mrs johnson – Page 2 – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 497: Acting like ourselves

Mrs Johnson, housekeeper in the principal mansion on the great estate of Collinwood, isn’t herself. She had a nightmare a week ago, and ever since has been plagued with a compulsion to tell its details to strange and troubled boy David Collins. She knows that if she does, David will have the same nightmare, the same compulsion to tell it to some third person, and that if he does that person will suffer the same complex. She doesn’t know that the nightmare is part of a curse sent by wicked witch Angelique, or that at the climax of the curse old world gentleman Barnabas Collins is supposed to revert to the vampirism that afflicted him from the 1790s until last month. But she does know that it is part of something horrible, and she has tried desperately to keep it from continuing.

Mrs Johnson spent a couple of days with her sister in Boston to stay far from David, but she kept having the nightmare there. She has given up, and has come back to Collinwood. She does not go straight home to the great house, but stops first at the Old House in the estate. Barnabas lives there, but it is Barnabas’ friend Julia Hoffman she sees. Julia had passed the dream to her. Julia urges Mrs Johnson not to tell David about it. She replies that she knows she should not tell him, but that she has no more choice in the matter than Julia had in telling her.

This scene will raise a question in the minds of regular viewers. Julia is a medical doctor doubly qualified in hematology and psychiatry; she also has developed a method of hypnosis so powerful that she can virtually rewrite a subject’s memory, confining even very intense recollections to the depths of the unconscious mind, sometimes after an acquaintance of only a few minutes. Why doesn’t she try to hypnotize Mrs Johnson into forgetting the dream? All she actually does is slap her and repeat her command to avoid David.

David turns up. His father has sent him to ask Julia to come to the great house at her convenience. Julia tries to manage the situation by sending Mrs Johnson home first and keeping David in the house for a while. After Mrs Johnson leaves, Barnabas’ servant Willie enters and tells Julia there is an emergency in the basement. David agrees to wait for her to come back, but once she is gone he shouts that he will be playing outside.

We follow David out the front door, and find that Mrs Johnson is there waiting for him. She comes up on him from behind and says she has something to tell him. This scene will startle regular viewers. For nineteen weeks, from #365 to #461, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the 1790s. In that period, Clarice Blackburn played repressed spinster Abigail Collins and David Henesy played Daniel Collins, heir to the Collins fortune. We first saw Daniel in #431, when his Aunt Abigail intercepted him on this very spot and scolded him for playing at the Old House. Abigail was enforcing rules and believed she was acting in Daniel’s best interests; now the same actors invert the scene, showing us Mrs Johnson doing something she knows to be wrong and harmful to David.

Mrs Johnson sneaks up on David. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, isn’t herself. Some emerald earrings mysteriously appeared in her purse the other day, and when she tried them on she got a faraway look on her face, began speaking in a voice different from her own, and a tinkling music played on the soundtrack. Today her boyfriend Joe tells her that he took the earrings and showed them to a jeweler and to the police. The jeweler valued them at $15,000* and the police said that they didn’t match the description of any jewelry that had been reported missing. Maggie was not only irked that Joe had taken the earrings without her permission, as anyone might be, but when he tries to get her to agree that such expensive things don’t just materialize out of thin air her usual level-headedness and cheerful disposition vanish and she becomes childishly defensive. Maggie does not know that Barnabas’ servant Willie placed the earrings in her purse as an attempt to reestablish the connection the two of them had when she was Barnabas’ prisoner in the Old House. As a result of Julia’s hypnosis, she does not even remember what Barnabas did to her. But after she runs Joe off, she is compelled to go to the Old House.

Again, regular viewers will recognize an echo of an earlier episode, in this case one that aired a year ago. When Maggie was Barnabas’ victim in May 1967, she snapped at Joe and drove him out of her house as she does today. Then too, she headed for Barnabas once Joe was gone.

Maggie doesn’t find Barnabas at the Old House. Instead, she sees Willie. Barnabas had framed Willie for his crimes against Maggie, and Willie was confined to the mental hospital Julia runs. Barnabas and Julia have brought him back to the Old House to help with their latest nefarious scheme. Willie had been Barnabas’ blood thrall; it is not clear to the audience just what effect it had on Willie when Barnabas’ vampirism went into remission. When we first see him today, he is playing with an unloaded rifle and grinning maniacally, reminding us of the dangerously unstable ruffian he was before Barnabas first bit him.

