mrs acilius – Page 12 – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 256: Always choose the worst things to want

A mysterious little girl in eighteenth century garb shows up outside the dungeon cell where vampire Barnabas Collins is keeping his victim, Maggie Evans. The girl stands with her back to Maggie’s cell and sings a couple of verses of “London Bridge” over and over while tossing a ball. Maggie pleads with her to stop singing, to get away before Barnabas and his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie Loomis catch her, and to tell someone that she has seen her. The girl does not acknowledge Maggie in any way.

Seconds after the girl has strolled slowly away, Willie comes by the same path she had taken. Maggie is bewildered that Willie didn’t see her. She urges Willie to escape from Barnabas. Willie gives a big speech about how he thinks about escaping all the time, and that when he is in his car he has sometimes tried to keep driving. But Barnabas’ power keeps pulling him back. Regular viewers will be interested in this confirmation that Willie has a car.*

Willie’s big speech.
Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

At the great house of Collinwood, strange and troubled boy David Collins is impatient with the geography lesson his governess Vicki is trying to give him. In the first 39 weeks of the show, the only set which consistently saw interesting scenes was David’s room, where he and Vicki became friends during his lessons. They don’t have the studio space to build that set today, so this lesson is conducted in the drawing room. When flighty heiress Carolyn comes into the room, Vicki sends David to play outside. Since the interrupted lesson was about Australia, he hops away kangaroo-style.

Vicki and Carolyn talk about Carolyn’s boyfriend, motorcycle enthusiast Buzz. Buzz is a refugee from Beach Blanket Bingo, so broadly comic a figure that he might have been too silly even for the biker gang in that movie and its sequels. Unfortunately, Buzz doesn’t show up today, and Vicki and Carolyn’s conversation is a pure specimen of old-time soap opera earnestness. There is an odd moment when Vicki asks Carolyn “How far do you intend to go with Buzz?” and Carolyn answers “All the way!” At the end of the scene, Carolyn uses the phrase “all the way” again. She’s talking about her plan to marry Buzz, but “all the way” was such a familiar euphemism for sexual intercourse in the 1960s that it is hard to imagine it wasn’t intentional on some level. When Carolyn tells Vicki that she and Buzz will go “all the way” while Vicki watches, we wonder what weddings are like in Collinsport.**

David has gone to the yard around Barnabas’ house. We see a location insert of him on the swing set there. This footage is reused from #130, when we discovered that he was being watched by his mother, blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. Laura had died sometime previously, but it didn’t take.

Now, he is being watched again. The mysterious little girl from the dungeon has made her way up to the porch and calls to him as “Boy!” When he tells her his name is David, she says “I know.” She gives her name as Sarah, and asks him to play with her. They toss her ball back and forth, and he finds fault with her fondness for “London Bridge.” She says she used to go to school, a long time ago. She lives around there, but everyone she lives with went away and left her all alone. She excuses herself to go look for them. Willie then comes out of the house. David tells him about Sarah, and Willie shoos him away.

Playing catch as best you can when you’re on a tiny set, photographed in 4X3.
Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

That Sarah can come and go from the dungeon without being seen shows that she is one of the ghosts who haunt the house. David has seen several of these, but does not recognize her. Her behavior in the opening scenes leaves us wondering if she is aware of Maggie’s presence; if not, she may simply be an apparition, unable to interact with the living characters.

When Sarah meets David, not only is she able to converse with him, but her ability to play catch with him using the ball she brought with her shows that she has a physical body and that she can manipulate material objects. That makes it all the more puzzling that she did not answer Maggie. Was she ignoring her, or was she somehow less capable in the dungeon than she is on the porch?

When Sarah uses the words “a long time ago,” we suspect that she knows she is a ghost and she has been displaced to a future century. But then she becomes confused as to where her people are, and is filled with a terrible urgency to go look for them. Again it is ambiguous just what sort of being Sarah is and what she can do.

There is always a vagueness about the supernatural- if you could explain a phenomenon fully in words and measurements, it wouldn’t be in that category at all. The key to holding an audience’s attention with a story about ghosts and such is to intrigue them with questions that seem like they might have answers and to use them to lead to another, equally imponderable set of questions before the first set gets old. So it is a promising sign that Sarah is introduced while we are still asking what Barnabas can do, what he wants to accomplish, what he needs for survival, and how he got to be the way he is.

That we see David in a lesson with Vicki and then hear him talking with Sarah about how neither of them goes to school anymore is also interesting to regular viewers. Dark Shadows is just about a year old. It started with Vicki’s arrival at Collinwood, where reclusive matriarch Liz had summoned her to teach David. David and his father, Liz’ impecunious brother Roger Collins, had been living at Collinwood for about a month. Before then, they had lived in Augusta, Maine, where David went to school.

When Vicki showed up, Roger objected that he knew nothing about her, and Liz refused to tell him or Vicki how she knew that she existed or why she chose her to be David’s governess. The show has been hinting very heavily that Vicki is Liz’ biological daughter and that Liz is desperate to keep that relationship secret. It is also clear that Liz wants above all for David to grow into her idea of a male Collins, an idea to which her bratty little brother Roger does not in any way conform.

Barnabas’ plan for Maggie is a ghoulish parody of Liz’ for David. He wants to erase her personality and replace it with that of his long-lost love, Josette Collins. Over the generations since her death, Josette has become the patroness of the Collins family and the emblem of its perfect female member. And of course Barnabas is as anxious to hide the secrets in his basement as Liz is to hide those in hers. That Sarah appears to both Maggie and David emphasizes that Barnabas is a funhouse mirror reflection of Liz.

Back in the great house, David hears Buzz’ motorcycle and tells Carolyn that he is there for her. She can’t quite bring herself to tell David that she and Buzz are planning to get married, but does encourage his interest in going for a bike ride with Buzz. As she leaves, he brilliantly mimes motorcycle riding.

David gives Vicki a detailed account of his encounter with Sarah. She is disappointed he didn’t bring her home. Though it is her job to be David’s only friend, Vicki is no more enthusiastic about his isolation from playmates his own age than Willie is about Barnabas’ treatment of Maggie.

Back in the dungeon, Willie finds that Maggie has not eaten. They share a sad moment. He leaves, and Sarah reappears. Maggie talks to her. At first, she doesn’t respond. But then she turns to her and says “If you see my big brother, don’t tell him you saw me. He doesn’t like anybody to come down here.” Then she leaves, a spring in her step.

The last time a ghost spoke to an imprisoned woman was in the same house, in #126. That time, Vicki was bound and gagged and hidden in a secret room on the main floor by crazed handyman Matthew Morgan. When Matthew had gone to get an ax with which to decapitate Vicki, the ghost of Josette had appeared to her and said, in a perfectly cheerful voice,*** “Do not be afraid.” Josette didn’t untie Vicki or anything, she just told her that and vanished. Later in the episode, she and some other ghosts scare Matthew to death before he can kill Vicki. When Sarah goes away from the stunned Maggie and skips along the floor, regular viewers might remember that event and see a promise that Sarah has something up her sleeve.

Closing Miscellany

Sarah is identified in the closing credits as “Sarah Collins,” the name given in #211 for Barnabas’ sister who died in childhood. That rather blunts the surprise of her closing reference to her “big brother.”

Sarah’s identity raises a couple of other questions. Barnabas’ house was the original Collins family home, and he and Sarah would have lived there. The cell in which he keeps Maggie is covered with cobwebs, evidently a feature of the house from its beginning. When she tells Maggie that her big brother “doesn’t like anybody to come down here,” she is speaking from experience- the adults don’t like it when you go near the jail cell in the basement.

Slavery was a legal institution in Massachusetts**** until 1783, and indentured servitude under conditions not so far removed from those to which slaves were subject continued long after. The Old House has been described as a “huge mansion,” so presumably its owners would have held people under at least one of these statuses. As a Collins of the eighteenth century, Sarah’s blithe attitude towards someone held in the cell would seem to be chillingly appropriate.

