In the late 1960s and early 1970s, most households in the USA had television sets that received only in black and white. So the first requirement of any program’s visual strategy was that it look good on those sets. Prime-time programs with big budgets and long production schedules could sometimes look good in black and white and dazzling in color; the most noteworthy example was the 1966-1968 Batman series. But even most prime-time shows limited themselves to a palette that resembled a plate of processed baby food, with the green of strained peas next to the orange of puréed carrots and the purple of mashed prunes. The use of color on a show like Dark Shadows, which every week had to crank out five episodes on a total budget of $70,000, could rarely rise even to the level of a well-presented infant’s breakfast. Directors Lela Swift and John Sedwick were ambitious visual artists who sometimes managed to use color to advantage, but most of the time the color is a gimmick as worthless as any spear pointed at the viewer of a 3D movie.
Today begins with a reprise of the dream sequence that ended Friday’s episode so effectively. But where that episode survived only on a black and white kinescope, the original videotape of this one has come down to us. As a result, we see the dream in color today. Black and white images are abstract; color images, even when they are composed of only two or three flat colors, make everything literal. So while the dream we saw in Friday’s ending was a terrifying message from a mysterious realm, today’s opening is something that might trouble the sleep of someone who ate a big meal too soon before bedtime.
Strange and troubled boy David wakes up from his nightmare, and well-meaning governess Vicki tries to calm him down. David is frustrated that Vicki won’t take him seriously when he tells her that he learned from the dream that his cousin Barnabas is an undead ghoul and that his friend Sarah is a ghost. We know that he is right, but after the color version of the dream, we can understand why Vicki thinks all he needs is a warm glass of milk.
Meanwhile, Barnabas is at home, being unpleasant to his co-conspirator, mad scientist Julia Hoffman. He snaps at Julia for sitting in his house browsing through medical journals. This is unfair of him- since Julia is concealing her medical degree and pretending to be an historian studying the old families of New England, she can’t very well read medical journals anywhere else.
What is really bothering Barnabas is that his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie isn’t dead yet. The authorities have decided to blame Willie for the many unsolved crimes Barnabas himself committed, primarily because Willie is poor and unpopular, and if he dies of the gunshot wounds the police inflicted on him in #322, they will close all those cases. Yet Willie “clings to life with leech-like persistence.” Barnabas fears that Willie will make a miraculous recovery and set about “writing his memoirs.” Barnabas wants to break into the hospital and kill Willie, but Julia persuades him this would be counterproductive.
Barnabas then starts talking about his inclination to kill David. Julia persuades him that she can hypnotize David so that he will no longer be curious about him. In both parts of the conversation, Barnabas is a pouting child, Julia an authoritative figure, though because of her amorality ultimately a no less childish one. We see again the Bossy Big Sister/ Bratty Little Brother dynamic that has been at the heart of Dark Shadows since the first episode, when we were introduced to matriarch Liz and her brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger.
Back at the great house of Collinwood, Julia asks Liz and Vicki if she might talk alone with David about his fear of Barnabas. She explains that she has had some experience of child psychology. This led my wife, Mrs Acilius, to exclaim that Julia has forgotten her cover story and is presenting herself as what she actually is, a medical doctor dually qualified as a specialist in psychiatry and hematology. Liz remarks that Julia is “a woman of many talents.” This is not the first time Liz seems suspicious of Julia, but she nonetheless agrees to bring David to meet with her alone in the drawing room.
Julia and David sit on the couch, and she takes out the medallion she shows to people while she is hypnotizing them. David recognizes the medallion from his dream. He saw a faceless woman wearing Julia’s wig and coat showing him that medallion. He declares that the dream was warning him against Julia, and runs off, calling to Vicki.
Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, is not allowed to leave home. The yard outside her door is full of policemen. They are hoping that a rumor that her amnesia is breaking and she will soon remember who abducted her and held her prisoner will draw that person out of hiding. If he approaches the house, they will… it isn’t clear what they will do, exactly. Whatever they do, Maggie hopes that it will end the danger so that she can get back to her normal life.
Maggie and her father Sam talk about the situation. This conversation doesn’t advance the plot or give the audience new information, but it is somewhat interesting to people who have been watching the show from the beginning. For the first 40 weeks of the show, Sam was an alcoholic and Maggie’s attempts to keep him out of trouble were a substantial part of the story. Adult Child of an Alcoholic (ACoA, in the lingo of the twelve step movement) mannerisms such as advertising that she is happy by starting utterances with a laugh and stressing whatever syllables have a rising pitch are still a major part of Maggie’s characterization.
Father and daughter
But Sam isn’t an alcoholic anymore. Not only doesn’t his drinking cause him problems, but we’ve seen him function as a social drinker. He keeps a bottle of whiskey in the living room of the Evans cottage and occasionally takes a drink or two; he often goes to The Blue Whale tavern and enjoys happy hour there. But he declines drinks when they are offered at inconvenient times, doesn’t get drunk, doesn’t have trouble with his work, and Maggie doesn’t have any complaints. The other day, the show referred back to Sam’s drinking days. He and the sheriff went to The Blue Whale, where Sam started the rumor about Maggie’s memory. Sam pretended to be drunk and the sheriff pretended to hush him while he declared that Maggie would be leading the police to her captor any day now. But he was stone sober the whole time, even though he had had a drink at home before leaving for the tavern.
The show dropped the theme of Sam’s alcoholism when it gave up on the storyline of “The Revenge of Burke Devlin.” Sam had started drinking because of the events behind that storyline and his drunkenness made it unpredictable what role he would play in it. Since that ended in #201, the writers don’t seem to see a point in presenting Sam as an alcoholic, even as one in recovery. But I think that is a mistake. The actors and directors remember that Sam has that history, and it adds depth to both David Ford’s portrayal of Sam and Kathryn Leigh Scott’s of Maggie. You wouldn’t have to spend any more screen time presenting Sam as a recovering alcoholic than they spend now presenting him as a social drinker. All he’d have to do is reply to a remark about booze by saying that he never touches the stuff anymore, and you’ve made the point.
Viewers who have been with the show from the beginning will look at Sam and Maggie’s heart-to-heart talk and remember the scenes from the first 40 weeks where Maggie wound up playing the parent in the parent-child relationship. Seeing him really function as a father here will not only reassure us that they are free of that now, but will also explain why Maggie kept falling into all of the patterns of behavior that enabled Sam when he was a drunk. Today, he’s the Daddy she knew before alcohol got the better of him, the one she was always sure was still in there someplace.
Sam leaves the room, and Maggie gets a visitor. After Sam had assured Maggie that the house was so well-guarded no one could get in, we saw a shot of the permanently nine year old ghost of Sarah Collins outdoors, peering over a picket fence.
Looking for a friend
Maggie falls asleep, and wakes to find Sarah in the room with her. Maggie repeatedly asks Sarah how she got in, and Sarah keeps declining to answer. Maggie keeps trying to get her father into the room, and Sarah keeps telling her that if a third person comes in, she will have to go away. Sarah finds that Maggie is not in possession of the doll she gave her, and tells her that she will have to get it back as soon as possible and keep it with her at all times. Maggie asks more than one question about that as well, and Sarah again tells her that she can’t explain. Sarah gets to be quite exasperated that she has to keep reviewing the ghost rules with Maggie.
