Vampire Barnabas Collins spends most of his time on screen doing a job of acting. He is playing the role of a present-day gentleman from the long-forgotten English branch of the ancient and esteemed Collins family of Collinsport, Maine. His performance has been convincing enough that the Collinses have entrusted him with the long-abandoned Old House on the great estate of Collinwood. He and his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie reside there and have restored it to the condition it was in when Barnabas was alive.
Today, another actor comes to Collinwood. She is mad scientist Julia Hoffman. By profession, Julia is a medical doctor with specialties in psychiatry and hematology. She is treating Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, who is in a state of complete mental collapse after months as Barnabas’ victim. After Maggie escaped from Barnabas, her family doctor, addled quack Dave Woodard, decided to tell everyone in town that she was dead and send her to Julia’s mental hospital so long as her captor was unknown and at large. So when Julia figures out that the person responsible for Maggie’s woes is an undead monster who dwells at Collinwood, she has to conceal her identity from everyone there and in Collinsport.
In the drawing room of the great house at Collinwood, Julia tells well-meaning governess Vicki and Vicki’s charge, strange and troubled boy David Collins, that she is an historian writing a book about the Collinses. David immediately exposes a fatal flaw in Woodard’s cockamamie plan when he mentions a girl named Sarah whom he has seen near the Old House. Julia knows that Maggie saw Sarah when she was imprisoned and that Sarah visited Maggie’s father Sam and told him where to find her. If that information had been made public, Vicki and David would have been able to connect Sarah with the Old House, and the police would have suspected Barnabas weeks ago. Returning viewers know that Sarah is the ghost of Barnabas’ sister, a fact onto which Julia cottoned yesterday and of which she finds corroboration today.
Vicki tells Julia how elusive Sarah is
We also know that Barnabas wants Vicki to become his next victim, and that she is already under his influence to a substantial degree. When she and Julia are talking in the drawing room, Vicki waxes enthusiastic about how Barnabas has recreated a past world and committed himself to living in it, and says that this is a fine thing for him. “But not for you?” asks Julia. Vicki looks down, and with a troubled expression says that she supposes not.
When Julia asked “But not for you,” she drew a reaction from my wife, Mrs Acilius. Mrs Acilius said that while Julia may not seem like any kind of therapist in the sessions we’ve seen her have with Maggie, her delivery of that question sounds exactly like every therapist she’s ever had. With Maggie, the mad scientist is very much on the surface of Julia’s manner, but when she is playing the role of Miss Hoffman the historian she can draw on her profession to make herself appealing.
Vicki takes Julia to the Old House and shows her the restored bedroom of Josette Collins. Vicki says that she could stay in that room forever, which is as a matter of fact precisely what Barnabas has in mind for her. Julia feels a chill as the sun sets. Perhaps this is the result of Barnabas coming back to life and rising from his coffin in the basement of the house, or perhaps it is Sarah or another friendly ghost* trying to warn her to get out before the vampire finds her. Whatever its cause, Vicki doesn’t feel it. Again, we don’t know whether this is because Barnabas already has a strong enough hold on Vicki that she is insensitive to warnings about him, or if it is a message specifically for Julia.
Julia wants to leave the room, but Vicki insists on lighting a candle so that they can see it as Josette did. The candle burns long enough for Julia to make the appropriate comments, and then something we cannot see blows it out while Julia feels another chill. The cold still doesn’t reach Vicki.
Julia returns to Woodard’s home office,** where she has stashed Maggie. Maggie has the doll Sarah gave her when she visited her in Barnabas’ dungeon. Julia takes the doll from Maggie, much to Maggie’s displeasure. She holds the doll and says she wants her to listen for the doll’s name. Maggie furrows her brow and asks “Doll talk?” Maggie has been speaking in complete sentences lately, but apparently Julia’s latest antics have been too much for her and she has lost some ground.
Julia orders Maggie to listen and says the names of some of the people at Collinwood. Maggie doesn’t react until she gets to “Barnabas Collins,” at which point Maggie freaks out. Julia holds her and repeats “It is the wrong name” until Maggie stops crying and starts singing “London Bridge.” She then looks away and says “The wrong name for the doll… but the right name for… something else.”
*Sarah’s little cousin, Caspar Collins?
**An exact replica of his office in the hospital as we saw it in #242. Man knows how he likes to have things set up.
Four and a half weeks ago, Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, escaped from vampire Barnabas Collins. Barnabas managed to scramble Maggie’s brains sufficiently that she has amnesia covering her time as his victim and much of the rest of her life as well. She is now a patient at a mental hospital called Windcliff, where her care is supervised by Dr Julia Hoffman.
Maggie’s family doctor, addled quack Dave Woodard, is an old friend of Julia’s. He had recommended Maggie be sent to Windcliff. He had also come up with a cockamamie scheme to protect her from her captor by hiding her there and telling everyone in and around the town of Collinsport that she was dead. If he had known that the captor was a vampire, this might have made some kind of sense- no character on Dark Shadows has ever heard of Dracula, so they don’t know how to fight against vampires. But he doesn’t know that, so his plan is just a way for the writers to stall while they try to come up with more plot points.
Today we open with Woodard in Julia’s office, complaining that she isn’t communicating with him about Maggie’s case. She tells him that there have been no developments worth reporting. Returning viewers know that this is a lie, because in a session we saw yesterday Maggie remembered a lot of sense impressions from her time of captivity and Julia told her that they represented tremendous progress. Woodard tells Julia that a lack of new information is no excuse for her failure to return any of his last six phone calls. He says that she seems to be intent on hoarding any information she may glean from Maggie as her own private possession, an impression he describes as frightening.
Julia responds to this characterization with a display of offense, and Woodard apologizes. She then brings up an idea that occurred to her at the end of yesterday’s episode. She says that Maggie’s memory might improve if she takes her to visit Eagle Hill Cemetery, where she was found wandering early in her illness. Woodard objects strongly that Maggie’s condition, as Julia has described it, is so delicate that such a visit might do her permanent harm. Julia retreats and promises she won’t actually take Maggie to the cemetery. This is such a flagrant lie that the camera momentarily goes haywire, focusing on Woodard’s chair rather than his face.
Woodard leaves, and Julia calls Maggie in. She’s already wearing her coat. She asks where Julia is going to take her, and she tells her not to worry about that.
On the great estate of Collinwood, well-meaning governess Vicki is staring vacantly into space while listening to an antique music box Barnabas gave her as part of his plan to subject her to the same treatment he inflicted on Maggie. A knock comes at the door. Vicki closes the music box and goes to answer it. It is her boyfriend, fake Shemp Burke Devlin.
