peter bradford – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 660: Suppose I am from another century

A couple of weeks ago well-meaning governess Victoria Winters vanished into a rift in the fabric of space and time, traveling back to the 1790s to be with her husband, a loudmouthed idiot known variously as Peter and Jeff. Now evidence is accumulating that when Vicki and Peter/ Jeff were reunited, they were immediately put to death for their many crimes. Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins is determined to follow Vicki into the past and thwart the course of justice.

Barnabas and his best friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, call on occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes. Barnabas pleads with Stokes to work the same mumbo-jumbo for him that enabled Peter/ Jeff to go back to the 1790s. Stokes says that the procedure would have no effect on Barnabas. He explains that it transported Peter/ Jeff only because Peter/ Jeff properly belonged to that period. It would do nothing to a person who was already living in his own time. Barnabas then asks “Suppose I am from another century?” Stokes replies “Then it’s one of the best-kept secrets in Collinsport, isn’t it?” while Julia coughs and looks panic-stricken.

Julia and Stokes react to Barnabas’ invitation to suppose that he is from another century.

In fact, Barnabas is a native of the eighteenth century. He finds himself in the 1960s because he was, for 172 years, a vampire. This is indeed one of the best-kept secrets in town. If any part of it leaks out he and Julia will be spending the 1970s and 1980s in prison, so it is no wonder she tries to shut him down before he can make any indiscreet revelations to Stokes. But it is an exciting moment for longtime viewers. As it stands, Julia is the only character who knows Barnabas’ secret, and therefore the only one who can speak freely with him or interpret new information in the light of what the audience already knows. Stokes is a highly dynamic character; if he joins the inner circle, there is no telling how fast the action might move or in what direction. It is a bit of a letdown that Barnabas decides not to come out to him.

Stokes makes a little speech that puzzles many viewers. He says that he has reached the conclusion that Peter/ Jeff really was two people. The spirit of an eighteenth century man named Peter Bradford must have come to the year 1968 and taken possession of the body of a living man named Jeff Clark. Now that Peter has returned to the past, Jeff must have regained control of his physical being and is out there in the world someplace. This theory does not fit with anything we have seen over the last several months, and it won’t lead to any further story development.

Peter/ Jeff himself suggested the same idea a few weeks ago, but he had so little information about himself that we could discount it. Stokes, though, is one of the mouthpieces through which the show tells us what we are supposed to believe.

Many science fiction and fantasy fans like to take the world-building elements of their favorite franchises as seriously as they possibly can, and treat every apparent contradiction or dead end as a riddle to be solved. That kind of analysis doesn’t get you very far with Dark Shadows, a narrative universe whose structure star Joan Bennett summarized by saying “We ramble around.” It is tempting to go to the opposite extreme, and to assume that they didn’t do any advance planning at all. But we know from an interview that writer Violet Welles gave to the fanzine The World of Dark Shadows in 1991 that they did the same planning exercises that other daytime soaps did. They would make up six month story forecasts called “flimsies” and fill those out with more detailed plans covering periods of 13 weeks. Welles explains the resulting difficulty:

The difficult ones were — we were in 13-week segments, and there were sometimes characters that didn’t work, and because they didn’t work, they didn’t use them as much, they weren’t part of the plot. So at the end of the 13 weeks, toward the end of the cycle, you’d have characters who were really not a lot of interest who had to play scenes with other characters who really didn’t have a lot of interest, dealing with things that basically didn’t concern them. Those were hard to write. But you never felt particularly overwhelmed.
Violet Welles interviewed by Megan Powell-Nivling, The World of Dark Shadows, issue #59/60, June 1991. Preserved by Danny Horn on Dark Shadows Every Day, 30 August 2015.

In other words, while the writers definitely did long-range planning, those long-range plans come into the audience’s view not a source of secret message to decode, but in the residue left over from stories that didn’t work out. During his months on the show, Peter/ Jeff spent a lot of time getting violently angry when people called him “Peter,” responding in his grating whine “My na-a-ame is JEFF! CLARK!” That disagreeable habit made up about 90 percent of Peter/ Jeff’s personality, and the other 10 percent was no picnic either. Coupled with this Goes Nowhere/ Does Nothing story about Peter appropriating the body of Jeff Clark, I would guess that in some early stage of planning they kicked around the possibility of having two Peter/ Jeffs. But it has long since become clear that one Peter/ Jeff is already one too many. That leaves them to fill out some scenes that would otherwise run short with material that may have seemed like a good idea when they made up the flimsies six months ago, but that is pointless now.

Also in this episode, children Amy Jennings and David Collins visit Eagle Hill cemetery and have questions. Amy suggests they go see the caretaker, a suggestion David derides. He declares that the caretaker is as old as the tombstones, and that he won’t answer any of their questions. Amy insists, and they go looking for him.

The caretaker appeared on the show four times when David’s mother, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, was the chief supernatural menace. He then made five more appearances early in Barnabas’ time as a vampire. As played by veteran stage actor Daniel F. Keyes, he was a delight, a boundlessly befuddled old chap who seemed to have strayed in from the pages of EC Comics. Sadly, David and Amy don’t find the caretaker today.

Eagle Hill cemetery itself was introduced as one of several burial grounds in the Collinsport area. It is the old graveyard north of town, and Barnabas and his immediate family were the only Collinses buried there. The rest of the Collins ancestors were interred in a private family cemetery, and there was also a public cemetery somewhere in or around the village of Collinsport. They stuck with this geography longer than you might have expected. But today Amy explicitly says that Eagle Hill is on the grounds of the estate of Collinwood, just outside the front door of the main house. This contributes to the effect, growing very noticeable lately, that the imaginary space in which the drama takes place is collapsing in on itself. The occasional excursions the show took to the town of Bangor, Maine in its early days are long gone, and now we barely even see the village of Collinsport. It’s often said that Dark Shadows is Star Trek for agoraphobes; it is starting to feel as if it is retreating into a very small cocoon indeed.

Episode 642: Stop thinking of Jeff

Heiress Carolyn comes back to the great house of Collinwood with her date for the evening, a mysterious drifter named Chris. He keeps trying to excuse himself, but she insists he stay. Carolyn is frightened because the barmaid who served them when they were at the Blue Whale tavern the night before was killed in an ultraviolent incident a few hours after they left, and the police are, as usual, stumped. Chris is uncomfortable because he is the killer. He is a werewolf, a fact which he has so far managed to conceal from all the characters he hasn’t already killed.

