Cottage,” with her father, drunken sad-sack Sam Evans. Sam’s career as an artist was ruined when he took a bribe from high-born ne-er-do-well Roger Collins and allowed his one-time friend, Burke Devlin, to go to prison alone for a crime of which Roger was also guilty. Sam’s misery and Maggie’s Adult Child of an Alcoholic (ACoA, they call it) mannerisms, such as laughing awkwardly whenever she begins to speak, attest to the dire consequences for the whole town of what goes on in the big house on the hill. As Maggie and Sam’s territory, the cottage was a space where Burke, who left prison and came back to Collinsport as a corporate raider, could talk about his plans to wrench control of the cannery and fishing fleet from the feudal-minded Collinses and bring the area into the age of capitalism.

From #12, Maggie at home with Sam. At that point, Sam was played (very badly) by Mark Allen.

They eased up on the “everybody’s pal and nobody’s friend” business pretty quickly. Maggie’s short blonde hair was a wig seen for the last time in #12; from #20 on, she has Miss Scott’s long brown hair. When Miss Scott’s real hair came out, her real personality started to peek through as well. While Maggie could still make a caustic remark or a tactless one as occasion demanded, the signs were already there of her final form, The Nicest Girl in Town.

In #63, Maggie made her first visit to Collinwood. She had made a vow never to set foot in the great house, and was ill at ease when she broke it. With a great show of courage she stood up to matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. She told Liz that she believed that her family had information about what had gone wrong in her father’s life, and she wanted answers.

Maggie admits to Liz that she had to screw up her courage to come to Collinwood.

The supernatural was represented in the first months of Dark Shadows primarily by people using the word “ghost” as a metaphor when talking to Vicki, prompting her to reply “Surely you don’t believe in ghosts!?” They would then respond that they damn well did believe in them, and that if she went on living at Collinwood it wouldn’t be long before she believed in them, too. The first unequivocal sign the audience had of supernatural activity came in #70, when the ghost of the gracious Josette Collins emanated from her portrait above the mantel of the Old House at Collinwood, walked outside, and danced among the columns. The figure of Josette was none other than Kathryn Leigh Scott, who volunteered for the task when the original plan to achieve the effect without a performer fell apart.

Miss Scott reprised the role of Josette’s ghost in #126, wearing a heavy veil over her face. We hear her voice, with a French accent of sorts, telling Vicki not to be afraid even though a madman has tied her up and is on his way with an ax to cut her head off. Josette then leads the other ghosts of Collinwood in killing the madman before he can harm Vicki.

With that, Miss Scott became the first member of the cast to play multiple roles on Dark Shadows. For anyone who happened to recognize her voice in #126 and notice that she was in the credits, even though Maggie was not in the episode, the wised-up waitress and the ghost of Josette would have made an interesting pair. All we knew about Josette at that point was that her maiden name was LaFreniere, that she came to Collinwood in 1830 and married Jeremiah Collins, that she died by jumping off the cliff at Widows’ Hill, and that her ghost could be seen and heard around the estate. For all we knew, the LaFrenieres may have been a humble Franco-American family whom Jeremiah’s haughty relatives snubbed. She may have grown up in a house like The Evans Cottage, and her death might have been the outcome of a class conflict. Later, Josette’s family name would be retconned to DuPrés, her time of arrival to 1795, and she would be presented as a French aristocrat who was the daughter of one of the richest sugar planters on the island of Martinique, a description met in our universe by Joséphine de Beauharnais, wife and empress to Napoleon I.

In the first months of the show, Liz’ daughter Carolyn was dating hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell. Carolyn and Joe were bored to tears with each other, and only kept going out because Liz thought they should. Joe and Carolyn finally broke up in #84, and he started dating Maggie by #129. Maggie and Joe were happy together, and soon planned to get married once Joe had saved up the money to go into business for himself with a boat and crew of his own. Their cheerful repartee was more agreeable to watch than were the many many scenes of Carolyn and Joe staring silently at each other, but it did not generate any story. It would be helpful that Joe and Maggie each had someone to talk to if they got involved in the plot in any way, but there were long stretches when we did not see either of them.

Maggie invites Joe to stay for a nightcap after a date in #129.

From December 1966 to March 1967, Dark Shadows was dominated by the story of undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. Maggie was very far from the center of the action during that period. Laura’s story gathered up the loose ends of all the ongoing stories, including “The Revenge of Burke Devlin” and the significance it gave to Sam’s alcoholism. That would clear the decks for the transformation of the show from a Gothic romance with occasional nods to the uncanny to a full-blown supernatural thriller.

After Laura went up in smoke in #192, Sam wrestled with the idea of admitting Burke that he had taken a bribe from Roger to stay silent in his case. Maggie had a tearful scene in #199 when Sam told her the truth. She urged him to make a clean breast of it. Even if he went to prison, he would be better off in prison than he has been these last ten years. In #200 and #201, Burke heard Sam’s confession and Roger’s, and decided to peace out. The Revenge of Burke Devlin never was a very exciting storyline, and it was apt that Burke himself eventually gave up on it.

In April 1967, Laura was succeeded as the show’s supernatural Big Bad by vampire Barnabas Collins. Barnabas met Maggie in #221, and shortly after added her blood to his diet. She went through a period bedridden in her room at The Evans Cottage, helplessly weak during the day and aggressively determined to deliver herself to Barnabas at night. Eventually he took her to his home, the Old House, where he set about erasing her personality and replacing it with that of Josette.

Barnabas with the partially Josettified Maggie in #241.

Despite Miss Scott’s appearances as the ghost of Josette in #70 and #126, the show had always associated Josette primarily with Vicki up to that point. At times it seemed Barnabas believed Maggie really was Josette come back to life; he certainly expressed himself with conviction in #260, when he sat with Maggie in the prison cell in his basement to which he had confined her after she started trying to resist him and said “But you are Josette!” And David, who had been very chummy with the ghost of Josette, saw Maggie in the dress in #240 and #241 and took her for Josette, remarking that her face looked exactly the same as it always had. In those moments, the show was nodding to the 1932 film The Mummy, in which Boris Karloff plays the undead Imhotep, who recognizes in Helen Grosvenor (Zita Johanns) the reincarnation of his lost love Ankh-Esen-Amun (also Zita Johanns.)

At other times, it seems that any pretty girl will do for arnabas’ fiendish plan. So in #274, after Maggie escaped and he decided to repeat the experiment with Vicki as the subject, Barnabas tells his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie Loomis that if you “Take the right individual, place her under the proper conditions and circumstances, apply the required pressure… a new personality is created.”

While Barnabas was holding Maggie in his basement cell, the ghost of his little sister Sarah showed up and befriended Maggie. It was she who helped Maggie escape. Sarah’s appearances turned out to be at least as big a turning point in Dark Shadows’ development as anything else that had happened up to that point, since it showed that the beings who lurked in the supernatural back-world behind the show’s action are starting to emerge into the foreground. Eventually, they will come on in force.

Maggie was sent off to a psychiatric facility called Windcliff after her ordeal as Barnabas’ prisoner. She had lost much of her memory and regressed to an almost nonverbal state. Her doctor, Julia Hoffman, probed into her mind, and soon learned the truth. Julia then went to Collinwood, where it turned out that her true loyalty was not to Maggie at all. She had been working on a cure for vampirism, and wanted to attach herself to Barnabas. When Sarah magically released Maggie from Windcliff and led her back to Collinsport, Julia betrayed her patient completely by using her powers of hypnosis to erase her memory and protect her abuser.

In November 1967, the supernatural back-world switched places with the naturalistic fore-world when Vicki traveled back in time to 1795. There, she met Josette, played by Miss Scott. That casting confirmed that Maggie really was the reincarnation of Josette, as Helen Grosvenor really was the reincarnation of Ankh-Esen-Amun. Those who remember how bleak the show was in May and June of 1967 when Maggie was in Barnabas’ basement can’t help but squirm at the thought that his attempt to torture her into expressing Josette’s personality was motivated by anything other than his utter loathsomeness, yet here the show is telling us that, however unsound his methods may have been, he had a point.

Josette’s first appearance as a living being, in #370.

When the show returned to contemporary dress in March 1968, it was a Monster Mash with a cast drawn from the whole back-catalogue of Universal Studios horror pictures from the 1930s. Wicked witch Angelique struck Sam blind; later, he befriended Frankenstein’s monster Adam. Not knowing his own strength, Adam would accidentally kill Sam. The story moved so fast in those days that Maggie didn’t have much time to mourn her father.

Angelique defied her master, suave warlock Nicholas Blair. To punish her, Nicholas turned Angelique into a vampire. Angelique took Joe as a victim, wrecking his relationship with Maggie. In #599, Maggie had recovered her memory of her own time as Barnabas’ victim, and she saw Angelique biting Joe. She pleaded with Joe to run away with her, urging upon him the hope that there was still time for them to escape. Then, Nicholas got hold of them. He erased Maggie’s memory again, leaving her cheerful and Joe beyond help.

Shortly thereafter, Nicholas and Maggie went on some dates. Nicholas had plans for Adam that required a woman to risk her life. In #633/634, Maggie accompanied Nicholas to the basement of the Old House, where he was forcing Julia and Barnabas to do his bidding. Maggie calmly and cheerfully volunteered to serve the function Nicholas had in mind for her. She looked around the basement and mentioned that she had spent a great deal of time there, indicating a knowledge of everything that had happened to her in that place before. When Nicholas threatens to kill both Adam and Barnabas if he does not get his way, Julia tells Maggie to stop him. Maggie blandly asks why she should. Her willingness to risk her life seems to be the measure, not of her resignation to her fate, but of an indifference to human life so total as to include her own life. Maggie was under a spell then, and when Nicholas’ plans failed she became her usual self again. But in that scene, we catch the only glimpse we will ever get of Evil Maggie. It is thrilling.

Maggie working with Nicholas in #633/634.

Not long after Nicholas’ defeat, Vicki disappeared. Maggie took her place as the new governess at Collinwood just in time for a story that calls for a new governess, an adaptation of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. Unlike the famously unreliable narrator of that novella, Maggie is not an overpowering presence who would obviously a danger to the children in her charge even if she were right about the ghosts. Instead, she is a squish, a completely ineffective teacher whom David and his live-in playmate Amy Jennings easily wrap around their fingers.

That’s a long way from the hard-boiled dame in the short blonde wig. Nor is it what we would have expected of the plucky heroine who fought her way back from dependence on the vampire’s bite to escape Barnabas in June 1968. It works in the story, though, and we’ve all known people who are tough and efficient in one situation but who go to pieces in a different kind of situation. And if we remember #63, we know that even when she was at her most hard-bitten Maggie couldn’t keep from trembling at the thought of Collinwood, so longtime viewers can believe that Maggie would be unable to bring herself to discipline David, who is after all one of Liz’ principal heirs.

The “Haunting of Collinwood” segment ended with another trip back in time, in this case to 1897. In that period, Miss Scott played Rachel Drummond, a neurotic intellectual hired to act as governess to children Jamison and Nora Collins. Rachel had spent the first twenty-odd years of her life under the thumbs of the horrendous Rev’d Mr Gregory Trask and his equally unspeakable family, wife Minerva and daughter Charity. The show gave Miss Scott enough to work with that we could see why Rachel kept going back to the Trasks and submitting to further abuse from them.

Miss Scott’s performance as Rachel was a finely observed and persuasively realized study of the psychology of dependence, which is probably why the fans all hate it so much. Dark Shadows was such a slam-bang adventure show at that point that Rachel seemed to have wandered in from the Strindberg play in the theater down the street. But so far as I’m concerned, she anchors the whole 1897 segment. Every story in it depends on our dread of the Trasks. They are the villains in the part that is concerned with the danger that they will take control of Collinwood. The Collinses are such a mess that the Trasks have to be something special to make us see them as a step down. The other parts of the segment require that we enjoy watching or even root for villains who are so wicked that we might be expected to want them to be stopped immediately. It is because they are a relief from the Trasks that we can find sympathy for werewolf Quentin Collins, can be amused by sorcerer Count Petofi, and can be glad that Angelique makes friends with Julia and Barnabas. Rachel’s torment shows us just how much is at stake in the battle against the Trasks and makes those reactions possible.

Rachel died halfway into 1897. After a bit, Miss Scott returned to the cast as Kitty Soames, a young American woman who is the dowager Countess of Hampshire. Kitty schemes to marry stuffy Edward Collins for his money, while he wants to marry her for her money. As it happens, they don’t have a cent between them. This farcical situation is executed with charm and wit, and as Kitty Miss Scott proved that she could play a character who is not The Nicest Girl in Town.

Kitty’s story came to a bizarre end. It turned out that she really was the reincarnation of Josette, that Josette’s personality was lurking in her subconscious, and that she wanted to trade places with her and live again. Barnabas was all for this, and he and Kitty vanished from 1897 into Josette’s portrait. They came out in 1796, where Kitty was indeed an inchoate memory somewhere in the depths of Josette’s mind. Barnabas tried to prevent Josette dying, but succeeded only in diverting her from her leap off the cliff to a fatal dose of poison. Poison was a suitable way to end that story, since it left a bitter taste in the audience’s mouths.

When the show was back in a contemporary setting in February 1970, Josette’s ghost appeared one last time. In #948, she told Barnabas that it was over between them, and that he should get a new girlfriend. In March, it looked like he and Maggie were becoming an item. She was certainly interested in him. In #973, she asks the newlywed Carolyn how married life is treating her, and mentions that she has a dinner date with Barnabas. When Carolyn responds that “Oh, maybe you and Barnabas…,” with the implied conclusion “will get married soon, Maggie doesn’t contradict her. It is unclear how Barnabas can take Maggie to dinner- she doesn’t know that he’s a vampire, and if she looks up from her salad to see him munching on one of the girls at the docks she will probably catch on. But for a couple of weeks they are getting remarkably cozy.

In #980, Barnabas traveled to an alternate universe, which the show insists on calling “Parallel Time.” In Parallel Time, Maggie’s counterpart is married to Quentin’s. Parallel Quentin is an abusive jerk, and he and Maggie Collins never have a single happy day together. This Maggie stands up for herself in #985. In one of the very best scenes Miss Scott ever played on Dark Shadows, she objects that Quentin insists on talking to her “like a child, and I am not a child, and I refuse to be treated like a child.” She walks out of the house and does not return until #1016.

Maggie Collins refuses to be treated like a child.

The six weeks of Maggie’s absence were the six weeks Miss Scott was in Tarrytown, New York for principal photography on the feature film House of Dark Shadows, in which she played the lead. When we see Maggie again, she is in her sister’s apartment in New York writing a letter to Quentin saying that it is time to formally end their marriage. She crumples that letter up before the phone rings and she learns that Quentin is gravely ill. Whether she would have written another draft making the same point, we never find out.

Maggie goes back to Collinwood, where Quentin dishes out more of the same stuff. This time she does allow herself to be treated like a child. It is a demoralizing thing to see. We don’t get enough of Maggie Collins’ backstory to give Miss Scott room to etch a portrait of the psychology of defeat like that which made Rachel such a triumph for her. Worst of all, Quentin is not in the position of the Trasks- we aren’t supposed to hate him. On the contrary, we can get invested in the story only to the extent that we like him. Seeing how he treats Maggie, that extent is zero.

In July 1970, Barnabas returned to the original continuity. After a few days we saw that Maggie was distraught that he wasn’t coming around anymore. Other characters tried to explain that he and Julia had learned of a terrible menace facing Collinwood and were busy trying to fight it, and they did eventually enlist Maggie in their efforts. But she is still disappointed that her romance with him has fizzled. Considering that Barnabas’ attempted Josettification of Maggie was the story that first made Dark Shadows a hit, and that it is retold in House of Dark Shadows, you don’t have to be a longtime fan for this attitude to make you queasy.

For the last couple of weeks, Maggie has been the victim of a vampire other than Barnabas. This turns out to be Roxanne Drew, counterpart of a woman Barnabas fell in love with in Parallel Time. Barnabas has taken male victims before, but this is the first time a female vampire has taken a female victim. They never showed Barnabas biting Willie or the luckless Dirk Wilkins, while they often lingered over him biting female victims and Angelique, in her vampire phase, biting male ones. The ABC network’s office of Standards and Practices was vigilantly on guard against any exploration of homoerotic imagery. We never see Roxanne bite Maggie, though the final image of #1104 does show Maggie with a startlingly raw look of longing as she approaches a veiled Roxanne.

We see Maggie for the last time today. She is in a car, being driven back to Windcliff by strangely dressed man Sebastian Shaw. Some speculate that this ending was a private joke on the part of executive producer Dan Curtis, who thought that Miss Scott was crazy to want to leave the show and move to Paris with her husband, photographer Ben Martin.

Be that as it may, it is a nice touch that the final reference to Windcliff should be in connection with Maggie, for whom it was invented in the first place. Her stay there brought Julia onto the show, and Julia, for all her villainy, has for some time been the chief protagonist and audience identification character. Sending her there also leaves open the widest range of options for ways to bring her back. Maybe she will still be a patient there, as she was when she played a mad scene in #265 that was the single most frightening moment in all of Dark Shadows. Or maybe she will return to Collinwood, or maybe she will become a monster, or maybe something else will happen. Anything is possible.

Except that nothing is possible. The ratings are going down, Curtis and the writers are exhausted, and the public has moved on from the mood that made Dark Shadows one of the big fads of the late 1960s. The loss of Miss Scott, a performer who gave the show so much of its heart, is a nail in a coffin that was almost fully built already. House of Dark Shadows is in the theaters, and it is a big enough hit that MGM will greenlight another film in the franchise. But the series is on a one-way road to cancellation. In April 1971, Mrs Ben Martin will pick up an American paper from a newsstand in Paris and be astonished to read that Dark Shadows has broadcast its final episode.

In the years since, Miss Scott has been perhaps the most assiduous member of the original cast at keeping the fandom alive. No one has attended more of the conventions; she presided over the last two, held this year. Her publishing firm, Pomegranate Press, has put out many Dark Shadows-themed books, some of which she herself wrote. She, along with Jonathan Frid, David Selby, and Lara Parker, had a cameo in Tim Burton’s 2012 Dark Shadows film. She took roles in many of the audio drama continuations of the show produced by Big Finish, and she is the voice performer for the audiobooks of “Marilyn Ross'” Dark Shadows novels. If Dark Shadows was a projection of the personality of Dan Curtis while he was alive, in the last twenty years Kathryn Leigh Scott has been the first lady of the world of Dark Shadows, and has done more than anyone else to set the cheerful, welcoming tone of its fandom.

Episode 1105: Look for the H and follow the arrow

From March until July 1970, Dark Shadows was set in a universe other than the one where the action had taken place up to that point. In that universe, which the show insists on calling “Parallel Time,” the counterparts of heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard and woebegone lowlife Willie Loomis were a married couple. That other Will Loomis was a bestselling but hard-drinking author who had squandered his earnings, and Carolyn Loomis was a poor relation of the master of the great house of Collinwood. They bickered incessantly, in an adaptation of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? that, in the hands of John Karlen and Nancy Barrett, sometimes seemed to rival Edward Albee’s original.

We’ve been back in the original continuity for five weeks now. The Carolyn we have known from the first week of the show is back, but she is half mad, intermittently possessed by a ghost known as Leticia Faye. Willie is helping time travelers Barnabas Collins and Julia Hoffman in their efforts to battle two distinct supernatural menaces, one consisting of a group of ghosts including Leticia, the other a vampire whose identity they have not discerned but whom they know to be feeding on governess Maggie Evans. Carolyn and Willie have their first scene together today since the return from Parallel Time. It is infused with the energy Karlen and Miss Barrett brought to their versions of Albee’s George and Martha. Karlen has some scenes alone where he wanders around and shouts in the general direction of a microphone; those don’t work at all. But when he has Miss Barrett to anchor him, he’s terrific and so is she. When she addresses him as “Willie Loomis!,” we are, for one lovely moment, right back in Loomis House.

Carolyn gives Willie a riddle and tells her that unless he’s too stupid to solve it, it will lead him to the missing governess: “Where the north woods path is narrow, you’ll be at sixes and sevens, but look for the H and follow the arrow, that points to Maggie Evans.” That riddle reminds longtime viewers how far the show has come in the last three years. The last time Maggie was the victim of a vampire, it was the summer of 1967 and the ghoul was Barnabas. The ghost of Barnabas’ little sister Sarah appeared to Maggie in the cell where he and his blood thrall Willie were keeping her and gave her a riddle which she solved, finding an escape route and avoiding the death Barnabas had planned for her. Now Maggie is helpless, and Willie and Barnabas are the good-ish guys. This riddle will enable Willie to come to her rescue.

Willie goes to the narrow part of the path through the north woods. He shines a flashlight directly into the camera, a sure sign that we are watching Dark Shadows. Willie finds himself in a graveyard. He notices a tombstone inscribed with the name of Harrow. Subtracting the H, what’s left is “arrow.” He keeps moving his eyes rightward beyond the edge of the stone and sees the door of a mausoleum. He goes inside and finds Maggie on the floor, beside an empty coffin. He infers that the empty coffin must be where the vampire rests during the day.