Burke is waging a determined battle against the story, and he is fighting dirty. He doesn’t want Vicki to have anything to do with Barnabas, or with the ghost of Josette Collins. When Vicki says she wants to lay flowers on Josette’s grave in the cemetery, where we know she will cross paths with Maggie and Julia, he resists furiously. When she reminds him that she has had dealings with Josette’s ghost, he says “Or you think you have.” In previous episodes, including yesterday’s and Monday’s, he knew she had, and in an earlier period of the show he knew that several other characters, including some of the most level-headed ones, had also encountered Josette’s ghost. When he starts belittling Vicki for believing in “the spooks of Collinwood,” it therefore comes off as an especially crude instance of gaslighting. The Mrs and I aren’t much for profanity, but we both cussed at the screen when Burke was disgracing himself this way.
Julia and Maggie are in the cemetery. I believe it is the first time we’ve seen the set in a daylight scene. You can see the shadows of the foliage on the soundstage walls, and the corners where the walls meet. I can’t believe the director meant for us to see those things, but I kind of like it- the situation needs a touch of unreality, and the obvious falsity gives it the feeling of a black box theater.
Some of the shadows on the wall that Art Wallace spoke ofCorner of the soundstage
Maggie is agitated. Julia tells her to calm down and that everything is all right. I’m no expert, but I kind of doubt that talk therapy involves a lot of “Calm down!” and “Everything is all right!” It reminded me of this Saturday Night Live sketch from the 90s, in which Patrick Stewart plays “Phil McCracken, Scottish Therapist,” a psychologist who won’t stand for any emotionalism from his patients.
Vicki and Burke see Julia and Maggie in the distance. When Maggie turns to face them, Vicki recognizes her. Julia whisks her away before Burke can see her. When Vicki tells Burke she saw Maggie, he immediately unloads on her with the same garbage he handed her at Collinwood. He declares that Maggie is dead, that Vicki knows she’s dead, that she can’t possibly have seen her, that “there is a resemblance, THAT’S! ALL!” When he asks “What’s wrong with you?” I stopped the streaming and shouted at the screen “She’s wasting her time with you, you ******* ********, that’s what’s wrong with her!” To that, Mrs Acilius said that we should just restart the show and get through the scene.
Part of what makes Burke’s behavior so infuriating is the writer’s fault. A first-time viewer, unaware that what Burke is telling Vicki are delusions that suggest she is crazy are in fact things he knows to be true, might think that he is being reasonable in dismissing ideas about ghosts and the like. But even that viewer will realize that a person ought to be nicer about it. When Vicki says she saw Maggie, Burke could easily have suggested that they go up to the woman and introduce themselves, thinking that a closer look will disabuse her of the notion. But actor Anthony George must also bear part of the blame.
George C. Scott famously told Gene Siskel that there are three things to consider in evaluating an actor’s performance: first is to make the audience believe that the person they are looking at is the sort of person who might do the things the character does. This is in turn dependent on casting- put the wrong person in the part, and all is lost. Second are the choices the actor makes in the key emotional moments. Performers have any number of options as to how they will use their faces, voices, and limbs to show a character’s feelings, and those who make a lasting impression are those who make choices that are at once totally unexpected and perfectly logical. Third is the zest of performance, the actor’s joy in the opportunity to create a character. If that doesn’t come through, nothing else is worth much.
As Burke, Anthony George fails all three of these tests. Burke would have been a difficult part for anyone to take over, both because the originator of the role, Mitch Ryan, was so memorable, and because the character had lost all connection to any ongoing storylines by the time Ryan left. And by his own admission, George knew nothing about soap operas and had no idea how to play a romantic interest on one when he joined Dark Shadows. That’s where he fails the casting part of the believability test.
As for the skill part, George has something going for him. He is always mindful of his physicality, moving only those parts of his body he needs to show us who he is and keeping the rest of himself admirably still. He also keeps his voice remarkably consistent, both by holding a steady level of volume and maintaining a simple, precise pitch. In these and other ways, he shows impressive levels of technical proficiency as an actor, but the result is a mannered, unconvincing performance. His Burke doesn’t seem to be a real person. As a cardboard figure, he becomes an abstract symbol of whatever he’s doing, and when he’s doing something bad he’s hard not to hate.
Since he makes one choice for each resource available to him and sticks with it unvaryingly throughout the episode, he doesn’t give the audience any surprises. Nor does he yield anything to his scene-mates. They always know exactly what’s coming from him. George’s eyes are always watching another actor intently, as he watches Alexandra Moltke Isles intently today, but nothing in her performance can divert him from his plan, not in the smallest particular. When Burke isn’t listening to the other character, as he isn’t listening to Vicki, George’s disconnection from the other actors makes Burke seem like an irredeemable jackass.
Nor does George show any zest for the part. He covers his discomfort with soap acting by plastering on a smile whenever the script allows it, but he is stiff when Burke ought to be loose, cool when he ought to be warm, and loud when he ought to speak with a quiet, nuanced voice. The result is just sad and awkward. When Burke is being pleasant, we can feel sorry for George, but when he has to play the scenes like the ones Burke gets today we just want him to get off the screen and leave us alone.
Compare George’s Burke with Grayson Hall’s Julia, and you will see how an actor can determine an audience’s reaction to a character. Julia is a terrible therapist. She lies repeatedly to Woodard in the beginning, denying the severe breach of ethics and disturbing disregard of public safety involved in covering up what she knows and suspects about Maggie’s experiences and running an unconscionable risk with Maggie’s mental health by taking her to the cemetery. She lies again to Maggie at the end, promising that they will duck into the Tomb of the Collinses only for a moment and then refusing to let her leave there when she starts to show a violent emotional reaction. Her methods are so unorthodox and so harsh that we suspect she is not interested in helping Maggie at all. Because we have known Maggie since episode #1, and Kathryn Leigh Scott’s performance as Maggie renews our fondness for her every time she appears, we ought to feel deep hostility towards Julia.
But we don’t. In fact, Julia quickly becomes (almost) every Dark Shadows fan’s favorite character. The George C. Scott tests tell us why. Hall’s manner is so intense that we can believe her as a mad scientist; her uninhibited use of every facial muscle, of the full range of her vocal output, and of subtle tricks of movement she learned from choreographers when she appeared in musicals may have produced a style that no acting teacher could recommend as a model, but they do mean that every moment she is on screen she is doing something we wouldn’t have predicted; and she’s clearly having a blast. She can do things vastly worse than what makes us hate Burke today, and we will still want her to come back again and again.
Closing Miscellany
The opening voiceovers aren’t usually the best-written parts of the show, but there is a particularly bad bit in today’s: “Hidden deep in the cliffs of Collinwood, the majestic, ancient rocks that separate the Earth from the sea, there is a tiny cove carved by a long-ago sea. No one at Collinwood has seen it, and no one will ever see it.” If no one ever will see it, why bother telling us about it? The narrator tells us that it is because “the Earth knows how to hide its secrets well. Sometimes men, too, must hide secrets.” Does this mean that “no one ever will” discover the secrets the characters are hiding from each other? That isn’t a very promising thing to tell the audience of a soap opera, a genre which is all about unsuccessful attempts to keep secrets and their aftermath.
