Dark Shadows never really followed the traditional soap opera formula of a week that begins with an eventful Monday episode, followed by slower paced installments on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and culminating in a big finish on Friday. Major developments often occur midweek, while there is no guarantee anything much will happen on Mondays and Fridays. Today is one of those slow Fridays.
Suave warlock Nicholas talked Frankenstein’s monster Adam into serving his evil scheme. Nicholas wants mad scientist Julia and recovering vampire Barnabas to construct a mate for Adam in order to found a RACE OF ATOMIC SUPERMEN!!! race of artificial people who will be subject to his control. Adam told Barnabas that he would kill everyone at the great house of Collinwood unless he and Julia built a woman for him.
Adam has a crush on heiress Carolyn. Shortly before yesterday’s episode was taped, Nancy Barrett fell ill, and so the part of Carolyn was temporarily recast with Diana Walker. Adam comes to Nicholas’ house today and declares “There can never be another Carolyn.” Miss Walker wasn’t that bad, but Miss Barrett is a unique talent, so I see where he’s coming from. Adam says that he is going to tell Barnabas to forget about the experiment.
My wife, Mrs Acilius, points out that Adam is a smart character who must know that Nicholas will try to talk him out of giving up on the experiment. If he had really given up on the mate-building process, he would have gone directly to Barnabas. He wants Nicholas to talk him into sticking with it, so it is no surprise when Nicholas persuades him. Nicholas does have to resort to promising Adam that he can somehow have both Carolyn and his lab-made mate.
Nicholas’ sidekick, vampire Angelique, is in the room when he has his conversation with Adam. After the big guy leaves, Angelique asks Nicholas how he plans to arrange for both women to be Adam’s lovers. Nicholas responds “I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.” Angelique is amused by that response, as she had been amused by his attraction to Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town.
Grayson Hall joined Dark Shadows as Julia in June 1967, making her first appearance in #265. No one else on screen today was on the show before that, making this the first episode with a cast made up entirely of actors who came to the show after Jonathan Frid’s Barnabas premiered in April 1967.
Recovering vampire Barnabas Collins is in the woods on the estate of Collinwood, searching for well-meaning governess Vicki Winters. He hears dogs howling, as they used to howl when he was in the grip of bloodlust. He goes to pieces at the memory.
Barnabas’ fellow searcher, Vicki’s fiancé Peter Bradford, sees him standing petrified. Barnabas asks him if he can hear the dogs. Peter says he can, and is puzzled that Barnabas was afraid he was hallucinating their sounds. Peter asks Barnabas if he is all right. Barnabas insists that he is just worried about Vicki, and resumes searching.
Shortly after, Barnabas finds himself in the foyer of the great house on the estate, slumped in a chair under his own portrait. He makes a sad contrast with the haughty figure in the painting. His friend Julia Hoffman enters, and he gives her a pleading look that emphasizes the contrast between his present weakness and the arrogant power he wielded when he posed for the portrait, more than 170 years before.
Barnabas tells Julia that he does not know how he got into the house. The last he remembers, he was in the woods and heard the dogs howling. She suggests that their noise may not mean anything, but he is sure there is some unearthly horror afoot.
Barnabas tells Julia something else he is sure of. Earlier this evening, Frankenstein’s monster Adam came to his house. Adam mistakenly believes that Barnabas created him, and demanded that he build a woman to be his mate. When Barnabas told him that would be impossible, Adam vowed to make him sorry, then left. Shortly after, Vicki came by for a brief visit. Barnabas is certain that Adam abducted Vicki to use as a hostage, and that the only ransom he will accept is the artificially created woman he has no way of supplying.
Barnabas goes to the telephone and announces he is going to tell the police what he knows about Adam. Julia objects that Adam can tell the police enough about the two of them to expose them both to prosecution. Barnabas says that he is willing to take that risk for Vicki’s sake, and begins dialing. Julia says she is not, and places her finger on the telephone receiver to end the call.
Julia has never been able to entirely conceal her dislike for Vicki, rolling her eyes when Vicki talks to her and making sarcastic remarks when Barnabas praises her, so regular viewers can hardly be surprised that Julia does not volunteer to go to prison for her sake. Still, Julia has often enough shown a troubled conscience about the many crimes she has committed during her association with Barnabas that her utter coolness represents a new step in the character’s development. The other day she wanted to shoot wicked witch Angelique, but Angelique was not really human and was enormously dangerous. Even so, Julia was deeply upset when she made up her mind to kill her, and she backed down when she came face to face with Angelique. But Vicki is resolutely, unfailingly, rather tediously good, Good with a capital G. That Julia is so blandly willing to consign her to death at Adam’s hands suggests that her sense of right and wrong will no longer serve as a brake on any sinister plans that might advance whatever goals she and Barnabas are pursuing.
