When Dark Shadows began, one of the most important relationships was that between matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard and her brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins. Liz and Roger each had a terrible secret to hide. In the work of hiding, they embodied opposite extremes. Liz was motivated to conceal her secret by a fear that she would damage the reputation of the Collins family and the fortunes of its members. Her morbidly intense concern for the family’s position both made her a prisoner in her home and gave her a certain air of nobility. Roger’s motives for hiding his secret were wholly selfish, and he was a symbol of lack of family feeling. So much so that he squandered his entire inheritance, jumped at a chance to sell the ancestral seat to his sworn enemy, and openly hated his own son.
Since Roger was living in Liz’ house as her guest and working in her business as an employee, it fell to her to rein in her impossibly irresponsible younger brother. But the very quality that led her to try to exercise authority over him undercut her efforts to do so. Liz’ devotion to the Collins family compelled her to try to keep Roger on the strait and narrow path, but that same devotion prevented her from taking any action against him so harsh that it might actually deter him from misconduct. Further, her own secret compromised her moral authority and kept her from engaging with anyone outside the family. So she wound up less as a commanding matriarch than as a bossy big sister.
Liz and Roger both let go of their secrets, Roger in #201, Liz in #270. Roger is still far from heroic, but he no longer gives Liz the nightmares he once did. Liz is still mindful of the family’s good name, but there is nothing keeping her from following through on whatever orders she might give. So Liz and Roger’s Bossy Big Sister/ Bratty Little Brother dynamic is no longer a productive story element.
Now, the show is reintroducing the same dynamic with another pair of characters. Mad scientist Julia Hoffman is conducting an experiment which she hopes will turn vampire Barnabas Collins into a real boy. When Barnabas threatens to murder her, she becomes impatient and tells him to stop being ridiculous. When he threatens to murder other people, she threatens to discontinue the experiment unless he starts behaving. He usually responds to Julia’s orders by pouting, sulking, and giving in to her.
In the opening scene, Julia was in Barnabas’ house. He told her that he was likely to kill Roger’s ten year old son David because he thinks David might know that he is a vampire. Julia demanded that he leave David alone, prompting him to walk out of his own house. She then followed him to the old cemetery north of town, where Barnabas heard her footsteps in the distance and she hid behind a tree.
This woman holds a medical doctorate and is qualified in two unrelated specialties.
Barnabas enters the Tomb of the Collinses. Julia confronts him there, insisting he tell her what secret about the place he is keeping from her. He demands that she leave and threatens to kill her if she does not. He tells her that he ought to stash her corpse nearby, “along with”- then interrupts himself. Regular viewers know that Barnabas killed seagoing con man Jason McGuire in #275 and buried him in the secret chamber inside the tomb in #276. Jason has barely been mentioned since, not once in any scene featuring Julia. When she asks Barnabas what he is talking about, he says “Never mind.”
Julia presses Barnabas with “You’ve shared all your other secrets with me. You have no choice but to share this one with me too.” The logic of this statement eludes me, but all Barnabas can do when Julia has made it is to walk backward away from her, staggering into a corner and pouting at her.
Barnabas, stunned by the force of Julia’s reasoning.
Meanwhile, Sam and Dave are walking through the cemetery.
No, not that Sam and Dave. Local artist Sam Evans and addled quack Dr Dave Woodard have noticed that a series of odd occurrences have taken place in the vicinity of the tomb lately and have come to the cemetery to investigate. They run into the old caretaker, who delays them with his usual warnings about the unquiet spirits of the dead.
Alas, the final appearance of Daniel F. Keyes as the Caretaker.
Back in the tomb, Barnabas is telling Julia everything she wants to know. He lets her into the secret chamber and explains that he was imprisoned there in a coffin for many years, freed only when the luckless Willie Loomis accidentally released him to prey upon the living. Julia listens, showing pity as Barnabas recounts his woes.
Barnabas finds David’s pocket knife, proving that the boy was in the chamber and convincing Barnabas that he must kill him. He takes the knife close to Julia in a gesture that might be threatening, were its blade intact. The broken blade negates the threat and emphasizes Barnabas’ powerlessness before Julia. Since 1967 was the heyday of Freudianism in the USA, it is likely that many in the original audience would have seen it not only as a useless tool, but also as a phallic symbol. As such, not only its brokenness, but also the fact that it was made to be carried by a little boy, would make the point that Barnabas brings no sexual potency to his relationship with Julia. Her own behavior towards him may be childlike, but in her eyes he is a smaller child than she is.
Julia protests, claiming that someone else might have left the knife there. Barnabas dismisses her assertions, but does not regain control of the situation. As they prepare to leave the chamber, he kneels and she stands over him, watching him open the panel.
On his knees before her.
They hear Sam and Dave approach. (Still not the cool ones.) They scurry back into the secret chamber, as David had done when he heard Barnabas and Willie approaching the tomb in #310. They listen to the men discuss the facts that have brought them to the tomb, and grow steadily more alarmed as they realize how close they are to discovering Barnabas’ terrible secret.
This is the first episode not to include any actors who were signed to the show at the time production began. The character of Sam Evans was at that time played by a loud man called Mark Allen; Allen’s last episode was #22, taped on 12 July 1966, and David Ford’s first was #35, taped on 29 July. The Caretaker was introduced in #154, Barnabas in #210,* Dave Woodard in #219,** and Julia in #265.
*As the hand of stand-in Alfred Dillay- Jonathan Frid wouldn’t appear until #211. Though the portrait he sat for was on screen in #204, and was identified as that of Barnabas Collins in #205.
**Played by Richard Woods. Robert Gerringer took over the part in #231.
Strange and troubled boy David Collins got himself trapped in the secret chamber of the old Collins mausoleum in #310, and everyone has been searching for him ever since. Most of them want to get him home safe, but his distant cousin, Barnabas, has a different agenda. He suspects that David has learned that he is a vampire, and is determined to be the first to find him so that he can kill him.
Friday, David got out of the secret chamber and walked outside, straight into Barnabas’ hands. Today, we open with a reprise of that scene. After Barnabas greets his young cousin with a richly sinister “Hel-lo, David!,” he questions him sharply. He expresses dissatisfaction with David’s answers, then tells him that because no one is at home in the great house of Collinwood, he will be taking David to his own house. David grows more and more uncomfortable. Just as he is coming to be really frightened, the voice of local man Burke Devlin calls his name.
When Burke reaches them, David throws his arms around him and Barnabas squirms guiltily. Burke dislikes Barnabas, and gives him a suspicious look while he and David explain what has happened. When Burke says that there are people at home in the great house, David flashes a look of alarm at Barnabas. Barnabas says that no one had answered when he knocked on the door earlier, so he assumed everyone had joined the search. The two men take David home.
There, David eats a sandwich in his room while his father Roger asks him where he has been. This conversation is just magnificent. Roger is trying to be stern, but is such a flagrantly neglectful father that David knows full well that he can’t be bothered to punish him. So while Roger puts a series of pointed questions to him, David ignores him and muses aloud about Barnabas. “Barnabas is mysterious, isn’t he, Father?…You know, we don’t know anything about him. He just showed up one night.” Roger keeps urging David to forget about Barnabas and start answering his questions, but gets nowhere. Louis Edmonds and David Henesy were both talented comic actors, and they worked well together, so it’s no surprise this scene is laugh-out-loud funny.
Along with the comedy comes the thrill of a potential change in the show. In his post about this episode, Danny Horn writes: “It’s a great moment. It’s like the ‘logical explanation’ spell was suddenly broken, and David just realized how bizarre his life is.” The structure of Dark Shadows’ storylines has been that someone has a terrible secret, they are deep in denial about the extent to which the secret is deforming their lives, and when they finally let go of their secrets they are free. So matriarch Liz had a terrible secret that kept her from leaving her house for over eighteen years, she revealed the secret in #270, and now she’s happy to go anywhere. She’s on an extended visit to Boston at the moment. Roger had a secret connected with an incident for which Burke went to prison years ago and he spent all his time making a fool of himself as he struggled to keep it hidden; he admitted the truth in #201, and since then he has been a carefree fellow who can make anyone laugh. So the Collins family curse that Barnabas embodies is made up chiefly of denial, and it can be defeated by facing facts. If David has seen through all the lies and is willing to reckon with the truth, he has the power to bring everything to a conclusion. So when he says that Barnabas “just showed up one night,” we catch a glimpse of what it would be like if the entire series came to its ultimate climax.
