nancy barrett – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 1070: Never without you

The sun has set, and vampire Barnabas Collins is opening the lid of his coffin in the basement of the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. Suddenly a cross is thrust in his face. He recoils from it, crying in pain and becoming immobile. The cross is wielded by the sheriff of Collinsport, who announces “I know all about you, Barnabas Collins!”

Before the sheriff can take matters any further, a teenage girl appears nearby. Shocked to see her, he reels away from the coffin. He jabbers at her, saying that he recognizes her and pleading with her not to come closer. Barnabas grabs him from behind and strangles him to death.

Barnabas didn’t have anything against the sheriff, but can’t deny that it feels good to use the old strangling muscles again. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas goes upstairs and finds his best friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman. He tells Julia that the sheriff’s gun was loaded with silver bullets, and that only the manifestation of the ghost of Carrie prevented his destruction. The police know about him, and more officers will be coming any time. Julia admits that she told the sheriff about Barnabas. Shocked, he says “You betrayed me?” He has said these words many times, always as a prelude to extreme violence. Julia braces herself, expecting the same. But to her amazement, Barnabas is gentle and understanding. He realizes she is under the sway of an evil ghost named Gerard. She says that she will betray Barnabas again and again, and urges him to leave without her. He says he will never do that. She embraces him, weeping, and he comforts her. For most people, a day that begins with the murder of a policeman is a day when nothing goes well, but Barnabas is not like most people. This is far and away the most mature behavior we have ever seen on his part.

The year is 1995; Barnabas and Julia have come unstuck in time and found themselves at Collinwood 25 years after a mysterious disaster wrecked the great house on the estate, ruined its inhabitants, and left Gerard in charge. They believe they can travel back to 1970 and prevent the disaster from ever occurring, if only they can find out what it was. Barnabas’ distant cousin Carolyn left him a note yesterday consisting of six cryptic phrases which he took to be clues, but Gerard killed Carolyn before Barnabas could ask her to explain them.

Barnabas has brought occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes to the Old House. We find Stokes exclaiming to Barnabas “You killed the sheriff?” Barnabas confirms, “Yes, I killed him.” Stokes replies, “Everyone’s going mad. It’s the effect of this place. I’m not surprised at your terrible story. Horrified, not surprised.” One wonders what the story was that Julia and Barnabas told. Stokes’ role in the parts of the show set in contemporary times was always limited, because he is too decent and law-abiding to be a party to the continued existence of a vampire. He could never be allowed to learn the truth about Barnabas. He stays in the room, chatting amiably with Barnabas and Julia, so clearly they haven’t told him now, either. Perhaps they just told him that the sheriff was going to shoot Barnabas, and let him assume that the reason was that Gerard was making him do it.

Be that as it may, Stokes is still aware of the situation. “Do you realize that I will be implicated in all this if the police come here?” he asks. They say that they do, but that they desperately need him to make a third for a séance. He dismisses as hopelessly naive the idea that Gerard would allow a séance to succeed, but Barnabas says that Gerard may not have the power to prevent Carolyn’s spirit coming through and telling them what her note meant. The idea of one spirit trying to block another from emerging out of the supernatural back-world and speaking at a séance harks back to the very first séance on Dark Shadows, in #170 and #171, when undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins used her powers to impede the spirit of the gracious Josette from warning the company about her. Stokes gives in and agrees to participate; Julia, self-conscious because of her compromised position, is reluctant, but Barnabas proclaims that if Carolyn is to speak it will be through her.*

The séance begins. Julia goes into the trance, and starts speaking in what appears to be Carolyn’s voice. If this is Grayson Hall’s Nancy Barrett imitation, it is terrible. Mrs Acilius and I laughed out loud at it. But the voice does not give any useful information, and Julia is under Gerard’s power, so it is also possible she is faking the trance to throw Barnabas off. In that case, it is Julia’s Carolyn imitation, and it reminds us of the ups and downs in the relationship between those two characters.

When the séance is over, Stokes says he feels a presence. He rises from the table, drifts towards the window, and sees Gerard watching him from outside. Gerard touches the pane. Stokes staggers back, descends into a chair, and becomes still. Barnabas finds that he is dead. He looks up and realizes that Julia has fled the house.

Julia has gone to the great house. She is in a mysterious playroom with Gerard. Gerard gives her a dagger. She asks if she “must.” She is reluctant, but finally works herself up to joy as she says that she always knew it would come to this, that now she will be with Gerard as he wants her. She lifts the dagger to stab herself in the heart.

Barnabas enters. He confronts Gerard. As the two beings from beyond the grave stare each other down, Julia drops the dagger. Barnabas tells Gerard he cannot stop them leaving. Gerard looks offended at this. He touches Julia, who collapses. She is not dead, but she and Barnabas fear she is dying. Gerard leaves the room and takes his time locking the door from the outside.

Carrie’s ghost materializes to Julia and Barnabas. She beckons to them, then walks out through the wall. They stare at the wall, and a door appears. They pass through the door, and find themselves on a staircase. They follow the staircase, and come to another door. They exit in the same corridor outside the playroom; they have gone in a circle. In space, anyway- the time appears to be different. The corridor is in severe decay in 1995, but is in good repair now. And they see a girl who looks exactly like Carrie, but is alive. She asks them who they are.

This is the final episode set in 1995. It is also the last we will see of Don Crabtree. Previous sheriffs of Collinsport have been ridiculously ineffective. Crabtree’s sheriff doesn’t chalk up many successes either, but no one else meets with anything but failure in these two weeks. Every death and defeat we see reinforces the sense that the evil which Gerard represents is overwhelming. As the penultimate victim of the 1995 curse, the sheriff is second only to Stokes as someone who would have been able to make a positive difference, if anyone could have, and Crabtree makes us believe that he belongs in that position.

*In the main continuity of Dark Shadows, spirits at séances always speak through a medium of the same sex as themselves. In the séance in #990, when the show was set in a mirror universe, the spirit chose a medium of the opposite sex.

Episode 1068: Almost pleased

I wonder how long the actors had the script before they started taping this one. As unspeaking, barely mobile ghosts Gerard and Daphne, James Storm and Kate Jackson didn’t need much prep time; as lunatics Carolyn Fredericks (neé Stoddard) and Quentin Collins, Nancy Barrett and David Selby probably didn’t need much more. But vampire Barnabas Collins has a lot of dialogue today, and Jonathan Frid rarely seems to be within a country mile of his scripted lines. That isn’t so unusual, but Grayson Hall’s trouble really stands out. Barnabas’ friend, Julia Hoffman, MD, is possessed by Gerard and is pleased that Barnabas keeps meeting with one failure after another. We are supposed to know this, Barnabas isn’t. But she has a huge grin on her face each time she gloats to Barnabas about one of his setbacks. The one time Frid is clearly delivering a line that was written for him, Barnabas tells a conspicuously blissed-out Julia that she seems “almost pleased.” Hall was a highly accomplished actress, and we would expect her to be able to do “secretly pleased” in her sleep. But when this line comes up, she gets a bad laugh.

Far and away the happiest we have ever seen Julia, this strikes Barnabas as “almost pleased.”

The episode ends with Barnabas going to the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood in response to a note from Carolyn. He finds her sitting at the desk there. He talks to her for a moment, then notices that she is not moving. He touches her, and she falls over dead. The episode has its problems, but that is an extremely effective closing curtain.

Episode 1065: How long will it be before they all come back?

Vampire Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman have come unstuck in time and found themselves in 1995, 25 years ahead of their proper period. The great house on the estate of Collinwood is in ruins. Some of the people they knew are missing, some are dead, and the rest are determined not to help them find out what happened when disaster struck in 1970.

In his post about the episode on his great blog Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn writes that “if this is July 1995, then Barnabas and Julia are on completely the wrong track. They want to know where Elizabeth and Roger and Maggie are, and the answer is obvious — they’re watching the O.J. trial. Where else would they be?”

Barnabas’ distant cousin Carolyn owns Collinwood now, and she doesn’t have cable. So she is in the great house, a demon-haunted wreck which most people avoid. Julia and Barnabas have followed her there. They hear Carolyn talking and laughing inside an upstairs room that didn’t exist in 1970. They let themselves in. Unlike the rest of the great house and every other structure on the estate, the room is in perfect repair, well-lit and full of luxury items. Carolyn has repeatedly told Barnabas and Julia to stay off her property, even sending the sheriff to arrest them on one of their previous trespassing expeditions to the great house, and she is outraged at this latest intrusion. She demands how dare they follow her into the room, and they respond by praising themselves for their good intentions.

Julia and Barnabas finally leave the room, and Carolyn relaxes. She turns and starts talking to someone who, to her surprise, is not there. She is all the more furious that Barnabas and Julia have driven this person away.

Not content with one home invasion, Julia and Barnabas go to the apartment of their former friend Timothy Eliot Stokes. Before they pushed past him into his parlor, Stokes had been reading a letter from a psychiatric facility where Barnabas and Carolyn’s distant cousin Quentin is a patient. His interior monologue read the part to us about Quentin having taken a turn for the worse. While Barnabas hectors Stokes, Julia leans way down and reads the letter. It turns out Quentin has escaped from the facility. At length, Stokes tells them that he was out of town when the disaster occurred in 1970 and that he doesn’t know much about it. He agrees to help them.

Julia keeps it classy. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Later in the episode, two scenes take place between Stokes and Carolyn. Carolyn enters Stokes’ apartment and reproves him for collaborating with the enemy. She laments that Julia and Barnabas ruined the birthday party, and that there won’t be another birthday party for a year. He has no idea what she is talking about and tries to reason with her. He finally takes her home. These, like every scene with Carolyn in the 1995 segment, are spectacularly good. Nancy Barrett is an excellent actress, Dark Shadows suited her strengths perfectly, and crazy lady Carolyn Fredericks was as good a part as any performer could wish for. Thayer David was terrific also, and the two of them are unforgettable together today.

Barnabas and Julia return to the playroom, since they haven’t been arrested yet tonight. They find a brand new birthday card addressed to “Tad” and signed “Carrie.” Barnabas has never heard those names in connection with Collinwood and wonder who they could be.

Barnabas says that he wants to question Quentin. Julia responds “Barnabas, If Quentin has been in a mental institution, he can’t help us.” It’s true that it takes special training and considerable experience to gain useful information by questioning severely disturbed people, but Julia has those qualifications. She is a psychiatrist who, when we first saw her in #265, was conducting an examination of a barely verbal patient. Over the last three years, everything that Julia had in those days has been stripped from her, a theme the show has been exploring heavily for the last six weeks. This line seems like a throwaway, but it underlines the transformation we have seen.

Quentin’s existence depends on a magical portrait painted in the year 1897. In an upstairs room at the Old House, Julia and Barnabas find this portrait intact. At that very moment, Quentin himself rushes in with a knife and tries to slash it. Barnabas thwarts him.

Quentin won’t believe that Barnabas and Julia are who they appear to be. He babbles as if he were still in the psychiatric facility. He claims never to have heard of the playroom, then insists the playroom was always there. They take him to the playroom, their third trip there today. Quentin looks in the room and flees in terror. Barnabas and Julia stay, and see the ghost of strange and troubled teen David Collins. The appearance of David’s ghost is one of the most forceful week-ending images in the series, up there with Barnabas’ hand darting out of its coffin in #210 or the Old House in sunlight in #365.

Episode 1064: There are only intruders

A disruption in the very nature of time and space has thrust vampire Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman into the year 1995, where the great house of Collinwood is in ruins and everyone is annoyed with them.

Yesterday, Julia and Barnabas were poking around inside the great house against the express instructions of its owner, Carolyn Fredericks, as conveyed earlier in the evening by the sheriff when he arrested them for trespassing. A heavy bust fell from the railing on the top of the foyer stairs, narrowly missing Julia. She and Barnabas fled the house. They looked back, and saw a young man in nineteenth century garb glaring at them from a window.

Today, Barnabas and Julia are in the parlor of the Old House on the estate. She tells him that when she saw the man in the window she was overcome by a powerful sensation. “It was the very essence of evil! I felt evil all around me. I was trapped by it!” Regular viewers may have thought Julia would be used to that by now, but apparently not. “It made me aware of something deep inside me that I don’t even understand — as though, with that one look, he could concentrate every grain of evil I have in my nature! Make it grow, and grow…” She asks Barnabas if he felt the same thing, and he says he didn’t, not at all. He concedes that he is an inhuman abomination from beyond the grave, so maybe he’s immune to that kind of thing.

Meanwhile, Carolyn is at home in the old shack by Finley’s Cove, accompanied by Mrs Johnson, who was the housekeeper at Collinwood in the late 1960s. Carolyn is brushing her hair and smiling. She reminisces about when she was a little girl and Mrs Johnson used to brush her hair. Mrs Johnson is not shy then or later about contradicting anything Carolyn says that is not so, but does not deny that she did that. So the audience is supposed to believe it. Some say this is a retcon, since Mrs Johnson did not join the staff at Collinwood until 1966, when Carolyn was fully grown. But in a comment on Danny Horn’s post about the episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day, I expounded a theory as to how it might be true:

In the early episodes, Carolyn talks about having gone to school in town. How did she get there?

She can’t have walked; it was miles away, much of it along a winding road with several blind curves. Her mother never left the grounds during those years, she couldn’t have driven her. Roger was living in Augusta with Laura.

(I should expand on this point. Roger says that when Carolyn was born, he was away at boarding school. So he would still have been in college when his niece first became a pupil at Collinsport Elementary. He then busied himself squandering his inheritance, a process which included the ten years between his marriage to Laura and his return to Collinwood. So that doesn’t leave any time for him to have looked after his “Kitten” when she was little.)

The only servant was Matthew. Matthew and Carolyn don’t seem at all close; it doesn’t seem likely that he drove her to school every morning. If a school bus came up the hill to Collinwood day after day, the kids who rode it couldn’t have maintained the attitude Carolyn describes, whispering behind her back about her living with the witch in the haunted house. Sooner or later they’d have started talking to her face to face about it.

Carolyn also talks about Bill Malloy being more like a father to her than any other man, and the two of them do have a cozy relationship. Carolyn is also very quick to fall in with Mrs Johnson when Burke pitches the idea of her joining the household staff at Collinwood. So I think we have to conclude that Bill Malloy and his housekeeper were in charge of getting Carolyn to school in the mornings. Malloy was on the fishing boats, so that would require an early start to the day. There were probably many days when little Carolyn was still in her pajamas when she got to the Malloy house. On those days, Mrs Johnson brushed her hair while the water came to a boil for breakfast.

Comment left by “Acilius,” 27 January 2021, on Danny Horn, “Episode 1064: Here Comes the Hotstepper,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 20 August 2017.

Carolyn seems to be a crazy lady these days. Yesterday, we saw that much of this is an act, but in her scene with Mrs Johnson we see that it is an act she puts on even when she is alone with someone she trusts. It allows her to smile and laugh and be happy even when she is surrounded by the residue of an unimaginable catastrophe.

Carolyn tells Mrs Johnson that she will be going to the great house of Collinwood to get ready to host a picnic at the gazebo, which she pronounces “ga-ZAY-bo” in a bit of Collinsport English that we’ve been hearing intermittently since Lara Parker invented it in the summer of 1968. Mrs Johnson reacts with horror, saying that no one can go to the devil-haunted wreckage of Collinwood, but Carolyn laughs off her objections. Carolyn shows a picture of a picnic they had at the ga-ZAY-bo in 1970, the last year Collinwood was habitable. Mrs Johnson spots a figure in the background and declares that was “the first time we saw him.” Carolyn gets upset and tears up the picture.

Barnabas had insisted to Julia that the man they saw at the window may not be the only supernatural entity operating within the great house, and Carolyn seems to confirm that he is right. She does not want to hear Mrs Johnson referring to him, nor does she want to have a picture of him. But she happily says that she is going to the great house tonight with a present, because it is his birthday. Apparently him and his refer to different beings, each of which inheres in the haunting. One wonders how much of supernaturalism would dissolve if people would just use proper names instead of pronouns.

Julia and Barnabas barge into Carolyn’s house. Carolyn tells them to get out, which they refuse to do. They badger her with the story of what happened when they were illegally roaming around in her other house, and Mrs Johnson runs out. Eventually Carolyn resumes her crazy lady demeanor. Barnabas and Julia give up and leave, and for a moment we wonder if they are on their way to let themselves into some other property of Carolyn’s.

Julia and Barnabas go back to the Old House. They find that Mrs Johnson is waiting for them there. They tell her that they are time travelers, and that if she will tell them what happened they might be able to go back and prevent it. She is dubious about this claim, but starts telling the story anyway. She casts her mind back to the summer of 1970. “It all began when the days were so beautiful, you couldn’t help but be happy. There was a spirit of joy at Collinwood; there was a feeling that hadn’t been there in a long time. There was so much love among all of us at that time…” This would be the period that began immediately after Barnabas and Julia left.

Mrs Johnson says that all of the beauty and joy and love and other things you might experience when you don’t have a vampire and a mad scientist around your estate came to an end one quiet night. She seems to be on the point of saying something important when she looks at the window of the parlor and sees the glaring young man. She breaks off, screams that she won’t tell, and runs out into the night. Julia tells Barnabas she felt the evil presence, and that the ghost was there. They go out to look for Mrs Johnson.

The ghost catches up to Mrs Johnson first. He touches her shoulder, and she dies. When Barnabas and Julia find Mrs Johnson, she is sitting on the ground, her back against a tree, her eyes open. This was the same posture in which Clarice Blackburn’s character Abigail Collins was found when we saw her corpse in #432. That image was a brief shocker in the last couple of seconds of the episode; this time the camera zooms in on Blackburn’s face and pans across it, allowing her to show that an outstanding actress can give a powerful performance even when she is altogether motionless.

Carolyn happens by. Julia and Barnabas hide. Carolyn thinks Mrs Johnson is alive and chatters to her. As the truth begins to dawn, Carolyn’s alarm mounts. Finally Barnabas and Julia emerge from the shadows. Carolyn accuses them of killing Mrs Johnson. They deny their guilt. Carolyn is unconvinced, and indeed we cannot help but think that since Mrs Johnson lived through the 25 years of their absence and turned up dead so shortly after they returned, Julia and Barnabas cannot be exactly innocent.

Barnabas and Julia follow Carolyn into the great house. Julia wonders what Mrs Johnson could have meant by “the children’s old room.” This is a blooper on Grayson Hall’s part- Mrs Johnson mentioned “the room the children called The Playroom.” Julia and Barnabas hear music playing, and follow it to a room upstairs. Barnabas looks at the doorway and remarks that the room was never there when he knew the house. The shot is framed at such a severe Dutch angle that we can tell something isn’t on the level.

Tell all the truth but tell it slant. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

They hear Carolyn inside, talking and laughing with at least one other person. Since their whole philosophy of life now seems to be making themselves as obnoxious as possible to Carolyn, they let themselves in.

Episode 1063: To see what you own

The sheriff of Collinsport arrests two trespassers at the long-deserted great house of Collinwood. They are Barnabas Collins and Dr Julia Hoffman, who inexplicably disappeared in 1970 and have even more inexplicably reappeared in 1995. The owner of Collinwood, Carolyn Fredericks (formerly Carolyn Stoddard Hawkes) has complained about them.

Barnabas pretends to be his own son, and claims that Carolyn’s mother, Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, put the Old House on the estate in his father’s name in the late 1960s. While we never saw this happen, from 1967 on Liz often did talk about the Old House as if it and its contents were Barnabas’ property. Furthermore, the sheriff’s office appears to be right across the hall from the registry of deeds, and the Sheriff himself appears to be far more competent than most Collinsport law enforcement personnel we have seen, so if Barnabas were lying he would probably catch on.

The sheriff says that Barnabas may have a right to go to the Old House, but that he found him and Julia at the great house. He asks a number of intelligent questions, none of which Julia or Barnabas can answer to his satisfaction. He threatens to hold them on a vagrancy charge. When Barnabas says that “I have a great deal of money… I own property here,” he backs off that threat, but he does tell them that he hopes their friends from Bangor come and take them away very soon.

Barnabas and Julia leave the sheriff’s office. Carolyn enters from the back room where she has been eavesdropping. She asks the sheriff to look at a picture in her photo album. It is a picture of Julia taken in 1970. The sheriff notices that she hasn’t changed a bit, not even the way she wears her hair. He asks Carolyn if she has any pictures of Barnabas, and she says that she does not. She says that the only picture of him she knows of is an oil painting done in the 1790s.

There was another oil painting of Barnabas done in 1967, and Carolyn’s late cousin David took a photograph of him in #659. The 1967 portrait hung in the Old House, which Carolyn may not have visited in the last twenty five years, and the photograph David took was an oddity that likely would not have been put into an album. So it isn’t really strange that she doesn’t think of them.

Carolyn does remember some other things about Barnabas, though. We open with Julia and Barnabas heading towards the Collins family mausoleum in the old cemetery north of town. They find that the door to the secret chamber is standing open, and are shocked that someone else knows about it. They find Carolyn there. They pretend not to have known about the chamber. They also pretend to be puzzled by the empty coffin in the chamber.

Carolyn says she knows why the coffin is there. She tells Barnabas it is waiting for him. Then she turns to Julia and says that it may also be waiting for her, whichever one dies first. They leave. Carolyn closes the panel and says with a gleam in her eye that it is waiting for him.

Barnabas is a vampire, and the coffin is his resting place. In the fall of 1967, he bit Carolyn and took her as his victim. He was cured of vampirism in March of 1968. The bite marks disappeared from his victims’ necks at that point, and it seemed that their memory of what he was and what he had done to them faded as well.

But for months after, Nancy Barrett played Carolyn as if she remembered a good deal more than Barnabas knew she remembered. The scripts didn’t give her much support in that interpretation, but it was well over a year before she had to make it clear Carolyn no longer knew about Barnabas. Perhaps whatever happened while Barnabas and Julia were away jarred Carolyn’s memory loose. If Carolyn does remember that Barnabas is a vampire, she is being astonishingly reckless in her scene with him and Julia in the secret room. Barnabas takes a menacing tone when she says that she knows why the coffin is there, and the background music makes it clear that he is on the point of striking when she says it is waiting for him. She laughs after she says to herself that “It is for him”; perhaps the light in her eyes is nostalgia for those days in 1967 when she was his blood thrall.

There is also a scene in Julia’s old room at Collinwood where they find that the box containing the notes she took while trying to cure Barnabas of vampirism has been forced open. They wonder who may have seen those notes.

Julia and Barnabas go back to the great house. She points out that the sheriff will lock them up if he finds them there, a concern Barnabas dismisses. He mentions that they have to find another place for the coffin, and suggests the great house. It would be interesting if they were lugging a coffin around when the sheriff showed up, but Julia puts the kibosh on that. Barnabas then says maybe the Old House. They busy themselves running up and down the stairs in the foyer for no discernible reason. They hear some music coming from nowhere in particular. Barnabas declares that this cannot be a sign of danger, since “music is seldom used to frighten.” For months in early 1969, an evil spirit possessed Collinwood and drove the family out by the incessant playing of a sickly little waltz, but apparently that has slipped Barnabas’ memory.

Yesterday, a man called Victor Flagler told Barnabas and Julia that he and his wife Jeanne had gone into the great house on a dare. Something pushed a heavy object off the rail at the top of the stairs. It landed on Jeanne’s head, killing her, and Victor heard laughter in the house. Julia and Barnabas don’t notice that there is a weighty bust perched on that rail today that wasn’t there yesterday, and Julia stands on the floor beneath it. It falls, and she gets out of the way in the nick of time. They leave the house.

We see a blue dot pulsating inside the house. Barnabas and Julia don’t get a look at that, but when they are outside they do see a man in nineteenth century garb sneering at them through a window. He is the face of whatever is going on in the house. The credits give his name as Gerard.

Episode 1062: You shouldn’t look the same

Vampire Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman have come unstuck in time and found themselves 25 years in the future, in the year 1995. The great house of Collinwood is in ruins. They are trying to find someone who can tell them what happened after they left in 1970.

They meet Carolyn Collins Stoddard Hawkes, who has changed her name to Carolyn Fredericks. Carolyn now lives in an old shack on the beach. She is offended that Julia and Barnabas look the same as they did in 1970. She refuses to answer any of their questions and orders them to leave her house.

During the day, Barnabas takes shelter in his coffin in the secret chamber hidden in the old Collins family mausoleum. Julia leaves the mausoleum and finds Carolyn waiting outside. Carolyn warns her that she and Barnabas must leave the area. Julia goes on her way, and occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes comes out of the shadows and talks with Carolyn. Carolyn had seemed to be drifting in and out of lucidity while talking to Julia, but she is crystal clear while she and Stokes discuss the need to get rid of the new arrivals.

Julia goes to the county building and tries to get the clerk to answer questions about what happened in 1970. He is frightened by the mention of the date and claims that there are no records of any kind from that year. She finds Stokes in the corridor outside the clerk’s office. She greets him joyously. He tells her to go away, lest he and others be “forced to act.”

After nightfall, Julia and Barnabas decide to visit a man named Victor Flagler, whose name the clerk had mentioned. As Barnabas and Julia leave the mausoleum, Stokes and the clerk watch them go and speculate as to their destination. Evidently the secret chamber is no longer secret at all.

Victor is in his 30s; he has a framed picture of his wife Jeanne that appears to have been taken during the Coolidge administration. Some fans complain that everyone in the 1995 segment dresses in clothes that might have been found at Ohrbach’s in 1970, but I don’t think that’s a problem. The Collinses of Collinwood had a stranglehold on the economy of the village of Collinsport in the 1960s, and if they were annihilated in 1970 and their assets left to rot it stands to reason people in the area would still be wearing the clothes they bought then. But the antique style of this photograph really does take me out of the show:

A photo taken no earlier than 1985. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Victor initially resists having anything to do with Julia and Barnabas, but finally tells his story. He and Jeanne went into Collinwood on a dare, believing it to be just a big empty house. They felt an evil presence there, and something pushed a heavy object from the top of the foyer stairs onto Jeanne’s head, killing her. When Victor found that Jeanne was dead, he heard laughter resounding through the house.

Barnabas and Julia go back to the mausoleum, only to find that the door to the secret chamber is standing wide open. They wonder who knows about it.

The clerk’s name is Ed. He is played by Ronald Dawson, who also appeared in #910 as art restorer Henry Osmund. This is Ed’s only episode, and Dawson’s final appearance. It is also Victor’s only episode, and Cliff Cudney’s final appearance. Cudney played a zombie in #963, 964, and 965. Both Dawson and Cudney have much better chances today to show us what they could do than those earlier parts afforded them. Indeed, all the actors are on top form. All roles played by Nancy Barrett are serious contenders for the title Best Character Ever, and in her scene with Barnabas and Julia in the little house on the beach, we can see that Carolyn Fredericks will be no exception.

Episode 989: This tacky little drama again

Dark Shadows has taken us to a parallel universe where the A story is a mashup of Daphne Du Maurier’s 1938 novel Rebecca with Edgar Allan Poe’s 1838 story “Ligeia,” and the B story is a retelling of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Today we also get a good look at the C story, another mashup. The ingredients in this one are Dracula and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

Drunken novelist William H. Loomis and his disappointed wife, the former Carolyn Collins Stoddard, take the roles of George and Martha. The parts of Nick, of Honey, and of George and Martha’s imaginary son are combined in vampire Barnabas Collins.

Honey is present at two conversations with George and Martha. She flees from each, moved to vomit by their cruelties, and after the second is never seen again. One session with Will and Carolyn was enough for Barnabas. The circumstances of his exit were rather different from those of Honey’s. Barnabas did not become physically ill when he saw Will and Carolyn quarreling, and is willing to keep skulking in and out of their basement when he is not out preying upon the living. But Will has other ideas. He has chained Barnabas in his coffin in the basement of their house and is planning to force him to tell him his life story, which Will thinks he will be able to use as material for a book that will restore his fortunes. In this he is the mirror image of his counterpart in the main continuity, who broke the chains that held Barnabas in his coffin in his own attempt to get rich quick.

As Martha taunts George for the dead end his career has reached, Carolyn is in the habit of taunting Will with his inability to write new books of his own. As Martha flirts aggressively with Nick in front of George, so Carolyn wants Will to release Barnabas so that he can drink her blood again. As George and Martha’s son turns out to be imaginary, not part of their material reality, so Barnabas is a visitor from the main continuity, not a part of this universe. Inasmuch as Jonathan Frid is away for several weeks making the feature House of Dark Shadows, Barnabas is present only as a topic in Will and Carolyn’s quarrels.

Will pours himself a glass of something, perhaps bergin and water. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

One might wonder if the idea of casting John Karlen as an analogue of George in an adaptation of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? occurred to the makers of the show around the time of #706. In that episode, Karlen played inveterate prankster Carl Collins, who held a gun at Barnabas’ head and threatened to shoot him. When he pulled the trigger, a flag labeled FIB! sprang out. George fires a rifle at Martha in Act One of the play, only to produce a similar effect with a Chinese parasol.

Later, Carolyn is eavesdropping outside the drawing room in the great house of Collinwood while Will is flirting with a lovely houseguest, a central character in the Rebecca/ Ligeia mashup. Carolyn stands in the doorway, in Will’s line of sight when he tries to make a date with the woman. Will has already rubbed Carolyn’s face in the intimate nature of her connection to Barnabas, and as his victim she can’t very well recreate Martha and Nick’s threat to cuckold George with any other male. So if we are going to have another scene built around that kind of insult, it will have to be Will who plays it with another woman.

Will makes sure Carolyn can see him at work. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Carolyn also spends some time with her friend Sabrina Stuart, who is part of the Jekyll and Hyde story. Sabrina is engaged to Dr Cyrus Longworth, the Jekyll character, and did not recognize him when last night he invaded her home and assaulted her in the persona of John Yaeger, the Mr Hyde character. Cyrus himself is puzzled when he comes to his laboratory in the morning and finds a terrible mess there, along with an IOU from Yaeger. A policeman shows up and asks him some questions, assuring him that he does not match the description of Yaeger. In his post about the episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn points out that this scene is recycled beat for beat from Dan Curtis’ 1968 TV movie adaption of Jekyll and Hyde.

Carolyn marches into Cyrus’ lab and tells him Sabrina is missing. She is angry with him for leaving Sabrina alone when the man who attacked her is still at large. He tries to assure her that Sabrina is in no danger, but since he cannot explain why he would believe that he only exasperates her further. She insists they go looking for Sabrina, and he acquiesces. It turns out Sabrina is in the great house of Collinwood, in a trance, trying to reenact the séance at which the Rebecca analogue died.

In the main continuity, Carolyn’s counterpart was married to someone whom she believed to be a man named Jeb. Like Cyrus, he was played by Christopher Pennock. Also like Cyrus, he was a shape-shifter who in his other form committed horrific acts of violence. Carolyn accepted Jeb’s refusal to tell him anything about himself, as Sabrina accepts Cyrus’ refusal to tell her anything that might lead her to suspect the nature of the potion he has developed. It is refreshing to see this Carolyn taking Sabrina’s side and insisting Cyrus do things a reasonable person might do.

Episode 980: I don’t want memories

Heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard has had a dream in which her new husband, whom she knows as Jeb Hawkes but who when we first saw him asked to be called Jabe, was in a fight on top of Widows’ Hill. His opponent, a stooge named Sky Rumson, threw him off the precipice to his death. When she awoke, Carolyn ran to the hill in search of Jabe. Instead, she found Sky. He told her that her dream was not complete, because it did not show her death. He then grabbed her by the throat.

Jabe rushes up and knocks Carolyn out of Sky’s grip. He and Sky fight, and Sky does throw him off the precipice. Carolyn escapes.

Back home at the great house of Collinwood, Carolyn finds her mother, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, and permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, MD. It takes her a while to compose herself sufficiently to tell Liz and Julia what happened. Julia offers Carolyn a sedative, which prompts her to jump up and shout a verbal refusal. By the time Carolyn starts telling the story, her distant cousin, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, has joined them in the drawing room. She interrupts herself to yell at Barnabas that he always hated Jabe and is probably glad he’s dead. When Carolyn finishes, Barnabas slips out. Liz calls the police, and Julia is surprised neither of them saw Barnabas leave.

For the last nineteen weeks, the show has been trying to make a story out of some themes drawn from the writings of H. P. Lovecraft. That segment is usually called “the Leviathans,” after a race of Elder Gods who are behind the action. Jabe was central to the Leviathan segment. Sky is the only other character remaining from it. Barnabas appears in the house where Sky has been crashing and finds him packing his bag. Sky does not understand how Barnabas got in. Barnabas dismisses his question, merely saying that Sky knows there are things he can do that ordinary people cannot. Sky draws a revolver and fires two rounds at Barnabas point blank, without effect. Sky exclaims “Oh, no!” Barnabas is amused that none of Sky’s late colleagues told him that he is a vampire. He takes Sky’s hand, curls his arm back so that the gun is pointing at his heart, and squeezes Sky’s finger onto the trigger.

Back at the great house, Liz gets a telephone call from the sheriff. The police haven’t found Jabe’s body, and have surmised that it washed out to sea. They have found Sky, and have tentatively ruled his death a suicide. Later, Carolyn has another dream. In this one, Jabe shows up and confirms his death. That marks the end of the Leviathan segment. Carolyn will go on using the name “Mrs Hawkes” and saying she misses Jabe, but otherwise the last nineteen weeks will be forgotten.

Carolyn sees Jabe for the last time. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Before killing Sky, Barnabas had mentioned that he almost regrets not leaving him to the other person who is on her way to do him in. That is Sky’s estranged wife, wicked witch Angelique. Had the Leviathan segment been more successful, or had Geoffrey Scott been even marginally competent in his performance as Sky, they might have made something of the parallels between Sky and Jabe. They are both very tall men with blonde wives who are dissatisfied with them. Angelique is dissatisfied that Sky is a tool of the Leviathans and that he tried to set fire to her on the orders of their representative, and Carolyn is dissatisfied with Jabe because he keeps running away from dangers he has brought on himself by his rebellion against the Leviathans and he won’t tell her anything about himself. Sky is a mortal man, while Angelique may once have been human but has long since become a creature of the supernatural. Carolyn is a mortal woman, while Jabe is now human but was originally a shape-shifting monster from beyond space and time.

But the ratings have been sinking throughout the Leviathan period, and the whole narrative structure of the arc keeps collapsing around them every time they try to do anything with it. So they are in too much of a hurry to move on to the next thing to do any exploring of the characters. Also, Scott is hopeless. As my wife, Mrs Acilius, put it, it isn’t that he is an actor with just one strategy. He keeps trying different things, and none of them comes close to working. We won’t see him again.

The new story has to do with an alternate universe that is occasionally visible in a room in the long disused east wing of Collinwood. Barnabas, Julia, and others have been spying on its inhabitants, and Barnabas is fixated on the idea that if he can cross over into it his vampirism will disappear. Since his bloodlust is overwhelming him, he is desperate to pursue this forlorn hope. He goes to the room when the alternate universe cannot be seen there, and a moment later finds that it has changed with him in it. Julia is in the hallway, looking in. At first she and Barnabas can see each other, and she can hear him, though he cannot hear her. After a moment, Carolyn’s alternate universe counterpart enters and demands to know who Barnabas is and what he is doing in the house.

Barnabas took Carolyn as his blood-thrall in October 1967. The show went back in time to 1795 the following month. In the 1790s segment, Nancy Barrett played fluttery heiress Millicent Collins. We saw that Barnabas first became a vampire in 1796; not long after, he took Millicent as his blood thrall. Shortly after the show returned to contemporary dress in March 1968, one of Julia’s colleagues in the mad science profession applied a treatment that put Barnabas’ vampirism into remission. That freed Carolyn of her connection to him, and at some point she forgot it ever happened.

For most of 1969, Dark Shadows was set in 1897. In that segment, Miss Barrett played repressed schoolmarm Charity Trask. Barnabas bit her, too. Carolyn’s counterpart in “Parallel Time,” known by her married name Carolyn Loomis, is the fourth character* Miss Barrett played on Dark Shadows; considering that Barnabas is so frantically hungry, it looks like she will follow in the footsteps of her predecessors and serve as his breakfast.

*Or fifth- in #819, sorcerer Count Petofi found Charity’s personality to be an irritant, so he erased it and replaced it with that of the late Pansy Faye, a Cockney showgirl/ mentalist. From that time on, Miss Barrett played Pansy, not Charity.

Episode 967: Too many outsiders

In November 1967, well-meaning governess Victoria Winters came unstuck in time. She went to the year 1795, and took the audience with her. For the next four months, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the late eighteenth century. That segment was a triumph for the show, but a disaster for Vicki. She had left her brain in the 1960s. Her behavior was so idiotic that she drove the people of Collinsport to put her to death on a charge of witchcraft, even though the witchcraft laws had been repealed in 1735. She also found herself mired in a romance with an intolerable character called Peter Bradford, played by an intolerable actor named Roger Davis.

Vicki returned to her own time as the noose was being placed around her neck. Peter followed her there, calling himself Jeff Clark and suffering from amnesia. Jeff felt the same way about Vicki that Peter did, and had no memories of or connections to anyone but her, so there was no point at all in his continual insistence that “My name is Jeff Clark!” Nor was there any obstacle in the way of their desire to marry each other. In fact, there was no reason for either of them to be on the show at all by that point. Eventually, whatever supernatural force was keeping Peter/ Jeff in existence gave out, and in #650 he and Vicki disappeared into a time warp, returning to the 1790s.

In January 1969, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins traveled back in time to 1796 to find that Vicki was back in the Collinsport Gaol, about to be hanged a second time. Barnabas rescued her, and she and Peter went out west to get married.

Longtime viewers may have been reminded of Vicki and Peter/ Jeff yesterday. The show formally gave up on an effort it had been making to plug the cast into some themes derived from the tales of H. P. Lovecraft and make a story out of it. One of the characters introduced during the Lovecraft segment is a tall young man who at his first appearance asked people to “Call Me Jabe.” In fact, Jabe is a monster from beyond space and time, and the tall young man is only a disguise he assumes. But he fell in love with heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard and wanted to marry her, so he destroyed everything that gave the menace in that segment its power. When he had done so, he learned that his humanoid form cannot survive indefinitely without that power.

As Peter/ Jeff married Vicki when he was about to vanish from the visible world, so Jabe is frantically trying to persuade Carolyn to marry him tomorrow and run off with him. But a ghost keeps interfering. Today, he learns that the ghost is none other than Peter himself.

Peter tells Jabe that he hates him and will do anything to prevent him from finding happiness with Carolyn. His hatred dates from 1797. In that year, Jabe lured Vicki to kill herself by jumping off the cliff at Widows’ Hill. Peter then shoved Jabe off the cliff, causing him to drown. Peter was hanged for killing Jabe, and as a ghost he still wears a noose around his neck.

This makes zero sense. Jabe came into being only four months ago. He emerged as a whistling sound from a box which Barnabas brought back with him after another trip to the 1790s, but when that trip took place Vicki and Peter had not returned to Collinsport.

It’s even worse when Peter says that drowning is “the only way” Jabe can be killed. When Jabe was a monster, they made a big deal of his vulnerability to werewolves and also mentioned that ghosts could kill him. Granted, the estate of Collinwood is the world capital of both ghosts and werewolves, but it takes a bit of doing to get either of them to work on your schedule. Jabe’s enemies would feel pretty silly if they realized that they could at any point have thrown him in the water and had done with him. Now that his powers are gone, Jabe is going to vanish on his own before long, and if Peter wants the satisfaction of killing him himself he can open any drawer in any piece of furniture at Collinwood, take out a loaded revolver, and gun him down.

Before Jabe took his adult form, he manifested as a series of boys. Antique shop owners Megan and Philip Todd were under the psychic control of the forces Jabe represented, and they acted as his foster parents. Now Philip is in Vicki’s old cell at the Collinsport Gaol. He has confessed to three murders that Jabe committed. When Jabe destroyed the power of the paleogean menace, the control it had over people’s minds broke, and Philip does not remember the murders or why he confessed to them.

