mrs acilius – Page 10 – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 370: Foreign to both of us

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.

Josette asks Vicki why she is staring at her. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

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.

Angelique casts a spell. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas starts choking and collapses.

Barnabas collapses. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

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.

Episode 358: The secret magic number of the universe

Barnabas Collins is a vampire, but he rarely bites anyone. He spends most of his time pursuing an acting career. His role is that of Living Man Born in the Twentieth Century, and his audience is almost everyone he meets.

Jonathan Frid often has trouble with Barnabas’ lines, but usually he manages to make it seem that it is Barnabas, not he, who is scrambling to keep his performance on track. His posture and facial expression project whatever emotion Barnabas is supposed to be feeling, and the words rarely get in the way.

As my wife, Mrs Acilius, pointed out, there is a moment today when he simply falls out of character. Barnabas is telling his distant cousin and blood thrall, Carolyn, that he is going to cast a spell that will bring madness upon his co-conspirator turned bête-noire, mad scientist Julia Hoffman. Barnabas has been acquiring new powers lately, and this is the first time we hear that he knows how to cast spells. Apparently this case of power creep was too much for Frid. While telling Carolyn about the “secret magic number of the universe,” he drifts from Barnabas’ voice into his own, looks down, then breaks off and stares mutely, not at Carolyn, but at Nancy Barrett struggling valiantly to keep a straight face. He then has to stand up and do a little dance while wearing a green dressing gown. The ridiculousness of it, for once, overwhelms him.

Before the dance. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 345: That place in Brazil

In Dark Shadows #3, man of mystery Burke Devlin mentioned that he started on the path to riches when he was in a bar in South America. Since then, he has mentioned his business interests on that continent several times, and the old standard “Brazil” has emerged as his informal theme song. Yesterday’s episode, one of the finest in the series, called back to the early days of the show several times, and today they close the loop on Burke’s connection to Brazil. His plane crashes in that country, and he dies there.

We learn of Burke’s fatal accident when housekeeper Mrs Johnson tells her employer, Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, that she has heard a radio report of an aviation disaster in Brazil. Mrs Johnson first came to work in Liz’ home, the great house of Collinwood, in #81. At that time Burke had sworn to wreak a terrible vengeance on the Collinses and Mrs Johnson was his secret agent. Burke renounced his quest for vengeance in #201, which was just as well, since it was never very interesting anyway. But they never told us that he had stopped paying Mrs Johnson or that she had stopped funneling information to him. So viewers who have been watching all along may wonder if she really did just happen to be listening when the radio announced that a Varig flight had gone down outside Belém. Maybe she was in touch with some associate of Burke’s who told her more than she could repeat to Liz. Or maybe not, but in any case it is satisfying to be reminded of the connection.

Burke was engaged to marry one of Collinwood’s residents, well-meaning governess Vicki. When she is told that Burke is missing and presumed dead, Vicki declares that she is certain he will come back. Vicki was originally the audience’s point of view character, an outsider to whom everything we did not know had to be explained. We now know many things she does not, but in this declaration she once more seems to be closer to us than to the other characters in her knowledge. She knows, as we do, that she lives in a soap opera and no major character is likely to stay dead permanently, especially not when his death is supposed to be the result of a plane crash in a faraway jungle.

On the other hand, Burke has been fading in importance for a long time. After his revenge story fizzled, he never really found a new reason to be on the show. His relationship with Vicki might have made things happen when he was still in conflict with the Collinses. She would then have found herself torn between her lover and the family that had all but adopted her. But once Burke and the Collinses patched things up, there was no obstacle between him and Vicki. In the last few days, it has seemed that she might even be able to stay in the house and keep her job after marrying him. There has been a theme where Burke tried to gaslight Vicki out of believing in supernatural phenomena that he himself had plenty of evidence to suppose were real, but that was less a storyline than a speed bump. Burke’s part was recast after the charismatic Mitch Ryan showed up for #252 too drunk to work; since then he has been played by the woefully miscast Anthony George, and it has been obvious that the character needed to be written out of the show before he did permanent damage to George’s career. So maybe Burke won’t come back after all.