Sarah’s address to David as “Boy!” when she knows his name is also interesting coming from her. To be sure, if she had called him by name before they met, he would have known right away that there was something very strange about her. Since he has seen many ghosts and knows that ghosts congregate in and around the Old House, he may have identified her as one right away.

On the other hand, during the “Revenge of Burke Devlin” storyline that ran from #1-#201, there was considerable doubt as to whether David was Roger’s natural son or Burke’s. That doubt came to a head when Laura was on the show. Laura only left 13 weeks ago, and Burke is still hanging around. As far as we know, the question may come back up, and David Collins may turn out to be David Devlin. In that case, Sarah may have chosen to call him “boy” because she is a Collins and therefore better than everyone who is not.

I posted a couple of long comments about this episode on Danny Horn’s Dark Shadows Every Day. I won’t copy them here, because they contain spoilers for people who haven’t seen the whole series. But I’ll link to them- under the post about this episode, I argued that Sarah’s introduction was the most important plot development in the entire series; and under a post about a much later episode, I wish one of the words in her closing line had been different.

*Regular viewers are interested in some weird stuff, what can I say.

**My wife, Mrs Acilius, is very much taken with the actresses’ recollections of how Louis Edmonds, who played Roger, would make them laugh so hard during rehearsals that it was sometimes difficult for them to stay in character during filming. She says it is just as well that Roger wasn’t in this episode, because there is no way they could have got through this scene if he had been.

***Provided by Kathryn Leigh Scott, who also plays Maggie.

****Maine was part of Massachusetts until 1821.

Episode 254: As much fun as a bag of spiders

Reclusive matriarch Liz and well-meaning governess Vicki are in the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood. Liz is depressed because her daughter Carolyn is dating motorcycle enthusiast Buzz. She asks Vicki if she has any idea how to break Carolyn and Buzz up, then answers her own question. Liz knows that Carolyn is protesting her engagement to seagoing con man Jason McGuire, and that only by breaking it off with Jason can she change things with Carolyn.

When Liz claims that she is marrying Jason because she wants to, Vicki says it’s none of her business. Vicki has seen abundant evidence that Jason is blackmailing Liz, and won’t pretend she hasn’t. She manages to be quite respectful to her employer without backing down an inch. Despite herself, Liz is impressed with Vicki’s firmness and diplomacy.

Alexandra Moltke Isles was cast as Vicki because she and Joan Bennett looked so much alike, and this is one of the scenes that uses their resemblance to show Vicki as a reflection of Liz. As Vicki is finding tactful ways to express her suspicions, she says things that we have heard Liz say and that we know she is thinking. Each time she does so, Joan Bennett does a quarter turn one direction from the shoulders and a quarter turn the other direction from the neck, as if she were being twisted open. When Liz tells Vicki to stop, she calls her “Victoria,” a name we haven’t heard her use since 1966, and when Vicki asks permission to leave the room she responds, in a near-whisper, with the usual “Vicki.” This alternation also suggests twisting, and to regular viewers who remember that Liz has a secret connected with the fact that “Her name is Victoria” it is another twisting open.

Meanwhile, Jason is entering the Blue Whale tavern with his former henchman, Willie Loomis. Jason wants to confront Willie with the fact that he saw him in town earlier in the day selling a piece of jewelry. Willie says that he was selling it on behalf of his employer, wealthy eccentric Barnabas Collins. Jason knows of Willie’s obsessive fascination with jewels and his tendency to steal them, and does not believe that Barnabas would entrust him with such a task. What Jason does not know is that Barnabas is a vampire and Willie is his sorely bedraggled blood-thrall. As such, Barnabas has a power over Willie that makes it rational to entrust the most remarkable tasks to him.

Carolyn and Buzz enter. They almost leave when Carolyn sees Jason and Willie. Jason and Willie rise and meet them at the door. Jason assures Carolyn that they were just going. Before they do, he taunts Carolyn with his engagement to Liz.

On Tuesday, Carolyn and Buzz started dancing together in the drawing room. Buzz made a few very graceful moves, saw Carolyn going into the Collinsport Convulsion, and sat down to observe. Today, Buzz sees two background players twitching awkwardly while the jukebox plays and declines Carolyn’s invitation to join her on the dance floor. He wants to stop drinking, saying that he is looking for something that will make him feel like he’s never lived before, while “drinking only makes you feel drunk.” It sounds a little bit like he’s going to offer Carolyn a drug stronger than alcohol, but by the end of the scene he just wants to get back on his bike. Liz’ fears to the contrary, Buzz seems pretty darned wholesome.

While Carolyn and Buzz are on their way out of the tavern, hardworking young fisherman Joe comes in. Carolyn asks Buzz to wait outside while she talks with Joe. Buzz reluctantly agrees to spend a few minutes alone with his bike.

Carolyn and Joe were dating when the show started, and there was a whole storyline about how they were tired of each other and couldn’t get themselves sufficiently organized to break up. Their scenes together reminded us that the 1960s were the decade in which Michelangelo Antonioni used the cinema to explore the nature and significance of boredom.

But they are far from boring today. After he and Carolyn finally called it quits, Joe started seeing Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. Maggie is now missing and feared dead. Carolyn sits next to Joe at the bar and expresses her sympathies. When I say that Nancy Barrett’s acting style was to throw herself unreservedly into whatever the script gave her character to do that day, it may sound like I’m saying she was undisciplined or that she lacked subtlety. That is not at all what I mean, and in this scene she does one of the most delicate drunk acts I’ve ever seen. Carolyn sits a fraction of an inch too close to Joe, tilts her head back a fraction of a degree too far, opens her eyes the tiniest bit too wide, and speaks ever so slightly too slowly. No one of those signs would even be noticeable by itself, but together they make it very clear why Buzz was anxious that he and Carolyn should leave their drinks unfinished.

Back in the drawing room, Jason is badgering Liz into setting the date for their wedding. Carolyn and Buzz come back, and Jason tells them he and Liz will be married two weeks from tonight. Carolyn says that she and Buzz ought to get married the same night. Buzz is delighted when she first says this, and is still smiling when she insists she is being serious.

Buzz delighted with Carolyn’s proposal.
Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

My wife, Mrs Acilius, urged me to call this one “A piece of that action,” something Jason says to Willie. Trekkie that she is, that seemed irresistible to her. But Joe’s line that Buzz seems to be “about as much fun as a bag of spiders” is the funniest of the many witty lines in today’s script, and when you remember that Dark Shadows has, since December of 1966, been basically a horror story, you have to think that in its terms a bag of spiders might be a lot of fun. So that had to be the title.

Episode 250: A servant’s name

Maggie Evans, the Nicest Girl in Town, has been the prisoner of vampire Barnabas Collins for some time. At rise, she is in front of her mirror, struggling to remember who she is. Her name and her father’s come back to her, but then the music box Barnabas gave her starts playing, and she begins to believe that she is Barnabas’ long-lost love Josette. This scene takes about a minute more than is necessary.

She renews the struggle later, and this time overcomes the hypnotic power of the music box. She decides to pretend that she believes that she is Josette in order to trick Barnabas and Barnabas’ sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie into giving her enough freedom to escape. She fools them, only to hear Barnabas tell Willie that her compliance means that the time has come for the final part of his plan.

Maggie hears carpentry work, and sneaks down to the basement. She finds Barnabas watching Willie build a coffin. It sits next to the coffin in which Barnabas spends his days. It becomes clear that once Maggie is fully Josettified, she will be a vampire as well. Unfortunately, Jonathan Frid has a great deal of trouble with his lines in this scene. I don’t usually mind Frid’s bobbles, but his line troubles here take us out of what needs to be a terrifying moment.

In the morning, Maggie goes back to the basement. Willie finds her there. He is not convinced that she believes she is Josette. He presses her, and she finally breaks down and gives up the act.