Maggie tells Julia that she doesn’t recognize the name Collins. She has lived her whole life in the town of Collinsport, where most people are employed by Collins Enterprises, which is owned by the Collins family who live at Collinwood. That’s some pretty widespread amnesia she has.
The show has been going back and forth on the dates when Barnabas and Josette Collins originally lived and died. Today we get a long look at Josette’s tombstone, giving her dates as 1800-1822, and another at the plaque on Barnabas’ little sister Sarah’s resting place in the mausoleum, with the dates 1786-1796. Those dates fit with a remark Barnabas made to his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie in #271, that Sarah lived long before he met Josette, but not with his remark in #281 that Josette had been dead for “almost 200 years,” much less with a book we saw in #52 that gave her dates as 1810-1834.
We cut back and forth between an opulent estate called Collinwood and a mental hospital called Windcliff.
At Collinwood, we spend our time with well-meaning governess Vicki. From the beginning of Dark Shadows, Vicki has been the audience’s main point of view character. The audience is now made up chiefly of people who want to see how they are going to fit vampire Barnabas Collins into an ongoing series, and Barnabas’ principal concern is getting hold of a woman, erasing her personality, and replacing it with that of his lost love Josette. So of course Vicki is fascinated with Barnabas and fantasizes about being Josette.
Matriarch Liz has functioned as a blocking figure. Her goal has been to keep her secrets. Her actions in pursuit of that goal have slowed story development in a largely futile attempt to create suspense. She’s fresh out of secrets, but is still trying to put the brakes on. She keeps complaining that Vicki’s interest in Josette is unwholesome.
Liz has a point. Barnabas has settled on Vicki as the next subject of his experiment. To that end, he has given Vicki Josette’s music box. When he was trying his lunatic plan on Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, he had given Maggie the music box. Evidently the music box has some kind of magical power over the women to whom Barnabas gives it. When she opens it, Vicki sits for hours staring vacantly into space listening to its simple tune.
The previous night, Vicki had worn Josette’s dress at a costume party Barnabas hosted in his house on the estate. The party ended in a séance in which Josette spoke through Vicki. Liz mentions this possession as a sign that Vicki is becoming too involved with Josette. Vicki doesn’t see anything out of the ordinary. She blandly exclaims “It’s happened before!” Indeed, the show’s first séance, in #170 and #171, climaxed with Vicki channeling a message from Josette. Liz points out that this doesn’t make it better.
Vicki goes to Barnabas’ house to return the dress. She and Barnabas’ sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie take it to Josette’s restored bedroom upstairs. There, she blissfully tells Willie she wishes she could wear Josette’s clothes all the time. Remembering what Barnabas did to Maggie and knowing his plans for Vicki, Willie winces. He hates the things Barnabas does, but is too far under his power to actively oppose him. Vicki goes on about how close she is coming to feel to Josette, and Willie winces harder. She tells him that she has been listening to the music box for hours at a time, and he shouts “You shouldn’t do that!” When she asks why not, he takes a second to come up with something that he can say. He tells her she might damage the mechanism. Still blissful, she says, “Oh, I’ll be careful.”
Willie tells Vicki that tomorrow is Josette’s birthday. Vicki is delighted with this information. She resolves to go to the cemetery and lay flowers on Josette’s grave. When she tells Liz of this plan, Liz objects to it. Because of Liz’ function as a blocking figure, her opposition implies that it will advance the plot. To appease Liz, Vicki agrees not to go alone, but to take Liz’ fellow narrative speed-bump Burke Devlin.
At Windcliff, Maggie is in session with her therapist, Dr Julia Hoffman. As a result of her time as Barnabas’ prisoner, Maggie has amnesia and can speak only with difficulty. In his effort to Josettify Maggie, Barnabas combined his own supernatural powers with sensory stimuli like the music box that were supposed to elicit the responses he had in mind. Now Julia is trying to recreate those stimuli in her effort to recover Maggie’s memories and restore her personality.
At one point, Maggie tells Julia about a sweet scent that regular viewers know to be that of Josette’s jasmine perfume. As she does so, music starts playing on the soundtrack that we have heard when Josette’s ghost has appeared. When this happened, my wife, Mrs Acilius, said “Josette is there.” Later in the episode, when Vicki is in Josette’s room with Willie, Vicki takes a whiff of the perfume. The music strikes up then too. Josette’s ghost hasn’t manifested since March- maybe the ghost’s musical cue is now the perfume’s.
Their use of sensory stimuli is not the only way in which Julia is a reverse-image reflection of Barnabas. Barnabas is a vampire, so we expect to hate him and oppose his plans. But he is also the character who makes the show fun to watch, so we find ourselves wanting to see more of him. Further, he evolves into a comic villain, with whom we identify as we see him scramble to keep his madcap schemes from backfiring. And the longer we see him, the more of actor Jonathan Frid’s personality comes through, and Frid seems to have been adorable.
Julia is a doctor trying to help a patient we know and care about, so we expect to like her and cheer her on. Yet she always seems more than a little sinister. She takes a stern, occasionally impatient tone with Maggie today, which we might think is part of her therapeutic technique. But in her previous appearance, in #265, she took the same tone with Maggie’s father, boyfriend, and family doctor, none of whom is her patient. More than once in that episode, she made remarks suggesting that she suspected that Maggie’s condition was the result of an encounter with an undead monster, then refused to explain what she meant. We wonder why she would withhold such information. At the end of today’s installment, she insists that Maggie return to a place where something terrible happened to her. When Maggie begs her not to make her go back there, we see a closeup of Julia’s face with a look of satisfaction that led Mrs Acilius to say “Julia can do ‘evil face’ as well as Barnabas can.”*
Julia’s E-face
Julia’s grim satisfaction mirrors ours. Ever since Liz gave her great show of reluctance at Vicki’s plan to lay flowers at Josette’s grave, we’ve been wondering what kind of progress a stop at the cemetery could possibly represent for the story. Julia has unwittingly answered that question for us. The place she is going to take Maggie is, of course, that very cemetery.
*Mrs Acilius had a lot to say about Julia as Barnabas in reverse, this whole section is derived from her insights.
Vampire Barnabas Collins is giving a costume party using clothes that belonged to members of his family in the century when he was alive. It isn’t exactly a wild evening. Barnabas doesn’t appear to have planned any activities beyond mutual admiration of the costumes and a guided tour of his house. Moreover, four of the five guests live together and the fifth is fake Shemp Burke Devlin.
