Vampires and mad scientists are both metaphors for extreme selfishness. The vampire exists only to feed on humans, gaining a night’s nourishment for himself at infinite cost to them; the mad scientist takes skills and equipment that could bring great boons to humanity and uses them only to further some perverse private whim. The Frankenstein’s monster emerges as the logical synthesis of these metaphors. As a botched resurrection and a parody of the Christian story, the Frankenstein’s monster evokes the vampire; as the helpless product of the mad scientist’s hubris, he is a child neglected and abused by a narcissistic parent, bringing home the real-world stakes of the issues raised in stories of uncanny horrors.
Mad scientist Julia Hoffman and vampire Barnabas Collins have finally got round to creating a Frankenstein’s monster of their own. His name is Adam. Julia and Barnabas had expected Barnabas to die and his “life force,” what the opening voiceover today refers to as his “spirit,” to animate Adam. They are surprised that the experiment has ended with Barnabas and Adam both alive. They are entirely bewildered about what to do with this 6′ 6″ newborn. Julia goes to her usual default, and injects him with a sedative.
Matriarch Liz comes from the great house of Collinwood to the house where Julia and Barnabas are working. She brings some information about the B plot. Barnabas makes it clear that he and Julia are deeply involved in an experiment begun by the house’s previous owner, the late Dr Lang. Liz is mystified by Barnabas’ new interest in science. She and Julia go to Collinwood, while Barnabas stays downstairs in Lang’s old consulting room. He is waiting for the dawn, wondering if the process of creating Adam cured him of the symptoms of vampirism or if he will crumble into dust when the sun rises.
In the lab upstairs, Adam regains consciousness. He plays with some of the shiny objects around him. It’s rather an odd playpen for a baby, with its electrical equipment spraying sparks, vials of boiling acid, loaded gun, and medical sharps. But he seems delighted with everything until he grabs a scalpel by the wrong end. Then he starts smashing things.
By that point, Julia is back, the sun is up, and Barnabas has learned he is human again. Julia and Barnabas hear the crashing sounds from upstairs. They try to stop Adam. He flings them aside. The episode ends with him sticking his arm out the door while they press it shut. Grayson Hall and Jonathan Frid do such a good job of playing Julia and Barnabas as farcically clueless that the sequence left me and Mrs Acilius roaring with laughter.
There is a bit of self-reference in this one. The first person Adam sees when he opens his eyes is Barnabas. When he can see Barnabas, he is calm. When he cannot, he becomes agitated and dangerous. Most of the people watching Dark Shadows at this point first tuned in because they were curious about Barnabas, and have stayed with the show because they are fascinated with him. The viewer mail whenever Barnabas was not getting enough of the spotlight to please his fans must have been unpleasant for the writing staff to read, and might have made them apprehensive of the crowds that gathered every weekday outside the studio at 442 West 54th Street. Perhaps Adam’s rampage was their nightmare dramatized.
Strange and troubled boy David Collins is at his wit’s end. A bat entered his room and menaced him. He can’t even convince the adults in the great house of Collinwood that the bat existed. Still less can he get a hearing for his correct surmises that his cousin, courtly gentleman Barnabas Collins, used magical powers to send the bat against him.
David’s aunt and father call the family doctor, addled quack Dave Woodard. Woodard gives David a sleeping pill, waits a few minutes, and starts asking him questions. David tells him about his friend, mysterious girl Sarah. He asks if Woodard believes that Sarah is a ghost. Several times, the audience has seen Woodard wrestle with evidence pointing in this direction, so we know that he is telling the truth when he answers David’s question with “I don’t know what I believe.” Robert Gerringer does a fine job of acting today, and draws the audience into Woodard’s struggle to come to terms with the idea that he lives in a world where supernatural forces are at work.
Later, Sarah wakes David up. She says she’s angry with him. In her last apparition, she specifically told him to stay away from Barnabas’ house, but the very next morning he went there, sneaked in through a window, and was trying to get into the basement when Barnabas’ co-conspirator Julia Hoffman caught him. He keeps asking for more information, and she complains that he asks too many questions. She keeps insisting that he stay away from Barnabas’ house.
Sarah gives David an antique toy soldier and tells him to keep it with him. She says it belonged to someone who played with it long ago, and that it will keep David safe as long as he has it with him. Returning viewers know that Sarah is the ghost of Barnabas’ sister, so the “someone” must be Barnabas himself. Also, we saw Sarah give a doll of her own to Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, with the same instructions, so we know this is her usual mode of operation.
When Sarah is complaining that David asks too many questions, she says that she isn’t always sure of the answers. This makes an interesting contrast with Woodard’s earlier remark that she seems to know everything. It also brings up a mystery from recent episodes. In #325, David had a dream in which Sarah led him to a basement where they saw Barnabas rise from a coffin. This must have been a dream visitation, since it includes information only she would have. But in #327, David sees Sarah in the woods and surprises her when he tells her about the dream. Later in that same episode, she makes it clear that she does not want him to know the information he gained from it.
The sight of Sarah in the corner of David’s room, lit from below, might cast the minds of regular viewers back to the first supernatural being to make an entrance in that spot. David’s mother, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, drove the story from #126 to #191. In the early part of the Laura arc, the show made a great deal out of the uncertainty about how the various events and appearances associated with her related to each other. There was a more or less substantial, apparently living woman who comes to stay in the cottage on the estate of Collinwood; an image of the same woman that occasionally flickers on the lawn of the estate; and a scorched corpse in the morgue in Phoenix, Arizona. These three, and an undetermined number of other phenomena, might all be aspects of the same being, or they may not. They may be pursuing the same objective, or they may be working at cross-purposes. They may be organs of a single mind, or they may be entirely unaware of each other. As the story went on, Laura became an ever-more dynamic personality, but it was never made altogether clear just how many of her there were.
The difference between the Sarah who led David to Barnabas in his dream and the Sarah who demands that he stay away from Barnabas when he is awake raises the same question. Sarah used to be a little girl, and she still looks and sounds like one. But she isn’t really that, nor is she anything else that belongs in our world anymore, and she can’t be expected to follow any rules we can understand. She is a focal point around which uncanny phenomena gather, and through which information passes into our world from an alien plane of existence. Sarah is not only a messenger- she is herself the message.
The uncertainty Sarah admits to today, along with our uncertainty about how her various manifestations fit with each other, show that David is wrong if he finds her a reassuring presence. She is part of a world in which the living have no place, and her irruption into David’s experience thrusts him into the company of the dead. David cannot fully understand Sarah’s world, much less control it. If he keeps trying to find his own way to safety, he will quickly meet his doom.
Each of the episodes of Dark Shadows from #1 to #274 began with a voiceover narration delivered by Alexandra Moltke Isles in character as well-meaning governess Victoria Winters. The implicit promise of these little bits of prose was that Vicki would eventually find out about whatever was happening in the episode we were about to see.
Now, vampire Barnabas Collins is a permanent addition to the cast of characters. If Vicki finds out what Barnabas is up to, she will work to destroy him as she worked to destroy the show’s previous undead menace, blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. If she succeeds, the show will lose the only ratings-maker it has ever had. If she fails, Barnabas will have to kill her and who knows how many other characters, requiring them to start all over with a new cast. So Vicki has to move off the center of the stage.
Today’s opening voiceover is delivered by Nancy Barrett, not in character as heiress Carolyn, but as an unnamed external narrator. The pattern will be that a female member of the day’s cast will play that role. Mrs Isles still does it when she is in the episode, but if she isn’t they give it to another woman. Eventually they will start letting the men do it, and down the line there will be episodes in which Mrs Isles appears but which she does not narrate. Sometimes they are careless and give the voiceover to an actress whose character’s presence in the episode was supposed to come as a big shock, spoiling it for us.
