Vampire Barnabas Collins first appeared on Dark Shadows in #210 and quickly became the show’s main character and star attraction, but the word “vampire” was not uttered on-screen until #410, and thereafter was used quite sparingly for a long while. Those days are definitely behind us now; the characters say “vampire” eight times in this one.
Barnabas has traveled back in time to the year 1897, and is embroiled in a great many storylines, none of which he fully understands or has any idea of changing for the better. Yesterday, crazed groundskeeper Dirk Wilkins told twelve year old Jamison Collins (David Henesy) that Barnabas was a vampire, and Jamison, checking on his story, found an empty coffin in Barnabas’ basement. Today, Jamison tells his father, the stuffy Edward (Louis Edmonds,) what Dirk said and what he saw.
Edward comes to Barnabas’ house, repeats Jamison’s story, and asks to see the basement. Barnabas has hidden the coffin, but Edward tells him that he cannot dismiss the story so easily. A few weeks before, Edward discovered that Jamison’s mother Laura was an undead blonde fire witch bent on incinerating her children to renew her own existence; since that experience, he can no longer disregard claims about the supernatural. There have been a number of attacks on the estate of Collinwood and in the village of Collinsport which have left victims drained of blood and showing bite marks on their necks; he must take Jamison’s claims seriously. He is alone with Barnabas in his basement while explaining this to him, rather a foolhardy position in which to lay out to a man one’s grounds for suspecting that he is a vampire.
Edward leaves. Barnabas is in a bind. Jamison’s children will be the adults at Collinwood in the 1960s, and they are the ones who accept Barnabas’ story that he is their distant cousin from England and give him the Old House on the estate to live in. If Jamison knows about him, it will hardly be likely that his children will be so welcoming. Even if he can reverse his journey through time, there will be no future for him to go back to. So he tells his blood thrall, maidservant Beth, that they must provide a vampire to take the blame for his earlier deeds and allay Jamison and Edward’s suspicions.
Barnabas thinks that he has already arranged a solution to this problem. He bit Dirk in order to shut him up and bring him under control, but apparently he over-ate. Dirk is not going to live through the night. When he dies, he will rise as a vampire. Barnabas and Beth will see to it that Dirk is caught and that he takes the fall for Barnabas’ crimes.
Barnabas has stashed Dirk in a secret room off the parlor of the Old House, a space behind the bookcase in the front parlor. Barnabas opens this space, intending to sit by Beth until they see Dirk die, only to find that it is too late- Dirk has wandered off.
Longtime viewers will find satisfactions in the reflections of earlier characters that run throughout this episode. The secret chamber in which Barnabas tried to keep Dirk is not a place which he has used before, but it first appeared on the show long before he did. In #115, another crazed servant, handyman Matthew Morgan, locked well-meaning governess Vicki up in the chamber, eventually attempting to kill her there. When Barnabas suddenly thinks of that chamber, he is emphasizing the echo of Matthew in Dirk’s rampage.
Edward’s fearlessness in standing alone before Barnabas in his basement and telling him that he suspects he may be a vampire is also something we have seen before. From November 1967 to March 1968, when Dark Shadows was set in the 1790s, Louis Edmonds played haughty overlord Joshua Collins. In #446, Joshua found his son Barnabas rising from his coffin in this same basement and confronted him about his bad behavior. When Barnabas moved to kill him, Joshua glared at him and Barnabas slunk away in shame. Edward is quite different from Joshua; on the one hand he lacks the earlier man’s sense of enterprise and drive for power, while on the other he is far more loving towards his children and quicker to set aside his individual pride for the sake of family unity. But we can see that he does share his kinsman’s ability to fend off vampire attacks by insisting on good manners.
The most fully developed echo is of #333. In that episode, set in contemporary times, strange and troubled boy David Collins (David Henesy,) had seen a coffin in Barnabas’ basement. Connecting that with an abundance of other readily available evidence, David concluded that Barnabas was a vampire. David’s father, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins (Louis Edmonds,) refused to consider such a notion. When local men Burke and Dave went to Barnabas’ house and demanded to search the basement, he initially resisted. At length he led them downstairs. The coffin was not there. Burke and Dave went back to the great house of Collinwood, and Roger crowed with triumph that they had been so silly as to take David’s story seriously. Embarrassed, Burke and Dave asked David if he might have made the whole thing up.
Barnabas may have had this incident in mind, and with it a hope that by showing Edward the empty basement he would embarrass him as he had embarrassed Burke and Dave, perhaps turning him into the same kind of ally that Roger was in 1967. But Edward is made of sterner stuff, and he sheds light on what was in the minds of the makers of the show.
Laura was another iteration of the show’s first supernatural menace. From December 1966 to March 1967, we learned that David’s mother, Laura Murdoch Collins, was a humanoid Phoenix who had returned from the dead to incinerate him along with herself and thereby renew her existence. Roger eventually came face to face with that fact and made himself marginally useful in the effort to stop her. Afterward, he was shocked out of his habit of openly expressing hatred for David, and eventually even showed a modicum of affection and concern for the boy. But he quickly snapped back into the Collins family’s traditional attitude of denial that the supernatural could have any role in human events, and he would not be budged from this denial.
The Laura we saw in 1897 was a violent retcon of many of the most important features of the story we saw in 1966 to 1967, and as Jamison’s mother she implies that Roger married his own grandmother. So it seemed inexplicable that the makers of the show would choose to introduce her. It is when Edward explains that his experience with Laura has opened his mind to the possibility of dangers intruding from the world of the supernatural, that we understand why they did it. They are showing us that Edward is on a continuum about halfway between Joshua and Roger.
Joshua was in a way too strong for his world to support, so that he defeated his own aims and produced tragedies for all those he meant to elevate. By contrast, Roger is like one of Nietzsche’s “Last Men,” what nowadays some call “cage-stage,” a person who is so degenerated he cannot exist on his own or create anything lasting but can be happy in captivity. Edward does not have Joshua’s anomalous strength; like Roger, he lives in his sister’s house as her guest and works for her business as an employee. But neither does he have Roger’s cowardly inability to face facts or his vicious glee in the humiliation of others. He is brave enough and strong enough and fair-minded enough to represent a grave threat to Barnabas.
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