The Countess DuPrés (Grayson Hall) complains to her niece, gracious lady Josette (Kathryn Leigh Scott,) that life on the great estate of Collinwood is nothing but “a series of prepared speeches.” It’s hard to top that for commentary on this episode, but I do have a couple of things to add.
Josette has been seeing her lover and onetime fiancée, the late Barnabas Collins. Since his death, Barnabas has become a vampire. On Friday, he bit Josette. Now, she is trying to conceal her neck wounds from her aunt.
Josette, her neck wounds visible. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die. These wounds are a single piece of makeup. Kathryn Leigh Scott still has it, she showed it in a Dark Shadows cast reunion on Zoom in 2020. The other cast members didn’t know why she wanted it any more than I do. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Those who have been watching Dark Shadows for a while will find this story all too familiar. Until #365, the show was set in contemporary times, 1966 to 1967. Since then, it has been set in the years from 1795 to 1796. In the segments set in the 1960s, Miss Scott plays Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, and Hall plays mad scientist Julia Hoffman. Maggie was Barnabas’ victim in May and June of 1967, and after she escaped from him, Julia was her psychiatrist. The countess is different enough from Julia that Hall has a lot of room to maneuver. But there are only so many ways an actor can convey the idea that her character is in a daze and alternately blissful and defensive. So Miss Scott winds up recycling the performance she gave as Maggie, and the result is pretty stale.
We traveled back to the 18th century with well-meaning governess Vicki. Vicki has not in any way adapted to her new environment, with the result that she is now in gaol on charges of witchcraft. When the countess visits her today, Vicki tells her that she is from the 1960s and that in that period she had learned from history and legend that a grim fate awaits Josette. The countess concludes from Vicki’s presentation that she is indeed a witch, and that she is not giving her warnings, but is cruelly gloating over the evil spells she has cast.
Vicki is accompanied by her gaoler/ defense attorney/ boyfriend, Peter. Peter had tried to stop her blabbing to the countess, and asks her why she did it. Vicki says that she is counting on the idea that if she keeps telling the truth, people will have to believe her. Peter asks her to think of how she would react if someone from the 21st century traveled to 1968 and went around telling everyone how and when they were going to die. At this, Vicki’s eyes widen. “Oh, Peter, what a fool I’ve been!”
At that, we can hear the sound of the viewing public giving up on Vicki once and for all. Peter isn’t even the first person to try to explain her situation to her. Both kindly gentleman Jeremiah Collins and caddish naval officer Nathan Forbes gave her explicit instructions about her need to lie and scam her way through her predicament, and neither of them made any impression on her. Movie reviewer Roger Ebert famously described stories that work only because the characters do things the average member of the audience would be too smart to do “idiot plots”; for the last eleven weeks, Vicki has been the Designated Dum-Dum at the heart of the most irritating idiot plot imaginable.
There actually is a very sweet little scene between Vicki and Peter right after that low point. She tells him about airplanes and other features of twentieth century life, and he tries to figure out what she’s talking about. Almost all of the anger we feel towards Vicki for being written so badly and towards Peter for being played by Roger Davis melts away by the end of that scene.
Sarah Collins is going to turn 11 two days from now, on 26 January 1796. Sarah misses her big brother Barnabas. She has been told that Barnabas has gone to England, and today her mother, Naomi, tells her that Barnabas may not be back for a long time, maybe not until Sarah is grown up. Sarah refuses to believe this. She insists that if she lights a candle in the window of the bedroom where Barnabas’ onetime fiancée, the gracious Josette, has been staying, Barnabas will “somehow know it’s there” and come home.
Naomi lies to Sarah.
Sarah is right to disbelieve her mother. On the orders of her husband, haughty overlord Joshua, Naomi is repeating a lie to conceal Barnabas’ death. Joshua believes that Barnabas died from the plague, and that if that word gets out the men won’t report for work at the family’s shipyard. In fact, Barnabas never had the plague. He died of a witch’s curse. As a further result of the curse, he is now a vampire. The last few nights, he has been snacking on the women who frequent the waterfront of the village.
Josette is out of town, so Sarah takes the candle to her room, meaning to leave it there as a surprise. Looking out the window, she sees Barnabas on the lawn, peering up. Sarah is excited to see her brother, and runs out of the house after him. He doesn’t want her to know what has become of him, and runs off.
Barnabas on the lawn. Sarah spots Barnabas.