We end with David still in his room, telling well-meaning governess Vicki that he feels someone evil is watching him. We cut to Barnabas in his own house, staring out the window at the great house in the distance, thinking his sinister thoughts. David’s feeling should be familiar to him- when his mother, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, was staying in the cottage in the estate, she often stared out her window and caused David to have nightmares.
Laura was a threat to David because the basic conditions of her existence drove to kill her son. Barnabas’ threat to him is a result of circumstances that were always likely to arise, but that might not have, and that might yet be changed. So when Laura was on the show, the suspense was how she would be destroyed before she could kill David. Now with Barnabas, there is a question whether he will try to kill David at all. So the suspense is more complicated, and there are more options for pacing. The plot doesn’t have to be either glacial or rapid, as it did with Laura, but can move at any of a variety of speeds depending on which of the many possible directions they decide to take the story.
This one is an exercise in nostalgia for people who have been watching Dark Shadows from the beginning.
We remember the days when high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins was the show’s chief villain, a man with so little sense of family loyalty that he openly hated his own son. That son, strange and troubled boy David, repaid his father’s hatred by trying to murder him. Roger has been off-screen for over six weeks; when he comes back today, the first thing he sees is the sheriff’s car in the driveway, and the first thing he hears is that the sheriff has come about David. He stiffens, and in a voice dripping with distaste asks “What about David?” When well-meaning governess Vicki explains that David is not suspected of a crime, but is missing, Roger scolds her for failing to earn her pay by keeping track of the boy. He seems to be far more irked by the money wasted on Vicki’s salary than by David’s disappearance.
When heiress Carolyn and hardworking young fisherman Joe come to report on their fruitless search for David, Roger turns his disdain on them, berating them for letting him get away in the first place. Seeing Joe and Carolyn together brings back memories of the early months of the show, when the two of them were dating and there was a whole storyline about how bored they were with each other. For that matter, we were reminded of the first 40 weeks when Vicki hesitated to tell Roger that she had been on a date with her depressing fiancé Burke Devlin- Burke had been Roger’s sworn enemy until he decided to peace out in #201.
Roger agrees to go with Joe on a search of the countryside. When Vicki and Carolyn are left alone in the drawing room, they have a conversation about how tired they both are. Each of them urges the other to take a nap, and each responds that she can’t sleep. Writer Malcolm Marmorstein was fired off the show a few days ago; he was perfectly capable of taking a conversation like that and making a whole episode out of it. Today’s episode is filler from the point of view of the overall plot, but the ludicrous pointlessness of this conversation is a rarity in the post-Marmorstein era.
Roger and Joe’s search is represented in a couple of shots done in front of a green screen showing outdoor locations. That casts our minds back to the black and white episodes, which occasionally spliced in location inserts. Most of that footage was taken before the series started principal photography, and none of it can be reused now that the show is in color. The last of these inserts came in #275, when Carolyn took a walk on the beach. Now Dark Shadows is shut within the doors of 442 West 54th Street forever, and its only memory of the outside is in these green screen shots.
Roger continues his flagrant display of indifference to David throughout this sequence. When he sees men in blue uniforms searching for David, he makes some acerbic comments about the incompetence of the local police.* When Joe points out a nearby cemetery where odd events have been taking place of late, Roger remarks on its dreariness and on the generally low aesthetic standard of cemeteries in central Maine. When Joe suggests searching there, Roger is appalled, and joins him only with loud reluctance.
After Roger says “down” meaning “up,” which is a feature of Collinsport English we heard in #12, In the cemetery, we get another reminder of the show’s past. The Caretaker, a doddering old fool played hilariously by Daniel F. Keyes, had a significant part in the story of Roger’s ex-wife, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, appearing in #154, #157, #179, and #180, and appeared again in episodes #209 and #211, which dealt with the introduction of vampire Barnabas Collins.
When we find him today, the Caretaker is inspecting the area around the Tomb of the Collinses. Unknown to him, there is a secret chamber hidden inside this tomb. David is trapped in that chamber. The Caretaker opens the door to the visible part of the tomb and asks if anyone is there. He hears David’s voice calling for help from the other side of the wall, and jumps to the conclusion that he is hearing a bunch of ghosts. “There is no help for you!” he cries out. As he hurries away, he shouts, “You must rest!”
David is nothing if not obedient. A minute after the Caretaker told him he must rest, he sits down and falls asleep.
The Caretaker runs into Roger and Joe. He asks them if they are alive. As “You must rest!” harked back to his constant refrain in his previous appearances that “The dead must rest!,” so this greeting echoes his first line in his first scene, when he asked Vicki and her instantly forgettable boyfriend Frank if they were alive. Frank responded to that one calmly; with his personality, it was a question he probably got from a lot of people. By contrast, Joe is disbelieving and Roger scoffs.
When they tell the Caretaker they are looking for a boy named David, he replies “Yes, he is here,” then describes the death of a boy named David who is buried in one of the graves. His compulsion to tell us the circumstances of people’s deaths is another trait of his we remember from the Laura days, especially in his oft-repeated phrase “died by fire!”
The Caretaker tells them that he heard the voices of the dead in the tomb. He urges Roger and Joe to stay away from it. Roger tells him he will be happy to oblige, but Joe insists they search there. Roger declares that he is embarrassed by the very idea of going inside such a place, and says that if anyone finds out he did he will blame Joe. Again, Roger can barely restrain his eagerness to give up the search for David.
David is too deeply asleep to hear Roger and Joe in the outer chamber. Since they are there, Roger decides to take a moment and look at the plaques naming the people buried in the tomb. After all, they are his “incestors – incestors! I mean ancestors.” This is one of the most famous bloopers in the entire series. If Louis Edmonds hadn’t stopped, glanced back at Joel Crothers, repeated “incestors,” and corrected himself, I doubt many people would have noticed it. It was a suprisingly unprofessional moment, but who would have it otherwise? To the extent that the episode is a retrospective of Dark Shadows so far, it wouldn’t be complete without an attention-grabbing mess-up. If the camera isn’t going to drift away from the mark and show a crew member eating a sandwich, “incestors” is the least we can expect.
Since the episode is so much a review of the show’s bygone themes, it is understandable that some viewers are disturbed by a line in the first scene. Roger mentions to Vicki that, while he has just returned from a trip to Boston, matriarch Liz is staying on in that city a while longer. The Dark Shadows wiki objects: “Elizabeth has decided to stay in Boston. This is incredible, since she was still afraid to leave Collinwood a few weeks ago, even hesitant to go to the Old House.”
I don’t find it incredible. Liz’ hesitation about going out was last mentioned in #280, and by #298 she was not only quick to accept Burke’s suggestion that she go with him to inspect a property on the other side of town, but she was the one who talked Carolyn into coming along with them. Neither Carolyn nor Burke expressed surprise that Liz was the one who was enthusiastic about getting out of the house. With that, Dark Shadows told us that it had no further use for the “Liz is a recluse” theme. They may be taking us on a stroll down memory lane today, but they aren’t going to take us all the way to that particular dead end.
*In all fairness, the Collinsport police are exceptionally incompetent.
Vampire Barnabas Collins is giving a costume party in his home at the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood. His distant relatives, the living members of the Collins family, are dressed as their ancestors from Barnabas’ own time as a living being. The whole thing was impossibly dull until the mischievous and witty Roger Collins suggested they have a séance. Now well-meaning governess Vicki is in a trance, channeling the spirit of Josette Collins.
The last time Josette took possession of Vicki at a séance was in #170 and #171. At that time, Josette delivered her message in French. Since Vicki could not speak French (but Alexandra Moltke speaks it fluently,) that was evidence enough to convince even the most skeptical that something was going on. Today Josette speaks English. The characters are all sure that she is the one speaking, but it doesn’t have the same effect on the audience as did that earlier irruption of a language we had not expected to hear.
I do wonder if the decision not to use French came at the last moment. Even though Vicki/ Josette’s voice is loud and clear, the others make a show of struggling to understand what she is saying and seize on a word here and there (“Something about ‘run!'”,) as people do when they are listening to someone speak a language they don’t quite understand. Perhaps writer Joe Caldwell wasn’t quite up to writing in French, and the Writer’s Guild wouldn’t let Alexandra Moltke Isles or any other Francophones on set make a translation. Or maybe they thought that the switch to French wouldn’t be as effective the second time as it was the first.
Josette is telling the story of her death. A man was chasing her, and fleeing him she threw herself off the peak of Widow’s Hill to the rocks below. Barnabas interrupts and breaks Vicki’s trance.
When the others scold him for stopping Josette before she could reveal the name of the man who ran her off the cliff, Barnabas says that the name could not have been of any importance, since whoever it was who drove Josette to kill herself must have been dead for “almost 200 years.” The others do not suspect that he was that man. They do not know that he is a reanimated corpse; they think he’s just English.
When Dark Shadows started, the stories of the tragic death of Josette and of the building of the great house of Collinwood were set in the 1830s. In the weeks before Barnabas’ introduction in April of 1967, they implied that Josette’s dates were much earlier, sometime in the 18th century. Last week, they plumped for the 1830s again. But Barnabas’ line about “almost 200 years ago” puts us back to the 1700s.
After the séance ends, we have evidence that this bit of background continuity might start to matter. Vicki looks at the landing on top of the staircase and sees the ghost of Barnabas’ 9 year old sister Sarah watching the party.
It seems that when Barnabas was freed to prey upon the living, he unknowingly brought Sarah with him. Sarah has been popping in and out quite a bit the last few weeks, and she has already made some important plot points happen. We’re starting to wonder just how many more beings will emerge from the supernatural back-world into the main action of the show. The opening voiceover today tells us that “the mists that have protected the present from the past are lifting,” so perhaps they will have to nail these dates down sooner rather than later.
The whole party had accepted instantly that Vicki was channeling the spirit of Josette and none of them ever comes to doubt it. But when she says that she saw a little girl at the head of the stairs, they get all incredulous. By the end of the episode, Vicki will have encountered so much disbelief on this point that she herself will decide that she must have been hallucinating.
Back in the great house, Roger is still overjoyed that the séance turned out to be so exciting. His sister Liz and Liz’ daughter Carolyn consider this to be in terrible taste. But Roger won’t give an inch. He has some great lines, exiting with “I think that all of the unhappiness of all of my ancestors is my rightful heritage, and you shouldn’t try to keep it from me. Good night, ladies.” Both Patrick McCray, in his Dark Shadows Daybook post about this episode, and Danny Horn, in his Dark Shadows Every Day post, make insightful remarks as they analyze the fun Louis Edmonds has playing Roger.
Carolyn approaches Vicki to speak privately. She tells her that she isn’t bothered that fake Shemp Burke Devlin is dating Vicki. Vicki’s response to this is “What?” Carolyn reminds Vicki that she used to be interested in Burke and was initially jealous of Burke’s interest in her. But she assures her she doesn’t feel that way any longer. Vicki smiles, nods, and looks away. Carolyn then says “He’s really very nice!” Vicki answers “Who?” “Burke!” says Carolyn. Again, Vicki smiles, nods, and looks away.
This is probably supposed to tell us that Vicki is coming under some kind of spell associated with Barnabas, but in fact it is likely to suggest something quite different to the audience. Burke was originally a dashing action hero played by Mitch Ryan. Dark Shadows never really came up with very much for a dashing action hero to do, but Ryan’s skills as an actor and his charismatic personality always made it seem that he was about to do something interesting. Several weeks ago, Ryan was fired off the show after he came to the set too drunk to work.
Since then, the part of Burke has been played by Anthony George. George was a well-trained actor with an impressive resume, and by all accounts was a nice guy. But he cannot dig anything interesting out of the character of Burke as he stands at this point in the series. The only scene in which George has shown any energy so far was in #267, when Burke had lost a dime in a pay phone. The rest of the time, he has blended so completely into the scenery that it is no wonder Vicki can’t remember him from one line to the next.
Back in the Old House, Barnabas talks to Josette’s portrait. In the months from #70 to #192, it was established that Josette can hear you if you do this. Several times she manifested herself either as a light glowing from the surface of the portrait or as a figure emerging from it. In #102, we saw strange and troubled boy David Collins having a conversation with the portrait- we could hear only his side of it, but it was clear that Josette was answering him.
The first time we saw Barnabas in the Old House, in #212, he spoke to the portrait. At that point, Josette was not yet his lost love. It seemed that she was his grandmother, and that she had sided against him in some terrible fight with his father Joshua. He ordered Josette and Joshua to leave the house to him. The next time David tried to talk to the portrait, in #240, it seemed that they had complied- David could no longer sense Josette’s presence in it.
Barnabas had spoken briefly to the portrait the other day, but today he makes his first substantial address to it since banishing Josette and Joshua in #212. Again he entreats her to go, but for a very different reason. Now he says that she is lost to him forever, and must allow him to live in the present. Since he has been scheming to capture a woman, erase her personality, replace it with Josette’s, and then kill her so that she will rise from the grave as a vampiric Josette, this sounds like he has decided to make a big change in his relations to the other characters.
It turns out that he hasn’t, but the writers have decided to change their relationship to their source material. Barnabas’ original plan was identical to that which Imhotep, the title character in the 1932 film The Mummy, had pursued in his attempt to replicate his relationship with his long-dead love Princess Ankh-esen-amun. Imhotep met Helen Grosvenor, whom he regarded as the reincarnation of Ankh-esen-amun because they were both played by Zita Johanns, and subjected her to the same treatment Barnabas first inflicted on Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, and now plans to try on Vicki.
Maggie is played by Kathryn Leigh Scott. The audience in 1967 would not have known that Miss Scott also played the ghost of Josette in some of her most important appearances. However, they would have noticed when David saw Maggie dressed as Josette in #240 he assumed it was the ghost, because her face was “exactly the same” as it had been when she manifested herself to him previously. So we have the same reason to believe that Maggie is the reincarnation of Josette that Imhotep had to believe that Helen was the reincarnation of the princess, and we therefore assume that Barnabas, like Imhotep, was trying to take possession of both the ghost and the living woman.
But after Barnabas tells Josette to go away, he declares that if he is to have her, she must be someone from the present. This sequence of words is nonsensical in itself, but harks back to a theory he had laid out to his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie in #274: “Take the right individual, place her under the proper conditions and circumstances, apply the required pressure, and a new personality is created.” Jonathan Frid would always sound and move like Boris Karloff, but now his project of Josettery is inspired less by Imhotep than by the various “mad doctors” Karloff played in the 1940s. Of course, in the 1960s real-life mad scientists such as Stanley Milgram and John Money were performing experiments on human subjects for which Barnabas’ statement might have served as a motto. So Barnabas is coming to be less a merger of Dracula and Imhotep than of Dracula and Dr Frankenstein.
One of the devices by which Barnabas tries to place women “under the proper conditions and circumstances” for Josettification is a music box which he bought for the original Josette and may or may not have given her.* He gives this to Vicki. To his satisfaction, she is reduced to a complete stupor when she hears it play. She is in that state when the episode ends.
* In #236, he says he never had the chance to give it to her. In subsequent episodes, he implies the opposite.
The first major villain on Dark Shadows was high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins, played by Louis Edmonds. Edmonds was a master of the sarcastic remark, so that Roger was often funny. But no matter how often he made the audience laugh, Roger was never a comic villain. That requires a character we can empathize with as we watch them scheme and plot, scramble and improvise, in pursuit of goals that could not be achieved without ruining all the fun. We laugh when we recognize our own foibles in an outlandish character, and laugh again when we realize that our ability to feel with others encompasses even those whose feelings have led them to do dastardly deeds.
Roger’s personality was too cold, his motives too contemptible for us to empathize with him. Where a comic villain thinks fast and puts himself in ridiculous situations, Roger stuck with his fixed ideas, using the same tactics time and again to bully his unwilling co-conspirator Sam to stick with their plan. Even when he bumbled about with a damning piece of evidence, a fountain pen left at a crime scene, he was never the coyote caught in his own over-elaborate trap, but a criminal in a police procedural. He was a melodramatic villain who was only incidentally funny.
