In #473, we saw that wicked witch Angelique had traveled from the eighteenth century to the year 1968 to reimpose the vampire curse she had once placed on old world gentleman Barnabas Collins. In a single day, Angelique met Barnabas’ distant cousin Roger, bewitched him, and married him. This secured her a home in the great house on the estate of Collinwood. Barnabas lives in the Old House on the same estate. Calling herself Cassandra and wearing a black wig, she pretends not to understand why Barnabas doesn’t like her.
In #477, Angelique appeared to Barnabas in a dream and told him and the audience how she would go about turning him back into a vampire. Her approach would essentially be a distributed malware attack on the wetware inside the heads of the people of Collinsport. One person after another would have the same basic nightmare. Each nightmare would begin with a visit from a person who had not yet had it, and after the dreamer awoke they would feel an uncontrollable compulsion to describe the dream to that person. Once they had done so, that person would have the nightmare, and the cycle would repeat. When the dream got back to Barnabas, he would become a vampire again.
Yesterday, heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard had the dream. Carolyn met with occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes and mad scientist Julia Hoffman at the Old House. Stokes managed to insert himself into Carolyn’s dream as the person to whom she must tell it. Today, Stokes has the dream. He sets out to function as an antivirus program. He has learned what the dreamer usually does, and consciously makes himself defy all those rules. His hack-back works sufficiently to force Angelique/ Cassandra to appear in the dream herself and get into an argument with him.
Angelique/ Cassandra addresses Stokes by the name of his eighteenth century ancestor Ben, an indentured servant whom she ensorcelled and used for her own nefarious purposes. She refuses to believe that Stokes is not Ben, and does not react strongly when he tells her that he knows her name is Angelique. When he later addresses her as Cassandra Collins, she is horrified and vanishes. It’s a staple of stories about magic that the act of calling adversaries by their true names can defeat them; Mrs Acilius brought up the story of Rumpelstiltskin. That the name “Angelique” has no effect while “Cassandra” drives her away suggests that she was using a pseudonym when we first knew her, and she really is Cassandra.
The power of naming also explains what Barnabas may have been thinking when he kept confronting Angelique/ Cassandra and telling her exactly what he did and did not know about her. Perhaps he hoped that simply by addressing her as “Angelique” he would make her vanish.
When Stokes awakens, he tells Julia he is confident that he has stopped the curse. That confidence is put to the test immediately when a knock comes at the door. Stokes opens it, and sees the man from his dream. He does not know the man, but we do. He is Sam Evans, an artist recently blinded by one of Angelique/ Cassandra’s spells. He is accompanied by Joe Haskell, fiancé to Sam’s daughter Maggie. They mention that Maggie is spending the evening in the nearby city of Bangor, Maine. Sam says that he heard the name “Stokes” in his head earlier in the evening, and that he also felt an urge to come to the Old House. He has a strong feeling that Stokes has something to tell him, and insists that he do so.
Stokes is disquieted to see Sam, but feels no compulsion to tell the dream. Sam is furiously dissatisfied. It is unclear whether his frustration at not hearing the dream will be as intense or as persistent as is the upset previous dreamers felt when they resisted telling it.
Sam and Joe leave. In front of Sam’s house, Joe reaches to open the front door. Sam is irritated with him. He not only insists on opening the door himself, but won’t do so until Joe leaves. Joe explains that Maggie made him promise to keep an eye on him, to which Sam replies with a threat to forbid their marriage unless he backs off. Joe mentions that a strange, very tall man who recently abducted Carolyn might still be at large; Sam replies that the man jumped off Widows’ Hill, which means certain death to “anything human.”
Inside the house, Sam finds that a window Joe had closed before they left is open. He hears someone in Maggie’s room. It turns out to be the strange, very tall man, badly cut from his recent fall and wielding a kitchen knife.
They don’t explain what Maggie is doing in Bangor. From episode #1 until she was attacked by Barnabas in #227, Maggie was the principal waitress at the restaurant in the Collinsport Inn. After some time as Barnabas’ prisoner and a longer period as a patient in Julia’s hospital, she returned to town in #295. For all they’ve told us since then, Maggie may have got her job back or taken another one. But if she had, they would have told us today that she was working the night shift, not that she was on some unexplained trip out of town. So now we know that nobody in the Evans house is gainfully employed.
Mrs Johnson, housekeeper in the principal mansion on the great estate of Collinwood, isn’t herself. She had a nightmare a week ago, and ever since has been plagued with a compulsion to tell its details to strange and troubled boy David Collins. She knows that if she does, David will have the same nightmare, the same compulsion to tell it to some third person, and that if he does that person will suffer the same complex. She doesn’t know that the nightmare is part of a curse sent by wicked witch Angelique, or that at the climax of the curse old world gentleman Barnabas Collins is supposed to revert to the vampirism that afflicted him from the 1790s until last month. But she does know that it is part of something horrible, and she has tried desperately to keep it from continuing.
Mrs Johnson spent a couple of days with her sister in Boston to stay far from David, but she kept having the nightmare there. She has given up, and has come back to Collinwood. She does not go straight home to the great house, but stops first at the Old House in the estate. Barnabas lives there, but it is Barnabas’ friend Julia Hoffman she sees. Julia had passed the dream to her. Julia urges Mrs Johnson not to tell David about it. She replies that she knows she should not tell him, but that she has no more choice in the matter than Julia had in telling her.
This scene will raise a question in the minds of regular viewers. Julia is a medical doctor doubly qualified in hematology and psychiatry; she also has developed a method of hypnosis so powerful that she can virtually rewrite a subject’s memory, confining even very intense recollections to the depths of the unconscious mind, sometimes after an acquaintance of only a few minutes. Why doesn’t she try to hypnotize Mrs Johnson into forgetting the dream? All she actually does is slap her and repeat her command to avoid David.
David turns up. His father has sent him to ask Julia to come to the great house at her convenience. Julia tries to manage the situation by sending Mrs Johnson home first and keeping David in the house for a while. After Mrs Johnson leaves, Barnabas’ servant Willie enters and tells Julia there is an emergency in the basement. David agrees to wait for her to come back, but once she is gone he shouts that he will be playing outside.
We follow David out the front door, and find that Mrs Johnson is there waiting for him. She comes up on him from behind and says she has something to tell him. This scene will startle regular viewers. For nineteen weeks, from #365 to #461, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the 1790s. In that period, Clarice Blackburn played repressed spinster Abigail Collins and David Henesy played Daniel Collins, heir to the Collins fortune. We first saw Daniel in #431, when his Aunt Abigail intercepted him on this very spot and scolded him for playing at the Old House. Abigail was enforcing rules and believed she was acting in Daniel’s best interests; now the same actors invert the scene, showing us Mrs Johnson doing something she knows to be wrong and harmful to David.
Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, isn’t herself. Some emerald earrings mysteriously appeared in her purse the other day, and when she tried them on she got a faraway look on her face, began speaking in a voice different from her own, and a tinkling music played on the soundtrack. Today her boyfriend Joe tells her that he took the earrings and showed them to a jeweler and to the police. The jeweler valued them at $15,000* and the police said that they didn’t match the description of any jewelry that had been reported missing. Maggie was not only irked that Joe had taken the earrings without her permission, as anyone might be, but when he tries to get her to agree that such expensive things don’t just materialize out of thin air her usual level-headedness and cheerful disposition vanish and she becomes childishly defensive. Maggie does not know that Barnabas’ servant Willie placed the earrings in her purse as an attempt to reestablish the connection the two of them had when she was Barnabas’ prisoner in the Old House. As a result of Julia’s hypnosis, she does not even remember what Barnabas did to her. But after she runs Joe off, she is compelled to go to the Old House.
Again, regular viewers will recognize an echo of an earlier episode, in this case one that aired a year ago. When Maggie was Barnabas’ victim in May 1967, she snapped at Joe and drove him out of her house as she does today. Then too, she headed for Barnabas once Joe was gone.
Maggie doesn’t find Barnabas at the Old House. Instead, she sees Willie. Barnabas had framed Willie for his crimes against Maggie, and Willie was confined to the mental hospital Julia runs. Barnabas and Julia have brought him back to the Old House to help with their latest nefarious scheme. Willie had been Barnabas’ blood thrall; it is not clear to the audience just what effect it had on Willie when Barnabas’ vampirism went into remission. When we first see him today, he is playing with an unloaded rifle and grinning maniacally, reminding us of the dangerously unstable ruffian he was before Barnabas first bit him.