Barnabas looks at Julia, shocked. Perhaps her coldness shocks him. Perhaps what shocks him is that he is so dependent on her that he does not resume dialing.
Meanwhile, another drama has played out not so far away. Electrician Tom Jennings was inspecting the wiring in a house that suave warlock Nicholas Blair is renting from the ancient and esteemed Collins family. Tom told Nicholas that he wanted to inspect the cellar to make sure the foundation was in good repair. Nicholas replied that this would not be necessary, but Tom insisted. He opened the cellar door, and found a coffin. Nicholas told him that the coffin was there when he moved in. Tom asked if he’d called the police, and Nicholas replied there was no need, since the coffin was empty.
On his way home, Tom told himself that the Collinses wouldn’t leave a coffin in the basement of one of their houses. That shows what he knows- for the first 55 weeks of the show, matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard thought that her husband was buried in a box in the basement of the great house, and when he was a vampire Barnabas kept his coffin in the basement of his house. It wouldn’t be a Collins house if it didn’t have a coffin in the basement, and a dungeon too.
Tom sees someone and asks who it is. The part of the other person is played by the camera, so we do not know. The camera zooms in, and Tom collapses.
Later, Peter finds Tom propped against a tree. He touches Tom, and Tom falls over, apparently dead. He has two bloody wounds on his neck. Peter goes back to the great house. He tells Barnabas and Julia that he must use the telephone. They hear him describe Tom’s wounds to the police. Afterward, Barnabas and Julia realize that there is another vampire operating in the area.
Tom’s appearance is the debut of Don Briscoe, who would be a big part of Dark Shadows for almost two years. On his Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn told an amazing story about Briscoe:
Many years ago, when I was in high school, my mother walked into the room while I was watching Dark Shadows.
She looked at the guy on the screen, and said, “Is his name Don?”
I said, yeah, that’s Don Briscoe, and she said, “I thought so. I knew him, when I was in grad school. He asked me out once.”
Seriously, true story. She said that they were both getting a master’s in English — he was at Columbia University, and she was at Barnard, which is right across the street. He asked her out on a date, and he was very handsome, and very nice, but he wasn’t Jewish, so she said no.
At the time, I had no way to verify this, and I never really knew what to think about it. I mean, she knew the guy’s first name, but maybe she confused him with some other brown-haired guy named Don.
But now I have this excellent book called Barnabas & Company, which has extensive bios on everybody in the cast. It turns out that he really did get a master’s degree in English at Columbia University, and that means that Don Briscoe is kind of my dad.
Granted, hundreds of actors had parts on Dark Shadows over the five years of its run, a great many people have blogged about the show, and I’m sure Danny’s mother was a very attractive young woman who had offers from lots of fellows. But Briscoe was one of the more important members of the cast, and Danny is as good as any of the bloggers. So it really is a noteworthy coincidence that they are connected to each other in that particular way.
Dr Julia Hoffman is in the front parlor of the house of her fellow mad scientist, Eric Lang. She is on the telephone, asking the operator to connect her with the police. Even though she has lived in the Collinsport area for months now, she is still surprised that the sheriff’s office doesn’t have an emergency number.
Julia locked the door to the parlor; Lang is outside it with a gun, and recovering vampire Barnabas Collins is knocking and calling her name. They want to stop her reporting to the police that Lang is building a Frankenstein’s monster with body parts retrieved from the cemetery, and that he was planning to cut a living man’s head off to use as the last piece of the creature. Lang plans to bring the body to life by draining Barnabas’ “life-force” into it. Barnabas hopes this will free him of the vampire curse once and for all, and is desperate to complete the experiment.
Barnabas shouts that Julia should remember “someone.” When he can’t come up with the name, Lang prompts him with a yell of “Dave Woodard!” Barnabas and Julia killed local physician Dave Woodard in #341; Julia hangs up the phone, realizing that if the operator ever does manage to find a police officer any investigation of Lang would likely expose her as a murderer.
