Vampires and mad scientists are both metaphors for extreme selfishness. The vampire exists only to feed on humans, gaining a night’s nourishment for himself at infinite cost to them; the mad scientist takes skills and equipment that could bring great boons to humanity and uses them only to further some perverse private whim. The Frankenstein’s monster emerges as the logical synthesis of these metaphors. As a botched resurrection and a parody of the Christian story, the Frankenstein’s monster evokes the vampire; as the helpless product of the mad scientist’s hubris, he is a child neglected and abused by a narcissistic parent, bringing home the real-world stakes of the issues raised in stories of uncanny horrors.
Mad scientist Julia Hoffman and vampire Barnabas Collins have finally got round to creating a Frankenstein’s monster of their own. His name is Adam. Julia and Barnabas had expected Barnabas to die and his “life force,” what the opening voiceover today refers to as his “spirit,” to animate Adam. They are surprised that the experiment has ended with Barnabas and Adam both alive. They are entirely bewildered about what to do with this 6′ 6″ newborn. Julia goes to her usual default, and injects him with a sedative.
Matriarch Liz comes from the great house of Collinwood to the house where Julia and Barnabas are working. She brings some information about the B plot. Barnabas makes it clear that he and Julia are deeply involved in an experiment begun by the house’s previous owner, the late Dr Lang. Liz is mystified by Barnabas’ new interest in science. She and Julia go to Collinwood, while Barnabas stays downstairs in Lang’s old consulting room. He is waiting for the dawn, wondering if the process of creating Adam cured him of the symptoms of vampirism or if he will crumble into dust when the sun rises.
In the lab upstairs, Adam regains consciousness. He plays with some of the shiny objects around him. It’s rather an odd playpen for a baby, with its electrical equipment spraying sparks, vials of boiling acid, loaded gun, and medical sharps. But he seems delighted with everything until he grabs a scalpel by the wrong end. Then he starts smashing things.
By that point, Julia is back, the sun is up, and Barnabas has learned he is human again. Julia and Barnabas hear the crashing sounds from upstairs. They try to stop Adam. He flings them aside. The episode ends with him sticking his arm out the door while they press it shut. Grayson Hall and Jonathan Frid do such a good job of playing Julia and Barnabas as farcically clueless that the sequence left me and Mrs Acilius roaring with laughter.
There is a bit of self-reference in this one. The first person Adam sees when he opens his eyes is Barnabas. When he can see Barnabas, he is calm. When he cannot, he becomes agitated and dangerous. Most of the people watching Dark Shadows at this point first tuned in because they were curious about Barnabas, and have stayed with the show because they are fascinated with him. The viewer mail whenever Barnabas was not getting enough of the spotlight to please his fans must have been unpleasant for the writing staff to read, and might have made them apprehensive of the crowds that gathered every weekday outside the studio at 442 West 54th Street. Perhaps Adam’s rampage was their nightmare dramatized.
Nineteen weeks ago, well-meaning governess Vicki disappeared from a séance in the drawing room of the great house at Collinwood and found herself in the year 1795. Her miserable failure to adapt to her new surroundings led to her conviction on charges of witchcraft. At the end of Friday’s episode, we attended her hanging.
Today we begin with an unusually long opening voiceover. These typically end before we see the actors; only a couple of times have they picked up again after a scene. This episode marks the first and only time the narration resumes after the opening title. It is necessary- they have to explain that what’s happening to Vicki in the 1790s is somehow simultaneous with the séance in the 1960s.
When Vicki disappeared in #365, a woman named Phyllis Wick materialized in her place. Now, we cut back and forth between the hanging and the séance. Phyllis clutches her neck and cries out in pain as the rope tightens around Vicki’s neck. Then Victoria reappears in the drawing room, wearing the dress she wore in the 1790s and bearing the wounds she sustained then. Back in the eighteenth century, the hangmen remove the hood they had put on Vicki and see Phyllis’ dead face underneath.
It’s a standard of stage magic for the magician to get into a box, for the box to be sealed tight, and for the magician’s assistant to be the one who gets out when the box is opened. That gag may not have been so familiar in the eighteenth century, but the inexplicable substitution can hardly undermine the certainty the executioners feel that Vicki was a witch.
By the end of the scene in the drawing room, first time viewers will be very largely caught up on what was going on when Vicki left in November. Before Vicki even appeared, we learned that Barnabas Collins recognized Phyllis Wick and was alarmed to see her, telling us that he is an interloper from the past trying to conceal a secret. Permanent house-guest Julia Hoffman announces that she is a medical doctor. Julia apologizes to Liz for having concealed this fact, which not only lets us know that she did conceal it but also tells us that the house belongs to Liz. Julia and Carolyn exchange frosty words, making it clear that they are enemies. Julia is even chillier to Barnabas, while Barnabas and Carolyn exchange a conspiratorial look. In contrast to all of these promises of drama, the reasonable observations Roger makes and his straightforward helpfulness suggest that he hasn’t been an active part of a storyline for some time.
The scene in the drawing room does not match the one Vicki left. Everyone is sitting in a different spot, the conversation after Vicki disappeared doesn’t seem to have played out the same way, and Phyllis is played by another actress. The Dark Shadows wiki has some fun with this, saying that the changes “can be rationalized as a changed history due to Victoria’s presence in [the] past.” This is the kind of theory that I enjoy very much, but I’m afraid it doesn’t work. If Vicki has come to a later stage of the time-band in which she spent the last nineteen weeks, Barnabas would remember her, not Phyllis, as his little sister’s governess.
As it is, Barnabas is desperate to find out what Vicki learned when she was in the era that holds the key to his secret. Julia leaves Vicki alone for a moment, and Barnabas appears at her bedside. She talks to him in a quiet, urgent voice about her fragmentary recollections of the 1790s. Alexandra Moltke Isles’ performance in this scene is so beautiful that I can’t imagine it failing to touch even the most shriveled hearts.
We end with Barnabas telling Carolyn that if Vicki knows enough to be a threat to him, he will stop at nothing to silence her. When Carolyn asks what he means, he repeats his ominous vow.
There are many line bobbles and a couple of physical stumbles today. Most obvious is a moment when Grayson Hall, as Julia, stumbles over a piece of metal equipment while entering Vicki’s room. But the whole thing is so well-structured and the actors are so completely into it that none of them bothered us.
Like every episode of Dark Shadows, this one begins with a voiceover by a member of the cast. Unlike all the preceding voiceovers, this one is delivered by a man. Thayer David does the honors.
We open in the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood. For the first time in months, Barnabas Collins is there. Barnabas died and rose as a vampire in January, and has been concealing his existence since. But now his secret is known to several people in the house. One of those, his mother Naomi, reacted to the knowledge by taking poison. In his agony, Barnabas is pacing the floor, complaining to his friend, much put-upon servant Ben, that the doctor hasn’t come. Barnabas’ father Joshua comes downstairs and announces that there is no longer any need for a doctor- Naomi has died.
Joshua dismisses Ben and talks with Barnabas. He confesses his doubts that he is able to love anyone. Barnabas tells him that such a disability might save his life- the curse wicked witch Angelique placed on him means that everyone who loves him will die. Joshua says that he must end the curse, and will do so by destroying Barnabas. Barnabas asks if he will drive a stake through his heart. Joshua replies that he found a book in Boston that tells of another way. Come morning, he will fire a silver bullet through Barnabas’ heart.
This is the first we have heard that silver bullets will kill vampires. There is some lore that suggests vampires avoid silver, but we know that doesn’t apply to Barnabas- one of his chief trademarks is a cane with a mostly silver handle. The 1941 film The Wolf Man established silver bullets as a means of killing werewolves, and the Lone Ranger fires silver bullets to knock the guns out of the bad guys’ hands, so I guess they might have come to mind in the 1960s if you were thinking of exotic weaponry.
