rosemary mcnamara – Acilius on Dark Shadows

Episode 240: Don’t look for her there

Vampire Barnabas Collins has taken up residence in the long-abandoned Old House on the grounds of the great estate of Collinwood and restored two rooms, leaving the rest of the mansion a shambling ruin. That image captures the current state of Dark Shadows. This episode, like many others we’ve seen recently, contains some scenes that are all right by themselves, but that do not contribute to any structure. The result is continual frustration and disappointment.

From its introduction in #70 until Barnabas claimed it in #212, the Old House was the stronghold of the ghost of Josette Collins and the playground of Josette’s darling, strange and troubled boy David Collins. We’ve seen Josette appear several times, and characters including David, well-meaning governess Vicki, and artist Sam Evans have interacted with her. Now, Barnabas not only seems to have silenced Josette’s ghost, but is holding Sam’s daughter Maggie and trying to turn her into a resurrected Josette by following the procedures Boris Karloff’s character Imhotep demonstrated in the 1932 film The Mummy. Regular viewers are growing impatient to see Josette emerge from her portrait and lead the battle against Barnabas, as she led the successful battles against crazed handyman Matthew Morgan in #122-#126 and against blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins in #126-#191.

Today, David reflects our impatience. We see him at the Old House, knocking on the door, then peeping through the window. He sees a veiled figure in Josette’s white dress walking down the stairs. He returns to the door, which opens for him. No one is in sight.

We have assumed that the woman in white was Maggie wearing the dress Barnabas gave her, but the fact that she was out of sight by the time the door opened suggests that it might have been Josette’s ghost after all. David calls to Josette. When she does not answer, he goes upstairs to look for her.

David finds Josette’s restored bedroom, where her portrait now hangs. He talks to the portrait, not in the easy conversational tone he had used with it in #102, but in awkward shouts. He pleads and protests that he can’t sense her presence. When he came to the house in #223 and saw that the portrait was not in its old place above the mantle in the front parlor, he had wandered around whining that the portrait is lost and Josette is lost with it. Now that he has found the portrait, his perplexity deepens- she is still nowhere near.

Barnabas enters, and demands to know what David is doing deep in his house. After a moment, he sits and talks with the boy. He tries to present the idea of ghosts as absurd on its face, but David has seen too much to find that convincing. When Barnabas tells him that the door probably opened because of the warping of the wood, we know that it must have been the work of a paranormal being- a villain cannot say something so plausible unless it is false. Even if the figure David saw was Maggie, there is definitely some spectral presence in the house that Barnabas does not know about and cannot control.

Barnabas and David have a man-to-man talk, or should I say ghoul-to-boy.

Barnabas finally tells David to take a long, deep look at the portrait, and asks him if he still feels that Josette is there. David says that he does not have that feeling. Barnabas triumphantly declares that Josette is really gone.

Now, at last, we expect everything will start to come together. David will talk to Vicki, they will compare notes about their encounters with Josette, and will try to figure out how and why she has changed. There will be images building on the ambiguity about who David really saw through the window and who really opened the door for him. David’s father, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger, will try to revert to his usual denials that anything peculiar is going on, but will grudgingly admit that the events of the last several months have proven that Josette’s ghost is real, and will not be able to resist wondering what is going on with it now. That in turn will lead to a new understanding between Roger and Vicki, allowing Roger’s relationships with both her and David to become more dynamic. Barnabas will realize that, even if he can keep Josette from manifesting herself again, she has already revealed enough to the characters about the supernatural back-world behind the settings in which they operate that she has created a dangerous situation for him, and he will have to scramble to keep them from discovering that he is a vampire.

The script brings us right up to the brink of every one of those events, only to whisk us away and instead show us something dull and pointless. David does tell Vicki that he saw Josette’s ghost, that Josette is in some way he cannot explain different than she was when he saw her before, and that he could not feel Josette’s presence in her portrait. But Vicki does not draw on her many experiences with Josette and join David in trying to unriddle these mysteries. Instead, she behaves as she did in the first twelve weeks of the show, and treats David as if he is having a neurotic episode.