Barnabas has told Lang a great deal about himself. For example, in #467, Lang was the first person Barnabas told that his vampirism was the result of a curse placed on him by wicked witch Angelique. So returning viewers can believe that Barnabas might have confided in Lang about the murder of Dr Woodard. But it would be strange for him to have done so off-screen. And just Friday, Barnabas explained to Lang that the reason he thinks Julia can be trusted with the secret of the experiment is that she has a crush on him.* He hasn’t had much time to share more information with Lang since then, and if Lang had already known that Julia couldn’t call the cops without exposing herself to a murder charge Barnabas wouldn’t have needed to mention her crush on him. The likeliest explanation is that the loud and clear exclamation of “Dave Woodard!” is not Lang prompting Barnabas at all; rather, it was Addison Powell prompting Jonathan Frid. The result is a blooper that seriously confuses the relationships among Lang, Barnabas, and Julia. It’s early enough in the episode that it really is odd they didn’t stop tape and start over.
At any rate, they never mention Woodard again. He was introduced early in the vampire storyline. He was the counterpart to Dr John Seward, the physician in Dracula who realizes that all the patients who are suddenly showing up with puncture wounds on their necks and massive blood loss need care he is not trained to provide, and calls in his old med professor, Dr Van Helsing. Julia was the Van Helsing analogue, but she wound up siding with the vampire and killing her onetime friend. It is appropriate that the last reference to Woodard comes in this, the second episode of Dark Shadows with no cast members introduced before Barnabas. From now on, the daylight world Woodard represented and tried to restore is no longer present even as a memory.
Julia lets Barnabas and Lang into the parlor, and asks Lang to promise that he won’t kill anyone. He gives such a promise. She is unconvinced, but agrees not to call the police. She also tells Lang she will continue to oppose the experiment.
On the terrace of the great house of Collinwood, Barnabas and Julia talk about Lang’s experiment. Angelique, wearing a black wig and calling herself Cassandra, lives in the house as the wife of sarcastic dandy Roger, and the terrace is surrounded by trees, fences, and other prime screens for eavesdroppers. Barnabas and Julia know this well, as each of them has eavesdropped on important conversations here themselves.
Of course Angelique/ Cassandra comes by and hears everything. Barnabas does catch her, grab her, call her by her right name, and vow that she won’t stop him. After he lets her go, he moans to Julia that it was foolish of them to discuss their plans there. That underlines the foolishness of an idea key to the plan, that after Lang’s creature has been animated Angelique will never realize that Barnabas is dwelling within it and place a fresh curse on it. Barnabas assumes that Angelique, who has transcended time itself to pursue him, will just give up and go away once she sees that his original body is dead, and won’t have any questions about the new guy living at his doctor’s house.
Angelique summons her new cat’s paw, lawyer Tony Peterson. Jerry Lacy plays Tony. From #365 to #461, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the 1790s. In that phase of the show, Mr Lacy played the Rev’d Mr Trask, a fanatical witchfinder who inadvertently gave Angelique a great deal of assistance in her campaign to destroy the Collins family and those close to them. Most of the characters in the 1790s segment represent a commentary of some kind on the characters the same actors play in the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s. Tony and Trask have seemed to be an exception. In 1967, Tony was introduced through his profession and served mainly as an instance of Mr Lacy’s famous Humphrey Bogart imitation. Trask did end up functioning as a lawyer in a witchcraft trial, and his lunatic shouting about “THE ALMIGHTY!!” and “THE DE-VILLLL!!!!” were occasionally suggestive of what Bogart might have ended up doing if Captain Queeg’s testimony before the court-martial in The Caine Mutiny had gone on for nineteen weeks. Otherwise, there didn’t seem to be any fruitful points of comparison between the two.
Angelique tells Tony that the reason she chose him as her servant was that he reminded her of Trask. She orders him to go to Lang’s and steal a talisman that can guard against witches. At that, Tony shouts “Against you!,” and he sounds very much like Trask. Perhaps we are to think that a secular education and a steady diet of Hollywood movies could have turned the farcically warped Trask into a basically reasonable fellow like Tony, but that there is no strength in those things to stand up to a force like Angelique.
The talisman was a gift to Lang from Barnabas. Lang refuses to keep it on his person, even though it saved his life to clutch it when Angelique was making his heart beat so fast it was about to burst. Lang shows up at Barnabas’ house, under the false impression he received a telephone call from Barnabas. Barnabas, who has no telephone in his house, explains to Lang that Angelique has lured him away. When he learns that Lang has left the talisman in his desk drawer at home, he insists on accompanying him back there.
It is too late. Tony has already stolen the talisman and delivered it to Angelique. She looks at it and says that Lang will not be able to save either Barnabas or himself. Presumably, not even by reminding him of his lines.
