Gordon Russell’s script contains an interesting scene. A psychiatrist brought in to examine strange and troubled boy David Collins gives a little speech attributing David’s fear of his cousin Barnabas to various unresolved traumas he has recently experienced. This speech sounds very plausible to the adults who listen to it, and might go some way towards explaining the appeal of Dark Shadows to its audience. But we know that David’s fears are entirely rational and that Barnabas really is a vampire. When the psychiatrist mentions that Barnabas had fangs in one of David’s dreams, family doctor Dave Woodard catches up with us and realizes that Barnabas really does have fangs and that he used them to inflict bite marks on some of his patients.
Episode 335 of Dark Shadows was a scab job done during the October 1967 National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians strike. In March of that year, at a time when Dark Shadows was at rock bottom in the ratings, the actors stayed out in support of the announcers and newscasters when they went on strike, and the show survived even though it went dark by the time the strike ended. Now, the vampire story is pulling in more viewers every week, making it a valuable property to ABC. But it is at this time that executive producer Dan Curtis told the cast that he would pay their union fines if they crossed the NABET picket line, and most of them did, with network executives and their stooges handling the equipment.
Sad to say, only two cast members did the right thing by the technicians. Robert Gerringer, who played Woodard, was one of those. Even if he had been a good actor, the scab stealing food from the mouths of Robert Gerringer’s children wouldn’t have been able to deliver on the moment when Woodard figures out that Barnabas is a vampire- we need Gerringer for that. He is the person we’ve grown used to seeing in the part, and his self-consciously soap operatic style of acting sets him apart from the rest of the cast and highlights the weirdness of this story playing out on a daytime serial in 1967.
But the scab isn’t a good actor. His most memorable moment comes when Joan Bennett, as matriarch Liz, bobbles a line, and he corrects her. She flashes a look of anger, but what does she expect? What she is doing is no better than what he is- if anything, it’s worse, because she was a big star and could have called a halt to the whole filthy disgrace if she’d lived up to her obligations as a member of AFTRA.
I’m writing this in September 2023, month three of the SAG-AFTRA actors’ strike and month five of the Writer’s Guild of America strike, so I’m even angrier about the whole thing than I usually would be. But I always find it hard to watch material produced under these conditions.
The character of Maggie Evans wasn’t in any of the episodes produced during the strike, so Kathryn Leigh Scott wasn’t involved in breaking it. She is walking a picket line today, and in her column she wrote about the particular issues at stake in the 2023 strikes. Different matters hung in the balance in 1967, but it’s always true that we live in a society, for the love of God, and if working people don’t stick together they don’t have anything.
For the last eight weeks, Dark Shadows has been presenting a riddle about strange and troubled boy David Collins. In #288, he wondered if mysterious little girl Sarah might be a ghost. Since then, he has seen her several times, and every time she has given fresh evidence to corroborate that hypothesis. When he isn’t with Sarah, David is either looking for her or fielding questions from adults who are anxious to make contact with her, and in the course of every search and every question he finds still more reason to suppose that she is a ghost. David had always been the first character to believe in ghosts, yet he kept resisting the obvious conclusion that Sarah was one.
Friday, David had a dream in which Sarah told him that she died when she was ten years old. In that same dream, David saw his cousin Barnabas rise from a coffin, greet Sarah warmly, and threaten him with his cane. Yesterday, David woke up and told his well-meaning governess Vicki that he now understood everything about Sarah, because he knew that she was a ghost. Vicki listened carefully to his dream. Much to his frustration, she tried to talk him out of taking it literally. But today, when David is out of earshot, Vicki twice shows the other adults that she regards David’s dream with the utmost seriousness.
In the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood, mad scientist Julia Hoffman tries to hypnotize David so that he will stop making trouble for her co-conspirator Barnabas. Before she can induce the trance, David recognizes her medallion as the one a faceless woman held before his face in the dream. He flees from Julia and calls out for Vicki.