David tells Vicki that Josette’s face, as he saw it through Barnabas’ window, was “exactly the same” as it was when he saw her ghost before. We don’t see the face at all today, and when we’ve seen Josette before, the only look we had at her face were brief glimpses in #149, #165, and #184. In each of those episodes, she was played by stand-in Rosemary McNamara. Today, the performer wearing the dress is Dorrie Kavanaugh. Casting Miss McNamara and letting a bit of her face peep out for a fraction of a second would seem to be way of building on the ambiguity, especially since she resembles Kathryn Leigh Scott strongly enough that she could easily be taken for Maggie.

Though Miss Scott played Josette’s ghost in #70 and #126, this is the first we’ve heard that Maggie resembles Josette. Perhaps Barnabas chose Maggie, not only because she is an attractive young woman who works late and often has to walk home alone after dark, but because she really does look like Josette. If so, the parallel with The Mummy is stronger- Helen Grosvenor looked just like the Princess Ankh-esen-amun, and the movie hints that Imhotep may have been right to believe that she was her reincarnation.

Vicki doesn’t react at all to David’s observation. She simply grows more exasperated with him for his persistence in believing in ghosts and intruding on Barnabas’ privacy, and warns him that “your father and I” will have to become stricter with him if his behavior does not improve.

Meanwhile, Barnabas and Roger are talking in the drawing room. Roger speculates that David has gone back to his preoccupation with ghosts because everyone is so worried about the missing Maggie, then remarks that it is strange that the boy’s behavior should have created a connection between Maggie and the portrait of Josette. This line doesn’t make any sense in the script as written, but if we could believe that Roger remembers what he recently knew to be true about Josette’s ghost, its powers, and its connection to Maggie’s father, it would be a sign that he is on his way to making a crucial discovery. In that situation, Barnabas’ mounting dread as he listens to Roger would carry considerable dramatic force, as opposed to the meaningless throwaway it in fact is.

Vicki’s amnesia is especially depressing, because the only story that consistently worked in the first 39 weeks of the show was the relationship between Vicki and David. At first David hated Vicki and wanted to kill her. After he found out she’d seen a ghost, David proclaimed his love for Vicki, but that was a love that might quickly transform itself into a violent hostility. Gradually, a true friendship grew between them. The Laura arc was the climax of that story, ending with David turning away from the biological mother who wanted to kill him and embracing Vicki as a more acceptable mother figure.

Once David had adopted Vicki as his new mother, their story was complete. Alexandra Moltke Isles and David Henesy made so much of Vicki and David’s scenes together, often in spite of very bad writing, that we are eager to see a sequel to that story that will give us more victories over the stuff that dribbled out of the typewriters of Ron Sproat and Malcolm Marmorstein. One possible sequel would have been an arc in which Vicki and David have to work together to defeat the vampire. If Vicki has forgotten everything that’s happened on the show since October of 1966, when she saw the ghost of Bill Malloy in #85, she won’t be able to do that, or much of anything else for that matter. The show has been primarily a supernatural thriller for months now, and if Vicki is excluded from the supernatural stories her future on it is very limited indeed.

A possible non-supernatural storyline might have been a romance between Vicki and Roger. After all, if Vicki is acting as David’s mother and she lives in the same house as his father, it only makes sense that the two of them should become a couple. And indeed, there are moments today when that seems to have happened. She hesitates for a fraction of a second while delivering the line about “your father and I,” which does sound so much like something an impatient mother would say. She then goes on to have a quarrel with Roger about how to discipline David and what emotions it is proper to display in front of him, sounding like they’ve been married for years. After a lot of raised voices, they apologize to each other and leave together.

We’ve seen Vicki and Roger in date-like situations a few times, for example in #78 and #96, and each time it has immediately become clear that the two of them are wrong for each other. Besides, Roger has been turning into the actor who plays him, the obviously gay Louis Edmonds. So a relationship between Vicki and Roger would be doomed from the start.

Still, it would reactivate some dead storylines. The series started with Vicki on a quest to learn who her parents were, a theme that went nowhere. They’ve been hinting very heavily that Roger’s sister, reclusive matriarch Liz, is Vicki’s mother, so that an engagement between Vicki and Roger would put Liz in a position where she could hardly keep that secret any longer. Moreover, Vicki has gone on some dates with dashing action hero Burke Devlin, who is not directly connected to any ongoing storylines. Burke hates Roger and is attracted to Vicki, so a love triangle involving the three of them might bring him back into the show. But that fizzles out just as the other potentially interesting situations do, leaving us without much to look forward to.