Meanwhile, in the Old House on the same estate, vampire Barnabas Collins is moping around while mad scientist Julia Hoffman works on her notes about her attempt to turn him into a real boy. When she asks if there is anything she can do to lighten his mood, he sarcastically suggests that they play a game of cards or of cribbage. She’s up for either one, but he says that he won’t be happy until Vicki comes to him. He doesn’t know about Burke’s accident, but has somehow convinced himself that Vicki’s personality will eventually disappear and be replaced with that of his long-lost love Josette, and that as Josette she will be his bride. Barnabas goes on so long about how wonderful it will be when the Josettified Vicki is in the house that we start to wonder just how the two of them will pass the time. The day may come when Barnabas is glad of a cribbage board.

Julia only recently committed her first murder. She and Barnabas killed her old medical school classmate Dave Woodard a week ago, and she is still reeling from the shock of it. One thing she has settled on is the fact that she is going to be linked to Barnabas for the rest of her life. It doesn’t seem likely that she will ever be able to tell anyone else about Woodard, and being a murderer is, like it or not, an important part of her identity. So no one other than Barnabas can ever really know her. She’s making the best of this by trying to fall in love with him, but his sick obsession with reenacting the plot of the 1932 film The Mummy with himself in the Boris Karloff role and a woman in her early twenties in Zita Johanns’ double role as the dead princess and her reincarnation would seem to leave her at an impasse.

Julia presses Barnabas about his relationship with Josette. When he keeps insisting that the Josettified Vicki will come to him of her own free will, she asks if the original Josette ever did that. Barnabas’ silent grimace answers her question. She goes on to ask why Josette is so important to him if he was never very important to her. He says he will explain it all to her, but that they must have the proper setting. He leads her to the place of Josette’s death, the cliff at Widows’ Hill.

Barnabas has given us at least two versions of his relationship with Josette. In #212, he gave a speech to her portrait which implied that she was his grandmother, and that she sided with his father her son when he and Barnabas had a fateful clash. Soon after, Josette was retconned into Barnabas’ lost love. In #236, Barnabas was trying to brainwash Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, into thinking that she was Josette. He told her then that he had sailed with Josette from her home in the French West Indies to Collinwood, where she was to marry his uncle Jeremiah Collins. It was his task to teach her English on the voyage. Aboard ship, they fell in love. This reenactment of the tale of Tristan and Isolde ended as sadly as did the original, though the particulars of the story were not the same.

Now, Barnabas tells Julia that he met Josette for the first time when she arrived at Collinwood. He had taken no interest in his uncle’s betrothed until he saw her, but was stunned by her beauty and quickly fell in love with her. He found himself compelled to be “her good and faithful friend Barnabas,” a position he found humiliating. As a vampire, Barnabas is a metaphor for selfishness and cruelty, and so it is hardly surprising that he confines Julia to the same position with regard to himself and that he openly delights in her humiliation. It is a bit dizzying that she expresses so much sympathy for him, telling him in this scene that he never seems more human than when he talks about Josette.

In telling this latest version of the story, Barnabas says that as Josette came to feel that her youth was wasted on the elderly Jeremiah, it dawned on him that there was a way he could offer her eternal youth. This harks back to #233, when Barnabas told Vicki and Liz’ daughter Carolyn the story of Josette’s death, that she leapt off the cliff because she was being pursued by her lover. So we are to assume that Josette killed herself rather than let Barnabas turn her into a vampire. But it might suggest more than that. Whenever Barnabas met Josette, and whether it was aboard ship or on her arrival, he was not yet a vampire. We have not heard how he turned into one. Perhaps he involved himself in some kind of black magic in an attempt to keep himself and Josette young forever, and as a result he became a vampire and she fled from him to her death.

Vicki shows up and tells Barnabas and Julia about Burke. They are stunned. Julia’s reflex is to lean in and touch Vicki’s arm, Barnabas’ is to stagger back.