My wife, Mrs Acilius, said that the first time we watched the episode it was enough for her to see the actors dressed in antique clothes. But this time, she couldn’t help but notice their awkward pauses as they sit around with nothing to do.
There are some red herrings that particularly bothered her. For example, when the other guests left for the party while well-meaning governess Vicki waited for Burke, the show dwelt on Vicki for quite some time, leading us to expect that her separation from the group would cause something dramatic to happen. When Vicki and Burke arrive shortly after the other guests, Barnabas is startled by the sight of Burke in his costume. For a moment it seems that this might be the dramatic thing we were led to expect, but Barnabas recovers his composure right away and Burke doesn’t seem to be offended. Everyone forgets about it instantly. Vicki and Burke might as well have come with everyone else.
Amid the boredom, the guests start to notice cold spots in the room and other traditional indications of ghostly presences. Roger Collins gets a bright idea. There is no electricity and are therefore no light bulbs in Barnabas’ house, so the idea is represented by a candle above his head.
Roger has an idea
Roger suggests they hold a séance to contact any ghosts who might be in the room. Everyone is reluctant, especially Barnabas, but Roger gets his way. After a lot of grumbling from around the table, well-meaning governess Vicki goes into a trance. Roger announces that a visitor from the world of the dead is about to deliver a message. The closing credits roll.
Closing Miscellany
This episode was taped on the Fourth of July. I can’t help but suspect that the characters’ impatience with Barnabas’ snoozer of a party may reflect the cast’s frustration at having to work on a holiday.
As the party begins, a bell tower strikes eleven. We’ve heard this chiming in Barnabas’ house before. Barnabas identifies it as the bells of “the chapel in the valley,” and matriarch Liz remarks that she hadn’t realized you could hear it so clearly in his house.
So much emphasis is placed on Liz’ resemblance to Barnabas’ mother and Vicki’s to Josette Collins that we wonder if Joan Bennett and Alexandra Moltke Isles will play their ghosts in upcoming episodes. Barnabas mentions that Roger doesn’t look as much like his father as Liz looks like his mother, so any plans they did have along those lines evidently did not include Louis Edmonds.
This is the third séance we’ve seen on Dark Shadows. In #170 and #171, the ghost of Josette spoke through Vicki, and in #186 someone named David Radcliffe spoke through strange and troubled boy David Collins. Roger had been a staunch opponent of those earlier séances, a fact he acknowledges in passing as he begins his pitch today.
Vampire Barnabas Collins and his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie Loomis talk about the man Barnabas killed the other day, seagoing con man Jason McGuire. Willie has been in town, and assures Barnabas that no one misses Jason. They say a few words about Barnabas’ plan to take control of well-meaning governess Vicki, erase her personality, and replace it with that of his long-lost love Josette. Barnabas then decides to invite the residents of the great house of Collinwood to a costume party.
In the drawing room of the great house, matriarch Liz and her brother Roger talk about the family business. Liz hasn’t willingly left home for 18 years, for reasons that were never very interesting and that the show has now promised to stop bothering us with. So Roger urges her to stop working from home and start coming to the office. She reflexively says that she can’t, but then agrees that she will. It’s an interesting moment of psychological realism- even if Liz’ original motive for cooping herself up had nothing to do with agoraphobia, such a long immurement would breed tenacious habits.
Liz and Roger wonder about Jason. He had been living at Collinwood while blackmailing Liz, and now has disappeared. They are glad to see the last of him, but are puzzled that he didn’t take any of his belongings. Even his razor is still in his room.
That will also strike regular viewers as odd. Willie had been staying at Collinwood when Barnabas claimed him, and they were able to get Willie’s things out of the house without anyone noticing them come or go. You’d think they’d have done the same with Jason’s things, just to prevent any suspicion forming.
Part Two. Gone the Sun
Barnabas comes by the great house. Vicki greets him at the door. He invites her to come outside and look at the scenery. He chats about the loveliness of the sea and the Moon, then starts hating on the Sun. “I find the daylight harsh and cruel, whereas the night is kind and soft… When one considers that the Moon takes on its beauty by reflecting the rays of the Sun, it seems inconceivable that the sun could be so ugly… One cannot even look upon it without being blinded; it burns the skin, it scorches the Earth.” The episode was taped in New York City on 5 July 1967, a fairly hot day, so the part about how the Sun “scorches the Earth” was at least topical.
In reply to this, Vicki says of the Sun that “our whole universe revolves around it. We can’t exist without it… man was designed to live with it.” Vicki may overstate the scientific case with her reference to “the whole universe,” but she is putting the matter into a powerful mythological context. In trying to alienate Vicki from the Sun, Barnabas is trying to lure her into his private world away from the common light in which communities of people live. His world is cut off from the cycle of growth, fertility, aging, and death which the Sun traditionally represents.
Further, the Sun is in many cultures a symbol of the masculine, and its relationship to the Earth represents the union of male and female. Barnabas’ plans for Vicki will short-circuit her sex life and replace it with something that is essentially solitary. Perhaps this aspect of the vampire myth explains why so many pubescent girls in the late 1960s embraced Barnabas. Though within his narrative universe he is a blood-sucking creature of Hell, in terms of the situation such girls are actually uneasy about he is a Non-Threatening Boy who will not push her into something she isn’t ready for.
That may also be part of the reason why LGBTQIAAPP+ people have had such a complicated reaction to the image of the vampire over the years. On the one hand, the vampire promises an escape from compulsory heterosexuality. On the other, that escape leaves in place a whole cosmic order centered on opposite sex relationships. It leads to an absolute dead end of isolation, sterility, and parasitism. A figure like Barnabas shows that a real liberation for sexual minority groups can come only in the course of revolutionary change on the grandest scale, not as a result of individual adventures.
Part Three. A Family Party
Barnabas invites Liz, Roger, and Vicki to his party. Liz initially declines. While Barnabas and Vicki wait in the study, presumably going into greater depth about how ugly the Sun is, Roger exhorts her to give up her reclusive ways. She agrees.
Barnabas explains that he has clothing that belonged to their ancestors in the late eighteenth century, and that he will make it available to his guests. He will dress as his “ancestor” (actually himself,) Barnabas Collins. Roger and Liz will dress as Barnabas’ parents, Joshua and Naomi Collins. He turns to Vicki and says “You will be Josette Collins.” The credits roll.
Vicki reacts to Barnabas’ casting her as Josette
Vicki was excited when Barnabas first invited her to the party, but looks pensive when Barnabas tells her that she will be Josette. My wife, Mrs Acilius, pointed out that for Vicki, Josette is still an active presence. Josette’s ghost appeared and spoke to her in #126, and interacted with her and her friends many times during the arc centering on Roger’s ex-wife, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. Further, Barnabas’ house had been Josette’s stronghold in the months between her first appearance in #70 and Barnabas’ arrival there in #212. As far as Vicki is concerned, Barnabas is asking her to dress in the clothing of the mistress of the house and to impersonate her while she watches. That would make anyone feel silly.