Carolyn’s mother, matriarch Liz, enters. She is followed by occult expert Professor Stokes and governess Vicki. Vicki is wearing a bright green overcoat that matches Carolyn’s dress. It seems likely that the two items are part of the same outfit, and that one of the women borrowed what she is wearing from the other. Carolyn is significantly shorter than Vicki, so it is unlikely Vicki’s dress would fit her as snugly as does this one. We can assume, therefore, that Vicki is wearing Carolyn’s coat.

Carolyn in the green dress, Vicki in the matching coat. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Vicki is sobbing because Liz and Stokes prevented her from flinging herself to her death from the cliff near the house. What Vicki’s plan would have meant for Carolyn’s coat we need hardly describe. If I were Carolyn, I would keep Vicki away from my closet from now on.

Vicki is suicidal because her husband, an unpleasant man known variously as Peter and Jeff, vanished into thin air the other day, going back in time to the 1790s. Stokes and Liz are with Vicki in her bedroom when a white dot surrounded by a blue halo appears on screen, representing Peter/ Jeff’s ghost. Had Peter/ Jeff been played by a white dot all along, he might have been considerably more tolerable than he was as portrayed by Roger Davis, but that’s just another of the what-ifs we have to think about when we reflect on the show.

“Today, the part of Jeff Clark will be played by a white dot.” Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Stokes decides to hold a séance to contact Peter/ Jeff. Chris and Liz are both reluctant to join, but Stokes insists. Carolyn goes into the trance and channels, not Peter/ Jeff, but someone named “Magda.” Magda doesn’t seem to recognize Peter/ Jeff’s name. She talks about “my curse”; Peter/ Jeff was not represented as being under a curse. She says “You must stop them!” and “He must not come back!”; returning viewers know that Chris’ little sister Amy and Liz’ young nephew David have contacted a ghost named Quentin and are bringing him back into the affairs of the house. So we can conclude that Magda’s message has nothing to do with Peter/ Jeff.

As Carolyn channels Magda, she gets more and more agitated. Chris grabs her and breaks the trance. Vicki appears to be disappointed that they didn’t reach Peter/ Jeff. She resumes sobbing and runs off, and Liz follows her. Chris clutches the dazed Carolyn to him, while Stokes angrily tells him he wishes he knew why he cut the trance short.

Angry Stokes. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The first séance on Dark Shadows took place in #170 and #171. In that one, Vicki was medium for the gracious Josette. We had been hearing about Josette since #5, had seen her ghost in #70, had met her when she led the other ghosts out of the supernatural back-world to rescue Victoria from crazed handyman Matthew in #126, and were aware of her as she played a central role in opposing the machinations of the show’s chief menace for the months that followed, undead fire witch Laura. It was exciting to think of Josette entering into conversation with multiple characters at once. Many of the subsequent séances (today’s is the ninth by the count of the Dark Shadows Wiki‘s “Séance” page) had brought up voices we were just as eager to introduce to society.

But no one wants to hear more from Peter/ Jeff. He was a drag from his first appearance, and only got harder to take the more we saw of him. Vicki’s inexplicable attachment to him dealt her character the last of the many blows that alienated her from the audience. When Liz, Stokes, and others order Vicki to stop bringing this dreary personage up they speak for all of us who would very much like to forget he ever existed. The result of today’s séance gives us hope that the makers of the show have caught on to our distaste for Peter/ Jeff, and that they will be keeping future references to him to a minimum.

Episode 627: Her name is Victoria. I cannot take care of her.

Dan Curtis often said that the idea for Dark Shadows came to him in a dream about a girl with long black hair taking a journey by train. When he persuaded ABC-TV to let him make a pilot for a series, the most difficult part of the casting process was finding the actress who would embody that girl, whose name came to be Victoria Winters. Alexandra Isles, then still known as Alexandra Moltke, finally emerged as the one person who combined the right physical appearance with a mysterious, otherworldly quality that suggests a figure from a dream.

From Episode 1: The girl on the train. Reflected in the window behind her is Burke Devlin, her original love interest.

Mrs Isles’ casting had an immediate effect on the underlying story in Art Wallace’s original series bible, Shadows on the Wall. Wallace projected a puzzle about Vicki’s origins that would be resolved when it was revealed that she was the child of an extramarital liaison between Paul Stoddard, the long-missing husband of matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, and some unknown woman. Liz’ guilty feelings about Paul would explain her concern for Vicki and her decision to bring her to the great house of Collinwood as governess for her nephew, strange and troubled boy David Collins. Since Vicki would not be a blood relative of the Collins family, it would also leave an option for Vicki to develop a romance with David’s father, Liz’ brother Roger.

From Episode 1: The front doors of Collinwood open for the first time. Liz and Vicki come face to face, and each sees her own reflection in the other.

Wallace did include a note saying that if it was more story-productive, it could turn out that Liz was Vicki’s mother. Liz was played by Joan Bennett, whom Mrs Isles strongly resembled. When Bennett first saw Mrs Isles, she famously mistook her for her own daughter. From the first episode on, the show heavily signaled that Vicki was Liz’ daughter by a man other than Paul. Liz soon treats Vicki so much like a daughter that the only events that would follow from confirming the relationship would be to make some changes to Liz’ will. Since the business aspects of the characters’ lives ceased to generate action after the first few months, that would have been a severe anti-climax. So they wound up dropping the question altogether.

For the first 39 weeks of Dark Shadows, Vicki was its main protagonist. Not many of the storylines worked in those days; the only scenes that reliably clicked were those between Vicki and David. Even though their dialogue was as dreary as anything else in those early scripts, Mrs Isles and David Henesy managed to use their physical movements and the spaces they occupied to tell the story of a young woman persuading a boy to trust her. That version of the show ended with #191, when David ran from the mother who was trying to lure him to his death and flung himself into Vicki’s arms. That completed their story, and left neither character with a clear path forward.

From Episode 191: David turns from his mother and death, embracing Vicki and life.

After #191, the show was on course for the introduction of vampire Barnabas Collins. Vicki kept trying to get close to Barnabas; she even invited herself to spend the night at his house in #285 and #286. But he wouldn’t bite her, and she couldn’t get a foothold in the A-story otherwise. There was an odd meta-fictional side to Vicki in this phase. In-universe, she didn’t know that Barnabas was a vampire, and she certainly didn’t know that she was a character on a soap opera that was coming to be all about him. But her behavior made sense only if she did know those things and was making an effort to reestablish herself as a central figure in the action. I don’t know whether Mrs Isles or any other particular person was lobbying the writers to present her that way, or if it was a response to fan mail. It happened so often and led to so little that it did seem to be coming from somewhere outside the usual creative process behind the scripts.

In November 1967, Vicki came unstuck in time and found herself in the year 1795. She took the audience with her, and for several months the show was a costume drama set in the late eighteenth century. On balance, the result was a triumph. By the time Vicki and the show came back to contemporary dress in March 1968, Dark Shadows had become a real hit, and Barnabas had become one of the major pop culture phenomena of the 1960s. But Vicki did not benefit from that success. When the costume drama insert started, fans had every reason to expect it would revive her character. Barnabas spent most of his time in 1967 scrambling to impersonate a native of the twentieth century; Jonathan Frid would always say that it was in that scramble that he found Barnabas, and that he thought of him first and foremost as a liar. When Vicki turns up in Barnabas’ original period, we look forward to seeing her doing what he did, and trying to pass as his little sister’s governess. Remembering how well Mrs Isles did during the 39 weeks she carried the show on her shoulders, we look forward to her showing us what Vicki can do when she has to think fast.

But that was not to be. Instead, Curtis and his staff chose to write Vicki as an intolerable moron. She introduced herself to every new person by telling them that they are being played by actors who had other parts in the first 73 weeks of the show. Tedious as that habit was, it was compounded when she made one inexplicably idiotic decision after another as she failed utterly to adapt to her new surroundings. That would have been a difficult role to make appealing even if she had shared her screen time with a partner as capable as David Henesy. It became utterly impossible when Vicki made the least intelligible move of all and fell in love with her jailer/ lawyer/ boyfriend/ accomplice Peter Bradford, played by the abusive and shouty Roger Davis. Marooned in scene after scene with Mr Davis, Mrs Isles withered and Vicki became a cipher. By the time the court sentenced Vicki to be put to death for her many crimes, half the audience was on their side.

Shortly after Vicki returned to the 1960s, Barnabas finally bit her. Each of Barnabas’ victims reacted to his bite differently; Vicki’s reaction was perhaps the most unexpected, and certainly the funniest. She was just sort of chill about the whole thing. She showed up when Barnabas summoned her and didn’t object when he told he her she would become his vampire bride for all eternity, but first she had some errands to run, and she was irritated with him when he tried to get her to skip them. When a doctor saw the bite marks on her neck, she did not react with the fear or defensiveness of other victims, but innocently asked “Why are they bad?” She seemed to regard them as just another hickey, the result of Barnabas’ peculiar make-out technique.

Unfortunately, Peter came back to life and ruined Vicki’s relationship with Barnabas. He jumped out in the road in front of her car while she was driving off with Barnabas, causing her to crash. Vicki and Barnabas were taken to the hospital. There, one of the doctors turned out to be a mad scientist who cured Barnabas of vampirism. Once the cure took hold, Vicki forgot all about her time as Barnabas’ victim, and she sunk into a relationship with the irredeemably repellent Peter. Every time we’ve seen her in recent months, she has dragged Peter back to our attention. Mrs Isles has found ways to liven up Vicki’s scenes; she always projected a forceful personality when she was standing near the clock in the foyer of the great house of Collinwood, and she has even managed to coax Roger Davis into playing a couple of scenes competently. Mr Davis never had quite as much to offer as did the clock, but when Mrs Isles could raise her voice and fix him with a steely stare it does seem to have come back to him that he had had a lot of acting lessons and could deliver dialogue interestingly.

Today is Mrs Isles’ last day on the job. We open with a reprise of the end of yesterday’s episode, when Vicki finds the corpse of a strangled woman in the closet in Peter’s room. Peter assures her he doesn’t know how the corpse got there. She tells him they have to call the police. He says he needs time to figure out what happened before they can involve the police; she points out that delaying will only make him look guiltier in their eyes. He tells her that she should leave so that her name won’t be connected with the case; she tells him it is too late for that. We can see why Vicki has faded- she is thinking like a rational person from our world, not like anyone you would meet in Soap Opera Land.

Vicki goes home to Collinwood and tells permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman that Peter is in jail, suspected of murder. She explains that the dead person is a woman Peter knew only as Eve. Julia reacts with shock to the name; Vicki asks if she knew Eve. Julia says of course not, and Vicki tells her she will go wake Roger and ask him to help arrange bail for Peter. She goes into the door leading to the bedrooms, never to be seen again.

In her final appearance, Vicki talks with Julia, her successor as the principal audience-identification character.

Viewers who have been with the show from the beginning will see a loop closing in the idea of Vicki going to Roger’s bedroom while he sleeps. In #4, Roger had tried to let himself into Vicki’s bedroom at night, only to be caught with his hand on the doorknob by Liz. In response to Liz’ threats, Roger told her not to bother him about his “morals,” a choice of words that made it clear that his intentions with regard to Vicki were of a sexual nature. Later in the episode, he and Vicki bantered flirtatiously after he offered her a snifter of brandy; for the first and last time, Vicki sounded like what she was supposed to have been, a street kid from NYC. Roger has long since been stripped of all his villainous qualities; in #585, he and Vicki even shared a scene in her bedroom while she was in her nightgown, and it was all perfectly innocent. In that scene, we not only saw that the old menacing Roger was gone forever, but that Vicki was also reduced to such a humdrum status that a man can enter her bedroom at night without raising an eyebrow. Now that Julia sees nothing out of the ordinary in Vicki dropping in on Roger while he sleeps, that humdrum status is reinforced.

When Vicki first arrived in the village of Collinsport in #1, she met her original love interest, dashing action hero Burke Devlin. Burke told her she had found her way to “the beginning and the end of the world.” We are reminded of the beginning of the world since we know that the man who killed Eve was named Adam. This Adam and Eve are no one’s parents; they share nothing but hostility and death. The episode ends with the wicked Angelique trying to summon up the Devil, a symbol of the end of the world. She herself disappears, apparently destroyed. Burke’s description is finally fulfilled.

The part of Vicki will be recast twice in the months ahead, but those actresses never had a chance to breathe any life into her. The character had lost any reason to be on the show long before Mrs Isles’ departure. In #87, David had trapped Vicki and left her to die; wondering where she was, Roger said, “She came to us from nowhere, and now it seems she has disappeared into nowhere.” And so, at last, it has come to be. The long-haired girl from Dan Curtis’ dream, the image that started it all, has vanished, never to be seen again.