Sarah can not believe Maggie still doesn’t get it.
Several characters have entertained the possibility that Sarah might be a ghost, among them Maggie and Sam. They keep snapping back from really believing that she is. In the early months of the show, characters had speculated that there might be ghosts on and around the great estate of Collinwood, but they couldn’t let go of the idea that they lived in a world that basically made sense according to the usual natural laws. So no matter what they saw, they kept retreating from the full implications of the supernatural events that came to be a more and more obvious part of their experiences. Sarah’s impatience with Maggie today is reflected in the impatience many viewers of the show express when characters who have had encounter after encounter with the paranormal won’t stop droning on about how there must be a perfectly logical explanation.
Sarah keeps repeating herself and Maggie keeps missing the point. Maggie tells Sarah that she will like Sam, who likes little girls. That again is a poignant line to those who are thinking about the happy life Maggie had with her father before he started drinking and that has only recently resumed, though it is lost on newer viewers. We also know that Sarah already likes Sam- she visited him in this house in #260 and told him where to find Maggie.
But in the world of Dark Shadows, ghosts cannot appear to more than one person at a time. For example, in #141 strange and troubled boy David Collins took his mother, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, to the Old House on the grounds of Collinwood, hoping that the ghost of Josette Collins would appear to her. He left her alone in the house, explaining that Josette appears only to one person at a time. Josette did communicate with Laura after David left, though Laura concealed that fact from her son.
We’ve seen only two exceptions to the rule that ghosts appear to one person at a time. The first case was in #165, when Josette manifested herself in a room with David and Laura. The second time was in #294, when Sarah herself helped Maggie escape from the mental hospital where mad scientist Julia Hoffman was keeping her for evil reasons. Both Maggie and her nurse could see Sarah that time.
But those were special occasions. It was such a strain for Josette to present herself to two people that she could shimmer into view only when David was asleep, and a few words from Laura were enough to shoo her away before he could wake up, though he did feel her presence afterward. And Sarah’s appearance to Maggie and the nurse lasted for only a few seconds. Viewers reminded of Sarah’s earlier appearance to Sam will remember that she vanished before he finished a sketch of her that she very much wanted him to give her, so however great a power she might represent, we know that it is not entirely under her control. She can do what she is supposed to do and tell people what they are supposed to know, but she cannot simply do as she wishes, and when she has completed an assigned task or entered an uncongenial situation she will disappear.
Eventually Maggie insists on opening the door and calling to Sam. Of course Sarah has vanished when he enters, of course the men guarding the house didn’t see her, and of course Sam and Maggie fret that if Sarah could come and go unobserved so could the person they are trying to catch. Those bits bring on our frustration with characters who don’t get that they are living in a universe pervaded with supernatural beings. If they were proceeding from the premise that Sarah was a ghost and considering the possibility that Maggie’s captor may also have been some kind of uncanny being, that would indicate that the action is about to start moving a lot faster. As it is, it’s just filler.
Meanwhile, Julia has left her hospital and come to Collinwood, where she is in league with Maggie’s captor, vampire Barnabas Collins. Barnabas has heard the rumor that Maggie is recovering from her amnesia. Julia induced that amnesia to keep Maggie from exposing him and inconveniencing her.
In Friday’s episode, Julia tried to talk Barnabas out of killing Maggie. He had calmly and suavely told her that he had no choice but to yield to her arguments, and she had been satisfied that she had persuaded him. Today, he tells his sorely bedraggled blood-thrall Willie Loomis that he will set out for the Evans cottage as soon as the clouds cover the moon and give him a deep enough cover of darkness.
Willie sneaks over to the terrace at the great house of Collinwood, where he informs Julia of Barnabas’ intentions. Julia cannot believe that her powers of persuasion failed to win Barnabas away from his plan to kill Maggie. Willie has to repeat himself time and again, until he grows as exasperated with Julia as Sarah was with Maggie.
This is the first time we have seen Julia in denial. It’s understandable that she would overestimate her ability to bend Barnabas to her will- not only has she had a great deal of success so far at dominating their relationship, but she is usually able to manipulate people to a fantastic degree. When she induced Maggie’s current amnesia, she took her in a matter of minutes from a state in which she remembered everything that had happened to her to one in which an impenetrable mental block covered exactly the period in which Barnabas abused her. Someone who can do that might well have difficulty grasping the fact that she has not turned someone to her way of thinking.
Barnabas stares out the window of his house in the direction of the Evans cottage and thinks murderous thoughts about Maggie. My wife and I often laugh about the comment Danny Horn made on this scene in his post about this episode on his blog Dark Shadows Every Day:
Meanwhile, the dogs are howling, and Barnabas is standing at the window, staring out into the night.
“Goodbye, Maggie Evans,” he thinks. “I might have loved you. I might have spared you. Now… you must die.”
Man, what a diva. He even has backup singers.
Danny Horn, “Episode 321: What We Talk About When We Talk About Ghosts,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 3 February 2014
When the show dwells on the dog-noise, Mrs Acilius and I often turn to each other, say “the backup singers!,” and laugh. When we watched this episode yesterday, we laughed louder than usual because our beagle joined in with them, right on cue. He often looks up when the howling starts, the backup singers are the stars of the show as far as he is concerned, but it is unusual for him to sing along. They must be in particularly good voice in this one.
In the outer room of the Tomb of the Collinses, Sam Evans and Dr Dave Woodard recap the story so far. In the hidden chamber on the other side of the wall, vampire Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman eavesdrop on their conversation. When they hear how close Evans and Woodard have come to discovering their terrible secrets, Julia squirms and Barnabas looks shocked.
Busted.
When Dr Woodard mentions that Julia had used the word “supernatural” in a conversation with him, Barnabas nearly blows their cover. He grabs Julia by the throat and she lets out a yelp. Sam hears this, Woodard does not. Woodard suspects that there are ghosts at work in the area, but he cannot believe that Sam’s hearing is better than his, so he dismisses the idea.* He notices the plaque marking the burial site of Sarah Collins, 1786-1796, and says out loud that the little girl named Sarah whom everyone has been looking for lately is the ghost of that Sarah.
Evans and Woodard leave the tomb, and Barnabas resumes raging at Julia. He opens his old coffin and pushes her head into it, asking if she wants to spend eternity confined there. She talks him down with warnings of what would happen were he to kill strange and troubled boy David Collins.
Woodard goes to the great house of Collinwood, where he questions David. Woodard is much more forthcoming with what he knows than he has been in any previous conversation. David listens closely, trying to find out what he knows. But Woodard’s questions are all about David’s friend, Sarah. David doesn’t know that answers to many of Woodard’s questions, and Sarah has sworn him to secrecy about much of what he does know. So the only new piece of information Woodard learns from David is that Julia was lying to him the other day when she said that she hadn’t given much thought to Sarah. David tells him that she asks him about her all the time.
Julia comes in and tries to stop Woodard questioning David. He ignores her and asks another question, then warns him to stay away from the Tomb of the Collinses. When he tells David that whatever secret Sarah told him about the tomb is also known to someone else, and that that other person is very dangerous, David is horrified. When he was trapped in the hidden chamber last week, Barnabas and his servant Willie entered. David hid from them in Barnabas’ old coffin and eavesdropped on a conversation in which Barnabas dropped a huge number of clues about his secrets. Since Woodard started his questioning of David with a reference to the unknown person who has been terrorizing the area since April, David now has reason to believe that Barnabas is that person.