The first supernatural menace on the show was Roger’s ex-wife, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, played by Diana Millay. Millay was hilarious, every bit as funny as Louis Edmonds. It was a shame the two of them didn’t play a married couple in a long-running comedy. They could have raised sarcasm to heights previously unknown to humankind. But while Millay gets laughs every time the script gives her the least chance, Laura was even less of a comic villain than Roger.
It is clear that Laura is a malign presence from beyond the grave and that, if she is not stopped, she will burn her young son David to death. But everything else about her is an impenetrable mystery. She is not part of a familiar mythology, and even the most basic questions about her remain unanswered. We cannot empathize with her motives, since we cannot begin to guess what her motives are or even be sure if she has motives.
The first comic villain on Dark Shadows was seagoing con man Jason McGuire, played by Dennis Patrick. Jason had his first comic turns only after he had been on the show for weeks, during which time we had been subjected to many iterations of a dreary ritual in which he made a demand of reclusive matriarch Liz, Liz resisted, he threatened to expose her terrible secret, and she capitulated. When his henchman Willie slips out of Jason’s control and he starts scrambling to contain the damage Willie is doing to his plan, Patrick finally gets a chance to play Jason as a comic villain, and the result is very engaging. But those scenes are scattered too thinly through Jason’s long-running, relentlessly monotonous storyline to make him a success as a comic villain.
Now, the show has struck gold. Vampire Barnabas Collins is becoming a pop culture phenomenon and bringing the show the first good ratings it has ever had. They have to keep Barnabas on the show indefinitely, and he has to be the most important character. That presents a practical difficulty. Vampires usually figure in folklore and fiction as unstoppable killing machines. Daytime soap operas explore the shifting relationships among large casts of characters. It’s going to be hard to maintain that cast if Barnabas sets about murdering everyone. To square the circle, they try to redefine Barnabas as a comic villain.
Barnabas is giving a costume party for his distant cousins, the living members of the Collins family. He has invited well-meaning governess Vicki to attend and to wear the dress of the legendary Josette Collins. In the first 39 weeks of Dark Shadows, Vicki had developed a close friendship with Josette’s ghost, so she is excited about this. For his part, Barnabas has borrowed an evil scheme from the 1932 film The Mummy. He will erase Vicki’s personality and replace it with Josette’s, then kill her so that she will rise as a vampiric Josette. So he is glad she likes the dress.
Barnabas asks Vicki to come to his house and help him pick out the antique clothes that the family will wear at the party. She enthusiastically agrees, saying that she loves to go through trunks full of old clothes. The clothes are in a trunk in Josette’s old room, which Barnabas has restored.
In the room, we see the ghost of Barnabas’ 9 year old sister Sarah sitting on the trunk. She vanishes a second before Barnabas and Vicki enter. Both of them have a strong feeling that someone just left the room. Barnabas tries to dismiss the sensation as nervousness, but Vicki has had too much experience with ghosts to be put off so easily.
Vicki has been our point of view character for most of the series. At first, that was because she was a newcomer to the great estate of Collinwood and the nearby town of Collinsport, and so we would learn everything we needed to know as we listened to people explain things to her. Later, it was because she was the key protagonist in the stories, so that the action got going once she knew what was going on. So when Barnabas equals Vicki’s sensitivity to Sarah’s presence, he is presented to us as another possible point of view character.
Barnabas keeps talking about the Collinses’ eighteenth century ancestors in terms that make it obvious that he knew them, so that he more than once has to clean up after himself with remarks like “I would imagine.” He does alarm Vicki when he blurts out something about what will happen to her should she “become Josette.” He hastens to say that he means that Vicki will become her for the duration of the party.
“Become Josette?”
Vicki goes back to the great house and talks with Liz about the party. Liz smiles happily, the first time we’ve seen this expression on her face in the whole run of the series.
Happy Liz
Vicki goes on about Barnabas’ connection to the past, saying that he gives the impression of someone who really is misplaced in time. She has the feeling that he needs to recreate a bygone era, and that he is doomed to be unhappy because of the impossibility of traveling backward in time. Vicki does not know what Barnabas’ plans for her are, but she understands his motives perfectly and empathizes with him deeply. That Vicki, Barnabas’ intended victim, can feel this way suggests that we can, too.
Back in Barnabas’ house, Sarah reappears in Josette’s room and sees her blue dress. She is excited to find it. She looks at her reflection in the mirror and smiles. Her good cheer is emphasized when her musical cue, an excerpt from “London Bridge,” is for the first time played in a major key.
Sarah’s reflection looks like it has never seen a ghost before
The minor key was appropriate during Sarah’s previous appearances. The first several times we saw her, Sarah was associated with Barnabas’ imprisonment of Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. Maggie was the victim of Barnabas’ first mad attempt at Josettery, and Sarah intervened just in time to keep Barnabas from killing her. The other day, Barnabas killed Jason, and we saw Sarah when Barnabas was forcing Willie to help him hide his old friend’s corpse. Barnabas isn’t killing anyone today, so Sarah can be a bit more cheerful.
Sarah helps to establish Barnabas as a comic villain. As the ghostly sister who returned to the upper world when Barnabas was loosed to prey upon the living, Sarah and he are part of the same eruption from Dark Shadows‘ supernatural back-world into its main continuity. Perhaps she personifies his conscience, certainly she gives him an occasion to make schmaltzy speeches about his days as a human. More important than either of these, when we see that Barnabas’ 9 year old sister is his most powerful adversary, we begin to wonder just how seriously we should take him.
Closing Miscellany
Yesterday and today, Alexandra Moltke Isles delivered the recorded voiceover monologue at the beginning of the episode. The first 270 times she did this, it was in character as Vicki. Now, they’ve given up the idea that Vicki or any other one character will eventually find out about everything that we see on screen, so the openings are delivered by whatever actress is available as a nameless external narrator.
In those first 270 outings, Mrs Isles sounded like Vicki. She adopted Vicki’s distinctive way of speaking, carefully articulating one word at a time and often ending sentences with surprising little inflections- a curl of uncertainty here, a touch of breathy optimism there, a falling note of despair in another place. The voiceovers were usually remarks about the weather or the sea that were supposed to involve some vague metaphor for events in the story, so that it is open to question whether it was really worth Mrs Isles’ time to put so much effort into creating a character with them. But I guess a pro is a pro, and it was a matter of course that she would do her best no matter how little she had to work with.
In these last two, she has used a relatively flat voice, with none of Vicki’s particular vocal traits. The pacing has been structured, not around sentences, but around an attempt to convey an overall sense of urgency. They sound very much like The Narrator. I wonder what Mrs Isles would have made of The Narrator if the voiceover passages had extended beyond the opening moments and run through the episodes.
There is a famous production error under the closing credits, when a stagehand shows up in the window, realizes he’s on camera, and makes himself all the more conspicuous when he tries to escape from his predicament.
The first shot of the first episode of Dark Shadows featured well-meaning governess Vicki sitting on a train next to a window in which we saw the reflection of dashing action hero Burke Devlin. Vicki was on her way to the great estate of Collinwood, where she hoped to learn who her birth parents were. Burke was on his way to the village of Collinsport, where he hoped to exact revenge on high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins and other residents of Collinwood.
Vicki’s quest to learn her origins never took off, and hasn’t been mentioned for months. Burke’s pursuit of revenge drove a lot of action in the first twenty-one weeks of the show, but has been fading ever further into the background in the nineteen weeks since. Today, it fizzles out altogether.
In his original story bible for Dark Shadows, titled Shadows on the Wall, Art Wallace had proposed that Burke’s pressure on Roger would culminate in Roger’s death. Roger was to inadvertently reveal to Vicki that he was guilty of the crime that sent Burke to prison long ago. Roger would then try to push Vicki off the cliff at Widow’s Hill, but would miss her and go over the edge himself. The show discarded this resolution when Roger’s relationships with several other characters proved to be consistently interesting, particularly the Bossy Big Sister/ Bratty Little Brother dynamic between him and reclusive matriarch Liz. Besides, Louis Edmonds had such a gift for comic dialogue that he could get a laugh out of even the lines in which Malcolm Marmorstein attempted to be funny. So they couldn’t afford to kill Roger off.