Part Two. “All those years… there was nothing there.”
Matriarch Liz spent the last eighteen years on the great estate of Collinwood. Ostensibly this was because she was afraid that if she left, someone might wander into the locked room in the basement where the remains of her ex-husband Paul Stoddard were buried, and once there would discover that she had killed him.
This never made much sense-the estate is supposed to stretch for miles in every direction, and she roams all over it. If she is spending a day in the gardens by the groundskeeper’s cottage, she is no more guarding the locked room than she would be if she were skiing in the Alps. It made even less sense when we learn, in #249, that nothing untoward can be seen in the room, which Liz has frequently visited over the years, because the tile flooring over Stoddard’s grave had been replaced and cleaned up. It made the least sense of all when we learned in #271 and #272 that Liz herself must have been the one who replaced and cleaned it.
In #259, Liz confided her terrible secret in Vicki. She told Vicki that she had to keep the secret at all costs, not because she feared prison, but because she feared that her daughter Carolyn would hate her if she found out she had killed her father. Now the secret has been revealed and Liz has discovered that she never actually killed anyone. Seagoing con man Jason McGuire helped Stoddard fake his death, buried an empty trunk in the basement, and told Liz she had killed him. Liz never had anything to hide from either the police or her daughter.
Today, Liz is in bed. She appears to be ill, but it turns out the doctor just overdid it a bit with a sedative, she’s fine.
Carolyn left the house before the truth came out, and thinks her mother killed her father. Liz is distraught. We hear her thoughts in a taped voiceover. She is horrified that Carolyn is under this impression and urgently wonders where she is. We fade to a location insert of Carolyn walking along the beach, she’s fine also.
Her shoes aren’t even sandy.
Carolyn comes to Liz’ room and tells her that she was silly to run- she’s sure that whatever Liz did, she did because she had no choice. She vows to stand by her throughout the trial and what may come after, and mentions that after all, she never really knew her father. Liz then tells her there won’t be a trial, because she didn’t actually kill Stoddard.
On his Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn expresses his exasperation with this extreme anticlimax:
So, you know that blackmail storyline where Liz had to do everything that Jason said, because otherwise she’d go to prison and her daughter would hate her forever?
Well, guess what? Liz finally told everybody that she killed Paul, and now she’s going to prison, and her daughter hates her forever.
But not really. It turns out that Liz never killed Paul in the first place, and Carolyn would have forgiven her even if she had.
Carolyn spent the night wandering around outside, in clear violation of Collinsport’s recent curfew. She’s given it a lot of thought, and now she’s ready to stand by Liz through the trial. Except there won’t be a trial, because there was no murder, and the entire four-month storyline was a complete waste of time.
Liz then explains that Jason won’t stand trial either. She isn’t going to press charges for the blackmail because she just wants to forget the whole thing. An understandable desire, to be sure. Carolyn says she hopes Jason has gone a million miles away, two million miles away, even further. “I hope he’s gone to the end of the Earth.”
Part Three. He gets what he came for.
Carolyn gets her wish. As it happens, the end of the Earth is conveniently located right there on the grounds of Collinwood. It is the Old House, where Liz’ distant cousin Barnabas and his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie are in residence. Jason broke into the Old House at the end of yesterday’s episode, and is searching the front parlor for a box of jewels he had earlier seen through the window.
Willie catches him there. Willie was once Jason’s henchman, and still has friendly feelings towards him. Willie tries to warn Jason that he is in danger, and even after Jason hits him and twists his arm he resorts to the extreme expedient of telling him the truth- “Barnabas, he isn’t alive. He can walk at night, but he’s dead.” Jason doesn’t believe him.
Jason keeps telling Willie that he is determined to get enough money to start over. The way he expresses it is “I need a stake.” Little does he know how right he is!