Barnabas quickly senses opportunity, and he shoos Julia away. He says that she was complaining of the cold and that for the sake of her health she ought not to stay. She is so obviously humiliated that only Vicki’s absorption in her own distress keeps her from noticing.

Barnabas plays the “good and faithful friend,” and Vicki looks over the edge of the cliff. She talks about the widows who have thrown themselves to their deaths from it over the years. She says that she had at first assumed that they were just “make-believe creatures,” but that if she thought Burke were really gone she would throw herself after them. Barnabas grabs her and urges her to stop such talk.

As this goes on, we hear the “Widows’ Wail,” a sound effect prominent in the early months of the show that the uninitiated mistake for wind, but that indicates something terrible is about to happen. When Vicki and Burke had their final conversation yesterday, they heard it, and he refused to admit its meaning. Vicki and Barnabas hear it now. The Widows bewail upcoming disasters, and Burke is already dead. Barnabas tells Vicki that she will be a bride very soon, and she nods and repeats, “A bride… very soon.” As she does, the Wail sounds louder than before.

Closing Miscellany

This episode includes one of the most famous bloopers in the entire series. When Liz is on the telephone getting the news about Burke’s plane crash, she refers to “That place in Brazil… (long pause)… (separate, equally long pause)… (fidget)… (different kind of pause)… Belém!” It is a wonder to behold.

This episode was taped on 16 October 1967. On the 28th of that month, Alexandra Moltke married Philip Isles. So, whether or not Vicki was going to become “a bride very soon,” her player was. The wedding announcement in The New York Times doesn’t mention Dark Shadows; it does mention that “Mrs David Ford” was part of the bridal party. That Mrs David Ford was Nancy Barrett, who played Carolyn, and her Mr Ford played Maggie’s father Sam.

From The New York Times, 29 October 1967

Neither Mrs Isles’ marriage to Philip nor Miss Barrett’s to David Ford lasted very long. Mrs Isles is still known as Mrs Isles, even though she was married to a doctor named Alfred Jaretzki for 33 years, ending with his death in 2014. By the time she met Jaretzki, she was a nationally known documentary filmmaker, and there is her son Adam Isles, the father of her three grandchildren and a former high official of the US government. So I suppose it made sense to stick with that name. In any case, I doubt very much that the widows were wailing for her.

My wife, Mrs Acilius, mentioned that even though we have seen the whole series before, she fully expected Barnabas to push Julia off the cliff. The episode pulled her in so completely that she didn’t stop to tell herself that she would have remembered if he’d done that.

Episode 337: Disowned

We open on a set we haven’t seen since #180, the archives of the old cemetery north of town. There, a scene plays out between two actors who aren’t really on the show. Daniel F. Keyes created the role of the Caretaker of the cemetery; Robert Gerringer took over the role of Dr Dave Woodard some months ago and did as much with it as anyone could. But neither of those men was willing to cross a picket line and break the National Association of Broadcast Engineers and Technicians strike, and so they were replaced with a couple of stooges.

The stooges are both terrible. Patrick McCray, Danny Horn, and John and Christine Scoleri all go into detail documenting non-Woodard’s incompetence, but the non-Caretaker is just as bad. Patrick McCray memorably described the Caretaker, in Keyes’ realization, as a “refugee from the EC comics universe.” This fellow has none of Keyes’ zest or whimsy; he simply recites his lines.

At one point, the non-Caretaker tells non-Woodard that it will take some time for him to locate the document he is asking about. Non-Woodard replies “Take your time!” We then have about ninety seconds of the non-Caretaker sorting through papers. The show is moving away from the real-time staging that had often marked its earlier phases, so this comes as a surprise.

The episodes in which the archive set was introduced included a lot of talk about the geography of the cemeteries around the town of Collinsport. They told us that the old cemetery north of town was the resting place of the Stockbridges, Radcliffes, and some other old families, but that most of the Collinses were buried in their own private cemetery elsewhere. They also mentioned a public cemetery closer to town where the remains of less aristocratic Collinsporters might be found. In today’s opening scene, non-Woodard tells the non-Caretaker that they had met previously in Eagle Hill Cemetery. Eagle Hill is the name now associated with the old cemetery north of town. So perhaps this building, which also houses a tomb in which several of the Stockbridges were laid to rest, is not in Eagle Hill Cemetery, but one of the others.