Vicki and matriarch Liz ask Julia what happened. Julia tries to play dumb, but Vicki recognizes her medallion both as the one David described when he was telling her about his dream and as the one Julia showed her and Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, when she dropped in on them at Maggie’s house in #298. During that visit, Vicki briefly left Julia and Maggie alone together. Before she left the room, Maggie was about to remember who abducted her and held her prisoner; after she came back, Maggie’s amnesia had returned in full force. During the interval, Julia had used the medallion to do a little emergency hypnosis, restoring the memory block that keeps Maggie from identifying Barnabas as her captor and as a vampire. Julia has reason to squirm when she realizes that Vicki has connected the medallion both with that incident and with David’s dream.
Vicki goes to David’s room to again try to talk him out of a supernatural reading of his dream. She finds him gazing into his crystal ball, looking for Sarah. He pleads with her to allow him to go look for Sarah. She resists, but he tells her that he saw Sarah in the crystal ball and that it won’t take him long to find her. He promises to tell Vicki what he and Sarah talk about. She lets him go, on condition that he be back within an hour.
The riddle of David’s long refusal to acknowledge that Sarah is a ghost is matched by the riddle of Vicki’s attitude. She has seen and interacted with ghosts on many occasions, a fact that is no secret from David. Both her recognition of Julia’s medallion and her acceptance of David’s claim to have seen Sarah in the crystal ball show that she knows she is operating in a world where supernatural forces are at work. Yet she keeps urging David back into “logical explanation”-land. Perhaps she has read Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw,” and doesn’t want there to be any ambiguity about whether the boy saw the ghosts himself or his crazy governess put the idea into his head.
David goes to the woods, hears the familiar strains of “London Bridge,” and sees Sarah. She tells him that she knows he saw her in his crystal ball. When he asks how she knows he was looking into his crystal ball, she answers only “I know lots of things.” He asks her about his dream; apparently that is not among the things she knows about, because it all comes as news to her. David tells her that in his dream, she told him that she was very sick when she was ten years old. She excitedly replies “That’s true!” He then says that she told him she died of that sickness. Even now, after the dream, after telling Vicki that Sarah is a ghost and shouting with frustration when she won’t agree, he follows up the idea that Sarah has died with “That isn’t true, is it, Sarah?”
Before Sarah can answer, Vicki’s depressing boyfriend Burke lumbers onto the scene. He hears David and Sarah’s voices and shouts “David!” Sarah then becomes alarmed and declares she has to go away. David asks her to stay, and goes to tell Burke to wait. By the time they turn around, Sarah has vanished.
Burke used to be an interesting character, back when he was a dashing action hero played by the charismatic Mitch Ryan. In fact, he was the one who gave David the crystal ball in the first place, back in #48. But he hasn’t had much to do on the show since his major storyline evaporated in #201, and now he is played by Anthony George, an actor whose cool, understated approach was the exact opposite of Ryan’s tendency to red-hot, larger than life reactions. In the scripts written by Ron Sproat, the part of Burke still depends on Ryan’s strengths, and George is entirely at sea with it. Today, Gordon Russell’s script takes advantage both of George’s actual abilities and of the dimwitted impression he has made previously.
David tells Burke that he doesn’t think Sarah will talk to anyone other than him from now on, not because she is shy, but because she doesn’t want anyone else to know that she is a ghost. Burke gives David a smug little speech about how foolish it is to believe in ghosts. David asks how Sarah got away so fast. Burke admits he doesn’t know. David gives Burke some details about Sarah’s way of vanishing into thin air, and he is left speechless.
Back in the drawing room, Burke tells Vicki and Liz that David thinks Sarah is a ghost. Liz reflexively asks if he ought to be taken to a doctor. Burke suavely says that he doesn’t believe it is as serious as all that, that David is just letting his imagination run away with him.
Vicki speaks up. She says that she disagrees with Burke on two points. First, she thinks the matter is very serious. Second, she doesn’t believe it has anything to do with David’s imagination. Sarah really is a ghost.