Mad scientist Eric Lang has been building a Frankenstein’s monster out of body parts his assistant, a man named Peter who prefers to be called Jeff, has dug up out of the cemetery. Once the body is completed, Lang will “drain the life-force” from recovering vampire Barnabas Collins into it, bringing it to life and freeing Barnabas of vampirism once and for all. The time has come to fasten a head on the creature. Barnabas and Lang decided the other day to cut Peter/ Jeff’s head off and use it. When Peter/ Jeff found out about this, he irritated Lang with a lot of small-minded objections. When Barnabas realized that his friend Vicki was in love with Peter/ Jeff, he had second thoughts and stopped Lang from proceeding with the decapitation.
Lang pulls a gun on Barnabas, leading to several minutes of rather tedious business. Lang finally capitulates to Barnabas’ insistence that they call in a second mad scientist. Barnabas assures Lang that Dr Julia Hoffman can be trusted to keep their secrets. Julia, Barnabas says, “cares for me,” and will be discreet for his sake. He telephones her.
Julia is a permanent houseguest in the great house on the estate of Collinwood. We see her there carrying on a friendly conversation with the newest member of the household. Like Peter/ Jeff, this person has two names. She is Angelique, the wicked witch who made Barnabas a vampire in the first place. She has been telling everyone that her name is Cassandra, and has made her way into the house by marrying sarcastic dandy Roger Collins.
Julia smiles at Cassandra/ Angelique, agrees with everything she says, and talks in a soft, warm voice. She praises her for her honesty, and tells her that honesty is a quality she admires in people. With this, returning viewers have no doubt that Julia knows exactly who she is dealing with. Honesty is a quality Julia finds difficult to tolerate; several times we have seen her having conversations with the scrupulously ingenuous Vicki, and she could barely wait for Vicki to look away from her before she rolled her eyes, squirmed, and showed evidence of physical pain. When Barnabas was still an active vampire Julia once went to him after a conversation with Vicki and offered herself to him as his next victim, apparently a desirable fate if the alternative was having another conversation with Vicki. Angelique/ Cassandra hasn’t known Julia long, but her puzzled facial expressions do hint that she might suspect that her pliant manner and conventional words are an act put on to deceive an enemy.
The telephone rings; as a houseguest, Julia steps aside and lets Angelique/ Cassandra, a member of the family, answer it. We see the grimace on Barnabas’ face when he hears the voice of his bête-noire answer. He asks for Julia. Angelique/ Cassandra hands her the phone, and Barnabas orders her simply to do as he says. She replies, still speaking in the sweet, quiet tone she had been using with Angelique/ Cassandra, “all right.” This is so much unlike her usual self that it can only be an act she puts on when she is in the presence of an extremely deadly foe. Barnabas commands that she come to Lang’s and bring the medallion she uses to perform stupendous feats of hypnosis.
At Lang’s, Julia asks what’s going on. When Barnabas and Lang give her a cover story about Peter/ Jeff having paranoid delusions, she has her back to them and her face to the camera when she assures them that she is accepting their version of events. Again, we can see that she is far too savvy for these two guys to hoodwink.
Julia, unconvinced by the story Barnabas and Lang have given her. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Lang escorts Julia to the room where the sedated Peter/ Jeff is tied up on a bed. Julia orders Lang out of the room. Peter/ Jeff regains consciousness; Julia identifies herself as a friend of Vicki’s come to help him, and he tells her all about the experiment and Lang’s attempt to murder him. After she hypnotizes him into forgetting the preceding five hours, she goes to the laboratory, finds the creature, and confirms Peter/ Jeff’s story. At the sight of the creature, she can’t help but scream.
Grayson Hall’s performance up to this point in the episode has been so masterful that the scream is a terrible letdown. Hall had asthma, and as a result she could not control the quality of her voice when she screamed. This was a major disability for an actress on Dark Shadows.
Julia’s scream brings Lang and Barnabas. Barnabas makes it clear that he is still determined to go through with the experiment. He just wants to make sure the person they decapitate isn’t close to Vicki. Julia staggers out of the lab. She is in the foyer when we hear her interior monologue. She tells herself she cannot be a party to another murder, not even for Barnabas’ sake. She goes into Lang’s front parlor and picks up the telephone to call the police. Lang and Barnabas come to the door of the parlor, find it locked, and pound on it. Lang draws his gun again.
This is the first episode without any cast members who were on Dark Shadows before Barnabas was introduced in #211. This one is so much focused on Julia that faces which would remind regular viewers of what the show was like in those first 42 weeks would just be a distraction, so it’s logical to leave them all out.
Dark Shadows Commentary 