Episode 625: Dead man’s wedding

The first time we might have expected to see a wedding on Dark Shadows was in #270, when reclusive matriarch Liz was supposed to marry seagoing con man Jason in the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood. That wedding was called off when Liz, rather than saying “I do,” announced “I killed Paul Stoddard and that man was my accomplice!” It turned out that Liz didn’t actually kill Paul after all. She only stunned him, and he and Jason connived to trick her into thinking she had killed him so that she would give them a lot of money. The two of them buried an empty trunk in the basement of the great house and Jason told Liz that Paul’s corpse was in it. Liz’ refusal to be blackmailed into marrying Jason led to the exhumation of that empty trunk.

The next time there was supposed to be a wedding at Collinwood was in #380, when the show was a costume drama set in the 1790s. Scion Barnabas was supposed to marry the gracious Josette, but wicked witch Angelique cast a spell that caused Josette to elope with Barnabas’ uncle Jeremiah. We did not see their wedding, but we did see Barnabas and Angelique get married in #397. We also saw them on their wedding night, when Barnabas left Angelique in her bedroom and retired to his, without so much as a goodnight handshake between them. As Jason’s attempt to marry Liz ended with the exposure of a vacant coffin, so these marriages led to vacant coffins as well. Barnabas killed Jeremiah in a duel in #384, and Angelique raised him from the dead in #392. It does not appear he ever did go back to his grave. He opened his own coffin in #397 and tried to bury Angelique alive in it.

When Barnabas found out that Angelique was the witch responsible for Jeremiah and Josette’s elopement and all the misery afterward, he tried to kill her, and she retaliated by turning him into a vampire. His coffin was empty every night for a while, but in March 1968, shortly after Dark Shadows left the 1790s and returned to contemporary dress, he became human again. Now Angelique is a vampire, and it is her coffin that is regularly vacant.

Today, another wedding is scheduled for the drawing room of the great house. Well-meaning governess Vicki is supposed to marry an unpleasant man known variously as Peter and Jeff. A mysterious woman with two names of her own, Eve and Danielle, shows up while Peter is smoking on the terrace.

Peter/ Jeff and Eve/ Danielle both lived in the 1790s, and both have come back to life in 1968. Peter/ Jeff is in deep denial about his own status as a revenant, and gets even more obnoxious than he usually is whenever anyone brings it up. Eve/ Danielle remembers him from their previous lives, and is, inexplicably enough, in love with him. She brings him a note that she acquired on a recent trip through time. In Peter’s handwriting, under the salutation “Dear Danielle,” it says that he would rather go to the gallows on the off chance that in some future life he will be with Vicki than go away with Danielle. Somehow, Danielle takes Peter’s willingness to face death in hopes of reunion with Vicki to mean that he should now leave Vicki and go away with her. The logic may escape the viewer, but evidently it convinces Peter/ Jeff. He leaves Collinwood to go dig up his grave. He finds the coffin vacant. It is unclear whether this means he will reunite with Eve/ Danielle, but apparently it convinced him he should not marry Vicki.

Nobody’s home. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Liz’ aborted wedding to Jason marked the end of the blackmail arc, which was itself an extended in-betweener meant to clean up the last non-supernatural stories, introduce the vampire, and give the rest of the cast something to do while Barnabas was settling in. The aborted wedding of Barnabas and Josette marked the end of the part of the 1795 segment in which most of the characters don’t know that there is a tragedy brewing, while Barnabas and Angelique’s wedding told the audience that the preliminaries were over and they were about to explain how Barnabas became a vampire. Vicki and Peter/ Jeff’s attempted wedding today marks another ending. Alexandra Moltke Isles will leave the role of Vicki after the episode coming up on Tuesday. Vicki started moving to the sidelines once undead fire witch Laura went up in smoke in #191, and she has long been a secondary character. But she was the main protagonist for the first 39 weeks of Dark Shadows, and Mrs Isles carried the show very capably during those days. It was disappointing when she moved so far out of the main current of the action, and sad to see her go.

Episode 622: A position to help each other

Well-meaning governess Vicki is on the terrace of the great estate of Collinwood. A man known variously as Peter and Jeff keeps clutching at Vicki’s arms so sharply that her biceps pulse, then holds her with one hand and paws her with the other as she stands rigidly still. First time viewers, knowing only that Dark Shadows features stories of monsters and crime, would think that the man had some power over the woman and that they were seeing him abuse that power. They would be right. Unfortunately, the man and woman are not Peter/ Jeff and Vicki, but actors Roger Davis and Alexandra Moltke Isles. Vicki is supposed to be in love with Peter/ Jeff and reluctant to part from him, but the instant she has spoken her last line she turns her face from him and runs away, without the slightest attempt to suggest that she wants to linger.

After Vicki escapes from Peter/ Jeff’s repellent attentions, a woman named Eve emerges from the bushes. Peter/ Jeff is angry with her. He grabs her roughly and throws her out of the frame. Peter/ Jeff then stalks off. Eve comes back into the frame. It’s a relief to see her upright and well-put-together- Mr Davis shoved Marie Wallace so hard she had to struggle to right herself as she spun out of view. It looked like she might have slammed her head against the floor.

Marie Wallace using her arm to regain her balance and keep from sustaining a serious injury.

In a comment on Danny Horn’s post about this episode on his blog Dark Shadows Every Day, Marc Masse reports what happened when this scene came up at a panel discussion at a Dark Shadows convention many years later:

This was the episode where Grabby Davis got so overly excited in his scene with Marie Wallace on the terrace that he grabbed her by the arms and threw her completely out of frame. You see her struggling to remain on her feet as she stumbles off to the right. Some 20 years later at a fan convention (it’s in Dark Shadows 25th Anniversary Special from the disc set that has the last episode of the series), Marie Wallace brought this up as Roger Davis was telling the audience of how they (or rather he) would cut up and laugh and have fun while they were making the episode, and of how they would just laugh off their flubs. Wallace then broke in to remind Davis of episode 622 as she recalled, “Hey, Roger? I didn’t laugh when you threw me out of frame in that scene, on camera. Remember that? Several times?” She explained to the audience how all during dress rehearsal he’d never touch her and then when he’d done it on camera he’d come up to her and apologize profusely, but Wallace told him then and there at the convention that she never believed him.
Marc Masse, as “Prisoner of the Night,” in a comment left 8 April 2015 on “Episode 622: Heated Conversations on Somebody Else’s Lawn,” Danny Horn, Dark Shadows Every Day, 8 April 2015.