Burke starts giving another sanctimonious speech about how one oughtn’t to believe in ghosts. Some weeks ago, Sproat and recently-departed, never-lamented writer Malcolm Marmorstein had given Burke some angry speeches in which he demanded Vicki stop taking the supernatural seriously. Those speeches would have marked Burke as bad news had Mitch Ryan delivered them, but at least they might have suggested that he was going to become an interesting villain- coming from an actor as cold as Anthony George, they were just pointless nastiness. Vicki’s attempts to comply with Burke’s gaslighting campaign also did a lot of damage to her character in the audience’s eyes, presenting her as weak-willed and empty-headed.
But today, Gordon Russell doesn’t write Burke as a loudmouth or Vicki as an aspiring doormat. Instead, he lets George make a reasonable-sounding case in the quiet, detached manner in which he excelled, and he has Vicki surprise him with an equally quiet but unyielding disagreement. She tells Burke to hire all the private investigators he likes to use and tell them to search for Sarah. If they can produce the girl in the flesh, she will admit that she is mistaken. But she tells Burke that won’t happen, because “David is right- that little girl is a ghost.”
If we remember Vicki’s earlier attempts to submit to Burke’s gaslighting, this scene answers the riddle about her. She knows that there are a lot of Burkes and a lot of Lizzes in this world, and that if you want to get along with them you have to be able to present yourself as someone who doesn’t believe in ghosts. She is trying to teach David how to play the role of the practical-minded fellow who takes it for granted that what we can see in the plain light of day is all we have to concern ourselves with. If she and the other adults can shelter him from enough of the uncanny doings that she knows full well are afoot all around them, perhaps he might get through his childhood actually being something like that fellow. It worked out that way when David’s mother, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, came to Collinwood to claim him- the storyline around her drew him deeper and deeper into the world of the occult, but once Vicki had rescued him and it was all over he didn’t remember anything about that side of it.
Upstairs, David is trying to sleep. Sarah appears in the corner of his room, lit from below. Laura stood on the same spot, in the same lighting, when she visited David while he slept in #150. His mother had called his name in a whispering voice and had a subtle message for him, but Sarah yells “David!” and says she’s ready to answer more questions.
David doesn’t ask her if she died. Perhaps when he told Burke that she doesn’t want anyone to know that she is a ghost, he meant that he has realized it is a sensitive subject for her. He does ask about the coffin he saw in his dream. She says she doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He says it was in a room that he felt he’d been in before, and she says maybe it was. He says he doesn’t know where it is, and she tells him that’s good- she doesn’t want him going anywhere near it.
David keeps talking about the coffin, and it dawns on him that it is in the basement of Barnabas’ house. She insists that he stay away from Barnabas’ house, that it isn’t safe for him there. She won’t answer any of his questions about that, but she keeps insisting that he stay away from Barnabas’ house.
David asks Sarah if Barnabas’ servant Willie really was the man who abducted Maggie, as the police think. Sarah answers, “Oh no, poor Willie only went to Maggie’s house to warn her.” David asks what he was trying to warn Maggie of, and Sarah says that she has to go away. She repeats that he must stay away from Barnabas’ house. He pleads with her to stay, but she dematerializes in front of him. This is the first time we’ve seen a ghost vanish in this way since #85, when the ghost of Bill Malloy appeared to Vicki, sang a sea shanty, and then disappeared. It’s also the first time Sarah has let David see her dematerialize. Evidently, she’s more relaxed about these things now that she’s out to him.
Closing Miscellany
There is a particularly funny blooper 14 minutes and 20 seconds into the episode, when Burke comes out of the door that leads to the bedrooms at Collinwood, an off-camera voice calls out “Go in!,” he turns around, goes back in the door, then comes out again with exactly the same expression on his face.
Burke and Vicki have a little conversation about why Julia spends so much time at Barnabas’ house. Burke guesses Julia might have “a mad crush on Barnabas.” Vicki reacts as if this is absurd. The same idea had occurred to Julia’s old acquaintance Dave Woodard, MD, in #324, and Julia had been delighted to find that she had inadvertently acquired a cover story. That Burke came up with the notion independently leads us to wonder if we will be hearing more about it, and that Vicki regards it as so self-evidently preposterous reminds us of the times she has seemed more interested in Barnabas than in Burke. Perhaps the Vicki/ Burke/ Barnabas love triangle has a future after all.