Maggie knocks on the door and asks Willie if she can come in. He falls over himself inviting her. He becomes the friend he tried to be to her during her imprisonment. She says she knows that he wasn’t the one who hurt her, and he is overjoyed. She seems blissful. He asks her out on a date; she says that Joe wouldn’t like it. Before Barnabas, Willie propositioned all the young women and threatened all their boyfriends, and at first this approach, like his gleeful handling of the rifle, suggests that dangerously unstable ruffian is back. He assures Maggie that he only wants friendship, but after she leaves he picks the rifle up again and says that Joe will be out of the way soon.
For her part, Maggie’s behavior does not represent a reversion to her time as Barnabas’ prisoner. Rather, the earrings seem to have done what Barnabas tried to do when he bit her, imprisoned her, and subjected her to a series of role-playing exercises. Her personality is showing signs of giving way to that of Barnabas’ lost love, gracious lady Josette. In #260, Barnabas told Maggie “You are Josette!”; in #370, we saw that he was right, inasmuch as Kathryn Leigh Scott played both characters, as Zita Johanns had played both Helen Grosvenor and Princess Ankh-Esen-Amun in the 1932 film The Mummy, from which Barnabas’ Josettification project was borrowed. The tinkling melody that plays on the soundtrack when Maggie wears the earrings is that of Josette’s music box; this could be a sign that her memory of what Barnabas did to her is coming back, since he forced her to listen to the music box for hours on end. But the voice she speaks in at those times is the voice Miss Scott used as Josette, and her blissfulness reminds us of Josette’s first scenes with her beloved Barnabas, not of Maggie’s captivity in the ghoul’s dungeon.
Back at Collinwood, Mrs Johnson watches David sleep. She tells him she is sorry for what she has done and for what he will suffer. Clarice Blackburn was always good, but she outdoes herself with this speech. It is a beautiful performance.
David has the nightmare. The first several dream sequences in the Dream Curse storyline ended with the dreamer opening a door, seeing something scary, and screaming. David’s goes a step further. There is a gigantic spider web behind the last door he opens. He not only sees it, but is tangled in it when he starts screaming. He awakes, still screaming, and Mrs Johnson holds him.
From #227 to #260, Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, was under the influence of vampire Barnabas Collins. As Barnabas tried to brainwash Maggie so that her personality would disappear and that of his lost love Josette would take its place, she began to rebel against him. From #251 until she escaped in #260, Barnabas kept Maggie locked up in a prison cell in his basement.
Throughout this whole period, Barnabas’ sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie Loomis tried to spare Maggie the worst. Willie anonymously telephoned Maggie’s friend Vicki in #230 so she and her friends could interrupt Barnabas’ first attempt to take Maggie into custody; while Maggie was Barnabas’ prisoner he several times pleaded with Barnabas to show her mercy; and when in #260 Barnabas had decided to kill Maggie with extreme cruelty, Willie brought a glass of poison to her cell so she could die painlessly.
Now, Barnabas’ vampirism is in remission. He has brought Willie back to work for him, arranging his release from the mental hospital where he was confined after Barnabas framed him for all of his crimes against Maggie. It is by no means clear what effect Barnabas’ loss of his vampire powers has had on Willie. At times he seems to be confused and childlike; at times, to be the dangerously unstable ruffian he was before he fell into Barnabas’ clutches. But he is still fascinated by Maggie, and still longs for her friendship. The very night Barnabas brought him home from the hospital, Willie sneaked off to visit Maggie and tell her he was innocent.
For her part, Maggie’s memories of her experience with Barnabas were excluded from her conscious mind when mad scientist Julia Hoffman hypnotized her. The other day, Maggie had a nightmare as part of the “Dream Curse,” and in the course of the nightmare she heard the sound of Josette’s music box, which Barnabas forced her to listen to while in captivity. She also saw a skull with eyes, suggesting that her deepest fear has to do with the dead watching her. Since Barnabas, as a vampire, was dead and yet kept Maggie under surveillance, this image combines with the music to suggest that Maggie’s memory might soon return.
Today, Willie is minding Adam, a Frankenstein’s monster whom Julia brought to life in a procedure meant to cure Barnabas of his vampirism once and for all. Barnabas and Julia have no idea what to do with Adam, and so they have chained him up in Maggie’s old cell. Barnabas’ jewel box is stashed behind the secret panel Maggie used to escape from the cell, and Willie shows Adam some of its shinier contents to calm him.
Among the shiniest are a pair of emerald earrings. Barnabas has been talking to Willie as if Willie remembers everything that happened when he was his blood thrall, yet Willie has not confirmed that this is so. When he sees the earrings, Willie gets very intense. He says that he saw Josette wearing them, then realizes that it was Maggie. Perhaps Barnabas, by modeling the conversations they used to have, is inadvertently providing the therapy Willie needs to recover his memory.
Willie decides to give the earrings to Maggie. He goes to Maggie’s house and peeks through the window. He sees her with her boyfriend Joe. When he came to the house the other day to tell Maggie he never meant to hurt her, she was terrified and Joe stated as a matter of fact that he would kill Willie if he ever came near Maggie again. Willie does not knock on the door to greet the two of them.
Instead, he slips into the house while they are out of the room. He plants the earrings in Maggie’s purse, and is gone by the time she and Joe come back. Maggie finds the earrings. The tinkling sound of Josette’s music box plays on the soundtrack while she looks at them. She is fascinated:
Maggie says that the earrings “remind me of something- something I’ve forgotten. I know they don’t belong to me yet. But somehow when I look at them, I seem to think they were meant for me- I mean from the start. They are lovely, a very beautiful and thoughtful gift. Only a man who has gazed into my eyes with deepest love would know they were meant for me.” As she delivers these lines, Kathryn Leigh Scott fades out of Maggie’s voice, into the tones she used while playing Josette from #370 to #430.
Barnabas’ attempt to turn Maggie into Josette would have reminded many viewers at the time of the 1932 film The Mummy, in which the undead Imhotep (played by Boris Karloff, whose voice Jonathan Frid often seems to be imitating as Barnabas) abducts the beautiful young Helen Grosvenor, whom he believes to be the reincarnation of his lost love, the Princes Ankh-esen-amun. In that movie, Helen and the Princess were both played by Zita Johanns, suggesting that Imhotep was onto something. From November 1967 to March 1968, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the 1790s and we saw that Maggie and Josette are both played by Kathryn Leigh Scott, suggesting the same about Barnabas. The bleakness and horror of Barnabas’ treatment of Maggie in the summer of 1967 makes this suggestion a daring one, and that Maggie makes a speech blissfully describing the one who looked at her and saw Josette as a “man who gazed into my eyes with deepest love” in the middle of an episode that begins and ends in the cell where he confined her and planned to torture her to death is more daring still.
I don’t think the risk pays off. Miss Scott was usually one of the most reliable performers on Dark Shadows. She found Maggie in her relationship to her father Sam, whose drinking problem was a major story point for the first 40 weeks of the show, and articulates the character as a series of very intelligent answers to the question “How would an Adult Child of an Alcoholic respond to this situation?” This scene presents her with a very complex challenge, as she is supposed to show that the earrings have jarred loose some fragment of a memory but to keep us guessing just what that fragment is. Joel Crothers plays Joe’s disquiet at the appearance of the earrings with a simplicity that sets Miss Scott up for a star turn. But she doesn’t seem to have any idea what to make of her lines. For the first time on the show, she is physically stiff and vocally overbearing. As a result of her atypical overacting, the scene does not deliver the sense of mystery and foreboding it requires. It just leaves the audience confused.
The late Dr Eric Lang built a Frankenstein’s monster with the intention of draining the “life force” from recovering vampire Barnabas Collins into it. Wicked witch Angelique turned Barnabas into a vampire in the first place, and has returned to the scene to thwart this experiment and make Barnabas once more an undead abomination preying upon the living. Angelique struck Lang dead with one spell, and with another has started a “Dream Curse” that has for the moment compromised the ability of the senior mad scientist in town, Barnabas’ best friend Julia Hoffman, to pick up where Lang left off.
In Lang’s laboratory, Julia and Barnabas recap the plot. Under the stress of the Dream Curse, Julia is having trouble controlling her emotions. At one point she refers to her crush on Barnabas. Every time she has mentioned this before, Barnabas has been a huge jerk about it, ridiculing her and reminding him of the crimes they have committed together, including murder. This time, he is warm and kindly. His non-obnoxious response marks a significant change in their relationship.
Lang left an audio message for Julia on his tape recorder. He said that if she does the experiment and Barnabas and the Frankenstein’s monster, whose name is Adam, both live, neither Barnabas nor Adam will be a vampire. But if Adam dies, Barnabas will revert. His recovery is already hanging by a thread, as he feels ever stronger cravings for blood.
Julia and Barnabas play the tape today, but leave the room before it gets to the part with the message. Lang’s voice plays to an empty set. Addison Powell didn’t do a very good job playing Lang on screen, and he’s no better as a voice actor. Powell appeared in a number of feature films, including hits like The Thomas Crown Affair and Three Days of the Condor, but is best remembered for a series of commercials he did in the 1980s as “The Gorton’s Fisherman.” I remember those spots- I thought he was an actual fisherman they’d hired to read copy. Usually I’m uneasy with the idea of taking a job away from an actor, since I know lots of very talented people who have spent years training in that craft, never to make a living at it. But Powell was so bad I wish my original impression had been correct.
Julia has reached out to Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, a scholar of the occult, for help with the Dream Curse. When she met with him yesterday, she did not identify Angelique as the witch. She couldn’t tell him anything about the experiment or about Barnabas’ vampirism without confessing to her many crimes. Today, Stokes is trying to fill in the blanks Julia left so that he can help to oppose the Dream Curse. He calls on Barnabas at Lang’s house. He breaks down Barnabas’ resistance and learns that the witch is Angelique, whom he knows under her alias of Cassandra Blair Collins.
Stokes next calls on Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, at her house. Maggie was the first person to have the dream, and she gives Stokes a detailed description of it. This gives Kathryn Leigh Scott an opportunity to look into the camera and emote, which is always worth seeing.
There are a lot of shots today using mirrors. In their post on Dark Shadows Before I Die, John and Christine Scoleri include several screenshots of these and of ambitious camera angles from other episodes.
In April 1967, dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis inadvertently freed vampire Barnabas Collins to prey upon the living. Barnabas made Willie his blood thrall, and reduced him to a sorely bedraggled state. As spring turned to summer, Barnabas added Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, to his diet. When Barnabas first held her captive in his house, Maggie was dazed and submissive, but as he tried to brainwash her so that her personality would disappear and that of his lost love Josette would take its place, she began to rebel. Maggie and Willie formed a strange friendship as he did what he could to protect her from Barnabas. Eventually she escaped, and mad scientist Julia Hoffman erased her memory of what Barnabas did to her. When Willie tried to warn Maggie that Barnabas might attack her again, the police jumped to the conclusion that it was he who had abducted her. They shot him. He was declared insane and sent to Windcliff, a mental hospital of which Julia is the director.
A few weeks ago, another mad scientist, Eric Lang, gave Barnabas a treatment that put the symptoms of his vampirism into remission. At the time he was feeding on two women, heiress Carolyn and well-meaning governess Vicki. When Barnabas gained the ability to go around in the sunlight, cast a reflection, and eat solid food, Carolyn and Vicki’s bite marks disappeared. It is unclear whether either of them remembers that Barnabas was a vampire, but their personalities certainly went back to what they were before he bit them. That leaves us wondering about Willie. When Barnabas responded to Lang’s treatment, did Willie revert to the violent personality he had in his first full week on the show, when on Tuesday he menaced Maggie in a barroom, on Wednesday he cornered Vicki in the study at Collinwood, and on Thursday would have raped Carolyn if she hadn’t drawn a gun on him? Did he become some version of the deeply troubled young man who was desperate to help Maggie but powerless to resist Barnabas? Or did he become something else entirely?
Today, in furtherance of Lang’s evil plans, Barnabas wants to free Willie from Windcliff and bring him back to his house on the great estate of Collinwood. Julia has become Barnabas’ best friend, but she is firmly opposed to his association with Lang. So Barnabas lies and tells her that he wants to free Willie because his conscience is plaguing him. Julia knows that isn’t true, and points out that he never visited Willie at Windcliff. Barnabas replies that when he was in the full grip of the curse, he could move about only after dark, and says that he could hardly show up at the hospital to visit Willie in the middle of the night. Julia says that she would have arranged it had he asked. He doesn’t have an answer to this, and she doesn’t fall for any of Barnabas’ other fabrications. But she can’t figure out what he really is doing. She plays along with him, and the two of them go to see Willie at Windcliff.
This is the first time we have seen Barnabas outside of a little orbit composed of Collinwood, the village of Collinsport, and the cemetery north of town. Not only was Barnabas’ ability to travel limited while the symptoms of the curse were manifest, he often lost interest in people when they left the area. So in the fall of 1967 he was obsessively hostile to strange and troubled boy David and obsessively indecisive about Vicki until the two of them went to Boston, at which point he seemed to forget they existed. It’s too bad the set representing the waiting area at Windcliff isn’t more visually striking- Barnabas’ first trip out of the Collinsport area marks a significant change in the character’s possibilities, and it would be good if it came with an image that would stick with us.
While Barnabas waits, a glossy magazine catches his attention. He picks it up and leafs through it. Since we are about to see Willie for the first time in several months, there is a good chance that this little bit of stage business will remind regular viewers of a peculiar remark Barnabas made shortly before the last time we saw Willie. Shifting the blame for his own crimes onto Willie, Barnabas planted Maggie’s ring in Willie’s room. When he came up with this plan, Barnabas remarked that the cheaper sort of tabloids say that criminals sometimes hold onto morbid mementos of their crimes, prompting us to picture Barnabas reading a cheap tabloid. That incongruous image comes to life here:
Julia joins Barnabas in the waiting room. They talk for a moment, then a nurse ushers Willie in.
At first, Willie is silent, a confused look on his face. He walks slowly towards Barnabas. Barnabas asks Willie if he recognizes him. In this moment we pick up exactly where we left off in #329, when Willie was a patient in another hospital and did not remember who Barnabas was.
This time Willie does recognize Barnabas. But as he did at the end of #329, he seems happy and untroubled. He is positively childlike in his eagerness to go back to Barnabas’ house and work for him again. He says that he and Barnabas were friends and that he always enjoyed their time together, a statement that dumbfounds Julia, as it dumbfounds anyone who remembers the show from April to September 1967. Even when Barnabas wasn’t bashing Willie across the face with his cane, Willie was miserable beyond words and hated everything Barnabas forced him to do.
Julia sends Willie back to his room, and Barnabas proclaims that Willie is entirely cured. Julia sarcastically thanks him for his diagnosis, calling him “DOCTOR Collins!” This too harks back to #329, which ended with Willie asking Barnabas if he were a doctor, to which Barnabas replied, “That’s right. I am a doctor!”
Barnabas takes Willie back to his house and tells him that for the time being, he must not so much as go outside by himself. Willie accepts Barnabas’ explanation that many people in the area will have to be prepared for his return before they see him. Willie gladly agrees to stay in the house. Barnabas leaves him alone, and he immediately slips out. He is heading for Maggie’s place.
Maggie’s father Sam is a painter, a fact advertised by the canvases around the cottage they share. When we cut to the cottage, she is making a frame. This is rather an obvious visual metaphor. The last time Willie came to the cottage, he inadvertently framed himself for Barnabas’ crimes against Maggie.
Of course Maggie is horrified to see Willie at the door; of course she demands he leave; of course she threatens him with her hammer when he insists on staying and telling her he is innocent; of course she cries for help when her boyfriend Joe comes to the door; of course Willie runs off when Joe enters. Willie puts himself in the frame again, this time as an ongoing threat to Maggie and all the women of Collinsport.
Joe goes to Barnabas’ house and demands to see Willie. At first Barnabas plays dumb, but Joe doesn’t give an inch. Barnabas then admits that he persuaded Julia to let Willie out of the hospital, but assures Joe that Willie is no longer dangerous and tells him that he will see to it that Willie behaves himself. Joe says that Barnabas has already failed in his responsibility, since Willie just went to Maggie’s house and scared her. Joe says that he will kill Willie if he goes near Maggie again. He repeats that assurance, and his voice is pure steel.
Joe exits the house. We see him outside, walking away. Willie emerges from the shadows with a rifle. He takes aim at Joe and squeezes the trigger. The gun isn’t loaded, so Willie makes nothing more than a click. Apparently that was enough for him. He grins maniacally.
On their Dark Shadows Every Day, John and Christine Scoleri point out that the the gleeful face Willie flashes after he clicks his rifle at Joe is the same expression he showed in the frenzied crimes he committed before he came under Barnabas’ power. They back this observation up with a pair of screenshots, one of Willie immediately after he pretended to kill Joe, one from his last moment before he released Barnabas and lost his freedom:
Indeed, the whole episode replays Willie’s character arc from April to September in reverse. He starts as the crushed little thing we had seen at the end of #329, becomes Maggie’s tormented and misunderstood would-be protector, then ends as the dangerously unstable ruffian who followed seagoing con man Jason McGuire to town. If the episode were a few minutes longer, John Karlen might have had to take a break and let James Hall play the last scene. This recapitulation heightens the initial suspense generated by the question of how Willie would be after Barnabas had lost his vampire powers. Whatever effect the change in Barnabas has had on Willie has certainly not made him less complex or more predictable. We can’t tell when he is being sincere and when he is faking. Based on what we see today, it’s possible he is being sincere the whole time, but that he is just extremely impulsive, and equally possible that everything he does and says is a fake meant to cover up something we don’t yet know enough to guess at.
The actors are uniformly excellent today. John Karlen has to recreate the three faces of Willie in quick succession, and executes each of them clearly and memorably. Almost all of Grayson Hall’s dialogue is expository, but while delivering it she shows us all of Julia’s complicated feelings about Barnabas and lets us into her attempt to solve the riddle of his plans for Willie. Kathryn Leigh Scott is only on screen for a few minutes, beginning with her absorbed in carpentry and proceeding directly to screaming and running around and clutching at her male scene partners, but still makes it clear that Maggie is a strong and level-headed person who has been forced into frantic behavior by circumstances no one should have to face.
In the confrontation with Barnabas, Joel Crothers shows us a new side of Joe. Always loyal, always honest, always hardworking, Joe has up to this point been soft-spoken and self-effacing, deferential towards members of the ancient and esteemed Collins family. The only time he broke that deference was when he spoke some harsh words to matriarch Liz in #33, and he had to get thoroughly drunk to manage that. There is no trace of drink in him now, and he does not regard himself as anything less than Barnabas’ equal. For the first time since Burke Devlin lost his connection with the plot and shriveled so drastically that he ceased to be Mitch Ryan and became Anthony George, Dark Shadows has a plausible action hero in its cast.
The part of Barnabas is especially challenging today; he tries and fails to fool Julia in the beginning and Joe at the end, and in between may or may not have fooled Willie. So Jonathan Frid must show us what it looks like when Barnabas does an unsuccessful job of acting. He chooses to do that by having Barnabas overact. My wife, Mrs Acilius, pointed out that Frid’s own performance in the role of a man who is severely overacting is in fact exceptionally restrained and precise. Frid bobbles his lines as he usually does, but never makes a wrong physical move, and not for one second does he miss the perfect tone for Barnabas’ lines. The result is simply outstanding.
Recovering vampire Barnabas Collins hopes that mad scientist Eric Lang will be able to free him of his curse once and for all. Since wicked witch Angelique, who put the curse on Barnabas in the first place, has come back to the great estate of Collinwood, Barnabas found a twelfth century Sicilian talisman with the power to protect against witches and gave it to Lang with instructions that he was to keep it on his person at all times. Several days ago, Angelique drove Lang to the point of death, and he survived only because he managed to touch the talisman at the last moment. Even so, Lang refuses to wear the talisman or even to keep track of it. Now Barnabas is with Lang in his study, whence they discover that the talisman has been stolen. Lang asks Barnabas if he can get another one for him. Barnabas looks at Lang as if he were the world’s stupidest man, and tells him that such objects are extremely rare.
The whole business with Lang and the talisman is a prime example of what Roger Ebert called Idiot Plot, in which the story would end immediately if the characters showed as much intelligence as the average member of the audience has. If Lang were played by a good actor, he might be able to hold our interest through a few of these inexplicable actions. Both Alexandra Moltke Isles, as well-meaning governess Vicki, and Dana Elcar, as Sheriff George Patterson, were cast as the Designated Dum-Dum in a number of episodes, and each managed to survive longer than one might have expected. Mrs Isles kept the audience on board for Vicki by making us wonder how anyone could absorb the torrent of bizarre information drowning her. Elcar made the sheriff watchable by making speculate he might only be pretending to be clueless. But as Lang, Addison Powell is just dismally bad. Not only does he not invent a way to make Lang seem like he might be secretly smarter than the script makes him out to be, he does not show any sign of ever having acquired even the most basic acting skills. When Lang seems to think Barnabas can take him to Talismans-Я-Us to replace the priceless object he has lost, the audience loses whatever patience it may have had with him.
Lang’s assistant, a former mental patient named Peter who insists on being called “Jeff,” is quitting after months of helping Lang steal body parts from fresh graves. Peter/ Jeff tells Barnabas that he will be staying in town. That’s bad news for Barnabas, but much worse news for the audience. Peter/ Jeff is played by Roger Davis, who is a far more skilled actor than Addison Powell but, if anything, even less pleasant to watch. His characters are either full of rage or insufferably smug, he often manhandles his scene partners, and when he raises his voice he projects, not from the muscles of his pelvic floor, but from his anal sphincters, causing him to sound like he is suffering from severe constipation.
Lang tells Barnabas he needs a new assistant as soon as possible. Barnabas says he knows just the man. He is Willie Loomis. As Peter/ Jeff was a patient in an institution for the criminally insane when Lang found him, Willie is a patient in such an institution now. Willie was Barnabas’ servant for the first months he was in the 1960s, when Barnabas was a vampire rampaging through the village of Collinsport. Barnabas eventually took the heat off himself by pinning some of his crimes on Willie, packing him off to the mental hospital.
Willie was a fan favorite. Largely this was because actor John Karlen was as capable as Addison Powell was inept and as likable as Roger Davis is repellent. But the writers, too, always found fresh ways to make Barnabas’ conversations with Willie interesting, and when mad scientist Julia Hoffman teamed up with Barnabas she and Willie were great fun to watch together. The idea of Willie replacing Peter/ Jeff, in whatever capacity, is something to cheer for.
We cut to the cottage where Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, lives with her father Sam. Maggie is wearing a pair of trousers which may well be the weirdest things ever shown on Dark Shadows. According to a blog called 1630 Revello Drive,* they are based on an article of women’s clothing traditional in India called a gharara. Surely no one in India ever made such things out of this brightly colored floral quilt. If this garment can exist, we would be foolhardy to rule out the possibility of ghosts or vampires or time travel or witches or anything else.
Maggie answers a knock on the door and finds Peter/ Jeff. Vicki had arranged for him to rent a room at the Evans cottage. Shortly after he arrives, Vicki comes. Peter/ Jeff tells her she doesn’t know much about him, and asks what she will do if it turns out he is someone she hates.
The next thing we see after that question is Peter/ Jeff with his shoe, a shoe he wears while robbing graves, on Maggie and Sam’s coffee table. Anyone who saw that might well conclude that Peter/ Jeff is such a clod that any civilized person would be tempted to hate him.
That isn’t an ottoman, buddy.
Again, there are actors who specialize in playing men who are compelling to watch when they do unpleasant things. Dark Shadows hit the jackpot in this regard when it cast Jonathan Frid as the vampire Barnabas. It narrowly missed doing so on other occasions. In the first year of the show, future movie stars Harvey Keitel (in #33) and Frederic Forrest (in #137) showed up as background players. Surely they would have taken speaking parts on the show at this point in their careers, and either of them could have made Peter/ Jeff almost as much of an asset as John Karlen made Willie, even if he did wantonly ruin people’s furniture.
Soap operas usually have multiple more or less independent storylines going simultaneously. Dark Shadows had trouble keeping that up, usually having an A story with all the action and a B story that never got off the ground and eventually dried up altogether. Now, in the spring of 1968, they have several equally dynamic arcs going at once. As a result, today’s episode is a bit of a jumble, as we catch glimpses of several loosely related events.