H + arrow = Harrow. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Willie takes Maggie back to her room at Collinwood and confers with Julia and Barnabas. Barnabas decrees that Willie and Julia should go to the mausoleum during the day and stake the vampire. When they do, they are uneasy to find that no one is guarding the coffin. The episode ends with Julia’s expression of shock when she sees inside the coffin.

Episode 1104: When a body meets a body

Time travelers Barnabas Collins and Julia Hoffman are doing battle with two distinct supernatural menaces. One of these is the ghost of Gerard Stiles, who, as they learned while visiting the far-off future year 1995, is destined to destroy the great house of Collinwood and the people who call it home before the end of the current year, 1970. The other is a vampire whom they have not identified, but who has been feeding on their friend and frequent victim, Maggie Evans.

In the drawing room, housekeeper Mrs Johnson sees Gerard. Gerard takes control of her, as he does when he meets people in that room. She goes upstairs, where Julia is keeping vigil over Maggie. Mrs Johnson says she woke up from a frightening nightmare in which Barnabas was suffering. She describes the setting of the nightmare. Julia recognizes it as Rose Cottage, the deserted mansion where Barnabas has gone to confront Gerard. Julia tells Mrs Johnson to take over for her in Maggie’s room, and rushes off to her friend’s side.

Julia bursts into the room where Barnabas is standing around, his confrontation with Gerard having come and gone without noticeable result. Barnabas is surprised to see her. As she explains what Mrs Johnson told her, the room bursts into flames. They try to escape, only to find that the door will not open. All seems lost, until the door opens from the other side. A woman named Roxanne Drew has come to their rescue.

Before their sojourn in 1995, Julia and Barnabas spent a while in an alternate universe which the show insists on calling “Parallel Time.” In Parallel Time, Barnabas met Roxanne’s counterpart while she was comatose. Charmed by her immobility and silence, he fell in love with her. Even after she came to and started moving around and speaking, Barnabas remained attached to that Roxanne. Barnabas and Julia escaped from Parallel Time through a room in a burning house; we learned in #1071 that Roxanne followed Barnabas and Julia into the burning room too late for them to rescue her. We can only assume she died in the fire. In the current universe, an inverted mirror image of that one, this other Roxanne is the one who rescues Julia and Barnabas from a burning room.

Roxanne separates from Barnabas and Julia in the woods, saying she has something else to do. They return to Collinwood. They find Mrs Johnson unconscious and Maggie missing. In the woods, Maggie approaches a shrouded figure, whom we assume to be the vampire and who appears to be Roxanne.

Maggie meets the bloodsucker. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

This episode marks the final appearance of the character Mrs Johnson and of the actress Clarice Blackburn. Blackburn had taken a writing job on another soap by this time and was not available for acting work on a regular basis. She was an outstanding performer; Nancy Barrett says that Blackburn was the single best actor in the entire cast of Dark Shadows. Since Miss Barrett herself is a serious contender for this title, that is not an opinion to be taken lightly.

In the 1995 segment, Mrs Johnson died in the episode broadcast on 23 July 1970. That would suggest a dramatic date of 23 July 1995, very close to Blackburn’s actual date of death, 5 August 1995. But it gets eerier than that. In #1071, when charming rogue Quentin Collins says that he looked into Parallel Time and saw Roxanne trapped in the burning room, he goes on to fix the date of Julia and Barnabas’ departure from Parallel Time as 3 August, two weeks after the broadcast date. That would be the date of their arrival in 1995, and would mean that the third night of their time in that year, the night when Mrs Johnson died, would have been 5 August 1995.

Episode 1101: Whithersoever the governess listeth

Vampire Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman are trying to prevent a disaster that is fated to destroy the great house of Collinwood and everyone in it before the year 1970 is out. They have a handful of cryptic phrases that clue them in to events that will precede this disaster. One of the phrases is “The night Rose Cottage was destroyed.” They have no idea what Rose Cottage is, and have been unable to find anyone who does.

Julia finds heiress Carolyn Stoddard Hawkes leaving the great house. Carolyn says nonchalantly that there is something she has to do at Rose Cottage. Julia gets Carolyn to say that going to Rose Cottage involves leaving the grounds of Collinwood through the front gate. She asks her to mail a letter for her on her way. She agrees, and waits outside while Julia goes back into the house to get the letter.

Julia rushes to a bedroom where Barnabas is sitting with governess Maggie Evans, who is the victim of a vampire other than himself. Julia fabricates a letter while repeating to Barnabas what Carolyn said. Julia takes over the vigil, and Barnabas gives Carolyn the phony letter. He then follows her to a deserted mansion in the area.

Barnabas barges in on Carolyn in a room in Rose Cottage. He ignores her indignation at his following her and presses her with questions:

CAROLYN: Barnabas!

BARNABAS: So this is Rose Cottage.

CAROLYN: You followed me here!

BARNABAS: Carolyn, who is your friend? Who were you talking to just before I came in?

CAROLYN: That, that really is no concern of yours, now is it?

BARNABAS: Carolyn, you must tell us everything you know about this place, who lived here and who it was you were trying to find.

CAROLYN: Why are you and Dr. Hoffman so interested in this place?

BARNABAS: We’ve told you before one of the events that’s to happen before the disaster at Collinwood is the destruction of Rose Cottage.

CAROLYN: Rose Cottage… [laughs] Now, that’s a strange name for a place like this, isn’t it?

BARNABAS: I know now why it was so difficult to find. How did it get such a name?

CAROLYN: Oh, it happened a very long time ago, when Carrie was very small.

BARNABAS: Carrie lived here?

CAROLYN: Are you going to be quiet and let me tell you?

BARNABAS: I’m sorry, go on.

CAROLYN: Carrie, Carrie always dreamed of having a doll’s house which she would call Rose Cottage. So for her birthday I asked Quentin to build her one. Quentin was so good with his hands you know, and so terribly inventive. He actually built a replica of this house, and I gave it to Carrie for her birthday. [laughs] I told her she would have to find another name for it, but she said no, it would always be Rose Cottage to her. So she kept calling it that, and before very long people called the mansion itself Rose Cottage.

BARNABAS: When was all this, Carolyn?

CAROLYN: I’m not going to answer any more of your questions! You were very rude to follow me here, very rude indeed!

Carrie died in 1841. Her ghost has taken possession of teenager Hallie Stokes. The ghost of Carrie’s friend Tad has taken possession of David Collins. Tad and Carrie, in personis David and Hallie, are currently at Windcliff, a psychiatric facility Julia controls. Before they were taken there, Carrie and Tad did some mumbo-jumbo and restored their late governess Daphne Harridge to life. Daphne then led Tad and Carrie in an unsuccessful attempt to do the same for another ghost, erstwhile pirate captain Gerard Stiles. Carolyn is possessed by the spirit of a certain Leticia Faye, though unlike Hallie and David her own personality still exists within her body and from time to time asserts itself.

We have seen the dollhouse of which Carolyn/ Leticia speaks many times, and we know that it is in some supernatural sense identical with the full-scale mansion. The episode opened with a reprise of Friday’s cliffhanger, in which Gerard used the dollhouse to trap Daphne in the mansion and to set fire to it. Carolyn/ Leticia interrupted Gerard and saved Daphne.

Barnabas returns to the great house and tells Julia that he now knows where Rose Cottage is. He says that he saw Carolyn there. She asks if he got any information out of Carolyn. He says that he did not. He does not mention the business about Carrie and the dollhouse, which is just bizarre. He and Julia know about a mysterious playroom full of toys appropriate to small children that intermittently appears in a space in a little used part of the great house otherwise occupied by a linen closet. They know that all four ghosts are associated with this playroom. You would think he would therefore realize that a story about a toy of Carrie’s would be relevant to their concerns, but apparently the connection escaped him.

In the last scene, Julia is in Maggie’s room when she is suddenly seized by a fit of sleepiness. A dark figure in a cloak and a slouch hat appears inside the window. Maggie gets up and goes to the figure, who is no taller than she is.

The figure’s slight build and short stature may suggest it is a woman, but no woman on *Dark Shadows* has ever worn shoes like that. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

I don’t know if the above makes it clear, but this episode is a sharp step up from last week’s offerings. It is tightly paced, clearly developed, and forcefully acted, a bright spot in a storyline that has been desperately dreary so far.

House of Dark Shadows

Vampire Barnabas Collins joined the cast of Dark Shadows in April 1967. Barnabas introduced himself to matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard and her family as their distant cousin from England. Soon, Liz had given him run of the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood, and she was treating that house and its contents as though they were Barnabas’ property.

In May and June of 1967, Barnabas took Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, as his new victim. He did not merely want to drink Maggie’s blood. He wanted to erase her personality and overwrite it with that of his lost love Josette. At the climax of this plan, he would make her into a vampire like himself, and the two of them would go forth to prey upon the living.

Barnabas’ plan failed. Maggie recovered her will and escaped from Barnabas. She would have exposed him, had her psychiatrist Julia Hoffman not betrayed her and magically mind-wiped her memory of what Barnabas was and what he had done. Julia attached herself to Barnabas as his personal physician, making it possible for him to go long periods without biting anyone. Barnabas continued to make his home at the Old House and to pass as a live Englishman. In time, the relationship between Julia and Barnabas became the core of Dark Shadows, and its most important stories were their adventures.

With Barnabas’ introduction, the show became a hit. By the time 1968 turned into 1969, it was one of the major pop culture fads of the period. That gave executive producer Dan Curtis an opening to pitch a Dark Shadows feature film to Hollywood studios. The one that bought the idea was MGM, headed at that time by Kirk Kerkorian, a tycoon who was trying to get out of the movie business and put MGM’s brand and other resources in service of his chief goal in life, making himself the king of Las Vegas. Kerkorian still had contracts with distributors that obligated him to provide a certain number of features a year. Dark Shadows already had a fan base, so that a film version of it wouldn’t require as much spending on advertising and promotion as would a new product, and the show was done so cheaply that Curtis couldn’t very well argue that he needed a big budget for production. So Kerkorian saw a way to meet his legal obligations at minimal financial risk.

The movie that resulted from this business decision is slow-paced, confusing, and amateurishly shot. I love it.

Most of the events and characters are drawn from the first seven months Barnabas was on the show. There are lots of Easter eggs for fans of the show. Almost all of the music is recycled from the show, including a brief bit of one of the rock and roll numbers that often played on the jukebox at The Blue Whale tavern in the first year but that have rarely been heard since. Both Maggie, in the opening scenes, and the sheriff later on point flashlights directly into the camera. The sheriff and his deputies display the same clownish ineptitude that distinguished them on the show. My favorite example comes after a deputy has driven his car directly into a tree. The sheriff says that he wouldn’t have done that unless he saw something, prompting us to think that a Collinsport law enforcement officer probably would be more comfortable driving with his eyes closed.

The events do not take place in the same sequence as they did on the show, and some of the characters are jumbled as well. So in 1967, the governess in the great house was the well-meaning Victoria Winters and her boyfriend was dashing action hero-turned hopeless schlub Burke Devlin. Vicki and Burke were already past their peak of interest in April 1967, and have been gone and forgotten for years at this point. Maggie is the governess on the show now, and she is the governess in this version of Collinwood as well.

Maggie’s last steady boyfriend was hardworking fisherman Joe Haskell, who left the show when he was the victim of a vampire in 1968. So in this Collinwood, Maggie is engaged to Jeff Clark, who corresponds to the character who married Vicki after Burke was lost in a plane crash. Like his namesake on the show, this Jeff is played by the repellent Roger Davis. There is a costume party in the movie, as there was in the show. Jeff wears an eighteenth century naval uniform that was originally worn on television by Nathan Forbes, a character who, like Joe, was played by Joel Crothers. It is as if Curtis is acknowledging that we would rather see Maggie and Joe, but rubbing our faces in the fact that we’re getting more Roger Davis instead.

Julia is not Maggie’s psychiatrist in this universe. When Barnabas is freed from his coffin, she is already at Collinwood, researching the Collins family history. She claimed to be doing that as a cover story in 1967, but here it is apparently the truth, for some reason. She confirms that Barnabas is a vampire when she sees that he does not cast a reflection in the mirror in her compact, the same gimmick she used on the show. She makes her offer to cure Barnabas of vampirism 56 minutes into this 96 minute movie, after he has killed several people and thrown the whole area into an uproar. She falls in love with him shortly after, to his embarrassment. When the treatments misfire by causing him to age rapidly, as they did in the show, he deviates from the original by killing her.

That sets off the final crisis. Barnabas takes Maggie to his hiding place and tries to Josettify her. Several characters set out to hunt him. Jeff finds that Barnabas has killed some of them and turned them into vampires. He kills two of these, then finds Barnabas and destroys him just as he is about to turn Maggie into a vampire.

We had barely seen Jeff and Maggie together, and in their few shared scenes they had no chemistry at all. Nor has he been involved in any of the other action sequences. Indeed, he begins the climactic sequence by being woken and told that he has overslept, which serves to underline his peripheral position in the plot up to that point. So it is entirely unsatisfying that he comes out of the blue and is the rescuer in the grand finale.

My wife, Mrs Acilius, pointed out that we have seen Maggie interact quite a bit with Roger Collins, brother to Liz and father of strange and troubled boy David. Roger also took an active part in the first destruction of a vampire, when his niece Carolyn was staked. So it would make sense for him to be the rescuer, and for Mr Davis’ character to be left out of the movie altogether. A romance between Roger and Maggie would hark back to the early days of the show, when there were a few hints that Vicki, a Jane Eyre analogue, might start dating Roger, whose position as father of her charge and whose very name recall Mr Rochester.

Fans often wonder what Barnabas’ long-term plan was in the Spring and Summer of 1967. Maggie was known to everyone and her disappearance was big news, so he could hardly have presented her to the family once she was Josettified. And his own operations as a vampire were an ongoing disaster that had everyone in the Collinsport area on edge. Add a second vampire to the household, and the situation would become entirely unsustainable.

The show indicated what would probably have happened had Barnabas succeeded, first in February 1969, and then in more depth in July 1970. In #694, the ghost of Quentin Collins takes control of the great house, forcing all of its residents to flee for their lives. In episodes #1061-#1070, Julia and Barnabas come unstuck in time and find themselves in the far-off future year 1995, where another ghost has taken control of Collinwood. The great house is in ruins, the grounds overgrown, and the residents of Collinsport are unwilling even to mention the estate, let alone go there. Surely those were the only surroundings in which Barnabas and a vampiric, Josettified Maggie could have gone on existing.