Maggie shows Willie the diamond necklace Barnabas gave her as a present for their wedding, and tells him it will be his if they destroy Barnabas and escape. Willie’s fascination with jewels was what led him to undertake the grave-robbing expedition that freed Barnabas in the first place, and the necklace does distract him for a little while. But then he hears Barnabas’ heartbeat. He heard that sound before, in #208, #209, #210, and #217, but in those episodes no one else could hear it. Maggie can, since Barnabas has been drinking her blood too, but she can still resist the vampire’s spell. She is holding a large awl, ready to drive it into Barnabas’ heart, but Willie cannot overcome his urge to protect his master. He disarms Maggie.

We see Maggie in her room and hear Barnabas’ voice on the soundtrack going over what she heard him say in the basement. This is the first time an interior monologue has played quotes from another character. They aren’t the lines Jonathan Frid actually delivered, but cleaned-up, intelligible lines, presumably the ones that were in the script.

As sunset nears, Willie takes Maggie back to the basement. He leaves, telling her that she and Barnabas must be alone when he completes “the ceremony.” She finds the awl, picks it up, and opens the coffin. Before she can drive it into Barnabas’ heart, he awakens and shows his fangs. She screams and presses herself against the brick wall behind her.

This is the second episode credited to writer Joe Caldwell, and is certainly the best teleplay Dark Shadows has seen since Francis Swann left the show in November of 1966. Like Swann and Art Wallace, Caldwell understood what actors could do and knew how to give them a platform to show their stuff.

Aside from Frid’s one bad scene, the actors excel. In 1967, Kathryn Leigh Scott was already a highly trained actress. Maggie Evans, on the other hand, has never acted before. When Maggie is pretending to believe she is Josette, Miss Scott shows her giving a crude imitation of Barnabas’ high-flown style, mixed with some prancing movements you might see from a little girl playing the princess in a school play. Barnabas is so desperate to believe that his lunatic scheme is working that he falls for it completely. When he and Maggie are in the front parlor together, he responds to her amateur performance as a sign that she is matching his pomposity, which of course thrills him.

When Willie and Maggie are in the basement, John Karlen plays his earthy skepticism with a simplicity that makes Maggie’s pretending look ridiculous. When Maggie gives up her act and whispers a plea for Willie to help her, Miss Scott matches the force of Karlen’s performance and the resulting encounter is as powerful as anything the show ever achieves.

The episode is good enough that we barely noticed some major lapses in story logic. If Maggie can sneak down to the basement to eavesdrop on Barnabas and Willie, why can’t she slip out the front door? She knows how to get from Barnabas’ house to the great house of Collinwood, where she has friends and there is a telephone to call the sheriff.

And when did she learn that you can destroy vampires by driving stakes through their hearts? She’s lived in Collinsport all her life, and no one in that town has ever heard of vampires. Granted, the show would move a lot faster and could have more layers of irony if the characters had read Dracula and seen movies from Universal and Hammer, but this is the first hint that any of them has.

My wife, Mrs Acilius, was very interested in the fact that Maggie calls herself “Maggie, or Margaret” in this one. First time we hear the name Margaret! I’m not sure why that impressed her so much, but she’s very bright, so I’m sure it’s important. All I can think of is that “Maggie” waits tables in the diner, cleans up after her Pop has had one drink too many, and is everybody’s pal, while “Margaret” is a saint’s name, and a queen’s name. So Margaret might have a bigger destiny than we’ve seen.

Episode 242: One of the best men in the field

Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, suffered from an ailment her doctor, Dave Woodard M. D., could not identify. She then vanished from her hospital room in a manner law enforcement, led by Sheriff George Patterson, could not explain. The opening voiceover says that Maggie’s troubles “mystify the finest minds.” This is the first and last time either Woodard or Patterson is classed with “the finest minds” even among the low-functioning characters who abound in the period when Dark Shadows is being written by Ron Sproat and Malcolm Marmorstein. Well-meaning governess Vicki is still the single smartest character on the show, and she turns into an absolute moron every two or three days.

In the opening teaser, dashing action hero Burke Devlin asks Dr Woodard if his studies of Maggie’s blood samples will help find her. He says that they won’t, but that if he can diagnose her he might be able to help her after she is found. Burke asks if he is about to make a diagnosis. He says that he might be making progress towards that goal. At that point, there is a dramatic musical sting, and we cut to the credits. That’s the hook, a statement that further study is needed.

Dr Woodard tells Burke that he has contacted “Hoffman, one of the best men in the field,” and that he hopes Hoffman will be able to get things moving. Under Burke’s questioning, he admits that he is pessimistic that Hoffman will see anything he has missed. This is the first mention of the name “Hoffman” on Dark Shadows. I believe it is only the second mention* of any surname that is not derived from Irish (as are such names as Collins, Devlin, Malloy, and McGuire,) English (as are names such as Woodard, Patterson, Loomis, Johnson, Stockbridge, and Garner,) Welsh (as are names such as Evans and Morgan,) Scottish (as are the names Adair and Murdoch,) or French (as are the names La Freniere, Bilodeau, and du Près.)** It is certainly the first name we have heard that suggests there might be Jewish people in the universe of Dark Shadows.

We then cut to the study in great house of Collinwood, where high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins has to confront his sister, reclusive matriarch Liz. The auditors have told Roger that the books are out of balance at the family business. Roger knows that the reason for this is that Liz is giving money to buy the silence of seagoing con man Jason McGuire. He reminds Liz that he himself was afraid of blackmail for the first 40 weeks of the show, so he knows from personal experience that it is no way to live. Liz refuses Roger’s plea that she tell him her secret. As he probes and she resists, they move around the room at times like fencers, at times like dancers performing a paso doble. Their movements are easily the most interesting element of the episode, a credit to director John Sedwick.

Roger’s first approach to the shielded Liz

Roger admits that he hasn’t been much help to Liz over the years, but begs her to let him help her now. Liz won’t tell him anything, but she is touched to see her bratty brother sincerely trying to step up.

Liz goes to the drawing room. The camera is behind her as she approaches the room. Jason is standing at the fireplace under the large portrait, the spot furthest from the camera. Not only does he look as small as possible, but at the moment we first see him he is turned away from us, his head tilted far back as he takes a drink. Jason’s smallness and obscurity, coming so soon after Roger’s speech about the dreariness of blackmail, feels like an acknowledgment that Jason doesn’t have much to offer the audience.***

Liz tells Jason she can’t give him any more money without blowing the secret they share. He amazes her by accepting this information calmly, but she is sure he is not done tormenting her.

Liz returns to the study, where Roger is still sitting. She tells him that she has talked to the auditor and straightened out the books. That sounds like something that would take quite a while, even if you are sitting across from each other, and Liz and the auditor had to do it over the telephone. So how long has Roger been sitting there?

Then we rejoin Burke and Woodard in the doctor’s office, which someone has ransacked. The perpetrator wrenched the metal bars out of the window and stole Maggie’s blood samples. Dr Woodard says that the only way the bars could have been twisted was by someone with the “supernatural strength of madness.” I’m not an expert in mental health, but that does not sound like a conventional psychiatric opinion to me.

*After Lieutenant Costa of the Arizona State Police, whom we saw when Dark Shadows took us to Phoenix in #174.

**It is pretty weird that a show set in Maine has so few French-surnamed characters. We’ve only heard of one working-class Mainer with a French name, Amos Bilodeau. La Freniere was given in #45 as the maiden name of Josette, a grand lady who came from France to marry into the Collins family in a previous century; eventually, Josette’s birth name will be retconned to du Près.

***My wife, Mrs Acilius, was the one who really noticed the visual strategy both in Liz and Roger’s first scene in the study and in Liz’ entry into the drawing room.

Episode 234: The people who inspire the questions

We open with the sight of sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie Loomis broken and crumpled on the floor of the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. He is under the heavy cane which vampire Barnabas Collins carries and which he uses to beat Willie. Barnabas demands Willie confess that he played a part in preventing him from taking full possession of Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. Willie at first tries to deny his responsibility, but finally swears that he won’t disobey Barnabas again. Barnabas gives him some orders and dismisses him.