Strange and troubled boy David is peering into his crystal ball.* David’s cousin Carolyn tells him it is time to go to dinner. He tells her he is looking for his friend, mysterious little girl Sarah. Sarah has been driving the story of Dark Shadows for weeks now, and the ratings keep going up. Not only does she get viewers to tune into their television sets, she even gets Carolyn to start watching the crystal ball.
Hazel Roy is billed as costume designer for this episode. Mrs Roy died in 2010, no doubt still embarrassed by David’s shirt.
Hardworking young fisherman Joe comes to the house. Joe is also looking for Sarah, and asks if David can help find her. He explains that Sarah might know who abducted Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. David says that he knows where Sarah is, but that it is a place he promised he would keep secret. He offers to go himself and bring her back. Joe is all for it, but Carolyn points out that it is after dark, David’s dinner is getting cold, and that his source of information is something he saw in his crystal ball. Joe backs down.
David recognizes the urgency of the situation. He sneaks out of the house and goes to the secret place, the Tomb of the Collinses in the old cemetery north of town. Sarah is indeed there. When David asks if she knows who abducted Maggie Evans, she replies that all she knows is that she has a friend named Maggie.
David takes that at face value. Regular viewers cannot be so sure. We know that Sarah is a ghost, and that she returned to the Earth after her brother, vampire Barnabas Collins, was loosed to prey upon the living. We do not know whether Sarah knows that she is a ghost or that Barnabas is a vampire. Nor do we know what she remembers from one apparition to the next. Clearly she remembers the people she has spent time with, but we can’t be sure if she remembers that Maggie told her that her father’s name was Evans and where she could find him. She might be telling the truth when she denies knowing anything more than Maggie’s first name, or she might be lying to protect Barnabas from exposure.
My wife, Mrs Acilius, compares Sarah to a superhero. Like a superhero, Sarah shows up, does what needs to be done to meet the immediate need, and disappears. You could almost say that she “lives in the moment,” if that were not the opposite of what ghosts do. Maggie needs a friend, Sarah shows up and befriends her. Maggie needs to escape from Barnabas, Sarah arranges her escape. Maggie needs to escape from mad scientist Julia Hoffman, Sarah breaks her out and leads her home. Barnabas needs to be stopped from killing Maggie, Sarah stops him.
Playing catch with David, Sarah throws the ball wide, and he ducks to look for it. When he looks up to complain that she threw it where he can’t find it, she has disappeared. Evidently all that needed to happen was that David had to go to the tomb- she has accomplished that, so she goes back to her rest.
David looks for her in the tomb and in the secret room. As he is about to leave, he hears voices approaching. He must honor Sarah’s secret, so he looks for a hiding place. The only place he can find is the tomb, so he stays inside.
The voices are those of Barnabas and his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie. Willie had seen Sarah through the window of their house** in the opening scene, and Barnabas has decided to come to the tomb where Sarah was buried in hopes that she will appear to him.
David realizes that Barnabas and Willie are coming into the tomb. He hides in the secret room. Little does he know that Barnabas is an expert on this room- he was trapped in a coffin there for a century or two, until Willie accidentally released him in April. That old coffin is still there, and when David hears Barnabas order Willie to open the panel he hides inside it.
We don’t know an in-universe reason why this was what needed to happen. We do know that Barnabas has been so harmless lately that the vampire story is running out of juice, so we can see why the writers would want to create a situation where Barnabas decides he has to kill David. But it is so mysterious what Sarah’s motives are or whether she is the kind of being who has what we could recognize as motives that the episode leaves us in suspense, not only as to how David will get out of danger, but what we will learn about her as a result of the incident.
*The crystal ball was a big deal for a while after dashing action hero Burke Devlin gave it to David in #48. He hasn’t really used it since #82, and Burke has since lost his connection to the plot, been recast with a less interesting actor, and turned into a hopeless schlub. It’s hard to see any way back into the story for Burke, but maybe there is hope that the crystal ball will again be a focus of interest.
**Willie was polishing the chandelier when he turned to the window and saw Sarah. Evidently he had seen her reflection in the crystal. So Sarah is twice detected today through scrying.
Last week’s episodes established that high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins and dashing action hero Burke Devlin are both unpredictable men capable of real cruelty, and that our point of view character, well-meaning governess Vicki Winters, is about to find herself in the middle of a conflict between them. Today, we see that Roger and Burke’s conflict will take the form of a lot of prattling about a fountain pen.
As we open, Vicki is starting a math lesson with her charge, “strange and troubled boy” David Collins. David, son of Roger, has been studying his crystal ball, hoping to find evidence implicating his hated father in murder. Unknown to either of them, Vicki may have stumbled upon just such evidence. While taking a walk on the beach at Lookout Point, she found a fountain pen that Roger may have left there during a homicide. All Vicki knows is that the pen looks nice. She is in a happy mood, and teases David with jokes about the pen. As usual, David refuses to laugh or to cheer up in any way, but he is impressed that the pen looks to be very pricey.
Vicki reclaiming the pen from David
In the restaurant at the Collinsport Inn, Burke invites himself to sit at the sheriff’s table. Perhaps Burke has a crystal ball of his own- he has somehow developed a theory that Roger left the pen on the beach at Lookout Point while killing beloved local man Bill Malloy. The sheriff is unimpressed with Burke’s theory and bored with the whole topic of the pen. In this, he is the voice of the audience. On his blog Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn lists 21 episodes that are largely or entirely dedicated to talking about the pen. I believe it is uncontroversial among Dark Shadows fans to say that 21 episodes was too many for this theme.
Knowing that Vicki has the pen, Roger is close to panic. He succeeds in his second attempt to steal it from David’s room. Between the two attempts, he has offered Vicki thousands of dollars in cash if she will go away and take a job with friends of his in Florida. He has also complied with Burke’s telephoned demand that he go to town and participate in a confrontation about the pen. During this confrontation, the sheriff happens by and earns a cheer from all of us by telling Burke to find another topic.
As the Saga of the Pen begins, the idea that Roger will be exposed as a murderer generates a measure of excitement. Our desire to see justice triumph is in conflict with the fact that Roger is so much fun to watch that we don’t want him to face any consequences that will remove him from the core cast. That is the sort of conflict an audience experiences as suspense.
Today, though, the suspense is blunted. The coroner has ruled Bill Malloy’s death an accident, so the sheriff doesn’t have a case to investigate. Even if there were still a homicide case pending, there is no way of proving that the pen was left on the beach that night. Bill died many days before Vicki found the pen. In that interval, a person, an animal, or the tides could have moved the pen a great distance.
Roger’s conflict with Burke is similarly unconvincing. Burke has searched Lookout Point and knows the pen isn’t there now, and he has no reason to think that it ever was there. He had no reason to summon Roger to town, nor did Roger have any reason to come.
At times, the writing seems to be deliberately tedious. Both the word “pen” and images of the pen are repeated countless times. The sheriff’s exasperation with the topic gets a great deal of screen time, and Roger’s labeling of it as an “endless conversation” is the only memorable phrase in his whole scene with Burke.
The pen was first introduced in episode #42, the second episode written by Francis Swann. Episodes 1-40 were all credited to Art Wallace, who also wrote the original series bible, Shadows on the Wall. Neither the death of Bill Malloy nor the pen is in Shadows on the Wall; those may have been among Swann’s contributions. This is Wallace’s last week on the show. Swann will stick around for another month, leaving after episode #113. I wonder if the tedious parts of today’s script are Wallace’s refusal to try to make Swann’s inspiration interesting, or if they are a positive warning to Swann and the writers who are about to come on board that the Saga of the Pen is going to bore the audience silly unless they rethink it radically.
In yesterday’s episode, Vicki the governess had come downstairs with a sketch of the great house of Collinwood that her charge David made. She showed the sketch to David’s father, Roger. Vicki tells Roger that she had taken the sketch from David’s room without David’s knowledge. Vicki spent the third week of the show trying to make it clear to David that by taking a letter from her room without her permission, he was stealing from her. Viewers who remember those episodes can’t help but wonder why Vicki is being so hypocritical.
Today, Vicki returns the drawing to David. He is surprised that she took the drawing, but pleased when she tells him how good she thinks it is. He’s starting to warm up to her, until she tells him she showed the drawing to Roger and that Roger liked it. At that reference to his hated father, David tears the drawing to pieces. David then brings up her lectures about his taking the letter and tells her she has one standard for children and another for grownups. She apologizes and agrees that she ought not to have touched the drawing. He refuses her apology and tells her he hates her. It goes on like that for a moment, until David’s aunt Liz walks in. At first Vicki tells Liz that what she’s hearing is an argument about the American Revolution, but she then says that David “had every right to be angry” because she took a drawing of his without his permission. David is involved with something else at that moment, but he does glance back at Vicki when she says “he had every right to be angry.”
Later in the series, Vicki will seem to lose quite a few IQ points. While it was foolish of her to take the drawing from David’s room without his permission and almost as foolish to tell him that Roger liked it, I don’t think this is quite a Dumb Vicki moment yet. Even the smartest adults do occasionally forget to respect children’s rights to privacy and to property, and it isn’t easy for anyone to really absorb the fact that a ten year old boy hates his father as intensely as David hates Roger. The most important thing about the scene is that Vicki admits to David that she’s wrong, apologizes to him, and tells Liz that David was in the right. The growth of a friendship between Vicki and David is going to be the most successful story-line of the first 42 weeks, and we can see the seeds of it right here.
Liz has come to David’s room to deliver a package. The package is a gift with a bow on it, brought by a messenger from the village and addressed to David. It’s a crystal ball, sent by David’s idol Burke Devlin. David loves it. Liz points out that Burke is the Collins family’s arch-nemesis, and says that it would be a good idea to send the present back. David pleads to be allowed to keep it, and she relents.
The crystal ball allows David to make all sorts of cryptic pronouncements, and gives the cameramen opportunities to take some ambitious shots. This still is featured on just about every webpage anyone has ever posted about the episode:
In a couple of years, we will see similar images, some of them giving great prominence to reflections of characters who aren’t supposed to cast reflections. For now, it is so unlike any other image in the show that I think we have to regard it as a message to the viewer. Just as David was the first character to look directly into the camera- he did it twice, in episodes 17 and 23, and no other character would do so until Sam did it day before yesterday, in #46- so he is the first one to look into a glass that will present us with a distorted image of his eye. The show seems to be laboring to get us to think about David’s viewpoint, about David as an observer.
The other plot also comes back to David as observer. Joe comes to the house and tells Liz that Bill Malloy didn’t come to work and isn’t at home. That gets everyone worried about Bill. Vicki tells Liz that Bill came to the house the night before, revealing to Liz that Roger lied to her. That gets Liz upset with Roger. David ties this together when he tells Vicki that he looked into the crystal ball and saw that Bill is dead, that his death was violent, and that Roger is responsible.
David is absent from the show for long stretches- today is the first we’ve seen him since #36. So it’s easy to regard him as a secondary character. But, we followed Vicki to Collinwood, and she came there because she had been hired to be David’s governess. The name “Collins” is something everyone on the show regards as terribly important, and David is the only candidate to carry that name into the next generation. They build a lot of story points around Burke, and at times Burke seems to be David’s fantasy come to life. David’s actions precipitated the saga of the bleeder valve, which was after all the first story-line on the show to be resolved. And David will be the fulcrum on which several story arcs will turn in the years to come. So perhaps we should see him as the central figure of the whole series.
Acilius on Dark Shadows 