That’s very much the situation that is about to come into being at the end of this film. We don’t see the great house. Instead, Jeff encounters occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes on an island overgrown with weeds, finds that he has become a vampire, and destroys him. He then goes to a building in ruins, apparently located on the same island (though the scraps of film that make up this movie are so confusingly pieced together that you can never be quite sure where anyone is supposed to be at any time,) and finds Roger sitting on a sort of throne. Roger is also a vampire, and Jeff destroys him too. From there he goes to the Old House, probably, where he confronts Barnabas in a big space that is also in ruins. The structures we do see show us what would happen to the great house if Barnabas survived, and what may happen to it anyway. The only living members of the family are Liz, who was catatonic after she found out that her daughter had become a vampire and doesn’t seem likely to make much of a recovery, and David, who was already pretty screwy when the movie started. It’s hard to see how either of them is going to keep such a big place up.

Episode 1093: It’s just gonna happen anyway

In July, vampire Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman came unstuck in time and found themselves in the far-off future year 1995. Julia and Barnabas found that the great house of Collinwood had been in ruins ever since some mysterious disaster took place on an unspecified night in 1970. Some residents of the great house went missing that night, others died, and two of them, Carolyn Stoddard Hawkes and Quentin Collins, went insane. The mad Carolyn of 1995 apparently knew that Barnabas was a vampire; she had known that for a while in 1967, when she was his victim, but appeared to have forgotten it when he was relieved of the effects of his curse for a while starting in March 1968. Towards the end of Barnabas and Julia’s time in 1995, Carolyn left a note for them, consisting of six cryptic phrases, shortly before the ghosts who rule Collinwood killed her. They decided the phrases were clues to the disaster, and ever since returning to 1970 have been trying without success to use them to figure out what is going on.

One thing that is clear is that the disaster will involve the deaths of teenagers Hallie Stokes and David Collins and the merger of their ghosts with the ghosts of their lookalikes from the year 1840, Carrie Stokes and Tad Collins. David and Hallie are aware of this and spend all their time moaning about how helpless they are to do anything about it. Their headquarters for this operation is a room that intermittently materializes behind a door that usually leads to a linen closet. The room is much too large to fit into the space the linen closet occupies, is stocked with high-end antique toys, and is frequented by the ghosts. Hallie and David call it “The Playroom.” In 1995, Julia and Barnabas found that The Playroom was in existence all the time and that anyone could enter it, but until today only David, Hallie, and the ghosts have been able to go there. Everyone else just sees the linen closet when they open the door.

Hallie and David are in The Playroom, bummed out because Carrie has revealed to them that they are fated to become dolls in the dollhouse that is there. This was previously revealed to them in #1082, but Dark Shadows has been losing teenage viewers lately, so perhaps David and Hallie weren’t watching that day. A miniature carousel starts turning and playing music; David is influenced by the music, and says that perhaps their future in the dollhouse won’t be so bad.

Meanwhile, Carolyn is in the corridor outside The Playroom. We see her after the camera pans out from a closeup of the stained glass work above the door that sometimes opens on The Playroom. We notice that it depicts roses. The dollhouse is a scale model of a house that was known as Rose Cottage in 1840, and is in some sense identical to that house. One of the clues Carolyn left in 1995 was “The night Rose Cottage was destroyed,” which has led Barnabas and Julia to ask everyone if they’ve ever heard of Rose Cottage and to work feverishly to try to locate it. You might think they would remember the roses above the door to The Playroom and to think of the toys they saw there in 1995, but no such luck.

Carolyn hears the carousel’s music and wonders where it is coming from. She opens the door to The Playroom. She still hears the music, but sees only the linen closet. It is a haunting moment. We know that she is glimpsing an aperture between her world and another, but nothing she can see could lead her to conclude that anything at all extraordinary is happening. It might leave us wondering what it would be like if we were in the presence of some utterly bizarre phenomenon- would we notice?

Carolyn returns to the corridor. Her back is turned when David opens the door. We see The Playroom behind him. We wonder if Carolyn would be able to see it if she were facing the right way. David closes the door silently. Carolyn turns and is startled to see him. He says he is looking for Hallie. Carolyn asks him about the music; he claims he cannot hear it. He suggests someone may have left a radio playing in another part of the house.

The sequence reminded me of the 2017 season of Twin Peaks, as does the whole idea of The Playroom. As Agent Cooper disappeared into the mysterious, intermittently existent Red Room and the Black Lodge beyond, so the ghosts threaten to absorb the living characters into the mysterious, intermittently visible Playroom and the ruinous world of 1995 beyond. As Deputy Hawk once caught a glimpse of the curtains of the Red Room in the clouds above the spot deep in the woods where the worlds sometimes open onto each other, a glimpse so brief and vague that someone unfamiliar with the legends of the Black Lodge would likely either ignore it completely or assume it was a reflection of the clouds from some water on the ground, so the music from the miniature carousel gives Carolyn a glimpse so subtle and vague that anyone who had not been briefed by Julia and Barnabas would immediately accept David’s idea that it is just a radio. I doubt that this part of the show had a direct influence on Twin Peaks– more likely, the shared imagery is just the logical endpoint of a sense that there is more to the world than we can readily perceive with commonplace fears of being trapped in unfamiliar places. But I do think the two shows can shed light on each other.

Under the influence of the ghosts, Hallie and David make a doll with bright yellow hair and put it in the dollhouse. It represents someone named “Leticia” who will join them when they are living in the dollhouse. Since the only blonde character on the show other than Hallie is Carolyn, we have to assume that a ghost named Leticia has the same designs on Carolyn that Carrie has on Hallie and Tad has on David.

In 1995, Carolyn had not disappeared into the dollhouse, but was living in a shack by Finley’s Cove. She even went in and out of The Playroom from time to time, interacting with Tad and Carrie. This is the first indication we’ve had that the ghosts’ will is not entirely ineluctable. There may be nothing the characters can do to keep a disaster from occurring, but perhaps there is some hope that we might see them do something to shape the particulars of the disaster that will befall them.

Carolyn is busy looking after David and Hallie’s governess, Maggie Evans. Maggie is ill, having been bitten by a vampire. When he found out about this, Barnabas was surprised to learn he isn’t the only vampire in town, and he and Julia have been trying to figure out who has been feeding on Maggie. Carolyn and Maggie talk about the previous vampire attacks. There is an electric moment when each of them looks like she is trying very hard to remember something that is hidden way down in the recesses of her mind. Several times in 1968, Nancy Barrett played Carolyn as if she remembered a lot more about Barnabas than he knew. The script didn’t give her any support in that, and she eventually had to give it up. Maggie was Barnabas’ victim in May and June of 1967; that experience has been wiped from her memory several times, and we may wonder if it will emerge one more time. In light of what we saw about Carolyn’s knowledge in 1995 and the similarity of what Maggie is going through now to what she went through in 1967, this moment is highly effective.

Miss Barrett also manages to get a laugh from regular viewers today. She has a scene with Christopher Pennock as astrologer Sebastian Shaw. Pennock also played Carolyn’s late husband Jabe (alias “Jeb”) Hawkes. The two characters are supposed to resemble each other strongly, and for a while Carolyn hoped Sebastian would turn out to be Jabe. But she’s given up on that, and Sebastian wants to date Maggie.