David leaves the room, and Woodard asks Julia what she was trying to prevent him from finding out. She refuses to answer any of his questions. She hears the sound of dogs howling, and knows that it means Barnabas is getting ready to kill someone. Knowing that she has very little time to try to prevent David’s murder, she cannot focus on Woodard’s questions. For once, she can’t think of any lies that will hold him off. Her reason for being in town, so far as Woodard is concerned, is that she is a doctor treating Sam Evans’ daughter Maggie, Barnabas’ former victim. When she won’t answer his questions, he takes her off Maggie’s case.
Julia goes to Barnabas’ house. She finds him on his way out the door, on a mission to kill David. She opposes him, and he declares that nothing can stop him. At that, the wind blows the doors open. It extinguishes some of the candles in the room. The strains of “London Bridge” begin playing, and Barnabas and Julia realize that Sarah, who in reality is the permanently nine year old ghost of Barnabas’ little sister, is in the room. Barnabas cannot leave. Julia says with satisfaction that nothing can stop him- “except one little girl.”
The whole episode is very strong from beginning to end. Julia is usually so much in charge that the only suspense is what she will choose to do, but throughout this one she is scrambling to bring Barnabas under control. When her final attempt fails, Sarah’s intervention comes as a thrilling surprise.
The performances of both Jonathan Frid and Grayson Hall stand out today. Hall is as powerful a presence playing a character who controls nothing as she usually is playing a character who controls everything. And few could match Frid’s ability to appall us with Barnabas’ plan to kill a ten year old and seconds later to elicit tears by calling out to his beloved little sister.
Strange and troubled boy David is peering into his crystal ball.* David’s cousin Carolyn tells him it is time to go to dinner. He tells her he is looking for his friend, mysterious little girl Sarah. Sarah has been driving the story of Dark Shadows for weeks now, and the ratings keep going up. Not only does she get viewers to tune into their television sets, she even gets Carolyn to start watching the crystal ball.
Hazel Roy is billed as costume designer for this episode. Mrs Roy died in 2010, no doubt still embarrassed by David’s shirt.
Hardworking young fisherman Joe comes to the house. Joe is also looking for Sarah, and asks if David can help find her. He explains that Sarah might know who abducted Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. David says that he knows where Sarah is, but that it is a place he promised he would keep secret. He offers to go himself and bring her back. Joe is all for it, but Carolyn points out that it is after dark, David’s dinner is getting cold, and that his source of information is something he saw in his crystal ball. Joe backs down.
David recognizes the urgency of the situation. He sneaks out of the house and goes to the secret place, the Tomb of the Collinses in the old cemetery north of town. Sarah is indeed there. When David asks if she knows who abducted Maggie Evans, she replies that all she knows is that she has a friend named Maggie.
David takes that at face value. Regular viewers cannot be so sure. We know that Sarah is a ghost, and that she returned to the Earth after her brother, vampire Barnabas Collins, was loosed to prey upon the living. We do not know whether Sarah knows that she is a ghost or that Barnabas is a vampire. Nor do we know what she remembers from one apparition to the next. Clearly she remembers the people she has spent time with, but we can’t be sure if she remembers that Maggie told her that her father’s name was Evans and where she could find him. She might be telling the truth when she denies knowing anything more than Maggie’s first name, or she might be lying to protect Barnabas from exposure.
My wife, Mrs Acilius, compares Sarah to a superhero. Like a superhero, Sarah shows up, does what needs to be done to meet the immediate need, and disappears. You could almost say that she “lives in the moment,” if that were not the opposite of what ghosts do. Maggie needs a friend, Sarah shows up and befriends her. Maggie needs to escape from Barnabas, Sarah arranges her escape. Maggie needs to escape from mad scientist Julia Hoffman, Sarah breaks her out and leads her home. Barnabas needs to be stopped from killing Maggie, Sarah stops him.
Playing catch with David, Sarah throws the ball wide, and he ducks to look for it. When he looks up to complain that she threw it where he can’t find it, she has disappeared. Evidently all that needed to happen was that David had to go to the tomb- she has accomplished that, so she goes back to her rest.
David looks for her in the tomb and in the secret room. As he is about to leave, he hears voices approaching. He must honor Sarah’s secret, so he looks for a hiding place. The only place he can find is the tomb, so he stays inside.
The voices are those of Barnabas and his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie. Willie had seen Sarah through the window of their house** in the opening scene, and Barnabas has decided to come to the tomb where Sarah was buried in hopes that she will appear to him.
David realizes that Barnabas and Willie are coming into the tomb. He hides in the secret room. Little does he know that Barnabas is an expert on this room- he was trapped in a coffin there for a century or two, until Willie accidentally released him in April. That old coffin is still there, and when David hears Barnabas order Willie to open the panel he hides inside it.
We don’t know an in-universe reason why this was what needed to happen. We do know that Barnabas has been so harmless lately that the vampire story is running out of juice, so we can see why the writers would want to create a situation where Barnabas decides he has to kill David. But it is so mysterious what Sarah’s motives are or whether she is the kind of being who has what we could recognize as motives that the episode leaves us in suspense, not only as to how David will get out of danger, but what we will learn about her as a result of the incident.
*The crystal ball was a big deal for a while after dashing action hero Burke Devlin gave it to David in #48. He hasn’t really used it since #82, and Burke has since lost his connection to the plot, been recast with a less interesting actor, and turned into a hopeless schlub. It’s hard to see any way back into the story for Burke, but maybe there is hope that the crystal ball will again be a focus of interest.
**Willie was polishing the chandelier when he turned to the window and saw Sarah. Evidently he had seen her reflection in the crystal. So Sarah is twice detected today through scrying.
Sarah Collins has taken her friend and distant cousin, strange and troubled boy David Collins, home with her. Since Sarah is a ghost, her home is in a mausoleum. She has decided to show David one of the most interesting features of the place.
As we open, David is following Sarah’s instructions. He is standing on the sarcophagus of her mother and pulling a metal ring in the mouth of a stone lion’s head. The ring comes forward and a panel opens, revealing a room that was hidden for more than a century and a half.
The lion’s head.Pulling the ringThe panel opens
The first time we saw the panel open was in #210, when dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis happened upon the ring and ended up releasing vampire Barnabas Collins from his coffin in the hidden room. Now that we see this gimmick again and see it in color, it’s starting to seem odd that all you have to do to open the panel is pull the ring. The ring stands out as the only piece of metal in the tomb. Anyone entering the space would be tempted to tug on it, if only to polish it. If you’re wanting to make sure your vampire doesn’t get loose, I’d think you’d install a more secure system. Maybe you could add two or three additional decorative doodads to the wall, one of which you turn, say, three quarters of the way to the left, the other of which you turn some other way, and between them they release the ring.
Be that as it may, Barnabas’ old coffin is still in the hidden room. Sarah announces they will be opening it, and David resists the idea. He debates with Sarah for a while before curiosity gets the better of him.
Sarah the psychopomp. David wants to let the dead rest.David’s resistance crumbles.
He is shocked to see that it is empty. David asks Sarah why an empty coffin would be put in such a place, and she happily tells him that it wasn’t always empty. There was someone in it once, but he got up and left. David protests that the dead don’t walk away, to which Sarah replies that “Sometimes they do.”