Willie under the Willie-beater. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

At the Evans cottage, Maggie is sick in bed. When her friend, well-meaning governess Vicki, comes to sit with her, she makes Vicki promise she won’t leave her alone no matter what she says or does. She won’t even let Vicki go as far as the kitchen to fetch her a glass of milk- she doesn’t dare spend one second by herself.

Maggie’s father, artist Sam, has called Vicki because he himself has had to go to the Old House to work on the portrait he is painting of Barnabas. He is working on some problems in the background, and encourages Barnabas to take a walk. While Barnabas is away, Willie comes into the room and asks Sam where he is. Sam is concentrating hard on his work and responds to Willie’s questions with irritated grunts.

When Willie asks Sam how his daughter is doing, Sam turns to him and angrily snaps “Don’t mention her name!” He didn’t mention her name, but he was very rude to Maggie more than once in the days before he met Barnabas, when he was still dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis. In #207, Willie was so crass in his behavior towards Maggie and Sam in The Blue Whale tavern that dashing action hero Burke Devlin had to beat him up and order him to leave town, the incident that prompted Willie to launch the grave-robbing expedition that released Barnabas. Sam was unhappy to see Willie again at the end of #222. By #225/226, he was willing to tell Burke that Willie had reformed, but that doesn’t mean he wants him to have anything to do with Maggie.

Of course, Maggie has already become Willie’s colleague, Barnabas’ second blood thrall. That’s the point of showing us the results of the beatings Barnabas inflicts on Willie. We’ve known Maggie for over 46 weeks and have liked her the whole time, so the idea that she is on her way to suffer that kind of abuse horrifies us. Willie’s determination to help Maggie, asking Sam about her even after the beatings, shows us how much he wants to spare Maggie the fate that has befallen him.

Back in the Evans cottage, Maggie has had another mood swing. These are familiar to readers of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, where the vampire’s victims Lucy and Mina are at one moment desperate to be rescued from him and at the next equally desperate to go to him. Maggie has been displaying these swings for several days now, and it is only because Kathryn Leigh Scott is a highly trained actress with a big bag of tricks that the scene where she demands Vicki leave is not painfully repetitious. My wife, Mrs Acilius, was particularly impressed with the way Maggie enunciates the word “leave” in her commands to Vicki.

Dogs make alarming noises near the french windows, sending Vicki into a state of panic. Maggie denies that she hears them at all. When the windows rattle and it seems that a pack of fierce dogs are about to burst in, Vicki runs to the next room to telephone Burke. When she is out, the door to Maggie’s room slams shut and Vicki finds that she is unable to open it.

Some wonder why Vicki goes to the next room to make her call when there is a telephone next to Maggie’s bed. Maggie used it to make a call in #225/226, and it was prominently featured in several shots in #231. I think it makes sense, though. Maggie is between Vicki and that telephone, and she is being extremely uncooperative. Vicki doesn’t want to take the time to fight her, she wants to call for help at once. Besides, Vicki is so terrified that we wouldn’t expect her to look around, and she has used the telephone in the other room before.

Others might wonder why she calls Burke rather than calling the police. Considering what we have seen of the Collinsport sheriff’s office, I don’t think this is a difficult decision to defend. Vicki tried to call the sheriff from the Evans cottage the other day, and no one was there to answer the phone. Nor have they managed to solve any of the crimes that have been committed on the show so far, even though the perpetrators left so much evidence lying around that Vicki herself, while going about her business, has accidentally stumbled on the solutions to one murder and two attempted murders.

The final shot of the episode, with Vicki banging on Maggie’s door and pleading with her, is not very compelling, and brings a wince to the faces of viewers who remember #84-#87, when Vicki was locked in a room in an abandoned part of the great house of Collinwood and spent several hundred hours of screen time* banging on the door and calling for help. Today’s ending isn’t exactly a Dumb Vicki moment, but it certainly isn’t an interesting moment, and we hope there aren’t any more like it.

*An approximation. It seemed like at least a thousand hours, but since the whole story played out in three and a half episodes lasting 22 minutes each I don’t suppose it could actually have been quite that long.

Episode 231: Anyone’s blood

Today is only the second time we hear a voice announce a recast over the opening title. The first time was in #35, when David Ford took over the part of drunken artist Sam Evans from wildly incompetent actor Mark Allen. This time Robert Gerringer is taking over the part of addled quack Dr Woodard from Richard Woods. Woods only played the role twice, and neither time could he find a way to distract the audience from the ignorance of medicine that the writers showed in their scripts.

Gerringer’s lines don’t make much more sense than did the ones they dumped on Woods, but he acts up a storm. Woodard is examining Sam’s daughter Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. Unknown to Sam or Woodard, vampire Barnabas Collins has been sucking Maggie’s blood. Woodard is firm with Maggie when she resists his examination. He seems to be somewhat on edge, just enough that we wonder if there is more to it than the difficulties we can see Maggie giving him. Perhaps he is thinking something he isn’t saying. Woods never managed to make us wonder if his version of the doctor was doing that.

When Woodard and Sam leave Maggie’s room, Woodard assumes an alarmed tone. He tells Sam that Maggie is on the point of death and needs a blood transfusion at once. By showing us that Woodard was concealing the true nature of his concern when he was with Maggie, Gerringer gives substance to our hopes that the character’s nonsensical words and deeds will turn out to be a screen hiding something interesting.

Maggie’s boyfriend, hardworking young fisherman Joe, joins Sam and Woodard. Woodard asks if either Sam or Joe has blood type A. Joe does. Woodard doesn’t ask about Rh factors or Joe’s medical history or anything else, he simply marches Joe into Maggie’s room and the bodily fluids start pumping right away. Joe holds Maggie’s hand at first, but her violent protests force him to let go.

In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Professor Van Helsing and Dr John Seward give blood transfusions to the vampire’s victims. That novel was written in 1897, and blood types weren’t discovered until 1900, so Van Helsing and Seward take blood indiscriminately from all the men cooperating in the effort to defeat Dracula. Van Helsing is particularly enthusiastic when he learns that Arthur Holmwood has given blood to Lucy Westenra, because Arthur “is the lover of her!” Van Helsing is Dutch, and speaks in a vaguely comical broken English. Woodard doesn’t seem particularly excited that Joe is “the lover of her,” but audiences who had read the book will recognize the allusion.

At this point in the production of Dark Shadows, the tentative plan was that Dr Woodard would become something like the expert on paranormal dangers that Dr Peter Guthrie had been during the Phoenix storyline, and that Barnabas would be destroyed in episode 275. Like Stoker’s Dracula, the Phoenix arc had featured a group of stout-hearted men and one valiant young woman coming together to do battle with an undead menace. Dr Guthrie had been their Van Helsing, an expert from out of town who leapfrogs over some weaknesses in the evidence actually available to the protagonists to get them to the same level of understanding that the audience has been given. Also like Van Helsing, Guthrie is the first to realize that the one female member of the team is the key to the success of their efforts, and so he insists on putting her in situations the other men regard as too dangerous for her. As Mina had been instrumental in the destruction of Dracula, so well-meaning governess Vicki is the person who finally thwarts the plans of the Phoenix.

If Woodard and Vicki are going to destroy Barnabas in #275, we have to wonder what story the show will have to tell in #276. The only other plotline going at the moment is the blackmail of reclusive matriarch Liz by seagoing con man Jason McGuire, and that can’t continue indefinitely. Not only will Liz run out of things for Jason to take away from her, but Dennis Patrick, the actor playing Jason, will leave the show no later than the end of June. Since the end of June is when #275 will be airing, we can hardly expect Jason to take the show over after that time.

In fact, Jason is an in-betweener brought on the show to clear away the last non-paranormal plot elements left over from the period before the show became a supernatural thriller in December 1966. By the time he leaves, both the reason for Liz’ long self-immuration in the great house of Collinwood and the identity of Vicki’s parents are supposed to be laid bare for all to see. Neither of those secrets ever generated an interesting story, but as long as they are around it is at least theoretically possible that the show will become a conventional daytime soap opera again. Without them, they are altogether committed to the spook show route. Destroy Barnabas, and you just have to come up with yet another menace from beyond the grave.

I remember Gerringer’s acting style from the first time I saw Dark Shadows. That was back in the 90s, when it was on what was then called the SciFi Channel. He so perfectly represented the doctor characters on the soaps my mother used to watch when I was a kid twenty years before that seeing him in the middle of a story about a vampire told me everything about the strangeness of a conventional daytime serial switching to a horror theme. If that guy is the one to drive the stake through Barnabas’ heart, or if he is even part of the team that finishes him off, it will be a statement that the makers of Dark Shadows have decided to stop being silly and start imitating The Guiding Light.

My wife, Mrs Acilius, was particularly frustrated with the dialogue in this episode. As Maggie, Kathryn Leigh Scott does a good job with nonverbal communication creating the image of a reluctant patient trying to get out of her skin, but her lines consist chiefly of repeating whatever is said to her. The other members of the cast are equally effective at projecting concern for a loved one whose grave illness they don’t understand and can’t help, but their lines too are so heavily loaded with repetition that we started to suspect that Malcolm Marmorstein was writing for a cast of myna birds. In particular, Woodard’s lines to Sam in the living room repeat the word “shock” so many times that they start to sound like he’s stuttering.

The original choices for the roles of Sam, Joe, Dr Woodard, and Maggie.
Photo by Bird Ecology Study Group

In his post about this episode, Danny Horn complains that there is not a single interesting still image in it. I agree with that, though I would say that the actors’ movements tell a story. Granted, it is a story that could have been told in a tiny fraction of the actual running time, but they deserve credit for holding the show together when the script gave them zero support.

Danny says that the episode would have been just as good if it were a radio show. Mrs Acilius says that it would have been “a thousand times better” than it is if it were a silent movie. Maybe they could compromise, and it could be presented with neither audio nor video, and the audience could spend the 22 minutes doing something else.

Episode 230: Some explaining to do

The Body in Question

Dark Shadows has been a supernatural thriller ever since the ghosts of Josette and the Widows scared Matthew Morgan to death in December 1966. But today’s episode is the first one that is structured like a horror movie.

Horror movies tend to focus on the visible damage done to the bodies of the female victims of the monster. The current victim is Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, and the monster is vampire Barnabas Collins. We open with Maggie’s father, artist Sam Evans, looking helplessly around the house. Sam doesn’t know it, but Maggie was compelled to leave by the power that Barnabas has gained over her by drinking her blood.

What Sam does know is that Maggie was in extremely poor health. He cannot understand how she could have gone anywhere under her own power. We then see Maggie looking awful and wandering around the graveyard. Later, a closeup of a professional headshot of actress Kathryn Leigh Scott will dissolve into an image of Maggie among the tombstones, contrasting her usual fresh-faced beauty with her present ghastly haggardness.

The monster who has reduced her to this sorry state, vampire Barnabas Collins, emerges from the fog. Barnabas has been on the show for four full weeks now, but this is the first time we see his face not in the pleasant disguise of a wealthy gentleman visiting from across the sea. He is wearing a more extreme version of the makeup Maggie has on, and his fangs feature prominently. This is the introduction of the monster, a key element on any horror film, and it suggests that Barnabas is now what Maggie will become.

Fangs on display.
Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

When Barnabas hears Maggie’s friends approaching before he can complete his evil plan, he drops her on the ground and steps over her, again treating her body as a thing.

After she is carried home, Maggie moans about her pain but can say nothing about what has happened to her, who is responsible for it, or what she is thinking. Again, we can connect only with her physical being, not her social relations or her inner life or the events that have involved her. At the end, the handkerchief tied around her neck is removed without her permission or objection, as if she were inanimate. The camera zooms in on open wounds on her neck, isolating that area and leaving us with the image of the wounds as things available to us to examine apart from Maggie’s personality or the rest of her body.

The Source of the Evil

The episode is an adaptation of elements from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Early in that novel, the vampire’s victim Lucy rose from her sickbed and wandered off to a graveyard. As Lucy is found by her friend Mina, so Maggie will be found by her friend, well-meaning governess Vicki. As Mina would spend the second half of the novel as the only female member of a group of stalwart and dynamic men doing battle with the evil Count, so Vicki is working with an otherwise all-male search party led by dashing action hero Burke Devlin. As Mina’s colleagues exclude her from their activities and thereby come close to total failure, so the men leave Vicki behind in the Evans cottage to wait by the phone, only to find that she is the one who will have the most to offer when she joins them in the field.

After Lucy dies and her undead form is destroyed, Mina becomes Dracula’s victim. Mina ends up as the precursor of the “Final Girl” in the mad slasher movie, playing a key part in Dracula’s final defeat, though unlike those movies Dracula ends with a successful team effort.

Since Vicki has been our point of view character from the beginning, was an effective protagonist in the “Phoenix” storyline, and is as relentlessly wholesome as the Final Girl typically is, we might expect that she will be Barnabas’ last victim. That expectation in turn suggests that Maggie, like Lucy, will die, rise as a vampire, and be destroyed by those who love her most. Maggie is one of every viewer’s favorite characters, so the prospect that she might turn into a monster and then leave the show altogether brings keen suspense.

Barnabas Beats His Willie

Vicki does have two important conversations with sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie Loomis while she is in the Evans cottage. The first occurs when Willie comes to the door to bring a message that his master Barnabas will not be available at the usual time to sit for the portrait Maggie’s father is painting of him. Vicki tells Willie that Sam is out searching for Maggie, and Willie becomes very upset to learn that Maggie is missing.

The second conversation comes a few minutes later, when Willie, not disguising his voice in any way, telephones the Evans cottage and tells Vicki that Maggie is in the cemetery and that she is in extreme danger. Somehow Vicki doesn’t recognize his voice. I suppose there were lots of people it might have been- maybe it was Detective Mary Beth Lacey’s husband Harvey from Cagney and Lacey, or Stefan from Daughters of Darkness, or Jock Porter from Love is a Many Splendored Thing, or Geoffrey Fitton from the original Broadway cast of All in Good Time, or any of dozens of policemen and criminals who were in single episodes of cop shows in the 1970s and 1980s.

Willie’s call to Vicki made me wonder about the extent of Barnabas’ powers. When we first saw Barnabas with Willie, his power over him was so extreme that it cost Willie a great effort even to ask Barnabas an unwelcome question, and a look was enough to drive Willie to scurry off and perform the most hateful of tasks. An act of defiance like this was out of the question. Perhaps Barnabas can only keep one blood thrall under total control at a time, and by adding Maggie to his diet he has weakened his hold over Willie.

Willie intrudes on Barnabas’ encounter with Maggie in the cemetery to warn him that Maggie’s friends are on their way. Barnabas instantly suspects that Willie told them where to look for her. When Vicki’s party arrives in the cemetery, Barnabas and Willie run away and hide in the back room of the Collins family tomb where Barnabas was trapped for about 170 years until Willie accidentally released him. This is a departure from Dracula– the Count would have attacked whoever interrupted him, no matter how many of them there were, and fled only if they were armed with crucifixes or consecrated communion wafers or other objects he couldn’t tolerate. But, as my wife Mrs Acilius pointed out, Barnabas has gone a long time without using his vampire powers, so he’s probably rusty.

Barnabas and Willie listen as Burke looks around the outer room of the mausoleum. Once they are sure he is gone, Barnabas confronts Willie with his suspicions. Willie’s lies do not satisfy him, and he lifts his heavy cane and starts beating Willie with it. All we see of this beating is Jonathan Frid’s face and the cane in his hand, but those images, coupled with sound of John Karlen’s cries, imply a violence that shocks us.

In the secret room.
Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

Closing Miscellany

Burke picks Maggie up off the ground, grunting audibly as he does so. He carries her into her house, again with a lot of grunting. If I had been Kathryn Leigh Scott’s agent, the production staff would have received a very hot letter about that grunting. The good-looking young women on a soap opera aren’t supposed to weigh anything at all, certainly not enough to cause a dashing action hero to grunt like that even if he carried her all the way from the cemetery.*

In his post about this episode, Danny Horn has some lines about the ineffectiveness of the Collinsport police that I can’t resist quoting:

Sam tells the Scooby gang that he’s alerted the police — the sheriff and his deputies are out looking for Maggie. But, as everyone knows, the police department in Collinsport is 100% useless, so by now the deputies have probably arrested each other, and the sheriff’s all tangled up in a clothesline somewhere…

Vicki tries to call the sheriff, but there’s no answer; apparently every single person associated with the police department is out searching for Maggie, or falling down wells, or buying magic beans, or whatever the hell it is that Collinsport police officers do in a crisis.
Danny Horn, “Episode 230: The Transylvania Twist,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 27 September 2013

When I first read about “the sheriff all tangled up in a clothesline somewhere” a few years ago, I laughed for about five minutes and knew I would be reading Danny’s blog to the end. I’m glad I did, it’s so much fun it inspired me to start this one.

*Mrs Acilius and I remembered a story Miss Scott tells nowadays. Early in the production of the show, Joan Bennett saw her eating a cheese Danish and said “The figure you have now can be your career for the rest of your life.” She put the cheese Danish down immediately, and hasn’t eaten another since. Our response to the story has been to eat cheese Danish on Miss Scott’s behalf at regular intervals.

Episode 227: The nature of her illness

Vampire Barnabas Collins enters the bedroom of Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. We see a closeup of him in profile, his mouth open to expose his fangs. This shot might have been effective if it had flashed on the screen for a fifth of a second or less and been followed by some kind of action, but we linger on it for a couple of seconds and cut to the opening credits. The result is laugh-out-loud funny. It makes him look like he’s pretending to be a dog in a cartoon. It’s bad enough when Barnabas reminds us of a Scooby-Doo villain without pushing him over the line into imitating Scooby-Doo.

Ruh-roh!
Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

The rest of the episode is composed of scenes that go on too long, though none quite as disastrously as this. In the morning, Maggie’s father, artist and former alcoholic Sam, wakes her. She is ill and moody. Kathryn Leigh Scott maintains just the right level of intensity, and David Ford plays Sam quietly enough to stay out of her way. But they make all their points in the first minute or two, and it just keeps going.

Later, Maggie is sitting at the counter at her place of employment in the restaurant at the Collinsport Inn.* She’s wearing a scarf and feeling awful. Her boyfriend, hardworking young fisherman Joe, comes in. He teasingly asks her how a paying customer can get a cup of coffee. She tells him to pour it himself. He’s about to do it when she drags herself to her feet. She drops the cup. He makes a little joke about seeing her use a broom and she says she’ll sweep it up later. He is shocked, and she snaps at him.

She continues to have trouble with basic tasks, and Joe grows concerned. Sam comes in and reminds her that he told her she shouldn’t have gone to work. He says he’ll call the doctor, and she yells at him. Then, she faints.

That’s probably the best scene in the episode. Miss Scott holds on at the level she had established in the previous scene, while Joel Crothers matches Ford’s steady, understated support. With three actors, there’s enough action to keep us interested. My wife, Mrs Acilius, praised the choreography that allowed Miss Scott to make such a memorable turn unencumbered by Malcolm Marmorstein’s dialogue. Still, they could have done all that in about half the time and we wouldn’t have missed a thing.

Then Maggie’s back in her room, this time with Joe sitting on the side of the bed while she lies in it. The body language between them is affectionate, but after about a minute and a half you can’t help but notice them complying with the requirements of the Standards and Practices office. Sick as Maggie is, it is jarring to see Joe keep his distance from her quite so scrupulously.

Night falls, and we see Barnabas in his house. He peers out his window, and we cut to Maggie. She’s still in her room, but now she is out of bed, brushing her hair, and grinning. Sam enters and is surprised at the change in her.

Maggie’s up.
Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

After a meandering conversation, Maggie volunteers to drive Sam to Barnabas’ house where Sam will be working on a portrait of Barnabas. Evidently Sam agrees, because the two of them enter there together.

Maggie and Barnabas exchange looks and conversation loaded with double meanings while Sam sets up. Jonathan Frid plays Barnabas’ part in this so heavily that it is laughable Sam doesn’t notice something is going on between him and Maggie.

Barnabas and Maggie murmuring to each other.
Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

I’m always reluctant to complain about Frid’s acting. It’s so hard to explain just what it was that made Barnabas such an enormous hit that you can never rule out the possibility that any given thing might have been indispensable to it. Still, seeing him ham it up so shamelessly today, especially after the other three members of the cast have shown such strict discipline, I did have to wonder what he was thinking. It’s hard to imagine anyone would have directed him to play the part that way.

I can see one advantage to Frid’s overacting. Maggie sticks around his house a couple of minutes after the point of the sequence has been made, and the time is filled with repetitious dialogue about her illness. When Barnabas says that the house is an unhealthy place for someone in her condition, Frid leans so hard on the line and makes himself look so silly that you don’t really notice that there is no reason for the scene still to be going on.

After Maggie has gone home and got back into bed, Sam tells Barnabas he’s tired and thinks it’s time to stop for the night.** Barnabas wants him to keep going for a while and to take the next night off. They discuss this fascinating topic at length. Sam decides to spend an hour working on the background. Their conversation has already taken so long that we fear they might show that hour of painting in real time, and it is a relief when Barnabas says he will go outside while Sam paints. We can assume he’s going to pop into Maggie’s room for a snack.

*The last appearance of this set, alas.

**Barnabas’ sorely bedraggled blood-thrall, Willie Loomis, will be driving Sam home. At this point they’ve settled on the idea that Willie has a car.

Episode 222: The local crime rate

We open in the front parlor of the long-abandoned Old House on the grounds of the estate of Collinwood. Willie Loomis, the sorely bedraggled blood-thrall of newly resident vampire Barnabas Collins, is lighting candles.

A knock comes at the door. No one knows that Barnabas has brought Willie to the house. Before Barnabas bit him, he was dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis, a menace to all and sundry. Almost everyone in the great house on the estate and many people in the nearby village of Collinsport have been feeling a great sense of relief for the last few days because they believe that Willie has gone and will never return. So he responds to the knocking by trying to hide.

Well-meaning governess Vicki comes in and calls for Barnabas. She finds Willie and demands to know what he is doing there. He tells her not to worry about that, but to get out of the house as quickly as she can.*

Willie tried to rape Vicki in #203, and crazed handyman Matthew Morgan held her prisoner in the Old House in episodes #116-126. So regular viewers will be absorbed in Alexandra Moltke Isles’ performance of Vicki’s refusal to be intimidated by this man in this space. At first she visibly steels herself to stand up to Willie. As he keeps his distance and evades her questions, she starts to suspect that he is more afraid of her than she is of him. She begins to relax, and takes stock of the improvements that have been made to the house. By the time she concludes that Willie is probably telling the truth about being Barnabas’ servant, she has an amused, almost triumphant look on her face and an easy sway to her movements. She talks easily and cheerfully about the improvements made since the last time she was in the house, and Willie squirms.

As Vicki tries to communicate reclusive matriarch Liz’ invitation for Barnabas to join the Collins family for dinner in the great house, Willie denies that he knows where Barnabas is or when he will come back, and continues to demand that Vicki leave. She finally gives up and goes, but with irritation, not fear. She leaves with a sarcastic “Thank you!”

After Vicki leaves, Barnabas appears and scolds Willie. First, he taunts Willie’s roughness (“My, you are a polite one!”) Then, he orders him not to try to protect anyone from him. He is stern, Willie is terrified, the whole effect is suitably sinister.