Sebastian comes to Collinwood. Carolyn tells him Maggie is very sick and cannot receive visitors. Sebastian wants to see her anyway. Carolyn tells him that is impossible. He becomes angry and declares that she will see him sooner or later, no matter what! Sebastian storms out of the house, and Carolyn watches him go with a sad little smile. Sebastian is violent, irrational, controlling, and childish, just like Jabe. Her look shows us how much she misses those things about him.

Aww, what a wonderful dangerously unstable man-child he is!

Carolyn can’t get the tune the little carousel plays out of her head. She goes back to the door and opens it. Now, it opens on The Playroom. The circle the ghosts have drawn around Hallie and David now encloses her as well. We can start to see how she might have known enough to leave the clues she left in 1995 for Barnabas and Julia.

The vampire story is new and has some promise, but the haunting has been going in a tight little circle for five weeks, with no progress in sight. The miniature carousel is all-too-apt a symbol of that. Even the opening voiceover seems to acknowledge that the show is in a rut. It breaks off in mid-sentence. We hear Kathryn Leigh Scott telling us that David and Hallie have discovered “a secret world- a world populated by the dead. And this night, they learn…” That’s it, the audio stops abruptly at that point. What do David and Hallie learn? What does it matter, whatever it is can’t possibly affect the story in any way.

Episode 1092: Visitors only stay for a week

Governess Maggie Evans has been bitten by a vampire other than Barnabas Collins. Barnabas and mad scientist Julia Hoffman are stymied in their efforts to find out who this other vampire is. They decide not to take Maggie to the hospital, since they don’t want to answer any questions. Instead, Julia goes to some unspecified location in the village of Collinsport to get several units of blood to transfuse into Maggie. I’m sure a no-questions-asked blood bank would be a highly profitable enterprise in Collinsport.

I wonder if Julia had to go in the blood store to get that bag, or if they have a drive-through. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Meanwhile, Maggie’s charges, gloomy teenagers David Collins and Hallie Stokes, are sitting around in a space that intermittently materializes in a location usually occupied by a linen closet. It is stocked with fancy antique toys, frequented by ghosts, and called “The Playroom.” The ghosts don’t take visible form today, but Hallie and David notice that they keep playing with a dollhouse in The Playroom.

The dollhouse is a scale model of a mansion known as Rose Cottage that stood somewhere in the Collinsport area in 1840, when the ghosts were living beings, and is in some supernatural sense identical with that mansion. The ghosts are big fans of scale models. Some time ago they gave David a scale model of a ship that one of them sailed when he was alive. Today, David and Hallie see that the ghosts have added a tiny model of the same ship, reduced in size so that it is in the same proportion to the dolls in the dollhouse as the original model was to the residents of the great house of Colllinwood. Hallie says that if they go to David’s room, they will find that the model is gone from there, because it has been transformed into this minuscule thing.

The Java Queen II. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

At the end of the episode, Hallie and David hear one of the ghosts telling them to look into the dollhouse and learn their fate. They comply, and see themselves in place of the dolls. David and Hallie have spent all day sitting around doing nothing, and when they look into the future they see that they are still sitting around doing nothing. Evidently the greatest horror the writers can imagine is that the show will go on as it has been lately. I have to admit they have a point!

Ultimate fate. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 1091: Whoever did this

David Henesy has been in the cast of Dark Shadows since the first week, yet today is the first time he has been called upon to deliver the opening voiceover narration, after dozens of other cast members have had their turns. He does a great job with it, he should have done it every time.

As the voiceover concludes, we dissolve to an extreme closeup of a fixture that has been on the show even longer than has Mr Henesy, the clock in the foyer of the great house of Collinwood. We see that there is a little painting in the body of the clock, above its face. It is a rustic landscape centered on a small church. I believe this is the first time we have been able to see this painting; certainly it is the first time it has received such emphasis. The episode will end with a closeup of a cross that heroine Julia Hoffman is carrying as she goes off to confront a vampire. Opening with a picture of a church and closing with a cross would suggest that there is some kind of Christian content in between, though it escapes me what it might be.

Today’s story is a whodunit. Governess Maggie Evans has been bitten by a vampire. Julia suspects her best friend, Barnabas Collins. Barnabas denies that he is the guilty party. They have three conversations which we might call soulful, if it weren’t tactless to remind Barnabas that he has no soul. When Julia sees Maggie’s indifferent response to Barnabas when he visits her in her sickroom, she is convinced of his innocence. That does raise the question of how Barnabas has been getting his nutrition lately, a question the show does absolutely nothing to answer or forestall.

Teenager Hallie Stokes fears that the ghost of the evil Gerard Stiles is responsible for Maggie’s condition. Her friend David Collins conjures up, not the ghost of Gerard, but that of Hallie’s lookalike Carrie Stokes, who indicates that Gerard had nothing to do with it.

So we know that we now have a B-story to complement the A-story of Gerard’s haunting of Collinwood, and that the villain in that B-story is a vampire who is new in town. Barnabas mentions that astrologer Sebastian Shaw arrived in Collinsport only recently; Julia rules Sebastian out as a potential vampire, since she has seen him during the day.

Sebastian arrived with a woman named Roxanne. Barnabas does not mention Roxanne as a suspect, perhaps because he is deeply infatuated with her and does not want to believe she shares his curse. But returning viewers know that Roxanne appears only at night that she has some hold over Sebastian that makes him miserable, and that just before Maggie showed up with the puncture marks on her neck Roxanne was quarreling with Sebastian about a date he had had with Maggie. Roxanne alluded to mysterious powers that she has and looked self-satisfied when she said she had further plans to use those powers. So I think we have to classify Roxanne as the prime suspect in the latest attack on Maggie.

Episode 1090: All we can do is maintain vigilance

Julia Hoffman enters the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood and sees her best friend, vampire Barnabas Collins, embracing governess Maggie Evans and staring hungrily at Maggie’s neck. She interrupts with news that she just had an ugly scene with one of Maggie’s charges, teenager David Collins. Julia suggests Maggie go to talk with David, and she immediately does so.

Julia scolds Barnabas for almost biting Maggie. He denies he was about to do that. She reminds him of the lengths he went to a few months ago to resist the temptation to bite Maggie. She does not mention that Maggie was his victim three years ago, in May and June of 1967, an event that has repeatedly been wiped from Maggie’s memory, though not from anyone else’s. Barnabas insists that he is in complete control of himself, and that Maggie is in no danger from him. Julia looks at him skeptically, as well she might. He sounds like every addict who is ten minutes away from a relapse.

Later, Barnabas and Julia are back in the drawing room. Barnabas is all huffy because Maggie went on a date with astrologer Sebastian Shaw. Julia asks why that bothers him. He says that Sebastian is either a charlatan or something worse. Coming from a vampire, this note of prim disapproval is pretty rich, and Julia does nothing to hide her sardonic amusement at his discomfiture.