For the nineteen weeks stretching from #365 to #461, well-meaning governess Vicki came unstuck in time and found herself trapped in the 1790s. In that period, she met many people, among them gracious lady Josette and wicked witch Angelique. In the 1960s, one of Vicki’s closest friends is Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town. Like Maggie, Josette is played by Kathryn Leigh Scott. When Vicki saw Josette, she realized that Maggie had some kind of metaphysical connection to her. This was a daring move on the part of the show, since it means that vampire Barnabas was onto something in the summer of 1967 when he abducted Maggie and tried to brainwash her so that her personality would vanish and Josette’s would appear in its place.
Angelique has followed Vicki to 1968. She calls herself Cassandra, wears a black wig, and has married sarcastic dandy Roger, thereby securing residence in the great house of Collinwood. Vicki and Barnabas recognize Angelique/ Cassandra, and each knows that she is a deadly threat to everyone in and around the estate. For her part, Vicki is trying to hide her knowledge from Angelique; Barnabas has taken a different tack, and the other day let Angelique into his house where he proceeded to give her all the information she could possibly need to realize her evil intentions towards him. This is not because Barnabas cannot keep a secret. Vicki has tried to enlist him in the battle against Angelique, but he, now in recovery from the vampire curse Angelique placed on him in the 1790s, does not want Vicki to know the truth about him, and so he will not cooperate with her in any way. It’s only his enemies with whom Barnabas compulsively shares damaging intelligence.
Maggie comes to the great house to have a tea party with Vicki today. Angelique/ Cassandra opens the door, and cannot hide her shock at Maggie’s resemblance to Josette. She so blatantly stares at her that she has to admit that she is unnerved because Maggie looks very much like someone she knew a long time ago.
Vicki comes in, and Angelique/ Cassandra asks her, not in her usual mid-Atlantic accent, but in Lara Parker’s sweetly musical Tennessee voice, if she and Maggie are planning to use the drawing room. Vicki at once offers to use a different space, not only as would be correct for a member of the household staff speaking to one of the family, but in a relaxed and friendly way that betrays nothing of her knowledge of Angelique/ Cassandra’s true identity. While returning viewers know that Angelique/ Cassandra remembers Vicki from the 1790s, the Southern accent is so much more natural than her usual way of speaking that it suggests Vicki has managed to get her to let her guard down to some degree.
While Vicki and Maggie settle into the drawing room, Angelique/ Cassandra goes to a portrait of Barnabas that hangs in the foyer of the great house and delivers a speech to it. She tells the portrait that Maggie is the very image of Josette, and will therefore be the first victim of her latest evil plan. She is going to spam people’s dreams with a series of nightmares, and when the last person has had the nightmare Barnabas will be a vampire again. Evidently the dreamers of Collinsport didn’t have anti-virus programs installed in their brains, because Angelique/ Cassandra expects them all to be helpless before this morphean malware.
In the drawing room, Maggie is too preoccupied with Angelique/ Cassandra’s strange reaction to her to hear when Vicki asks her how she takes her tea. When she tells Vicki that Angelique/ Cassandra was shocked by the sight of her, Vicki amazes her by saying that she is sure she did react that way, and giving her the details of the reaction before Maggie reports them. Maggie asks Vicki to explain how she knew and what it means. Vicki explains nothing.
This is something of a reversal. In #1, Vicki met Maggie. Vicki had just arrived in Collinsport, and went to the diner where Maggie was the waitress. While Maggie served Vicki, she told her that Collinwood was haunted and that it was unwise to go there. Vicki did not at that time believe in ghosts and told Maggie so. Now, Vicki is the one serving the tea, and she is the one who knows far more about the supernatural than does Maggie. At least, far more than is in Maggie’s conscious mind- she has amnesia about her experience as Barnabas’ victim.
Vicki and Maggie’s tea party
Maggie is far more upset by Angelique/ Cassandra’s reaction to her than circumstances would appear to warrant. Vicki’s reticence is understandable, given the extreme complexity and improbability of her story, but she has always been so forthcoming with her friends that when Maggie asks why she is being so mysterious it seems quite likely that Vicki will tell her everything. Together, these two facts suggest to regular viewers that Maggie will eventually hear herself compared to Josette, that the comparison will jar loose the memory of what Barnabas did to her, and that she will go to the authorities. As an audience, we hope Barnabas will get away with his crimes, because the show is most fun to watch when he does. Now that Angelique has come to 1968, we have a morally defensible in-universe reason for this hope. Angelique is even more evil than Barnabas is, and without his active participation there is no hope she can be stopped.
Vicki’s reticence brings up another question. In the months before her journey to the past, she saw a great deal of evidence that Barnabas was a vampire. While in the eighteenth century, she saw so much more that upon her return Barnabas was certain she must have figured out his secret, and bit her to keep her quiet. When his vampirism responded to medical treatment, the symptoms of his bite went away. We wonder what Vicki knew at each stage of the story, and what she remembers now.
One possibility is that she has known everything all along. That would put Vicki in an intriguing position if Maggie’s memory does come back. Vicki originally represented the audience’s point of view; if she turns out to have been aware of Barnabas’ crimes from the beginning, she will put us in the uncomfortable position of wondering what it tells us about ourselves that we are consistently on the vampire’s side.
Vicki changes the subject to her boyfriend, a man named Peter. Vicki met Peter in the 1790s, and like Angelique he has followed her into her own time. Also like Angelique, he keeps insisting that he has a different name. He wants to be called Jeff. Unlike Angelique, Peter/ Jeff is amnesiac, is under the control of mad scientist Dr Lang, and brings the show to a screeching halt every time he is on screen. Vicki asks if Peter/ Jeff can rent the spare room in the cottage Maggie shares with her father. Maggie has never met or heard of Peter/ Jeff, and wants more information before she commits to living with him. Vicki doesn’t have anything to tell her, inflaming Maggie’s curiosity to the point where she exclaims “I can’t stand it!”
Peter/ Jeff telephones from Lang’s laboratory, and Vicki gets Maggie to agree to meet him at her house in an hour. Unknown to Vicki, Lang is building a Frankenstein’s monster, and plans to download Barnabas’ personality into the body once it is completed. Peter/ Jeff has dug up graves and fetched body parts for Lang to use, but is tired of that sort of work and is eager to make a fresh start. Unfortunately for him, Barnabas requested that the body look like Peter/ Jeff. So Lang persuades Peter/ Jeff to call Vicki back to say he won’t be available to meet her and Maggie today after all. He then gives Peter/ Jeff a shot to knock him out, straps him to a table, and sets about cutting his head off. Peter/ Jeff comes to and complains about this; Lang, irritated, tells him he can’t very well have expected him to let him live, knowing what he knows.
Maggie has the dream Angelique has sent. It begins with Peter/ Jeff calling on her. Since they went out of their way to tell us Maggie has never seen Peter/ Jeff, this tells first time viewers that this sequence, as is typical of dream sequences on Dark Shadows, comes not from the character’s mind, but is the product of a supernatural agency. In the course of the dream, Maggie hears the sound of Josette’s music box; Barnabas made her listen to this when he was holding her prisoner. This again raises the prospect that Maggie’s memory will return. The rest of the dream is a concerto for fog machine. Technical director Lou Marchand is credited today; presumably he was the soloist. The fog immerses everything so completely that it is anyone’s guess what exactly Miss Scott is doing for most of the sequence.
In 1966 and the early weeks of 1967, the Collinsport Inn was an important place on Dark Shadows. The restaurant there, presided over by Maggie Evans (Kathryn Leigh Scott,) The Nicest Girl in Town, was a place where people could meet each other unexpectedly and characters new to town could be introduced. Dashing action hero Burke Devlin (Mitch Ryan) lived in a suite at the inn, and the place often represented his territory, the base from which he conducted his war against the ancient and esteemed Collins family.
We haven’t seen Burke’s room since #206, at which point he had given up his vendetta against the Collinses and proceeded far down the road to irrelevance. We haven’t seen the restaurant since vampire Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid) met Maggie there in #221. By the time Anthony George took over the part of Burke in #262, Burke seemed to live in the Blue Whale tavern. He made business calls from the pay phone there, and in one episode apparently stayed behind when the bartender locked the place up for the night.
The inn makes a return appearance at the top of today’s episode. It is 1795, and Jeremiah Collins (Anthony George) is sharing a suite with Josette DuPrés (Kathryn Leigh Scott.) They are on their honeymoon.
