When well-meaning governess Victoria Winters came unstuck in time and tumbled from 1967 to 1795, she brought with her a copy of the Collins family history. We first saw this book in #45, when flighty heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard read this excerpt aloud:
Jeremiah Collins, sixth generation descendant of the founder of Collinsport. In 1830 married Josette Lafrenière of Paris, France. The construction of Collinwood, the family mansion, was begun the same year.
Right up to the last few weeks before Vicki left for the past in November 1967, Dark Shadows kept equivocating about whether Josette, Jeremiah, and the rest of them lived in 1830 or in the late 18th century. The name “Lafrenière” was not mentioned again after #45, but neither was any other surname given for her birth family until the name “DuPrés” was introduced during the 1795 segment. Likewise, #45 is the only time we hear that Josette was from Paris. Her association with the island of Martinique is established in #239, when the vampire Barnabas Collins tells his victim Maggie that he met Josette there and taught her English on the journey to Collinsport, where she was to marry Jeremiah. That Josette was the daughter of the richest French planter on Martinique, a condition that in 1795 in our time-band characterized the lady who would become the Empress Josephine, is something the show commits itself to during the flashback segment.
These were only a few of the myriad revisions and retcons the show went through in regard to Barnabas and Josette’s time as living beings. Today, Josette and her aunt, the Countess DuPrés, go through the book and remark on its many inaccuracies. The episode ends with a shock when they realize that at least one of these inaccuracies is the result of a conscious decision by haughty overlord Joshua Collins to falsify the record of events.
I was going to write about how meta this all is, but then I reread Danny Horn’s post about the episode on Dark Shadows Every Day and found that he had already done it. I would just add that the very idea of traveling back in time is a metaphor for rewriting, so that the whole storyline is an exercise in self-reference by the writers and producers.
This episode features the death of Barnabas Collins. Barnabas has been the show’s main draw for a long time, but he was already dead when we met him in April 1967, and he’s been dying for the last four days of this flashback, so that’s less of a milestone than it might seem. The event is presented as another exercise in continuity. In #345, vampire Barnabas told mad scientist Julia Hoffman that before his death he had vowed to Josette that he would someday return to her. Indeed, Josette is at his bedside in his last moments as a human, and he does make that vow.
Barnabas accompanies his vow with a plea for Josette to wait for him. That, too, is a continuity moment. Josette is played by Kathryn Leigh Scott, who also played Maggie. When Barnabas returned as a vampire in 1967, he kept Maggie prisoner and tried to replace her personality with that of Josette. Whatever the living Barnabas may have been thinking in his last moments, the vampire Barnabas expected to find Josette waiting for him, 172 years after his death, and that expectation motivated the first major crime we saw him commit.
Well-meaning governess Vicki is in jail, about to be tried on a capital charge of witchcraft. That couldn’t happen in the New England that existed in 1795 in our timeband, but many things were possible in the world of Dark Shadows that we don’t see in ours.
Gallant gentleman Barnabas Collins has figured out that Vicki is innocent and that the real witch is his new wife, Angelique. Rather than go to the authorities with his evidence, he decides to take a more direct approach and murder Angelique. That won’t be much use to Vicki, but Barnabas can’t be bothered with details.
The longest sequence of the episode is a farce in which Barnabas pours two glasses of sherry, puts poison in the one he then gives Angelique, and tries to get her to drink. They don’t do “the old switcheroo” and mix up the glasses, but instead go with an equally hoary device of having Barnabas’ mother show up and take Angelique’s glass. Barnabas has to claim the glass is cracked and knock it from her hand.
After the failure of his attempt to poison Angelique, Barnabas opens a hidden compartment of his desk and takes out a dagger. If it weren’t for Robert Cobert’s solemn musical score, the effect would be that of seeing Wile E. Coyote open yet another crate from the Acme Corporation. He goes up to Angelique’s bedroom and lifts the dagger. Since there has been no indication that she has got into her bed, and all we see on it are a lump of covers, the audience has no reason to suppose she is in there. We end with the distinct impression that Barnabas, having barely avoided matricide, is stabbing a mattress.
We first knew Barnabas in the year 1967, when he will be a vampire and will develop from a profoundly bleak presence and an urgent threat to our favorite characters into a comic villain for whom we can’t help but feel a kind of affection as we watch him fail again and again in his elaborate schemes. In that way, his maladroit attempts on Angelique’s life today are entirely typical of the Barnabas we had met before Vicki traveled back in time in November.
In another way, this episode represents one of the biggest retcons in the whole series. Throughout his first eight months on the show, Barnabas nursed a bitter hatred for his uncle Jeremiah Collins. In the first weeks of the 1795 segment, we saw that Jeremiah eloped with Barnabas’ beloved fiancée, the gracious Josette, and that Barnabas responded to this betrayal by killing Jeremiah in a duel. When Barnabas is talking today about Angelique’s black magic, he realizes that Jeremiah and Josette ran off together only because they were under a spell, and that neither was responsible for betraying him. He has no hostility left for Jeremiah.
In the various accounts the vampire Barnabas gave in 1967 of his last years as a living being, he never mentioned Angelique. Nor did he ever say that he, Josette, or Jeremiah had been the victim of witchcraft. Instead, he had indicated that he himself had gotten involved in black magic. In #345, he told his sometime friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, that he became a vampire after trying to gain eternal youth, and that Josette killed herself when he offered her that eternal youth. In #358, he uses “the secret magic number of the universe,” which he had learned while studying witchcraft under a warlock on Barbados, to torment Julia. The Barnabas we met when we came to 1795 hadn’t done any of that. Until he learned the truth about Angelique, Barnabas was a man of the Enlightenment and didn’t believe that witches even existed.
Perhaps this is a change Vicki’s arrival and her bizarre behavior have wrought. The stories Barnabas tells in #345 and #358 both took place years after Josette and Jeremiah were married. So perhaps in the original timeline, with no one around yammering about what the first 73 weeks of the show were like, events moved much more slowly. The change of loves took place gradually enough that Barnabas did not feel he had to challenge Jeremiah to a duel, but he was still full of hatred and resentment. Angelique was able to cover her tracks so that no one suspected witchcraft was underway. She gradually lured Barnabas into the occult arts, perhaps giving up the idea of marrying him at some point, certainly losing his attention. By the time he brought the vampire curse on himself, the version of Barnabas in that timeline would have forgotten Angelique and would have come to be consumed by his grievance against Jeremiah. That fits far better with the April-November 1967 Barnabas than does the character we have seen so far in 1795.
Barnabas asks a key question in this episode. When Angelique says that she will always love him, he asks her what she thinks love is. She answers “Why of course I do!,” which probably means that the script called for him to ask if she knew what love was, but “What do you think love is, Angelique?” is a better question. She’s been destroying every relationship that makes him the man he is in order to have him all to herself, suggesting that if Barnabas pressed Angelique to explain what love is, she would wind up saying that it means having total control over someone. As a vampire, that’s going to be Barnabas’ working definition too, suggesting that he will be more like Angelique then than he already is now.
In this episode, the portrait of Josette is delivered to Barnabas’ home, the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. This portrait, haunted by Josette’s ghost, was the dominant presence in the Old House from its first appearance in #70 until Barnabas moved back in there in #221, and was important as a symbol of Barnabas’ obsession with Josette thereafter. The makers of the show left it on the wall of Josette’s bedroom at the beginning of the 1795 segment; we see it there in #374, but they replace it with a different portrait in #377. It’s hard to understand why it would already have been there before Josette formally became a member of the family- perhaps it was just a slip-up that it was there in #374, and they’d always planned to show its arrival at Collinwood.
The Rev’d Mr Trask, a cleric of sorts, is convinced that there is a witch in the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood. He is right about this. He is also convinced that the witch is the eccentric Victoria Winters. He is wrong on this point. The real witch is Angelique Collins, wife of the master of the house, the gallant Barnabas. Barnabas, who as a man of the Enlightenment asserts that there are no witches, is hiding Vicki, and has reluctantly agreed to let Trask perform a rite of exorcism, believing that once he is finished he will have to go away and everyone will have to admit that Vicki is innocent.