We cut to the Evans cottage, home of artist Sam Evans and his daughter Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town. Maggie rushes into the front door panting, as if she has been running. She shows intense fear when she hears a knock on the door. She calls out, “Who is it?” “Barnabas Collins,” comes the reply. “Mr Collins?” “That’s right.” She slowly opens the door, with the chain in place, and peeks out. She relaxes slightly when she sees that it really is the kindly eccentric she met the other night.

Barnabas asks permission to come in. Maggie opens the door and gestures towards the inside of the house. Barnabas asks again. Only after she explicitly invites him does he cross the threshold. There’s a tradition that vampires can enter only where they are invited, and the show has been following that strictly so far. Barnabas didn’t even go into Maggie’s restaurant until she asked him. Perhaps that was why he went there after it had closed, so that she would have to unlock the door and explicitly invite him to come in.

Maggie explains that she is unsettled because she felt someone followed her home. Considering that Barnabas knocked on her front door less than 30 seconds after she came in, I’d say her feeling has had some pretty solid corroboration, but she doesn’t seem to be making the connection. Maggie goes on to say that she is on edge anyway because some unseen man grabbed local woman Jane Ackerman by the throat the other day and vanished into the night when Jane was able to scream and attract a crowd.

Barnabas explains that he was intrigued when she mentioned that her father was an artist. Maggie brightens and ushers Barnabas towards Sam’s paintings. He looks at several and admires them.

Sam comes home. He is as disquieted as Maggie was when she entered. He tells her that he looked for her at the restaurant and was alarmed to see that she had already closed and was presumably walking home. There has been another attack.

The conversation shows how exotic Barnabas is in Collinsport. He speaks with a mid-Atlantic accent, uses old-fashioned grammatical constructions,** and his manners are a caricature of the Old World courtier. Sam is slangy and vulgar, telling Barnabas that the police “think it’s the same guy” behind both attacks. The contrast between the polished Barnabas and the coarse Sam will be developed further in this episode and later.

Barnabas asks Sam to paint his portrait. At the word “commission,” Sam stands up straight and becomes very still, while Maggie holds her breath. When Barnabas offers $1000 for the work, Maggie burst into grin, and Sam visibly struggles to keep from jumping with joy.***

As Sam, David Ford has a lot of trouble with his lines today. So much that Danny Horn, in his post about this episode on Dark Shadows Every Day, writes that “It’s unbelievable that this man was employed, even on this show.” But Ford plays Sam’s response to Barnabas’ offer perfectly, showing us a man who is excited by a lucrative opportunity, but who also remembers a time when he was in a position to negotiate when such offers came in, and who wishes his daughter could remember it as well. In spite of all Ford’s communings with the teleprompter, that moment reminded me of Marc Masse’s rave review of Ford’s first appearances on Dark Shadows and of his theory that Ford’s style of acting had a salutary influence on his cast-mates.

Barnabas wants to sit for Sam before the night is out. He insists that the painting be done at the Old House, and exclusively at night. Sam has little choice but to agree.

We know that Barnabas is unavailable during the day, but it is not immediately clear why the work should be done at the Old House. Barnabas seems to have plans for Maggie, and hanging around her house every night would seem a more efficient way to advance those than having her father come to his.

Perhaps he wants the portrait to have some kind of special relationship to the house. Portraits have been an important part of the show from the beginning. The main set is the foyer and drawing room of the great house of Collinwood, and the oversized portraits of Collins ancestors are among its most prominent visual features. In the early weeks, dashing action hero Burke Devlin commissioned Sam to paint his portrait, which for reasons too tedious to repeat sent high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins into a tizzy.

As the show moved deeper and deeper into uncanny themes, portraits became a bridge between the world of the living and the world of the more or less dead. When blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins was driving the action of the show, a supernatural force compelled Sam to paint portraits of her. And Willie freed Barnabas from his coffin because he became obsessed with the portrait of Barnabas in the foyer of the great house and Barnabas was able to call to him through it. So maybe a portrait painted in the much-haunted Old House will derive some kind of magical or demonic power from its place of origin.

Maggie, still radiant with joy at the promising new turn in her Pop’s career, drops him off at the Old House. He sets up an easel, puts a canvas on it, puts a chair where he wants Barnabas to sit, and starts to work right away. My wife, Mrs Acilius, is among other things a painter; when she saw this, she asked in puzzlement what happened to the sketch-making phase of the project. By the time the sun is about to rise and Barnabas disappears from the room, the figure is almost half completed. Comparing that with the weeks and weeks Sam spent dragging his feet in response to Roger’s demand he not paint Burke, and with his frustratingly repetitious role in the Laura storyline, this Bob Ross-like speed would seem to suggest that the show will be picking up its pace sometime soon. ****

Meanwhile, Maggie is visiting Vicki at the great house. In front of Barnabas’ portrait in the foyer, Vicki says that she likes Barnabas very much- after all the troubles the Collinses have had in the last several months, it’s a relief to have someone around who is friendly. This is almost exactly what flighty heiress Carolyn had said to Vicki when they were standing on the same spot in #214, and it accounts for Liz’ instantaneous delight upon meeting Barnabas in #211. It is his contrast with foes like Burke, Laura, Willie, and seagoing con man Jason McGuire that has smoothed Barnabas’ entry into the present-day Collins family, and he is sliding right into possession of the Old House, which is after all a huge mansion.

The episode ends with an inversion of its beginning. Instead of going into hiding, Willie emerges into view. Sam, who had a nasty run-in with Willie in #207, is as surprised and as unhappy to see him as Vicki had been. As Vicki had done, he accepts Willie’s claim to be Barnabas’ servant after he looks around the parlor and realizes that Barnabas must have had someone helping him put it to rights. As the action began with Vicki coming in through the doors of the Old House, so it ends with Sam going out through them. Vicki entered looking up and calling loudly “Mr Collins!” Sam exits looking down and muttering about the idea of resuming work at sundown. The contrast shows how the events of the episode, even those which seemed pleasant to the people experiencing them, have left everyone confused and helpless before Barnabas.*****

*When Willie delivers this line, actor John Karlen briefly assumes an accent reminiscent of his predecessor in the role, Mississippian James Hall. There’s a little bit of the South in some of his lines later in the episode as well, mostly when he says “Ah’m” instead of “I’m.” Karlen was from Brooklyn, and the day will come when Willie is from there as well. But today is not that day.

**He doesn’t use them correctly- twice he uses the objective case form “whom” when the context calls for the subjective “who.” Still, he uses them, that’s the point.

***For several months, ending 1 May 2023, PlutoTV had a channel that showed Dark Shadows 24/7. They had about 600 episodes, starting from #210 and ending somewhere in the 800s, which they run on a loop interspersed with some related material, such as Dan Curtis’ Dracula. Every week or two, I turned it on during odd moments of the day to see which one they were showing. Often as not, I found this episode. Twice in a row, I tuned in at the moment when Barnabas is telling Sam “You are definitely the man for me!” I turned it on in the middle of the afternoon on 18 April, the very day Mrs Acilius and I were going to watch this episode and I would start writing the post above, and there was Maggie telling Barnabas about the attack on Jane Ackerman. I turned away, since I knew we’d be watching it that evening.

Now, Pluto shows a block of episodes on their “Classic TV Dramas” channel in the afternoons. Late this morning I turned Pluto on to have sound in the background while doing some paperwork, found Rat Patrol on that channel, and at noon it gave way to… Dark Shadows, episode 222!

****Mrs Acilius points out that Sam painted Laura’s portraits just as quickly. That time, he was acting as the tool of the ghost of Josette Collins. Perhaps Barnabas can do what Josette did, and is acting through Sam.

She also remarks that what Sam has painted includes Barnabas’ face without his mouth. Considering that the subject is a vampire, it must be significant that the painter is delaying the depiction of that particular body part.

*****As Willie leads Sam out of the house, a bell tower chimes. A single rooster isn’t too hard to accept as a feature of the estate, but since when has Collinwood had a carillon?

