Mad scientist Julia Hoffman has escaped from a band of zombies who were wrecking the great house of Collinwood. From her perspective, it is a few moments after she saw her friend, vampire Barnabas Collins, wrestling with the zombies and urging her to save herself by walking down a mysterious staircase. But she soon discovers that she has left the year 1970 and made her way to 1840, when both the zombies and the ghosts who have triggered their destructive actions were living human beings.
Julia enters the staircase from a playroom that is only intermittently present in 1970 and walks down its two flights. She exits into the same playroom, which is a normal presence in 1840. We saw this same distortion of space in #1070 and #1071, when Julia and Barnabas used the staircase to escape from the far-off future year of 1995 and return to 1970. It was an effective way of expressing the magical nature of the staircase and the playroom then, and is still effective the second time.
When they opened the playroom door on their return to 1970, Barnabas and Julia saw a girl in the corridor. That girl appeared to be a ghost named Carrie whom they had met in 1995, but turned out to be a living girl named Hallie Stokes who had moved into Collinwood while they were away on their bizarre cosmic journey. Now, Julia opens the door and sees the living Carrie in the same corridor.
Hallie was the niece of occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes and therefore a descendant of much-put-upon indentured servant Ben Stokes, whom we got to know from November 1967 to March 1968, when the show was set in the 1790s. We learn today that Carrie is Ben’s granddaughter, and that he and she are staying in the great house as the guests of Daniel Collins.
We saw Daniel in the 1790s segment. He was played then by David Henesy, who was eleven years old at the time. Mr Henesy looked a lot older in September 1970 than he had three years before, and he was an accomplished young actor. But it would likely have been beyond even his abilities to play a character well into middle age, so when we see Daniel from the knees down later in the episode we can be fairly sure he will turn out to be someone else.
Julia sees a confrontation between Carrie and a tall young man in a wheelchair. The man turns out to be Daniel’s son Gabriel. He insists Carrie open the door to her grandfather’s bedroom and push him in. Carrie objects, and Gabriel sneers that she is not to tell a Collins what to do at Collinwood. He berates her, saying that while others may indulge her because they are impressed by her good looks he sees only her impudence. She capitulates to his demands.
In the room, Gabriel turns his abusiveness against Ben. He orders Ben to break some bad news to Daniel. Word has come that Daniel’s son Quentin and Quentin’s son Tad have been lost at sea. Ben protests that Daniel is in no condition to receive such news. Gabriel digresses and says that he cannot make his own living; Ben tells him that many men in worse condition than he is have done, which only makes him angrier than he was to start with. Gabriel regrets his inability to stand up and strangle Ben. We can see that he’s a true Collins; they are a strangley bunch. He then says that he is now likely to become Daniel’s heir, and threatens to evict Ben and Carrie from Collinwood when he does. He menaces Ben with the prospect that he will use his position to make Carrie’s life difficult if he does not obey him now. Ben gives in.
When Ben returns to his room he finds Quentin’s wife, Samantha Drew Collins, waiting for him there. He tells her that the news did not prompt Daniel to change his will. She is still in line to inherit the estate when Daniel dies.
Samantha goes to the drawing room, where she finds Gabriel playing a one-handed game of chess. She is smugly pleased with his dismayed reaction to the news that Daniel has not changed his will. She exits and later returns with word that Daniel has escaped from the tower room. The Collinses have always made a practice of keeping mentally ill family members in that room, and Samantha and Gabriel are so frightened by his escape that we can assume Daniel’s illness disposes him to violence.
Julia emerges from the shadows in Ben’s room. Ben is alarmed to see her, and horrified when she identifies herself a friend of Barnabas’. She claims that she is not a monster, which is a defensible claim, given a very narrow definition of “monster.” When she tells him about traveling back in time from a future period when Barnabas is free to prey upon the living and she is his best friend, he says that she is mad. She denies being mad, which is what a person would do when they are as far from sanity as she is. Ben is leery, but agrees to help her. He escorts her back to the playroom and tells her to stay there until morning. Of course she leaves the room very shortly thereafter, and as soon as she enters the corridor Daniel grabs her by the throat.
The drawing room is downstairs; Ben’s room and the playroom are upstairs. No one seems to be helping Gabriel get from one floor to another, and there is no sign of any ramp or other contrivance that would make it possible for wheelchair users to get themselves from one floor of the house to another without help. Odd as this is, it is not a first on Dark Shadows. In January and February 1970, strange and troubled boy David Collins used a wheelchair in a few episodes because David Henesy had actually suffered a leg injury. David kept going up and down stairs by himself, without explanation of how such a thing was possible. I suppose they got few enough letters complaining about the illogic of that movement that they decide they could get away with it again.
Carrie has three scenes. In addition to her encounter with Gabriel, she talks with Samantha in the playroom and with her grandfather in his room. As Hallie, Kathleen Cody was in a state of maximum nervous tension from the start, so that she had nowhere to go in response to anything that might happen. As Carrie’s ghost, she often swung to the opposite extreme, being so blandly cheerful that she made no impression at all. She did put in a few good performances in the 1970 segment, however, and she is quite good as Carrie today.
Samantha is played by Virginia Vestoff, making her Dark Shadows debut. Vestoff was a distinguished performer who is now remembered chiefly for her role as Abigail Adams in the original Broadway cast of 1776 and of the 1972 film based on that musical. The Broadway cast also included several other Dark Shadows alums- David Ford (Sam Evans #2, Andre DuPres) as John Hancock, Emory Bass (Mr Best) as James Wilson, Daniel F. Keyes (The Cemetery Caretaker) as Josiah Bartlett, and Peter Lombard (Oberon) as a stage manager and understudy for the roles of Stephen Hopkins and Thomas Jefferson. All of those, aside from Lombard, also appeared in the film. Vestoff died of cancer in 1983, aged 42, a major loss to the world of the theater.
A great deal of emphasis is placed today on Samantha’s maiden name, Drew. We have in the last few months met two characters named Roxanne Drew; we can take it that Samantha will turn out to be related to one of those in some way.
Longtime viewers, learning that Daniel and Ben are in the 1840 story, will readjust their expectations. Most of what we saw in the ten weeks leading up to this uncertain and frightening journey into the past was recycled from a story that ran from December 1968 to March 1969 and culminated in a trip to the year 1897. So we may have come in thinking there would be a retelling of 1897. But seeing Ben and Daniel, we have the prospect of a sequel to the 1790s segment. That does sound like a fresher idea.
The episode is certainly structured very differently than were the first episodes of either the 1790s segment or the 1897 segment. Those featured a relatively wide variety of brightly lit sets full of busy people, getting us off to a fast start in a new world. Today most of the action takes place in the playroom, Ben’s room, and the corridor between them, with a couple of brief glimpses of the drawing room. We keep cutting to Julia standing very still behind one partition or another as she eavesdrops on the dialogue. We are operating within a very small space, but hearing about people who are far outside that space and whom we are confident we will meet soon. So rather than leading with the equivalent of a panorama of our new surroundings, they are opening the space up for us a little bit at a time. That makes it easier to keep the action moving rapidly and clearly, and also leaves us wanting more.
