mrs acilius – Page 7 – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 518: How to speak to people

We open in a hospital room where Sam Evans is in bed, wearing dark glasses. This would tell a first time viewer that Sam is blind, and also that he’s reckless about his glasses.

Sam is begging his daughter Maggie to bring her friend Vicki around so he can tell her about a dream he just had. Vicki shows up and invites Sam to tell her the dream. This leads to a dramatic musical sting and a cut to the opening title. The first time viewer, still worried that Sam might nod off and break his glasses, will be unlikely to see why Vicki’s willingness to listen to Sam’s dream should be a concerning development.

Sam starts to describe his dream. A knock on the door interrupts him. It is Timothy Eliot Stokes. Stokes orders Vicki out of the room. Stokes is wearing a suit, not a white coat, and is addressed as “Professor.” So it should be clear to the first-time viewer that he is not a medical doctor, has no authority in the hospital, and is not particularly close to Vicki, Maggie, or Sam. The women resist his commands, but when it becomes clear he won’t back down they humor him.

In the corridor outside Sam’s room, Vicki tells Stokes “I hope you have some explanation.” He replies “The situation required drastic action.” “Is that all you have to say?” “No, I might add you should be grateful to me.” Thus the first-time viewer learns that Stokes does not feel obligated to be polite to young, pretty women.

Stokes tells Vicki that “Your recent experience in the past has taught you some rather frightening things about witchcraft.” Vicki agrees with this statement. Maggie turns away and looks out into space, wondering what the heck these lunatics are talking about. At last the first-time viewer has an on-screen representative.

Stokes describes a “Dream Curse,” in which a series of people all have the same nightmare. Each dreamer is compelled to tell the nightmare to a particular person who appeared in it. That person then has the nightmare, featuring a third person, and awakens with the same compulsion to tell the nightmare to that person, keeping the cycle going. Vicki declares that she doesn’t know what Stokes is talking about, but Maggie seems to. Vicki grudgingly agrees not to go into Sam’s room, but refuses to leave the corridor.

Returning viewers know that Maggie was the first to have the nightmare. It will also stretch their credulity that Vicki hasn’t heard about it. Maggie is one of Vicki’s dearest friends, and the nightmare was a terrifying experience that weighed on her for quite some time. The person Maggie passed the nightmare to was Vicki’s boyfriend Peter, who prefers to be called Jeff. Not only has neither Maggie nor Peter/ Jeff told Vicki about the nightmare, neither has any of the three people who have already had the nightmare and who live with her in the great house of Collinwood. These are heiress Carolyn, whom Vicki has addressed as “my best friend”; strange and troubled boy David, who is Vicki’s charge in her job as governess and who feels very close to her; and housekeeper Mrs Johnson, who habitually tells everyone everything she knows.

It will also be strange to those who have been watching the show that Stokes does not tell Vicki the key thing about the Dream Curse, that it is aimed at old world gentleman Barnabas Collins. Vicki is extremely fond of Barnabas; Stokes knows this, because in #509, he told her that he was doing battle with a witch whose goal was to kill Barnabas, and she was most eager to help him. If he told her that by listening to Sam’s account of the dream she would be bringing Barnabas one step closer to death, surely he would have persuaded her to go home. But, as my wife Mrs Acilius pointed out while we were watching the episode, that would let Vicki back into the story. Stokes, like Barnabas and several other major characters, is working to keep Vicki from becoming relevant to any ongoing plot.

Stokes has to leave the hospital to attend to another matter. While Maggie was leading the way out of the hospital room, he looked out the window and saw a man looking in. The man is Adam, a very tall, phenomenally strong, peculiarly inarticulate fellow whom Stokes met at Sam and Maggie’s cottage a few days ago. Stokes is eager to get to know Adam. He lets himself into the cottage and waits there until Adam comes by. Adam is confused to find him there, but Stokes quickly persuades him to come home with him. Stokes promises to give him food and become his friend. The two of them are quite cheerful as they walk out the front door.

The camera repeatedly focuses on a stickpin Stokes dropped on the rug, suggesting that he will get in trouble for having let himself into the cottage without Maggie’s permission. That suggestion is clearer to the first-time viewer than to those who know what’s been happening. Stokes had been in the cottage with Sam not long before, and could easily claim to have dropped the stickpin on that occasion.

Back in the hospital corridor, Vicki hears Sam crying out in agony. She goes to his room. Maggie joins her there, and Sam starts describing the nightmare. Maggie recognizes it as the one that caused her such distress when she had it, and her eyes dart to Vicki. She tells Vicki she doesn’t have to stay. Vicki insists, and a look of panic starts to form on Maggie’s face. Sam doesn’t get far into the nightmare before he dies.

Returning viewers will remember that the luckless Willie Loomis was interrupted in his attempt to tell Carolyn the nightmare in #506, and that when she next went to sleep she could have only the part of the nightmare he had described. So we wonder if Vicki will have the same problem.

We may wonder about something else. Stokes, as an expert on witchcraft, has several times said that a Dream Curse is designed to “end with a death.” We may wonder if Sam’s death will end it before it gets to Barnabas.

That would represent a stinging defeat for the witch. Sam was once a fairly important character, but long ago receded to the margins of the show. He made his debut in #5, and has been played by David Ford since #35. Originally he was a tormented alcoholic, driven to drink by his part in the injustice done long ago to dashing action hero Burke Devlin. Burke’s storyline fizzled out completely in #201, and since then Sam has made only intermittent appearances, mostly as support for Maggie, who is herself usually a secondary character. To launch an attack on the show’s breakout star and hit a tertiary player would be quite embarrassing to any villain. Maybe the witch’s next plan will wind up falling on Bob the Bartender, and the one after that will hit one of the sheriff’s feeble-minded deputies.

Kathryn Leigh Scott tells some stories about Sam’s death scene that do not fit with what is on the tape. In her 1986 book My Scrapbook Memories of Dark Shadows, she writes about the teleprompter falling over and making a loud noise and Ford shouting “Where is it!?” In appearances at Dark Shadows conventions, she has said that the lines Ford improvised to replace the ones he couldn’t read ran over time, and that in her desperation to get to the next break she pushed a pillow on his face and nearly smothered him while saying “Don’t die, Pop!” In his post on Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn says that Miss Scott’s “anecdote was entirely made up. None of that happened.”

I reserve judgment. Maybe the episode we have is a second take. It runs unusually smoothly up to Sam’s death scene, as if the cast had had more practice with its parts than usual. We know that, in spite of all the spectacular bloopers and other production errors they left in, they did sometimes start over, and the incidents Miss Scott described might well have been enough to warrant that.

Episode 517: Tell me your dream

Wiggèd witch Cassandra shakes off an attempt to burn her and finds out that Sam Evans, an artist whom she blinded a little while ago, is in the hospital with a severe head injury. Sam is on the critical list.

Cassandra has cast an elaborate spell that takes the form of a series of nightmares one person after another has. Sage Timothy Eliot Stokes managed to stop the dream curse a while ago, but Cassandra is determined to restart it. Sam must be the next person to have the dream, so she goes to his hospital room and puts a powder in his drinking water that does the trick.

We see Sam’s dream, as we saw the dream when each of the previous nine people had it. The dream is an opportunity for the actors to emote as fiercely as they want, and most of them seem at least a little bit silly as they go through the exercise. Today, David Ford is the most ridiculous yet. He has to scream several times, and we find that screaming was not one of his strengths as an actor. In fact, every time he did it Mrs Acilius and I laughed out loud. The other person in his dream, the well-meaning Vicki, is played by Alexandra Moltke Isles. Mrs Isles has a ghostly quality that makes her very effective as a mysterious figure in a nightmare. Next to her, Ford seems to be some random guy in a bathrobe who just wandered onto the set.

Sam wakes up from his dream and begs his daughter Maggie to get her friend Vicki to come over. Only by telling her about it can he be relieved of the agony that comes to those who have had the dream. Regular viewers know that if he does this, Vicki will have the dream. In a soliloquy, Cassandra tells us that Vicki will pass the dream to recovering vampire Barnabas. Her purpose in setting the curse was to turn Barnabas back into an active vampire; this will therefore be the last step to her success.

Stokes knows how the curse works and knows that Barnabas will die if the dream gets back to him. He does not know that Barnabas was a vampire, much less that Cassandra wants him to revert to vampirism. Maggie was the first to have the dream and knows that Stokes is an expert on it. She does not know that it is designed to kill someone at its culmination. So she sends for both Vicki and Stokes. At the end of the episode, Vicki is at Sam’s bedside, inviting him to tell her the dream; Stokes is still on his way.

Cassandra chose Maggie to be the first to have the dream because she resembles Barnabas’ lost love, gracious lady Josette. They look so much alike that they are the same actress. She does not tell us why she chose Vicki to be the last, but Vicki had extensive contact with Josette’s ghost in the first 39 weeks of the show, and from November 1967 to March 1968 traveled back in time and got to know Josette as a living being. When Josette was alive, Cassandra was known as Angelique. She was a lady’s maid in Josette’s family’s home, and secretly hated the young mistress. Barnabas had an affair with Angelique until he realized he could marry Josette, when he discarded the servant and pursued the mistress. Eventually, Barnabas’ attachment to Josette led the enraged Angelique to turn him into a vampire. So it is logical that Angelique/ Cassandra uses the two women closest to Josette as the first and last instruments in her campaign to revamp Barnabas. It does make it all the more ironic that Stokes lumped strange and troubled boy David, who for the first months of the show was more involved with Josette’s ghost than anyone else, among the “comparative strangers” who have the dream when Barnabas is in relatively little danger.

Episode 512: A jury of the dead!

For nineteen weeks from November 1967 to March 1968, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the late eighteenth century. Among the more interesting characters introduced in that period were fanatical witchfinder the Rev’d Mr Trask; roguish naval officer Nathan Forbes; fast-talking con artist Suki Forbes; and streetwalkers Ruby Tate and Maude Browning. All five of these characters were murdered by vampire Barnabas Collins, and all five of them are among those who return today for an impromptu trial of Barnabas.

Barnabas killed Trask by luring him to his basement and bricking him up in an alcove, as Montresor did to Fortunato in Edgar Allan Poe’s 1846 story “The Cask of Amontillado.” Some other characters invited themselves to the basement yesterday and held a séance there. As a result of the séance, the bricks fell away and Trask came back to life. Now, Trask has confined Barnabas to the same alcove. He declares that he will give him a trial before he bricks him up.

In the eighteenth century, Trask was the prosecutor in the trial of time traveling governess Vicki Winters. Victoria was convicted of witchcraft and sentenced to death. Vicki’s trip from the 1960s to the 1790s inverted Barnabas’ displacement in time; as Vicki’s witchcraft trial was so chaotic it did not seem to follow rules of any kind, neither does the murder trial Trask improvises for Barnabas fit any conceivable model of procedure. Vicki’s trial stretched over two weeks, from #427 to #437; Barnabas’ begins and ends today, during the second half of the episode.

Trask conjures up Nathan, Suki, Ruby, Maude, and Barnabas’ first homicide victim, his uncle Jeremiah, to serve as a jury; he conjures up a man named Ezra Simpson, of whom we have never previously heard, to act as judge. Trask is the prosecutor, and Nathan is his sole witness. This court of “the damned!,” as Trask calls them, recalls the rogues who confront Jabez Stone as jurors and judge in Stephen Vincent Benét’s 1936 story “The Devil and Daniel Webster.” Unlike Jabez Stone, however, Barnabas does not have a right to counsel.

Court is in session. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Trask asks Nathan how he died. After Nathan says that Barnabas strangled him, Trask asks him how Suki died. Barnabas objects that Nathan shouldn’t be allowed to speak for others; regular viewers sympathize with this, since Suki, played today as she was originally by Jane Draper, was sensational every second she was on screen, and when we saw Miss Draper again we were happy to think that she would have another chance to show what she could do. Barnabas also shouts at one point that he is innocent; this is less likely to attract the audience’s sympathy. Mrs Acilius and I certainly got a good laugh from it.

Barnabas asks to be allowed to present a defense. Trask invites him to question Nathan. He is about to do so when Nathan smiles at him, turns around, and vanishes. Trask explains that Nathan has already said all that needs to be said. Later, Trask looks at the recompleted wall and laughs with vicious glee, delighted at what is behind it.

Barnabas has neither the powers nor the limitations of a vampire now. The effects of the curse went into remission when mad scientists Eric Lang and Julia Hoffman created a man from parts scavenged from the cemetery and connected Barnabas to him as they electrified him and brought him to life. Barnabas named this man Adam.

Now Adam has escaped from the horribly abusive home Barnabas and Julia provided for him. He has found a friend in Sam Evans, an artist who was blinded when Barnabas enlisted him in one of his hare-brained schemes. Sam is teaching Adam to speak, and is so impressed with his ability to learn that he wonders aloud if he will be able to teach him to paint professionally.

Adam develops a sudden pain in his wrists. He moans “Barnabas! Hurt!” A shot of Barnabas hanging by his wrists in the basement alcove is laid over a closeup of Adam. Evidently the bond between them is such that Adam can sense Barnabas’ pain, even though they are miles apart. Apparently it is mid-1840s day on Dark Shadows; the scene in Barnabas’ house recalls “The Cask of Amontillado,” and the scene at Sam’s house is based on Alexandre Dumas’ 1846 novella The Corsican Brothers. “The Devil and Daniel Webster” was set in that decade or a bit earlier, and while Frankenstein was written in 1818 many adaptations of it, including the one Dark Shadows creator Dan Curtis would make in 1973, are set in the 1840s.

Adam becomes agitated. He cannot explain what is happening to him, no matter how patiently Sam asks. Sam’s son-in-law-to-be Joe Haskell comes in; Adam brushes against Joe as he runs out the door. Though Joe is a tall and sturdy man, Adam is so tremendously strong that this casual contact sends him flying.

It dawns on Joe that Adam is the man who abducted heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard and then fell from the cliff on Widows’ Hill. Sam calmly replies that he had already figured that out. Joe is shocked that Sam hasn’t called the police; Sam replies that Adam is as disabled as he is, and that he means no one any harm. Joe is not at all convinced of the second of these points, and worries that “Barnabas! Hurt!” might not have reflected a fear that Barnabas is hurt, as Sam thinks it does, but might rather express Adam’s resolution to hurt Barnabas. Joel Crothers and David Ford bring out the full comic value of this scene; Mrs Acilius laughed at the blandness with which Ford’s Sam confirms that he knows who Adam is.

Joe goes to Barnabas’ house to warn him, but finds it locked and apparently empty. Later, Julia goes there too. She has a key, and lets herself in. She doesn’t see any evidence that Barnabas is or has been home; she goes downstairs, and is mystified to see that the alcove wall, which was broken when she was there for the séance, is now bricked up again.

Several times, Dark Shadows has contrasted Barnabas’ home, the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood, with the Evans cottage, a working class residence in the village of Collinsport. Today they draw this contrast in sharp relief. The basement of the Old House is always dark, but even the upstairs is lit by candles today; the scenes in the Evans cottage, taking place at the same time, are sunlit. The basement is the most haunted part of the most haunted house on the haunted estate, and eight characters in costume dress materialize from thin air there; the Evans cottage is a part of the modern world where Sam and Joe can use reason to arrive at agreement about facts, even if they make different judgments about the significance of those facts. When Julia and Joe go to the Old House, each wanders about alone, finding no one to talk to; at the Evans cottage, even Adam is able to have a conversation, and while there he can receive a message from Barnabas by some mysterious means. Trask seizes control of the basement of the Old House to make a parody of the criminal justice system and enact his vengeance on Barnabas; in the Evans cottage, Sam refuses to call the sheriff because he wants to shield Adam from punishment for the crimes he inadvertently committed.

Episode 511: It’s not fair to come into someone’s house

In the first months of Dark Shadows, the audience’s point of view was represented by well-meaning governess Vicki, who needed to have explained to her everything we might want to know and who reacted to all the strange goings-on with the mixture of disquiet and curiosity that the makers of the show hope we will feel.

Vicki has long since been replaced as our representative by mad scientist Julia. We no longer want characters to tell us what has been going on, nor are we making up our minds about our moral evaluation of the events in the stories. We find ourselves in the middle of a whole clutch of fast-moving plots, trying to keep up with them all and hoping that nothing will stop the thrills. Julia’s loyalty to her best friend, sometime vampire Barnabas, and her supremely well-developed capacity for lying put her in the same position, and her vestigial conscience is no obstacle to any juicy storyline.

When Vicki was our on-screen counterpart, her charge, strange and troubled boy David, was the show’s most powerful chaos agent. David precipitated a series of crises that seemed likely to expose the secrets of the ancient and esteemed Collins family, to kill one or more of the major characters, or both. In #70, David led Vicki to his favorite playground, the long-vacant Old House on the estate of Collinwood. David would keep sneaking into the Old House even after Barnabas took up residence there in #218.

Today, David again lets himself into the Old House. He is caught there by Julia and a man he has not seen before. Julia is stern with him for entering the house without Barnabas’ permission; he defends his presence there, reminding Julia that she promised him he could play with the tape recorder on Barnabas’ desk. He asks who the man is.

The man introduces himself to David as “Timothy Eliot Stokes.” This is the first time time we have heard his middle name. Soon, the show will phase “Timothy” out, and his friends will address Stokes as “Eliot.” I suppose that’s because he’s a professor, and “Eliot” suggests Harvard.

In 1966, Thayer David played crazed groundskeeper Matthew. Suspected of murder, Matthew hid out in the Old House and kept Vicki prisoner there until some ghosts scared him to death in #126. David didn’t believe Matthew was a killer and didn’t know he was holding Vicki, so when he stumbled upon him in the Old House he brought him food and cigarettes. Even after he found Vicki bound and gagged behind a hidden panel, he kept Matthew’s secret. When David meets another character played by the same actor on the same set, longtime viewers can see that Stokes is as genteel and urbane as Matthew was rough-hewn and paranoid. For her part, Julia recalls Vicki when she scolds David for sneaking into the Old House, but where Vicki was doing her job as David’s governess and trying to enforce the rules of the household as a governess might, Julia is scrambling to keep David from finding out about her own secret activities.

Julia tells David to take the tape recorder and go home to the great house on the estate. As he makes his way to the front door, Stokes takes Julia aside and tells her that it will not be well if it is known in the great house that David has seen him. Julia hurries to David and tells him to keep quiet about the fact that he has seen Stokes. She says that she hates to ask him to lie; at this, I mimicked Julia and said “I know you share my devotion to the truth,” prompting Mrs Acilius to laugh out loud. Later, Julia will go to the great house, where she lives as a permanent guest, and David will cheerfully assure her that he kept her secret. The two of them seem quite relaxed together, leading us to believe that he will continue to do so.

There is a bit of irony in Julia’s harshness with David for entering Barnabas’ house without his permission. She and Stokes didn’t have Barnabas’ permission to be there, either. Indeed, if he had known what they were up to he would likely have objected most strenuously. Along with a man named Tony, they held a séance in the part of the basement where Barnabas kept his coffin when he was under the full effect of the vampire curse. They were trying to contact the Rev’d Mr Trask, a Puritan divine whom Barnabas bricked up to die in the eighteenth century. The séance was so successful that the bricks crumbled, exposing Trask’s bones, still held together somehow in the shape of a skeleton hanging from the ceiling. At the end of the episode, Trask has resumed his corporeal form and set about taking revenge on Barnabas by walling him up in the same spot.

Odd that Trask’s skeleton holds together after all the ligaments and tendons have rotted away, odder that there is a straight cleavage separating the top of the skull from the rest, oddest of all that the section is attached to the rest of the skull by a piece of Scotch tape.

Episode 508: Old tricks

In #473, we saw that wicked witch Angelique had traveled from the eighteenth century to the year 1968 to reimpose the vampire curse she had once placed on old world gentleman Barnabas Collins. In a single day, Angelique met Barnabas’ distant cousin Roger, bewitched him, and married him. This secured her a home in the great house on the estate of Collinwood. Barnabas lives in the Old House on the same estate. Calling herself Cassandra and wearing a black wig, she pretends not to understand why Barnabas doesn’t like her.

In #477, Angelique appeared to Barnabas in a dream and told him and the audience how she would go about turning him back into a vampire. Her approach would essentially be a distributed malware attack on the wetware inside the heads of the people of Collinsport. One person after another would have the same basic nightmare. Each nightmare would begin with a visit from a person who had not yet had it, and after the dreamer awoke they would feel an uncontrollable compulsion to describe the dream to that person. Once they had done so, that person would have the nightmare, and the cycle would repeat. When the dream got back to Barnabas, he would become a vampire again.

Yesterday, heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard had the dream. Carolyn met with occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes and mad scientist Julia Hoffman at the Old House. Stokes managed to insert himself into Carolyn’s dream as the person to whom she must tell it. Today, Stokes has the dream. He sets out to function as an antivirus program. He has learned what the dreamer usually does, and consciously makes himself defy all those rules. His hack-back works sufficiently to force Angelique/ Cassandra to appear in the dream herself and get into an argument with him.

Angelique/ Cassandra addresses Stokes by the name of his eighteenth century ancestor Ben, an indentured servant whom she ensorcelled and used for her own nefarious purposes. She refuses to believe that Stokes is not Ben, and does not react strongly when he tells her that he knows her name is Angelique. When he later addresses her as Cassandra Collins, she is horrified and vanishes. It’s a staple of stories about magic that the act of calling adversaries by their true names can defeat them; Mrs Acilius brought up the story of Rumpelstiltskin. That the name “Angelique” has no effect while “Cassandra” drives her away suggests that she was using a pseudonym when we first knew her, and she really is Cassandra.

Stokes makes Angelique/ Cassandra disappear. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The power of naming also explains what Barnabas may have been thinking when he kept confronting Angelique/ Cassandra and telling her exactly what he did and did not know about her. Perhaps he hoped that simply by addressing her as “Angelique” he would make her vanish.

When Stokes awakens, he tells Julia he is confident that he has stopped the curse. That confidence is put to the test immediately when a knock comes at the door. Stokes opens it, and sees the man from his dream. He does not know the man, but we do. He is Sam Evans, an artist recently blinded by one of Angelique/ Cassandra’s spells. He is accompanied by Joe Haskell, fiancé to Sam’s daughter Maggie. They mention that Maggie is spending the evening in the nearby city of Bangor, Maine. Sam says that he heard the name “Stokes” in his head earlier in the evening, and that he also felt an urge to come to the Old House. He has a strong feeling that Stokes has something to tell him, and insists that he do so.

Stokes is disquieted to see Sam, but feels no compulsion to tell the dream. Sam is furiously dissatisfied. It is unclear whether his frustration at not hearing the dream will be as intense or as persistent as is the upset previous dreamers felt when they resisted telling it.

Sam and Joe leave. In front of Sam’s house, Joe reaches to open the front door. Sam is irritated with him. He not only insists on opening the door himself, but won’t do so until Joe leaves. Joe explains that Maggie made him promise to keep an eye on him, to which Sam replies with a threat to forbid their marriage unless he backs off. Joe mentions that a strange, very tall man who recently abducted Carolyn might still be at large; Sam replies that the man jumped off Widows’ Hill, which means certain death to “anything human.”

Inside the house, Sam finds that a window Joe had closed before they left is open. He hears someone in Maggie’s room. It turns out to be the strange, very tall man, badly cut from his recent fall and wielding a kitchen knife.

They don’t explain what Maggie is doing in Bangor. From episode #1 until she was attacked by Barnabas in #227, Maggie was the principal waitress at the restaurant in the Collinsport Inn. After some time as Barnabas’ prisoner and a longer period as a patient in Julia’s hospital, she returned to town in #295. For all they’ve told us since then, Maggie may have got her job back or taken another one. But if she had, they would have told us today that she was working the night shift, not that she was on some unexplained trip out of town. So now we know that nobody in the Evans house is gainfully employed.

Episode 506: That man again

All of the storylines in the part of Dark Shadows set in 1968 bear a heavy weight of repetitious elements. The “Dream Curse” consists of countless reenactments of the same dream sequence, almost all of them followed by at least one scene in which the character who had the dream struggles with a compulsion to tell it to someone else, and then by a speech in which we hear the details of the dream yet again. That curse was set by wicked witch Angelique, who for no particular reason keeps insisting that her name is Cassandra. Angelique is a time traveler from the eighteenth century, as is shouting man Peter, who for no particular reason keeps insisting that his name is Jeff.

Mad scientist Eric Lang tried to cure Barnabas Collins of vampirism by an experimental procedure that involved the creation of a Frankenstein’s monster. Angelique killed Lang before he could finish the experiment, but fortunately for Barnabas his best friend Julia is also a mad scientist, and she completed it. Barnabas named the creature Adam. Lang left behind an audiotape explaining that Barnabas will be free of vampirism as long as Adam lives, but that he will revert if Adam dies. Barnabas and Julia have not heard this message, but it has been played for the audience many times. Yesterday’s episode closed with yet another replay of the message, and today’s opens with still another. Since the message is nearly a minute long, it will soon have accumulated a full episode’s worth of airtime.

After the message, we see a new set. It represents the rocky shore below the cliff on Widows’ Hill. Barnabas is there with his servant Willie, looking for Adam. Adam jumped off the cliff yesterday. Since episode #2, that plunge has always been shorthand for certain death, so the opening voiceover introduces a new idea when it tells us that Adam’s leap merely “appeared to be” his self-destruction. Barnabas believes that Adam is still alive, though Willie does not. The two of them stand around and shout Adam’s name over and over; after the fifth or sixth repetition, Mrs Acilius and I cracked up laughing. At least they could have broken it up a little, and alternated “ADAM!!!” with “STELLA!!!”

Willie had the dream last night, and now feels compelled to tell it to heiress Carolyn. Adam had abducted Carolyn and held her for a couple of days before he dove from the cliff; she is now at home in the great house of Collinwood. Willie wants to sneak into Collinwood to talk to Carolyn. Barnabas points out that Willie was only recently released from the mental hospital where he was confined after he took the rap for Barnabas’ abduction of another young woman, Maggie. If he sneaks into Carolyn’s bedroom it will go badly for him. Barnabas directs Willie to search for Adam inland, prompting Willie to flash a grin. The very first night Willie was back from the hospital, he disobeyed Barnabas’ orders and ran off to visit Maggie. So his grin tells us to expect that he will disobey Barnabas’ orders again, this time to visit Carolyn.

Willie goes to the great house. We see him standing by the wall, below the second-storey window of Carolyn’s room. In her room, Carolyn talks with her mother, matriarch Liz. She explains to her mother that she is neither frightened of Adam nor angry with him, but that she pities him, because he seemed like an inarticulate and lonely little child. After this conversation, Liz leaves the room. Willie scales the wall, slips in through Carolyn’s window, grabs Carolyn, holds her mouth shut, and forces her to listen while he starts to tell the dream. Carolyn bites Willie, screams, and Liz comes.

Willie flees through the window. Carolyn explains to her mother that she is neither frightened of Willie nor angry with him, but that she pities him, because he seemed to be deeply terrified by his dream. She says that she is afraid that she, too, will have the dream.

Three people who live in the house have already had the dream. One of them is Julia, who is careful about who she talks to. The others are strange and troubled boy David, who regularly confides in both Carolyn and Liz, and housekeeper Mrs Johnson, who tells everyone everything. It is surprising that neither of them has mentioned it to either Carolyn or Liz.

Episode 500: Ruined another life

Dark Shadows never followed the traditional soap opera pattern of building up through the week to a slam-bang spectacle on Friday. Its one-hundredth week is a case in point. Yesterday was a big event, with two special makeups representing the rapid aging of wicked witch Angelique, a confrontation between heiress Carolyn and lawyer Tony, and the blinding of artist Sam. Today is mostly recapping.

A few minutes of action break up the chatter. Frankenstein’s monster Adam fights with his keeper Willie and breaks out of his cell. Recovering vampire Barnabas and his friend, mad scientist Julia, come in and find Adam hitting Willie. Barnabas orders Adam to stop. He loses his temper and beats Adam with his cane, leading Adam to fight back. This indicates that Barnabas has lost his control over Adam.

Barnabas talks about all the people he has killed and maimed, prompting Julia to feel sorry for him. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The only moment from this one that stuck with me came when Barnabas was lamenting his role in attracting Angelique’s attention to Sam. While he is talking about all the misery he has brought to people over the centuries, Julia interjects “You’ve suffered too!” When Julia says things like this, my wife and I mimic her and say “You mustn’t blame yourself!” Julia’s misplaced sympathy for Barnabas is the foundation of her character, and it becomes steadily more bizarre as the show progresses.

Episode 498: One step closer to the dream

Sarcastic dandy Roger Collins has remarried. His previous wife, undead blonde witch Laura Murdoch Collins, was Dark Shadows’ first supernatural menace, posing a threat to the life of their son David from #123 until she vanished amid a cloud of smoke in #191. The ghost of gracious lady Josette joined in the battle against Laura. Among other things, Josette compelled artist Sam Evans to paint a series of pictures warning of Laura’s evil plans. Laura responded to those paintings in #145 and #146 by causing a fire that burned Sam’s hands so badly it seemed he might never again be able to paint.

Roger’s new wife is also an undead blonde witch, though she wears a black wig all the time. This wiggéd witch calls herself Cassandra, but is actually Angelique, who in the 1790s killed many of Roger’s ancestors and turned his distant cousin Barnabas into a vampire. Angelique/ Cassandra has returned to the world of the living because Barnabas’ vampirism is now in remission, and she is determined to restore it.

Before he met Angelique/ Cassandra, Roger became obsessed with a portrait of her. Barnabas concludes that this portrait is essential to her power. He orders his servant Willie to steal it from the great house of Collinwood. Barnabas takes the portrait to Sam and commissions him to paint over it so that Angelique will look tremendously old. He doesn’t offer Sam any explanations, but we heard him tell Willie his theory that what happens to the painting will also happen to Angelique. If her likeness is aged to reflect her actual years, then she will vanish from 1968 and be confined to the past. At the end of the episode, Angelique’s hands have aged dramatically, suggesting that Barnabas is correct.

This is David Ford’s first appearance on the show since December, and he had shaved his mustache in the interim. The fake is not up to the makeup department’s usual standards. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Portraits have been a very prominent part of the visual composition of Dark Shadows from the beginning, and a battlefield on which supernatural combat could be joined for almost as long. So it is hardly surprising that the show would eventually get around to doing a story based on Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.

It would seem Barnabas has little time to lose. Angelique/ Cassandra has distributed some malware to the minds of the people around Barnabas by means of a dream that one person after another will have. The first dreamer is beckoned into a Haunted House attraction by someone, opens some doors behind which there are scary images, is terrified, and cannot find relief until telling its details to the beckoner. That person then has the dream, changed in only two particulars, the identity of the beckoner and the image behind the final door. When everyone’s brain has been hacked, this worm is supposed to reset Barnabas as a vampire.

Yesterday, David had the dream, and Willie was his beckoner. Today, we open in Barnabas’ house, where Willie is paralyzed with fear. David has already told him the dream, and Willie knows he will have it. With all the previous instances of the dream, the audience had to sit through a highly repetitious dream sequence, then a scene in which the character agonizes about whether to tell the dream to the next person, and finally a speech repeating all the details of the dream. At least this time we skip the second and third of those rehashings.

Since Willie is so close to Barnabas, it seems likely that he will be the last to have the dream before it gets back to Barnabas and makes him a vampire again. So it’s no wonder that Barnabas decides it’s time for the high-stakes gamble of a burglary at Collinwood.

There’s also a scene in Barnabas’ basement. Barnabas’ vampirism is in remission because some mad scientists created a Frankenstein’s monster, whom Barnabas named Adam. They connected Barnabas to Adam in a way that drains the symptoms of the curse from Barnabas without manifesting them in Adam. Barnabas has no idea how to raise any child, let alone a 6’6″ newborn with the strength of several grown men, and so locks him up in the prison cell where he used to keep Sam’s daughter Maggie.

The imprisonment of Maggie was a dreary, unpleasant story, but Adam’s time in the cell is even harder to take. Maggie was established as a strong, intelligent person who knew her way around, she could speak, and she had many friends who cared about her. So we never quite gave up hope that she would get away and be all right in the end. But Adam has none of that. As a result, his scenes in the basement are a tale of extreme child abuse, made all the harder to watch by Robert Rodan’s affecting portrayal of the big guy’s misery.

Moreover, Maggie was a major character, introduced in the first episode and connected to everyone else. It’s unlikely they would kill her off unless the show had been canceled and they were going out with a bang. But only the people holding Adam prisoner know who he is, and Frankenstein’s monsters meet their deaths practically every time they feature in a story.

Worst of all, the show is basically very silly right now. A story about a child locked in a cell from birth can be made bearable only by joining it to some kind of deep insight into the human condition, and there is little prospect that anything like that will crop up among all the witches and vampires and other Halloween paraphernalia. My wife, Mrs Acilius, watched the whole series with me in 2020-2021. She was avidly rewatching it with me this time. But when they took Adam to the cell, she suggested I start watching it on days when I get home from work before she does. I’m sure she isn’t the only Dark Shadows fan who takes a pass on the Adam story.

This is the first episode credited to director Jack Sullivan. Lela Swift and John Sedwick took turns at the helm until #450, when executive producer Dan Curtis tried his hand at directing a week of episodes. Swift and Sedwick then returned to their usual pattern. Sedwick will be leaving in a few weeks; Sullivan, who has been with the show as an associate director since the third week, will be Swift’s alternate until November, and from #553 on will be credited as Sean Dhu Sullivan.