David is shocked.Nobody’s home.
When David first met Sarah in #256, she was outside Barnabas’ house, puzzled that she couldn’t find her parents or anyone else she knew. Now it is starting to seem that she knows that she is a ghost haunting a time long after her own, but Sarah’s lines here are the first clear indication that she knows what is going on with her brother Barnabas.
David’s bafflement that the coffin is empty echoes #273. In that episode, matriarch Liz was shocked to find that the chest seagoing con man Jason McGuire buried in her basement did not contain the murdered remains of her husband. Liz kept asking “Why is there nothing there?” David seems almost as appalled as his aunt had been at the sight of some clean fabric unadorned with a rotting corpse. A few days after Liz found out Jason hadn’t really buried her husband in her basement, Barnabas killed Jason. Regular viewers will already have this story in mind, because in #276 Barnabas and his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie buried Jason in the floor of the very room David and Sarah are visiting at this moment. Clearly Barnabas would not be happy were he to find out that David knows about the room.
That wasn’t the first vacant grave in Dark Shadows. From #126 to #191, the show was mainly about David’s mother, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. As the Laura arc progressed, graves of various women named Laura Murdoch were revealed to be empty. Now Laura’s son is coming face to face with an unoccupied coffin, suggesting to loyal fans that he may yet learn something about his own origins.
To Sarah’s consternation, David says he has to go home. He tells her that if he does not, his governess, the well-meaning Vicki, will be upset with him. He simply refers to Vicki by name, as if Sarah already knows who she is. Regular viewers have reason to believe she does know who Vicki is, but it is not clear why David assumes that he can just say “Vicki” without explaining to Sarah who he means. Sarah swears David to secrecy about the existence of the room.
By the time David gets back to the great house of Collinwood, it is 9:30 PM and Vicki is indeed worried about him. Apparently no one else is at home; certainly, no one else has missed David. Vicki sits David down on a seat that’s been in the foyer from the beginning of the series, but which has only been used once or twice before. They have an earnest little talk that recalls the scenes they shared in the first 39 weeks of Dark Shadows, when their complicated relationship was the one storyline that consistently worked.
Rarely used seat.
David describes Sarah to Vicki. It finally dawns on her that Sarah is the little girl she saw on top of the stairs at Barnabas’ house in #280. When the light flashed in Vicki’s eyes, my wife, Mrs Acilius, shouted at the screen “Tell him!” Vicki and David again look like the fast friends they had become by #140, so we would indeed expect her to tell David that she thinks she has seen Sarah, and to tell him where and when she saw him. If she and David join their lines of inquiry and work together to find out about Sarah, the plot will move more quickly and on a much bigger scale than it can so long as everyone pursues their own questions in isolation.
Vicki catches on.
But, Vicki is also very fond of Barnabas, and reluctant to believe anything bad about him. Sarah has been seen in several places connected to the abduction of Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. Vicki doesn’t want anyone to add Barnabas’ house to that list, so perhaps it is not a “Dumb Vicki” moment when she decides to keep the information to herself.
Meanwhile, Barnabas is at home. He is irritated with mad scientist Julia Hoffman. Julia is attempting to cure Barnabas of vampirism, and he is dissatisfied with the progress of the treatment. He is also irked that Sarah broke Maggie out of the mental hospital where Julia was keeping her locked up, and blames Julia for failing to ghost-proof the place. He declares that Julia is “a meddlesome and domineering woman,” and that he, as a native of a different century, has no intention of tolerating such a person.
Barnabas and Julia discuss Vicki’s depressing boyfriend Burke. Burke has been investigating Barnabas, and his operatives have come upon some information that would raise questions Barnabas would have a hard time answering. Julia agrees that Burke must be stopped, and urges Barnabas to let her handle the matter. He says that he will take care of it, and that he will do so with “finesse” of a sort unfamiliar to the loutish inhabitants of the twentieth century.
Barnabas’ masterful finesse consists of telling Vicki what Burke is doing and asking her to make him stop. Those eighteenth century guys must have been amazing, to come up with something so complex and subtle in just a couple of days.
Julia comes into the great house as Barnabas is leaving. She asks Vicki if David is back yet. Vicki tells her that he had been out playing with Sarah in some location he refuses to disclose. Barnabas tries to conceal his alarm with a laughing remark about leaving Vicki and Julia to investigate the mystery of David’s playmate.
David comes out of his room to ask for food. While Vicki goes to fetch the housekeeper for him, Julia meets him at the top of the stairs and they talk about Sarah. David points out that she is repeating questions she has asked in previous episodes. He tells her that he doesn’t mind questions and neither does Sarah, but cautions her that the answers Sarah gives don’t make much sense.
The stained glass windows at the top of the stairs look great in color, and it is a relief when David shares the audience’s awareness that we’ve heard Julia’s lines before. Even so, the scene is a disappointment. David and Julia were fun to watch in their previous scenes because they were so relaxed together. Perhaps that was because David Henesy and Grayson Hall understood each other right away. Not only did they have similar ways of working as actors, but her son Matthew is about his age, so she might already have been familiar with a lot of things in his life that the other adults on set wouldn’t have known about.
Today, though, they are both having trouble with their lines. That keeps them from making enough eye contact with each other to sell the scene. David Henesy keeps looking at the teleprompter, which he could evidently read from the top of the stairs with only a little squint; Grayson Hall couldn’t read from that distance, but she does tilt her head back and look up when she’s searching her memory for her next line. Since the characters aren’t looking at each other, we don’t feel an emotional connection between them.
Hall has to thread a particularly small needle in this scene. Julia is trying to make her interest in Sarah seem casual in the same way Barnabas affected a lack of interest in her, by delivering lines about her with a jokey inflection. We know that she is urgently concerned with finding Sarah, and her efforts have to leave David unsure whether she really is the easygoing adult he has so far taken her to be or whether she is trying to pull a fast one.
In the course of a friendly chat between two people who obviously like each other, onetime Academy Award nominee and frequent Broadway luminary Hall could certainly have accomplished all of this. But in the course of this awkward encounter, it all falls flat. Especially so with Julia’s last line to David. After he has told her how difficult it is to get a straight answer from Sarah, she puts on a goofy voice and says that she’ll keep that in mind if she ever meets her. Since she isn’t looking at him when says this, it comes off not as an affectionate gesture acknowledging that they’ve run out of things to say, but as a high-handed dismissal. Even though she pats him on the shoulder and he smiles after that line, it still doesn’t seem that David would come away from the interaction with as complex an emotional response as he is supposed to have. Most likely he would just be irritated with Julia, as indeed the audience is likely to be.
“I’lll kee-e-ep that in mind.” Departure.
We end back at Sarah’s place. Barnabas is in the cemetery looking pathetic. He hears the strains of “London Bridge” coming from the mausoleum. We see Sarah sitting on her mother’s sarcophagus moving her fingers on her recorder far more rapidly than the music we hear would call for. She looks more like she’s playing a rock ‘n’ roll number.
Jammin’ with the Junior Funky Phantom of 1967.