Jeremiah and Josette eloped from the estate of Collinwood on the night when Josette was supposed to marry Jeremiah’s nephew, kindly gentleman Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid.) Josette truly loved Barnabas and Jeremiah was his dearest friend, but they were under a spell cast by wicked witch Angelique, who wanted Josette out of the way so she could have Barnabas for herself. The power of the spell waxes and wanes. When Josette and Jeremiah are in the grip of it, a trident shaped mark appears on their hands; when they return to their senses, the mark disappears.
When the episode begins, the tridents are showing, and the newlyweds are inflamed with passion. Shortly after, Josette’s mark is gone, Jeremiah’s still showing. She is filled with regret, he is still ardent.
Back in the manor house of Collinwood, Barnabas has a conversation with Josette’s father André and his own father Joshua. He resists André’s suggestion that Josette and Jeremiah must have left together, and resists even more strenuously Joshua’s declaration that they did so because they are the victims of witchcraft. Joshua says that his sister Abigail and André’s sister, the Countess DuPrés, found a blasphemous trinket in the quarters of governess Victoria Winters, and that a witch-hunting divine, the Reverend Trask, is coming to investigate the matter. Barnabas is appalled at the notion of an inquiry into witchcraft, and vows to defend Victoria if Trask comes. Joshua forbids him to do so.
Barnabas’ reaction to the idea of a witchcraft trial, coupled with what we have seen of him so far in the 1795 segment, looks like a retcon. In #358, only a week and a half before we began this uncertain and frightening journey to the past, vampire Barnabas told a story about studying witchcraft under a warlock on Barbados who taught him “the secret magic number of the universe.” Events are moving so fast that it doesn’t look like Barnabas will have time to sail to the Caribbean before he becomes a vampire, and he won’t be crossing any waters after that. But now he is a man of the Enlightenment, who scoffs at the idea of witchcraft today as he scoffed at the tarot when the countess introduced him to it in #368/369.
Jeremiah returns to the house. There is an exquisite little scene with a servant, Riggs, who is uncomfortable at the sight of the disgraced Mr Jeremiah. Riggs stands in for the establishment of Collinwood and the whole working class of the town of Collinsport, and in his reaction we see the disquiet that bad news from the big house on the hill would spread among the people whose livelihoods are at stake when trouble comes to the family there. Riggs makes haste when Jeremiah tells him to go out and fetch Joshua.
When Riggs is gone, Josette enters. The audience sees that the mark is gone from Jeremiah’s hand, and Josette can tell that his passion for her is gone. She tells him that he no more loves her than she loves him. He begins with a protest against this remark, but ends by saying that they must be kind to each other.
Joshua and André enter. André embraces his daughter and tells her everything will be all right; Joshua looks at his brother with distaste and demands an explanation.
Jeremiah says that he and Josette are married. He further says he realizes they are not welcome, and that they will return to the inn. This raises the prospect of a recreation of the early days, with the inn as a territory separate from and opposed to Collinwood. Joshua rejects the idea at once. He will not have the scandal of Jeremiah and his new wife living in town because they have been estranged from the rest of the Collinses. He decrees that they will live at Collinwood and put on a happy face for the townsfolk.
Barnabas enters. Joshua tells him that Jeremiah and Josette are married. He refuses to believe it until Josette confirms it herself. He takes the glove from Jeremiah’s hand and slaps him in the face. He gives him a choice of weapons.
Dueling may have been as alien to the ideals of the Enlightenment as were Barbadian warlocks, but so too is Joshua’s plan of forcing the whole family to commit itself to a massive lie in order to preserve its hereditary privileges. Joshua, the proud apostle of Jeffersonian republicanism, is simply being a hypocrite, but Barnabas is a more complicated figure. Seeing his every hope turned to dust before him, his ideals have become useless. He has only a moment to choose among the evils the Enlightenment had promised to stamp out, and he chooses the most macho one available.
Joshua forbids the duel, but Barnabas disregards his father’s authority and insists on it. In 1795 and for some time after, dueling was widely practiced in much of the United States, and particularly in the South and West a gentleman lost face if he refused a challenge. No such stigma attached in New England, where dueling was condemned by law and religion. Had Joshua or Jeremiah gone to the police, Barnabas would have been arrested. In 1719, Massachusetts, of which Maine was a part until 1821, passed a law making it an offense punishable by a fine of £100 (equivalent to about $7000 today) to challenge someone to a duel. Massachusetts law already considered it murder to kill someone in a duel, and prescribed death by hanging as punishment. Of course, Joshua’s declaration that Jeremiah and Josette will live in the house and the family will present a “united front” to deter scandal makes it clear he will never turn his son over to the police, and the pattern of cover-up with the support of law enforcement we saw among the Collinses in 1966 and 1967 leads us to doubt that anything a member of the family does will ever be a matter for the courts to judge.
There is a missed opportunity in the show’s lack of interest in Massachusetts’ actual laws about dueling. The 1719 law was amended to be even stricter in 1730. Among the provisions added to the law at that time was a requirement that anyone who had either been killed in a duel or been put to death for winning a duel would “be given an unchristian burial at a gallows or crossroads, with a stake driven through their body.” Since the audience knows that Barnabas is fated to become a vampire, there is a chilling irony in seeing him volunteer for a staked burial.
On Wednesday, we met a new arrival from Paris by way of the island of Martinique. She is Angelique, maidservant to the Countess DuPrés and onetime bedfellow of rich young gentleman Barnabas Collins. Barnabas is engaged to marry the countess’ niece Josette, and is anxious to keep Angelique in the background. Angelique does not share either of Barnabas’ goals.
At rise, Angelique meets Barnabas’ uncle Jeremiah in the front parlor of the manor house of Collinwood. She has found a toy soldier and asks Jeremiah about it. When he identifies it as one of the toys Barnabas was most fond of in his boyhood, he volunteers to take it to the playroom himself. She asks to keep it for a while, so that she can study its workmanship. He doesn’t object, and exits. Once she is alone in the parlor, Angelique starts talking to herself. She says that she will use it to cause Barnabas unimaginable pain. This is the first direct suggestion we have seen that Angelique is involved in witchcraft.
Time-traveling governess Vicki enters. She tells Angelique that they should be friends, because they are both servants in the house, and it is a foreign setting to both of them. Angelique asks what Vicki means by describing herself as foreign, since she is an American. Vicki realizes that she can’t tell someone she has just met that she is a time traveler thrust here from 1967 by the ghost of the little girl she is supposed to be educating, and so she mutters something about how Angelique wouldn’t understand. After they part, we hear Angelique musing that Vicki has no idea what she understands. At no point does Angelique show any interest whatever in becoming friends with Vicki.
Later, we see Angelique alone in her room with the toy soldier and Barnabas’ handkerchief. She is talking to herself about her evil plans again when she is interrupted by a knock at the door. She hides the things and answers it. Barnabas enters.
Barnabas renews the effort he made at the end of Wednesday’s episode to friendzone Angelique. Again, she isn’t having it. After he leaves, she takes the soldier and the handkerchief back out and tells them that she has decided to wait for Josette’s arrival to enact her revenge on Barnabas.
She won’t have to wait long. Josette’s father, André, is entering the parlor, grumbling about the lack of servants at Collinwood. He beckons his daughter, and she follows him into the house. She is played by Kathryn Leigh Scott.
A major cast member of the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s as Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, Miss Scott has played Josette’s ghost more than once. She created the part in #70, when she was the shimmery figure who emerged from Josette’s portrait in the very house we are in today and danced among its pillars. She reprised the part in #126, again in this house, when Josette led the other ghosts in rescuing Vicki from crazed handyman Matthew Morgan. For some months Barnabas, who is in 1967 a vampire, held Maggie prisoner here and tried to replace her personality with that of Josette. Barnabas often seemed convinced that Maggie really was Josette, and when strange and troubled boy David saw Maggie wearing Josette’s dress in #240 he said that her face was “exactly the same” as it was on the many occasions when he had seen Josette’s ghost.
Barnabas’ plan to Josettify Maggie is drawn from the 1932 film The Mummy, in which the undead Imhotep (Boris Karloff) is released from his tomb, holds Helen Grosvenor (Zita Johanns) prisoner, and tries to replace Helen’s personality with that of his lost love Princess Ankh-Esen-Amun. In that movie, there is a flashback to ancient Egypt, where we see that Zita Johanns also plays Ankh-Esen-Amun and we realize that Imhotep’s crazy plan was rooted in some supernatural connection between the two women. The connection between Josette and Maggie has been equivocal until now- Miss Scott was always veiled when she played Josette’s ghost, and stand-in Dorrie Kavanuagh was the one wearing the dress in #240. Moreover, after Maggie got away in #260, Barnabas soon turned his attentions to Vicki, and decided he would try the same gimmick with her. But now we see that Barnabas really was onto something with regard to Maggie, and we wonder where it will lead. I remember the first time we watched the show, my wife, Mrs Acilius, reacted with great excitement to Josette’s entrance in this episode and exclaimed “Of course! Maggie is Josette!”