Seconds after she exits the front door, Sarah is in the cemetery. It has been established many times that this cemetery is miles from the house; earlier in this very episode, Barnabas’ helper Ben visited him in his tomb there, and made it clear he had plenty of opportunity to shake anyone who might be following him as he journeyed there from the house. This inconsistency bothers a lot of people, but I kind of like it. We got to know Sarah as a ghost in 1967, and she was at the center of a number of very intriguing surrealistic sequences. She’s alive now, but the whole situation is so bizarre that it only seems right she moves as she would in a dream. Watching the scene this time, I was surprised- I had remembered the set behind Sarah being blurred as she ran and some other visual effects that would have presented it as an eldritch moment, but none of those was actually there.
The episode ends with Sarah in the outer part of the tomb, near the secret panel behind which Barnabas’ coffin is hidden. She is calling out to him. We have been warned that Sarah will die on her birthday as a result of exposure; when Barnabas does not come to her, she complains of the cold, and we end on an ominous note.
Sarah in the mausoleum.
When Sarah sees Barnabas standing on the lawn, we echo earlier phases of Dark Shadows. We often saw characters looking out that window during the first 73 weeks of Dark Shadows, when the dramatic date was 1966 or 1967 and the room was occupied by well-meaning governess Vicki. We also saw Barnabas peer up at Vicki’s window from the lawn several times. The first time was at the end of #214, when the camera stuck with him so long we wondered if he really was a vampire and not just a garden gnome.
The closing shot of #214, set in 1967. Compare with the image of Barnabas on the lawn above.
Barnabas’ penchant for staring at windows in turn echoed his predecessor as the show’s supernatural menace, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. As ten year old Sarah Collins looks out a window and sees her big brother Barnabas looking up at her from the lawn today, so in #134 did another child of the same age, strange and troubled boy David Collins, look out a window and see his mother Laura looking up at him from the same lawn.
Vicki is in this episode. Sarah’s ghost yanked her here from November 1967 so that she could “tell the story from the beginning.” It isn’t so much Vicki who has been getting the story as it is the audience. Vicki is left out of most of the key developments; in particular, she has no clue Barnabas is a vampire. She has done such a poor job of fitting into her new environment that even though witchcraft laws had been repealed throughout the English-speaking world sixty years before, the village of Collinsport has brought them back just for her. She is in gaol, and from there has continued to find ways to make her situation so much worse that she is now all but certain to be hanged.
Today, Vicki asks for Naomi to visit her in the gaol. Barnabas and Ben are the only ones who know who the witch really was, but neither of them is in a position to talk to the authorities and clear Vicki’s name. Naomi and Sarah are the only other people who believe that Vicki is innocent. Vicki tells Naomi that she has a book printed in the twentieth century that tells her Sarah will die of exposure on her eleventh birthday. In response, Naomi looks at her in wonderment and says that she is starting to believe she really is a witch. Vicki dismisses that topic, and pleads with her to keep Sarah indoors for the next few days. Naomi agrees to do so.
Vicki’s warnings not only make Naomi suspect that the charges against her are true; it is because Naomi is not home that no one stops Sarah running out and getting stuck in a cold place. I suppose there is meant to be a dramatic irony in seeing Vicki bring about the very disasters she is trying to prevent, but the character’s foolishness throughout the whole segment set in the late eighteenth century blunts that irony.
If we saw a smart person operating at the top of her form and still causing a series of calamities, we might have a sense of tragic inevitability, a feeling that the course of history cannot be changed whatever we do. But Vicki has not been that person. Movie reviewer Roger Ebert famously called stories that depend on the characters doing things the average member of the audience would be too smart to do “idiot plot.” For all the strengths of the 1795 segment, there is an idiot plot at the center of it, and Vicki is the Designated Dum-Dum. That undercuts the arc and destroys the character.
Four and a half weeks ago, Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, escaped from vampire Barnabas Collins. Barnabas managed to scramble Maggie’s brains sufficiently that she has amnesia covering her time as his victim and much of the rest of her life as well. She is now a patient at a mental hospital called Windcliff, where her care is supervised by Dr Julia Hoffman.
Maggie’s family doctor, addled quack Dave Woodard, is an old friend of Julia’s. He had recommended Maggie be sent to Windcliff. He had also come up with a cockamamie scheme to protect her from her captor by hiding her there and telling everyone in and around the town of Collinsport that she was dead. If he had known that the captor was a vampire, this might have made some kind of sense- no character on Dark Shadows has ever heard of Dracula, so they don’t know how to fight against vampires. But he doesn’t know that, so his plan is just a way for the writers to stall while they try to come up with more plot points.