Julia is darkly amused at Barnabas’ sputtering over Maggie’s date with Sebastian. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Julia is so deeply involved with Barnabas that she has no hope of making a life that does not include him, and she long ago decided to make the best of this situation by falling in love with him. Barnabas initially responded to this attitude by cruelly taunting her, but now tends to respond to her unrequited feelings with tact and, at times, a measure of compassion. That tact and compassion do not go so far as to keep him from telling her about the other women he is chasing and expecting her to help him catch up to them, but sometimes, he speaks softly and gives her a hug. For Barnabas, that’s an enormous act of kindness.

For a long time, Barnabas was hung up on Maggie, and early in 1970 it looked like she was about to reciprocate his interest. Julia meekly stayed out of their way at that time. Then Barnabas went on a cosmic journey through an alternate universe and into the far-off future year of 1995. Julia accompanied him on that journey. While in the alternate universe, he fell in love with a girl named Roxanne, who looked like she could be Julia’s daughter. When he and Julia returned to 1970, Barnabas spent some of his time trying to prevent the disaster he and Julia learned was coming when they were in 1995 and the rest mooning about his lost Roxanne. That left him no time to reconnect with Maggie. Then, he met Roxanne’s Doppelgänger who is native to the main universe, and he was back in love.

This Roxanne apparently lives with Sebastian, much to Barnabas’ dismay. So whatever his past attachment to Maggie, the fact that Sebastian is available for Maggie to date suggests Barnabas might have a shot with Roxanne. Part of Julia’s grim amusement may come from watching Barnabas’ total inability to be rational enough to see this as a bright side.

Maggie comes back to the great house having had a fine time with Sebastian. She talks with Julia and Barnabas about David and her other charge, Hallie Stokes. She agrees that they seem already to be under the influence of the evil spirits whom Barnabas and Julia saw in the wreckage of the great house when they were in 1995, and laments her inability to get through to them. Barnabas says he will go home; Maggie offers to walk with him partway, since she wants some fresh air.

We cut to Sebastian and Roxanne’s place. Roxanne knows all about Sebastian’s date with Maggie. She mentions that she saw them at the restaurant in the Collinsport Inn. That will interest longtime viewers- the diner, as it is often called, was a major set in the first 41 weeks of the show, when Maggie worked there. It has been seen so rarely since then that we can never be sure it still exists. Sebastian wonders how Roxanne knows so much, and she placidly tells him she has her ways. He leaves the room, and she gives a mischievous smile, as if she has thought of another opportunity to use her ways to secure her interests.

Julia sees Maggie when she returns to the great house. Julia tells Maggie that she has been gone for an hour and asks what kept her so long. Maggie collapses, and Julia sees bite marks gaping on her neck.

At one point they cut from the clock in the foyer at the great house to Julia. They do a matrix wipe, in which the picture dissolves into squares and then the next picture assembles from those squares. It’s the first time they have used this effect, and it is not at all clear what point it is supposed to make. Also, both shots are loaded with lots of little visual details, so that laying one on top of the other produces an ugly, confusing image.

Matrix wipe. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 1073: I don’t have to imagine things

Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins and his friend, Dr Julia Hoffman, MD, have returned to 1970 after an inexplicable journey through time. During a sojourn in 1995, they learned that a mysterious disaster is about to befall the great house of Collinwood. They have told several people about this disaster and withheld the information from several others.

Among those Julia and Barnabas have told is matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. We see Liz in the drawing room discussing the matter with governess Maggie Evans. Maggie is hurt that Barnabas hasn’t seen her since he returned. When Barnabas departed, there was a story brewing about a possible romance between him and Maggie; we might have thought the show would have forgotten this narrative thread, and some fans would prefer it had done so. But evidently it isn’t quite gone yet.

Among those Barnabas and Julia have not told is grouchy New England teen David Collins. David enters the room as Liz and Maggie are talking about the idea that something might happen. He says that something is happening, all right. Liz asks what it is and he says he will tell them what he knows if they tell him what they know. Liz huffily declares that the matter at hand has to do with a theory he could not possibly understand, and that she knows he could not understand it because she doesn’t understand it, either. Unimpressed by this logic, David stands his ground. He says it’s time they stop treating him like he is four and a half years old. Liz tells him that if he knows something they ought to know, he should tell them about it. How he is supposed to know what they ought to know when they won’t tell him anything is unclear. The exchange ends in a stalemate.

Julia and Barnabas have also tried to keep the relevant information from the other teen in the house, Hallie Stokes. Hallie eavesdropped on a conversation yesterday and picked up some ominous-sounding remarks with no context. David had a dream that night in which he saw Hallie wearing an old-fashioned long orange dress with puffy sleeves. Later, the same dress materialized on Hallie’s bed.

What neither Hallie nor David knew was that Barnabas and Julia saw that dress in 1995. The girl wearing it looked exactly like Hallie, but was named Carrie. She danced a minuet at the gazebo on the grounds of Collinwood with a boy who looked exactly like David but was named Tad.

When Hallie sees the dress at the beginning of today’s episode, she wonders how it got there. Maggie knocks on the door and Hallie hides it under her bedclothes. After Maggie goes, Hallie wonders why she didn’t just ask her about it. Longtime viewers have seen enough supernatural storylines start on Dark Shadows to know that a compulsion to withhold information is often the first step towards doom. It is frustrating that Liz, who has been central to the show since episode 1 premiered on 27 June 1966, hasn’t learned that lesson yet and applied it to her dealings with David.

David goes to Hallie’s room and tells her about his dream. She says that lots of boys dream about her; he says that unlike the others, he tried to go back to sleep afterward. David doesn’t specify what the other boys are doing with the image of Hallie in the middle of the night, but he lets her draw the conclusion that she isn’t up to his standards in that wise. When he tells her about the dress, she freaks out and accuses him of playing tricks on her. He doesn’t know what she’s talking about and doesn’t care enough about her to stick around until she clarifies it. He grumbles that he’ll never understand women and stalks off.

Later, David gets a note telling him to go to the gazebo at midnight. He sees Hallie emerge from the bushes, wearing the dress. He suddenly realizes that she is not Hallie at all. Carrie has made her appearance.

Carrie and David by the armillary sphere. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The gazebo set is decorated with an armillary sphere that is prominently featured today. From the first appearance of this doodad in #737, we might have wondered if the show was going to incorporate astrology into its stories. Two of the cryptic phrases Julia and Barnabas collected as clues during their visit to 1995 were “the night of the sun and the moon” and “the unfinished horoscope,” indicating that the time is coming for this to occur.

Liz is in a strange quiet mood today; Joan Bennett plays her very deep. She speaks softly, rarely makes eye contact, and often gives little signs of deep, somber thought. She mutters to Maggie that no one can know the future, “unless…” When Maggie asks unless what, she refuses to answer.

Liz telephones a man named Sebastian Shaw, who is wearing a piece of clothing that was ridiculous even by the standards of 1970. Actor Chris Pennock would later say that he retained absolutely no memory of ever having played a character named Sebastian; if I had worn that garment on national television, I think I would have blocked out the recollection as well.

Sebastian gets very prickly when people do not accept him as a serious professional. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Sebastian is an astrologer. He agrees to cast a full horoscope for the rest of 1970 for Liz. Since Barnabas and Julia told Liz that an unfinished horoscope is one of the signs that doom is near, it would seem rather bold of her to start an astrologer casting an elaborate chart.