In his last few episodes, Robert Gerringer had a couple of scenes in which he and David Henesy established a close relationship between Woodard and strange and troubled boy David Collins. Today, non-Woodard sits on the couch in the drawing room at Collinwood and tells David he has come to believe everything he has been saying, including the stories that have led the other adults to call in a psychiatrist. As my wife, Mrs Acilius, pointed out, that would have been a great payoff from Gerringer’s earlier scenes if he had been in it. It might have been effective enough if any competent actor had played the part of Woodard. Certainly Mr Henesy’s performance gives non-Woodard plenty to respond to. But he barks out his lines as if they were written in all-caps with randomly distributed exclamation points. It is a miserable disappointment.

There is also a scene where David’s father, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger, tries to convince his sister, matriarch Liz, that they ought to send David to military school. This both harks back to the first 39 weeks of Dark Shadows, when Roger openly hated his son and jumped at every chance to send him away, and illustrates the changes that have taken place since then, as Liz acknowledges that Roger is motivated by a sincere concern for David’s well-being. The scene is intelligently written and exquisitely acted. The high caliber of their work makes it all the more distressing to see Joan Bennett and Louis Edmonds on a scab job. David Henesy was ten years old, and had a stereotypical stage mother, so you can excuse his presence and marvel at his accomplished performance. But these two old pros don’t have any business on the wrong side of a strike.

Nor does Jonathan Frid. When non-Woodard goes to confront Barnabas, there are moments when Frid seems to be showing his own irritation with his scene-mate more than his character’s with his adversary. As well he might- neither man knows his lines particularly well, but even when Frid stops and looks down he expresses emotions Barnabas might well be feeling, and he is fascinating to watch. When non-Woodard doesn’t know what words he’s supposed to bark, he drifts away into nothing. But it serves Frid right to have to play off this loser- by this point, he knows full well that without him the show wouldn’t be on the air. He had no excuse at all for crossing that picket line.

The cemetery’s combination archive/ tomb was a prominent part of the storyline of undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. That storyline approached its climax in #183 when Peter Guthrie, PhD, confronted Laura in her home about being “The Undead,” prompting her to kill him. An episode beginning on that set and ending with someone holding a doctoral degree confronting an undead menace would seem to be an obvious callback to that story. Guthrie’s confrontation had a point- he wanted to offer to help Laura find a place in the world of the living if she would desist from her evil plans, an idea which Woodard’s old medical school classmate Dr Julia Hoffman picked up in her quest to cure Barnabas of vampirism. By contrast with Guthrie and Julia, Woodard is just being a fool.

Episode 333: Why are you lying?

A few days after Dark Shadows began, we learned that high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins had squandered his entire inheritance. He and his son, strange and troubled boy David, then moved into Roger’s childhood home, the great house of Collinwood. The house belongs to Roger’s sister Liz. Roger lives there as her guest, and draws a salary from her business as an employee.

Time and again, Liz tells Roger that he must behave himself; time and again, she shields him from the consequences of his actions. Liz may want to believe that she is a model of adult authority, but in fact their relationship is one of Bossy Big Sister and Bratty Little Brother.

Liz extends that enabling behavior to the rest of the family. In episode #10, David overheard Roger in the drawing room, telling Liz that he wanted to send him away to school. Liz refused, because she saw that as Roger’s attempt to resign his responsibilities as a father. For his part, David reacted by tampering with the brakes on Roger’s car so that they would fail when he was driving down a steep hill and kill him. His murder plan failed. When Liz discovered it in #32 she lied to the sheriff in order to keep the whole thing quiet, and a few days later she ordered the family’s handyman to take the blame for the crash.