In a response to another post of Danny’s, Marc added that in the same video you can see actress Donna Wandrey’s appalled reaction to Mr Davis’ statement, and her increasingly visible disdain for him as Miss Wallace makes her case against him.

After Peter/ Jeff is gone, another visitor comes and addresses Eve by name. She is Angelique. Angelique is not a Roger Davis character, she is merely a vampire, so everyone can relax.

Regular viewers have been wondering what would happen when Angelique shared a scene with Eve. Marie Wallace’s style as Eve relies on many of the same techniques Lara Parker uses as Angelique. Both use an elevated style with many catches of breath, changes of volume in mid-sentence, and striking of oratorical poses. Each was capable of making this exaggerated method work, but no one could conceal its profound silliness, and a scene consisting of two characters both using it would be too ridiculous even to make a good joke in a cartoon. What actually happens is that Parker demonstrates the quietest possible version of the style, while Miss Wallace shows a more typically brassy version. Recognizing their approaches as two poles of the same axis, we are not only interested in their encounter, but also in what they show us about the craft of acting.

Angelique persuades Eve to join her in an alliance against warlock Nicholas. This might be an exciting development. Nicholas is the show’s chief villain at the moment, and between them Angelique and Eve just might be able to bring him down. It is also the first alliance we have seen take shape in a long time. Many characters have tried to control other characters, to deceive them, to imprison them, to enslave them, to brain-wash them. But the only group working towards a common end is made up of old world gentleman Barnabas, mad scientist Julia, occult expert Stokes, and servant Willie. That team formed long ago, has not managed to get anywhere lately, and is, at the moment, immobilized by Barnabas’ absence. Yesterday Julia tried to form an alliance with Nicholas against Angelique, but at the last minute his inability to talk with her forthrightly aborted that effort. So it is refreshing to see that the show is still capable of imagining a new alliance.

Danny’s post about this one is one of his very best, a composition in free verse weaving together quotes from the dialogue with retellings of the overarching narrative with meditations on a number of topics that the episode touches on. If you are a Dark Shadows fan and haven’t read Dark Shadows Every Day, this is a fine post to start with. It’s like a song- you may not understand all the lyrics the first time you hear it, but the sound of it will carry you along.

The comments below it include some great stuff too. I’ve already mentioned Marc Masse’s remark about Marie Wallace’s confrontation with Roger Davis. There are also two fanfic ideas about how the show might have resolved the question of who Vicki’s parents were. Someone posting under the name “William” had this plausible one:

My own theory: Victoria the daughter of Jamison Collins and Betty Hanscomb. So she’s Roger and Liz’s half-sister. Liz knows and Roger doesn’t.

Jamison aggressively seduces Betty, on whom Roger had teenage crush. He makes her pregnant and then coldly casts her out. A pregnant Betty shows up at Collinwood and tells Liz and Roger about what happened.

Roger confronts his father in a fit of rage in the Tower Room during one of Collinwood’s famous storms.

Jamison Collins has a heart attack during the confrontation, and Roger leaves him in the room to die. Roger staggers out, and Liz finds her father dead.

Roger has a complete breakdown and is sent to Windcliff, where Dr. Julius Hoffman, uncle of Julia Hoffman, wipes out his memory of that night in the summer of 1946.

Liz, with the help of new guy in town Paul Stoddard, pays off Betty Hanscomb to leave town and arranges for her half-sister to be raised at the foundling home in New York. Grateful to Paul for his help, Liz starts to fall for his charms …

(And this is why Liz is so fond of Victoria, but not like she is with Carolyn. And this is why she refuses to tell Roger anything about why she brought Victoria back).

–“William,” in a comment left 22 August 2016 on “Episode 622: Heated Conversations on Somebody Else’s Lawn,” Danny Horn, Dark Shadows Every Day, 8 April 2015.

That has a lot of potential. Liz doesn’t seem ever to have loved Paul, she did marry him shortly after her father’s death, and Roger’s attitude towards Vicki in the first months of the show was a strange mixture of extreme hostility and obvious attraction. “William’s” story would account for all of those things. But it doesn’t hold a pale blue candle to this theory posted by Pedro Cabezuelo:

Everybody, we’re missing the obvious! Vicki IS Betty Hanscombe!!!!! Somehow she managed to time travel AGAIN and ended up in Collinsport circa the 1940s and adopted the Betty Hanscombe identity, working her way as a servant at Collinwood. She had an affair with Paul Stoddard, gave birth to herself (at which point the adult Vicki ceased to exist) and THAT’S what caused all the irreperable harm to the time stream/parallel time/anything else you want to blame on Vicki.
Pedro Cabezuelo, in a comment left 10 April 2015 on “Episode 622: Heated Conversations on Somebody Else’s Lawn, Danny Horn, Dark Shadows Every Day, 8 April 2015.

I have my own fanfic idea about Vicki’s origin. I’ve shared it here before, and will again. But Pedro’s is so good I want it to be the last word today.

Episode 617: Few people in this world

The opening voiceover is very much to the point:

An autumn dusk has settled over Collinwood, bringing with it not the fear of night but a renewed hope of happiness for a young woman long acquainted with the terrors that have plagued these premises. But as the deepening dark surrenders to the night, a new threat, evil in its creation and awesome in its consequence, will reveal its final purpose, the destruction of Victoria Winters.

We then cut to a scene of Vicki with the evil creation that is destined to destroy her, her fiancé Peter. In place of a personality, Peter has a compulsion to insist that no one use his right name. Instead, he wants to be called “Jeff.” He also has a habit of pawing his scene partners and occasionally jerking them around violently. This loathsome man continually fondles Vicki in their scenes together, each time prompting Alexandra Moltke Isles first to stiffen, then to force an awkward smile when she remembers that her character is supposed to like the creep. It is painful to watch, and the more scenes Vicki has with Peter/ Jeff the sooner we hope she will leave the show.

A woman named Eve has seen Peter/ Jeff and recognized him from their previous acquaintance. She finds Peter/ Jeff alone on the terrace outside the great house of Collinwood and confronts him. He looks as uncomfortable alone with her as Vicki does alone with him. It is satisfying to see Peter/ Jeff get a taste of his own medicine, all the more so for regular viewers who know that Eve is a homicidal maniac and hope she will do him in before he blights any more episodes.