Further, they have gone over Roger’s crime so frequently and made all the details so clear to everyone concerned that a trial wouldn’t give the audience any new information about what happened or show us any characters reacting to shocking news. It would be like a real trial, where all the evidence has gone through a discovery process and there are no surprise witnesses. No one is going to put that on commercial television in 1967.
So when Burke shows up at the great house of Collinwood with drunken artist Sam Evans, who has finally admitted that he saw what happened and took Roger’s bribe to keep quiet about it, the only real question is how Burke can leave the status quo in place.
Burke demands that Roger and Liz meet with him and Sam in the drawing room. Burke demonstrates his mastery by closing the drawing room doors, something that Liz, the mistress of Collinwood, usually does, and that Vicki did several times during the weeks when Liz was away and she was effectively in charge of the place.*
Roger of course tries out a series of lies in his attempts to deny Burke and Sam’s charges, but Liz is convinced. When she picks up the telephone and calls the sheriff, Burke reaches in and disconnects her. He says that she doesn’t have to turn Roger in- it is enough for him to know that she really would do it. She declares that she won’t let Burke keep coming back and using Roger’s guilt to blackmail the family, apparently intending to place another call. Burke says that he will never bring it up again, provided Roger confesses here and now in front of the three of them. He does. Burke tells Roger that he used to want to see him rot in jail but that now he realizes that “People like you rot wherever they are.” Burke and Sam leave, and that’s that as far as they are concerned.
During a few scenes scattered throughout the first forty weeks of Dark Shadows, Burke had considered relenting from his quest for vengeance. Those scenes hadn’t been developed in any great depth, and hadn’t been connected to each other. Only in the climactic week of the “Phoenix” storyline, when Burke and Roger briefly joined forces to save Roger’s young son David from death at the hands of his mother, blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, did we have a sustained glimpse of something other than all-consuming enmity between the two men. That was such an extreme situation, and was followed so quickly by a renewal of their hostilities, that Burke’s decision to peace out cannot be said to have any foundation in what we have seen the characters do so far. It is simply a convenient way of discarding a story element that has outlived its usefulness.
Most episodes of Dark Shadows have a cast of five actors. The rest are almost evenly divided between casts of six and casts of four. Today is a rarity with eight on screen. Six of these eight have been deeply involved in the Revenge of Burke Devlin storyline, and are at loose ends now that it has reached its abrupt conclusion. Burke, Roger, and Sam suddenly find themselves with nothing in particular to do. Also, flighty heiress Carolyn had a mad crush on Burke that alarmed her mother Liz and terrified her uncle Roger; that ended months ago, and she’s been a utility player ever since. Vicki is starting to date Burke; if Burke is no longer a threat to the family, there’s no obvious drama in that relationship, and she doesn’t have much else going on. David was as fascinated by Burke as Carolyn was; now that Laura is gone and he is happy with Vicki as his substitute mother, he’s pretty well settled in too.
We don’t see wildly indiscreet housekeeper Mrs Johnson today. She had come to Collinwood as Burke’s secret agent. Now that Burke is satisfied, presumably that’s over. Nor does Sam’s daughter Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town, appear. She’s been dating hardworking young fisherman Joe, rebuffing his suggestions that they think about marriage because she is worried about what is going on with her Pop. Now that Sam’s conflict with Roger has come to its conclusion, there isn’t any reason the two of them shouldn’t get married, or stay unmarried, or whatever. So today’s episode leaves nine of the eleven major characters with no specific connection to any unresolved storyline.
Indeed, there is only one ongoing narrative arc. Long before he wrote Shadows on the Wall, Art Wallace wrote “The House,” a 1954 episode of The Web, an anthology series produced for CBS by Mark Goodson and Bill Todman.** Wallace recycled the story of “The House” for a 1957 installment of an hourlong anthology, Goodyear Playhouse, on NBC. Alternating with Alcoa Theatre in a window known collectively as A Turn of Fate, Goodyear Playhouse featured many pilots. The only one that seems to have been picked up was My World and Welcome to It, which went to series after an interval of more than a decade. I haven’t seen Wallace’s Goodyear Playhouse episode, but the 1954 version is too thin to fill a half hour, so I can’t see that an hourlong reworking would have been likely to catch the eyes of networks that passed on so many other pilots presented in that series, including teleplays by Rod Serling and Paddy Chayefsky. Wallace incorporated the story of “The House” in Shadows on the Wall, and a couple of weeks ago Dark Shadows dredged it up.
Seagoing con man Jason McGuire presented himself at Collinwood, to Liz’ great dismay. So far, they have had five conversations, two of them in Friday’s episode. All have followed the same pattern. Jason and Liz meet in the drawing room; he makes a demand of her; she resists; he threatens to expose her terrible secret; she capitulates. It’s true that on Friday they varied this a bit. Roger was with them during the first session, so that they had to veil their meanings, and in the second session Jason finds that Liz is unable to meet his initial demand, so that he shifts to a second one. In the first scene, they have a lot to show us as Liz and Jason manage to communicate their usual messages without letting Roger in on anything, and in the second they show us that Jason puts a higher priority on keeping Liz under his control than on any particular item he might want her to give him, so they managed to be interesting that day.
Today, Jason and Liz have their sixth conversation. It isn’t in the drawing room this time, but in the basement. While looking for David, Vicki had caught Jason listening at the doors of the drawing room at the moment when Liz was talking about going to the police, and he had rushed up to his room and telephoned*** his associate Willie, telling him they should be ready to get out of town fast. This conversation lets the audience know that Jason’s threat to Liz is a bluff. David had then caught Jason trying to get into the locked room in the basement. David told Liz what he saw Jason doing. Liz then goes down to the basement herself and shines a flashlight directly into the camera. We can see her in the halo, but Jason cannot. He seems helpless while she shines the light at him.
Jason blinded by the light
Jason scrambles a bit to regain control of the situation. Liz tells him he must leave the house immediately. He finally puts into words what the audience has long since figured out is on Liz’ mind, that she killed her husband Paul Stoddard eighteen years ago, that Jason buried him in the room, and that Jason will take this information to the police if she does not comply with his demands. She yields.
Liz’ reaction is interesting in the light of her scenes with Roger. When Burke was in the room, she explained her determination to call the police by saying that blackmail is no life for anyone to live. After Burke and Sam have gone, Roger starts begging Liz to let him and David keep living in her house. She doesn’t seem to know what he is talking about. She says that “Everyone does terrible things,” a remark she had also made to Burke and that is certainly true of characters who last on soap operas. He wants to go on pleading with her, but she just walks off, deep in thought about something else.
Remembering those scenes, we see Liz not simply giving in to Jason, but making a decision to keep going along with him. That makes today’s iteration of Jason Threatens Liz a bit more worthwhile than were the first three, if not quite as lively as the two we saw Friday. We can see something going on in her mind that raises the possibility she might do something different next time.
Two actors have bad trouble with lines today. When Burke is supposed to be saying something very dramatic and powerful about “hypocrites,” Mitch Ryan is actually blabbering about “hippie-crippie… er… hippie-crizz.” And when David Collins meets his Aunt Liz on the stairs and tells her he saw Jason in the basement, David Henesy stumbles over so many lines he falls out of character. Eventually he gets enough of the words out that you can tell what he’s trying to say, but he never really recaptures David Collins’ rhythm and intonations.
This latter slip-up leads to a reminder that there are always people in the audience checking in to a series for the first time with any given episode, so that actors are subject to judgments that don’t take into account what they have done before. At the bottom of their post on this episode, John and Christine Scoleri transcribe a conversation with a friend of theirs who hadn’t seen any of the episodes before this one. He says “Those who think the kid playing David went to any kind of acting school, raise your hand. Now leave the auditorium, please.”
In fact, David Henesy had been working steadily as a professional actor for four years before joining the cast of Dark Shadows at the age of nine. During that time, he had studied under many teachers, among them Uta Hagen. Usually, that background shows through, even when a particular script gives him problems. For example, he had a lot of difficulty with his lines in #191, and I rated that one as one of his weaker efforts. But here’s what Patrick McCray said about it on his Dark Shadows Daybook:
The success of this installment rests on the narrow shoulders of David Henesy. At the end of a big Henesy episode or scene, it’s common to announce that the kid nailed it, and this episode is no exception. His scene partners have it easy. They have straightforward, high stakes objectives to pursue. Either David goes into the fire or he doesn’t. There are only so many ways that people can implore the kid to come to them. On the other hand, Henesy has to stretch out indecision and keep it fresh for twenty minutes… with the help of an “ancient legend” that he recites. Not only does he succeed like a champ, but he concludes one of his better Hagen Days with a tearful catharsis that reads as properly-uncomfortably authentic.