For sixteen weeks, from March to June, seagoing con man Jason McGuire had lived the high life blackmailing reclusive matriarch Liz. Now the blackmail scheme has blown up in Jason’s face, and the police have given him until sundown to clear out of Collinsport. Looking for someone else to exploit, Jason has come to the Old House on Liz’ estate, where her distant cousin Barnabas lives with Jason’s onetime henchman Willie.
Jason lingers outside a window. He sees Willie bring Barnabas a chest full of jewelry. He hears Barnabas and Willie talking about Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, whom they abducted, held prisoner, and, they believe, killed. He is still listening when Barnabas and Willie start talking about well-meaning governess Vicki, to whom Barnabas plans to give the same treatment.
A bit later, Jason finds Willie in the woods outside the house. He demands Willie meet him in the Blue Whale tavern at noon the next day and give him a pile of jewels from the chest. He tells Willie that he knows what he and Barnabas did to Maggie and what they are planning to do to Vicki. Willie agrees to the meeting.
We cut to the tavern. Jason is waiting at the bar when Vicki comes in. She grimaces at the sight of Jason, then asks Bob the bartender if he has seen Liz’ daughter Carolyn. Bob shakes his head no.
Jason insists on talking to Vicki. We do not know what to expect from this conversation. Jason is a villain who has often taken pleasure in being cruel to Liz and other characters, and the scenes in which he threatened Liz were so repetitious as to constitute cruelty to the audience. He believes that Barnabas is a serial killer of women, and his plan to squeeze money out of Barnabas requires him to turn a blind eye while he continues in that career. On the other hand, Jason showed genuine and unselfish concern for Willie when he was ill, and actor Dennis Patrick has taken every opportunity to play him as a comedy villain, with whom we can empathize while he scrambles to keep his lies from being exposed. So we can easily imagine Jason wanting to give Vicki some kind of warning.
Jason begins their talk with a question about Carolyn. Vicki tells him that Carolyn left the house because she believed the false story that he had used to blackmail Liz, and expresses her intense disapproval of him. He makes some defensive and self-pitying remarks, and Vicki continues to tell him how bad he is. He tells her that she will soon suffer hardships while he is far away, laughing at her. She says she doesn’t know what he means, and he refuses to explain. She says “There is nothing as sad as a hollow threat.” At no point in any of this had it seemed that Jason was about to warn Vicki of Barnabas’ plans.
As Vicki is going, Jason says he wonders who she really is and where she comes from. He then says that she does not know the answers to those questions. He says that he was in Collinsport 18 years ago, and he might know them. That stops Vicki in her tracks. She turns, looks at Jason, and asks him what he knows. He says that whatever he knows, he will take with him. She says that he is only trying to hurt her. He asks if he is succeeding. She goes.
Vicki wonders if Jason knows something
It has been a while since we last heard about Vicki’s quest to solve the riddle of her origins. That story element never amounted to much, in part because, as Wallace McBride pointed out in a Collinsport Historical Society post in 2020, the very first episode of the show ended by showing us Liz and Vicki as each other’s mirror images. From that point on, everything has pointed to Liz as Vicki’s biological mother. Art Wallace’s original story bible for Dark Shadows had suggested that Liz’ ex-husband Paul Stoddard would be revealed as Vicki’s father and some other woman as her mother, but Art Wallace also said that the story might be better served by saying that Liz was her mother by another man, and that seems to be what they have tacitly done.
Art Wallace’s plan had also been that Vicki’s origins would be revealed at the climax of the blackmail story. It is not clear when they gave up on that. Since the actual episode, #271, runs drastically short, it is possible that they changed their minds only a few days before taping.
One of the possibilities was that Liz would admit that she was Vicki’s mother and Jason was her father. They haven’t done much to suggest that there ever was a sexual relationship between Liz and Jason, so this possibility lurks far in the background. If it were to turn out to be true, Jason’s indifference to Barnabas’ plans for Vicki becomes all the more chilling. Since Stoddard was also indifferent to Carolyn’s well-being, it would give Liz’ two daughters something miserable to have in common.
Jason was a friend of Stoddard, so he might have some information that would be meaningful if they are going for a twist in which all the hints that Liz is Vicki’s mother by another man were false and another woman were her mother by Stoddard. At any rate, when Jason says that whatever information he has will leave with him, it seems that he is telling the audience that the quest for Vicki’s origins will never be resolved.
Willie shows up at the tavern and gives Jason one piece of jewelry. Jason is loudly dissatisfied with this. Willie leaves him.
Later, Jason breaks into the Old House. As he enters, three notes ring out on the soundtrack. I sometimes laugh at this three note motif with my wife, Mrs Acilius. Not only because “dum, dum, DUMM!” is a corny way to end a show, but also because it often follows a three syllable closing line. So if the last words spoken before we hear it are “I want more!,” we will sing “I- want- MORE!” Since Barnabas is a far more dangerous person than Jason knows, this time Mrs Acilius sang “You- are- DEAD!”
Matriarch Liz is being blackmailed into marrying seagoing con man Jason McGuire. A couple of days ago, she decided the only way to address this situation was to throw herself to her death from a nearby cliff overlooking the sea. She has been prevented from completing this plan twice, first by her housekeeper Mrs Johnson, then by her cousin Barnabas the vampire.
Today, she tries to say goodbye to her nephew, strange and troubled boy David, and to her daughter, aspiring biker mama Carolyn. David tells her it sounds like she is going someplace. “You’re not, are you?” “Of course not!” she replies. Her storyline certainly isn’t going anywhere, why should she be any different.
David suggests that he and Liz take a walk on the beach. He says he wants to show her a cove he found in the rocks there. This will pique the interest of returning viewers. In #260, Barnabas’ prisoner Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town, found a secret panel in the wall of her cell and followed it to just such a chamber, from which she escaped onto the beach. Perhaps David has found the channel that leads into Barnabas’ dungeon.
When Liz tries to have a pleasant conversation with Carolyn, Carolyn responds angrily. She is furious about Liz’ upcoming marriage and insists on voicing her objections to it. Afterward, she has a talk with well-meaning governess Vicki in which she appears to regret her anger. She is worried that Liz might do something desperate.
When Carolyn shares her fears, Vicki asserts that they are groundless. Since both Mrs Johnson and Barnabas had confided in Vicki about Liz’ previous journeys to the edge of the cliff, this seems like a Dumb Vicki moment. But Vicki does go up to Liz’ room afterward. She finds that Liz is gone and she has written her date of death in the family Bible. We cut to the cliff, where Liz is approaching the edge.