Episode 221: A new Collins in Collinsport

Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, is closing up shop in the restaurant at the Collinsport Inn. A stranger startles her. He is the mysterious Barnabas Collins. Barnabas recently left his long-time residence in the cemetery five miles north of town and has been hanging around the great estate of Collinwood, but this is the first time we’ve seen him in Collinsport proper.

In the opening months of Dark Shadows, the restaurant, like the rest of the inn, was coded as the base from which dashing action hero Burke Devlin mounted his campaign to avenge himself on the ancient and esteemed Collins family. As the Revenge of Burke Devlin storyline ran out of steam, the restaurant emerged as a neutral space where new characters could be introduced without defining their relationships to the established cast all at once. In that period, Maggie was Collinsport’s one-woman welcoming committee.

Now, even Burke has given up on his storyline. The only narrative element of the show with an open-ended future is Barnabas, and once the audience has figured out that he is a vampire there’s no such thing as a neutral space where he is concerned. So it is not clear what, if any, role the restaurant will have from now on.

Barnabas asks if it is too late to get a cup of coffee. Maggie tells him it is, but relents after about a minute and reopens to serve him. She is charmed by his old-world manners and excited to learn that “there is a new Collins in Collinsport.” He tells her he is staying at the long-abandoned Old House on the grounds of Collinwood, prompting her to marvel at the idea of someone living in a dilapidated ruin that is probably haunted. When she admires his cane, he explains that it is not only quite valuable, but is also a family heirloom and on that account his most prized possession.

Barnabas appears to drink the coffee, as he appeared to drink the sherry his distant cousin Roger served him when he visited Collinwood in #214. Usually vampires are supposed to limit their diet strictly to human blood, but just a few weeks ago Dark Shadows wrapped up a long story about Laura Murdoch Collins, a humanoid Phoenix, who raised everyone’s suspicions by never being seen to eat or drink. So they may have thought that it would be repetitious to follow the Laura arc so closely with another undead menace who betrays himself with the same sign.

Barnabas kisses Maggie’s hand in farewell

Maggie’s boyfriend, hardworking young fisherman Joe, comes bustling into the restaurant seconds after Barnabas leaves. Maggie is surprised that Joe and Barnabas didn’t pass each other, and puzzled when Joe tells her there was no one in sight anywhere near the inn. Neither of them had heard of Barnabas before.

Joe tells Maggie that a woman named Jane Ackerman had an unpleasant run-in with a man she couldn’t see earlier in the night. The fellow retreated before doing her any serious harm, but Joe seems fairly sure that whoever it was is a real threat to the women of Collinsport. So he wants to keep Maggie company. Maggie doesn’t seem worried, either for her own sake or for Jane’s. She’s just happy to see Joe, and gladly agrees when Joe suggests they go to the local tavern, the Blue Whale.

As Dark Shadows’ principal representatives of Collinsport’s working class, Maggie and Joe illustrate the point the opening voiceover made when it said that people “far away from the great house” of Collinwood would soon be “aware of” Barnabas and of “the mystery that surrounds him.” As a name we have never heard before and are unlikely to hear again, “Jane Ackerman” reminds us that there is a whole community of people for Barnabas to snack on.

As Joe and Maggie are heading out of the restaurant, she notices that Barnabas left his precious cane behind. She wants to go straight to the Old House to return it to him. Joe would rather wait until morning, but Maggie explains that she doesn’t want to be responsible for it overnight. This is a bit odd- they are in a hotel, after all, a business that specializes in keeping valuable property safe while its owners sleep.

Perhaps Maggie wants to see the Old House. Joe has been there many times. When we saw him there with Burke, searching for well-meaning governess Vicki in #118, he mentioned that when he and flighty heiress Carolyn were children, they would occasionally play there. He returned there during the Laura storyline. Even Maggie’s father has visited the Old House, participating in a séance there in #186 and #187. Maggie has never been there at all. So perhaps she just feels left out.

Maggie and Joe knock on the doors of the Old House. No one comes. As they turn to go, there is a closeup of the door knobs turning. Maggie and Joe hear a door open, and go in. They don’t see anyone, but candles are burning and Joe remarks that the front parlor has been fixed up. Joe goes upstairs and leaves Maggie behind, explaining that he knows his way around the place and it isn’t safe up there for someone who doesn’t.

Once Maggie is alone, Barnabas appears next to her. She is startled and cannot see how he could have got there without her knowing. He apologizes for once more catching her unawares. He seems surprised that she is not alone. When Joe comes downstairs, he is exceedingly polite to both of them.

After Maggie and Joe excuse themselves, Barnabas’ blood-thrall, the sorely bedraggled Willie Loomis, appears. With obvious difficulty, Willie forces out one word after another, and manages to ask Barnabas what he plans to do to Maggie. Barnabas is displeased with Willie’s presence and with his presumption that he has the right to question him. He climbs the stairs and looks down at Willie, full of menace and demanding that he go out and do the work Barnabas has ordered him to do. Willie tries to refuse, but cannot stand the look Barnabas is giving him.

During this staring contest, Barnabas and Willie are standing on the spots where strange and troubled boy David Collins and Barnabas had stood when we first saw Barnabas in the Old House in #212. In that scene, David and Barnabas were more or less eye-to-eye, and for a moment it seemed that Barnabas was contemplating violence against David. In this scene, Barnabas shows how committed he is to violence. He has a power over Willie that he gained by the extreme violence of drinking Willie’s blood, and Willie’s inability to resist Barnabas’ stare shows that power in use. Willie’s horror at the task Barnabas has assigned suggests that it also is violent.

My wife, Mrs Acilius, believes that the confrontation between Willie and Barnabas solves one of the behind-the-scenes mysteries about Dark Shadows. Why was James Hall replaced by John Karlen in the role of Willie? She points out that Hall, while he is a fine actor, had a lot of trouble with Willie’s lines, particularly in the long he shared with Dennis Patrick’s Jason McGuire. By the time Willie was recast, Jonathan Frid had been attached to the role of Barnabas for some days, and Frid never made it a secret that he was a slow study. So if there were going to be a lot of long conversations between Willie and Barnabas, Willie had to be played by an actor who could get his dialogue letter perfect day after day. That was John Karlen.

After Willie scurries off to do whatever evil chore Barnabas has ordained for him, Barnabas wanders over to the window. On his way, we see that the portrait of Josette Collins is no longer hanging in the spot over the mantle where we have seen it since our first look at the Old House in #70. At the end of that episode, Josette’s ghost emanated from the portrait and danced around the outside of the house. From that point, the Old House was chiefly a setting for Josette. Crazed handyman Matthew Morgan learned that to his cost when he tried to hold Vicki prisoner there and Josette and other ghosts ganged up on him and scared him to death in #126. Laura knew that she was entering the territory of a powerful enemy when her son David took her to the Old House in #141, and when Vicki had formed a group to oppose Laura’s evil plans she and parapsychologist Dr Guthrie went there to contact Josette. In #212, Barnabas addressed the portrait and told Josette that her power was ended and he was now the master of the house. Removing the portrait tells us that Barnabas is confident that he is not only a new Collins in Collinsport, but that he is now the Collins at Collinwood.

Barnabas then does something Laura did several times- he stares intently out his window. When Laura stared out her window, David would be violently disturbed, no matter how far away he was or how many obstacles were between him and his mother. These incidents were a big enough part of Laura’s story that regular viewers, seeing Barnabas stare out the window, will expect someone at a distance from him to react intensely.

We cut from Barnabas to Joe and Maggie at her house. Joe asks what time he should pick Maggie up tomorrow, and Maggie suddenly becomes disoriented. Kathryn Leigh Scott has a sensational turn playing that moment of lightheadedness, creating the impression that she is having a scene with Barnabas. As she recovers, she explains to Joe that she has the feeling she is being stared at. Then we dissolve to Barnabas in his window. Barnabas may not be Maggie’s mother, but apparently there is some kind of link between them. Perhaps kissing Maggie’s hand in the restaurant was enough to give Barnabas the power to creep her out even when he is miles away from her.