Patrick McCray, Dark Shadows Daybook, 7 March 2018
I disagree with McCray overall about #191- I think Henesy’s line troubles in that one are bad enough that he doesn’t “succeed like a champ,” but I do agree that there are also some good things in his performance, particularly the way he uses his eyes and his posture. And there is no doubt that the last two minutes are very good.
Not even McCray comes to Henesy’s defense regarding #201, though the scene in the basement is all right. David Collins has a pleasant little conversation with Jason, and David Henesy gives sufficient support to Dennis Patrick that we can see just how badly wasted that talented actor is in all of those scenes where Jason repeats his threat to Liz.
*When we were watching the episode, my wife, Mrs Acilius, noticed the significance of Burke’s closing the drawing room doors. She had a lot to say about it, I wish she could remember her WordPress password and write her observations here.
**Later to become game show specialists, Goodson and Todman would be the producers of Match Game, which in the 1960s was on CBS 4:00-4:30 PM Monday through Friday opposite Dark Shadows, and of Password, a version of which would replace Dark Shadows on ABC in that timeslot when the show was canceled in April 1971.
***Just a few weeks ago, Laura nearly succeeded in killing David because there were no telephones upstairs. Apparently that has led Liz to have some new lines installed.
Yesterday, the “Phoenix” story had its climax. Today is taken up with the denouement of that story. Throughout the thirteen weeks of this arc, there has been so much recapping and re-recapping that a denouement may not seem necessary, but this is a satisfying episode.
We open in the woods, where well-meaning governess Vicki and strange and troubled boy David are running from the flames engulfing an old fishing shack in which David’s mother, blonde fire witch Laura, has tried to lure him to a fiery death. Laura did not burn, but disappeared amid the flames.
Vicki holds David by the hand. He is no longer under the trance in which his mother held him while they were in the shack, but neither is he clear in his mind. When Vicki tells him she is taking him home, he looks at the fire and exclaims “That is my home!”
Dashing action hero Burke comes tumbling out of the woods. Vicki tells him what happened. He wants to rescue Laura from the fire, and leaves Vicki no choice but to explain that she saw Laura simply vanish. David is standing by them when they have this conversation, but evidently does not hear it. He is quiet for a while, then looks at Burke and asks if what he sees burning is the fishing shack.
Back home in the great house of Collinwood, Vicki tucks David into bed. He asks her if the fishing shack burned. She says yes. He is dismayed- he had a lot of fishing equipment there. He then asks if his mother left. Vicki says yes. He talks about the situation with her for a while, finally saying that he might visit her sometime. Vicki tells him that he should know that his mother loves him.
Downstairs in the drawing room, Vicki tells Burke that David doesn’t seem to remember anything of his terrible experience. She hopes he never will.
David’s father, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger, comes home. He reacts to the sight of Burke with distaste, indicating that the hiatus in their feud while they were working together to protect David is now over. Roger is complaining that he was having a pleasant evening in town until he had to come home because of some foolish talk about a fire at Collinwood. Vicki asks Burke to leave the room so that she can talk to Roger privately.
Roger is thunderstruck by the news that Laura is no more. He is even more shocked to learn that Vicki had to struggle to keep David from joining Laura in the flames. “She wanted to kill him? She wanted him to burn?” “You saved him?” “What can I say?” For the whole of the series until the last few days, Roger has openly hated his son and wanted to be rid of him. Now that David has come so close to death, Roger has begun to understand what he has thrown away by refusing to love his son.
Roger goes up to David’s room. David wakes up. Roger says he didn’t mean to wake him. David is bright, cheerful, polite. He makes a comment about Roger’s grammar, then apologizes for correcting his elders. He asks Roger if he heard about the shack, and says he will miss his fishing gear. He mentions a particular pole that groundskeeper Matthew Morgan made for him a long time ago; David’s acquaintance with Matthew ended under circumstances scarcely less traumatic than what he went through in the fishing shack in yesterday’s episode, but his reference to Matthew is as chirpy and upbeat as is everything else he says. David keeps asking Roger why he came and what he wanted. Roger, who is supremely fluent when the conversation consists of sarcastic, belittling remarks, can barely complete a sentence. He can’t even maintain eye contact with David. He finally stumbles through something about how there are things that are hard to understand. It is a beautiful, terrible, wonderful little scene.
Roger realizes that his gigantic belt buckle is no compensation for what he and David have missed
In a hospital room in Boston, reclusive matriarch Liz has emerged from the catatonic trance in which Laura trapped her five weeks ago. Liz’ daughter, flighty heiress Carolyn, is overjoyed at her mother’s apparently complete recovery.
Carolyn telephones Collinwood with the good news. Vicki tells her what happened in the fishing shack. It dawns on them that Liz emerged from her trance as the flames were surrounding Laura. They don’t know what we saw yesterday, that David began to break from the trance in which Laura held him when he heard the sound of Liz shouting in her hospital room almost 300 miles away. They do realize that Laura’s power was at the root of Liz’ troubles, even if they never find out that Liz was able to exercise some power of her own. Carolyn wonders if all the strange goings-on have really finished going on, if the residents of Collinwood are now free to live quiet, uneventful lives.
Disturbingly for fans of the show, they really are free, at least for the time being. Liz is antsy today when she asks if a stranger has gone through the basement of the house. Carolyn is at one with the audience in finding this question completely uninteresting, but Liz was obsessed with keeping people out of the basement in the early weeks of the show, and the unexplained reason for that obsession is the closest thing they have to an unresolved storyline. Roger and Burke’s mutual dislike also ties into some unanswered questions that no one who isn’t desperate for a cure to insomnia really wants to ask again. So it is not at all clear where the show is heading. They could just stop here, say “They all lived happily ever after,” and that would be fine. But they’ve sold ABC another 65 episodes, so some misfortunes have to turn up in the next couple of days.
Like many children of divorce, strange and troubled boy David Collins finds himself having to decide which parent he will live with. He and his father, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger, have been living in the great house of Collinwood as guests of Roger’s sister, reclusive matriarch Liz, ever since Roger ran out of money some months ago. Now David’s mother, blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, has reappeared after an absence of many years, and she wants to take David. This idea delighted Roger from the first, but David had initially reacted to Laura with fear. He still has mixed feelings about her.
Today, well-meaning governess Vicki is trying to get David to focus on his studies. He tells her that he is thinking about his living situation. He likes Collinwood, especially since Vicki came. But he has just about decided to go away with his mother.
Vicki asks why David wants to do this. He reminds her of a vision he had yesterday that terrified him. He saw himself in the fireplace, immersed in flames and showing no sign of wanting to escape them. He interprets this as a warning from the supernatural realm that he is in great danger, and that the danger is to be found at Collinwood. He believes he will find safety if he goes far from the estate with his mother.
Vicki knows that David is partly correct. She has considerable evidence that the ghost of Josette Collins has been trying to warn David and her and several other people that David is in danger of being burned alive. She is also sure that the source of this danger is at Collinwood- it is Laura herself. She is an inhuman creature who will burn David alive. Vicki can’t tell David about this, but she does remind him of some of Josette’s previous warnings. David realizes that his mother featured prominently in those warnings, but does not see that she is the one Josette is warning him about. To Vicki’s dismay, David concludes that Laura is also in danger, and that it is urgent that the two of them go off together at once.
When her warnings to David backfire, Josette is running true to form. The first time she tried to rescue someone from imminent peril was in episode 122, when crazed handyman Matthew Morgan had kidnapped Vicki. Matthew’s response upon hearing a ghostly voice was to put a knife to Vicki’s throat. Eventually Josette enlisted some of her buddies from that land of ghosts which forms the back-world behind what we see, and together they would stop Matthew and save Vicki. Here again, Josette needs help getting her point across.