Barnabas has plans for his final night. It was naval officer/ sleazy operator Nathan Forbes who led Naomi to discover Barnabas’ secret, and who is to that extent responsible for her death. Ben enters to inform Joshua and Barnabas of another item to add to the list of Nathan’s misdeeds. Nathan has evidently apprehended bewildered time traveler Victoria Winters and taken her into town, where she faces death on the gallows after being unjustly convicted of witchcraft. The Collinses knew Vicki to be innocent and had been harboring her since shortly after she escaped from gaol. Joshua and Barnabas are certain that Nathan turned her in solely to collect the reward that has been posted for her capture. Barnabas vows to kill Nathan, and Joshua can’t talk him out of it.
We cut to Nathan in the Eagle tavern, where he is spending the money he sold Victoria for. The Eagle has changed pretty dramatically in the last several weeks. In #419, bartender Mr Mooney greeted a female patron with the announcement that the Eagle did not admit unaccompanied women. Since the Eagle is a public house on the waterfront, the management evidently thought this policy was necessary to keep the place from becoming a headquarters for the sex workers of Collinsport.
Now Mr Mooney is nowhere to be seen, and the only person in the barroom with Nathan is identified in the closing credits as “Barmaid.” She is played by Rebecca Shaw, whom we saw the other day as a streetwalker whom Barnabas was about to bite when good witch Bathia Mapes summoned him away with a magical incantation. She is sitting with Nathan, drinking with him, and flirting with him pretty heavily. A bat squeaking at the window frightens her, and when she catches her breath she announces that she will be leaving him alone in the bar for a bit while she lies down. Nathan replies to that by saying he will see her soon, and she turns to take a look at him, apparently expecting him to follow her to bed. It seems possible she is the same character who was working the docks, now employed in a similar capacity in the Eagle. If this is the person who has taken over from Mr Mooney, the management must have given up the hopes it formerly had for its reputation.
Once the woman leaves Nathan alone, Barnabas appears. He confronts Nathan about his many crimes. Nathan pulls a gun and tells Barnabas he will take him to the constable and turn him in as the Collinsport Strangler. Barnabas jeers. Nathan shoots, and Barnabas keeps standing there. He declares that Nathan cannot kill him, because he is already dead. He then informs Nathan that he will wait until 9 pm to kill him. Since it is now 8:30, this does not give Nathan a great deal of time.
At 8:45, Nathan appears at Collinwood. He finds Joshua and Ben in the drawing room, and tells them what has happened. They are neither surprised nor sympathetic. Joshua leaves the room, explaining that he would prefer not to see a gruesome murder. Ben is willing to stay for a while. When Nathan asks how Barnabas can be destroyed, Ben decides to have a little fun. He tells him that if he finds Barnabas resting in his coffin after sunrise and drives a wooden stake through his heart, that will take care of it. Ben is quite jolly when he points out that Nathan will be dead long before sunrise, so that this information would seem to be of little practical use to him. Ben then decides that he doesn’t want to watch the murder either, so he also takes his leave of Nathan.
With five minutes to go, Nathan tells himself that Barnabas will not kill him if Joshua is in the room. He finds Joshua in the study. He begs Joshua to stay. As Joshua is refusing, Nathan looks at the wall and sees a crossbow mounted there, with three wooden bolts next to it. Suddenly his cowardice gives way to wild hope. He tells Joshua he will wait in the study for Barnabas. Joshua goes.
Nathan takes a practice shot at the door, then stands waiting. Barnabas does open the door, Nathan does release another bolt, and does strike him in the chest, a bit to the left of the sternum. Barnabas cries out in pain, and as the episode ends it looks very much as if Nathan may have managed to stake him.
Barnabas is the reason the show is a hit, so we can be quite sure he won’t actually die. Still, the episode is good enough that it feels for a moment that he might. The contrast between the prospect of Joshua killing Barnabas in the stately manner he described earlier in the episode and the idea of Nathan killing him is instructive. Had Joshua carried out his plan or even attempted it, the result would have been what Aristotle was talking about in his Poetics when he described the majestic terror of tragedy. It would have been at once horrifying and awe-inspiring to see a father duty-bound to kill his son. But Nathan is a cheap bum, trying only to save himself so that he can live to abuse and exploit more people. When we root against Nathan destroying Barnabas, we do not want only to continue the pleasure of watching the show. We are rejecting a resolution that would be unworthy of what we have seen so far.
Nathan, indeed, is unworthiness incarnate. When he was first on the show, Nathan was a likable rogue, but in recent weeks he has become both cruel and dreary. So cruel that he has tried to arrange the murder of an eleven year old; so dreary that he works through a conspicuously dim-witted, relentlessly unappealing henchman. Many fans complain about Nathan’s turn, and some speculate that the show just ran out of villains sinister enough to be worthy of Barnabas’ vengeance. On that theory, Nathan’s grave crimes are a last-minute, slapdash invention.
I don’t agree. We met Nathan before Angelique came to Collinwood. In those days, there was room for light comedy, for grand gestures, for dashing heroism, for fairy tale whimsy, and for tender romance. But as her curses have done their work, everyone and everything has been ground down. The ceiling has been lowered, and there is no longer space for the bouncy good cheer of the Old Nathan, much less for the Satanic majesty of villains like Angelique or that Rev’d Mr Trask. The whole world is pervaded by cheapness and sordidness now, and growing more so by the minute.
The only grandeur left is in The Tragedy of Joshua Collins. Were Nathan to destroy Barnabas, that grandeur would vanish, not in sublime pity, but with a taunt. That would be a harsh ending indeed.
The opening voiceover is delivered by Vala Clifton, who makes her debut today as Maude Browning, a young lady whose profession it is to make herself agreeable to the gentlemen she meets. This marks the first time since episode #1 that the first voice we have heard was that of someone we had not seen previously. The rule lately has been that the introduction is always delivered by a woman who appears in the episode. Today, that leaves Ms Clifton as the only candidate.
At the top of the episode, vampire Barnabas Collins tells his friend, much put-upon servant Ben Stokes, of his plans for revenge on the Rev’d Mr Trask, a visiting witchfinder responsible for much misery and injustice. When he makes it clear that he plans to murder Trask and to do it in an especially atrocious manner, Ben puts his foot down and says that he will no longer help Barnabas in any way. Barnabas threatens to kill Ben if he doesn’t come back with the implements he has ordered. Ben says that he may as well kill him right away. He stands still and squeezes his eyes shut, evidently expecting Barnabas to accept the invitation. Barnabas does put on his strangling face and move towards Ben, but at the last second he relents.
We then see Ben at The Eagle tavern, demanding “More rum!” Maude is at his table, trying to engage him in conversation. He warns her against going out at night, bringing up Ruby Tate, a woman who died on the docks some nights before. Maude has already said that she arrived in town the day of Ruby’s death, but when she is explaining why she isn’t afraid to go out alone at night she suddenly becomes the expert on Ruby’s ways. “She talked to anyone. I don’t.” This is a delicious little moment, reminding us of all the people we’ve known who make up little stories to persuade themselves that they are immune from the misfortunes that have befallen others.
Untrustworthy naval officer Nathan Forbes enters the tavern accompanied by a man in sailor’s togs. Maude gives up on Ben and leaves his table; she chats with Nathan for a moment, her eyes on the bulge in his pants most of the time. That’s understandable, it’s rather a conspicuous bulge.
Maude leaves the tavern, and Nathan directs his companion to sit with Ben and to get information from him about Barnabas Collins. The man introduces himself to Ben, giving his name as Noah Gifford. Noah claims to be looking for work on the great estate of Collinwood. Ben tells Noah to stay away from there and to go back to the sea. He is drunk enough to mention Barnabas’ name, but doesn’t say much about him. He says that he wishes he could go to sea himself. He says that he likes tea, and wants to go to China to get a nice strong cup of it.
In #363, the ghost of Barnabas’ little sister Sarah mentioned that her father and his friends were always going to China on their ships. When Ben brings up China, regular viewers might remember that, and take it as confirmation that the Collinses were involved in trade with China in the 1790s.
Right before we watched this episode, I was reading an article by Amitav Ghosh in the 23 January 2024 issue of The Nationmagazine about trade between the USA and China. Mr Ghosh says that between 1784 and 1804, the USA shipped a wide variety of products to China, but that from 1805 on Americans sold nothing to China but opium. He likens the label “China trade” for that commerce to calling Pablo Escobar’s business “the Andean trade.” Right up to the beginning of the flashback in #365 the show was equivocating on whether Barnabas, Sarah, and the rest of them lived in the eighteenth century or in the 1830s. Choosing 1795-1796 as the setting for this segment turns out to be a way of lightening one of the darker shadows the history we know from our time-band might otherwise have cast over the world of the show.
Nathan’s connection with Noah will sound another echo in the minds of longtime viewers. The first unsavory mariner on the show was seagoing con man Jason McGuire, who spent several months in 1967 blackmailing reclusive matriarch Liz. Jason was accompanied by a henchman, dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis. Nathan at first seemed to be a good-natured and likable fellow, if a bit free with the servant girls and regrettably mercenary in his engagement to marry heiress Millicent Collins. But ever since it turned out that he already had a wife and that she was blackmailing him into splitting Millicent’s inheritance with her, Nathan has been reminding us more and more of the sinister Jason. When he turns up with Noah in tow, the resemblance is complete. We can only wonder if Noah will follow Willie’s lead and get into some kind of terrible trouble at the Collins family mausoleum in the cemetery north of town.
On the docks, Barnabas meets Maude. He goes through the same struggle to keep himself from biting her that he had gone through with Ruby in #414. He is so slow to move in for the kill that she has time to scream and attract Nathan’s attention. Barnabas hears someone running towards them, drops his cane, and runs off.
Nathan sends Maude back to the tavern. He finds the cane and recognizes his old friend Barnabas’ signature wolf’s head handle. In the tavern, he asks Maude to describe her assailant. She mentions that the man wore a gold ring with a large black stone. Knowing that Barnabas always wore such a ring, Nathan is convinced that he did not go to England as his family has been telling everyone, but that he is in Collinsport and is the strangler who has been terrorizing the community.
Nathan seemed most virtuous when Barnabas was alive and he was his more or less loyal friend. So it is a jolt that his reaction to the idea that Barnabas might be a serial killer is to tell Ruby that, lucky as she was to escape the Collinsport Strangler, she “may not be the only lucky one tonight.” Since he has not made any move to contact the authorities, there can be little doubt that his luck is not an opportunity to stop the killings, but the discovery of information he can use to blackmail the Collins family out of every penny they have. He has completed his transformation from a good guy with a rakish side into a deep-dyed villain.
Closing Miscellany
As Nathan enters the waterfront scene, we see a sign behind him labeled “Greenfield Inn.” We saw weeks ago that the Collinsport Inn, familiar from the first year of the show, already exists in the 1790s, so evidently this is a different hostelry. In #214, when Barnabas had returned to Collinsport in 1967, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins did mention that any place in town other than the Collinsport Inn where there were rooms for rent would hardly “qualify as a flophouse”; perhaps the Greenfield Inn is the ancestor of one of these frightful places.
Greenfield Inn. Presumably not the front entrance.
Originally broadcast on 29 February 1968, this was the only episode of Dark Shadows to air on a Leap Day. One of the reasons I started the episode summaries this blog when I did is that the calendars for the years 2022-2027 match those for 1966-1971, so that I can post on the 56th anniversary of each original broadcast, matching not only the date but also the day of the week.
For the second Friday in a row, the identity of the actress delivering the opening voiceover ruins what is supposed to be the big surprise at the end of the week. Last Friday, we were supposed to be shocked when the ghost of gracious lady Josette appeared at the end, but when we heard Kathryn Leigh Scott at the beginning we knew she was coming. Today, we are supposed to be surprised that a phantom of wicked witch Angelique manifests at the trial of bewildered time traveler Vicki, but when Lara Parker gives the narration we know she will be along.
Until #274, all the opening voiceovers were delivered by Alexandra Moltke Isles in character as Vicki. From #275, other actresses would deliver them if Mrs Isles was not in the episode, and they were usually given in the third person. Mrs Isles lost her place as the show’s default narrator starting with #332, in which she appeared but which Grayson Hall narrated. Not until #459 will a man read the opening voiceover. Vicki and Angelique are both in this episode; Mrs Isles does sound like she has a cold, but surely it would be better to have her deliver the introduction even if she were struggling than it is to spoil the surprise by giving it to Parker.
Angelique shows up at Vicki’s trial to undercut a witness for the defense. Much put-upon servant Ben Stokes, once Angelique’s unwilling catspaw, has testified that he knows Vicki is not a witch, because he saw Angelique casting the spells for which Vicki is being blamed. He explains to the court that he went along with Angelique because he was himself subject to one of her spells. When he is asked why he is free of her power now, he finds himself in a tricky position. Ben knows that Angelique is dead. Barnabas Collins killed Angelique when he realized she had turned him into a vampire, and as Barnabas’ loyal friend Ben buried her body. Ben doesn’t want to expose Barnabas, so he can’t tell that story. He says that he supposes that he is free of her because she “went away.”
Angelique materializes outside the courtroom and enters. Shocked to see Angelique, Ben points at her and shouts that she is dead. She takes the stand as a witness for the prosecution and recaps some plot points from the episodes where Vicki was arrested. Everything she says is true, and she shows no animus towards Vicki, but her appearance both discredits Ben and adds to the case for the prosecution. She leaves the room and dematerializes. When everyone is gone, she rematerializes and laughs merrily.
When Angelique was alive, she never took much interest in Vicki. It wasn’t even her idea to frame Vicki for her crimes- Vicki stumbled into the witchcraft charge by her own foolish behavior, and Angelique just helped the prosecution along a couple of times. So it is a bit odd that she bothers to come back from the dead, however briefly, to ensure Vicki’s conviction. No doubt we are supposed to think she is doing it because Barnabas wants Vicki to be acquitted, and she wants to deny Barnabas any happiness. But a more intriguing interpretation is possible. In a comment on Danny Horn’s post about this episode on Dark Shadows Every Day, “Jason” writes:
I don’t really understand the confusion over Angelique”s motive. This Angelique is from the future. She knows that Barnabas is in love with Victoria in 1967. In fact I would argue that is the entire reason Vicki went back in time. Angelique orchest rated it to get rid of Vick either as part of curse or to get Barnabs when she return’s to 1968.
Comment by “Jason,” left at 12:30 AM Pacific time 10 September 2019 on Danny Horn, “Episode 435: Next Stop Kansas,” Dark Shadows Every Day
This idea was enlarged in a followup comment, apparently by the same person:
The reason it has to be Angelique from the future is this never happened the first time. So obviously thI’d Angelique is from the future. The only way this storyline makes sense!
Comment by “Jas,” left at 12:36 AM Pacific time 10 September 2019 on Danny Horn, “Episode 435: Next Stop Kansas,” Dark Shadows Every Day
When Vicki went back in time in #365, the ghost of Barnabas’ little sister Sarah was speaking through her at a séance, saying that she ought to “tell the story from the beginning.” In the months leading up to that episode, we had seen that Sarah was the face of an enormously powerful complex of supernatural phenomena, so it made sense that she would be the one to rend the fabric of time and space and turn the show into a costume drama set in the late eighteenth century. But we won’t be seeing Sarah again, not least because the actress isn’t ten years old anymore and ghosts aren’t allowed to grow up. So we’re going to tend towards other ways of thinking about the temporal disruptions. Angelique can stick with the show for the long term, and she’s already been built up as the biggest of all the Big Bads. So “Jason’s” theory is likely to become more appealing as we go.
Barnabas Collins became a vampire just a few weeks ago, and he doesn’t yet know what powers his new condition has brought him. On the chance that he might be able to raise the dead, he goes to the fresh grave of his ex-fiancée Josette. He whines about how much he misses her until the sound of her sobbing can be heard. She begs him to let her rest. Later, she appears to him in her former bedroom in the Old House on the estate of Collinwood, and shows him that in her ghostly form her face bears the severe disfigurement inflicted when she fell to her death while fleeing from him.