Barnabas calls out to Sarah. He identifies himself as her brother and says that he has come to take her home. He goes into the mausoleum only to find that she has vanished. Wracked with sorrow, he pleads with her to come back, saying that he loves her and needs her. He touches the plate marking her grave. This underscores the futility of his desire to take her home. Leading him here, it is she who has brought him to what is in fact her home, and what ought also to be his.
Sad Barney.The impassable barrier.
This shows us a Barnabas we can sympathize with, but it also sets him on a collision course with David. Barnabas has been so harmless lately that we might wonder if his part is going to be recast with a purple felt puppet counting “Vun peanut butter saand-veech!” If he sets out to kill a child, he’ll be back on track as a horrifying menace.
Besides, David is not just any child- as the last bearer of the Collins name, David’s survival has a great symbolic importance to the show. He was central to everything that happened on Dark Shadows in its first 39 weeks. So if Barnabas becomes a threat to David, it will be a case of conflict between the current main character and the previous main character. Since Vicki originally represented the audience’s point of view and is still a major character, the divided loyalties between Barnabas and David that we first see influencing her behavior today could create a high level of dramatic tension. Especially so if Barnabas turns her into a vampire, and she winds up like Lucy in Dracula, the “Bloofer Lady” who herself preys on children.
Fake Shemp Burke Devlin is starting to suspect that there is something odd about old world gentleman Barnabas Collins. He suspects that Barnabas is not from England as he claims to be. More darkly, he is considering the possibility that Barnabas might be the one who abducted Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, and held her prisoner. As it happens, the audience knows that he is correct in both of these suspicions. We also know more- that Barnabas is a vampire.
Burke has hired investigators to probe into Barnabas’ past. Barnabas told him he lived near London with a cousin named Niall Bradford. Burke’s investigators have found that the last time a man of that name lived in London was 130 years previously. Dark Shadows has been going back and forth for months on whether Barnabas lived in the 1830s or in the eighteenth century. Yesterday they seemed to commit themselves to the earlier date, but now we’re back with the 1830s.
Burke asks Maggie’s doctor, addled quack Dave Woodard, to show him all of her medical records. Woodard protests that medical records are confidential. He then tells Burke everything he knows about Maggie’s case.
Burke calls on Maggie. She is back home, apparently well, but suffering from amnesia covering the entire period of her captivity. Unknown to any of the characters we see today, Maggie’s psychiatrist Julia Hoffman is a mad scientist in league with Barnabas, and she has wiped Maggie’s memory clean of any information that might threaten to expose him. Burke talks with Maggie and her boyfriend, hardworking young fisherman Joe, repeating everything Woodard told him a few minutes before.
Maggie and Joe tell Burke that she has had a few visitors since she came home. Maggie blithely mentions that Barnabas was one of those visitors. Burke is startled to hear this, and Maggie repeats that Barnabas dropped in to pay his respects.
During the fourteen weeks when Dark Shadows was driven by undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, Burke saw extensive evidence of supernatural doings. But he lately he has decided that he lives in the kind of world where the show took place in its first few months, where there might be hints of ghosts in the background, but all the action came from flesh and blood humans subject to the usual laws of nature. Since it doesn’t occur to him that a person might have powers like Julia’s, Maggie’s calmness when talking about a visit from Barnabas seems to prove that Barnabas is innocent.
Burke learns that Barnabas has been to see Maggie.
Maggie does say that there is just one memory she has that seems to be connected with her time in captivity. It is a bit of music- “a light, playful tune. A soft, tinkling sound.” She freely admits that it seems unlikely that this would have any connection with such an experience, and speculates that it may have been something she remembered from childhood.
In the great house of Collinwood, well-meaning governess Vicki is listening to the enchanted music box Barnabas gave her. Burke and Vicki are now engaged to be married. He comes to see her, and remarks on the music box. She accuses him of being jealous of Barnabas, and he keeps coming back to the music box. When she opens it for him, he remarks that it makes “a light, playful tune… a soft, tinkling sound.”
The episode ends with Burke listening to the music box and staring off into space. Barnabas gave the music box first to Maggie, then to Vicki, in each case hoping that she would listen to it until its magical quality caused her to believe that she was his lost love Josette. Seeing the look on Burke’s face as he listened, my wife, Mrs Acilius, said “Maybe Burke will start to think that he’s Josette.” Who knows, maybe he and Barnabas could be very happy together.
When new writers start working on Dark Shadows, they do some inventorying of ongoing and disused storylines. When Ron Sproat came aboard in November of 1966, he contrived a lot of scenes that served to mark storylines as “To be developed” or “To be discarded.” Now Gordon Russell has begun to be credited with scripts. He addresses continuity questions with brief lines of dialogue.
For example, for the last forty weeks the show has been equivocating about when it was that Barnabas Collins lived as a human being. Sometimes they say that he died and became a vampire in the 1830s. That fits with the original idea that Jeremiah Collins built the great house of Collinwood for his bride Josette in that decade, because Barnabas is supposed to have loved Josette and hated Jeremiah. At other times, they have pushed Barnabas, Josette, and Jeremiah back into the eighteenth century.
Now Barnabas has risen from the grave. Mad scientist Julia Hoffman has developed a series of injections to cure him of vampirism and turn him into a real boy. When Julia finds that Barnabas has heard the ghostly voice of his sister, nine year old Sarah, she declares that “The injection can wait!” and wants to talk all about Sarah. When Barnabas tries to avoid the subject, saying that Sarah has been dead for nearly 200 years, Julia replies “So have you.” That would seem to nail down that continuity question.
Julia speculates that Barnabas has subconsciously willed Sarah to return to the living, because she symbolizes the kindly side of his nature. There have been a bunch of possible explanations for why Sarah emerged shortly after Barnabas did; evidently this is the one we will be going with, at least for a while.
Barnabas has been looking through an album of family portraits, Sarah’s among them. He tells Julia that he is particularly intrigued by another portrait in the same volume, that of Jeremiah. He says that Burke Devlin, depressing boyfriend of well-meaning governess Vicki, bears a striking resemblance to Jeremiah. This point was first made in #280, when Burke came to a costume party at Barnabas’ in Jeremiah’s clothing and Barnabas was shocked by the resemblance. Barnabas says that he will be a happy man when Burke is as dead as Jeremiah. This tells us, not only that Barnabas is serious about his hostility to Burke, but also that we can expect some connection between Jeremiah and Burke to be developed.
Julia chases Barnabas around his living room until he hangs his head and mutters a promise not to hurt anyone, not even Burke, as long as there is a chance the injections will work. This helps both to explain why Barnabas has been so harmless lately and to reinforce the Bossy Big Sister/ Bratty Little Brother dynamic that is forming between him and Julia.
Julia goes to the great house. Matriarch Liz is under the impression that Julia is an historian writing a book about the old families of New England, and letting her stay in the mansion on the understanding that she is doing research into the Collinses. Liz asks about Julia’s previous books. Julia evades the question, saying that only scholars have ever heard of them. Liz mentions that she was a recluse for eighteen years, during which time she read so widely that she became aware of many scholarly books. Julia seizes on Liz’ reference to her time as a recluse, and asks a series of questions about it. Observing Julia’s facility at deflecting questions she doesn’t want to answer, Liz says that “If you are as nimble with the written word as you are with the spoken, you must be a very interesting writer.” This conversation not only marks Liz’ period of seclusion as an extinct topic, but also shows that Julia’s cover story is not going to be solid enough to cover her operations indefinitely. Moreover, it gives Joan Bennett a chance to show what Liz sounds like when she is smart.
Vicki meets Burke in the courtyard of the great house. She asks him why he’s late. He says he had a meeting with his lawyer, James Blair (a character we last saw in #95 and last heard mentioned in #133.) The reference to Blair tells regular viewers that Burke’s business interests may have something to do with an upcoming storyline.
Vicki asks what the meeting was about. Burke says it was to do with a message from London, then declares he didn’t come to talk about business. At the end of yesterday’s episode, Burke placed a call to London to initiate an investigation of Barnabas, so we know that he has already received some information about him. We also know that he is keeping the investigation secret from Vicki.
Burke brings up the marriage proposal he made to Vicki when last they saw each other. She says that she doesn’t know enough about him to be comfortable making a decision. In particular, she doesn’t know how he made his money or who his business associates are. In response to that, he launches into a speech dismissing those concerns as matters of “the past,” saying that he wants her to think only about “the future.” Considering that Burke won’t even tell Vicki what business he was conducting twenty minutes ago, “the past” that is off limits to her stretches right up to the present. This tells even first time viewers that Burke is a secretive and untrustworthy man likely to drag a wife into some shady enterprises.
It rings even louder warning bells for regular viewers. At this point in Dark Shadows, “the past” is how the characters refer to the vampire arc, which is the only ongoing storyline. Several times, Burke has angrily demanded Vicki renounce interest in “the past,” by which he means her attempts to stay relevant to the plot. As he has made those demands, he has accused her of being crazy when she told him that she saw and heard phenomena that we also saw and heard, in some cases phenomena that Burke himself is in a position to know are real. On Thursday, Burke enlisted Julia’s support in his effort to gaslight Vicki; in that conversation, Julia asked Burke if, when he said Vicki must “live in the present,” he meant that she must live with him, and he confirmed that he did. So Burke’s evasiveness in this scene shows that he is likely to be an abusive husband who will devote himself to controlling Vicki and stifling her contributions to the story.
The show is making something of an effort to launch a storyline in which Vicki and Burke will get married and move into a long-vacant “house by the sea” that has some kind of association with Barnabas and therefore with the supernatural. So the parade of red flags that Burke sends marching in front of his proposal may tell us to expect a story in which Vicki, the long-suffering wife confined to a haunted house, loses contact with the world of the living.
Perhaps that is where we will see Burke’s connection to Jeremiah. Maybe Burke will be possessed by the spirit of Jeremiah, and under that possession his abuse of Vicki will intensify. It is also possible that Burke will be revealed as a descendant of Jeremiah. On Friday, the story of Burke’s childhood was retconned, introducing the idea that his father left the family when Burke was nine. Perhaps it will turn out that he did this after he found out that Burke was the product of an extramarital dalliance with a Collins. That in turn might revive another paternity question concerning a nine year old boy. For months, the show hinted that Burke, not Liz’ brother Roger, was the father of strange and troubled boy David Collins. If Burke is a Collins bar sinister, then David can be his natural son and still retain his symbolic importance as the last in the male line of the family.
Whatever the nature of Burke’s connection to Jeremiah, Vicki’s eventual flight from him might lead her into the vampire story. Since Barnabas thinks he wants Vicki to be his next victim, he has been solicitous towards her, and she regards him warmly. My wife, Mrs Acilius, points out a sort of visual pun implicit in the prospect of Vicki choosing Barnabas over Burke. As played by Anthony George, Burke is an astonishingly poor kisser. As a vampire, Barnabas gives what might be called “the kiss of death.” A woman might prefer a single kiss of death to a lifetime of the impossibly awkward kisses of George.
Vicki caves in and agrees to marry Burke, even though he won’t answer any of her questions. They go into the drawing room and announce this ominous news to Liz, Barnabas, and Julia. Barnabas responds by looking off into space and exclaiming “Jeremiah!” Again, whatever relationship develops between Burke and Jeremiah, we know that Barnabas is committed to resisting its influence on Vicki.
Barnabas cannot conceal his dismay. He and Julia leave, explaining that they had planned to spend the evening together in town. Liz remarks that Barnabas was happy when he came, and sad when he left. Still, the idea that he and Julia might be going on a date is enough to keep Burke smiling.
In the courtyard, Barnabas tells Julia that he will give her his full cooperation as she tries to cure him of vampirism. He explains he wants to become human again so that he can prevent Vicki from marrying Burke.
This is rather alarming for the viewers. Dark Shadows became a hit when a vampire joined the cast. If the Burke/ Vicki/ Barnabas story is going to be just another daytime soap love triangle among humans, you may as well watch The Guiding Light. The foreboding dun dun DUNN! that ends each episode has rarely seemed more apt than it does coming on the heels of this grim prospect.
The only story on Dark Shadows at this point is the one about vampire Barnabas Collins. They’re trying to get a second one off the ground, about an old vacant house that has caught the fancy of well-meaning governess Vicki. Vicki’s depressing boyfriend Burke has interpreted her interest in the place as a marriage proposal. He wants to buy the house and live in it with her.
Today, we find out that the house is the property of the ancient and esteemed Collins family. That isn’t a big surprise, since Barnabas clearly knew something about it from his time as a human. It does suggest a partial answer to a question Vicki had when she, Burke, and Barnabas visited the house on Thursday. Barnabas found a handkerchief there bearing the initials “F. McA. C.” and gave it to Vicki. She expressed a determination to find out what those initials stood for. Now she should be able to look at the family’s records and search for a Mrs Collins whose maiden name had the initials “F. McA.”
Burke asks matriarch Liz if she is willing to sell the house to him, and she is perfectly agreeable. Liz’ daughter Carolyn joins them for a tour of the house. There is some startlingly sloppy writing in this scene. Carolyn remarks that the house has a special warmth and speculates that it is the result of so much light reflected into its windows from the sea nearby. A couple of minutes later, Liz complains that the house is terribly cold, and Carolyn says that’s because it is so close to the sea.
Both Liz’ glad willingness to sell the house to Burke and her trip to it signal that storylines from the first year of the show are now behind us once and for all. Burke was introduced in episode 1 as a dashing action hero returning to his home town to wreak vengeance on his old persecutors, the Collins family. The “Revenge of Burke Devlin” arc consisted so largely of talk about people, places, and events we never saw that it didn’t amount to much, and by the time Burke formally renounced his revenge in #201 it had long since fizzled. That left some chance it would flare back up, so in #223 Liz vowed she would never sell Burke any property at any price, but now the door is firmly closed on that old theme.
When Dark Shadows started, Liz was a recluse who hadn’t left home in eighteen years. Since they never showed us anyplace Liz might want to go, that story was an even more total dud than was The Revenge of Burke Devlin. Even after the reason for Liz’ seclusion was exposed as fraudulent in #273, she still made a show of reluctance when her brother Roger suggested she go to town in #277. Now she doesn’t hesitate to hop in a car and go to the house by the sea. In fact, she is the one who urges Carolyn to get out of the house. So that sends another non-starter to the narrative junk yard.
In this episode, the characters refer to “the house by the sea” as “Seaview.” That was an inside joke. The Newport, Rhode Island mansion used in the exterior establishing shots of the great house of Collinwood was known as Seaview Terrace. In 1974, Martin and Millicent Carey bought the house, and it came to be known as the Carey Mansion.
Meanwhile, Vicki is visiting Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. Maggie has amnesia, a condition induced by her doctor, mad scientist Julia Hoffman. Julia is in league with Barnabas, and has damaged Maggie’s memory to keep her from recalling that Barnabas abducted her and tried to replace her personality with that of his lost love Josette. Vicki is trying to help Maggie regain her memory.
There is another instance of distressingly sloppy writing in this scene. Vicki tells Maggie that she thought she saw her in Eagle Hill cemetery during the period she cannot recall. She tells Maggie that Burke tried to convince her that she can’t have seen her. In response, Maggie asks if Burke saw her, and Vicki again says Burke tried to convince her she hadn’t seen her.
Vicki tells Maggie that she and Burke had gone to the cemetery to lay flowers at Josette’s grave. Maggie reacts strongly to Josette’s name, and Vicki starts telling her about Josette. When she mentions that Barnabas has restored Josette’s room, a light comes on in Maggie’s eyes and she grows very animated. She is about to say something when a knock comes at the door. It is Julia.
There is a strange blooper in the conversation between Vicki and Julia at the door. Julia asks “Would it be all right if I came in and waited?” Vicki responds “Not at all.” My wife, Mrs Acilius, is usually very forgiving of bloopers, but she laughed out loud at this one.
It could be that Julia’s line was “Would you mind if I came in and waited?” Alexandra Moltke Isles was famously accurate with her line delivery, even when her scene partners bobbled, and it could be that she just went ahead and said what Vicki was supposed to say even though it didn’t make sense. In view of Carolyn’s self-contradictory lines about the temperature of the house and Vicki’s repetitious lines about Burke’s attempt to gaslight her, both of which were obviously scripted, it could also be that the actors are working from Ron Sproat’s unrevised first draft.
While Julia looks at some of Maggie’s father’s paintings, Vicki sits back on the couch with Maggie. Julia hears Maggie exclaim “Barnabas!” and get very agitated. It seems she is about to tell Vicki all about what happened when she was missing.
Maggie, remembering
Julia swoops in, asking if they like antiques. Vicki looks bewildered at the interruption, but answers with a polite yes.
Julia interrupts
Julia presses her jeweled medallion on her. Vicki passes it to Maggie, and Julia asks for a cup of tea. Maggie volunteers to make the tea, but Vicki insists on doing it. In #143, the living room and kitchen in the Evans cottage were two parts of an undivided space, but now we hear Vicki close a door when she goes to make tea. Not only is that confusing to viewers who remember the earlier episodes, but since Vicki goes in the direction of the front door it seems for a moment that she is leaving the cottage altogether.
While Vicki is out of the room, Julia hypnotizes Maggie. She commands her to forget everything that happened while she was missing. When Vicki returns, Maggie has indeed forgotten everything.
Mad scientist Julia Hoffman is hanging around her new base of operations, the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood. She is getting ready to perform an experiment which, if successful, will convert vampire Barnabas Collins into a real boy. She learned of Barnabas’ existence when treating his former victim Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. Julia answers a knock on the front door, and sees her old acquaintance, addled quack Dave Woodard.
Woodard has no idea what Julia is up to. So far as he knows, she is still on board with his own idiotic scheme, in which he, along with Maggie’s father Sam and her fiancé Joe, has told everyone in town that Maggie is dead in hopes that her captor would forget about imprisoning girls and draining their blood. In fact, Julia has told Barnabas that Maggie is alive and has lured him into cooperating with her project by promising to keep Maggie in a state of amnesia so that she will not represent a threat to him.
In yesterday’s episode, Sam and Joe called on Woodard and complained that Julia is staying at Collinwood while Maggie is a hundred miles away. They demanded that Woodard take her out of Julia’s care. Woodard tells Julia today that her conduct is growing “more and more unethical.”
Last week, Julia was able to forestall Woodard’s threat to take her off the case by playing dumb. This time, she has to take him partly into her confidence, telling him that Maggie encountered the supernatural and that her case represents an opportunity to find a crossing point on the boundary between life and death. She dangles the possibility of great fame before him, saying that the doctors who make the breakthrough she sees coming will go down in history. When he presses for details, she says that there is great danger in what she already knows, and that she must not tell him more.
Woodard has been on the show for months, and has been stuck in just two modes the whole time. When he’s with a patient, he makes a show of brisk dissatisfaction, as if trying to convince them that they oughtn’t to take their disease so seriously that they give up. This mode was as far as Richard Woods, the first actor to play Woodard, got in his two appearances (in #219 and #229.) When he is talking with someone else, Woodard struggles to find the words to express his bafflement at the terrible case he is treating. These two modes didn’t make Woodard a source of suspense. They were just filler between his announcements of what the script called for him to do next.
When Julia asks Woodard if, when he was in school, he dreamed of making a major contribution to the science of medicine, he gets a thoughtful look and says “Well, of course.” This is the first moment we have seen Woodard outside his two modes. When Julia tempts him with the idea that he will go down in history as the co-discoverer of the most fundamental truth imaginable, he displays an emotion that might lead to him to any of a number of exciting, story-productive actions. The first scene in the first episode credited to writer Gordon Russell manages the astounding feat of turning Dr Woodard into an interesting character.
We cut to the woods on the estate. We see the ghost of Barnabas’ nine year old sister Sarah sitting on a rock crying. All of Sarah’s previous scenes started with some other character on camera, then proceeded to Sarah making a mysterious entrance. That’s what we would expect of a ghost, after all. This time, Sarah is all by herself at rise. The first time we saw a ghost was in #70, when the ghost of Josette Collins emerged from her portrait and danced around the columns of the Old House. That was a solo appearance as well, but people had been in the Old House talking about Josette immediately before, so she was manifesting herself in response to attention from the living. Here, we see a ghost on her own, processing her emotions, hoping someone will come and hang out with her.
Strange and troubled boy David Collins shows up and asks Sarah why she is crying. She says she can’t find Maggie. David breaks the news to her that Maggie is dead. Sarah laughs, and assures David that she is still alive. When David insists that Maggie is dead, Sarah tells him that he may know “about leaves and everything,” but she knows “who’s dead, and who isn’t.”
Less than a week ago, in #288, David saw a portrait of Sarah and wondered aloud if the girl he has met is her ghost. In the first 39 weeks of the show, he was on intimate terms with Josette and some of the other ghosts. When he first met Barnabas in #212, he asked him if he were a ghost, and was disappointed to hear that he was not. So returning viewers expect David to ask Sarah the same question. Indeed, David has always interacted with ghosts as if they were people with whom he could pass the time of day, share thoughts and feelings, and get to know better from one encounter to the next. Seeing Sarah crying by herself should validate this attitude. But instead, David has developed Soap Opera Goldfish Syndrome, forgetting information which everything we have seen has led us to expect he will remember.
David insists Sarah come home with him to the great house of Collinwood and have dinner with the family. She tries to decline politely, but he will not take “I’ve been dead for centuries” for an answer. He gets Sarah into the foyer, then goes to the drawing room to announce her presence. He finds Julia there, with well-meaning governess Vicki and Vicki’s depressing boyfriend, fake Shemp Burke Devlin. By the time David gets the adults into the foyer, Sarah has disappeared.
Vicki is suffering from an even more frustrating version of Soap Opera Goldfish Syndrome. She had had extensive dealings with the ghosts of Collinwood on many occasions between #85 and #191, and that had been the basis of her bond with David. Vicki’s interactions with the supernatural reached a climax when she led the opposition to David’s mother, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, from #126 to #191. Since then, Josette has spoken through Vicki at a séance and she has seen Sarah.
But lately, Vicki has started to deny that there are ghosts. This is in response to Burke’s demands. Burke lost his connection to the story months ago, and he’s been trying to gaslight Vicki into dismissing all of her spectral encounters as signs of mental illness so that she will join him on the show’s discard pile of useless characters. In Friday’s episode, Vicki had apparently decided to give in to Burke and make herself believe that there were no supernatural beings at work around Collinwood. As a result, her scenes in that episode were unbearably dreary.
Before David brought Sarah home, Vicki had been dreary again. She’s excited about some old house she saw, and wants Burke to go look at it with her. As David’s governess, Vicki’s compensation consists largely of room and board, so as long as she has her job her interest in any particular piece of real estate isn’t going to lead to story development. If she quits the job and marries Burke, she will be giving up on ever being part of the action again. So her rambling about “the house by the sea” is suspenseful only to fans of Vicki who are afraid she will vanish into the background of the show.
When David starts telling the adults about Sarah, Vicki launches into the same garbage Burke has been giving her, talking down to him about imaginary friends and insinuating that anyone who believes in ghosts is soft in the head. Burke, who had previously been David’s great friend, joins in this abusive behavior. After David indignantly stalks away, Julia gets very uptight and lectures Vicki and Burke about the need to stifle David’s imagination and discourage him from telling them things they don’t already know. This scene is effective, but the effect is claustrophobic- by the end of Julia’s little speech, we feel like the mad scientist is holding us prisoner.
Vicki and Burke decide to leave to look at the house, and Vicki finds Sarah’s cap on the floor. That’s such a great moment that not only do we leave the episode no longer disappointed in David’s goldfish memory, we can even forgive Vicki’s.
The closing credits run over an image of the foyer with Sarah’s cap on the table. My wife, Mrs Acilius, thought it would have been hilarious if Sarah had marched in and taken the cap while the credits were rolling. I’d have liked to see that too, especially if, after putting it back on, Sarah had turned to the camera and put her finger to her lips, telling the audience to keep quiet about what we had seen.
At the great house of Collinwood, well-meaning governess Vicki is in a stupor, staring out a window and dreaming of a time when she will again be central to the plot.
Ever since #191 when she rescued her charge, strange and troubled boy David Collins, from his mother, undead fire witch Laura, Vicki has been hanging on to narrative relevance by her fingernails. Now Dark Shadows is built around vampire Barnabas Collins, and Vicki longs to play a major role in his storyline. He plans to make her his next victim, but is moving so slowly towards that objective that we’ve started to wonder if he ever will strike.
David comes into the room and calls Vicki’s name several times. When she finally comes to, she admits that she has been zoning out a lot lately, and says that it is a habit she needs to break. David says that it frightens him when she gets that way. She doesn’t look like herself when those spells come over her. He gets the feeling that she’s turning into someone else. Vicki can’t deny that David is onto something, and only when he insists on sticking with the subject after she has clearly become uncomfortable does Vicki become defensive and retreat behind claims that David is letting his imagination run away with him.
Mad scientist Julia Hoffman has insinuated herself into the house, concealing her true identity and pretending to be an historian writing a book about the old families of New England. David shows her an album of family portraits. He identifies one portrait as his namesake, David Collins. In #153, it was established that he was the first member of the family to bear the name “David,” and that his mother Laura insisted on giving her son this name would ultimately become evidence that her evil plans for him were in place long before he was born. So David’s remark about a previous “David Collins” will strike longtime viewers as a significant retcon.*
Though David has looked through the book many times, he finds a portrait in it that he has never seen before. It depicts Sarah Collins, who lived from 1786 to 1796. Sarah’s ghost has been busy in the area in recent weeks, and the clear implication is that she inserted the page. That in turn would suggest that Sarah might have more powers than we have seen her use so far.
Julia and David find a photograph of Sarah Collins, d. 1796. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die
David has seen Sarah and played with her on more than one occasion, and he recognizes the portrait. He wonders aloud if the girl he has met is Sarah’s ghost. Julia laughs off the suggestion. Vicki returns. She also recognizes the picture of Sarah. The police circulated a drawing of her when Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, was missing. Since Julia is actually a doctor who found out that supernatural doings were afoot at Collinwood when she was treating Maggie, she has heard several facts about Sarah, and by the end of her talks with David and Vicki she knows enough to be sure David is right about her.
We cut to the Blue Whale tavern, where Vicki is on a date with her depressing boyfriend, fake Shemp Burke Devlin. Burke sullenly complains about Vicki’s wish to help Julia with her project, complaining about Vicki’s “interest in the past.” “Interest in the past” is at this point synonymous with “a function in the story,” and Burke lost the last trace of that months ago. It’s as if Burke and Vicki know that they are fictional characters, and he resents her for holding on to a place in the action while he has settled in once and for all on the discard pile.
Vicki mentions that the night before, she had been awakened by the sound of a small girl singing. She says that after she got up and lit a candle, she could still hear the singing, but could not see the girl. Burke is too busy grumbling and making nasty remarks about Vicki’s mental health to ask her why she lit a candle rather than flipping the light switch. Vicki has to press on with more details and then volunteer that she wasn’t sleeping in her own room. She was sleeping in the Old House at Collinwood, home to Barnabas Collins.
Burke is upset by this news. Unfortunately Vicki doesn’t let him believe she went to bed with Barnabas. She tells him she was in a guest room, and that Barnabas was “a perfect gentleman.” Burke demands Vicki never go to the Old House again, and she refuses to make any such promise.
Julia takes the book of portraits to the Old House and insists that Barnabas look through it. While he grudgingly complies, Julia opens her compact. She finds that Barnabas does not cast a reflection in its mirror. This confirms her suspicion that Barnabas is a vampire. In #241 and #278, we had seen his reflection, but perhaps those were slip-ups and they were planning all along to use the idea that vampires do not cast a reflection.
Barnabas catches Julia studying her mirror and angrily asks what she is doing. She smiles and chirps that even historians have their share of feminine vanity. He glowers at her. The camera holds on his menacing look for quite some time, leading us to think that Julia has signed her own death warrant. But she doesn’t seem to think she is in any great danger. She is still smiling when she leaves.
Back in the great house, Vicki wanders up to the portrait of Barnabas that hangs by the front door. Apparently she is planning to stare at it as she resumes her dream of having something to do on the show. It worked for dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis- after a couple of long sessions staring at the portrait, Barnabas summoned him and next thing he knew he was securely established as his sorely bedraggled blood thrall, a core member of the cast. So Vicki is trying to take a proven path to success.
Before Vicki can get any high-quality staring done, Julia enters. Vicki asks her how it went with Barnabas, and Julia exults that she may have learned everything she needed to know.
*My wife, Mrs Acilius, noticed this and had a lot to say about it. I will refer to her insights in later entries, as they would contain spoilers at this point in the run of the show.
Dark Shadows Commentary 