Today we open with Woodard in Julia’s office, complaining that she isn’t communicating with him about Maggie’s case. She tells him that there have been no developments worth reporting. Returning viewers know that this is a lie, because in a session we saw yesterday Maggie remembered a lot of sense impressions from her time of captivity and Julia told her that they represented tremendous progress. Woodard tells Julia that a lack of new information is no excuse for her failure to return any of his last six phone calls. He says that she seems to be intent on hoarding any information she may glean from Maggie as her own private possession, an impression he describes as frightening.
Julia responds to this characterization with a display of offense, and Woodard apologizes. She then brings up an idea that occurred to her at the end of yesterday’s episode. She says that Maggie’s memory might improve if she takes her to visit Eagle Hill Cemetery, where she was found wandering early in her illness. Woodard objects strongly that Maggie’s condition, as Julia has described it, is so delicate that such a visit might do her permanent harm. Julia retreats and promises she won’t actually take Maggie to the cemetery. This is such a flagrant lie that the camera momentarily goes haywire, focusing on Woodard’s chair rather than his face.
Woodard leaves, and Julia calls Maggie in. She’s already wearing her coat. She asks where Julia is going to take her, and she tells her not to worry about that.
On the great estate of Collinwood, well-meaning governess Vicki is staring vacantly into space while listening to an antique music box Barnabas gave her as part of his plan to subject her to the same treatment he inflicted on Maggie. A knock comes at the door. Vicki closes the music box and goes to answer it. It is her boyfriend, fake Shemp Burke Devlin.
Burke is waging a determined battle against the story, and he is fighting dirty. He doesn’t want Vicki to have anything to do with Barnabas, or with the ghost of Josette Collins. When Vicki says she wants to lay flowers on Josette’s grave in the cemetery, where we know she will cross paths with Maggie and Julia, he resists furiously. When she reminds him that she has had dealings with Josette’s ghost, he says “Or you think you have.” In previous episodes, including yesterday’s and Monday’s, he knew she had, and in an earlier period of the show he knew that several other characters, including some of the most level-headed ones, had also encountered Josette’s ghost. When he starts belittling Vicki for believing in “the spooks of Collinwood,” it therefore comes off as an especially crude instance of gaslighting. The Mrs and I aren’t much for profanity, but we both cussed at the screen when Burke was disgracing himself this way.
Julia and Maggie are in the cemetery. I believe it is the first time we’ve seen the set in a daylight scene. You can see the shadows of the foliage on the soundstage walls, and the corners where the walls meet. I can’t believe the director meant for us to see those things, but I kind of like it- the situation needs a touch of unreality, and the obvious falsity gives it the feeling of a black box theater.
Some of the shadows on the wall that Art Wallace spoke ofCorner of the soundstage
Maggie is agitated. Julia tells her to calm down and that everything is all right. I’m no expert, but I kind of doubt that talk therapy involves a lot of “Calm down!” and “Everything is all right!” It reminded me of this Saturday Night Live sketch from the 90s, in which Patrick Stewart plays “Phil McCracken, Scottish Therapist,” a psychologist who won’t stand for any emotionalism from his patients.
Vicki and Burke see Julia and Maggie in the distance. When Maggie turns to face them, Vicki recognizes her. Julia whisks her away before Burke can see her. When Vicki tells Burke she saw Maggie, he immediately unloads on her with the same garbage he handed her at Collinwood. He declares that Maggie is dead, that Vicki knows she’s dead, that she can’t possibly have seen her, that “there is a resemblance, THAT’S! ALL!” When he asks “What’s wrong with you?” I stopped the streaming and shouted at the screen “She’s wasting her time with you, you ******* ********, that’s what’s wrong with her!” To that, Mrs Acilius said that we should just restart the show and get through the scene.
Part of what makes Burke’s behavior so infuriating is the writer’s fault. A first-time viewer, unaware that what Burke is telling Vicki are delusions that suggest she is crazy are in fact things he knows to be true, might think that he is being reasonable in dismissing ideas about ghosts and the like. But even that viewer will realize that a person ought to be nicer about it. When Vicki says she saw Maggie, Burke could easily have suggested that they go up to the woman and introduce themselves, thinking that a closer look will disabuse her of the notion. But actor Anthony George must also bear part of the blame.