Of all the characters, David is the one who has had the easiest rapport with Josette. In #102, we saw him standing in front of her portrait in the long-abandoned Old House on the grounds of Collinwood, chattering happily away to her. We couldn’t hear her, but he could. She had no need to manifest herself visibly or do anything else spectacular; she and David could just talk to each other.
Now, Laura is blocking Josette’s attempts to communicate. In #165, Josette manifested in a room with Laura and David; Laura ordered her to go away, and she did. In #170, Josette began speaking through Vicki at a séance; Laura silenced her, and in later episodes visiting parapsychologist Dr Guthrie said that Josette was battling against some power at least equal to her own. Strong as Josette’s connection to David has been, she cannot break through his mother’s interference.
Vicki confers with Guthrie. They decide to present their case to Roger, who alone has the legal right to oppose Laura’s wish to take David, and to dashing action hero Burke Devlin, who has a great influence over the boy. Guthrie meets with Roger in the drawing room, and Vicki goes to Burke’s suite at the Collinsport Inn.
Roger despised Guthrie as a quack starting almost as soon as he met him, but in his most recent appearance, in #178, he started to suspect that there might be something to Guthrie’s ideas. He is quite rude to Guthrie throughout their conversation today, but does hear him out.
Burke respects Vicki, but finds it impossible to sit still when she starts talking about Josette. So she sticks to the demonstrable facts. The camera sticks to Alexandra Moltke Isles’ eyes, on which the light plays arrestingly.
Vicki looks at Burke
At length, Burke admits that something strange might be going on. Vicki asks Burke if he will stop encouraging David to go away with his mother. He says he believes that he ought to stop doing that, but that he doesn’t know what he will actually do after he next sees Laura. Vicki says she knows how he feels about Laura. Burke tells her that he himself doesn’t know how he feels about Laura, or about anyone else.
Mitch Ryan projects Burke’s bewilderment about his own behavior when he is with Laura. We haven’t seen any sign that Laura has cast a spell on Burke. So far, it is entirely possible that Burke is just smitten with Laura. She was the ex-girlfriend who left him for Roger and is now suggesting she wants to get back together with him. As such, she is the symbol of both his lost youth and his upcoming triumph over his bitter enemy. Also, she is beautiful, and can be hilariously funny. That combination would be enough to cloud anyone’s mind. But when Burke is telling Vicki how confused he is about his emotions, we wonder if there might be some witchcraft involved as well.
Back at Collinwood, Roger and David are in the drawing room. David tells Roger that he wants to go away with Laura, and when Roger asks why he has made that decision David tells him what he saw in the fire. David asks him if he still wants him to go away. In previous episodes, David had asked Roger about his hostility towards him. Sometimes Roger parried these questions with witty remarks, other times he simply dismissed David and walked away. Now Roger just chokes up. “We’ll see,” he keeps saying. “We’ll see.” What we the audience see in Louis Edmonds’ performance is a man who is starting to realize what he has thrown away by refusing to love his son. It makes a powerful moment.
Roger tries to connect with David
After David leaves him alone in the drawing room, Roger assumes his usual position in front of the brandy bottle and pours himself a glass. He lifts it to his lips, then looks around, as if he detects an unusual scent in the air. He sets the drink down. He turns, and sees an old book open itself.
Roger sees the book open itself
A book first did this in the drawing room in #52. That time the Collins family history opened to a picture of Josette. More recently, Josette’s signature jasmine perfume was in the air in the crypt at the old cemetery when a book opened itself there in #157. Regular viewers will therefore assume that when a book opens without visible aid of a cast member, it is Josette, the spectral research librarian, leading the characters to the information they need.
Roger hasn’t seen these previous occurrences, and he has chosen to disregard the evidence he has seen for the existence of supernatural influences around him. So the sight of the book opening itself comes as a great shock to him. When he looks at the page to which it has opened, he finds out something about the death of a woman named Laura Murdoch Radcliffe, whom Guthrie and Vicki believe to be an earlier incarnation of his wife. That Laura had died by fire in 1867, along with her young son David. Guthrie had told Roger that. A fact he had not mentioned, and which strikes Roger with particular terror, is that David Radcliffe had not wanted to be rescued from the fire. He had wanted to burn.
The idea of Laura the Phoenix is an interesting one, and the storyline gives Josette and the other vague, indefinable spirits of the supernatural back-world Dark Shadows has been hinting at since it began a suitable adversary to bring them into the action of the main continuity. But most of the individual episodes are so slow, so heavy with recapping, and so confused in their development that few of them can be recommended on their own merits. Indeed, this is only the second episode from the Laura arc, after #146, to which I apply the “Genuinely Good Episode” tag.
After we watched the episode, my wife, Mrs Acilius, shared her theory that the show is getting better because they’ve learned that it will be renewed for another 13 weeks. That makes sense- if it was going to be canceled after #195, the writers might not want to come up with any fresh stories and the producers certainly wouldn’t want to pay to build any new sets or hire actors to play new characters. Better just to run out the clock so that the Laura arc ends in #195 and everyone else lives spookily ever after. But if they know they can keep going until #260, they will have time to work out new ideas.
At the end of yesterday’s episode, Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, and her boyfriend, hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell, had gone out to look for Maggie’s father, drunken artist Sam Evans. Maggie and Joe wound up carrying Sam home from the tavern.
Joe left the Evans cottage, Maggie went to the kitchen to brew up some coffee, and Sam lit a cigarette and passed out. The cigarette fell on some newspapers and started a fire.
While the fire began, the face of blonde fire witch Laura Collins was superimposed on the image of Sam. Some mysterious force has compelled Sam to paint pictures of Laura naked and in flames. Laura objects to these portraits. She came to the Evans cottage the afternoon before the fire and told Sam she would find a way to stop him painting any more of them. Her face appearing over the fire, along with spooky music and everything else the show has told us about Laura, demonstrates that she is casting a spell on Sam with the intention of making good her threat.
Today, Sam regains consciousness and sees the fire. He tries to put it out with his hands, burning them badly. Maggie comes running and beats the flames out with a rug.
The current storyline hinges on the idea that Laura’s supernatural powers make her a deadly threat to her son, strange and troubled boy David Collins, and perhaps to others as well. The outcome of this spell creates suspense as the audience wonders if Laura is mighty enough to keep the narrative arc going. After all, causing Sam to pass out and mess himself does not take much. There’s no suggestion that any magical abilities reside in Bob the bartender, yet he manages to do that just about every night, and he collects a paycheck for it to boot. For all we know, Laura’s spell might have been a total failure- it might be a sheer coincidence that she was trying to make him pass out and drop a lit cigarette when that’s what he was going to do anyway.
Maggie scolds Sam for his drinking. To Maggie’s exasperation, he raves that Laura started the fire. As he goes on and on about an unnamed power that has been controlling his behavior, Maggie responds “I think they call it alcohol.” Yesterday, Maggie was talking to Joe about laying aside her role enabling her father’s alcoholism and leaving the town of Collinsport altogether. Regular viewers will remember that conversation today, when she tells Sam that she is approaching the limit of what she will take from him. Sam loves Maggie more than anything, and he desperately tries to convince her that he is telling the truth. She sees his desperation, and we see her struggle to make herself say that nothing can convince her of a story like the one he is telling her.
As the voice of correction, Maggie is perfectly reasonable, perfectly justified, and perfectly mistaken. Sam is indeed the plaything of uncanny powers. A couple of weeks ago, they gave us scene after scene full of sound and fury, repeating the point that some spiritual force was making Sam paint Laura’s picture. We see today how little of that was necessary- Laura’s likeness and the theremin music are plenty to show us that the fire is in line with a spell she is casting. But Maggie, while she has often said that she wants to avoid the estate of Collinwood because she believes the stories that ghosts and ghouls haunt it, refuses to entertain the idea that there is anything unearthly at the root of Sam’s troubles. She says that she has to have evidence she can look at out in the open, and that she isn’t going to listen to Sam’s talk about unseen and unknowable powers. Although we know that Sam is right and Maggie is wrong about the particulars of this incident, to the extent that Maggie is speaking to her father as an adult child of an alcoholic she is the voice of the audience.