Eve has been kissing Peter/ Jeff passionately for several seconds when sarcastic dandy Roger Collins speaks up and says that he has not been introduced to her. She runs off, and Peter/ Jeff demands that Roger not tell Vicki what he has seen. Roger will not agree to that, but once the two of them are alone with Vicki in the drawing room he backs down and lets Peter/ Jeff off the hook. When Peter/ Jeff realizes Roger will keep his secret he breaks into a gleeful smile. Evil has triumphed once more.

Roger consigns Vicki to her fate, while her destroyer chortles with glee. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

In the early days of Dark Shadows, Roger was rather a dangerous villain. One of his crimes was perjury in a case that sent another man, one Burke Devlin, to prison for a homicide in which they were both implicated. In #201, Roger admitted to that perjury in front of Burke in this very room. That admission came after a long story arc involving the return of Roger’s estranged wife Laura to Collinwood. The Laura story absorbed all the dramatic significance of the conflict between Roger and Burke, leaving Burke nothing to do in response to Roger’s admission but to peace out. To viewers who remember that Vicki was once an interesting character and still have hopes that she will shake free of Peter/ Jeff’s baleful presence, Roger’s concession to Peter/ Jeff is an even bigger disappointment than was the too-late resolution of the Roger vs Burke story.

At the end, Roger has a dream in which it is revealed to him that if Vicki marries Peter/ Jeff, she will die. We suspect that he has missed his last chance to prevent this happening.

Episode 611: She must come willingly

Suave warlock Nicholas Blair proposes to Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. Maggie declines, citing her concern for her troubled ex-fiancé Joe Haskell. Nicholas has a man named Harry Johnson under his power, and a vial of poison he wants to give to Joe. After his disappointing date with Maggie, Nicholas goes home and takes a firm grip on his Harry Johnson. He orders Harry to slip the poison to Joe.

That was all I had to say about the episode, but my wife, Mrs Acilius, had a great deal more. She saw it as an essay about free will.

In the opening scenes, Nicholas talks with Frankenstein’s monsters named Adam and Eve. Adam was created in May, in a procedure that used parts salvaged from corpses and a “life force” extracted from recovering vampire Barnabas Collins. When Nicholas found out about Adam, he came up with the idea of a humanoid species bred from patchwork people and loyal to his master Satan. He schemed to have Eve created as Adam’s mate. Nicholas decided that the donor of Eve’s “life force” should be “the most evil woman who ever lived”; he therefore conjured up Danielle Roget, an eighteenth century homicidal maniac based on Madame DuFarge from A Tale of Two Cities, and assigned her the task. Now he finds that Eve has Danielle’s memories and personality, and that she hates Adam. She has found a man she recognized as the reincarnation of someone she was involved with when she was Danielle, and has made up her mind that they will love each other.

Nicholas is frustrated he cannot control Eve. He turns from her and looks into the camera, as if appealing to the audience for sympathy. Nicholas does not seem to understand what went wrong. He had the basic ingredients for his new species- a male and a female. He had not reckoned on one of them disregarding his plan and choosing a direction of her own.

Adam sees Eve storm out of the house as he is going to see Nicholas. He asks Nicholas where she is going, and is astonished when Nicholas tells him he doesn’t know. Adam is unhappy that Eve does not want him, and thinks that a change of scene would help. Still upset about his conversation with Eve, Nicholas is slow to focus his attention on Adam. When Adam complains Nicholas thinks that he and Eve belong to him, Nicholas turns to him and starts telling him what he wants to hear. Evidently it is dawning on Nicholas that Adam, too, might start to make his own decisions.

The man Eve has chosen is named Peter, but he prefers to be called Jeff. Eve shows up at his apartment, refuses to leave, and tells him that they are going to be together from now on. Roger Davis’ inadequacies as an actor leave this scene flat. Eve keeps talking about signs of doubts and irresolution she sees in Peter/ Jeff’s face, none of which Mr Davis is able to manifest. All he does is yell and pout. But as Eve, Marie Wallace manages to make the point that Eve is no more interested in anyone else’s free will than is Nicholas. She wants Peter/ Jeff to love her, and that is all there is to it so far as she is concerned.

For his part, Nicholas has learned nothing from the failure of his attempt to match Adam and Eve. He thinks all he has to do is get Joe out of the way and Maggie will come to him “willingly.” He even seems to underestimate Harry. He doesn’t bother lying to Harry about what he wants him to do to Joe, and Harry is horrified at the idea of complicity in murder. Harry is a career criminal, and several times we have seen him try to get money out of people by blackmail, extortion, or spying. Nicholas could easily have told him he is about to commit a crime he is used to committing and avoid all resistance. For example, he might have said that the potion was a truth serum and once Joe took it he would have to tell him some secret they could use against him. But it simply doesn’t occur to him to take Harry’s sensibilities into account, and he winds up having to threaten him to gain his compliance. A villain who is supposed to have subtle but irresistible powers loses a piece of his menace every time he resorts to an “or else!,” so this is a significant setback for the character of Nicholas.

Episode 610: You are the angel of death

A woman named Eve sees a man standing on the terrace of the great house of Collinwood. She addresses the man as “Peter Bradford.” Regular viewers know that this is indeed his name, but we also know that he prefers to be called “Jeff Clark.” Peter/ Jeff has died and came back to life since he was first known as “Peter Bradford,” so I suppose you could say that’s a case of deadnaming. But while most transfolk tend to be patient when people inadvertently deadname them, Peter/ Jeff is a huge jerk about correcting people who use his former name. Yesterday twelve year old David Collins called him “Peter Bradford,” and he grabbed the boy and shook him until it looked like he had given him a concussion.

Eve is also a returnee from the world of the dead. Doubly so; her body is a Frankenstein creation made of parts salvaged from corpses, while her memories and personality are those of eighteenth century homicidal maniac Danielle Roget. Peter lived in that same era, and when Eve/ Danielle recognizes him we learn that they knew each other then. Peter/ Jeff doesn’t assault her as he did David; she’s his own size. He doesn’t recognize her, which she attributes to the fact that she looks different than she did when they knew each other. He keeps whining that his name is “Jeff Clark,” but she isn’t having it.

Meanwhile, Peter/ Jeff’s fiancée, well-meaning governess Vicki, is in the drawing room, having a conversation with matriarch Liz. There is a blooper in the middle of this conversation. Liz is supposed to say something like “Then you’ve resolved all your difficulties,” but Joan Bennett stumbles over the words. Alexandra Moltke Isles improvises a response that makes sense of it. That response is smooth enough, but she delivers the rest of her lines very quickly and with unusually little eye contact with her scene partner. Perhaps that is because she was afraid the improvised line was going to put the scene over time, or maybe she realized she had called attention to Bennett’s flub and was nervous because she had embarrassed a big star.