Episode 489: Ga-ZAY-bo

Wicked witch Angelique has cast a spell on lawyer Tony, compelling him to do her bidding. Today he calls on her at the great house of Collinwood. He is starting to remember some of the things he did for her. He can’t remember why he did them, and is troubled. She commands him to meet her at the gazebo on the estate. Up to this point in the series, Angelique and all other characters referring to this structure have spoken the word “gazebo” in its usual North American pronunciation, as /gəzɪ́jbəw/ (“ga-ZEE-bo.”) When Angelique tells Tony to meet her, she directs him to the /gəzējbəw/ (“ga-ZAY-bo.”)

In the gazebo, Tony shares his vague recollections with Angelique. He says that he does not understand why he would obey her commands. She tells him to look at her. When we heard this line, Mrs Acilius and I both laughed. Lara Parker delivers it with a little smile and a relaxed voice that made it sound like she was about to say “Of course you can’t resist me, I’m gorgeous!” Instead, she puts the zap on him and gives him more orders. But after she releases him from his trance, he again says that he doesn’t understand why he keeps coming to her, and she does in fact say that he’s falling in love with her. They kiss.

Angelique took up residence at Collinwood just a couple of weeks ago. She had cast a spell on sarcastic dandy Roger Collins and married him. Roger’s son, strange and troubled boy David, has been on a trip to Boston the whole time. David is about ten, but evidently he’s been incommunicado. He comes back today, and is surprised to find that he has a new stepmother. His surprise turns to alarm when he walks in on Tony and Angelique kissing. Later, he announces to Angelique that he will tell his father what he saw in the gazebo. He too pronounces it /gəzējbəw/. Evidently this bit of Collinsport English is taking root.

Angelique makes a bad impression at the ga-zay-bo. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Angelique strikes David mute. The last time we saw her use her powers to silence a potential witness against her, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the 1790s, and her victim was indentured servant Ben. Ben was barely literate, but was able in #401 to write the letter A to indicate that she was the witch. Angelique has learned since then, and also prevents David from writing.

There are also two scenes where Angelique tries to find out if housekeeper Mrs Johnson has had a nightmare. Her motivation is to do with the Dream Curse, a dismal storyline I won’t explain, but the scenes are hilarious. Mrs Johnson is as commonsensical and down-to-earth as can be, while Angelique is as intense and melodramatic as can be. The two of them are naturally funny together, and these scenes leverage Clarice Blackburn’s gift for comedy of manners.

Episode 483: The three faces of Willie

In April 1967, dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis inadvertently freed vampire Barnabas Collins to prey upon the living. Barnabas made Willie his blood thrall, and reduced him to a sorely bedraggled state. As spring turned to summer, Barnabas added Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, to his diet. When Barnabas first held her captive in his house, Maggie was dazed and submissive, but as he tried to brainwash her so that her personality would disappear and that of his lost love Josette would take its place, she began to rebel. Maggie and Willie formed a strange friendship as he did what he could to protect her from Barnabas. Eventually she escaped, and mad scientist Julia Hoffman erased her memory of what Barnabas did to her. When Willie tried to warn Maggie that Barnabas might attack her again, the police jumped to the conclusion that it was he who had abducted her. They shot him. He was declared insane and sent to Windcliff, a mental hospital of which Julia is the director.

A few weeks ago, another mad scientist, Eric Lang, gave Barnabas a treatment that put the symptoms of his vampirism into remission. At the time he was feeding on two women, heiress Carolyn and well-meaning governess Vicki. When Barnabas gained the ability to go around in the sunlight, cast a reflection, and eat solid food, Carolyn and Vicki’s bite marks disappeared. It is unclear whether either of them remembers that Barnabas was a vampire, but their personalities certainly went back to what they were before he bit them. That leaves us wondering about Willie. When Barnabas responded to Lang’s treatment, did Willie revert to the violent personality he had in his first full week on the show, when on Tuesday he menaced Maggie in a barroom, on Wednesday he cornered Vicki in the study at Collinwood, and on Thursday would have raped Carolyn if she hadn’t drawn a gun on him? Did he become some version of the deeply troubled young man who was desperate to help Maggie but powerless to resist Barnabas? Or did he become something else entirely?

Today, in furtherance of Lang’s evil plans, Barnabas wants to free Willie from Windcliff and bring him back to his house on the great estate of Collinwood. Julia has become Barnabas’ best friend, but she is firmly opposed to his association with Lang. So Barnabas lies and tells her that he wants to free Willie because his conscience is plaguing him. Julia knows that isn’t true, and points out that he never visited Willie at Windcliff. Barnabas replies that when he was in the full grip of the curse, he could move about only after dark, and says that he could hardly show up at the hospital to visit Willie in the middle of the night. Julia says that she would have arranged it had he asked. He doesn’t have an answer to this, and she doesn’t fall for any of Barnabas’ other fabrications. But she can’t figure out what he really is doing. She plays along with him, and the two of them go to see Willie at Windcliff.

This is the first time we have seen Barnabas outside of a little orbit composed of Collinwood, the village of Collinsport, and the cemetery north of town. Not only was Barnabas’ ability to travel limited while the symptoms of the curse were manifest, he often lost interest in people when they left the area. So in the fall of 1967 he was obsessively hostile to strange and troubled boy David and obsessively indecisive about Vicki until the two of them went to Boston, at which point he seemed to forget they existed. It’s too bad the set representing the waiting area at Windcliff isn’t more visually striking- Barnabas’ first trip out of the Collinsport area marks a significant change in the character’s possibilities, and it would be good if it came with an image that would stick with us.

While Barnabas waits, a glossy magazine catches his attention. He picks it up and leafs through it. Since we are about to see Willie for the first time in several months, there is a good chance that this little bit of stage business will remind regular viewers of a peculiar remark Barnabas made shortly before the last time we saw Willie. Shifting the blame for his own crimes onto Willie, Barnabas planted Maggie’s ring in Willie’s room. When he came up with this plan, Barnabas remarked that the cheaper sort of tabloids say that criminals sometimes hold onto morbid mementos of their crimes, prompting us to picture Barnabas reading a cheap tabloid. That incongruous image comes to life here:

Julia joins Barnabas in the waiting room. They talk for a moment, then a nurse ushers Willie in.

At first, Willie is silent, a confused look on his face. He walks slowly towards Barnabas. Barnabas asks Willie if he recognizes him. In this moment we pick up exactly where we left off in #329, when Willie was a patient in another hospital and did not remember who Barnabas was.

This time Willie does recognize Barnabas. But as he did at the end of #329, he seems happy and untroubled. He is positively childlike in his eagerness to go back to Barnabas’ house and work for him again. He says that he and Barnabas were friends and that he always enjoyed their time together, a statement that dumbfounds Julia, as it dumbfounds anyone who remembers the show from April to September 1967. Even when Barnabas wasn’t bashing Willie across the face with his cane, Willie was miserable beyond words and hated everything Barnabas forced him to do.

Julia sends Willie back to his room, and Barnabas proclaims that Willie is entirely cured. Julia sarcastically thanks him for his diagnosis, calling him “DOCTOR Collins!” This too harks back to #329, which ended with Willie asking Barnabas if he were a doctor, to which Barnabas replied, “That’s right. I am a doctor!”

Barnabas takes Willie back to his house and tells him that for the time being, he must not so much as go outside by himself. Willie accepts Barnabas’ explanation that many people in the area will have to be prepared for his return before they see him. Willie gladly agrees to stay in the house. Barnabas leaves him alone, and he immediately slips out. He is heading for Maggie’s place.

Maggie’s father Sam is a painter, a fact advertised by the canvases around the cottage they share. When we cut to the cottage, she is making a frame. This is rather an obvious visual metaphor. The last time Willie came to the cottage, he inadvertently framed himself for Barnabas’ crimes against Maggie.

Of course Maggie is horrified to see Willie at the door; of course she demands he leave; of course she threatens him with her hammer when he insists on staying and telling her he is innocent; of course she cries for help when her boyfriend Joe comes to the door; of course Willie runs off when Joe enters. Willie puts himself in the frame again, this time as an ongoing threat to Maggie and all the women of Collinsport.

Joe goes to Barnabas’ house and demands to see Willie. At first Barnabas plays dumb, but Joe doesn’t give an inch. Barnabas then admits that he persuaded Julia to let Willie out of the hospital, but assures Joe that Willie is no longer dangerous and tells him that he will see to it that Willie behaves himself. Joe says that Barnabas has already failed in his responsibility, since Willie just went to Maggie’s house and scared her. Joe says that he will kill Willie if he goes near Maggie again. He repeats that assurance, and his voice is pure steel.

Joe exits the house. We see him outside, walking away. Willie emerges from the shadows with a rifle. He takes aim at Joe and squeezes the trigger. The gun isn’t loaded, so Willie makes nothing more than a click. Apparently that was enough for him. He grins maniacally.

On their Dark Shadows Every Day, John and Christine Scoleri point out that the the gleeful face Willie flashes after he clicks his rifle at Joe is the same expression he showed in the frenzied crimes he committed before he came under Barnabas’ power. They back this observation up with a pair of screenshots, one of Willie immediately after he pretended to kill Joe, one from his last moment before he released Barnabas and lost his freedom:

Indeed, the whole episode replays Willie’s character arc from April to September in reverse. He starts as the crushed little thing we had seen at the end of #329, becomes Maggie’s tormented and misunderstood would-be protector, then ends as the dangerously unstable ruffian who followed seagoing con man Jason McGuire to town. If the episode were a few minutes longer, John Karlen might have had to take a break and let James Hall play the last scene. This recapitulation heightens the initial suspense generated by the question of how Willie would be after Barnabas had lost his vampire powers. Whatever effect the change in Barnabas has had on Willie has certainly not made him less complex or more predictable. We can’t tell when he is being sincere and when he is faking. Based on what we see today, it’s possible he is being sincere the whole time, but that he is just extremely impulsive, and equally possible that everything he does and says is a fake meant to cover up something we don’t yet know enough to guess at.

The actors are uniformly excellent today. John Karlen has to recreate the three faces of Willie in quick succession, and executes each of them clearly and memorably. Almost all of Grayson Hall’s dialogue is expository, but while delivering it she shows us all of Julia’s complicated feelings about Barnabas and lets us into her attempt to solve the riddle of his plans for Willie. Kathryn Leigh Scott is only on screen for a few minutes, beginning with her absorbed in carpentry and proceeding directly to screaming and running around and clutching at her male scene partners, but still makes it clear that Maggie is a strong and level-headed person who has been forced into frantic behavior by circumstances no one should have to face.

In the confrontation with Barnabas, Joel Crothers shows us a new side of Joe. Always loyal, always honest, always hardworking, Joe has up to this point been soft-spoken and self-effacing, deferential towards members of the ancient and esteemed Collins family. The only time he broke that deference was when he spoke some harsh words to matriarch Liz in #33, and he had to get thoroughly drunk to manage that. There is no trace of drink in him now, and he does not regard himself as anything less than Barnabas’ equal. For the first time since Burke Devlin lost his connection with the plot and shriveled so drastically that he ceased to be Mitch Ryan and became Anthony George, Dark Shadows has a plausible action hero in its cast.

The part of Barnabas is especially challenging today; he tries and fails to fool Julia in the beginning and Joe at the end, and in between may or may not have fooled Willie. So Jonathan Frid must show us what it looks like when Barnabas does an unsuccessful job of acting. He chooses to do that by having Barnabas overact. My wife, Mrs Acilius, pointed out that Frid’s own performance in the role of a man who is severely overacting is in fact exceptionally restrained and precise. Frid bobbles his lines as he usually does, but never makes a wrong physical move, and not for one second does he miss the perfect tone for Barnabas’ lines. The result is simply outstanding.