The date she wrote was 10 April 1967. The episode was taped on 19 June and broadcast on 5 July; the usual rule of soap opera time is that the events are taking place the day the audience sees them, so that is a puzzling date. All the more so because there was no episode taped or broadcast on 10 April; that date fell on a Sunday, and the actors were in the middle of a strike at that time.
There is some good acting in this one. Joan Bennett does a good job showing Liz having achieved the kind of peace people sometimes reach after they’ve made up their minds to commit suicide, and Liz’ scene with David is especially fine. My wife, Mrs Acilius, was enthusiastic about these performances, but they frustrated me- seeing how good the actors are just made me wish they had a decent script to work with.
On Thursday, reclusive matriarch Liz admitted to well-meaning governess Vicki that she is being blackmailed. Eighteen years ago, Liz killed her husband, Paul Stoddard. Seagoing con man Jason McGuire then buried Stoddard in the basement. Now, Jason is threatening to expose this secret unless Liz marries him.
Today, Liz asks Vicki to be the legal witness at her wedding to Jason. Vicki demurs, saying that she might be compelled to speak up when the officiant asks if there is anyone who present who knows why these two people should not be joined in matrimony. The conversation then shades off into Vicki urging Liz to share her secret with her daughter, flighty heiress Carolyn. Liz won’t look directly at Vicki when Carolyn’s name is mentioned.
Word is spreading that Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, is dead. Vicki had just received that news when Liz brought up the wedding. Alexandra Moltke Isles does a fine job of expressing Vicki’s emotional tumult as she reels from one kind of shock to another. When Vicki breaks the news of Maggie’s death to Carolyn and then quarrels with Carolyn about her plan to marry motorcycle enthusiast Buzz, Mrs Isles reprises this transition from fresh bereavement to festering conflict, again quite effectively.
Carolyn goes out with Buzz, and Vicki goes for a walk on the beach with her boyfriend, Burke Devlin. Each episode begins with a voiceover which Mrs Isles delivers in character as Vicki. Typically, these consist of remarks about the sea and the weather which have some vaguely metaphorical connection to what’s happening on the show. While Vicki sits with Burke and stares out at the water, she launches into one of these monologues. In response, my wife, Mrs Acilius, started laughing so hard we had to pause the streaming. When Burke joins in with the observation that it is getting dark and “may get darker”- sometimes that happens as the evening goes on, seems to be some kind of pattern there- we both burst out laughing and had to pause it again. Before we restarted it that second time, Mrs Acilius asked “What does it say about us that we are sitting here watching this? That we choose to watch it when we’ve seen it before?” I’m not sure I want to know the answer to that one.
Vicki gets home shortly before Carolyn. Carolyn tells Vicki and Liz that after she saw Maggie’s boyfriend Joe walking down the street looking sad, she just wanted to go home and mourn. After Carolyn leaves them alone together, Vicki again urges Liz to tell her the truth. Vicki judges that Carolyn would listen to her sympathetically in the mood she is in now. Liz says she might tell Carolyn tomorrow, Vicki says that Carolyn might not be in the same frame of mind tomorrow, Liz says she can’t do it now.
In fact, Maggie is alive- her doctor decided to promote the story that she is dead as a lamebrained scheme to keep the person who tried to kill her from trying again. The blackmail plot, on the other hand, has barely shown a sign of life since it first arrived on the show ten weeks ago.
Jason is supposed to sweep away the last non-paranormal story elements left over from the period before Dark Shadows became a supernatural thriller/ horror story in December 1966. So far he has managed to disclose to the audience, but not to the other characters, why Liz hasn’t left home since the night Stoddard was last seen. That wasn’t an especially interesting question, as they have never shown us anyplace she would want to go, and it’s the only thing he has cleared up.
Another unanswered question is the one that led Vicki to come to Collinwood in the first place. She grew up in a foundling home, with no idea of who her parents were. The show has been hinting heavily that Liz is Vicki’s mother. Indeed, when Jason was brought on the show, the plan was that the grand finale of his storyline would confirm this. If that is still the plan, then the relationships among Vicki, Liz, and Carolyn are due for a drastic upheaval. That prospect lends a certain interest to the scenes among these characters today.
Closing Miscellany
This episode originally aired on 27 June 1967, the first anniversary of the broadcast of #1.
From #1 until #248, dashing action hero Burke Devlin was played by Mitchell Ryan. Ryan showed up at the set too drunk to work when they were supposed to tape #254 and was fired off the show. Today announcer Bob Lloyd tells us that “The part of Burke Devlin will be played by Anthony George.” There was never very much on Dark Shadows for a dashing action hero to do, and now that the most popular character on it is a vampire there isn’t going to be. It was only Ryan’s star quality that kept the character on the show so long.
Anthony George had appeared in feature films in the 1950s, had guest-starred in several prime-time shows, had been a regular cast member on the hit series The Untouchables, and had played one of the leads on a series called Checkmate. When the original audience saw him, many of them would have recognized him as a famous actor and would have expected the character to go on to do something important. Evidently they haven’t given up on Burke yet. But they had better come up with a story for him- George may have had a terrific resume, but he doesn’t have any fraction of Ryan’s charisma.
Unfortunately, they have given up on Buzz. He is on screen only briefly today, and we don’t see him again. Worst of all, while his first three episodes left us with the impression that he could not fail to be hilarious, he manages not to be even a little bit funny in this final appearance. He is just nasty and inconsiderate, demanding that Carolyn forget about whatever it is that’s bothering her and come to the loud party he’s planned.
Getting Buzz off the show the day Anthony George comes on as Burke does solve one problem. As of this episode, the three young women on Dark Shadows all have boyfriends. Maggie has Joe, played by Joel Crothers; Vicki has Burke, played by Anthony George; and Carolyn has Buzz, played by Michael Hadge. Those three actors were all gay. That wasn’t widely known at the time (except perhaps in the case of Mr Hadge, who really does not seem to be making an effort to keep the closet door shut while playing Buzz,) but now that everyone knows all about it, it does seem to be a sign that the show was spending a lot of energy on things that aren’t going anywhere.
Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, has been a prisoner of vampire Barnabas Collins for a long time now. Barnabas is planning to kill her tonight. We spend the opening scene with Barnabas’ sorely bedraggled blood thrall, Willie Loomis. We hear Willie’s thoughts as he does the housekeeping. Willie wishes he could save Maggie, but Barnabas has too much power over him. The most he can do is bring her a poisoned glass of milk and invite her to drink it if she wants to die an easy death.
Willie is not Maggie’s only friend. The ghost of Barnabas’ nine year old sister, Sarah, materializes in Maggie’s cell. Sarah asks Maggie why she is crying. Maggie tells her that if she doesn’t get out of the cell very soon, she will die. Sarah is distressed to hear this- “You mustn’t die- I don’t want you to die.”