George C. Scott famously told Gene Siskel that there are three things to consider in evaluating an actor’s performance: first is to make the audience believe that the person they are looking at is the sort of person who might do the things the character does. This is in turn dependent on casting- put the wrong person in the part, and all is lost. Second are the choices the actor makes in the key emotional moments. Performers have any number of options as to how they will use their faces, voices, and limbs to show a character’s feelings, and those who make a lasting impression are those who make choices that are at once totally unexpected and perfectly logical. Third is the zest of performance, the actor’s joy in the opportunity to create a character. If that doesn’t come through, nothing else is worth much.
As Burke, Anthony George fails all three of these tests. Burke would have been a difficult part for anyone to take over, both because the originator of the role, Mitch Ryan, was so memorable, and because the character had lost all connection to any ongoing storylines by the time Ryan left. And by his own admission, George knew nothing about soap operas and had no idea how to play a romantic interest on one when he joined Dark Shadows. That’s where he fails the casting part of the believability test.
As for the skill part, George has something going for him. He is always mindful of his physicality, moving only those parts of his body he needs to show us who he is and keeping the rest of himself admirably still. He also keeps his voice remarkably consistent, both by holding a steady level of volume and maintaining a simple, precise pitch. In these and other ways, he shows impressive levels of technical proficiency as an actor, but the result is a mannered, unconvincing performance. His Burke doesn’t seem to be a real person. As a cardboard figure, he becomes an abstract symbol of whatever he’s doing, and when he’s doing something bad he’s hard not to hate.
Since he makes one choice for each resource available to him and sticks with it unvaryingly throughout the episode, he doesn’t give the audience any surprises. Nor does he yield anything to his scene-mates. They always know exactly what’s coming from him. George’s eyes are always watching another actor intently, as he watches Alexandra Moltke Isles intently today, but nothing in her performance can divert him from his plan, not in the smallest particular. When Burke isn’t listening to the other character, as he isn’t listening to Vicki, George’s disconnection from the other actors makes Burke seem like an irredeemable jackass.
Nor does George show any zest for the part. He covers his discomfort with soap acting by plastering on a smile whenever the script allows it, but he is stiff when Burke ought to be loose, cool when he ought to be warm, and loud when he ought to speak with a quiet, nuanced voice. The result is just sad and awkward. When Burke is being pleasant, we can feel sorry for George, but when he has to play the scenes like the ones Burke gets today we just want him to get off the screen and leave us alone.
Compare George’s Burke with Grayson Hall’s Julia, and you will see how an actor can determine an audience’s reaction to a character. Julia is a terrible therapist. She lies repeatedly to Woodard in the beginning, denying the severe breach of ethics and disturbing disregard of public safety involved in covering up what she knows and suspects about Maggie’s experiences and running an unconscionable risk with Maggie’s mental health by taking her to the cemetery. She lies again to Maggie at the end, promising that they will duck into the Tomb of the Collinses only for a moment and then refusing to let her leave there when she starts to show a violent emotional reaction. Her methods are so unorthodox and so harsh that we suspect she is not interested in helping Maggie at all. Because we have known Maggie since episode #1, and Kathryn Leigh Scott’s performance as Maggie renews our fondness for her every time she appears, we ought to feel deep hostility towards Julia.
But we don’t. In fact, Julia quickly becomes (almost) every Dark Shadows fan’s favorite character. The George C. Scott tests tell us why. Hall’s manner is so intense that we can believe her as a mad scientist; her uninhibited use of every facial muscle, of the full range of her vocal output, and of subtle tricks of movement she learned from choreographers when she appeared in musicals may have produced a style that no acting teacher could recommend as a model, but they do mean that every moment she is on screen she is doing something we wouldn’t have predicted; and she’s clearly having a blast. She can do things vastly worse than what makes us hate Burke today, and we will still want her to come back again and again.
Closing Miscellany
The opening voiceovers aren’t usually the best-written parts of the show, but there is a particularly bad bit in today’s: “Hidden deep in the cliffs of Collinwood, the majestic, ancient rocks that separate the Earth from the sea, there is a tiny cove carved by a long-ago sea. No one at Collinwood has seen it, and no one will ever see it.” If no one ever will see it, why bother telling us about it? The narrator tells us that it is because “the Earth knows how to hide its secrets well. Sometimes men, too, must hide secrets.” Does this mean that “no one ever will” discover the secrets the characters are hiding from each other? That isn’t a very promising thing to tell the audience of a soap opera, a genre which is all about unsuccessful attempts to keep secrets and their aftermath.