Or maybe Mrs Isles was nervous because her next scene was going to be with Peter/ Jeff, and she knew it would involve Roger Davis putting his hands on her. As they exit, Peter/ Jeff clutches Vicki by wrapping his arms around her in a remarkably awkward fashion, and she visibly squirms. This is most likely Mrs Isles’ discomfort arising from Mr Davis’ habit of physically assaulting his scene partners. A charitable viewer just might be able to believe that it is Vicki’s discomfort because Peter/ Jeff just spent the whole scene telling her transparent lies. He doesn’t want to tell her about his encounter with Eve/ Danielle, and makes up totally unconvincing excuses for his distracted state. Perhaps Mrs Isles channeled her unhappiness at being yoked with Mr Davis into her expression of Vicki’s dissatisfaction with the loathsome little man she is engaged to marry.

Once Vicki and Peter/ Jeff are gone, Eve/ Danielle emerges from the bushes whence she had been spying on them. Liz comes out to the terrace and sees Eve/ Danielle. She asks who she is. When she does not answer, Liz tells her that she knows- she is the angel of death. Eve/ Danielle is startled by this, and hurries away.

The next scene takes place in the house of suave warlock Nicholas Blair. Nicholas has been keeping Eve/ Danielle there since she came to life. She has returned from Collinwood. Nicholas is upset with her for going out without his permission. She taunts him, and he slaps her. He threatens to kill her, and she says that while she does not know what his plans are, it is clear to her that she figures too prominently in them for him to do that.

Coming so shortly after we saw an actress give strong signs of unease at contact with Roger Davis, Nicholas’ slap to Eve/ Danielle’s face is a lesson in how professional actors handle scenes involving physical violence. Eve/ Danielle is relaxed before the slap and in shock after it. Her reaction gives the scene its energy. If Marie Wallace had reason to believe Humbert Allen Astredo would actually hit her, she may well have been as tense before the slap as Mrs Isles was before Roger Davis slithered his arms around her, and the scene would have dribbled out as lifelessly as does Peter/ Jeff’s scene with Vicki.

Once Nicholas concedes that Eve/ Danielle is important to his plans, she relaxes again and decides she may as well tell him about her encounter with Peter/ Jeff. Nicholas is intrigued, and disturbed. He tells Eve/ Danielle that “If it is true that they are one and the same, then there are forces at work here that I don’t know about.” Eve/ Danielle’s memory of her previous existence is very incomplete, and she wants Nicholas to help her to learn more about herself. Once he has heard about Peter/ Jeff, he is eager to oblige. He hypnotizes her.

At this point, my wife, Mrs Acilius, expressed frustration. “He’s going to hypnotize her and afterward she won’t remember anything! It’s only interesting if she remembers.” Eve/ Danielle does have a flashback to 1795, but at the end she seems to come out of the trance on her own. She turns to Nicholas, calls him by name, and says that she remembers Peter Bradford and she loves him. Since Nicholas doesn’t give her a post-hypnotic suggestion and snap his fingers, it seems likely she will remember her past with Peter.

When Danielle was introduced, I assumed that the name “Roget” was a case of deadline-induced selection. She is based on Madame DuFarge from A Tale of Two Cities, so she had to be French. But the writer didn’t have a list of French surnames at his fingertips, so he looked at his desk, saw a copy of Roget’s Thesaurus, and went with that. Perhaps that was what happened, but today Eve/ Danielle lives up to her namesake and goes into the synonym business. She calls Peter/ Jeff by his original name. She is on the receiving end of synonymy from Liz, since “the angel of death” is as good a name for her as any. And one of the memory gaps Eve/ Danielle wants Nicholas to help her fill is her previous name.

Marie Wallace plays Danielle in the flashback, even though she had mentioned in the first act that she looked different in those days. This occasions much discussion on the fansites. Here is the debate on the Dark Shadows Wiki:

During the fiashback scene, Danielle Roget should have been played by Erica Fitz instead of Marie Wallace. Fitz had previously portrayed Danielle Roget in episode 594, so it would have made sense and for character continuity to continue using the same actress. [Addendum: There are strong reasons to argue otherwise as well. One could argue that this is a memory that Nicholas is conjuring in Eve, so it’s from Eve’s perspective, and she would naturally see herself in her current guise, not even knowing what Danielle Roget looked like. This is also a reasonable place for dramatic license to prevail. The scene is very short, and it wouldn’t have been especially practical to have an additional actress. It’s also possible that viewers may have been confused if another actress was in the scene–Erica Fitz was on the show for only two episodes, so viewers at the time might not even have seen or not fully remembered what she looked like. Aside from that, it’s also possible Erica Fitz was not available.]
Discussion under “Bloopers and Continuity Errors” in “610” on The Dark Shadows Wiki.

In a comment on his own post about the episode on Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn puts it more succinctly:

Yeah, I think the in-universe explanation is that the flashback pictured at the top of this post is Eve’s hypnosis-assisted memory of the event, so she’s picturing herself as she is now.

The real-world explanation is that Marie Wallace is playing Eve/Danielle now, and exactly nobody wants Erica Fitz to come back and appear in the flashback.
Comment left 23 March 2015 by Danny Horn on “Episode 610: Inexplicable You,” Dark Shadows Before I Die, 21 March 2015.

For my part, I’m sure Erica Fitz Mears is a very nice lady, and we should all give her money to help with her health problems. But no, she was not a good actress and I do not regret that she did not get more work on screen. Since Mrs Mears was only in two episodes, today’s flashback might have been an opportunity to give some other actress a chance to show what she could do as Danielle. But Miss Wallace does a very good job, and rounding the episode with two confrontations between the same pair of performers does a great deal to strengthen its structure. It would probably have been a mistake to cast anyone else in the flashback.

The flashback scene does come as bad news to longtime viewers, for reasons that have nothing to do with the casting of Danielle. When in November 1967 the show needed to develop a backstory for vampire Barnabas Collins, it took us back to 1795 and introduced Angelique, a maniacal ex-girlfriend who was determined to disrupt Barnabas’ new romance. That was a triumph that turned Barnabas from a stunt that boosted their ratings sufficiently to ward off cancellation into one of the major pop-culture phenomena of the 1960s, and Angelique herself became one of the show’s most important characters. That they are trying the same tactic with Peter/ Jeff, right down to a dramatic date of 1795, leads us to fear that they see him as a permanent part of the cast, and that they want to tie Eve/ Danielle as closely to him as Angelique is tied to Barnabas.

Episode 609: For want of a fig leaf

Adam and Eve are discussing the Fall, comparing their incomplete memories of what came before it. This is not a flashback. The Adam and Eve we see today are Frankenstein’s monsters, and they do not live in exile from Eden when the world was young, but in the town of Collinsport, Maine in 1968. The Fall they have in mind is the one that is also known as Autumn. Adam is ashamed, not because he is naked, but because Eve accuses him of preferring life in captivity. He is not naked at all, even though Eve walks in on him and sees his Harry Johnson. Harry Johnson is the man to whom Adam has entrusted a letter, but since Adam’s favorite pastime is studying the works of Sigmund Freud, and since by 1968 “johnson” had been a familiar English slang word for “penis” for over a century, he would likely have been the first to make the connection to the predicament of their Biblical namesakes.

Adam takes Eve to his old home, a dusty room in the long-deserted west wing of the great house of Collinwood. Heiress Carolyn hid him there for a period that seemed so long the audience might feel that the original Adam and Eve were probably still around when it started. Carolyn greets them there. She is happy to see Adam again and eager to befriend Eve. Adam wants that too, but Eve isn’t having it. She quarrels with Adam and storms out, leaving Carolyn in an awkward position.

On the terrace outside the great house, an unpleasant man named Peter who prefers to be called Jeff is waiting for his date, well-meaning governess Vicki. Vicki has kept him waiting for an hour. Vicki’s charge, young David, happens by. Peter/ Jeff immediately makes it clear why Vicki is in no hurry to see him. He greets David with an accusation that he was hiding from him. When David denies this, Peter/ Jeff demands that he tell him who he was hiding from. Peter/ Jeff may have forgotten who is a guest in whose house, but David hasn’t, and he turns to go. Peter/ Jeff stops him, asking “We’re friends, aren’t we?” David doesn’t explicitly agree that they are, but he stays.

Peter/ Jeff starts to talk about his plans to marry Vicki. David calls him “Peter,” and since the closest thing he has to a personality is his insistence on being called “Jeff” he grabs David and shakes him violently. Watching this scene today, my wife, Mrs Acilius, said one word- “Psycho.” She wasn’t talking about Peter/ Jeff, but about actor Roger Davis. When one character shakes another, it is usually the actor playing the shakee who makes all the movements, while the shaker just mimes the action without actually touching them. Not so Mr Davis- he really did rattle David Henesy around hard enough that it’s pure luck he didn’t give him a concussion. That’s typical of the approach Mr Davis took to his performances on Dark Shadows, in the course of which he assaulted several women on camera. Mr Henesy is uncharacteristically tense throughout this scene, does not sustain eye contact with Mr Davis, and when the scene ends he rushes off stage.

Roger Davis has his fun. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

In his dialogue, Peter/ Jeff makes some pretty bizarre remarks:

You know, David, pretty soon, you’re gonna find out that love isn’t something you can remember. Sixteen years old… You know when you’re sixteen, you can really love somebody. And then you come back ten years later and you wouldn’t even notice her.

At this, David gives Peter/ Jeff a look that accords with Mrs Acilius’ one word assessment of Roger Davis. “Love isn’t something you can remember”? Which item on the sociopathy screening test is that? And what does “Sixteen years old” have to do with anything? David is twelve, Peter/ Jeff and Vicki are in their twenties, no one mentioned the number sixteen. And David would be doing Vicki a solid if he told her that her fiancé won’t remember her in ten years.

David Collins wonders what the #%*^ is wrong with Peter/ Jeff, while David Henesy recovers from Roger Davis’ assault on him. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

David leaves, and Eve shows up. She recognizes Peter/ Jeff and addresses him as “Peter Bradford!” The closing credits start rolling before Peter/ Jeff can shake her violently while whining that he wants to be called “Jeff Clark.” Eve is the reincarnation of an eighteenth century homicidal maniac; she hasn’t killed anyone since she was brought to life the other day, and Peter/ Jeff would be an excellent choice for her first victim. If she does kill him, I would be “Team Eve” all the way.

Episode 579: One tick of the clock

In the first 38 weeks of Dark Shadows, the best scenes were those between well-meaning governess Vicki and her charge, strange and troubled boy David. The scenes were not especially well-written- at one point, Vicki reads aloud from a textbook describing the geography of the state of Maine- but Alexandra Moltke Isles and David Henesy always found a way to use nonverbal cues to communicate to the audience exactly how matters stood in their characters’ relationship to each other.

Mrs Isles and Mr Henesy haven’t had a two-scene in donkey’s years, and so she has had to find another partner to play off. In recent months, her finest moments have come when she was standing next to the elaborately decorated clock in the foyer of the great house of Collinwood. Today, she stands there while confronting her fiancé, an unpleasant man named Peter who prefers to be called Jeff. She does a great job, and in response Roger Davis, whose performance as Peter/ Jeff was notably insipid in the first half of the episode, comes to life and is himself compelling to watch.

Mrs Isles standing next to her co-star. Also pictured: Roger Davis.

It’s been weeks since Peter/ Jeff has spent time with Vicki, and he has been extremely evasive when she asks him what is keeping him so busy. He has turned down a job offer that would have made it possible for them to start life together on a sound financial footing, again without an explanation. When he asks her simply to accept that he has a good reason, she explodes with “You put everything on that basis, and it’s just not fair!” They go into the drawing room and after he keeps dodging her questions she gives him his ring back.

Peter/ Jeff’s problem is that he is committed to spend all his time helping mad scientist Julia and recovering vampire Barnabas with an experiment meant to bring a Frankenstein’s monster to life, a project he doesn’t feel he can tell Vicki about. Earlier in the episode, he was in the lab in Barnabas’ basement and sneaked a peek at Julia’s notebook. Julia was angry when she caught him with her property. This appears to be the same little red notebook Julia hid from Barnabas in the autumn of 1967, at one point stashing it inside the clock that has such a salutary effect on Vicki.

Later, Vicki dropped by Barnabas’ house. Peter/ Jeff sneaked upstairs to eavesdrop on Vicki’s conversation with Julia. He stands inside the cellar door, which has a barred window. We’ve seen Barnabas’ front parlor through these bars several times, and it always catches my attention. This time, the shot is composed very much in the style of a panel from an old EC horror comic book, a style the show has borrowed in some of its most effective moments.