Maggie hasn’t figured out that Sarah is a ghost, and keeps asking her how she manages to get in and out of the cell. Sarah usually evades this question, but now she says that there is a way. She came upon it accidentally, long ago, and her father ordered her not to tell anyone, not even her brother. She will be punished if she tells. If her father put her in the prison cell in their basement intentionally, Sarah’s fear of punishment is quite understandable.
Sarah overcomes her fear sufficiently to share a riddle with Maggie which she says will give her the answer:
One, two, away they flew.
Three, four, by the door.
Five, six, count the bricks.
Seven, eight, the clue is “grate.”
Nine, ten, home again.
Maggie asks Sarah to repeat the riddle, and she says she can only say it once. Maggie tells her where to find her own father, Sam Evans, and asks her to tell Sam that she has seen her. Sarah disappears.
Sarah’s fear of punishment will ring a bell for regular viewers. Strange and troubled boy David Collins is so intensely afraid that his father, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger, will punish him by sending him away to a boarding school or a jail that he tried to murder Roger. Later, David left his favorite person, well-meaning governess Vicki, to be decapitated by crazed handyman Matthew Morgan because he was afraid that if he helped Vicki his father would find out he had earlier defied him and would punish him. Now, Maggie is in mortal danger because another Collins child, one who lived in a previous century, has a similar fear of punishment. The cell in the basement of the Old House was there before slavery was abolished in the area in 1783; perhaps Sarah’s fear and David’s are a bequest from the slaves and indentured servants whom their forebears locked up in it.
We cut to the Evans cottage. Sam is an artist, and is working. Sarah materializes in the living room. Sam had locked the door and Sarah won’t explain how she got in, but he seems to be delighted with her anyway. She is impressed with his paintings and asks him to paint a picture of her. He offers a drawing instead. When she agrees, he picks her up and sets her on a stool. She flashes a grin at being picked up. She asks if she can keep the drawing when he is done with it.
The most fun Sarah has had the whole time she’s been dead
Sam tells Sarah that her dress is very pretty. He then mentions that you don’t see many dresses in its style. She asks if that means he doesn’t like it. When Sam says that all he means is that it isn’t the sort of thing other little girls wear, she says she doesn’t play with other little girls so she doesn’t care what they wear. She seems to be getting worked up about this, so Sam calms her down with, “All right, all right, I see.” This little exchange gave my wife, Mrs Acilius, a laugh. Sarah may have been born in the same year as Jacob Grimm, but she is very much a nine year old girl.
While Sam draws Sarah, she steers the conversation to Maggie. She asks Sam if he looked for Maggie on the beach under Widow’s Hill. He says he’s looked everywhere he could. She repeats her suggestion that he look for her on the beach. He says he is sure he won’t find her there. She responds “You might, if you go there tonight.” Disturbed by this, Sam looks up, and finds that Sarah has vanished.
This surprises us almost as much as it surprises Sam. Sarah had made it clear that she very much wanted to keep the drawing, yet she disappears before Sam is finished. Evidently, it wasn’t within her power to stay.
Back in the cell, we see Maggie and hear her thoughts as she tries to remember Sarah’s riddle. Like Willie’s voiceover internal monologue in the opening scenes, Maggie’s goes on too long. We can see that Maggie is in an upsetting situation and understand why Sarah’s presence confuses and distracts her. That makes it clear she would have difficulty remembering the exact wording of the riddle, but we really don’t need to hear her go over every part of it.
By the time Maggie finds the loose brick that triggers the opening of the secret panel, Barnabas is already rising from his coffin. We cut between Barnabas walking through the basement and Maggie struggling to open the panel. It may sound like we’re describing filler when we say that we see Barnabas traversing three distinct corridors between his coffin and Maggie’s cell, but it doesn’t feel that way. Not only do these shots build suspense as we wonder if Maggie will get out before he reaches her, but in Barnabas shown as a hunched, solitary figure in narrow spaces sketched in shades of gray we see the representative of a world bleak beyond endurance. We can see why the first serious feature film about a vampire, F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), devoted so much screen time to showing Count Orlok skulking about the corridors of his castle.
First corridorSecond corridorThird corridor
Maggie crawls into the secret passage. She doesn’t close the panel behind her. Not only doesn’t Maggie know that Sarah is a ghost, she doesn’t know that Barnabas is Sarah’s brother. When Sarah says that not even her brother knows about the secret panel, she is telling us, but not Maggie, that Barnabas is unfamiliar with this way. We know that if Maggie had closed the panel, Barnabas wouldn’t have known where to look for her, and so we might yell at the screen urging her to do that. But since it is his house, she has to assume that he does know about the panel, and she knows that he might be at the door any second. So it is rational for her to forget the panel and use all of her time moving forward.
The gap between Maggie’s knowledge and ours again adds to the suspense as we watch her flee from Barnabas through the twisting passages beyond the panel. We only see one path, but the looks on the actors’ faces as they look from side to side tell us that there are several. Maggie is moving cautiously, choosing her way with care, the sensible thing to do if Barnabas is familiar with the passages. Since we know that it is new to him as it is to her, we want her simply to pick a path and run.
Maggie beholding the paths before her
Maggie finds two heavy doors, both of them apparently stuck. Barnabas looks around, seems bewildered, and takes a breath. He shouts a speech at Maggie, claiming that she has no chance of escape because he can hear her. He can’t hear much while he’s shouting, so we want her to take advantage of that and bash away at one of the doors during his speech.
Barnabas wondering at part of his house he never knew existedMaggie with two closed doors in front of her and an angry vampire behind her
This episode ends the 52nd week of Dark Shadows. When ABC* picked the series up in 1966, it gave executive producer Dan Curtis a 26 week commitment, carrying production to #130. After that, the network renewed it for the then-standard 13 week period. The first renewal carried them to #195, the second to this episode. Until just a couple of months ago, the ratings were so low that no one thought it was likely that it would get a third renewal. When the vampire was introduced in April, viewership started to pick up, preventing cancellation and requiring them to come up with a story that they could keep telling.
I do think we can see traces here and there of the original plan. The first part of the plan seems to have been to copy Bram Stoker’s Dracula far more thoroughly than they wound up doing.
The two female characters on the show who had or were about to have boyfriends when Barnabas was introduced were Maggie and Vicki, who are both seeing men who are cut out to be stout-hearted action heroes. The two female characters in Bram Stoker’s Dracula who had boyfriends were Lucy Westenra and Mina Murray, who were both seeing men who emerge as stout-hearted action heroes. Dracula feeds on Lucy, prompting several other people to band together to try to save her. Dr John Seward, MD, contacts his old Professor, the brilliant Abraham Van Helsing, to advise the group. Despite their best efforts, Lucy dies and rises as a vampire, the “Bloofer Lady” who feeds on the children of east London. Lucy’s boyfriend has to destroy her body to free her soul of the vampire curse.