Maggie tells Julia that she doesn’t recognize the name Collins. She has lived her whole life in the town of Collinsport, where most people are employed by Collins Enterprises, which is owned by the Collins family who live at Collinwood. That’s some pretty widespread amnesia she has.
The show has been going back and forth on the dates when Barnabas and Josette Collins originally lived and died. Today we get a long look at Josette’s tombstone, giving her dates as 1800-1822, and another at the plaque on Barnabas’ little sister Sarah’s resting place in the mausoleum, with the dates 1786-1796. Those dates fit with a remark Barnabas made to his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie in #271, that Sarah lived long before he met Josette, but not with his remark in #281 that Josette had been dead for “almost 200 years,” much less with a book we saw in #52 that gave her dates as 1810-1834.
We start with the twelfth iteration of a ritual that has been numbing our minds since March. Seagoing con man Jason McGuire makes a demand of reclusive matriarch Liz, in this case a position as Director of Public Relations for the Collins family business. Liz resists. Jason threatens to expose her terrible secret. Liz capitulates.
Liz’ daughter, flighty heiress Carolyn, is fed up with Jason’s endless impositions on her mother and everyone else in and around the great house of Collinwood. She knows that Jason was a friend of her long-absent father, Paul Stoddard. When her uncle, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins, tells her that some belongings of Stoddard’s are kept in the mysterious locked room of the basement of Collinwood, Carolyn decides she wants to go into the room and examine them.
Liz has the only key to the room, and hasn’t let anyone in it in the 18 or 19 years since Stoddard disappeared. She is shocked when Carolyn asks for the key. She tells her that they have nothing of Stoddard’s and that the room is empty. Roger and well-meaning governess Vicki are there when Carolyn presses Liz on the subject and Liz becomes agitated.
Later, Liz talks to Vicki privately and apologizes for her tone in that conversation. Vicki can’t believe that the locked room is empty. Vicki turns away from Liz, looks down, and says she can understand that it would be painful for her if Carolyn went through Stoddard’s belongings. We’ve seen Vicki try to lie on several occasions. She has always been unsuccessful at it, in part because she has mannerisms like these that give her away.
Vicki lying to Liz
Liz is so desperate to recruit an ally that she ignores Vicki’s tells, and immediately confirms that she is keeping things of Stoddard’s in the room. She must not realize that Vicki is an inept liar, because she asks her to back up her own lie and to persuade Carolyn that the room is empty.
Liz choosing to believe Vicki
In the study, Vicki finds Carolyn searching for the key to the locked room. The two women argue a bit about whether Carolyn ought to let herself into the room. Vicki turns away from Carolyn, looks down, and asks her to consider that her father’s things might not be in the room at all. Since these are the same mannerisms that told us she was lying to Liz, at first we think she is getting ready to repeat Liz’ lie to Carolyn.
Vicki looking like she’s about to lie to Carolyn
Carolyn asks Vicki what she is talking about. She turns to Carolyn and says that she wonders if there is something hidden in the room that would be far worse to uncover than a few random possessions of Paul Stoddard’s could be. With that, we cut to the closing credits.
Vicki not lying to Carolyn
The whole story of the locked room is a case of what Roger Ebert famously called “Idiot Plot,” a story that would end immediately if any of the characters were as smart as the typical member of the audience. No one has seen or heard from Stoddard since he disappeared. Liz hasn’t left the house since that night. She fired all the household staff, replacing them with a single extremely unsociable man, and discouraged strangers from entering the house. She is terrified of anyone entering a room in the basement that she locked shortly after Stoddard left, and is now flagrantly being blackmailed by a man who was around at that time.
It’s refreshing that Vicki is the one who seems to be figuring out that Stoddard’s corpse might be buried in the locked room. Again and again, the writers have painted themselves into a corner and found themselves able to get from one story point to the next only by having a character disregard all available facts and logic and do something inexplicably foolish. Since Vicki gets more screen time than anyone else, it has usually fallen to her to be Designated Dum-Dum. Indeed, the writers will eventually rely on Dumb Vicki so often that the character becomes unusable. But today, we get a look at Smart Vicki, and that version of her is terrific.
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