Vicki spent the first three days of this week telling the actors what parts they played in the first 73 weeks of Dark Shadows, an annoying habit. But there is a reason for it. She knew Barnabas and Sarah as supernatural beings in 1967, so she will recognize them as the same people here. And Josette’s looks reveal her connection to Vicki’s friend Maggie, so she will recognize that. Since only Angelique, of the characters we have met so far in 1795, is played by someone who did not appear previously, the writers are in a difficult position with regard to all of the other members of the company.
I wish they had solved that problem by having Vicki show up in 1795 unable to speak. The suggestion I made in my post about #366 is that she could have materialized in the midst of the accident that upset the carriage bringing the original governess, Phyllis Wick.* Vicki could have sustained a slight injury that left her mute for a week or so, could have had voiceover monologues registering her recognitions of Barnabas, Sarah, and Josette/ Maggie, and would not have had audible monologues when she saw the others. By the time she could talk again, Vicki would know that she was supposed to pretend to be Phyllis Wick.
Clearly Vicki is supposed to get into some kind of trouble in 1795; she is still the heroine, and the first rule of all soap operas is that the heroine must always be in danger. But she is supposed to be seeing the events that started the phase of the Collins family curse that involves Barnabas’ vampirism, and those events did not involve a governess who went around calling people by the wrong names and blurting out information she learned from reading the Collins family history. The logic of the plot requires that whatever trouble Vicki gets into is more or less the same trouble Phyllis Wick would have got into, and the appeal of the character requires that the audience watch to see what kind of con artist Vicki might turn out to be. Both of those imperatives demand that she try to masquerade as Phyllis.
Vicki does manage to keep herself from telling André and Josette that they are being played by the actors who took the parts of Sam and Maggie Evans in other parts of Dark Shadows. She can’t help staring at Josette, however. Josette is quite cheerful when she asks Vicki why she is staring; André, a more conventional aristocrat than his relaxed daughter, is visibly annoyed with Vicki’s impertinence.
There was an opportunity here for Vicki to show some quick thinking. She could have told Josette that Barnabas has gone on at length about her appearance, and that she is amazed at the accuracy of his descriptions. That would have endeared her to Josette as the bearer of the message that her fiancé is very much in love with her, and would have reassured her that, while Vicki is an attractive young woman who lives under Barnabas’ roof, she is not a rival for his affections. As it is, Vicki just mumbles something about not having known she was staring.
Angelique enters. She and Josette rush into each other’s arms and speak French. Miss Scott tells a funny story about that moment. She and Lara Parker had talked about the script and agreed that two Frenchwomen excited to see each other after a long separation ought to greet each other in French, and they persuaded the producer of their point. Only when they got the revised script with the dialogue in French did it dawn on them that neither of them could speak the language. Fortunately, several other members of the cast were fluent in it, and coached them through.
We can see that Josette really regards Angelique as a friend. Viewers who have been with the show from the beginning will remember Josette’s ghost as a powerful and stalwart force for good, and will also know that Maggie is The Nicest Girl in Town. So whatever grievance Angelique may have against Barnabas, and however unjust may be the social system that has exalted Josette and subordinated Angelique, when we see Angelique faking friendship for Josette while planning to make her watch her lover suffer, we know that she is really evil.
Barnabas enters. Josette tells him that her long, difficult journey was worthwhile now that she is with him. This is a very sharp retcon. In #345, mad scientist Julia Hoffman asked Barnabas if Josette ever came to him of her own free will, and he responded with a silent grimace that left no doubt as to the answer. Now, we see that she has gladly sailed from Martinique to central Maine in late autumn to be with him.
Barnabas and Josette are alone, and he wants to kiss her. She is bashful and says that their parents might be upset if they don’t wait for the wedding. He says they might pretend to be, but that in reality it is expected. That is a sweet little conversation, and it ends in a sweet little kiss.
Angelique is back in her room. She twists Barnabas’ handkerchief around the neck of his toy soldier.
The episode ends with Barnabas on the floor, apparently asphyxiating, while Josette looks on in horror.
Wednesday, Barnabas made it clear that he had his affair with Angelique because he didn’t think Josette could love him. That gives Angelique a perfectly understandable motive for seeking revenge on him. A rich man exploited his position to trifle with her, a servant, giving no thought to her feelings or interests.
The selfishness and entitlement Barnabas exhibited thereby is jarring in the mild-mannered, apparently egalitarian fellow we have seen so far this week, but it fits perfectly with his behavior as a vampire in 1967. Seen from another angle, his behavior is consistent with everything the Collinses have done to get themselves in trouble since we first met them. He was tempted to take advantage of Angelique because he had underestimated his own lovability and despaired of making a real connection with Josette.
Barnabas is still underestimating himself and Josette now. Never once does it occur to him to come clean to her about what he did with Angelique. While Josette would no doubt be saddened to learn that her beloved fiancé had dallied with her pet servant, as a rich French girl from Martinique she has after all lived her whole life among wealthy men surrounded by enslaved women, and so could hardly have been shocked by what Barnabas had done. Surely she would have decided to go ahead with the wedding, and she would have known to be wary of Angelique.
By failing to trust Josette with the truth about his misdeeds, Barnabas puts her and himself at Angelique’s mercy. We think of 1966, when matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard and her brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins, were both prisoners of shameful secrets they dared not share even with each other. In 1967, when those secrets were finally laid bare to the whole world, Liz and Roger found they were free to go on about their business as if nothing had happened. In Barnabas’ petrified silence, we see all of the shadows that have kept his relatives in darkness for so long.
*Whom Dorrie Kavanaugh played in her brief appearance at the end of #365.
In 1966 and 1967, supernatural menaces Laura Murdoch Collins and Barnabas Collins would often be seen staring out the windows of their houses on the great estate of Collinwood, sending psychic energy towards the targets of their sinister plans. In 1795, Barnabas is neither supernatural nor menacing, but we already see him peering out one of those windows. He is not projecting bad vibes into the world, but is worried about his beloved fiancée, Josette DuPrés. She is supposed to arrive soon, in fact was supposed to arrive some time ago. Now there is a storm, and he hopes she is not at sea.
The audience’s main point-of-view character in 1966 and for most of 1967 was well-meaning governess Vicki. Now Vicki has come unstuck in time, and found herself in this extended flashback to the eighteenth century. Since she will know Barnabas and regard him as a close friend in the 1960s, she is at her ease talking to him now. Although she is a member of the staff in his family’s house in a period when it was customary for masters to summon their servants with bells and communicate with them only in direct commands, Barnabas is a remarkably genial and democratic sort who welcomes her casual manner.
Vicki has already annoyed the audience several times by blurting out information that makes it obvious to the other characters that she does not belong in their world. She does that again in this scene. Barnabas is worried something may have happened to Josette, and Vicki tells him that she will arrive safely. He is surprised by the assurance with which she delivers this prediction, and asks if she is clairvoyant. She realizes that she has been indiscreet, and denies that she is. He is unconvinced.
Barnabas’ father, haughty overlord Joshua Collins, enters. He is appalled to find his son socializing with a servant. He dispatches Vicki to the nursery to look after her charge, his young daughter Sarah. He demands to know why Barnabas is not tending to his own duties at the family’s shipyard. They begin to quarrel, when a knock comes at the door.
Barnabas opens the door to find a woman named Angelique, whom he identifies as maid to Josette’s aunt, the Countess DuPrés. Angelique says that the countess was on her way to Collinwood, but that her carriage is stuck in the mud. Joshua orders Barnabas to send a footman to rescue her. Angelique is the first character we have met in 1795 who is not played by a performer we have seen in the first 73 weeks of the show.
Joshua goes to his wife, Naomi. Naomi is an alcoholic, a fact of which we are made aware because almost her every scene begins with a shot of her drinking alone. That’s what she is doing before Joshua finds her. He scolds her for her drinking; she complains that he doesn’t allow her to do anything else. She can’t even pass the time with a book- we saw Monday that Naomi is completely illiterate.
Naomi’s alcoholism is both a nod to the concern of first-wave feminism with the atrophy of the elite housewife, and a suggestive side-light on Barnabas as we knew him in the 1967 segment. Then, Barnabas abducted Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, and tried by more or less magical means to replace her personality with that of Josette. For the first 40 weeks of Dark Shadows, Maggie’s father’s alcoholism had been a substantial story element, and she would always retain a number of classic Adult Child of an Alcoholic (ACoA, in the lingo of the recovery movement) characteristics, such as beginning utterances with a little laugh to prove that she is happy. Now that we know that Barnabas is also an ACoA, we can wonder if that shared experience was part of the reason he was drawn to Maggie.
The countess arrives. Since she is played by Grayson Hall, who also plays mad scientist Julia Hoffman in the parts of the show set in the 1960s, Vicki blurts out “Julia!” when she sees her. Hall had also been nominated for an Academy Award for her performance as Judith Fellowes in the 1964 film Night of the Iguana; if Vicki is going to keep the audience up to date on the cast’s resumes, it would have been more interesting if she’d exclaimed “Judith!” Vicki explains that the countess looks like someone she once knew who was named Julia, a remark which irritates the countess, who would like to think her appearance is distinctive. Vicki has certainly not made a favorable impression on this grand lady.
Joshua tells the countess he is surprised that “You still affect a title” when “France has followed our example and become a republic.” His pride in this development, after the Terror and in the bloodiest year of the wars in the Vendée, marks Joshua as a member of the Jeffersonian party in US politics. The Federalists and others had long since turned against the French Revolution by that year.
The countess tells Joshua that it is precisely because France has become a republic that she chooses to live on the island of Martinique. That answers a question that some fans ask about Angelique- why is she white? If the DuPrés family lives on Martinique and are major sugar planters there, they must hold a great many African people in slavery. When we hear that they are bringing a servant with them, we expect that servant to be Black. When we learn that the the countess is an emigré, we realize that she brought Angelique with her from France.
The countess may solve one puzzle for us in her exchange with Joshua, but she presents us with another. Josette’s father André is the countess’ brother, yet he is never referred to as a count. Indeed, when he appears, we will see him answer to “Mr DuPrés.” Perhaps he renounced his title, as many French aristocrats did during the Revolution.
Whatever the explanation, “DuPrés” would seem to represent a missed opportunity. When Josette was first mentioned, in the early months of Dark Shadows, her maiden name was given as “LaFrenière.” It would have been a nice touch to have kept that name for Josette and her father, and to have reserved “DuPrés” as the name of the countess’ late husband.
“LaFrenière” had been a perfect choice because of its class ambiguity for a show about an aristocratic family in the state of Maine- it was originally the family name of the barons of Fresnes, and could therefore be a sign of a senior order of nobility, but is also a very widespread name in Quebec. So “Josette LaFrenière” might either have been a French noblewoman who deigned to marry into the mercantile Collins family at the apex of their prestige, or a working class girl from the north who eloped with the boss’ son.
The choice of Martinique as Josette’s place of origin might add a new twist to this class ambiguity. The Empress Josephine grew up there as a member of the untitled but ancient Tascher family, who, like the fictional DuPrés family, owned an enormous sugar plantation on the island. The Taschers of Martinique went back and forth between Martinique and metropolitan France, and Josephine herself was living there in 1779 when she married her first husband, the Vicomte de Beauharnais. Josephine herself was in prison when the vicomte was guillotined in 1794, one of the last to die in the Reign of Terror, and she was freed just a few days later. The next year, she recovered her husband’s property, and a year after that married the young general Napoleon Bonaparte. It seems likely that the similarity between the names “Josephine” and “Josette” was writer Sam Hall’s inspiration for placing Josette’s origins on Martinique. Association with a figure who was at once a grand lady and an example of very steep upward social mobility could synthesize the two possible Josettes LaFrenière into a single figure.
Had they developed the story of the family’s relationship with the town of Collinsport more richly in Dark Shadows 1.0 and 2.0, they could have used this ambiguity to build up suspense that would be resolved today, in the third episode of Dark Shadows 3.0. Since they did so little with that theme in those days, when the story was moving very slowly and it would have been relatively easy to fit just about anything in, I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that they drop it so completely at this period of the show, when the story is flowing at a breakneck speed.
The countess’ lofty aristocratic manner stings Joshua. Alone with Naomi, he loudly proclaims his belief that all men are equal. We already know enough about Joshua’s tyranny over his household that this absurd little speech must be an intentional spoof of the rich landowners who supported the Jeffersonian party in the early decades of the Republic. Again, this would be funnier and more poignant if the show had done more with social class in its first 73 weeks.
Barnabas sees the countess dealing out tarot cards. He tells her she is too sophisticated for them, and is reluctant to sit with her while she uses them to read his fortune. The moment she says that the cards suggest a connection between him and the concept of infinity, his skepticism evaporates instantly and he excitedly asks if that means he will live forever. The countess cautions that his jubilation at this idea may be misplaced. She notices the “Wicked Woman” card, and takes a significant look at Vicki. Evidently the audience is not alone in objecting to Vicki’s brainless nattering about what the show used to be like.*
Angelique comes to Barnabas’ room. It turns out the two of them had a brief affair when he was first on Martinique, and she expects to resume it. He is not at all pleased at her attentions.
Not how every man would react to a passionate embrace from Lara Parker… Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Barnabas explains that he was already falling in love with Josette when he and Angelique had their fling, but that he didn’t really know her. He couldn’t believe that she would reciprocate his feelings, and consoled himself by dallying with Angelique. This explanation goes over with her about as well as you’d expect, and she storms out of the room, vowing that she will get her way in the end.
We know that the tarot cards are giving accurate information, because the show leans heavily on the uncanny and they wouldn’t have spent so much time on a gimmick that wasn’t meant to advance the plot. We also know that Vicki is not the Wicked Woman the countess is looking for. That leaves Angelique, and we can assume that her wickedness will express itself in some supernatural action taken to avenge herself on Barnabas. Since we know that Barnabas will become a vampire, we wonder if it is Angelique who makes him one.
Closing Miscellany
I usually refer to surviving cast members with courtesy titles and to deceased ones by surname alone. So Alexandra Moltke Isles is “Mrs Isles,” which has been her professional name for 56 years, David Henesy is “Mr Henesy,” Nancy Barrett is “Miss Barrett,” etc, while Jonathan Frid, Joan Bennett, Louis Edmonds, and Grayson Hall are just “Frid,” “Bennett,” “Edmonds,” and “Hall.” Until last month, I’d been looking forward to saying lots of things about “Miss Parker” and her portrayal of Angelique, but Lara Parker died on 12 October 2023. So she’s just going to be “Parker,” and I’m going to be sad about it.
Artist Teri S. Wood has created a number of short animations about Angelique and Barnabas. This one is based on their two-scene at the end of today’s episode:
Patrick McCray has a post about this episode that mystifies me. He writes that “After seven months of hearing about Angelique, today, she enters. So, no pressure Lara. You only have to live up to a half year of build-up.” Uh, what? There has been absolutely no reference to Angelique on the show before today. I can think of an interpretation of the story that might retroject Angelique into episodes #211-365, and I will talk about it next week. But I don’t think it is an interpretation Patrick would favor.
He also talks about David Ball’s method of reading plays from the ending back to the beginning and then from the beginning forward, so that the ending comes to seem implicit in everything else. He allows that Dark Shadows has more than one ending, but I would say he doesn’t go far enough. I’d say the series has ten endings. The first came in #191, when Laura went up in smoke while her son David found refuge in Vicki’s arms. That ending defined Dark Shadows 1.0 as the story of David’s escape from his evil, undead mother Laura, and his adoption of Vicki as his new, life-affirming mother. The second came in #364, when Barnabas met the ghost of his little sister Sarah, she commanded him to be nice to the living, and he went right on with his murderous plans. That ending defined Dark Shadows 2.0 as the story of Barnabas’ irredeemable evil.
Two of the other endings will feature Angelique dying in Barnabas’ arms, and Patrick suggests that those make the whole show the story of their relationship. I don’t buy it at all. Each of the ten parts is about what it is about, and even those two episodes with Angelique dying derive more dramatic charge from other moments.
*Making connections with the first 73 weeks is my job!
Dark Shadows Commentary 