Jason forces Willie to accompany him to the basement. He sees Barnabas’ coffin there, and is convinced it is full of treasure. Willie makes one more effort to save his former friend, taking a handful of jewels from a table near the coffin and offering them to Jason if he will leave at once. Jason scoffs at him, and Willie backs sadly away. Jason opens the coffin. A ringed hand shoots out and chokes him. So long, Jason! We can’t say it hasn’t been weird.
Comeuppance
This is only the second on-screen killing we’ve seen on Dark Shadows, after Laura murdered Van Helsing-equivalent Dr Guthrie in #185. Moreover, it’s the first time Barnabas has killed anyone on the show. It’s kind of odd to have a vampire around for thirteen weeks before the first fatality is recorded. We might wonder if he will pick up the pace as he goes on.
In the great house of Collinwood, well-meaning governess Vicki is terrified of high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins. She had found evidence that led her to suspect Roger of murdering beloved local man Bill Malloy. Roger learned of her suspicions and told her a story that has left her unsure what to think.
In yesterday’s episode, someone unlocked the door to Vicki’s room and started to enter while she was in bed. She screamed, and the door slammed shut. Seconds later, Roger came. He denied having unlocked the door or seen anyone else in the hallway.
Today, Vicki is discussing that event with reclusive matriarch Liz. Vicki won’t explicitly say anything against Liz’ brother Roger, and Liz will not draw any conclusions about him in front of her. When Liz says she can’t imagine who might be in the house that Vicki could have reason to fear, gruff caretaker Matthew enters. This is not the least subtle clue the show has given us that we should consider Matthew a potential threat to Vicki.
Vicki tries to call her friend Maggie Evans. She talks to Maggie’s father, drunken artist Sam. Sam asks her to meet him at the local tavern to discuss a painting he did long ago of a woman to whom Vicki thinks she might be related.
After Vicki has left, Roger comes home. Liz is unhappy that he did not return her call when she telephoned him at his office in the business she owns. He is unrepentant. When she questions him about Vicki, he tells her that he thinks Vicki should leave Collinwood. He says that she is not safe there because she knows too much about the death of Bill Malloy. This does not leave Liz with a particularly sunny view of her bratty little brother.
At the tavern, Sam admits to Vicki that he doesn’t have anything to tell her about the painting. He wants to pump her for information about her suspicions. Vicki says she has something to say to Maggie about that subject, but only to her- she doesn’t want to go through it any more often than necessary. She refuses to tell Sam anything. When Sam gets overheated, she gets up to leave the table. He touches her sleeve. She gives him a look that goes from startled to commanding to wondering to pitying to just sad in the space of fifth of a second. He shrinks into his seat, and she sits back down. He offers her a ride home, she says she would rather walk. After she goes, he gulps a drink, then follows her out.
On the road, a car tries to run Vicki down. They’ve introduced a new set dressing for this scene. I like the signpost:
Between Brock Harbor and Collinsport
Vicki must have lost her keys when the car was coming at her, because she pounds on the front door of Collinwood until Liz lets her in. Vicki describes the incident, saying that the car deliberately swerved to hit her. In answer to Liz’ questions, Vicki says she couldn’t see anything but the headlights, and declines to call the sheriff. “I can’t talk to the sheriff. I can’t talk to anyone.” Liz mentions that Roger has left the house, and says it’s too bad he didn’t find her. Vicki replies “Maybe he did.” Liz responds to that by fetching a sedative and insisting Vicki take it.*
While Liz is out of the room, Vicki telephones dashing action hero Burke Devlin and tells him of the incident with the car. We hear only her side of the conversation, but we can presume Burke will do something about it.
*The first of countless sedatives that will be consumed in the drawing room of Collinwood in the years ahead. If the show had lasted another decade, the Ramones might have written a replacement for Robert Cobert’s piece for theremin as its theme song .
Acilius on Dark Shadows 