David had no big sister. Liz’ daughter Carolyn would later become a surrogate sister to him, but through the first months of the show she took no interest at all in her cousin. David spent his time with his well-meaning governess, Vicki. David was certainly bratty towards Vicki, trying to frame her for his attempt on Roger’s life in #27, and making an attempt on hers in #84. But while Vicki was glad to be sisterly towards David, she did not fall into the same pattern with him that traps Liz and Roger. She listened to him patiently, and enforced rules firmly. In response, David not only stopped committing crimes against Vicki, but when his mother, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, tried to claim him, he chose life with Vicki over death with her. Episode #191, the last installment of Dark Shadows 1.0, ends with David in Vicki’s arms, his new mother consoling him for the loss of his original mother.

Roger and Liz are minor characters in Dark Shadows 2.0, and Vicki is fast fading into the background as well. But #332 and #333 take us back to the first weeks. Yesterday, David again overheard his father in the drawing room saying he wanted to send him away to “a special school” where psychotherapy can cure him of his weird ideas. But Vicki’s influence has realigned David from evil to good, so that instead of trying to kill his father, he tries to collect evidence that his ideas are not a product of mental illness. In that effort, he went to the Old House on the estate and came upon the coffin in which his cousin Barnabas Collins, a vampire, rests during the day. Barnabas found him there and was closing in on him when mad scientist Julia Hoffman came into the house.

Julia and Barnabas are at the center of the show now, and they reproduce Liz and Roger’s Bossy Big Sister/ Bratty Little Brother dynamic. When Barnabas announces that someone or other “must die!,” Julia talks him out of doing anything to bring that death about. Sometimes she threatens to expose him, sometimes she promises to cure him of vampirism, sometimes she wears him down with lists of the practical difficulties of the murders he would like to commit.

But Julia also conceals and destroys evidence of Barnabas’ crimes. She induces grave amnesia in his victim Maggie Evans, and lets his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie Loomis take the blame for abducting Maggie. In fact, she very nearly killed Willie when it looked like he might not go down quietly. She may have rescued David today, but she protects Barnabas all the time, and it seems to be just a matter of time before she becomes an active participant in a murder for his sake.

Back in the great house, local man Burke Devlin is conferring with Dave Woodard, MD. Burke says that he is worried about David’s “fantasies,” to which Woodard replies “If they are fantasies.” Woodard is coming to believe that Barnabas is an uncanny being responsible for Maggie’s abduction and the other troubles the town of Collinsport has seen recently, and he takes everything David says very seriously. When David comes home and announces that he found the coffin, that Barnabas tried to kill him, and that Barnabas is a dead thing that can move around at night, Woodard listens intently.

Julia comes in, as does Roger. Julia dismisses all of David’s assertions. She claims to have seen Barnabas’ basement, and to know that there is no coffin there. David looks at Julia, and asks in an oddly calm voice “Why are you lying?” Roger is appalled at this question, but Woodard studies David carefully as he asks it and studies Julia’s reaction just as closely afterward.

In #331, Woodard gave David a sleeping pill and asked him questions about the strange goings-on. Robert Gerringer and David Henesy played that scene marvelously. Gerringer showed Woodard’s struggle, as a man of science, to come to terms with a set of facts that made logical sense only in a world where supernatural forces are at work, while Mr Henesy showed David’s desperation to find a responsible adult who will listen to what he knows. Gerringer also showed Woodard’s tender affection for David, tugging the covers of his bed over him when he fell asleep. As Woodard watches David today, we see the same intellectual crisis and the same tenderness that he played then.

Roger demands David apologize to Julia. He will not. Woodard says they ought to go look at Barnabas’ basement and see if there really is a coffin there. Roger is horrified by the implied insult to his cousin, and forbids any such thing. Burke points out that Roger is in no position to forbid it, and accompanies Woodard to the Old House.

There, Barnabas presents himself as shocked that Burke and Woodard want to search his basement. Woodard is polite about the whole thing, but Burke is an utter swine, declaring that they won’t leave until Barnabas submits to their demand. This is not the first time returning viewers have seen Burke impose himself as an unwanted house-guest, and it doesn’t get more attractive the more we see it. When Barnabas orders them to leave, Burke says they will come back “with a search warrant!” Even under the law codes of soap opera land, this would seem to be an empty threat- neither of them is a police officer, and while it may be eccentric to keep a vacant coffin in your basement I can’t think of a reason to suppose it would be a crime. Watching this scene, my wife, Mrs Acilius, said that Burke is so obnoxious that he makes us root for Barnabas despite everything we know.

Burke and Woodard start to go, and Barnabas relents. He takes them to the basement. The coffin is usually in the main area at the foot of the stairs, but when the three of them get there some crates and a trunk are stacked up on that spot.

Burke goes down a little corridor and sees nothing there, either.

Burke and Woodard are embarrassed, and Barnabas grins. We know that he had moved the coffin so that when someone came to check out David’s story they would see nothing, and that his resistance to Burke and Woodard’s requests to search was put on for effect. Barnabas spends most of his time with other people pretending to be a living man born in the twentieth century; his grin is that of an actor who finds he has given a particularly convincing performance.

We had seen corridors in the basement when Barnabas was holding Maggie prisoner there. We saw them most prominently in the episode that ended with her escape, #260. In that one, they looked very extensive. He had kept Maggie in a prison cell at the end of one of those corridors. That cell had been there since Barnabas’ time as a living being in a previous century, but none of the many people who had visited the basement before Barnabas moved in, including Burke in #118, had seen the cell. So there must be quite a bit of space down there that only Barnabas knows about, but he has chosen to put his most embarrassing possession in the one place no one coming to the basement could fail to notice. It’s like the old days, when you’d go to visit a single guy at home and find that he had left sexually explicit magazines or videos on his coffee table.

Episode 329: The truth about Willie

We open in the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood, home to courtly gentleman Barnabas Collins. In a bedroom there occupied by Barnabas’ servant Willie, Sheriff George Patterson and artist Sam Evans have found evidence that convinces them they have solved the case of the abduction of Sam’s daughter Maggie. They found Maggie’s ring hidden in a candlestick. The room is in Barnabas’ house and he has unlimited access to it. Further, the house is the only place Willie could possibly have kept Maggie if he had held her prisoner. But for some unexplained reason, they are sure that the ring proves that Willie and only Willie abducted Maggie. When Barnabas says that he feels somehow responsible, Sam rushes to tell him that he mustn’t blame himself.

The sheriff says that he will be going to the hospital, where Willie is recovering from gunshot wounds the sheriff’s deputies inflicted on him when they were looking for a suspect. Barnabas hitches a ride with him.

At the hospital, Willie’s doctor, addled quack Dave Woodard, is conferring with his medical colleague Julia Hoffman. When he steps out of the room for a moment, we hear Julia’s thoughts in voiceover. She is thinking about killing Willie before he can regain consciousness and tell a story that will make it impossible for her ever to practice medicine again. She thinks of Barnabas’ voice demanding that she kill Willie. She is reaching for the catheter through which Willie is receiving fluids when Woodard comes back in. She tells him she was checking it, and he is glad when she confirms it is working correctly.

Returning viewers know that Barnabas is the one who abducted Maggie and committed the other crimes of which Willie is suspected, that he is a vampire, that Julia is a mad scientist trying to cure him of vampirism, and that in pursuing her project she has become deeply complicit in Barnabas’ wrongdoing. We also know that she has several times told him that she will draw the line at killing anyone herself, but that she has involved herself in so many other evil deeds that it was just a matter of time before she found herself on the point of crossing that line.

Barnabas and the sheriff arrive at the hospital. In the corridor, Barnabas is bewildered to find that the sheriff will not allow him to be present while he questions Willie. The sheriff has been so careless about treating miscellaneous people as if they were his deputies- for example, enlisting Sam yesterday to help him search Willie’s room- that Barnabas’ puzzlement is understandable. The conversation goes on for quite a while.

Note the poster that reads “Give Blood.” That’s a message Barnabas could endorse. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The sheriff enters Willie’s room, and greets Julia as “Dr Hoffman.” Woodard thinks Julia has come to Collinsport to investigate Maggie’s abduction, and so he has agreed to keep her professional identity secret from most people in town, including the sheriff for some reason. Therefore, she is startled at this form of address. Woodard explains that now that Maggie’s abductor has been identified, he doesn’t see a point in keeping law enforcement in the dark.

Julia meets Barnabas in the corridor. When she tells him that she didn’t kill Willie, he fumes and calls her a “bungling fool.” He says he will do the job himself, but Julia points out that Woodard and the sheriff are in the room with Willie now. They wind up staring at the clock for hours.

Willie regains consciousness. He doesn’t recognize Woodard. When the sheriff shows him Maggie’s ring, his eyes gleam and he claims that it is his. Returning viewers will remember that before Willie ever met Barnabas, he was obsessed with jewelry. He is terrified when he learns that it is night-time, and says that he knows why he is afraid.

The sheriff and Woodard go out into the corridor to talk with Julia and Barnabas. Woodard tells Julia that she was right- Willie is hopelessly insane. Apparently when they asked him what he was afraid of, he mentioned “a voice from a grave. Nothing else made more sense than that.”

Julia and Barnabas go into Willie’s room. He looks at Barnabas and asks “Who are you?” Barnabas shows surprise that Willie doesn’t know him. Willie asks if he is a doctor. “Yes,” replies Barnabas. “I am a doctor.”

Sheriff Patterson is played by Dana Elcar today. It is Elcar’s 35th and final appearance on Dark Shadows. He would go on to become one of the busiest and most distinguished character actors of his generation.

Elcar had his work cut out for him with the part of Sheriff Patterson. If a police officer on the show ever solved a case, or followed any kind of rational investigative procedure, or interpreted a clue correctly, the story would end immediately. So all the sheriffs and constables and detectives have to be imbeciles. Elcar reached into his actorly bag of tricks almost three dozen times, and always came out with some way to make it seem as if something more was going on in Sheriff Patterson’s mind than we could tell.

My wife, Mrs Acilius, exclaimed “I’m so glad Dana Elcar is playing this scene!” when Barnabas and the sheriff had their long conversation in the hospital corridor. This week’s episodes were shot out of sequence, so yesterday’s was made after Elcar had left. It featured Vince O’Brien as Sheriff Patterson. O’Brien was by no means a bad actor, but he didn’t make the character seem any smarter than the script did. Elcar seems so much like he has something up his sleeve that Jonathan Frid’s insistent pleading makes sense as a cover for a mounting panic. Without Elcar to play against, it might just have come off as whining.

With the conclusion of Willie’s story, this is John Karlen’s last appearance for a long while. Beginning shortly after Barnabas’ introduction to the show in April, his conversations with Willie have been the main way we find out what he is thinking and feeling. More recently, Willie and Julia have been having staff conferences in which they come up with new ideas and add a new kind of flexibility and dynamism to the vampire storyline. From time to time, Willie’s conscience gets the better of him, and he adds an unpredictable element to the story as he tries to thwart one of Barnabas’ evil plans. For all these reasons, removing Willie from the show drastically reduces the number of possible outcomes in any situation they might set up involving Barnabas. His departure, therefore, seems to signal that some sort of crisis is at hand.

In fact, Karlen wanted to leave Dark Shadows because he had a better offer from a soap called Love is a Many Splendored Thing. But the producers knew that no one else could play Willie after the audience had got used to Karlen, and so they wrote the character out until they could get him back. Still, losing Willie puts Barnabas’ story on a much narrower track. So far, each development has led us to speculate about an ever-growing list of directions the story might possibly take. From now on, we are entering a phase where we will often be stumped as to what might be coming next.

Episode 326: Some experience with child psychology

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.

Vicki checks to see if David has a fever. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

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.

Episode 321: How many times do I have to tell you?

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.

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.

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.

Episode 318: What can a little girl know?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Episode 310: A logical place

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.