At the top of the episode, we see Angelique building a house of cards and delivering a soliloquy about her plan to cast a spell to make it look like Trask’s fraudulent ritual has proven Vicki’s guilt. There is an element of suspense as we wonder what the character’s actions will lead to, and an even more powerful suspense as we marvel at the courage it took for the actress to remain calm enough build a house of cards on what is essentially a live television show. Forget the Daytime Emmys, Lara Parker deserved a medal for this feat.
Angelique recites a spell over the house of cards, then sets it on fire. The first time they used an incompletely contained fire on Dark Shadows was in #191, and as a result of that daring experiment a load-bearing beam caught fire and collapsed in the middle of a scene. They finished taping before putting the fire out, and somehow everyone survived. There was also an off-camera fire during a conversation between Barnabas and Vicki in #290, and Jonathan Frid and Alexandra Moltke Isles just kept delivering their lines while we heard fire extinguishers blasting in the background. As a result of an excessive pre-treatment of the cards with lighter fluid, today’s fire burns faster and expels debris over a wider area than had been intended. I suppose a technical term for a rapid fire that expels debris is an “explosion.” Parker keeps up her incantation while this explosion progresses directly in her face. That shows an entirely different kind of courage than she showed with the house of cards, but she exhibits it in an equally rare degree.
Downstairs, Trask is standing at the threshold of the house, doing his own fire ceremony. He draws Vicki’s initials on the doorstep, holds up a dowsing rod, and jabbers for a while. Then he sets fire to the rod. In her room, Vicki sees flames erupting from the floor. She shouts in panic.
Barnabas is upstairs. He hears Angelique shouting “Eye of fire, heart of ice!” Her shouts grow louder and louder as she repeats the phrases faster and faster. My wife, Mrs Acilius, said that the pattern of Angelique’s voice sounded to her like someone having an orgasm. The willingness to risk the laugh that pattern might bring represents a third form of courage; by this point, we would have to admit that whatever we may think of Angelique, Lara Parker was one of the bravest people imaginable.
Barnabas is about to investigate, but then he hears Vicki shouting “Fire!” Between these two shouting women, he goes to the one who doesn’t sound like she’s enjoying herself. By the time he gets to Vicki’s room, she is gone. He sees no sign of fire.
Vicki runs out the front door, into Trask’s arms. He shouts “I’ve caught the witch!” and forces her to the ground. He looks delighted that his shtick actually worked, for once.
This moment is an odd inversion of the ending of #191. That episode ends with strange and troubled boy David running out of the burning building where his mother, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, was trying to immolate him, and finding refuge in Vicki’s arms. At that moment, life triumphs over death, and Dark Shadows version 1.0 reaches its conclusion.
When Vicki runs out of the house and into Trask’s arms, death and folly win a victory over life and reason. Nothing comes to a conclusion- the story just gains new layers of complexity. We don’t even go to a commercial break, but get a reaction from Angelique first.
Barnabas talks with Angelique, mystified by what just happened. When he mentions that he heard her in her old room shouting strange words, she lies and says she was in the sewing room. After she leaves, we hear his thoughts- he had searched the sewing room, and knows she is lying. He now believes that there is a witch. He would find it much easier to believe that Vicki, a strange girl who claims to be displaced in time from the year 1967, 172 years in the future, is that witch than to face the prospect that his own wife is, but he can neither overlook the lie she has told nor the sheer improbability that so flagrant a quack as Trask came up with the right answer to any question. He remembers that indentured servant Ben claimed to have been enslaved by the witch, and resolves to find out what Ben can tell him.
We first got to know Barnabas in the months between April and November of 1967, when he was a vampire preying on the living in Vicki’s native time. In those days, he never mentioned Angelique, and there was no indication that he suspected any of the witchcraft we have seen since we embarked on our journey to 1795. Perhaps in the original timeline, when the place Vicki has taken was occupied by a woman named Phyllis Wick, Angelique had to proceed more slowly and carefully, with the result that Barnabas was turned into a ghoul without ever picking up on what was going on. If so, it would be Vicki’s complete failure to adapt to her new time in any way that accelerated the pace of events and thereby exposed Angelique to Barnabas’ suspicions.
It is 1795. In the foyer of the great house of Collinwood, young gentleman Barnabas Collins stands on the staircase, his father Joshua stands on the floor. Joshua forbids Barnabas to marry lady’s maid Angelique on pain of disinheritance; when Barnabas declares he will marry her anyway, Joshua announces that they are no longer father and son.
In 1967, Barnabas will return to Collinwood as a vampire. In that year, in episode #214, he will take well-meaning governess Vicki on a guided tour of the foyer of the old manor house, indicate the staircase there, and say that “On these stairs, a father and son hurled words at each other, words that would lead to the death of the son.” He will then begin laughing maniacally and repeat the words “The death!,” seeing the desperate irony of referring to his own death in the past tense.
By today’s episode, the Collinses have moved out of the old manor house without any shocking scenes between Barnabas and Joshua playing out on the stairs there. That isn’t so surprising- that one remark eight months ago was the only reference to the stairs as the site of a fateful quarrel between Barnabas and Joshua, and the writer responsible for that day’s script, Malcolm Marmorstein, has been gone and forgotten since August. Neither today’s screenwriter, Gordon Russell, nor his colleague, Sam Hall, was with the show when Barnabas gave that speech to Vicki, and the third member of the writing staff, Ron Sproat, has been in the background for most of the 1795 segment so far.
But they do go out of their way to put Barnabas on the stairs of the new house for his showdown with Joshua today. It seems likely that they are hoping that at least some viewers will remember Barnabas’ remark in #214 and look for a significance in the connection. They did that sort of thing all the time in the early months of the show. For example, when they were developing a murder mystery about the death of beloved local man Bill Malloy in the last four months of 1966, they would show us a clock face in one episode, then weeks later have a character lie about the time established by that clock. Sproat more or less put a stop to those kinds of wild over-estimations of the audience’s attention span when he joined the writing staff near the end of 1966, but ever since the vampire story began in April of 1967 they had acquired obsessive fans who sent letters and gathered outside the studio. So they do have a reason to try to close the loop on a very long and very slender thread. What might the significance be of this particular nod to Barnabas’ first days on the show?
The 1795 segment began when the ghost of Barnabas’ little sister Sarah took possession of Vicki at a séance in #365, announced she wanted to “tell the story from the beginning,” and hurled Vicki back to her own time as a living being. But it is not simply a flashback explaining what made Barnabas a vampire. Vicki has completely failed to adapt to her new environment, and as a result has made significant changes to the timeline. She is now in hiding, suspected of witchcraft because of her endless stream of bizarre words and actions.
In fact, there is a witch at Collinwood. It is Angelique. Presumably, the first time these events took place Angelique pinned responsibility for her crimes on Sarah’s proper governess, Phyllis Wick. We caught a glimpse of Phyllis in #365; we could tell, not only that she was indigenous to the eighteenth century, but that she was quite cautious about anything that might suggest the paranormal. It would have taken Angelique some time and effort to set Phyllis up as a patsy, while Vicki volunteered for the role without any action at all on Angelique’s part. So maybe Vicki has speeded everything up. Maybe the family was still in the Old House when Joshua disowned Barnabas in the original sequence of events, but Vicki’s blunderings have accelerated matters so that they moved out before the conflict between them came to a head.
There is another puzzle about the writers’ intentions in this episode. It is established that without his inheritance or his position in the family business, Barnabas will be in a most parlous state. In separate scenes, both Barnabas and Joshua talk about the impossibility of Barnabas finding a job in Collinsport. Barnabas tells Angelique they will have to go at least as far as Boston before they can find anyone who will risk Joshua’s displeasure by hiring him. Later, Joshua tells Naomi that Barnabas won’t even be able to reach Boston- he doesn’t have enough money and won’t be able to get enough credit to stay in an inn, and he has no friends who will so much as put him up for a night if they know he doesn’t have an inheritance coming.
Barnabas’ mother, Naomi, has a solution to his financial problems. She gives him the Old House. The Old House is supposed to be a huge mansion, which it takes a very substantial income to maintain. How a man who can’t even afford a room for the night is going to meet those expenses is not made clear.
The frustrating thing about this is that they dwell at such length about the hard realities of dollars and cents immediately before, and then again after, Naomi makes her gift. By the laws of Soap Opera Land, a character who possesses a symbol of wealth such as a mansion does not need an income. We can accept that convention, and do in the 1967 segment, when a moneyless Barnabas occupies the Old House and can pay for all sorts of expensive things. But today they keep rubbing our faces in the implausibility of it.
My wife, Mrs Acilius, suggested they could have presented both themes if they’d dealt with the realistic financial problems in one episode and in a subsequent episode had gone back to the fantasy world. Maybe Joshua disinherits Barnabas on a Friday, he worries about getting a job on Monday, Tuesday we watch someone try to introduce Vicki to the concept of “lying,” Wednesday we see caddish naval officer Nathan woo feather-headed heiress Millicent, Thursday much-put-upon servant Ben Stokes tries to escape from the spell with which Angelique controls him, and then comes another Friday, when Naomi waves her magic wand and gives Barnabas the house. But as it stands, Barnabas talks to Angelique about how they have to go hundreds of miles to eke out a bare subsistence, Joshua talks to Naomi about Barnabas’ impending poverty, and then all of a sudden they remember that none of that matters, sorry sorry we shouldn’t have bothered you with it.
There were times in 1966 and 1967 when Dark Shadows only had one viable storyline, and no readily apparent means of starting others. But now they have several stories in progress, and an abundance of lively characters with whom they can make as many more as they like. There is no need for events in any one plot-line to move so quickly that incompatible themes crash into each other with such an unfortunate result.
Naomi’s gift to Barnabas was legally impossible in 1795. Until 1821, Maine was part of Massachusetts, and married women could not own property in Massachusetts until 1822. Maine did not pass its own Married Women’s Property Act until 1844. The show never brings this up, so it isn’t the same kind of problem as Barnabas’ lack of income.
Still, it does represent a missed opportunity. If Naomi’s family of origin had owned the house, they might have placed it in a trust over which she would have enough influence to deliver it to her son against her husband’s wishes. In fact, the show never makes the slightest allusion to where Naomi came from. If they’d given her relatives of her own, she would have had potential allies in a clash with Joshua and potential goals to pursue independently of him. As it stands, they have put her firmly in his shadow, so that the category of possible stories about Naomi is a subset of stories about Joshua. That’s a sad situation for a character who is capable of the dynamism she shows today, and a criminal waste of the talents of an actress as accomplished as Joan Bennett.
In episode 368/369 of Dark Shadows, haughty overlord Joshua Collins of Collinsport, Maine told his house-guest, the Countess DuPrés, that he was surprised she still chose to “affect a title,” since in this year of 1795 “France has followed our example and become a republic.” After the countess handed Joshua his head, he fumed to his wife Naomi that her snobbish Old World ways offended him, since he is such a devout believer in human equality.
It was immediately clear to any viewer that Joshua was being hypocritical. He tyrannizes his family and treats his servants as domestic animals that have unaccountably, and rather inconveniently, gained the power of speech. When he says that all men are equal, he means that he, personally, is the equal of anyone in a sufficiently lofty position, and the superior of everyone else.
Audience members who know something about the history of the late eighteenth century in the USA and France will find more to savor in Joshua’s preposterous position. By 1795, the French Revolution had gone through its most radical phases, and was anathema to everyone in the USA other than some of the nascent political tendency led by Thomas Jefferson, a tendency known in the southeast and New England as the Republican Party and in the middle states and the west as the Democratic Party. When Joshua says with great satisfaction that “France has followed our example and become a republic,” he is identifying himself with the most militant factions of the Jeffersonian party, and when he tells Naomi that “all men are equal” he is echoing the most famous passage of Jefferson’s most celebrated writing.
Ridiculous as it is to hear Joshua invoke the egalitarian rhetoric for which Jefferson was so well known, as a major landowner in a rural area far removed from the major cities he was perfectly typical of the most important backers of the Democratic/ Republicans. Jefferson himself was a member of this category, and he displayed both a remarkably sophisticated understanding of the leftwardmost theorists of the French Revolution, as demonstrated for example in the edition of the works of Destutt de Tracy that he prepared for publication in 1817, and a dismally cruel approach to his livelihood as a slave-holding planter.
When Dark Shadows was on the air in 1966-1971, the party that traced its origins to Jefferson was undergoing a revolution of its own. The coalition he forged between working-class groups in the north and rich slave-owners in the south had been an inspiration to the Democratic Party from the days before the Civil War right through the presidencies of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. After World War Two, the African American freedom movement finally scrambled this unlikely coalition, winning Black southerners the vote and challenging the dominance the heirs of the slave-owners had long held in the Democratic Solid South. Thoughtful Americans, seeing this change, might well think back to the origins of the Democratic Party and to the ridiculous incongruity of Jefferson’s soaringly egalitarian words coming out of his and other oligarchic mouths.
At the top of today’s episode, Joshua is very thorough about betraying all of Jefferson’s ideals. He tells Naomi that the common folk of the town must not know that their son Barnabas killed his uncle Jeremiah in a duel. Naomi replies that everyone already knows; Joshua insists that they do not, and declares that they will believe what he tells them to believe.
One of the major themes of Jefferson’s correspondence, as indeed of Destutt de Tracy and other Enlightenment philosophes, was what Karl Marx, a close reader of Destutt de Tracy, would call “false consciousness,” the tendency of the oppressed classes to see the world in categories generated by the ruling class, and that if false consciousness were erased the oppressed would rise up and sweep away all manner of social evils. Joshua’s determination to keep the working people of Collinsport in the dark about what is happening on the estate of Collinwood puts him at the opposite extreme from the beliefs his leader Jefferson professed. In his own life, Jefferson himself set about enforcing regimes of lies on more than one occasion, as for example when he used his office as president of the United States to cover up the crimes of General James Wilkinson. Even viewers who hadn’t read Jefferson’s letters and who were unaware of Jefferson’s less inspiring actions may well have known, in 1967, that the confidence which the Declaration of Independence expresses in what will happen if “the facts be submitted to a candid world” sat uneasily with the lies on which slavery in particular and white supremacy in general rests.
Joshua begins dictating to Naomi a fictitious story that sounds oddly familiar to regular viewers. Before well-meaning governess Vicki was plunged into her uncertain and frightening journey into the past, we had heard several versions of the Collins family history, none of which resembles the events that we have actually seen play out so far. As Joshua tells Naomi what he has decided people should believe, for the first time the outlines of the Collins family history published in the 1950s come into view. That history is not only sustained by false consciousness, but has its origins in a brazen lie.
Joshua is busy fabricating when Naomi interrupts him with more bad news. Barnabas has decided to marry Angelique, maid to the Countess DuPrés and to the countess’ niece, Barnabas’ former fiancée Josette. The great egalitarian Joshua is thunderstruck that his son would fall into the clutches of an “adventuress.”
Joshua sends Naomi to fetch Barnabas. He thunders his disapproval of the marriage, and Barnabas stands his ground.
Later, we see Josette in the cemetery, at Jeremiah’s grave. Barnabas spots her, and wonders whether he should tell her about his engagement to Angelique. He doesn’t want her to hear of it from someone else, as she surely will very soon. But the place could not be less appropriate. He approaches her; they have an awkward little talk, in the course of which he urges her to hate him for killing her husband. She says she cannot. She tells him not to say any more. He is helpless.
Angelique arrives and tells Josette that her carriage is waiting. Josette invites Barnabas to ride back to the manor house with them; he declines. Josette leaves the two of them alone for a moment; with a note of jealousy that belies her agreement to a sham marriage to a man who will always love Josette, she asks Barnabas if she interrupted something. He says that she did not. That’s true- he had already given up the idea of telling her about their engagement when Angelique joined them.
Back in the manor house, Joshua summons Angelique to the front parlor, where he offers her $10,000 to relinquish her claim on Barnabas and go back to the island of Martinique. It is difficult to compare prices between 1795 and 2023; to get a sense of proportion, we might remember that when Joshua offered Vicki a job as governess to little Sarah Collins in #367, he offered her a salary of $4 a week, and that this was rather a generous rate of pay for the position. So it would take even an upper servant 2500 weeks, that is to say almost fifty years, to earn the amount of money Joshua is offering Angelique.
Angelique refuses Joshua’s bribe. He says he is prepared to offer more, but when he sees that she is firm in her refusal he switches to threats. Naomi intervenes and says that she does not want to break ties. With Naomi’s promise of friendship, Angelique agrees to wait until the mourning period for Jeremiah is complete before marrying Barnabas.
What returning viewers know that Joshua, Naomi, Barnabas, the countess, and Josette do not is that Angelique is not only a maid, but is also a witch. It was under her spell that Josette, though in love with Barnabas, conceived a mad passion for Jeremiah, that Jeremiah, though a loyal friend to Barnabas, reciprocated that passion, and that the two of them, though they struggled with their consciences, eloped. That elopement prompted the jilted Barnabas to challenge his uncle to a duel, and his bewilderment at his own actions prompted Jeremiah to delope and let Barnabas kill him. Angelique and Barnabas had had a brief romantic fling before he became engaged to Josette, and she believed that once Josette was out of the way Barnabas would return to her.
It hadn’t quite worked out that way. In her frustration at Barnabas’ continued preference for Josette, Angelique cast a spell on Sarah, sickening her and threatening her life. When she saw how upset Barnabas was by his little sister’s illness, Angelique said that she could cure it, and extorted his promise to marry her if she did so. She released Barnabas from that promise in #390/391. When he told her that Josette would always come first for him, even though he knew there could never again be anything between them, she said she would marry him anyway. Apparently thinking he wouldn’t be likely to find another woman willing to enter a sham marriage on that basis, Barnabas proposed, and Angelique accepted.
In their conversation in the parlor, Joshua tells Angelique that he knows about the promise she extorted from Barnabas with her ability to cure Sarah. Evidently Barnabas told Naomi about that. There are those in the house who believe that witchcraft is afoot; indeed, Vicki is in hiding, having been accused as the witch. This story would seem to be proof positive that Angelique, not Vicki, is the guilty party, and she does widen her eyes when Joshua brings it up. But he and Naomi don’t make the connection.
Back in the graveyard, Angelique is holding a miniature coffin and casting a spell.
Where did she get that miniature? Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
In her bedroom, Josette hears Angelique’s disembodied voice, saying that Jeremiah is not dead. She runs to the front door, where Naomi sees her. Unable to dissuade her from going out in the night, Naomi follows Josette to Jeremiah’s grave. Josette keeps hearing the voice; Naomi does not hear it. But when Jeremiah’s hand bursts out of the soil, both women see it.
Jeremiah waves to the ladies. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
In the parts of Dark Shadows set in the twentieth century, Joan Bennett played matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Of all the major characters, Liz was the most reluctant to acknowledge the existence of supernatural forces, and she was the one who was least likely to see the evidence of such forces that abounded in the world around her. So when we see her as Naomi watching Jeremiah’s hand reaching out of his grave, it is the first time we have seen her react to an incontrovertible sign of the paranormal. It makes us wonder how far back in the Collinses’ past the roots of Liz’ denial extend.
It is 1795, and we are on the great estate of Collinwood. Under the influence of wicked witch Angelique, the kindly Jeremiah and the gracious Josette have eloped, breaking the heart of Josette’s fiancé, Jeremiah’s nephew and best friend Barnabas Collins. Barnabas, up to that point an idealistic man of the Enlightenment, responded by going against his beliefs and challenging Jeremiah to a duel.
Angelique is a lady’s maid. She was introduced as maid to Josette’s aunt, the Countess DuPrés, but today it seems she is Josette’s maid. She comes to Barnabas’ room. He demands to know why her mistress has sent her, meaning Josette, to which she replies she has come on her own account.
Angelique asks Barnabas why he has challenged Jeremiah to a duel, since he has never fought a duel or even seen one before. He explains that he could not stand being an object of pity- “I couldn’t be poor Barnabas.” In 1967, Barnabas will be a vampire. We saw him in that year, in #345, telling his sometime associate mad scientist Julia Hoffman the story of his relationship with Josette. The story he told was different from other versions he had told previously, for example in #233 and #236, and radically different from what we have seen play out in this extended flashback. In the story he told Julia, as in all other versions we had heard before coming to 1795, Josette was originally Jeremiah’s fiancée. One theme developed that resonates here was that all he could be to Josette was a faithful friend, and that he found that role humiliating. He was “poor Barnabas” in that version of the story, and he implies that it was to escape from that identity that he did whatever it was that made him the undead monster he became.
Angelique cast her spell on Josette and Jeremiah because she wanted Barnabas for herself. Now that she sees that he is likely to get himself killed before she can make her play for him, she asks him to wear a medallion of hers, one which she says will bring good luck. In the 1960s, a portrait of Barnabas hangs in the foyer of the great house of Collinwood. He is wearing a medallion in that portrait. Is Angelique’s medallion the one in the portrait? We can’t be sure.
Josette and Jeremiah have a conversation. They try to figure out what came over them. They don’t love each other, and regret hurting Barnabas. As their conversation goes on, Josette realizes that Jeremiah regrets it so deeply that he is planning to let Barnabas kill him in the upcoming duel. She is horrified by this. She doesn’t want anyone to die, and has accepted the fact that Jeremiah is the only husband she’s got. Nevertheless, she cannot dissuade him.
Josette’s father arranges for Jeremiah to have a final talk with Barnabas. Barnabas accuses Jeremiah of lusting for Josette all along, saying that “you wanted her the moment you saw her.” This is not true of Jeremiah, but in #345 it is exactly what Barnabas tells Julia he himself did. In that version, he conceived a wild passion for Jeremiah’s bride-to-be the moment he first saw her.
Barnabas tells Jeremiah “You must have hated me all your life.” As we have seen over these last few weeks, Jeremiah and Barnabas have been dear friends all their lives. But from his early days on the show in the spring of 1967 until we left for our voyage to the past in #365, Barnabas consistently said that he hated Jeremiah from his earliest days. The overall effect of comparing Barnabas’ various accounts of the past with each other and with what we are seeing in this flashback is something like reading the accounts of the patient’s memories in a case study by Freud. Not only does the order of the events jumble as retcon follows retcon, but guilt floats from one person to another and back again.
When Jeremiah tries to explain how he and Josette found themselves stricken with intermittent attacks of intense desire for each other and how they struggled against those attacks during the intervals between them, Barnabas asks “Why didn’t you come to me then?” That’s a good question, and it suggests another, equally good question. Angelique is casting spells because she and Barnabas had a brief affair before he became engaged to Josette. Why hasn’t he come clean to Josette about his past? If he had, Josette would not have put herself so completely in Angelique’s hands that she could bind her with her spells at leisure.
Jeremiah and Barnabas have their duel. We see them back to back, getting ready to pace off the prescribed distance. On Jeremiah’s face, we see his resolution to let Barnabas kill him.
The men are in place when Josette comes running up, pleading with them to stop. She arrives just in time to see Barnabas shoot Jeremiah. Some say they hear only one shot, but I hear two. I think Jeremiah deloped.
Josette goes to Jeremiah’s crumpled body and shouts at Barnabas. “You monster! You madman! You killed the only man I ever loved!” She claims that she and Jeremiah were happy together, and that in his pride Barnabas could not let them be happy. She refuses Barnabas’ offer to help move Jeremiah and get a doctor for him.
Angelique had rubbed Josette’s forehead with some of the rose water in which she had put her love potion not long before this, so Josette’s declarations that Jeremiah is “the only man [she] ever loved” and that they were happy together could be a sign of that influence. It could also be rooted in Josette’s realistic assessment of her situation. Earlier, she had told Jeremiah that she would never again allow herself to say that she loved Barnabas, and when Jeremiah said that his own death would make her a free woman she rejected the idea. Whatever the circumstances that led to the marriage, she is Jeremiah’s wife, and if she becomes his widow she will have an obligation to keep up certain appearances.
This was Anthony George’s last episode. George was woefully miscast when he first joined the show in #262 as the second actor to play Burke Devlin. Writers Ron Sproat and Malcolm Marmorstein kept writing Burke as if he were still being played by the explosively exuberant Mitch Ryan. George’s style was the exact opposite of Ryan’s. He was a cold actor whose characters keep us guessing as to their motives and intentions. He was utterly lost as the hot-headed Burke.
When Gordon Russell joined the writing staff in #292, things looked up for George. Russell understood what actors could do, and gave George some scenes he played very well indeed. In Jeremiah Collins, Russell and Sam Hall created a character who was perfect for George. It’s fascinating to watch Josette scrutinize Jeremiah until she gradually realizes that he has decided to throw his life away to do penance for the offense he and she have committed against Barnabas. It is also credible that, while we can see what Jeremiah is doing, Barnabas, who has known him all his life, would not catch on. George was so bad as Burke in the Sproat/ Marmorstein era that it seemed anything that got him off the show would be welcome. But Russell and Hall know so well how to take advantage of his strengths that it is sad to see him go.
All of the actors have trouble with their dialogue today, even the usually reliable Kathryn Leigh Scott and Lara Parker. Jonathan Frid always struggles, but is especially rough this time, and as for David Ford, what can we say. He mangles virtually every line. His character is supposed to be French; he doesn’t sound French, but doesn’t exactly speak English, either. Danny Horn transcribes many of Ford’s flubs in his post about the episode on Dark Shadows Before I Die, but you really have to hear it for yourself to absorb the sheer bizarreness of the speechlike sounds that come out of Ford’s mouth. I always enjoy watching Ford, and I think he made a major contribution to Dark Shadows‘ acting style when he first came on the show, but when he is off he is way, way off.
In 1966 and the early weeks of 1967, the Collinsport Inn was an important place on Dark Shadows. The restaurant there, presided over by Maggie Evans (Kathryn Leigh Scott,) The Nicest Girl in Town, was a place where people could meet each other unexpectedly and characters new to town could be introduced. Dashing action hero Burke Devlin (Mitch Ryan) lived in a suite at the inn, and the place often represented his territory, the base from which he conducted his war against the ancient and esteemed Collins family.
We haven’t seen Burke’s room since #206, at which point he had given up his vendetta against the Collinses and proceeded far down the road to irrelevance. We haven’t seen the restaurant since vampire Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid) met Maggie there in #221. By the time Anthony George took over the part of Burke in #262, Burke seemed to live in the Blue Whale tavern. He made business calls from the pay phone there, and in one episode apparently stayed behind when the bartender locked the place up for the night.
The inn makes a return appearance at the top of today’s episode. It is 1795, and Jeremiah Collins (Anthony George) is sharing a suite with Josette DuPrés (Kathryn Leigh Scott.) They are on their honeymoon.
Jeremiah and Josette eloped from the estate of Collinwood on the night when Josette was supposed to marry Jeremiah’s nephew, kindly gentleman Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid.) Josette truly loved Barnabas and Jeremiah was his dearest friend, but they were under a spell cast by wicked witch Angelique, who wanted Josette out of the way so she could have Barnabas for herself. The power of the spell waxes and wanes. When Josette and Jeremiah are in the grip of it, a trident shaped mark appears on their hands; when they return to their senses, the mark disappears.
When the episode begins, the tridents are showing, and the newlyweds are inflamed with passion. Shortly after, Josette’s mark is gone, Jeremiah’s still showing. She is filled with regret, he is still ardent.
Back in the manor house of Collinwood, Barnabas has a conversation with Josette’s father André and his own father Joshua. He resists André’s suggestion that Josette and Jeremiah must have left together, and resists even more strenuously Joshua’s declaration that they did so because they are the victims of witchcraft. Joshua says that his sister Abigail and André’s sister, the Countess DuPrés, found a blasphemous trinket in the quarters of governess Victoria Winters, and that a witch-hunting divine, the Reverend Trask, is coming to investigate the matter. Barnabas is appalled at the notion of an inquiry into witchcraft, and vows to defend Victoria if Trask comes. Joshua forbids him to do so.
Barnabas’ reaction to the idea of a witchcraft trial, coupled with what we have seen of him so far in the 1795 segment, looks like a retcon. In #358, only a week and a half before we began this uncertain and frightening journey to the past, vampire Barnabas told a story about studying witchcraft under a warlock on Barbados who taught him “the secret magic number of the universe.” Events are moving so fast that it doesn’t look like Barnabas will have time to sail to the Caribbean before he becomes a vampire, and he won’t be crossing any waters after that. But now he is a man of the Enlightenment, who scoffs at the idea of witchcraft today as he scoffed at the tarot when the countess introduced him to it in #368/369.
Jeremiah returns to the house. There is an exquisite little scene with a servant, Riggs, who is uncomfortable at the sight of the disgraced Mr Jeremiah. Riggs stands in for the establishment of Collinwood and the whole working class of the town of Collinsport, and in his reaction we see the disquiet that bad news from the big house on the hill would spread among the people whose livelihoods are at stake when trouble comes to the family there. Riggs makes haste when Jeremiah tells him to go out and fetch Joshua.
When Riggs is gone, Josette enters. The audience sees that the mark is gone from Jeremiah’s hand, and Josette can tell that his passion for her is gone. She tells him that he no more loves her than she loves him. He begins with a protest against this remark, but ends by saying that they must be kind to each other.
Joshua and André enter. André embraces his daughter and tells her everything will be all right; Joshua looks at his brother with distaste and demands an explanation.
Jeremiah says that he and Josette are married. He further says he realizes they are not welcome, and that they will return to the inn. This raises the prospect of a recreation of the early days, with the inn as a territory separate from and opposed to Collinwood. Joshua rejects the idea at once. He will not have the scandal of Jeremiah and his new wife living in town because they have been estranged from the rest of the Collinses. He decrees that they will live at Collinwood and put on a happy face for the townsfolk.
Barnabas enters. Joshua tells him that Jeremiah and Josette are married. He refuses to believe it until Josette confirms it herself. He takes the glove from Jeremiah’s hand and slaps him in the face. He gives him a choice of weapons.
Dueling may have been as alien to the ideals of the Enlightenment as were Barbadian warlocks, but so too is Joshua’s plan of forcing the whole family to commit itself to a massive lie in order to preserve its hereditary privileges. Joshua, the proud apostle of Jeffersonian republicanism, is simply being a hypocrite, but Barnabas is a more complicated figure. Seeing his every hope turned to dust before him, his ideals have become useless. He has only a moment to choose among the evils the Enlightenment had promised to stamp out, and he chooses the most macho one available.
Joshua forbids the duel, but Barnabas disregards his father’s authority and insists on it. In 1795 and for some time after, dueling was widely practiced in much of the United States, and particularly in the South and West a gentleman lost face if he refused a challenge. No such stigma attached in New England, where dueling was condemned by law and religion. Had Joshua or Jeremiah gone to the police, Barnabas would have been arrested. In 1719, Massachusetts, of which Maine was a part until 1821, passed a law making it an offense punishable by a fine of £100 (equivalent to about $7000 today) to challenge someone to a duel. Massachusetts law already considered it murder to kill someone in a duel, and prescribed death by hanging as punishment. Of course, Joshua’s declaration that Jeremiah and Josette will live in the house and the family will present a “united front” to deter scandal makes it clear he will never turn his son over to the police, and the pattern of cover-up with the support of law enforcement we saw among the Collinses in 1966 and 1967 leads us to doubt that anything a member of the family does will ever be a matter for the courts to judge.
There is a missed opportunity in the show’s lack of interest in Massachusetts’ actual laws about dueling. The 1719 law was amended to be even stricter in 1730. Among the provisions added to the law at that time was a requirement that anyone who had either been killed in a duel or been put to death for winning a duel would “be given an unchristian burial at a gallows or crossroads, with a stake driven through their body.” Since the audience knows that Barnabas is fated to become a vampire, there is a chilling irony in seeing him volunteer for a staked burial.
On Wednesday, we met a new arrival from Paris by way of the island of Martinique. She is Angelique, maidservant to the Countess DuPrés and onetime bedfellow of rich young gentleman Barnabas Collins. Barnabas is engaged to marry the countess’ niece Josette, and is anxious to keep Angelique in the background. Angelique does not share either of Barnabas’ goals.
At rise, Angelique meets Barnabas’ uncle Jeremiah in the front parlor of the manor house of Collinwood. She has found a toy soldier and asks Jeremiah about it. When he identifies it as one of the toys Barnabas was most fond of in his boyhood, he volunteers to take it to the playroom himself. She asks to keep it for a while, so that she can study its workmanship. He doesn’t object, and exits. Once she is alone in the parlor, Angelique starts talking to herself. She says that she will use it to cause Barnabas unimaginable pain. This is the first direct suggestion we have seen that Angelique is involved in witchcraft.
Time-traveling governess Vicki enters. She tells Angelique that they should be friends, because they are both servants in the house, and it is a foreign setting to both of them. Angelique asks what Vicki means by describing herself as foreign, since she is an American. Vicki realizes that she can’t tell someone she has just met that she is a time traveler thrust here from 1967 by the ghost of the little girl she is supposed to be educating, and so she mutters something about how Angelique wouldn’t understand. After they part, we hear Angelique musing that Vicki has no idea what she understands. At no point does Angelique show any interest whatever in becoming friends with Vicki.
Later, we see Angelique alone in her room with the toy soldier and Barnabas’ handkerchief. She is talking to herself about her evil plans again when she is interrupted by a knock at the door. She hides the things and answers it. Barnabas enters.
Barnabas renews the effort he made at the end of Wednesday’s episode to friendzone Angelique. Again, she isn’t having it. After he leaves, she takes the soldier and the handkerchief back out and tells them that she has decided to wait for Josette’s arrival to enact her revenge on Barnabas.
She won’t have to wait long. Josette’s father, André, is entering the parlor, grumbling about the lack of servants at Collinwood. He beckons his daughter, and she follows him into the house. She is played by Kathryn Leigh Scott.
A major cast member of the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s as Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, Miss Scott has played Josette’s ghost more than once. She created the part in #70, when she was the shimmery figure who emerged from Josette’s portrait in the very house we are in today and danced among its pillars. She reprised the part in #126, again in this house, when Josette led the other ghosts in rescuing Vicki from crazed handyman Matthew Morgan. For some months Barnabas, who is in 1967 a vampire, held Maggie prisoner here and tried to replace her personality with that of Josette. Barnabas often seemed convinced that Maggie really was Josette, and when strange and troubled boy David saw Maggie wearing Josette’s dress in #240 he said that her face was “exactly the same” as it was on the many occasions when he had seen Josette’s ghost.
Barnabas’ plan to Josettify Maggie is drawn from the 1932 film The Mummy, in which the undead Imhotep (Boris Karloff) is released from his tomb, holds Helen Grosvenor (Zita Johanns) prisoner, and tries to replace Helen’s personality with that of his lost love Princess Ankh-Esen-Amun. In that movie, there is a flashback to ancient Egypt, where we see that Zita Johanns also plays Ankh-Esen-Amun and we realize that Imhotep’s crazy plan was rooted in some supernatural connection between the two women. The connection between Josette and Maggie has been equivocal until now- Miss Scott was always veiled when she played Josette’s ghost, and stand-in Dorrie Kavanuagh was the one wearing the dress in #240. Moreover, after Maggie got away in #260, Barnabas soon turned his attentions to Vicki, and decided he would try the same gimmick with her. But now we see that Barnabas really was onto something with regard to Maggie, and we wonder where it will lead. I remember the first time we watched the show, my wife, Mrs Acilius, reacted with great excitement to Josette’s entrance in this episode and exclaimed “Of course! Maggie is Josette!”
Vicki spent the first three days of this week telling the actors what parts they played in the first 73 weeks of Dark Shadows, an annoying habit. But there is a reason for it. She knew Barnabas and Sarah as supernatural beings in 1967, so she will recognize them as the same people here. And Josette’s looks reveal her connection to Vicki’s friend Maggie, so she will recognize that. Since only Angelique, of the characters we have met so far in 1795, is played by someone who did not appear previously, the writers are in a difficult position with regard to all of the other members of the company.
I wish they had solved that problem by having Vicki show up in 1795 unable to speak. The suggestion I made in my post about #366 is that she could have materialized in the midst of the accident that upset the carriage bringing the original governess, Phyllis Wick.* Vicki could have sustained a slight injury that left her mute for a week or so, could have had voiceover monologues registering her recognitions of Barnabas, Sarah, and Josette/ Maggie, and would not have had audible monologues when she saw the others. By the time she could talk again, Vicki would know that she was supposed to pretend to be Phyllis Wick.
Clearly Vicki is supposed to get into some kind of trouble in 1795; she is still the heroine, and the first rule of all soap operas is that the heroine must always be in danger. But she is supposed to be seeing the events that started the phase of the Collins family curse that involves Barnabas’ vampirism, and those events did not involve a governess who went around calling people by the wrong names and blurting out information she learned from reading the Collins family history. The logic of the plot requires that whatever trouble Vicki gets into is more or less the same trouble Phyllis Wick would have got into, and the appeal of the character requires that the audience watch to see what kind of con artist Vicki might turn out to be. Both of those imperatives demand that she try to masquerade as Phyllis.
Vicki does manage to keep herself from telling André and Josette that they are being played by the actors who took the parts of Sam and Maggie Evans in other parts of Dark Shadows. She can’t help staring at Josette, however. Josette is quite cheerful when she asks Vicki why she is staring; André, a more conventional aristocrat than his relaxed daughter, is visibly annoyed with Vicki’s impertinence.
There was an opportunity here for Vicki to show some quick thinking. She could have told Josette that Barnabas has gone on at length about her appearance, and that she is amazed at the accuracy of his descriptions. That would have endeared her to Josette as the bearer of the message that her fiancé is very much in love with her, and would have reassured her that, while Vicki is an attractive young woman who lives under Barnabas’ roof, she is not a rival for his affections. As it is, Vicki just mumbles something about not having known she was staring.
Angelique enters. She and Josette rush into each other’s arms and speak French. Miss Scott tells a funny story about that moment. She and Lara Parker had talked about the script and agreed that two Frenchwomen excited to see each other after a long separation ought to greet each other in French, and they persuaded the producer of their point. Only when they got the revised script with the dialogue in French did it dawn on them that neither of them could speak the language. Fortunately, several other members of the cast were fluent in it, and coached them through.
We can see that Josette really regards Angelique as a friend. Viewers who have been with the show from the beginning will remember Josette’s ghost as a powerful and stalwart force for good, and will also know that Maggie is The Nicest Girl in Town. So whatever grievance Angelique may have against Barnabas, and however unjust may be the social system that has exalted Josette and subordinated Angelique, when we see Angelique faking friendship for Josette while planning to make her watch her lover suffer, we know that she is really evil.
Barnabas enters. Josette tells him that her long, difficult journey was worthwhile now that she is with him. This is a very sharp retcon. In #345, mad scientist Julia Hoffman asked Barnabas if Josette ever came to him of her own free will, and he responded with a silent grimace that left no doubt as to the answer. Now, we see that she has gladly sailed from Martinique to central Maine in late autumn to be with him.
Barnabas and Josette are alone, and he wants to kiss her. She is bashful and says that their parents might be upset if they don’t wait for the wedding. He says they might pretend to be, but that in reality it is expected. That is a sweet little conversation, and it ends in a sweet little kiss.
Angelique is back in her room. She twists Barnabas’ handkerchief around the neck of his toy soldier.
The episode ends with Barnabas on the floor, apparently asphyxiating, while Josette looks on in horror.
Wednesday, Barnabas made it clear that he had his affair with Angelique because he didn’t think Josette could love him. That gives Angelique a perfectly understandable motive for seeking revenge on him. A rich man exploited his position to trifle with her, a servant, giving no thought to her feelings or interests.
The selfishness and entitlement Barnabas exhibited thereby is jarring in the mild-mannered, apparently egalitarian fellow we have seen so far this week, but it fits perfectly with his behavior as a vampire in 1967. Seen from another angle, his behavior is consistent with everything the Collinses have done to get themselves in trouble since we first met them. He was tempted to take advantage of Angelique because he had underestimated his own lovability and despaired of making a real connection with Josette.
Barnabas is still underestimating himself and Josette now. Never once does it occur to him to come clean to her about what he did with Angelique. While Josette would no doubt be saddened to learn that her beloved fiancé had dallied with her pet servant, as a rich French girl from Martinique she has after all lived her whole life among wealthy men surrounded by enslaved women, and so could hardly have been shocked by what Barnabas had done. Surely she would have decided to go ahead with the wedding, and she would have known to be wary of Angelique.
By failing to trust Josette with the truth about his misdeeds, Barnabas puts her and himself at Angelique’s mercy. We think of 1966, when matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard and her brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins, were both prisoners of shameful secrets they dared not share even with each other. In 1967, when those secrets were finally laid bare to the whole world, Liz and Roger found they were free to go on about their business as if nothing had happened. In Barnabas’ petrified silence, we see all of the shadows that have kept his relatives in darkness for so long.
*Whom Dorrie Kavanaugh played in her brief appearance at the end of #365.
In 2021, I left a comment on Danny Horn’s blog post about episode 256. I found great significance in the introduction of the ghost of ten year old Sarah Collins:
I’d say Sarah’s introduction is the single most important moment in the whole show, more important than Barnabas coming out of the box, more important even than Barnabas’ first decision not to kill Julia.
From the beginning they’d been playing with the idea that there was another cast of characters hidden behind the characters we’ve been watching, supernatural characters who can make their influence felt at certain moments. The most prominent of these was the ghost of Josette. This ghost is a serene, distant, imperturbable. When her ghost and the ghosts of the widows rescue Vicki from Matthew in 126, there is an amused smile in Josette’s voice, the sound of someone for whom nothing very important is at stake in the affairs of this world.
When David sees Maggie in Josette’s clothes and mistakes her for the ghost of Josette in 240 and 241, it is clear that if the ghost of Josette returns, it will not be in that mode. After that sight, Josette’s ghost can return only as a terrifying spirit of vengeance. And David’s confrontation with Willie in 253 makes it clear that the protecting ghost will not return at all.
So the show has discarded the old supernatural realm of Josette and the widows, a realm that was, as you say, never more than slightly accessible. With Sarah’s appearance, we are introduced to an entirely new part of the show. Once again we have a set of characters hidden in the supernatural background, but they can interact with the characters from the main continuity more directly and at greater length than Josette and the widows ever could.
The puzzle of Sarah’s connection to Barnabas, and her talk about looking for the members of her family, indicates that this new order of supernatural beings have complex and unsettled relationships with each other, and that characters from the main continuity can have an influence on those relationships. We will have to figure those relationships out in the weeks and months to come, but as soon as Sarah demands Maggie not tell her big brother that she saw her, we know that they might come to enmesh the living beings. Every scene with Sarah, then, is a step leading directly to the time-travel and parallel universe storylines that will come to define the show.
By the end of last week, Dark Shadows had, for the second time in its 73 weeks on the air, run out of stories to tell. When Dark Shadows 1.0 ended with the disappearance of blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins in #191 and #192, the way forward was clear- introduce another supernatural menace to succeed Laura. That came in the form of vampire Barnabas Collins. As people tuned in to see how a daily soap opera could fit a vampire into its pattern, Dark Shadows 2.0 became a bona fide hit and a major pop culture phenomenon.
The first version of the show came to an end because none of the non-Laura stories ever really took off and the only danger Laura presented was that she would incinerate her son David when she herself vanished in flames. Once that was prevented, her threat profile was closed and the show needed to start over.
The second version crackled along quite well for months. It’s true that a number of the storylines had reached their natural conclusions, but they made little to no effort to replace them. On the contrary, they went out of their way to close off possible narrative directions. While even the slowest parts of Dark Shadows 1.0 left us guessing what might come next, the final weeks of Dark Shadows 2.0 present us with nothing but a series of blank walls. The first time I saw the show, I watched #365 without a single idea as to what they could do in #366.
What they actually do is to launch Dark Shadows 3.0 by flipping the back-world of the dead past into the foreground, while the characters and events of 1967 are thrust behind the action into a realm only we and Vicki know anything about. Indeed, it is Sarah who executes the switch.
We had a glimpse of what that might look like in #280, when Barnabas hosted a party in the Old House on the estate of Collinwood, restored in an eighteenth century style, to which the living members of the Collins family came dressed as their ancestors of that period. In Friday’s episode, we saw a séance in the great house on the estate on a dark and stormy night. Sarah spoke through well-meaning governess Vicki and said she would “tell the story from the beginning.” At that, Vicki vanished from the table, her eighteenth century counterpart Phyllis Wick appeared in her place, and Vicki found herself outside the Old House on a sunny day in the year 1795. Today, she meets the living versions of Barnabas and Sarah, as well as some of those who were impersonated at Barnabas’ costume party.
The first person Vicki meets in 1795 is Barnabas. She has spent a great deal of time with him in 1967, so she assumes he is just in costume. He is startled by her clothing- she is still dressed as she was at the séance. He assures her they have never met, and when she keeps insisting they have he begins to suspect that she is insane.
Sarah meets them and declares that Vicki is her new governess. Evidently she had some kind of premonition as to what her new governess would look like, and Vicki meets the description. Barnabas brightens and asks Vicki if she is a governess. She acknowledges that she is. Before she can explain that she is governess to a boy who won’t be born for 160 years, he ushers her into the house.
The writers faced a thorny problem with this segment of the series. Vicki has spent a great deal of time with Barnabas and has seen Sarah, so she must recognize them. On the other hand, most of the rest of the people she meets in 1795 will be played by the actors who have played characters she knew in 1966 and 1967. When Victoria is alone in the front parlor of the house, we find out how they have decided to handle this situation. Joel Crothers, who in the contemporary segment of Dark Shadows played hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell, enters in the character of bon vivant naval officer Nathan Forbes. Vicki throws herself in his arms and gushes about how happy she is to see him. Nathan is quite happy to see her, since she is a remarkably beautiful young woman and extremely friendly, but he is puzzled that she insists on calling him Joe.
The scene between Nathan and Vicki is pretty funny, and it’s understandable that Vicki would react as she does. But it’s also ominous. When we see actors at work, we may remember other parts they have played, but we don’t expect their scene-mates to bring them up. They are just supposed to accept them as whoever they are supposed to be at that moment. When Joan Bennett enters, not as twentieth-century matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, but as Liz’ ancestor Naomi Collins, we wonder how Vicki will react to her. Indeed, she does slow things down with a lot of wailing about how she can’t believe she isn’t Mrs Stoddard, a person of whom Naomi has never heard. It then dawns on us that every time Vicki meets anyone, she’s going to drag us through this same business where she mistakes them for another character the actor has played. That’s going to annoy us and make the other characters think she is deranged.
One of the reasons Vicki’s yelling about the cast’s resumes annoys us so much is that we all know how to look at the various characters an actor has played and see how they illuminate each other. We don’t need her to tell us to do that. Academics put that into a category of practices called “iconography,” which is shorthand for the idea that we remember what we’ve seen more than once in various kinds of movies and shows and notice when we see it again.
As Liz, Joan Bennett was the sort of imposing matriarch she often played as a major star of feature films and the Broadway stage. Virtually every event we saw in the first 25 weeks of Dark Shadows had its origins in Liz’ reactions to the events around her, and she was still the single most powerful figure in the whole gallery of characters for 30 weeks after that, right up to the death of seagoing con man Jason McGuire in #275. Everyone else was dependent on her, in one way or another.
Naomi is the lady of the manor in 1795, as Liz is in the 1960s. But we quickly learn that she is at the opposite extreme from her descendant. When invitations come for Barnabas’ upcoming wedding, she asks Nathan to read them to her. While Liz dominates the family and the town from her desk, Naomi is entirely illiterate.
This is something of an anachronism. Colonial New England was founded by Puritans who thought everyone ought to read the Bible, and so provided elementary schooling for all children, boys and girls. Scholars estimate that by the end of the eighteenth century, over 90 percent of men and about half of women in that region would have been able to read the Bible easily. A woman as wealthy as Naomi would certainly have had this ability, and the basic literacy which Naomi lacks would have been a rarity at any level of society. Perhaps the writers and producers of Dark Shadows were unaware of this history. Perhaps they are suggesting that she, like her son’s fiancée Josette DuPrés, came from some part of the world that valued literacy less highly than did New England. In any case, they do show us how severely disadvantaged she is in any disagreement with the men in her life, and how narrowly the bounds of her activities are circumscribed.
Barnabas comes back with the news that the carriage bringing Sarah’s governess overturned. The governess herself is missing from the scene of the accident; the other three people aboard were killed. When Phyllis Wick appeared in Vicki’s place at the séance, she did indeed say that she had just been in a carriage wreck, so this news will not come as a complete surprise to returning viewers.
This brings up a question and points to a missed opportunity. The question is whether Phyllis’ carriage had overturned in the original course of events. If so, perhaps she was killed along with the other three, and Sarah never did get a new governess. If not, then Sarah’s ghost killed three people when she sent Vicki back in time. Sarah has always been nice to people we liked, and has declared her allegiance to goodness. But she is also pretty clumsy, so she might have killed them inadvertently.
The missed opportunity is that Vicki could have entered 1795 at the scene of the accident. Had she been found in the wreckage, in Phyllis’ dress, with a wound that kept her from speaking for the first week of the segment, it would make sense that she was taken for the new governess. Of course, we wouldn’t have to see a carriage- some sound effects and a shot of Vicki on the ground, with some smudges on her face and the rim of a wagon wheel partly visible near her, would have been plenty. Surely the budget would have allowed that much.
Had Vicki been mute for the first week of the story, we could have seen her face and heard her thoughts in pre-recorded voiceovers as she saw Barnabas and Sarah and recognized them; we could have seen her face but not heard her thoughts as she saw other familiar actors in new roles, leaving it open whether she saw them as the same people she knew in the 1960s. By the time she had regained the ability to speak, she would have caught on that she had to pretend to be Phyllis Wick, to be a native of the eighteenth century, and to be new to Collinsport.
That way, she would start off with a reasonable chance of making a go of life in that era. Moreover, as we were drawn to Barnabas when we watched him trying to pass as a native of the twentieth century, we could be excited to see Vicki try to present herself as a native of the eighteenth. As it is, she is constantly drawing attention to herself as an alien, so much so that it is hardly likely the Collinses would want her in their house in any capacity, certainly not as tutor to their beloved daughter. Moreover, starting Dark Shadows 3.0 with Vicki doing what Barnabas did in Dark Shadows 2.0, while Barnabas would take the role Vicki played in their relationship then, as a benevolent if uncomprehending friend, would shed new light on both characters and on their stories. What she does instead is to annoy us and make it difficult to care about her at all.
We do get a brief inversion of Vicki’s relationship with her charge from the 1960s, strange and troubled boy David Collins. When Vicki first met David in #4, he greeted her with “I hate you!” and she assured him that they were going to be good friends. Vicki certainly does not hate Sarah, but she would appear to any observer who did not know what we know about her to be mentally ill, just as David appeared to be when first we saw him. It is little Sarah who cheerfully assures Vicki that they will be good friends. As her mental health is the least of Vicki’s problems now, so it turned out in 1966 that David’s difficulties stemmed, not from delusions, but from an all-too-accurate understanding of his metaphysical relationship to the world he lived in. Vicki rose to the challenge and became the companion and supporter David needed. In Sarah’s prediction that she and Vicki will be good friends, we therefore hear a promise that the show will develop a relationship between the two of them in which Sarah will emerge as Vicki’s confidant and protector.
The series was made with very little advance planning. Just a few weeks ago, we heard about a painting or drawing depicting Barnabas and Sarah as children of about the same age, yet today we see the forty two year old Jonathan Frid playing Barnabas as a fatherly figure to Sarah as played by ten year old Sharon Smyth. Still, they’ve put so much into the costumes and so much thought into the new characters that they must have meant for this segment to last more than a couple of weeks. Having Vicki insistently call everyone by the wrong names and then run around idiotically announcing information that she knows only because she is from 1967 puts her on the express train towards an insane asylum. If they don’t stop her doing those things right quick, they will have written themselves into a corner before they’ve got their money’s worth out of the work they have already done.
The episode looks very different from anything we’ve seen on Dark Shadows before. The series has been in color for months now, but there have only been one or two days when they managed to use color as anything more than an occasional special effect. Today, they are working from a palette of pinks and greens that give a sense of lightness and good cheer that is altogether new to the show. It doesn’t really play out in the visual strategy of the episode- the story they are telling in pictures is aimed chiefly at the majority of viewers who are watching on black and white sets. But for those who do have color television, it is unmistakable that this is not the same show that ended on Friday.
Yesterday’s episode ended with vampire Barnabas Collins telling his distant cousin and newly acquired blood thrall Carolyn that he would punish his associate Julia Hoffman. Carolyn smiled delightedly when she asked “Are you going to kill her?”
Today begins with a reprise of that scene. But there is a difference. Now, it is Barnabas who brings up the idea of killing Julia. Carolyn reacts with horror, tries to talk him out of it, says she won’t be part of a murder, and only reluctantly yields to him.
This instant retcon is disappointing to regular viewers for four reasons. First, while we can accept the show changing course from time to time, we do expect the story to build on itself as a reward to us for watching every day. If they’re going to pull a U-turn as abruptly as this, it may as well be an anthology series. Second, Carolyn’s reluctance to go along with Barnabas’ evil plans is nothing new to us- even her lines are recycled from objections her predecessor Willie and Julia herself had made to Barnabas’ earlier declarations that he intended to kill someone or other. Third, Nancy Barrett was tremendously fun to watch as a happy assistant murderer. She was nowhere near done exploring the possibilities of that persona.
The fourth disappointment goes deeper. It’s easy enough to see why the writers wouldn’t want Carolyn to rejoice in her situation for an indefinitely long period. As Stephen Robinson put it in a comment on Danny Horn’s Dark Shadows Every Day, “There’s no conflict [if] Barnabas’s partner in crime is a fully willing psychopath. They would just stand around going bwah-ha-ha.” But the excitement in the first four episodes of this week came from that very lack of dramatic possibility. It was so clear Carolyn’s relationship to Barnabas could not stay as it was for very long that we’re waiting for some big event to change it at any moment. When they slide back to the same old stuff we’ve already been through with Willie and Julia, that excitement gives way to the sinking feeling that nothing much is going to change in the foreseeable future.
Dark Shadows Commentary 