For her part, Megan has become a vampire. We find her with her blood thrall, a non-entity named Sky Rumson, who is pleading with her to stay. Her body is relaxed and her voice is dreamy, a mode absolutely new to Marie Wallace on Dark Shadows. In the three roles she has played so far, Miss Wallace has been the single most extreme exponent of the ultra-intense Dark Shadows house style of acting. This Zen version of Megan is refreshing, and disconcertingly sexy. She tells Sky she will call him when she needs him, and wafts away to visit Philip in his cell. She is just as relaxed with him as she was with Sky, and after a couple of minutes she bares her fangs and moves in for the bite.

Peter also appears in Philip’s cell. He tells him that it is Jabe’s fault that Megan is a vampire. He breaks Philip out of gaol and invites him to take revenge.

Peter tricks Jabe into going to Widows’ Hill. There, he meets Philip. They wrestle. Evidently Philip is trying to push Jabe over the edge.

When Peter said that Vicki had gone over Widows’ Hill, he harked back to the earliest days of the show. She was standing at the edge of the cliff when high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins startled her in #2, and Carolyn told her in #9 that two governesses had already jumped to their deaths from there, and that legend said a third would someday follow. She stood on the edge of the cliff and thought about jumping in #641 and #642, but some people showed up and talked her out of it.

Presumably Peter’s appearance and his story about Jabe’s involvement with Vicki was originally meant to herald yet another return to the 1790s. But in just a couple of weeks, executive producer Dan Curtis will take most of the main cast out of NYC to start principal photography on the feature film House of Dark Shadows. Whatever comes next on the show will have to be written around the absence of the actors who will have major parts in the movie. Perhaps they had trouble writing the time travel segment without them.

Moreover, Vicki has been gone for over a year, and Alexandra Moltke Isles flatly refused to return to the role of Vicki, or to the show at all unless she could play a villain. Two other actresses had briefly taken the part after her departure, but neither of them made much of an impression. Even those who remembered the character would feel that they were watching a different show if yet another new actress were suddenly playing the imperiled heroine. So it isn’t much of a surprise that they did not go with the idea of an eighteenth century backstory connecting Jabe with Vicki and Peter.

Episode 945: Carolyn’s rough night in

Episode 361 was virtually a one-woman show, featuring Grayson Hall as Julia Hoffman, MD. Julia was being tormented by haunted house-style effects resulting from her involvement with a supernatural entity. The script, by Ron Sproat, was largely a recycling of an episode Sproat had written for Never Too Young, the soap opera that ran on ABC at 4 PM before Dark Shadows premiered.

Episode 658 consisted largely of a one-man show, featuring Joel Crothers as fisherman Joe Haskell. Joe was being tormented by haunted house-style effects resulting from his involvement with a supernatural entity. The script, by Gordon Russell, owed a good deal to Sproat’s work on #361.

Episode 897 ended with a long scene that amounted to a one-woman show, featuring Marie Wallace as antique shop owner Megan Todd. Megan was being tormented by haunted house-style effects resulting from her involvement with a supernatural entity. The script, by Violet Welles, drew from both #361 and #658.

Many fans consider #361 to be The Worst Episode of Dark Shadows, and many consider Megan’s turn at the end of #897 to be The Worst Scene on Dark Shadows. To the extent that #658 is remembered at all, it is because it is one of Crothers’ last appearances on the show. The memory of this fine and well-loved actor makes the fans so weepy that no one can be very harsh about his final star turn.

Today, the second half of the episode is virtually a one-woman show featuring Nancy Barrett as heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard. Carolyn is being tormented by haunted house-style effects resulting from her involvement with a supernatural entity. The script, by Gordon Russell, recycles elements of #361, #658, and #897.

Carolyn scared. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Russell was usually one of the most careful writers on Dark Shadows, but this one is remarkably shoddy. Carolyn and her mother, matriarch Liz, are staying at the home of a woman named Angelique. Angelique tells them that she has to drive to the airport to pick up her husband, and that she will be away for “several hours.” A couple of minutes later, Liz is also called away, and she tells Carolyn that she is sure “Angelique will only be gone an hour or so.”

Worse, all the action of the episode is completely, flagrantly unnecessary. The calls that leave Carolyn alone in the house are part of a monster’s scheme to get at Carolyn. But Liz is the monster’s loyal servant- if he had told her to bring Carolyn to him, she would gladly have done so.

Carolyn’s torments aren’t quite a monodrama, since they are interrupted by a couple of brief scenes with other actors. But one of those is a dream sequence in which she talks to the monster while we see him silhouetted in darkness. The interaction between them is so limited he may as well be a recorded voice. She also has a few interactions with Angelique’s husband. Since he is played by Geoffrey Scott, he may as well be a cardboard standee.

One advantage this episode has over #361 is that Nancy Barrett was excellent at screaming, second only to Clarice Blackburn in her ability to produce a true blood-curdler. Grayson Hall, accomplished as she was, had asthma and was physically incapable of controlling the timbre of her voice when she raised its volume above a certain level. Sproat’s script for #361 required Julia to scream several times, and every time she tried it Hall emitted a croaking sound that raised a bad laugh. Miss Barrett’s closing scream today, by contrast, really puts the “opera” in “soap opera,” it sounds great.

This is one of the few episodes with no scenes on the estate of Collinwood, and one of very few to take place primarily in a location many miles from the village of Collinsport.

There’s also an interesting moment when Angelique claims to have met Liz and Carolyn’s distant cousin Barnabas while they were both living in England. Barnabas never lived in England, that’s a lie he has been telling his relatives to conceal the fact that he is a recovering vampire who hasn’t left Maine since George Washington was president. Liz is part of the current supernatural storyline and Carolyn has at various times known all about Barnabas, so we don’t expect to be reminded that he’s still peddling the “cousin from England” bit.