Meanwhile, Laura is sitting by the hearth in the drawing room at the great house of Collinwood. She is casting her spell on Sam. Reclusive matriarch Liz enters and tries to get Laura’s attention. When Laura finally looks up, her face is contorted in an unattractive expression. Liz remarks on it, and Laura asks if she looked ugly. Liz says yes, then for a fraction of a second looks embarrassed when she realizes that she told another woman that she was ugly. She quickly makes some meaningless remarks in a courteous voice. It is a small moment, but Joan Bennett extracts the jewel of comedy from it quite deftly.
Laura has come to Collinwood to re-establish a relationship with David. After years away, she wants to take David and leave. David’s father, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger, is all for this plan, but Liz is determined to thwart it. As the only male of his generation in the family, David represents the sole hope that the name of Collins will continue. As the custodian of the family’s past and future, Liz wants to be the chief maternal presence in David’s life. Besides, she never leaves the estate, so she needs all the company she can get.
Liz tells Laura that, while she had agreed that Laura could take David if their relationship were to make the right sort of progress, she is not at all satisfied that such is happening. Her objections don’t make much sense, and if the audience hadn’t been informed that Laura is an uncanny being whose plans will likely lead to David’s death we would probably be appalled at how unfair she is.
Roger shows up and takes Laura’s side. While the two of them stand firm against Liz’ wispy arguments, a knock comes at the front door. It is Maggie. Laura is shocked to see her- apparently she had expected her spell to do enough damage to the Evans cottage that Maggie would be unable to go visiting tonight. Laura’s reaction is dramatic enough, and the music behind it is overstated enough, that we may think Laura expected to kill Maggie. Again, the indications of Laura’s failure lead us to wonder if she is enough of a witch to deliver the supernatural thriller we have been led to expect.
Maggie wants to tell Laura about Sam’s accident, and to lament that Sam’s obsession with Laura has led him to the idea that she somehow caused it. Roger is indignant that Sam would say such things about his estranged wife, and storms off to the Evans cottage to give Sam a piece of his mind. Liz, on the other hand, is intrigued by Sam’s ideas and wants Maggie to give as many details as possible about Laura’s visit to the cottage earlier that day.
When we were watching the episode, Mrs Acilius wondered if Liz’ interest in Maggie’s story was a sign that she had noticed something eerie about Laura during their previous acquaintance. My interpretation was that Liz is so desperate to find information she can use to present Laura as an unfit mother that she is ready to listen when the town drunk claims she cast a spell on him. As reasonable, justified, and wrong as Maggie was in her scolding of Sam, so unreasonable, unjustified, and right is Liz in her conversation with Laura.
When Maggie says that Laura had threatened to stop Sam painting pictures of her naked and in flames, Liz asks what threat she made. Laura answers that all she said was that she would find a way to stop him. With a look of suspicion on her face, Liz asks what she was planning to do when she said that. “Just what I did do,” Laura answers. After a pause, she specifies, “Turn the matter over to Roger.”
In the Evans cottage, Roger reads the Riot Act to Sam. Louis Edmonds was a master of sarcastic dialogue, and Roger’s lines in this scene give him many chances to shine. Indeed, he and David Ford have a blast playing Roger and Sam’s mutual hatred. When Roger ridicules his claim to be subject to mystic powers, Sam replies in a taunting voice that Roger is in as much trouble as he is. The two men jeer contemptuously at each other, and it is a wonder to behold.
Mrs Acilius was particularly impressed by the contrast between the opening scene with Maggie scolding Sam and the closing scene with Roger railing at him. Sam’s two interlocutors make the same basic point, but the differences between them as individuals and between their respective relationships to Sam tell us entirely different things. Sam hates Roger almost as much as he loves Maggie, and their hostility is as explosive as Sam’s scene with Maggie is poignant. Maggie’s lovable, down-to-earth persona makes her the polar opposite of Roger with his haughty manner, sharp tongue, and utterly debased moral stature. In her scene, Maggie was to an extent the voice of the audience; insofar as Roger is continuing the lesson Maggie began teaching Sam, he is taking over in that capacity. It is quite a different thing for us to relate to The Nicest Girl in Town as our voice than it is for us to see a virtueless snob like Roger in that capacity, and so Roger’s first moments berating Sam in the Evans cottage whip us around fast.
Sam confirms that he has been driven to paint another picture of Laura, and Roger announces that he will destroy it. Sam doesn’t object. When Roger goes over to the painting, he sees that most of it has already been burned away. Sam is shocked to see this- the fire was on the other side of the room, and nothing in the several feet between a burned spot on the carpet and the painting has been touched by the flames. With this, the suspense is resolved- we know that Laura’s fire magic did achieve a result that Sam’s drinking could not. So the show will have a story to tell after all.
The script is credited to Malcolm Marmorstein, who was by far the worst writer on Dark Shadows. It is difficult for me to believe that someone who delivered so many low points wrote a script this good all by himself. Joe Caldwell was making uncredited contributions to the writing by this time, and he was so much better than Marmorstein that I am inclined to suspect that he wrote this one.
I suppose Marmorstein might just have been having a good day. There don’t seem to be any surviving documents identifying those contributors to the writing whose names didn’t appear in the on-screen credits for any given episode, so we can only guess which ones Caldwell worked on in his first several months on the show. But the structure, dialogue, and pacing of this one feel a lot more like the ones with his name on them than they do like the general run of Marmorstein’s work.
Maggie Evans, keeper of the restaurant at the Collinsport Inn and The Nicest Girl in Town, greets her boyfriend, hardworking young fisherman Joe, with a hearty “So, whaddaya hear from the morgue?” As Dark Shadows gets to be more deeply involved with horror and the supernatural, that will become a plausible alternative title for the series.
Maggie wants to know the details of the death of Matthew Morgan, fugitive and kidnapper, whom she believes to have been scared to death by ghosts. Joe doesn’t want to entertain that idea. Maggie’s father, drunken artist Sam Evans, shows up and announces that he’s tired of the topic of Matthew’s death. He wants to talk to Maggie privately.
Sam wants Maggie to get information about a mysterious woman who is staying at the inn. Maggie says that the woman won’t give her name or say much of anything about herself, but that she spent some time telling her about the legend of the phoenix. That rings a bell for Sam, making him uncomfortable. Maggie says she was glad to hear about it- “It isn’t something you hear the yokels around here talking about.” Not like the latest doings at the morgue…
Sam won’t tell Maggie why he wants to know who the woman is or why he is so agitated about her. He does tell her that he’s on his way to the tavern, and she doesn’t like that at all. Today’s episode and tomorrow’s go into depth presenting Maggie as an Adult Child of an Alcoholic. Joe volunteers to go to the tavern with Sam and keep an eye on him.
The mystery woman comes into the restaurant after Sam and Joe leave. She lights a cigarette and stares raptly at the flame of her match.
Maggie engages the woman in conversation. She starts with a cheery description of Matthew Morgan’s autopsy report. The woman’s bewildered reaction makes you wonder what it would be like to walk into a diner and be regaled with clinical details of an unexpected death. Maggie asks a series of questions. She leans further and further forward across the counter as she tries to get the woman to identify herself. By the time the woman leaves without giving any answers, Maggie almost falls face-first into her coffee cup.
Maggie goes to the tavern and tells her father that she made a fool of herself in a fruitless attempt to get the information he requested. Sam gets upset, then leaves to conduct his own investigation. He goes to the inn, looks in the guest registry, and finds a name. He goes to the telephone booth and watches the woman come into the lobby. He makes a phone call.
He is calling high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins. Ten years ago, Roger paid Sam to conceal evidence implicating him in a case that sent dashing action hero Burke Devlin to prison. Burke came back to town seeking revenge against Roger in episode 1, and he has by now figured out that Sam had something to do with the case as well. Roger and Sam hate each other, but are bound together by the case. Sam tells Roger to meet him at the tavern immediately.
Sam makes Roger buy him a couple of drinks, then tells him that the last person either of them had wanted to see has come back to town- Roger’s estranged wife Laura, the other witness to the event ten years ago.
The closing scene makes me wish they hadn’t put Laura’s name in the credits the other day. There has been enough evidence on screen that returning viewers will be fairly sure it must be Laura by this time, but if there were a chance it might be someone else Sam’s revelation and Roger’s reaction would have packed more of a punch.
Dark Shadows Commentary 