If the show was about to be canceled, it would have been a favor to Kathryn Leigh Scott to have Maggie suffer Lucy’s fate. Going out with a splash like that would certainly have given her something to lead with as she looked for her next job. But once it was decided that the show would continue beyond #260, it was out of the question to lose a character as popular and versatile as Maggie. When the network ordered 65 more episodes, Maggie had to be saved.
The Van Helsing analogue was actually named on screen. In #242, the show’s equivalent of Dr John Seward, addled quack Dr Woodard, said that he was going to call in a specialist to consult on Maggie’s case, a Dr Hoffman, who is “one of the best men in the field.” We haven’t heard about this man since Dan Curtis found out the show was going to be renewed, suggesting that they’ve abandoned the idea to hew quite so closely to Dracula.
In Stoker’s novel, once Van Helsing has corrected the group’s knowledge deficits concerning vampires, Mina emerges as its leader. Attempting to be gallant, the men cut Mina out of their operations, with the result that Dracula escapes them and bites her. Mina is able to resist his influence so far that she can play a pivotal role in the Count’s final destruction.
The first time Dark Shadows modeled a storyline on Dracula, the menace was not a vampire, but undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. In that arc, the men formed a group of stout-hearted heroes advised by Dr Peter Guthrie and led by well-meaning governess Vicki. Guthrie and Vicki were plainly Van Helsing and Mina. Laura killed Guthrie, so he can’t come back to help in the fight against Barnabas, but Vicki is still around, still the chief protagonist, and still the one likeliest to lead the opposition to a villain.
Indeed, Barnabas has expressed interest in Vicki as a replacement for Maggie, and in #233 he blurted out an obvious threat when he realized she was getting uncomfortably close to figuring out the truth about him. So, had Dark Shadows ended with this episode, it is likely that it would have ended with Vicki overcoming Barnabas’ power and driving a stake through his heart.
Of course, the vampire is the source of the ratings, and Vicki and Maggie are needed for future story development. So the makers of the show can’t use any of those plot elements. What in the world they can do is a question that does not, as yet, have a clear answer. So they have been stalling and stalling. Sooner or later, the stalling will have to end.
*The American Broadcasting Company, that is, not the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, is giving up hope. Vampire Barnabas Collins locked her up in the jail cell in the basement of his house some time ago, and everyone she knows is coming to believe that she is dead.
The other day, a little girl in eighteenth century clothing appeared outside Maggie’s cell. The girl did not respond when Maggie tried to get her attention, nor did Barnabas’ sorely bedraggled blood thrall, Willie, see her when she walked past him. Only on her second or third visit to Maggie did the girl interact with her, and then only to warn her not to tell her big brother that she had seen her. Maggie suspects that the girl was a hallucination of hers.
We know that the girl is real, because we saw her interacting with someone else. Outside Barnabas’ house, the girl talked with strange and troubled boy David Collins and played catch with him. If we’ve been watching the show from the beginning, we also know that there are many ghosts in and around Barnabas’ house, and that they have a special rapport with David. Further, this girl gives her name as Sarah and says that everyone she knows went away a long time ago. We’ve been told that Barnabas had a sister named Sarah who died in childhood, so we know that Sarah is the ghost of that sister.
Today, the girl appears to Maggie again. This time she shows up in the cell itself. At first, she tosses her ball in the air, sings “London Bridge,” and ignores Maggie’s repeated questions. Eighteenth century kids didn’t have mobile phones, apparently they had to resort to a ball and “London Bridge” when they wanted to tune out the grownups. Sarah finally comes around when Maggie puts her hand on her shoulder.
Sarah explains that she came because Maggie was crying. She asks what Maggie is sad about, which Maggie doesn’t try to explain.
Sarah won’t answer many of Maggie’s questions. Sarah says that she has been looking for her parents, and she is puzzled as to where they and everyone else have gone. She says she does have one friend. If that is a reference to David, it would show that Sarah can learn information during one apparition and retain it during subsequent apparitions. It is unclear whether she knows that she is a ghost, and her understanding of Maggie’s situation is remarkably slight.
Maggie and Sarah play catch and sing “London Bridge” together. Sarah vanishes a moment before Barnabas arrives. Maggie reacts to him with terror, but when it becomes clear that he isn’t planning to kill her right away her excitement at Sarah’s visit comes bursting out. She tells him that she has a secret friend who visits her in her cell and plays with her. When he asks what she’s talking about, she tells him it’s a secret. She babbles in a gleeful, childlike way.
Barnabas reacts to this with discomfort. He keeps his eyes on Maggie and edges away from her, speaking to her in a pitying tone. Bleak as Maggie’s situation is, this is a laugh-out-loud moment- she’s become too weird for Barnabas.
Maggie weirds Barnabas out
Upstairs, Barnabas tells Willie that Maggie isn’t working out. In a moment of wild hope, Willie asks if that means he’ll let her go. Barnabas sourly replies that of course it does not mean that- they will have to kill her. His plan is to kill her in such a way that no trace of her will ever be found, “because there will be no trace.”
Willie takes a meal to Maggie and demands she stop pretending to be crazy. It isn’t helping her, he says. She denies that she is doing any such thing, and babbles cheerfully that “I do whatever anyone tells me to do.” Willie leans in, putting his face close to hers, and screams and shouts that she has to be her usual self if she is to have any chance of survival.
After Willie leaves, Maggie starts crying again and telling herself that there is no little girl. But then she looks at the floor and finds a doll Sarah left behind. Maggie smiles, knowing that her secret friend does exist.
Maggie’s mad scenes are fascinating. Even though she believes that Sarah is real and we know she is right, seeing Sarah has the same effect on Maggie a psychotic break might have. It takes her out of the reality that she shares with Barnabas and Willie, and gives her an affect that is neither continuous with her usual personality nor intelligible to them.
The three adult actors are all on the top of their form today, just superb. Nowadays, when Sharon Smyth Lentz describes her performance as Sarah, she says that “The first word that comes to mind is ‘clueless.’” But that works out surprisingly well. We know so little about what, if anything, is going on in Sarah’s mind that the keynotes of the performance would have to be “lost,” “confused,” and “vague,” and she had those three things down pat. Things sometimes get rocky when Sarah has a long stretch of dialogue or when multiple actors are moving at the same time, but neither of those is a problem today.
Joe Caldwell started making uncredited contributions to the writing of Dark Shadows early in 1967, and I am tempted to attribute every good thing in a script by Malcolm Marmorstein to him. But Caldwell’s name is showing up in the credits now, and this episode is excellent. So maybe Marmorstein could rise to an occasion every now and then.
My wife, Mrs Acilius, points out that this is the first episode set entirely in the Old House.
Dark Shadows Commentary 