The audience is supposed to be in suspense at whether Barnabas will reach Josette. Unfortunately, the show ruins the surprise right at the outset, when Kathryn Leigh Scott delivers the opening voiceover. These monologues are spoken by an actress who appears in the episode, so we know that we will be seeing Miss Scott, and therefore Josette. It’s true that Miss Scott uses a very different voice for the opening monologues than she does for Josette or any of her other characters, but fans will recognize her right off.
Viewers who have been with Dark Shadows from the outset will recognize some connections with earlier episodes. Josette’s sobbing sounds more than a little like the mysterious sobbing heard several times in the basement of the great house of Collinwood in the first months of the show. They strongly hinted that the ghost of Josette was the source of this sobbing, only to give another explanation for it later.
Josette tells Barnabas that “the dead must rest!” This was a catchphrase of one of the funniest characters on the show, the Caretaker of the old cemetery. When we heard it from Josette, my wife and I laughed out loud.
Josette also commands “Do not disturb my rest.” A “Do Not Disturb” sign hung on a tombstone would be an apt symbol of Dark Shadows‘ view of the afterlife, since death on the show is usually about as temporary and as subject to interruptions as a stay at a cheap motel.
When Josette convinces Barnabas that she must not rise from the dead, not because she would have to prey upon the living as he does, but because she is ugly now, Mrs Acilius and I remembered two things. It’s true that when we saw Josette’s ghost in the first 73 weeks of the show, when it was set in 1966 and 1967, her face was almost always at least partly obscured. There were some brief exceptions, but in her most important appearances, when Miss Scott played her in #70 and #126, her face was completely veiled. So perhaps she bears her wounds then as well.
Our other recollection was not of Dark Shadows at all, but of the original Star Trek. And I do mean the original one, the first pilot, shot in 1964. At the climax of that one, our heroes commit themselves to die rather than stay on the planet where they have been trapped, as conditions there are such that no human being could possibly live a worthwhile life. When one woman says she wants to stay behind, they see that she is, contrary to the illusory appearance they have seen so far, severely disfigured. At that, the captain instantly accepts that she is right to stay. No uggoes allowed in space! Usually I’m reluctant to bring up the labels that end in “-ism,” but that ending and this one seem to be examples of looks-ism so extreme that they would be frankly genocidal if taken as a guide to real-world action.
Like every other episode of Dark Shadows, this one opens with a voiceover delivered by a member of the cast. The voiceovers in the segment of the series set in the year 1795 usually begin thus:
A séance has been held in the great house of Collinwood, a séance which has suspended time and space and sent one girl on an uncertain and frightening journey into the past, back to the year 1795. There, each of the Collins ancestors resembles a present-day member of the Collins family. But the names and relationships have changed, and Victoria Winters finds herself a stranger in a sea of familiar faces.
The “sea of familiar faces” results from the same actors appearing in the parts of the show set in different periods. The emphasis the show places on this, both by the repeated use of “sea of familiar faces” in one opening voiceover after another and by the hapless Vicki’s (Alexandra Moltke Isles) exasperating habit of telling the characters that they are being played by actors who previously took other parts, gives the audience a reading instruction. Evidently we are meant to compare and contrast each actor’s twentieth century and eighteenth century roles.
The first face we see today is the only unfamiliar one that has bobbed to the surface of the 1795 sea. It belongs to wicked witch/ lady’s maid Angelique, played by Lara Parker. Angelique had a brief fling with young gentleman Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid) some time ago. They met when he first went to the island of Martinique and met her employers, the wealthy DuPrés family.
Barnabas had fallen in love with the gracious young Josette DuPrés (Kathryn Leigh Scott,) but was convinced Josette could never love him. Barnabas consoled himself in Angelique’s arms until he realized Josette did love him. Barnabas and Josette agreed to marry. Josette came to Collinwood for the wedding, accompanied by her father André (David Ford) and her aunt, the Countess DuPrés (Grayson Hall.) Angelique is the countess’ maid, but also attends Josette.
Angelique used her powers of black magic to make Josette and Jeremiah Collins (Anthony George,) Barnabas’ uncle, conceive a mad passion for each other. Josette and Jeremiah eloped, breaking Barnabas’ heart. Barnabas and Jeremiah fought a duel; consumed with remorse, Jeremiah let his nephew kill him. Even after all that, Barnabas realized he would always love Josette, a fact of which he apprised Angelique. Frustrated to find that she could never have Barnabas, Angelique yesterday announced in a soliloquy that she would punish him by forcing him to watch his beloved little sister Sarah (Sharon Smyth) suffer. At the top of the episode, Angelique is in her room in the servants’ quarters of Collinwood’s manor house with Sarah’s doll and some pins.
We cut to the front parlor, where Sarah is looking up adoringly at her mother Naomi Collins (Joan Bennett,) who is reciting a story. We cut back to Angelique, who drives a pin into Sarah’s doll. In the front parlor, Sarah clutches her chest and cries out in pain. Angelique sticks more pins into the doll, and Sarah cries out again.
In the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s, Joan Bennett plays matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, owner of the great estate of Collinwood, of the Collins family enterprises, and of any other piece of property that they decide to tell a story about. In Liz’ time, the Collins family is much decayed from its eminence in 1795, but she is still the foremost figure in the town of Collinsport, and would have the authority to make just about anything happen. In fact, Liz can rarely bring herself to do very much that pertains to the plot, but when she does speak up we can see that she has great depths.
Naomi, by contrast, is utterly powerless, shut out by her husband, haughty overlord Joshua (Louis Edmonds) even from the management of the house. In today’s pre-title teaser, we see Sarah sitting on the floor of the front parlor, looking up adoringly while Naomi recites a story to her. That Naomi is reciting to Sarah rather than reading to her reminds us of what we learned when first we saw her in #366, that unlike most women in eighteenth century New England Naomi is altogether illiterate. Naomi occasionally bewails her inability to spend her time productively, and often drinks.
Sharon Smyth plays Sarah in 1795. In 1967, she was Sarah’s ghost, a frequent visitor to Collinwood and its environs. Sarah’s ghost was quite a different character than is the living Sarah. The little girl in the white bonnet who showed up in the oddest places and made the oddest remarks was only one aspect of a vast and mighty dislocation in time and space. It was Sarah’s ghost that started Vicki’s “uncertain and frightening journey into the past.”
Miss Smyth* nowadays describes her acting style when she was nine and ten saying “the first word that comes to mind is ‘clueless,'” but that works out surprisingly well for a ghost. It isn’t clear to us how the visible part of the Sarah phenomenon relates to the rest, much less how the whole thing works, and it can’t be clear- if a phenomenon stops being mysterious, it isn’t supernatural anymore. So it is gripping to see that the visible Sarah is herself in the dark about what she represents. That doesn’t work so well for living characters. When Miss Smyth can’t take her eyes off the teleprompter while delivering lines like “Help me, mother! It hurts!,” we can perhaps see one reason why the unfathomably mighty Sarah of 1967 was reduced to such a subordinate role in 1795.
But Miss Smyth’s limitations as a performer were not the only reason this development was inevitable. The whole idea of the supernatural is that something which appears to be very weak is in fact very strong. So children usually have fewer resources at their disposal than do adults, females are less likely to be found in positions of authority than are males, and the dead cannot rival the dynamism of the living. So the ghost of a little girl will of course be an immense force. The Sarah we see in 1795 is not yet a supernatural being, and so it would ruin the irony if even before her death she were already great and powerful.
In the part of the show set in 1967, Liz was one of the few major characters who never saw the ghost of Sarah. Liz was pretty firmly in denial about all reports of paranormal phenomena, and in #348 Sarah would declare that she could appear only to people who were prepared to believe in ghosts. So it is a bit startling for regular viewers to see these two actors together for the first time. Naomi is the same calm, indulgent presence to Sarah that Liz is to the children in her life, suggesting that though “the names and relationships have changed,” Liz and Naomi are two versions of the same person.
If the viewer’s main activity in watching the 1795 segment is contrasting the characters with those played by the same actors in the first 73 weeks, Angelique’s prominence is a puzzle. She is the only one who doesn’t fit into that scheme, yet she has driven all of the action so far. By the end of today’s episode, I think we can see a 1967 character with whom Angelique stands in juxtaposition. That character is Barnabas.
From April to November of 1967, Dark Shadows was largely the story of vampire Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid) and his attempt to impersonate a living man native to the twentieth century. It was so much fun to watch Barnabas scramble to keep this game going that the audience found it easy to put to one side the horrible evil he did and to look for reasons to think of him as good. But if we ever succeeded in doing that, Dark Shadows would be ruined. A deep-dyed villain allows a drama to be less serious overall than it might otherwise be, so that a thoroughly bad Barnabas lightens the tone. Make him relatable, or even forgivable, and everything gets terribly serious again. Yet a nonthreatening vampire is a purely comic character, like Count von Count on Sesame Street. So until they can establish another Big Bad, Barnabas has to be beyond redemption. If he is a lovable guy who just needs help dealing with his neck-biting problem, he has no place on the show, and it has no story left to tell. So they spent the fall systematically kicking away every possible mitigating factor and forcing us to behold Barnabas’ unrelieved evil.
The last hope of redemption for Barnabas in 1967 was his attachment to the late Sarah. Sarah had died when she was about ten, and her ghost started haunting the estate of Collinwood back in June, when Barnabas was holding Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town (Kathryn Leigh Scott,) prisoner in his basement. By November, many people had seen and talked with Sarah, but she had shunned Barnabas, even though he was desperately eager to reconnect with his baby sister. In his speeches about his longing for Sarah and in two moments when a suggestion he might see Sarah distracted him from a murder he was in the middle of committing, we saw the possibility that when Barnabas was finally reunited with her, he would change his ways.
That reunion finally took place in #364. Sarah walks in as Barnabas is strangling his only friend and sometime co-conspirator, mad scientist Julia Hoffman (Grayson Hall.) Barnabas does let Julia go, and has a heartfelt conversation with Sarah. Sarah says that she will not come back until Barnabas learns to be good. We can see just how long that is likely to be when, less than two minutes after Sarah has vanished, Barnabas tells Julia that, while he may not kill her tonight, her existence means no more to him than does that of a moth.
When even a direct encounter with Sarah cannot move Barnabas to find value in human life, we see that what Barnabas wanted when he was yearning for her to come near him was not to renew a relationship in which anything would be expected of him, but was something more like nostalgia. He has moved into the house where he spent his time when he was alive, and has restored it to its appearance in those days. He once persuaded his distant relatives, Liz and the other living members of the Collins family, to attend a party in that house dressed in clothing that belonged to their ancestors of his period and answering to their names. And he cherishes a fantasy that a young woman will discard her personality and replace it with that of Josette, then come to him and live out the life he had once believed he would have, long ago. His wishes for Sarah are of a piece with these attempts to recreate a past world. He wants to reenact the time he had with her, not to face the present alongside her. Barnabas is a damned soul, unable to love, unable to grow, unable to do anything for the first time.
Today, the show pushes Angelique into the same “Irredeemable” category where his reaction to Sarah’s visit had landed Barnabas. Again, it is an interaction with Sarah that represents the last straw. Josette and Barnabas made a sweet couple, but we knew before we ever saw them together that they were not fated to end up together. Jeremiah was likable enough, but we knew that he, too, had a sharply limited future. But Sarah is a child, a particularly adorable one, and is someone we have come to feel we know through her months as a ghost. When Angelique treats her so cruelly, we cannot imagine ever forgiving her.
And yet, there were times we felt that way about Barnabas, too. Angelique’s insane fixations are remarkably close to those vampire Barnabas exhibited in 1967, so much so that we keep wondering if whatever she does that turns Barnabas into a vampire will also put her personality into his body. We have come to be attached to the vampire; perhaps we will eventually discover it is Angelique we were watching until Vicki came to the past.
That isn’t to deny that the human Barnabas we have seen so far has points of contact with the ghoul from 1967. He was selfish enough to take advantage of a servant girl in Martinique when he didn’t think he could win the love of the grand lady he wanted and to discard her when he learned he could. He is cowardly enough that it never occurred to him to tell Josette that he had a past with Angelique at a time when doing so could have prevented Angelique casting the fatal spells on her and Jeremiah.
Real as these vices are, they are endemic to soap opera characters. Few daytime serials would have any stories to tell if they were about people who had a gift for monogamy, and we are supposed to find ourselves yelling at the screen “Just tell her!” and “Just tell him!” at regular intervals. Even the power differential between Barnabas the scion of the wealthy Collins family and Angelique the servant girl, problematic** as it would be in real life, is less troubling in the soaps, which take place in worlds where heirs and heiresses marry servants and their relatives all the time. Of course, most viewers know that Barnabas is destined to become a vampire, a metaphor for selfishness, and will be inclined to see in his use of Angelique the seeds of his subsequent damnation. And Angelique has enough lines about Barnabas’ selfishness that even viewers who joined the show during the 1795 segment can’t let him off the hook altogether.
Still, there is a great deal of good in the living Barnabas. We see him at Sarah’s bedside, consumed with worry for his beloved little sister. The doctor has been to see Sarah, and he has nothing to offer. Sarah asks to see her governess Vicki, who is in hiding because a visiting witch-hunter named Trask has blamed her for a series of inexplicable misfortunes that have befallen the house since she showed up in #366. It was Vicki’s own odd behavior that first made her a suspect, and Angelique has taken advantage of Trask’s foolishness to fabricate evidence against Vicki. She has gone into hiding, and Barnabas is helping her.
When Sarah keeps asking to see Vicki, Barnabas promises to bring her. Naomi is surprised to learn that Barnabas knows where Vicki is, and is not at all sure Trask isn’t right about her. But when she sees her daughter with Vicki, she is sure that she is innocent.
Vicki was the audience’s main point-of-view character throughout 1966 and well into 1967. Major story developments took place after Vicki found out what was going on. Vicki was the chief protagonist in the most important story of that period, the crisis represented by undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. Vicki took charge of the household, organized a group to fight Laura, and rescued strange and troubled boy David from the flames when Laura tried to burn him alive. That intelligent, forceful character has been fading ever further into memory in recent months, and we haven’t seen a trace of her in the 1795 storyline. Sarah is happy to see Vicki and says she likes the stories she tells, but she is a passive witness to today’s events. She serves chiefly as a prop, used to demonstrate that the human Barnabas, whatever his faults, is capable of heroic action.
Barnabas’ compassion for Sarah and his valiant defense of Vicki do not negate his vices. As the heir to Collinwood, Barnabas can express his self-regard both by gratifying his urge to treat some women badly and by earning admiration for treating other women well. In her low station, the same trait leads Angelique directly to the “Dark Triad” of Narcissism, Manipulativeness, and Psychopathy. As a vampire, Barnabas will exhibit the same three qualities in abundance, but for now, we still have license to hope for better from him.
As it was so much fun to watch Barnabas trying to pass as a modern man that we wanted to like him even after he had been terribly cruel to Maggie, a character we like very much, it was so much fun to watch Angelique twist Trask around her finger that we wanted to like her. Besides, her desire to remake Barnabas as her lover is understandable for those who have been watching the show and wanting him to be something other than a heartless murder machine. So, perhaps we will wind up liking Angelique after all.
Angelique has bewitched indentured servant Ben Stokes (Thayer David) and forced him to act as her assistant. Ben is devoted to Barnabas and miserable that he has been the instrument of so much evil done to him, but has been powerless to resist Angelique’s commands. When he realizes that Angelique is causing Sarah to sicken and perhaps die, he goes to her room and demands that she stop. He threatens to kill her if she does not relent. In response, Angelique causes him to have a heart attack. She lets his heart start pumping again when he promises to be quiet.
This is the second heart attack a character of David’s has had on screen. The first also prevented a servant in this same house from killing a young woman. That came in #126, when crazed handyman Matthew Morgan had been holding Vicki prisoner here and was about to decapitate her. The ghost of Josette led several other supernatural presences who scared Matthew to death before he could complete his fell purpose. Matthew and Ben are both devoted to the Collinses, and both are led astray so that they become parties to terrible crimes. As the benevolent spirit of Josette put a stop to Matthew’s crimes, so the malign Angelique prevents Ben from putting a stop to her own.
Barnabas drops by Angelique’s room to ask if she has seen Sarah’s doll, which she calls Samantha. He tells her that Sarah is very ill and has asked for the doll. It occurs to Angelique that she has some leverage over Barnabas. She says that she can brew a special kind of tea that might cure Sarah’s symptoms. He asks her to do so. She makes him promise to marry her if she does.
Several times, we have seen that Angelique is flying by the seat of her pants. She had no idea of using Sarah’s illness to gain a hold over Barnabas until he chanced to come into her room. Nor is she thinking ahead- as it stands, the witch-hunters have fastened on Vicki as their suspect, and are not thinking of her. If word gets out that she had the power to cure Sarah’s mysterious ailment and exercised it only after extorting Barnabas’ promise of marriage, that would seem to be proof positive that she is a witch.
In her own bedroom, Sarah sips the tea. At the same moment, Angelique, in the servants’ quarters, pulls the pins from the doll. How exactly Angelique got the timing just right isn’t exactly clear, but she must have had a way- she is perfectly confident when she tells the doll that it has served her well.
*Mrs Lentz now, but it’s strange to say “Mrs” when you’re talking about a ten year old.
**I know people don’t really say “problematic” anymore, but it seems to be the right word here.
Four and a half weeks ago, Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, escaped from vampire Barnabas Collins. Barnabas managed to scramble Maggie’s brains sufficiently that she has amnesia covering her time as his victim and much of the rest of her life as well. She is now a patient at a mental hospital called Windcliff, where her care is supervised by Dr Julia Hoffman.
Maggie’s family doctor, addled quack Dave Woodard, is an old friend of Julia’s. He had recommended Maggie be sent to Windcliff. He had also come up with a cockamamie scheme to protect her from her captor by hiding her there and telling everyone in and around the town of Collinsport that she was dead. If he had known that the captor was a vampire, this might have made some kind of sense- no character on Dark Shadows has ever heard of Dracula, so they don’t know how to fight against vampires. But he doesn’t know that, so his plan is just a way for the writers to stall while they try to come up with more plot points.
Today we open with Woodard in Julia’s office, complaining that she isn’t communicating with him about Maggie’s case. She tells him that there have been no developments worth reporting. Returning viewers know that this is a lie, because in a session we saw yesterday Maggie remembered a lot of sense impressions from her time of captivity and Julia told her that they represented tremendous progress. Woodard tells Julia that a lack of new information is no excuse for her failure to return any of his last six phone calls. He says that she seems to be intent on hoarding any information she may glean from Maggie as her own private possession, an impression he describes as frightening.
Julia responds to this characterization with a display of offense, and Woodard apologizes. She then brings up an idea that occurred to her at the end of yesterday’s episode. She says that Maggie’s memory might improve if she takes her to visit Eagle Hill Cemetery, where she was found wandering early in her illness. Woodard objects strongly that Maggie’s condition, as Julia has described it, is so delicate that such a visit might do her permanent harm. Julia retreats and promises she won’t actually take Maggie to the cemetery. This is such a flagrant lie that the camera momentarily goes haywire, focusing on Woodard’s chair rather than his face.
Woodard leaves, and Julia calls Maggie in. She’s already wearing her coat. She asks where Julia is going to take her, and she tells her not to worry about that.
On the great estate of Collinwood, well-meaning governess Vicki is staring vacantly into space while listening to an antique music box Barnabas gave her as part of his plan to subject her to the same treatment he inflicted on Maggie. A knock comes at the door. Vicki closes the music box and goes to answer it. It is her boyfriend, fake Shemp Burke Devlin.
Burke is waging a determined battle against the story, and he is fighting dirty. He doesn’t want Vicki to have anything to do with Barnabas, or with the ghost of Josette Collins. When Vicki says she wants to lay flowers on Josette’s grave in the cemetery, where we know she will cross paths with Maggie and Julia, he resists furiously. When she reminds him that she has had dealings with Josette’s ghost, he says “Or you think you have.” In previous episodes, including yesterday’s and Monday’s, he knew she had, and in an earlier period of the show he knew that several other characters, including some of the most level-headed ones, had also encountered Josette’s ghost. When he starts belittling Vicki for believing in “the spooks of Collinwood,” it therefore comes off as an especially crude instance of gaslighting. The Mrs and I aren’t much for profanity, but we both cussed at the screen when Burke was disgracing himself this way.
Julia and Maggie are in the cemetery. I believe it is the first time we’ve seen the set in a daylight scene. You can see the shadows of the foliage on the soundstage walls, and the corners where the walls meet. I can’t believe the director meant for us to see those things, but I kind of like it- the situation needs a touch of unreality, and the obvious falsity gives it the feeling of a black box theater.
Some of the shadows on the wall that Art Wallace spoke ofCorner of the soundstage
Maggie is agitated. Julia tells her to calm down and that everything is all right. I’m no expert, but I kind of doubt that talk therapy involves a lot of “Calm down!” and “Everything is all right!” It reminded me of this Saturday Night Live sketch from the 90s, in which Patrick Stewart plays “Phil McCracken, Scottish Therapist,” a psychologist who won’t stand for any emotionalism from his patients.
Vicki and Burke see Julia and Maggie in the distance. When Maggie turns to face them, Vicki recognizes her. Julia whisks her away before Burke can see her. When Vicki tells Burke she saw Maggie, he immediately unloads on her with the same garbage he handed her at Collinwood. He declares that Maggie is dead, that Vicki knows she’s dead, that she can’t possibly have seen her, that “there is a resemblance, THAT’S! ALL!” When he asks “What’s wrong with you?” I stopped the streaming and shouted at the screen “She’s wasting her time with you, you ******* ********, that’s what’s wrong with her!” To that, Mrs Acilius said that we should just restart the show and get through the scene.
Part of what makes Burke’s behavior so infuriating is the writer’s fault. A first-time viewer, unaware that what Burke is telling Vicki are delusions that suggest she is crazy are in fact things he knows to be true, might think that he is being reasonable in dismissing ideas about ghosts and the like. But even that viewer will realize that a person ought to be nicer about it. When Vicki says she saw Maggie, Burke could easily have suggested that they go up to the woman and introduce themselves, thinking that a closer look will disabuse her of the notion. But actor Anthony George must also bear part of the blame.
George C. Scott famously told Gene Siskel that there are three things to consider in evaluating an actor’s performance: first is to make the audience believe that the person they are looking at is the sort of person who might do the things the character does. This is in turn dependent on casting- put the wrong person in the part, and all is lost. Second are the choices the actor makes in the key emotional moments. Performers have any number of options as to how they will use their faces, voices, and limbs to show a character’s feelings, and those who make a lasting impression are those who make choices that are at once totally unexpected and perfectly logical. Third is the zest of performance, the actor’s joy in the opportunity to create a character. If that doesn’t come through, nothing else is worth much.
As Burke, Anthony George fails all three of these tests. Burke would have been a difficult part for anyone to take over, both because the originator of the role, Mitch Ryan, was so memorable, and because the character had lost all connection to any ongoing storylines by the time Ryan left. And by his own admission, George knew nothing about soap operas and had no idea how to play a romantic interest on one when he joined Dark Shadows. That’s where he fails the casting part of the believability test.
As for the skill part, George has something going for him. He is always mindful of his physicality, moving only those parts of his body he needs to show us who he is and keeping the rest of himself admirably still. He also keeps his voice remarkably consistent, both by holding a steady level of volume and maintaining a simple, precise pitch. In these and other ways, he shows impressive levels of technical proficiency as an actor, but the result is a mannered, unconvincing performance. His Burke doesn’t seem to be a real person. As a cardboard figure, he becomes an abstract symbol of whatever he’s doing, and when he’s doing something bad he’s hard not to hate.
Since he makes one choice for each resource available to him and sticks with it unvaryingly throughout the episode, he doesn’t give the audience any surprises. Nor does he yield anything to his scene-mates. They always know exactly what’s coming from him. George’s eyes are always watching another actor intently, as he watches Alexandra Moltke Isles intently today, but nothing in her performance can divert him from his plan, not in the smallest particular. When Burke isn’t listening to the other character, as he isn’t listening to Vicki, George’s disconnection from the other actors makes Burke seem like an irredeemable jackass.
Nor does George show any zest for the part. He covers his discomfort with soap acting by plastering on a smile whenever the script allows it, but he is stiff when Burke ought to be loose, cool when he ought to be warm, and loud when he ought to speak with a quiet, nuanced voice. The result is just sad and awkward. When Burke is being pleasant, we can feel sorry for George, but when he has to play the scenes like the ones Burke gets today we just want him to get off the screen and leave us alone.
Compare George’s Burke with Grayson Hall’s Julia, and you will see how an actor can determine an audience’s reaction to a character. Julia is a terrible therapist. She lies repeatedly to Woodard in the beginning, denying the severe breach of ethics and disturbing disregard of public safety involved in covering up what she knows and suspects about Maggie’s experiences and running an unconscionable risk with Maggie’s mental health by taking her to the cemetery. She lies again to Maggie at the end, promising that they will duck into the Tomb of the Collinses only for a moment and then refusing to let her leave there when she starts to show a violent emotional reaction. Her methods are so unorthodox and so harsh that we suspect she is not interested in helping Maggie at all. Because we have known Maggie since episode #1, and Kathryn Leigh Scott’s performance as Maggie renews our fondness for her every time she appears, we ought to feel deep hostility towards Julia.
But we don’t. In fact, Julia quickly becomes (almost) every Dark Shadows fan’s favorite character. The George C. Scott tests tell us why. Hall’s manner is so intense that we can believe her as a mad scientist; her uninhibited use of every facial muscle, of the full range of her vocal output, and of subtle tricks of movement she learned from choreographers when she appeared in musicals may have produced a style that no acting teacher could recommend as a model, but they do mean that every moment she is on screen she is doing something we wouldn’t have predicted; and she’s clearly having a blast. She can do things vastly worse than what makes us hate Burke today, and we will still want her to come back again and again.
Closing Miscellany
The opening voiceovers aren’t usually the best-written parts of the show, but there is a particularly bad bit in today’s: “Hidden deep in the cliffs of Collinwood, the majestic, ancient rocks that separate the Earth from the sea, there is a tiny cove carved by a long-ago sea. No one at Collinwood has seen it, and no one will ever see it.” If no one ever will see it, why bother telling us about it? The narrator tells us that it is because “the Earth knows how to hide its secrets well. Sometimes men, too, must hide secrets.” Does this mean that “no one ever will” discover the secrets the characters are hiding from each other? That isn’t a very promising thing to tell the audience of a soap opera, a genre which is all about unsuccessful attempts to keep secrets and their aftermath.
Maggie tells Julia that she doesn’t recognize the name Collins. She has lived her whole life in the town of Collinsport, where most people are employed by Collins Enterprises, which is owned by the Collins family who live at Collinwood. That’s some pretty widespread amnesia she has.
The show has been going back and forth on the dates when Barnabas and Josette Collins originally lived and died. Today we get a long look at Josette’s tombstone, giving her dates as 1800-1822, and another at the plaque on Barnabas’ little sister Sarah’s resting place in the mausoleum, with the dates 1786-1796. Those dates fit with a remark Barnabas made to his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie in #271, that Sarah lived long before he met Josette, but not with his remark in #281 that Josette had been dead for “almost 200 years,” much less with a book we saw in #52 that gave her dates as 1810-1834.
Vampire Barnabas Collins is giving a costume party in his home at the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood. His distant relatives, the living members of the Collins family, are dressed as their ancestors from Barnabas’ own time as a living being. The whole thing was impossibly dull until the mischievous and witty Roger Collins suggested they have a séance. Now well-meaning governess Vicki is in a trance, channeling the spirit of Josette Collins.
The last time Josette took possession of Vicki at a séance was in #170 and #171. At that time, Josette delivered her message in French. Since Vicki could not speak French (but Alexandra Moltke speaks it fluently,) that was evidence enough to convince even the most skeptical that something was going on. Today Josette speaks English. The characters are all sure that she is the one speaking, but it doesn’t have the same effect on the audience as did that earlier irruption of a language we had not expected to hear.
I do wonder if the decision not to use French came at the last moment. Even though Vicki/ Josette’s voice is loud and clear, the others make a show of struggling to understand what she is saying and seize on a word here and there (“Something about ‘run!'”,) as people do when they are listening to someone speak a language they don’t quite understand. Perhaps writer Joe Caldwell wasn’t quite up to writing in French, and the Writer’s Guild wouldn’t let Alexandra Moltke Isles or any other Francophones on set make a translation. Or maybe they thought that the switch to French wouldn’t be as effective the second time as it was the first.
Josette is telling the story of her death. A man was chasing her, and fleeing him she threw herself off the peak of Widow’s Hill to the rocks below. Barnabas interrupts and breaks Vicki’s trance.
When the others scold him for stopping Josette before she could reveal the name of the man who ran her off the cliff, Barnabas says that the name could not have been of any importance, since whoever it was who drove Josette to kill herself must have been dead for “almost 200 years.” The others do not suspect that he was that man. They do not know that he is a reanimated corpse; they think he’s just English.
When Dark Shadows started, the stories of the tragic death of Josette and of the building of the great house of Collinwood were set in the 1830s. In the weeks before Barnabas’ introduction in April of 1967, they implied that Josette’s dates were much earlier, sometime in the 18th century. Last week, they plumped for the 1830s again. But Barnabas’ line about “almost 200 years ago” puts us back to the 1700s.
After the séance ends, we have evidence that this bit of background continuity might start to matter. Vicki looks at the landing on top of the staircase and sees the ghost of Barnabas’ 9 year old sister Sarah watching the party.
It seems that when Barnabas was freed to prey upon the living, he unknowingly brought Sarah with him. Sarah has been popping in and out quite a bit the last few weeks, and she has already made some important plot points happen. We’re starting to wonder just how many more beings will emerge from the supernatural back-world into the main action of the show. The opening voiceover today tells us that “the mists that have protected the present from the past are lifting,” so perhaps they will have to nail these dates down sooner rather than later.
The whole party had accepted instantly that Vicki was channeling the spirit of Josette and none of them ever comes to doubt it. But when she says that she saw a little girl at the head of the stairs, they get all incredulous. By the end of the episode, Vicki will have encountered so much disbelief on this point that she herself will decide that she must have been hallucinating.
Back in the great house, Roger is still overjoyed that the séance turned out to be so exciting. His sister Liz and Liz’ daughter Carolyn consider this to be in terrible taste. But Roger won’t give an inch. He has some great lines, exiting with “I think that all of the unhappiness of all of my ancestors is my rightful heritage, and you shouldn’t try to keep it from me. Good night, ladies.” Both Patrick McCray, in his Dark Shadows Daybook post about this episode, and Danny Horn, in his Dark Shadows Every Day post, make insightful remarks as they analyze the fun Louis Edmonds has playing Roger.
Carolyn approaches Vicki to speak privately. She tells her that she isn’t bothered that fake Shemp Burke Devlin is dating Vicki. Vicki’s response to this is “What?” Carolyn reminds Vicki that she used to be interested in Burke and was initially jealous of Burke’s interest in her. But she assures her she doesn’t feel that way any longer. Vicki smiles, nods, and looks away. Carolyn then says “He’s really very nice!” Vicki answers “Who?” “Burke!” says Carolyn. Again, Vicki smiles, nods, and looks away.
This is probably supposed to tell us that Vicki is coming under some kind of spell associated with Barnabas, but in fact it is likely to suggest something quite different to the audience. Burke was originally a dashing action hero played by Mitch Ryan. Dark Shadows never really came up with very much for a dashing action hero to do, but Ryan’s skills as an actor and his charismatic personality always made it seem that he was about to do something interesting. Several weeks ago, Ryan was fired off the show after he came to the set too drunk to work.
Since then, the part of Burke has been played by Anthony George. George was a well-trained actor with an impressive resume, and by all accounts was a nice guy. But he cannot dig anything interesting out of the character of Burke as he stands at this point in the series. The only scene in which George has shown any energy so far was in #267, when Burke had lost a dime in a pay phone. The rest of the time, he has blended so completely into the scenery that it is no wonder Vicki can’t remember him from one line to the next.
Back in the Old House, Barnabas talks to Josette’s portrait. In the months from #70 to #192, it was established that Josette can hear you if you do this. Several times she manifested herself either as a light glowing from the surface of the portrait or as a figure emerging from it. In #102, we saw strange and troubled boy David Collins having a conversation with the portrait- we could hear only his side of it, but it was clear that Josette was answering him.
The first time we saw Barnabas in the Old House, in #212, he spoke to the portrait. At that point, Josette was not yet his lost love. It seemed that she was his grandmother, and that she had sided against him in some terrible fight with his father Joshua. He ordered Josette and Joshua to leave the house to him. The next time David tried to talk to the portrait, in #240, it seemed that they had complied- David could no longer sense Josette’s presence in it.
Barnabas had spoken briefly to the portrait the other day, but today he makes his first substantial address to it since banishing Josette and Joshua in #212. Again he entreats her to go, but for a very different reason. Now he says that she is lost to him forever, and must allow him to live in the present. Since he has been scheming to capture a woman, erase her personality, replace it with Josette’s, and then kill her so that she will rise from the grave as a vampiric Josette, this sounds like he has decided to make a big change in his relations to the other characters.
It turns out that he hasn’t, but the writers have decided to change their relationship to their source material. Barnabas’ original plan was identical to that which Imhotep, the title character in the 1932 film The Mummy, had pursued in his attempt to replicate his relationship with his long-dead love Princess Ankh-esen-amun. Imhotep met Helen Grosvenor, whom he regarded as the reincarnation of Ankh-esen-amun because they were both played by Zita Johanns, and subjected her to the same treatment Barnabas first inflicted on Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, and now plans to try on Vicki.
Maggie is played by Kathryn Leigh Scott. The audience in 1967 would not have known that Miss Scott also played the ghost of Josette in some of her most important appearances. However, they would have noticed when David saw Maggie dressed as Josette in #240 he assumed it was the ghost, because her face was “exactly the same” as it had been when she manifested herself to him previously. So we have the same reason to believe that Maggie is the reincarnation of Josette that Imhotep had to believe that Helen was the reincarnation of the princess, and we therefore assume that Barnabas, like Imhotep, was trying to take possession of both the ghost and the living woman.
But after Barnabas tells Josette to go away, he declares that if he is to have her, she must be someone from the present. This sequence of words is nonsensical in itself, but harks back to a theory he had laid out to his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie in #274: “Take the right individual, place her under the proper conditions and circumstances, apply the required pressure, and a new personality is created.” Jonathan Frid would always sound and move like Boris Karloff, but now his project of Josettery is inspired less by Imhotep than by the various “mad doctors” Karloff played in the 1940s. Of course, in the 1960s real-life mad scientists such as Stanley Milgram and John Money were performing experiments on human subjects for which Barnabas’ statement might have served as a motto. So Barnabas is coming to be less a merger of Dracula and Imhotep than of Dracula and Dr Frankenstein.
One of the devices by which Barnabas tries to place women “under the proper conditions and circumstances” for Josettification is a music box which he bought for the original Josette and may or may not have given her.* He gives this to Vicki. To his satisfaction, she is reduced to a complete stupor when she hears it play. She is in that state when the episode ends.
* In #236, he says he never had the chance to give it to her. In subsequent episodes, he implies the opposite.
For the first 54 weeks of Dark Shadows, reclusive matriarch Liz was paralyzed by the fear that someone would enter the locked room in the basement of the great house of Collinwood and find the murdered body of her husband Paul Stoddard buried there. For the last 16 of those weeks, seagoing con man Jason McGuire exploited that fear to blackmail Liz.
It turned out that Liz didn’t actually kill Stoddard and there never was a corpse hidden in the basement of the great house. There is, however, a corpse hidden in the basement of another house on the same estate. During the daytime, Liz’ distant cousin Barnabas Collins is a dead body resting in a coffin in the basement of the Old House. He gets up at night to feed on the blood of the living, lure the unwary to their damnation, and deliver rambling monologues about how sorry he feels for himself. Unlike Stoddard’s supposed grave in the great house, Barnabas’ coffin is not kept in a locked room, so the parallel has been incomplete.
Today, Barnabas decides to complete it. Trying to find and steal Barnabas’ jewels, Jason had broken into the Old House. He made his way to the basement, where he stumbled upon the coffin. He opened it, and Barnabas strangled him. Now, Barnabas orders his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie to help him carry Jason’s body to the secret room in the mausoleum where Barnabas himself was imprisoned and undiscovered for “nearly 200 years.”
Before they leave the basement, Barnabas tells Willie about his sister Sarah, who died when she was very young and innocent. After they leave, Sarah’s ghost appears and puts Jason’s sea cap on Barnabas’ coffin.
Episodes #1-#274 had all opened with voiceover narrations delivered by Alexandra Moltke Isles in character as well-meaning governess Vicki. Starting Friday, they gave the opening monologues to one of the actresses who happened to be in the episode to deliver as an unnamed external narrator. Today, this spoils a surprise. We haven’t seen Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, for a while, and aren’t sure when we will see her again. When Kathryn Leigh Scott delivers today’s opening voiceover, we know we will see Maggie today.
Barnabas had held Maggie prisoner for several weeks. He had borrowed a plan from the 1932 Universal film The Mummy. He would erase Maggie’s personality and replace it with that of his long lost love Josette. Once he had done that, he would kill her and she would rise from the dead as a vampiric version of Josette. Maggie did not go along with the plan, and Sarah’s ghost helped her to escape. Barnabas managed to scramble Maggie’s memory before her father found her, and she is now in treatment at a sanitarium called Windcliff.
Maggie’s hometown doctor, addled quack Dave Woodard, is visiting the director of Windcliff, Dr Julia Hoffman. Woodard wants to show Maggie a sketch Maggie’s father, artist Sam Evans, made when the ghost of Sarah visited him to tell him where to look for Maggie. Julia resists, Woodard insists. While Julia delays, she feeds the fish in the aquarium in her office. We see enough of the aquarium to suggest that Julia is the keeper of a world within a world, a little enclosure with its own rules.
Woodard shows Maggie the sketch. After a moment, she says “Sarah.” She tells them that Sarah visited her in the room where she was confined, that she told her a riddle that showed her how to escape. She becomes too upset to talk. She starts miming her search for a loose brick in the wall of the cell, then sings a verse of Sarah’s signature tune, “London Bridge.” She is shouting words from “London Bridge” when the nurse drags her down the hall, back to her room. Julia declares that the whole thing was a waste of time, a judgment in which Woodard does not concur.
Sam’s sketch of Sarah. Apparently the drawing was done before Sharon Smyth was cast as Sarah, when they planned to give the part to Harvey Keitel in drag. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die
Meanwhile, Barnabas and Willie take the body of Jason to the tomb of the Collinses and bury it in the secret room. They talk about the people buried in the part of the structure known to the public- Barnabas’ parents and his sister Sarah. Barnabas confirms that Sarah is the one he was telling Willie about in the basement, the friend he knew long before he met Josette. He reminisces about repairing a doll of hers the night before she died. We see the plaque giving her dates as 1786-1796, implying that Barnabas met Josette after 1796. They leave, and Sarah appears.
Liz had last seen Jason the night she thought she killed Stoddard; his reappearance would lead to the opening of the locked room and the exposure of its secret. Barnabas last saw Sarah in 1796; her reappearance, today’s events suggest, might lead to the opening of all the rooms Barnabas wants to keep closed and to the exposure of all his secrets.
Acilius on Dark Shadows 