Episode 149: The scent of jasmine

Yesterday’s episode gave writer Ron Sproat six major points to communicate to the audience:

None of the characters yet believed that the relationship between mysterious and long-absent Laura Collins and her son, strange and troubled boy David, involved physical danger or crime, much less a threat from the supernatural realm.
An police investigation taking place off-screen and centered in Phoenix, Arizona will advance the plot.
Well-meaning governess Vicki is a credible protagonist in the storyline about Laura.
Dashing action hero Burke Devlin is too smitten with Laura to be of much help to Vicki in her efforts to protect David from Laura.
The budding romance between Burke and flighty heiress Carolyn is at an end.
Vicki has decided the time has come to start fighting Laura.

With more help from the actors than he really deserved, Sproat managed to get all six of these points across. Today, Malcolm Marmorstein has only two themes to deal with. First, he shows us Carolyn processing her feelings about Burke. Then, he shows us the characters discovering that they are living in a ghost story.

Carolyn comes home to the great house of Collinwood in a grim mood. Vicki asks Carolyn who has upset her. She says that Burke has put an end to their budding romance. She asks Vicki to guess who has caught Burke’s eye now, and Vicki names Laura.

Later, Carolyn puts the same question to Laura’s estranged husband, her uncle, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins. Roger also names Laura, also without batting an eye. When Carolyn is surprised at his calm reaction, he assures her he has no interest in anything Burke and Laura might get up to.

In her anguish, Carolyn tells Roger that he would take an entirely different attitude if he could see Burke from a woman’s point of view. As Roger, Louis Edmonds replies to this remark by raising an eyebrow ever so slightly.

The episodes Art Wallace and Francis Swann wrote in the first twenty weeks of Dark Shadows gave more than a few hints that Burke and Roger’s enmity has its roots in a past homoerotic relationship. In the months since Sproat and Marmorstein took over the writing duties, that idea has only cropped up a couple of times in Sproat’s scripts, and not at all in Marmorstein’s.

Edmonds’ raised eyebrow here will bring a chuckle to regular viewers who have caught on to the theme. As the look passes from his face, Carolyn turns to look at her uncle. When Nancy Barrett saw Louis Edmonds, she must have been glad the scene was ending, as she didn’t have to worry about keeping herself from laughing out loud.

In the village of Collinsport, drunken artist Sam Evans and his daughter Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town, are at home. Maggie is trying to cheer her father up after a recent mishap with fire injured his hands, leaving him temporarily unable to hold either a paint brush or a whiskey glass. Losing his ability to paint is not as upsetting to Sam as it might be at another time. Lately, an occult power has compelled him to paint nothing but pictures of Laura, naked and in flames, a subject which he and everyone else, especially the lady herself, finds horrifying.

Maggie tries to talk sense to Sam. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

What is weighing most heavily on Sam at the moment is a mystical feeling that something is happening to the first of these paintings. It now hangs at Collinwood in the bedroom of Laura and Roger’s son, strange and troubled boy David. An occult power, presumably the same one that took possession of Sam, made Vicki take it back to Collinwood and show it to David. David took the painting because it depicted the scene of a recurring nightmare that had afflicted him and that Sam had no way of knowing about. In the nightmare, Laura had beckoned David to join her in the flames. Again, the nightmare seems to be a communication from an occult power, and there is no reason why it could not be the same one that possessed Sam and Vicki.

The painting has a blank spot the size and shape of David. Sam’s mystical feeling suggests to him that the painting is being completed. He goes to Collinwood to investigate.

While Sam is on his way, we see David’s room. The painting glows, as both it and the portrait of Josette Collins hanging in the long-abandoned Old House have done when supernatural beings were about. Josette herself manifests. She looks around. She turns to the painting and touches the blank spot.

Josette’s ghost is played here by stand-in Rosemary McNamara. We get a fair glimpse of her face. Her hair and makeup looks very much like those we just saw Kathryn Leigh Scott wearing as Maggie. Miss Scott has played the ghost of Josette several times already and will be closely associated with Josette later in the series. If resemblance is intentional, as it would seem it must be,* why not simply have Miss Scott play Josette today?