Maggie knocks on the door and asks Willie if she can come in. He falls over himself inviting her. He becomes the friend he tried to be to her during her imprisonment. She says she knows that he wasn’t the one who hurt her, and he is overjoyed. She seems blissful. He asks her out on a date; she says that Joe wouldn’t like it. Before Barnabas, Willie propositioned all the young women and threatened all their boyfriends, and at first this approach, like his gleeful handling of the rifle, suggests that dangerously unstable ruffian is back. He assures Maggie that he only wants friendship, but after she leaves he picks the rifle up again and says that Joe will be out of the way soon.

Maggie finds herself strangely at home. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

For her part, Maggie’s behavior does not represent a reversion to her time as Barnabas’ prisoner. Rather, the earrings seem to have done what Barnabas tried to do when he bit her, imprisoned her, and subjected her to a series of role-playing exercises. Her personality is showing signs of giving way to that of Barnabas’ lost love, gracious lady Josette. In #260, Barnabas told Maggie “You are Josette!”; in #370, we saw that he was right, inasmuch as Kathryn Leigh Scott played both characters, as Zita Johanns had played both Helen Grosvenor and Princess Ankh-Esen-Amun in the 1932 film The Mummy, from which Barnabas’ Josettification project was borrowed. The tinkling melody that plays on the soundtrack when Maggie wears the earrings is that of Josette’s music box; this could be a sign that her memory of what Barnabas did to her is coming back, since he forced her to listen to the music box for hours on end. But the voice she speaks in at those times is the voice Miss Scott used as Josette, and her blissfulness reminds us of Josette’s first scenes with her beloved Barnabas, not of Maggie’s captivity in the ghoul’s dungeon.

Back at Collinwood, Mrs Johnson watches David sleep. She tells him she is sorry for what she has done and for what he will suffer. Clarice Blackburn was always good, but she outdoes herself with this speech. It is a beautiful performance.

David has the nightmare. The first several dream sequences in the Dream Curse storyline ended with the dreamer opening a door, seeing something scary, and screaming. David’s goes a step further. There is a gigantic spider web behind the last door he opens. He not only sees it, but is tangled in it when he starts screaming. He awakes, still screaming, and Mrs Johnson holds him.

*Equivalent to $135,796.52 in 2024’s money, according to the CPI Inflation Calculator.

Episode 492: Think of a worse place

Mad scientist Julia Hoffman and recovering vampire Barnabas Collins have created a Frankenstein’s monster and named him Adam. Adam is 6’6″ and brawny, he can walk, and he seems to have some degree of understanding of speech. Still, he is only a few hours old, and he knows nothing about the world in which he finds himself. When he throws a tantrum and smashes up lab equipment, Barnabas gets a gun and prepares to shoot him to death. Julia stops him. She injects Adam with a powerful sedative and says they should take him to the basement of Barnabas’ house and lock him up in the prison cell where Barnabas sometimes confines his victims.

Returning viewers will be puzzled by this idea. Julia is in charge of a mental hospital a hundred miles away, and has twice stashed victims of Barnabas’ there and used her powers of hypnosis to mutilate their memories so that they cannot tell the authorities about him. Adam has no memories that would threaten Barnabas’ position; all he needs is care and supervision. Of course, sending him away would stop the story, so if Barnabas suggested it the writers would have to give Julia a line to explain why it wouldn’t be possible. That would be so easy to do that it is very odd they don’t bother to do it.

At one point, Julia says “We must make him trust us.” When Barnabas asks how, she admits that she doesn’t know. I suppose the first step would be to ensure that he never learns anything at all about either of them.

Meanwhile, Barnabas’ old nemesis, wicked witch Angelique, has come back to life. Wearing a black wig and calling herself Cassandra, she has married sarcastic dandy Roger Collins, establishing herself as a resident of the great house of Collinwood and as stepmother to strange and troubled boy David. The other day, David caught Angelique/ Cassandra kissing her cat’s paw Tony. Before he could tell his father what he had seen, Angelique/ Cassandra cast a spell on David leaving him unable to speak or write. Now David’s muteness has become an inconvenience to her, so she casts another spell on him, making him forget everything from the moment before he came upon her and Tony, then restoring his power of speech.

For the first several months of Dark Shadows, David had emotional problems resulting from the hostile atmosphere in which he spent the first years of his life. Roger openly hated David, and in #83 deliberately manipulated him into making an attempt on the life of well-meaning governess Vicki. David’s mother, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, was no better, trying to lure David to his death in the flames which would consume her current form and give her new life.

The only other children on the show until now were Daniel Collins, who like David was played by David Henesy and who was the object of a murder plot by his legal guardian, and Sarah Collins. Sarah was a ghost from #255 to #364, and a living being from #366 to #415. When Sarah was alive, Angelique had abused her very cruelly. Sarah’s big brother Barnabas spurned Angelique’s advances, and Angelique published him by afflicting Sarah with a grave illness. When Angelique placed the curse that made Barnabas a vampire, she declared that it would mean the death of everyone who loved him, and she should have known that as one of those who loved him most dearly Sarah would be among the first to die.

Roger and Angelique/ Cassandra, therefore, are hardly more promising as parents than are Barnabas and Julia. David and Adam might wind up in therapy together some day.

The episode ends with a dream sequence, part of the “Dream Curse” that Angelique decreed would fill time when the writers get stuck. One character after another has the same dream, each time ending with an image that is supposed to suggest some hidden fear that character has. Today’s dreamer is housekeeper Mrs Johnson. Evidently she is afraid of video inserts, because she sees a clip from an educational film about bats. It’s an interesting image, not at all in the thoroughly stagey, vaguely stately visual style director Lela Swift established for Dark Shadows.

And behind Door #3, a Zonk! Thank you for playing “Let’s Make a Nightmare,” we hope you had a good time. Screenshot by *Dark Shadows Before I Die.*

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 486: Endless corridors of trial and error

Today’s cast includes a vampire, a wicked witch, two mad scientists, a Frankenstein’s monster, and an irritable housekeeper. The deadly menace turns out to be the housekeeper.

In a laboratory in a house by the sea, mad scientists Eric Lang and Julia Hoffman are trying to transfer recovering vampire Barnabas Collins’ “life force” into the body of the creature Lang has built for the purpose, a creature Barnabas has named Adam. In the drawing room of the great house atop Widow’s Hill, wicked witch Angelique disrupts that attempt by sticking a pin into a clay figure that she addresses as “Dr Lang.” It is unclear how Angelique attached the clay figure to Lang, though since it has roughly the same acting ability as Addison Powell the pairing seems natural enough.

Lang gasps for air. Julia helps both him and Barnabas. Barnabas gets up from the operating table and declares he will go to the great house and stop Angelique. Lang tries to tell Julia how to carry on his work, but keeps breaking down. While Julia is out of the room getting some heart medicine, Angelique removes the pin from the clay figure. During that moment of relief, Lang is alone in the lab. He turns on his tape recorder and says that if both Barnabas and Adam live, Barnabas will be free of the vampire curse. Adam will drain it from him, but will not suffer from its symptoms. If Adam dies, Barnabas will revert to active vampirism.

Angelique resumes tormenting Lang as Julia returns to the laboratory. Lang cannot keep his breath long enough to tell Julia his message or make it clear that she should listen to the tape. Angelique says that Lang has suffered enough for tonight, and that she will put the pin away. As she is about to do so, the door to the drawing room opens and housekeeper Mrs Johnson comes in. Mrs Johnson startles Angelique, who inadvertently drives the pin through the clay figure, killing Lang.

This is the second death to which Mrs Johnson has contributed. The two cases are very similar. She unknowingly gave undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins the information she needed to cast the spell that killed parapsychologist Dr Peter Guthrie. Guthrie resembled Lang not only in holding a terminal degree, studying the uncanny, and doing battle with an undead witch, but also in his use of a tape recorder. In #170 and #171, Guthrie recorded the audio of a séance; in #172, Laura erased the recording and replaced it with the sound of fire; and in #185, he was on his way to get his tape recorder to use at another séance when Laura cast the spell that killed him. Mrs Johnson is a menace to a very specific kind of person.

Barnabas comes to the great house and threatens Angelique, calling her by the name “Cassandra,” the alias under which she has married sarcastic dandy Roger Collins and found a place in the house. At first he says he will burn her if Lang dies. She pretends not to know what he’s talking about, and says that she will expose him as a madman. He looks at her neck and leans in, a sign that his vampire urges are coming back. The telephone rings, and Mrs Johnson enters. Angelique/ Cassandra explains their compromising position by claiming that she was fainting; with that, she shows that her threat to air her complaints is a bluff, since she could easily have demanded Mrs Johnson call the police.

Barnabas is getting thirsty. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Mrs Johnson says the call is for Barnabas. It is Julia reporting Lang’s death. Barnabas makes some grim remarks to Angelique/ Cassandra, then goes back to the laboratory and talks with Julia. She is distraught, but agrees to pick up where Lang left off.

We end with a dream sequence. Angelique has loosed a “Dream Curse” on the people of Collinsport. One after another, they have the same basic dream, in each case beginning with an appearance by the next person to have the dream beckoning them into a haunted house attraction and ending with a door opening to expose something the previous dreamers didn’t see. Julia’s dream begins with Mrs Johnson, telling us she will be the next up. It proceeds with her walking through a foggy room, including a clear shot of the fog machine. It ends with the sight of a skeleton wearing a wedding dress and the sound of Angelique’s distinctive laugh, telling us that the position Angelique has gained by marrying Roger is particularly dangerous to Julia. Since Julia lives in the same house as Angelique and they know all about each other, this is not exactly a major revelation.

Featuring a very special appearance by the fog machine. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The dream involves the beckoner’s voice reciting a little bit of doggerel. As it goes on, some beckoners say “through endless corridors by trial and error,” others say “through endless corridors of trial and error.” I prefer “of trial and error.” That implies that the corridors are themselves made up of decisions people have made and of the consequences of those decisions. Saying that the characters are moving through the corridors “by trial and error” means that the corridors exist whether anyone engages with them or not. We saw Angelique start the curse, so we know it isn’t something that has been out there in reality all along, and it expresses itself in dreams, not in anything that persists when people stop paying attention to it. Besides, the whole idea of drama is to show decisions and their consequences, so “of trial and error” is better on every front.

Episode 471: Be quiet, Harry!

The opening teaser is a reprise of the last scene of Friday’s episode. Dr Eric Lang is trying to convince his patient, recovering vampire Barnabas Collins, to participate in an experiment he wants to start. He addresses him as “Barnabas Barnabas.”

It had been a quirk of Barnabas’ previous physician, Julia Hoffman, to repeat Barnabas’ first name, and as Julia, Grayson Hall manages to put a fresh inflection on “Barnabas, Barnabas” every time she says it. But as Lang, Addison Powell simply says “Barnabas Barnabas” without a pause, as if he were saying a compound name like “Jean-Claude” or “Jim Bob.” He even calls him “Mr Barnabas” at his exit, as if he thinks his full name was “Barnabas Collins Barnabas.” This is by no means the worst thing about Powell’s performance, but it is such an obvious contrast with Hall that it is as if the makers of Dark Shadows are sticking a thumb in our eye and taunting us with his inferiority to her.

As if that weren’t bad enough, Powell has competition for the title of worst actor in this episode. Craig Slocum washes up in the role of ex-con Harry Johnson. Well-meaning governess Vicki is the first to see Harry; she immediately screams in horror and starts to sob, the correct reaction to the sight of Slocum in any role.

At least there is a silver lining to Harry. He is the son of housekeeper Mrs Johnson, played by the estimable Clarice Blackburn. From November 1967 to March 1968, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the late eighteenth century, and Blackburn played repressed spinster Abigail Collins. Abigail was a triumph, an irresistible comic villain who was the highlight of every episode she was in. Mrs Johnson’s scenes today are the first we’ve seen of Blackburn since the show returned to contemporary dress, and she is razor-sharp. She is intriguingly sheepish when she asks matriarch Liz if her son Harry can stay with her for a little while, and alarmingly quick to assure Liz that Harry won’t make trouble. When she hears Vicki scream, Mrs Johnson comes hurrying in, is unsurprised to see that Harry is the source of Vicki’s panic, and cuts Harry off before he can offer a defense. She takes Harry into the drawing room while Liz calms Vicki upstairs, and tells him that he is one false move away from going back to prison forever.

Mrs Johnson reads Harry the Riot Act. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Blackburn is so much fun as the unillusioned mother that it is a terrible shame Slocum never manages to read a line or move a muscle in a way that a living person might in the given situation. She gets laughs in spite of him, but with a competent actor in his part the scene where Harry faces his mother would be some of the best intentional comedy in the whole series.

There is one other thing about Harry that makes me smile. On the blog of the Terror at Collinwood podcast, Danielle Gelehrter posted an article some time ago about some concept artwork Eric Marshall did for a hypothetical Dark Shadows animated show in the style of early 1970s TV cartoons such as Scooby Doo or Filmation’s adaptations of Star Trek or My Favorite Martian or Gilligan’s Island. The show Marshall imagines features Harry. Personally, I would have chosen motorcycle enthusiast Buzz, who dated heiress Carolyn for a couple of hilarious weeks in 1967, since his outlandish appearance makes him so much more obvious a choice for animation, but at least Harry’s presence suggests that had such a show been made Clarice Blackburn might have been in the cast and had the chance to do some comedic voice acting.

Eric Marshall’s proposed cast for an animated *Dark Shadows* that might have been made in the 1970- everyone but Harry. Posted at Terror at Collinwood.

Eric Marshall reminds us that Mrs Johnson’s first name is supposed to be “Sarah.” Posted at Terror at Collinwood.

There is some nice stuff in the drawing room between Barnabas and his sometime victim/ fiancée Vicki. Vicki has figured out that the spirit of wicked witch Angelique is once more at work in the great house of Collinwood and that it will take a great effort to stop Angelique from finishing the destruction of the Collins family that she began in the 1790s. If Vicki ever knew that Barnabas was a vampire, she has forgotten it, and Barnabas cannot confess it to her now. He certainly cannot tell Vicki that it was Angelique who made him one. So he listens to her report, but cannot accept her help in the battle against Angelique.

Quite the contrary. Barnabas looks at the spot on Vicki’s neck where he used to take his meals and feels the old hunger coming on. He says he must go to see Lang. Vicki protests that he should stay and let her tend him while they wait for Lang to come to them, but Barnabas insists.

Barnabas goes to Lang’s house. Lang tells Barnabas that if he participates in his experiment, he will not only be entirely free of the vampire curse, but that he might also have the physical appearance of Peter Bradford, alias Jeff Clark, an unpleasant young man who is more or less Vicki’s new boyfriend. This intrigues Barnabas, but Lang will not explain what he means. Since we know that Lang is a mad scientist who is forcing Peter/ Jeff to steal parts from newly interred bodies, we can assume that he will eventually be constructing a Frankenstein’s monster. Presumably he means that the finished product will look like Peter/ Jeff, and Barnabas will somehow live inside it. Since the creature is being built from parts, to look like Peter/Jeff it would have to be finished with salvage from Peter/ Jeff’s corpse. How Peter/ Jeff will be converted from his present state of living and obnoxious to dead and recyclable is what awaits explanation.

Episode 359: Very difficult for a girl

Carolyn Collins Stoddard has been a spoiled heiress all her life, and now is settling into a new role as blood thrall to her distant cousin, vampire Barnabas Collins. Carolyn is trying her level best to comply with Barnabas’ command to seduce lawyer Tony Peterson so that she can steal the notebook mad scientist Julia Hoffman entrusted to him. She is on a date with Tony, and they are starting to do some serious kissing.

No matter how well Carolyn serves him, Barnabas can’t keep himself out of her way. When Barnabas is upset, nearby hound-dogs start baying; Danny Horn calls the dogs Barnabas’ “backup singers.” When Carolyn hears them, her face goes blank and she forgets about Tony. Tony becomes irritated and ends their date abruptly.

Later, Julia goes to Barnabas’ house. Carolyn is there; Barnabas sends her into the next room to eavesdrop on their conversation. The shot of Carolyn in that room recalls a similar shot of housekeeper Mrs Johnson eavesdropping on Carolyn and local man Burke Devlin, on Burke’s instructions, in #69. That shot marked the beginning of the career of the previously guileless Mrs Johnson as a secret agent Burke employed to spy on the Collinses.

Mrs Johnson as Burke’s spy in #69. Screenshot by Dark Shadows from the Beginning.

As Mrs Johnson once listened to Burke pretending to a romantic interest in Carolyn, so Carolyn today listens as Barnabas pretends to a romantic interest in Julia. Julia realizes that she is unlikely ever to get Barnabas out of her life, and for a time she tried to make the best of the situation by falling in love with him. In his show of contrition and gallantry, she sees a glimmer of hope that he will reciprocate this love. Julia has seen too much to be as taken with Barnabas as Carolyn was with Burke, but she does give serious consideration to the idea that Barnabas might have given up on killing her and might be thinking of becoming her boyfriend instead.

The charmer. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

After Julia leaves, Carolyn comes back into the room. She objects that Barnabas was being cruel by raising Julia’s hopes that way. Again, this echoes #69. Mrs Johnson came back into Burke’s room after Carolyn left, and asked him if he thought “the girl [was] involved” in the wrongdoing they thought had taken place at the great house of Collinwood. When Burke replied that anyone in the house was “fair game,” Mrs Johnson asked “Even the girl?” To which Burke replied “Anyone!” That marked the end of the episode, so we didn’t hear how Mrs Johnson reacted to that pronouncement. But she did go on working for Burke, so apparently it didn’t bother her too much.

Barnabas calls Carolyn to him, looks into her eyes, and tells her she is tired. She smiles, and agrees that she is tired. Evidently he used his supernatural influence over Carolyn to erase her misgivings about his treatment of Julia. He hadn’t done anything supernatural to quiet Carolyn’s predecessor, the luckless Willie, on any of the countless occasions when he acted as Barnabas’ external conscience; he usually just hit him in the face with his cane. Barnabas has been picking up lots of new powers lately, gaining the ability to transform into a bat, to materialize inside closed rooms, and to cast magic spells, so it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that he now has greater control over his blood thrall than he had before.

Episode 345: That place in Brazil

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Closing Miscellany

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

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

From The New York Times, 29 October 1967

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

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

Episode 339: Even greater fool

This episode was taped during a National Association of Broadcast Engineers and Technicians strike. While the camera operators picketed outside, network executives and other amateurs were handling the equipment. It shows. As the episode begins, there is a lot of chatter and miscellaneous noise off camera; none of the shots is properly focused; each zoom shot moves at alarmingly fast pace; and at one point the camera swings wild. Dark Shadows was produced under such poor conditions that any one of those things might have made its way even into an episode made by trained professionals, but today is the single roughest cut yet.

At least the technical incompetence of the suits has some funny results. That can’t be said of the work of the alleged actor scabbing in the role of Dr Dave Woodard. Robert Gerringer, who started playing Woodard in May, honored his union obligations and refused to cross the NABET picket line; the stooge replacing him is so monotonous in his delivery of dialogue and so undistinguished in his bodily movement that he is little more than a blank spot on the screen. Much of this episode is devoted to him rummaging around looking for some papers; it would take considerably more skill than non-Woodard ever displays to make that interesting to watch.

The actor is so dull that he ruins one of the major sources of suspense. We ought to be conflicted about Barnabas’ plan to kill Woodard, because while we want the story to advance and Barnabas to stay on the show, we don’t want the good guys to be killed. Moreover, Woodard is the only one now who fully understands and supports one of our favorite characters, strange and troubled boy David. We certainly shouldn’t want David to lose his only backer. But this guy is such a waste of screen space that it is fatally easy for us to root for the character’s death.

There are a few interesting moments scattered here and there in Ron Sproat’s script. Mad scientist Julia Hoffman tells vampire Barnabas Collins that she tried to quell Woodard’s suspicions by telling him Barnabas had a rare blood disease that she was trying to treat. In fact, Julia does believe that vampirism is a rare blood disease, and she is trying to cure Barnabas of it, so she wasn’t lying when she told him that. It’s always startling to find Julia resorting to the truth.

Julia also tells Barnabas that Woodard came up with an idea she has encouraged him to believe, that she is in love with Barnabas. Barnabas laughs at this notion, and Julia objects that it doesn’t seem so preposterous to her. An incredulous look on his face, Barnabas glances at her wig, then at her clothes. He has a point- it really does not look like an ensemble a woman would wear if she was into dudes.

Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Yesterday’s episode gave us several clues that Julia is in fact attracted to Barnabas. Today, she not only seems hurt when Barnabas laughs at the idea she might be falling for him, but she flashes a look of jealousy later when he says something extravagantly complimentary about well-meaning governess Vicki. As my wife, Mrs Acilius, pointed out, this makes it rather unsettling when Julia remarks that she had thought Barnabas was incapable of feeling any emotion, even fear. We know that Julia is a very strange person, but as we find out what she looks for in a partner we start to wonder just how strange she is.

Barnabas is bewildered by everything Julia says and does. When she says she is surprised that he is frightened by Woodard’s investigation into him, he says that of course he is frightened, as it could easily result in his extinction. When she goes on to say that she had thought him a totally unemotional being, he becomes for a moment the audience’s point of view character- he doesn’t say anything, just gives her a look as if she is completely nuts.

At the moment, Barnabas is especially vulnerable because Julia is keeping her notes on the experiment in a little box in her bedroom at the great house of Collinwood. That is an odd place for them. She presumably makes the notes while she is working in her laboratory in the basement of Barnabas’ house, and she consults them while she is there. The laboratory is well-hidden- Woodard and local man Burke Devlin searched the basement in #333, and found no trace of it. So it doesn’t make any sense to create another danger of exposure by keeping them anywhere but there. Of course Woodard sneaks into Julia’s room today and finds the notes.

Housekeeper Mrs Johnson is in this one, after fourteen and a half weeks away. In fact, it’s only her second appearance since #211, the episode in which she was the first character to exchange lines with Barnabas. It’s great to have her back, though of course it saddens me that Clarice Blackburn crossed a picket line.

Episode 266: The sea is my grave. My grave is the sea.

Reclusive matriarch Liz is despondent, and no wonder. For months and months, seagoing con man Jason McGuire has been blackmailing her. She hasn’t been able to resist any of his demands; today she tells him that “There is no point in not being agreeable.” She makes a great show of submissiveness towards him, asking his permission to leave the drawing room. They are scheduled to marry in a few days, much to the dismay of everyone except Jason.

In the pre-credit teaser, we see Liz’ dream that she is standing atop the high cliff on her property, looking at the rocks and the sea far below. The ghosts of the Widows who have jumped to their deaths from the cliff over the years are calling her name. The Widows were a big part of Dark Shadows‘ supernatural back-world in its first months, but this is the first we’ve seen or heard from them since #126. In her dream, they call her name and she tumbles headlong over the cliff.

The Widows appear in Liz’ dream. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Liz mopes around the house during the day, then goes to the cliff. Housekeeper Mrs Johnson finds her there at nightfall. This is the first time in ten and a half weeks we have seen Mrs Johnson; I don’t usually give spoilers, but we won’t see her again for fourteen and a half more weeks. I suspect she was in this one just to be sure actress Clarice Blackburn would be in the studio when they were taking the cast photo I use as the header on this blog.

Was this photo taken the day this episode was shot?

Mrs Johnson mentions the Widows and tells Liz she doesn’t like hearing the legends about them. So Liz launches a detailed recounting of all of those legends. By the time Mrs Johnson is thoroughly uncomfortable, Liz starts to faint and pitch forward towards the edge of the cliff. Mrs Johnson rescues her, and walks her back to the house.

Liz goes back to bed and has the dream from the opening again. She gets up, opens the window, and tells the Widows she can hear them. As their voices travel in the wind, she repeats a catchphrase from one of the legends- “The sea is my grave. My grave is the sea.”

Episode 189: Doodling around

Yesterday, the group trying to keep blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins from immolating her son, strange and troubled boy David Collins, agreed on a plan. Dashing action hero Burke Devlin would take David away very early in the morning on a trip to a fishing cabin far to the north, near the border between Maine and Canada. David’s father, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins, would evict Laura from the cabin where she has been staying on the great estate of Collinwood. This plan was unsatisfactory to well-meaning governess Vicki, who believed that the time of greatest danger to David was before dawn. So she sat in David’s room overnight and watched him sleep.

Today, David wakes up after dawn and Vicki urges him to go back to sleep. When he stays up, they spend the morning on lessons. When Burke finally shows up around lunchtime, he announces that come evening he will be taking Vicki to dinner at the local tavern, the Blue Whale. Apparently the fishing trip to the cabin far to the north has somehow morphed into a couple of hours in the afternoon on a boat nearby. This is such a jarring break in continuity that Mrs Acilius and I wondered if the writer of today’s episode, Ron Sproat, just hasn’t been watching the show.

Vicki agrees to go out with Burke on condition that the housekeeper, the wildly indiscreet Mrs Johnson, keep David in her sight at all times. When Mrs Johnson was hired, David took it for granted she would be his “jailer.” He used that word with his aunt, reclusive matriarch Liz, in #77, and again with Burke in #79. Today, it turns out he was right. At one point, Mrs Johnson picks up a chair, sets it between David and the door, and plants herself in it to keep him from getting out. Sproat may not know what happened in yesterday’s script, but he does manage to set up an echo with what was going on five months ago.

The scenes between David and Mrs Johnson start off with some chuckles. David Henesy and Clarice Blackburn were both talented comic actors, and while they establish themselves as a restless boy and his irritable babysitter they seem like they are about to be funny. But they just don’t have the lines to keep us laughing. By the time Mrs Johnson tells David that she’s tired of watching him “doodling around,” we know the feeling- doodling around is all Sproat has to offer today.

At the Blue Whale, Vicki is too worried about David to keep her mind on Burke. Burke keeps trying to calm her fears. He saw Laura get on a bus out of town in the morning, and according to Vicki’s analysis it was last night that David was in the greatest danger. She still isn’t convinced.

Hardworking young fisherman Joe shows up. He tells them that he had looked at the nineteenth-century newspaper clipping that led Vicki to believe it was last night that Laura would make her move. Laura Murdoch Radcliffe, whom Vicki believes to have been an earlier incarnation of Laura Murdoch Collins, burned herself and her son David to death one hundred years before. Re-reading it, Joe realized that it was ambiguous whether last night was the anniversary of that event or tonight will be. So he went to the hall of records, and found that it was in fact one hundred years ago tonight that the Radcliffes burned.

Vicki wants to rush back to Collinwood at once to check on David. Burke suggests she telephone first and ask Mrs Johnson if he is all right. Vicki agrees.

This is one of the “Dumb Vicki” moments the writers make a disastrous habit of falling back on. When they can’t think of an interesting or even plausible way to get from one story point to the next, they have a character do something inexplicably stupid. Since Vicki is on screen more than anyone else, she is usually the Designated Dum-Dum.

At this point in the series, the only telephones in the great house of Collinwood are downstairs, one in the foyer, the other in the drawing room. Vicki has been living in the house since June, so she ought to know where the telephones are by now. Since David’s room is upstairs, the only way Mrs Johnson can answer a call is by leaving him unattended. Vicki knows that Laura’s power is so strong that she can do all sorts of bizarre things given a few seconds; it makes no sense at all that she accedes to Burke’s suggestion and gives Laura those seconds.

Mrs Johnson is reluctant to leave David alone, but he seems to be getting ready for bed. So she rushes down to get the phone. When Vicki asks her about David, she rushes back upstairs and finds that he has gone missing.

There are a couple of firsts in this episode. Burke has been trying to take Vicki out to dinner since the beginning of the series. They’ve had several near-misses, but this is the first time he buys a meal that she actually eats.

Burke first met Joe in #3, and within minutes he’d alienated him with an offer of a bribe. Joe found further reasons to dislike Burke as time went on. Those reasons have dissipated, and so today is the first time Joe greets cheerfully Burke and calls him by his first name. Joe and Burke were never particularly important to each other and there is no reason to expect they will become so now, but earlier this week we did see Burke and Roger, whose mutual hatred is a major theme in the show, act like friends for a little while. If Burke and Joe can make up, we might wonder if Burke and Roger’s brief détente might also point the way to some kind of reconciliation.