The ghost of Josette in David’s room. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

Roger, Carolyn, and Vicki are gathered in the drawing room, talking about the painting. Carolyn reminds Roger that David is out of the house, and suggests that he take the painting now and destroy it. Vicki objects that David would take that as a grave betrayal.

A knock comes at the door. Vicki answers it and greets Sam. She shows concern for his injured hands, and very gently takes his coat. She tells him that she is as mystified by her own actions in taking the painting and giving it to David as Sam is mystified by his compulsion to paint it in the first place. Sam asks to speak with Roger. Vicki ushers him into the drawing room, where he meets Roger and Carolyn.

Roger and Sam hate each other, but in front of the young ladies they behave almost correctly. Certainly their hostility doesn’t slow down the exchange of story-productive information. Sam asks to see the painting. Roger and Carolyn send Vicki up to David’s room to fetch it.

That’s an interesting moment. When Sam knocked, Vicki had gone to answer the door at once, and had presented him to Roger and Carolyn very much in the person of a household servant. When Roger and Carolyn send her for the painting, she is all smiles, happy to be on the job. Yet when she and Carolyn were in the drawing room earlier discussing Burke, Vicki was functioning entirely as Carolyn’s equal. The two of them sound like old friends, or like the sisters the show has been hinting they might be. Vicki can move with remarkable facility between the roles of servant and family member. That extraordinary flexibility is one of the qualities that we can imagine will come in handy as she confronts the spiritual forces of darkness gathering in the background.

When Vicki enters David’s room, spooky music starts to play. Vicki walks in slowly, looking from side to side. She senses an eerie presence. She looks at the painting, and sees that where it once was blank it now sports an image of David. She screams.

Roger, Carolyn, and Sam are momentarily stunned by Vicki’s scream. By the time they leave the drawing room, Vicki is already on the stairs holding the painting. Seeing David’s face depicted there, Roger exclaims that he saw the painting earlier that day, and that the spot was still blank then. Sam touches it, and says that is impossible- it is oil paint, and would take days to dry. Roger says that the painting now shows the whole scene of David’s nightmare.

As the four of them try to figure out what could have happened, Vicki says that when she entered the room she felt a weird presence. She says there was a specific perception accompanying this vague feeling- she could smell jasmine perfume. None of the ladies in the house wear that scent. Vicki says that she smelled it once before- in #126, when she saw the ghost of Josette Collins. The association of Josette with the scent of jasmine will continue throughout the series.

Vicki and Carolyn wonder how David will react to his own likeness in the painting, and Roger replies that he never will see it. He throws it in the fireplace. As it burns, the sound of a woman’s scream rings through the room.

This episode is a turning point. Hints of supernatural activity have been cropping up in the show from week one, the audience has been seeing evidence of it for months, and both Vicki and David have seen and talked with ghosts. But the completed painting and the scream that emerges from the fireplace are the first unambiguous tokens of the occult that have been presented to a group like these four.

The only other time more than one person had seen anything like it came in #88, when Roger and his sister, reclusive matriarch Liz, found seaweed on the spot where Vicki reported that the ghost of beloved local man Bill Malloy had dropped it. But Roger and Liz both want to keep the stories of Collinwood’s haunting to a minimum, and they threw the seaweed into the fire without telling Vicki or anyone else that they had found it. Denial, the psychological defense mechanism, is the ruling passion of their lives, and when the two of them found the evidence it was a foregone conclusion that it would be destroyed.

There is no such unity among Sam, Vicki, Carolyn, and Roger. Now that the only way any of them can deny that supernatural powers are operating in connection with Laura and David is to lie, we see that the four of them are strikingly ill-appointed to be the members of a plot to keep a secret. Sam is an outsider and no friend of the Collinses. Vicki is too conscientious to be part of a coverup. Carolyn is a loose cannon, and might tell anyone anything. Roger is unburdened by a conscience and is quite happy to tell lies, but he is also so cowardly and irresolute that he might be the weak link in any conspiracy he might join. So, not only do these characters now know that spirits are at work in connection with Laura’s relationship with David, but everyone else is likely to find out as well.

*Rosemary McNamara’s face is of the same general type as Kathryn Leigh Scott’s, but I think the hair and makeup above emphasize the similarity. Here’s the picture from her imdb profile: