tape recorder – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 897: Restore our flesh and bones

The Trouble with David

Yesterday we saw strange and troubled boy David Collins (David Henesy) go to a mysterious cairn in the woods, the ceremonial center of the cult of the Leviathan people, and announce that he was now one of the cult. The cairn then opened, revealing a little gap. David crawled into the gap. The gap was not quite big enough for him, so that the episode ended with an extended sequence of David Henesy wiggling his rear end at the camera while he tried to wedge himself into place.

Today we learn that the carpenters were not the only ones who haven’t caught on that Mr Henesy isn’t nine years old anymore. David has followed the gap to an underground chamber with a steaming cauldron. He takes some vegetation out of the cauldron and recites a cryptic poem, all the while staring portentiously off into space. His manner, words, and actions would be effective as part of a creepy little kid sequence, but the thirteen year old Mr Henesy looks mature enough that we just chalk him up as one more member of the Leviathan cult.

The Trouble with Chris

Heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard calls on drifter Chris Jennings in his cottage. They talk about someone named Sabrina who has told Carolyn that while Chris is a nice enough guy, he will, in spite of himself, kill her if she keeps hanging around him. Chris tells Carolyn that this is true and that he is “a monster.” He does not explain. She leaves, and he takes out a pistol. First-time viewers will wonder if Chris has a compulsion to fire his pistol at people. Regular viewers know that he is a werewolf, and that his particular case of lycanthropy is so advanced that he sometimes transforms even when the moon is not full. We can assume that he plans to use the pistol to put himself out of his misery.

Regular viewers also know that Chris was safely confined to a mental hospital until he checked himself out recently. When he returned to the great house of Collinwood, he told his psychiatrist, permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, that he just couldn’t stand the conditions at the hospital. Since leaving the hospital means that Chris will resume killing at least one random person a month, this decision just about completely erased any sympathy we might have for him as a character. It also undercuts his motivation in this scene. If Chris really wants to stop killing, he is free to go back to the hospital at any time.

The ghost of Chris’ great-grandmother, Jenny Collins (Marie Wallace,) appears. She tells him not to commit suicide. Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in 1897 from March to November 1969; in those days, we got to know Jenny as “Crazy Jenny,” who played nothing but one mad scene after another. She was sane and well-put-together just once, when she appeared as a ghost in #810 and #811. In this second postmortem appearance, Jenny is extra mad, wearing a disheveled wig that reaches heights few hairpieces have dared. She does not tell Chris to return to the hospital, but to find his great-grandfather, Quentin Collins. She says that she cannot help him, but Quentin can.

This confirms what the show has been hinting, that Quentin is alive. Chris doesn’t know that, nor does he know of his relationship to Quentin. He is left bewildered and helpless by Jenny’s pronouncement. His response would no doubt be more complex if he were up to date, but he has been so ineffective at managing his curse and so irresponsible generally that we can’t imagine he would do anything constructive even if he knew everything we do. The character seems to have reached a dead end.

The Trouble with Barnabas

Upset by her conversation with Chris, Carolyn goes to her distant cousin, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins. She enters his home, the Old House on the estate of Collinwood, and finds the front parlor empty. She hears Barnabas’ voice coming from behind a bookcase, repeating over and over that “There is no margin for error. Punishment is necessary.”

Longtime viewers know, not only that a room is hidden behind this bookcase, but that Carolyn knows about that room. Her friend, David’s well-meaning governess Vicki, was held prisoner there by a crazy man in December 1966, several months before Barnabas joined the show. Carolyn is moving her hands, as if she is looking for the release that makes the bookcase swing open, when Barnabas comes downstairs.

When Carolyn says that she heard his voice, Barnabas explains that he was simply keeping busy by “conducting an experiment in electronics.” The candles around the room will suffice to show that the house doesn’t have electricity, and even if Barnabas weren’t so resolutely technophobic it would still require explanation that the text he set his speakers to reproduce over and over was “There is no margin for error. Punishment is necessary.” Moreover, Carolyn knows Barnabas well, and she can’t have overlooked that he is not his usual self these days. He is distant, calm, and utterly self-possessed, a far cry from the fussy, excitable chap who so often stumbles over his words. He remains formidably well-composed as he reiterates his position that Chris is a dangerously unstable person whom Carolyn should avoid, and that she has a bright future ahead of her. He gently but firmly guides her to the front door, and she is out of the house in record time.

Carolyn does not know that Chris is the werewolf, but at least she knows that there is a werewolf. She does not know that the Leviathan cult exists, and so it is understandable that she does not suspect that Barnabas is acting as its leader. But as the story unfolds, others will no doubt catch on that something is up, and so many people have spent so much time with Barnabas that it is difficult to see how they can all fail to notice the drastic change in his personality and to connect it with the strange goings-on. Putting him in this position makes it likely that the writers will have a harder time managing the story’s pace than they would if his involvement were more subtle.

Once Carolyn has exited, Barnabas opens the bookcase and reveals Philip Todd, antique shop owner. He rewinds a reel-to-reel tape and replays “There is no margin for error. Punishment is necessary.” Philip and his wife Megan are members of the cult, entrusted with the care of many of its most sacred items. Yesterday Barnabas found out that one of these, a book, had gone missing. He summoned Philip to the cairn, and it seemed he might be about to kill Philip. But now, he sends Philip off to administer the punishment to someone else, presumably Megan.

The Trouble with Megan

Megan (Marie Wallace) has been in an extremely overwrought state ever since she found that the book was gone. Today’s episode ends with a long scene in which she is alone in the shop, feeling that someone is coming to kill her, reacting sharply to every noise.

Danny Horn devotes most of his post about the episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day to reasons why this scene does not work, among them the fact that a depiction of a person descending into madness requires that the person start off as something other than over-the-top loony. Megan has been so frenzied for the last few days that Miss Wallace has nowhere to go when she hears the ominous noises. Moreover, her first two characters on Dark Shadows, fiancée of Frankenstein Eve and Crazy Jenny, were both intense, overbearing characters who were so inflexible that they had little opportunity to respond to anything their scene partners might do. Longtime viewers therefore expect to see Miss Wallace screaming and carrying on by herself, so nothing she does here will unsettle us. They lampshade this iconography problem by showing us Crazy Jenny’s ghost today, but that doesn’t help at all.

Many fans compare this scene to episode #361. Most of #361 is devoted to a one-woman drama in which Julia is tormented by sights and sounds in her bedroom, suggesting that her mind is collapsing. I don’t think that episode is a success, but because Julia had always been in control of herself up to that point we can see what is supposed to be at stake in it. That’s more than we can say for Megan’s fearful turn.

In John and Christine Scoleri’s post about the episode on Dark Shadows Before I Die, Christine points out the prominence of the taxidermied animals in the background, and speculates that the scene is an homage to The Night of the Living Dead. I wouldn’t have guessed that director Lela Swift or writer Violet Welles would have studied that film, but Christine provides screenshots from it and from the episode, and the parallels are so striking that I can’t see how she could be wrong.

Closing Miscellany

I think the tape recorder is the same one we saw in the summer of 1968, when it was part of the Frankenstein story. It also appears to be the one that parapsychologist Peter Guthrie brought to Collinwood early in 1967.

Her haunting of Chris marks Jenny’s final appearance. Miss Wallace reprised the role decades later in a couple of the Big Finish audio dramas.

During Megan’s big scene, the camera swings a bit to the left and we can see beyond the edge of the antique shop set. We get a good look at a tree that stands near the cairn in the woods. Making matters worse, when they turn the camera away from the tree they go too far right, showing a stage light on the other side.

The antique shop and the cairn. Screenshot by Danny Horn, Dark Shadows Every Day.

As the opening credits begin to roll, the camera is pointed a bit too far to the right and a stagehand is visible, adding dry ice to the steaming cauldron in the underground chamber.

Closing credits blooper. Screenshot by Danny Horn, Dark Shadows Every Day.

Episode 546: A woman, born on Martinique in 1774

Suave warlock Nicholas has expressly forbidden his subordinate, the wicked witch known variously as Angelique and Cassandra, from killing Frankenstein’s monster Adam. But now he has twice caught her trying to do just that. He punishes her by stripping her of her powers. He tells her that she is now a human being, and that she will die soon.

Nicholas de-witches Angelique/ Cassandra, while also trying to hold her wig in place. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Angelique/ Cassandra’s husband, sarcastic dandy Roger, comes downstairs and confronts her about her indifference to him. She responds that there never was anything between them and never will be, and rushes out of the house. My wife, Mrs Acilius, is a soap opera fan from way back, and she says that as far as she is concerned this archetypal soap moment makes for a “Genuinely Good Episode.”

Angelique/ Cassandra goes to see recovering vampire Barnabas. He opens the door and asks what she wants. She says that she was once the mistress of the house and that as such she has a right to enter.

Ever since she showed up in the year 1968, Angelique/ Cassandra has been trying Barnabas’ patience and the audience’s by pretending that she was not the witch he married in the 1790s. He asks her why she has dropped that pretense now, and she says that she, like he, has become human. She also says that she will die at dawn. It is unclear why she thinks this- all Nicholas told her was that her life expectancy was to be measured in “minutes.” She declares her intention to kill Barnabas, and is pointing a gun at him when the episode ends.

If it does not lead to her immediate demise, depriving Angelique/ Cassandra of her powers would be an intriguing way of making her a more flexible character. In the costume drama segment set in the late eighteenth century, she was so powerful that she painted herself into a corner, facing no real opposition. The only suspense she could generate came when she was indecisive or distracted and got in her own way. In 1968, her subordination to Nicholas has pushed her to the opposite extreme. She has been very busy, but hasn’t done much. If she survives without her powers, it might be interesting to see her learn how to live as a human after all this time.

Angelique/ Cassandra’s appearance reflects the end of her dual identity perhaps more clearly than was intended. When she answered to the name Angelique in the 1790s, she had blonde hair; when she turned up in 1968 calling herself Cassandra, she wore a black wig. Throughout this episode, the wig keeps sliding around on her head.

This episode includes another of the innumerable replays of an audiotape message about Barnabas and Adam. The other day, it seemed that Nicholas and Cassandra had taped over the message, as undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins taped over a recording she didn’t want parapsychologist Peter Guthrie to hear in #172. But Friday they played it for us yet again. When Nicholas threatens Angelique/ Cassandra with death if she keeps disobeying him, Mrs Acilius said to the screen “I’ll kill you myself if you play that tape again!” I am glad to report that this is the last time we will hear the thing.

Danny Horn’s Dark Shadows Every Day post about this episode juxtaposes screenshots and dialogue from the scene in which Nicholas strips Angelique/ Cassandra of her powers with screenshots and dialogue from a contemporary episode of General Hospital. The contrast is hilarious. It also shows why even the conventionally soapy scenes with Roger and Barnabas stand out from the other daytime dramas of the period. Director Lela Swift’s use of the camera was incomparably more dynamic and ambitious than anything General Hospital was doing, Robert Cobert’s original orchestral score is comprehensible to a modern audience in a way that an organ playing in the background would never be, and the action is paced so that it takes less time for Angelique/ Cassandra to lose her supernatural powers, end her marriage to Roger, and pull a gun on Barnabas than it took Lucille to explain to Audrey that she had an idea about how she could learn to play bridge.

Episode 541: Creating a living human being

When Dark Shadows began in the summer of 1966, its most intelligent character was also its most dangerous, strange and troubled boy David Collins. David twice came within an inch of committing the perfect murder, first when he sabotaged his father Roger’s car, then when he trapped his governess Vicki in a room in the long-deserted west wing of the great house of Collinwood.

The only story that consistently worked in those days was the relationship between David and Vicki, and that was solely due to actors David Henesy and Alexandra Moltke Isles. While the writers gave them terrible dialogue- at one point having Vicki read aloud to David from a reference book on the geography of Maine- they used their faces, voices, and movements to show us what was going on inside the characters. Mr Henesy always looked like an angry boy who was grimly determined to keep hating his governess even though he couldn’t help but like her, while Mrs Isles always looked like a fearless young woman who was determined to befriend a boy who might make an attempt on her life at any moment. As David relented from his hatred, we could see a friendship budding between them, even if the words were still no good.

The story of Vicki and David had its climactic phase from December 1966 to March 1967, when his mother Laura Murdoch Collins was on the show. Laura was Dark Shadows’ first supernatural menace, an undead fire witch who planned to incinerate herself and David so that she could attain a new life. When David ran from the burning Laura into Vicki’s arms in #191, he chose her and life over Laura and death. She thus became his new mother, and their story was complete.

Since then, the show has found very little for David to do. Yesterday, he was wandering around the house with a tape recorder. He told his stepmother Cassandra that he couldn’t figure out how to play a tape. The preoccupied Cassandra sent him away, and he asked his cousin Carolyn to help him. Carolyn made it clear that all you do is press the button labeled “Play.” Two years ago, David could sabotage a brake cylinder to fail at precisely the spot on the road where it would be likeliest to lead to a fatal crash, but now he can’t grasp the concept of “Press play to listen to the tape”?

Longtime viewers will see a missed opportunity here. Cassandra is a wicked witch, also known as Angelique. In #492, Angelique/ Cassandra cast a spell that caused David to forget some incriminating information about her, so we know that he is subject to her power. Vicki knows a great deal about Angelique/ Cassandra; they could easily give us a series of scenes in which Vicki tries to warn David about his stepmother, but his mind is clouded. Instead, we never see Vicki and David alone together during this phase of the show, and Angelique/ Cassandra rarely does anything more with David than display irritation and order him to go away.

David eventually played the tape for Angelique/ Cassandra. She reacted with great excitement, since it included a message that explained why she failed in her attempt to restore the vampire curse she once placed on David’s distant cousin Barnabas Collins. She sends David away and keeps the tape recorder.

Angelique/ Cassandra won’t let David take the tape recorder back to his room. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Angelique/ Cassandra informs her supervisor, suave warlock Nicholas, that she can re-vamp Barnabas if she kills Frankenstein’s monster Adam. Fascinated by the idea of an artificially constructed human being, Nicholas loses interest in Barnabas and instructs Angelique/ Cassandra to find out more about Adam.

In #532/533, Nicholas met Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town. Nicholas was obviously smitten with Maggie, putting the lie to his taunting of Angelique/ Cassandra for her ability to feel an emotional attachment to Barnabas and his own claim to be motivated solely by a devotion to evil for its own sake. After he gives Angelique/ Cassandra her orders, Nicholas goes to Maggie’s house. Ostensibly this is to find out if she knows where Adam might be, but she so obviously does not that it is clear he just wants to see her. He asks her about her hospitalized fiancé Joe, admires her late father’s paintings, and offers to buy one of them at a high price and lend it back to her. Maggie seems to be quite charmed by him. Nicholas’ “Evil, be thou my good” schtick can be fun to watch for short periods, but if he is going to be a major character for any length of time he will need a more complex inner life. His attraction to Maggie is a step towards giving him one.

David goes to Barnabas’ house. He tells Barnabas’ friend Julia that at least twice this evening he has listened to a message on a tape recorder that had something to do with Barnabas and Adam, but he can’t remember any of the details. He does remember that Angelique/ Cassandra got excited when he played it for her, but that’s it. If Angelique/ Cassandra had cast a spell on David, his forgetfulness would be understandable. If Vicki and Angelique/ Cassandra were locked in battle for David’s allegiance, it could be dramatic. But as it is, the show has chosen simply to present David as an abject moron, and that is infuriating.

Julia and David go back to the great house, where they find Nicholas and Angelique/ Cassandra with the tape recorder. Nicholas and Angelique/ Cassandra leave, and Julia and David play the tape. It no longer has the original message, but instead has the witches’ sabbath portion of Berlioz’ Symphonie Fantastique. David furrows his brow, then comes up with the bright suggestion that Angelique/ Cassandra, who has been in possession of the tape the entire time, may just possibly be the one who made the change. Again, since we have not seen Angelique/ Cassandra cast a spell to confuse David’s thinking, this incredible stupidity can do nothing but exasperate the audience.

They don’t even have the excuse that the current writing staff doesn’t know that David used to be interesting. The gimmick of replacing important information on a reel-to-reel tape with an audio signature suggestive of the culprit is a callback to #172, when Laura thwarted parapsychologist Dr Peter Guthrie by replacing an audio recording of a séance with the sound of fire crackling. If they can recall that bit, surely they can remember that David used to have a functioning brain.

In the early days of the show, Vicki was on a quest to find out who her parents were and why they left her at a foundling home when she was an infant. In #60, Vicki stumbled upon a portrait Maggie’s father Sam painted twenty years before of a woman who looked just like her. Vicki wondered if this woman, whose name was Betty Hanscombe, might have been her mother or aunt. Sam gave Vicki the painting then, but it is back in Maggie’s house today, and Nicholas picks it up at one point. We don’t get a very good look at it, but you can buy a reproduction of it on canvas for $25.99 plus shipping from someone on Etsy, it looks nice.

Nicholas examines the Betty Hanscombe portrait. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 540: Intervening factor

Suave warlock Nicholas Blair tells his subordinate, the wicked witch known variously as Angelique and Cassandra, that she has an hour to figure out why her recent attempt to turn Barnabas Collins back into a vampire failed. When she tells him that won’t be enough time, he suggests she spend the hour preparing for her final destruction. At the last minute, her stepson David tells Angelique/ Cassandra about an audiotape message that happens to give her exactly the information she needs.

Nicholas threatens Angelique. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Angelique/ Cassandra has been an extremely unsympathetic villain, so it is daring to have an episode mostly from her point of view which is suspenseful if and only if we want her to stay around. My wife, Mrs Acilius, says that might have been a reasonable bet when a character as dynamic as Angelique/ Cassandra is played by a performer as appealing as Lara Parker, but it doesn’t pay off today, for two reasons. First, the episode doesn’t have much of a plot. Second, returning viewers will be angry with Angelique/ Cassandra right now. She just subjected us to a three month ordeal called “The Dream Curse,” in which we saw the same dull sequence play out a dozen times, heard it described almost twice as many times, and then found out that there was no point to any of it. We know perfectly well that Angelique/ Cassandra is too interesting to stay off the show for long, so that the “final destruction” Nicholas is threatening will probably last for three weeks at most. But we really do want to see her punished for wasting our time.

This is the first episode in which John Karlen reads the opening narration, and only the third episode in which any male performer reads it. Most cast members have read these narrations more or less in the characters they will play in that day’s episode; Karlen takes his place alongside Kathryn Leigh Scott as one of two who strive to invest the role of Narrator with its own personality.

This was the last of the five episodes credited to director John Weaver. It isn’t hard to find reasons why they wouldn’t have contracted him to do more. There are a number of moments when the action jolts to a standstill for no apparent reason, Humbert Allen Astredo as Nicholas never seems to know what direction he should be facing, and when Angelique/ Cassandra orders the bedraggled Willie Loomis to “Look into my eyes!” we get a shot of him looking past her.

Episode 539: Child’s play

The wicked witch known variously as Angelique and Cassandra is standing in the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood, thinking evil thoughts. The camera zooms out and we see that her stepson, strange and troubled boy David Collins, is standing next to her. She starts to speak her thoughts out loud, saying “You will pay!” David asks “Who will pay?” Angelique/ Cassandra is startled to discover that David is there, and is flustered when she tries to change the subject. She so often delivers incriminating soliloquys while standing out in the open that the comic effect of this scene must be intentional.

Angelique/ Cassandra oblivious to David’s presence.

David asks Angelique/ Cassandra to help him figure out the correct operation of a tape recorder he received some time ago as a present from permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman. After Angelique/ Cassandra refuses to help, he goes upstairs and finds his cousin, heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard, emerging from the long-deserted west wing of the house. He asks Carolyn what she was doing in the west wing. She asks him why he thinks she was in the west wing. When he says he saw her coming out of it, she drops her attempt to evade his question and tells him she was looking for some old family photos to show well-meaning governess Vicki. She has enough trouble remembering this story that it must be obvious to David that it is a lie, but he isn’t interested enough to follow it up. He just wants someone to help him figure out which buttons to push on the tape recorder.

On their Dark Shadows Before I Die, John and Christine Scoleri speak for longtime viewers of the show when they say that it is surprising David needs help with the tape recorder. When the show started, David was two years younger and had the mechanical skill to sabotage his father’s car in a very creditable attempt at patricide. All Carolyn has to do to get the tape going is read the label that identifies the play button. This apparent loss of cognitive function is of a piece with David’s massive loss of narrative function. For the first 39 weeks of Dark Shadows, David was the fulcrum on which every story turned, and actor David Henesy had abundant opportunities to show a level of professional skill that would be remarkable in a performer of any age. But he has been receding into the background for a long time now, and his extraordinary dim-wittedness today marks a low point for him.

Once the tape starts playing, Carolyn makes a hasty exit. David listens to a minute or so of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, hoping it will end and he will hear “something spooky.” His wish is granted when the music abruptly stops, giving way to a voice addressing itself to Julia. The voice rambles about David’s distant cousin Barnabas Collins, saying that if both he and “my creation” live, Barnabas will be all right, but that if “Adam” dies, “Barnabas will be as he was before.” The name “Adam” should mean something to David. He shared a confused and frightening moment with a mysterious man of that name in #495. That man subsequently abducted Carolyn, and is still the object of a police search.

What only Julia, Barnabas, and Barnabas’ servant Willie know is that Adam is a Frankenstein’s monster created in an experiment that freed Barnabas of the effects of the vampire curse that Angelique/ Cassandra placed on him in the 1790s. The voice on the tape is that of Eric Lang, the mad scientist who began the experiment. Minutes before he died of the effects of one of Angelique/ Cassandra’s spells, Lang recorded this message for Julia. The audience has heard this message approximately a gazillion bajillion times, but until now, the only character to have heard it was Adam, and he could make no sense of it.

Angelique/ Cassandra recently made an unsuccessful attempt to renew Barnabas’ curse, and is desperately searching for the obstacle that prevented it from working. Carolyn’s actual task in the west wing was showing Adam to a hiding place there. So Angelique/ Cassandra is now under the same roof with both the information she needs to identify her obstacle and the person she can remove that obstacle by killing. Things are looking bad for Barnabas and for Adam.

While David is upstairs with the tape recorder, Vicki is sobbing in the drawing room. Suave warlock Nicholas, who is staying in the house in the guise of Angelique/ Cassandra’s brother, enters and asks her what’s wrong. She says that she has just learned that Barnabas is dead. His back to her, Nicholas smiles brightly when he first hears this news, then puts on a sad face and turns to her with sympathetic words. In response, Vicki reveals that she knows all about Angelique/ Cassandra and that she has little patience for Nicholas’ pretensions. Carolyn enters and doubts Vicki’s news. Angelique/ Cassandra is the last to enter. She says that she saw Barnabas alive and well after the time when he is supposed to have been dead. Vicki and Carolyn look at each other, and do not see Nicholas’ look of disappointment. They go upstairs, and Nicholas and Angelique/ Cassandra go into the drawing room.

Nicholas scolds Angelique/ Cassandra for her failure. He addresses her as “dear sister.” He suggests she may not hate Barnabas sufficiently to impose a curse on him. When she denies this, he leans to her ear and teasingly asks if she loves him. He threatens to send her back where she came from if she doesn’t re-vamp Barnabas by midnight, and to focus her mind replaces her arm with a fleshless bone.

Director John Weaver was not much of a visual artist, and in his post about the episode on Dark Shadows Every Day Danny Horn analyzes the dismally inept blocking of the scene between Vicki and Nicholas. Danny also has some unkind words for writer Ron Sproat, but I think those are unfair. It’s true the opening scene between Adam and Carolyn goes on too long, David’s helplessness with the tape recorder is dismal, and Vicki and Carolyn’s reaction to Angelique/ Cassandra’s report that Barnabas is still alive doesn’t make sense. That’s a long enough list of flaws that we might fairly classify Weaver and Sproat as the B-team, not on a par with director Lela Swift and writers Sam Hall and Gordon Russell.

But it is genuinely funny when we first see David standing next to Angelique/ Cassandra, David’s questioning of Carolyn is intelligently written, Lang’s message is for once an actual source of suspense, Vicki’s lines to Nicholas as Alexandra Moltke Isles delivers them show the character’s strength, Nicholas’ teasing Angelique/ Cassandra with her alleged love of Barnabas raises a laugh as it makes them sound like a couple of kids, and the final gag with the arm bone is at once goofy enough to keep up the humor in the episode and startling enough to be effective as a touch of horror. All in all, it’s an enjoyable episode, if not one that fans would be tempted to use to turn their friends on to the show.

Episode 511: It’s not fair to come into someone’s house

In the first months of Dark Shadows, the audience’s point of view was represented by well-meaning governess Vicki, who needed to have explained to her everything we might want to know and who reacted to all the strange goings-on with the mixture of disquiet and curiosity that the makers of the show hope we will feel.

Vicki has long since been replaced as our representative by mad scientist Julia. We no longer want characters to tell us what has been going on, nor are we making up our minds about our moral evaluation of the events in the stories. We find ourselves in the middle of a whole clutch of fast-moving plots, trying to keep up with them all and hoping that nothing will stop the thrills. Julia’s loyalty to her best friend, sometime vampire Barnabas, and her supremely well-developed capacity for lying put her in the same position, and her vestigial conscience is no obstacle to any juicy storyline.

When Vicki was our on-screen counterpart, her charge, strange and troubled boy David, was the show’s most powerful chaos agent. David precipitated a series of crises that seemed likely to expose the secrets of the ancient and esteemed Collins family, to kill one or more of the major characters, or both. In #70, David led Vicki to his favorite playground, the long-vacant Old House on the estate of Collinwood. David would keep sneaking into the Old House even after Barnabas took up residence there in #218.

Today, David again lets himself into the Old House. He is caught there by Julia and a man he has not seen before. Julia is stern with him for entering the house without Barnabas’ permission; he defends his presence there, reminding Julia that she promised him he could play with the tape recorder on Barnabas’ desk. He asks who the man is.

The man introduces himself to David as “Timothy Eliot Stokes.” This is the first time time we have heard his middle name. Soon, the show will phase “Timothy” out, and his friends will address Stokes as “Eliot.” I suppose that’s because he’s a professor, and “Eliot” suggests Harvard.

In 1966, Thayer David played crazed groundskeeper Matthew. Suspected of murder, Matthew hid out in the Old House and kept Vicki prisoner there until some ghosts scared him to death in #126. David didn’t believe Matthew was a killer and didn’t know he was holding Vicki, so when he stumbled upon him in the Old House he brought him food and cigarettes. Even after he found Vicki bound and gagged behind a hidden panel, he kept Matthew’s secret. When David meets another character played by the same actor on the same set, longtime viewers can see that Stokes is as genteel and urbane as Matthew was rough-hewn and paranoid. For her part, Julia recalls Vicki when she scolds David for sneaking into the Old House, but where Vicki was doing her job as David’s governess and trying to enforce the rules of the household as a governess might, Julia is scrambling to keep David from finding out about her own secret activities.

Julia tells David to take the tape recorder and go home to the great house on the estate. As he makes his way to the front door, Stokes takes Julia aside and tells her that it will not be well if it is known in the great house that David has seen him. Julia hurries to David and tells him to keep quiet about the fact that he has seen Stokes. She says that she hates to ask him to lie; at this, I mimicked Julia and said “I know you share my devotion to the truth,” prompting Mrs Acilius to laugh out loud. Later, Julia will go to the great house, where she lives as a permanent guest, and David will cheerfully assure her that he kept her secret. The two of them seem quite relaxed together, leading us to believe that he will continue to do so.

There is a bit of irony in Julia’s harshness with David for entering Barnabas’ house without his permission. She and Stokes didn’t have Barnabas’ permission to be there, either. Indeed, if he had known what they were up to he would likely have objected most strenuously. Along with a man named Tony, they held a séance in the part of the basement where Barnabas kept his coffin when he was under the full effect of the vampire curse. They were trying to contact the Rev’d Mr Trask, a Puritan divine whom Barnabas bricked up to die in the eighteenth century. The séance was so successful that the bricks crumbled, exposing Trask’s bones, still held together somehow in the shape of a skeleton hanging from the ceiling. At the end of the episode, Trask has resumed his corporeal form and set about taking revenge on Barnabas by walling him up in the same spot.

Odd that Trask’s skeleton holds together after all the ligaments and tendons have rotted away, odder that there is a straight cleavage separating the top of the skull from the rest, oddest of all that the section is attached to the rest of the skull by a piece of Scotch tape.

Episode 488: May be human

The late Dr Eric Lang built a Frankenstein’s monster with the intention of draining the “life force” from recovering vampire Barnabas Collins into it. Wicked witch Angelique turned Barnabas into a vampire in the first place, and has returned to the scene to thwart this experiment and make Barnabas once more an undead abomination preying upon the living. Angelique struck Lang dead with one spell, and with another has started a “Dream Curse” that has for the moment compromised the ability of the senior mad scientist in town, Barnabas’ best friend Julia Hoffman, to pick up where Lang left off.

In Lang’s laboratory, Julia and Barnabas recap the plot. Under the stress of the Dream Curse, Julia is having trouble controlling her emotions. At one point she refers to her crush on Barnabas. Every time she has mentioned this before, Barnabas has been a huge jerk about it, ridiculing her and reminding him of the crimes they have committed together, including murder. This time, he is warm and kindly. His non-obnoxious response marks a significant change in their relationship.

Lang left an audio message for Julia on his tape recorder. He said that if she does the experiment and Barnabas and the Frankenstein’s monster, whose name is Adam, both live, neither Barnabas nor Adam will be a vampire. But if Adam dies, Barnabas will revert. His recovery is already hanging by a thread, as he feels ever stronger cravings for blood.

Julia and Barnabas play the tape today, but leave the room before it gets to the part with the message. Lang’s voice plays to an empty set. Addison Powell didn’t do a very good job playing Lang on screen, and he’s no better as a voice actor. Powell appeared in a number of feature films, including hits like The Thomas Crown Affair and Three Days of the Condor, but is best remembered for a series of commercials he did in the 1980s as “The Gorton’s Fisherman.” I remember those spots- I thought he was an actual fisherman they’d hired to read copy. Usually I’m uneasy with the idea of taking a job away from an actor, since I know lots of very talented people who have spent years training in that craft, never to make a living at it. But Powell was so bad I wish my original impression had been correct.

Addison Powell stealing a part from a non-professional actor.

Julia has reached out to Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, a scholar of the occult, for help with the Dream Curse. When she met with him yesterday, she did not identify Angelique as the witch. She couldn’t tell him anything about the experiment or about Barnabas’ vampirism without confessing to her many crimes. Today, Stokes is trying to fill in the blanks Julia left so that he can help to oppose the Dream Curse. He calls on Barnabas at Lang’s house. He breaks down Barnabas’ resistance and learns that the witch is Angelique, whom he knows under her alias of Cassandra Blair Collins.

Stokes next calls on Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, at her house. Maggie was the first person to have the dream, and she gives Stokes a detailed description of it. This gives Kathryn Leigh Scott an opportunity to look into the camera and emote, which is always worth seeing.

There are a lot of shots today using mirrors. In their post on Dark Shadows Before I Die, John and Christine Scoleri include several screenshots of these and of ambitious camera angles from other episodes.

Episode 486: Endless corridors of trial and error

Today’s cast includes a vampire, a wicked witch, two mad scientists, a Frankenstein’s monster, and an irritable housekeeper. The deadly menace turns out to be the housekeeper.

In a laboratory in a house by the sea, mad scientists Eric Lang and Julia Hoffman are trying to transfer recovering vampire Barnabas Collins’ “life force” into the body of the creature Lang has built for the purpose, a creature Barnabas has named Adam. In the drawing room of the great house atop Widow’s Hill, wicked witch Angelique disrupts that attempt by sticking a pin into a clay figure that she addresses as “Dr Lang.” It is unclear how Angelique attached the clay figure to Lang, though since it has roughly the same acting ability as Addison Powell the pairing seems natural enough.

Lang gasps for air. Julia helps both him and Barnabas. Barnabas gets up from the operating table and declares he will go to the great house and stop Angelique. Lang tries to tell Julia how to carry on his work, but keeps breaking down. While Julia is out of the room getting some heart medicine, Angelique removes the pin from the clay figure. During that moment of relief, Lang is alone in the lab. He turns on his tape recorder and says that if both Barnabas and Adam live, Barnabas will be free of the vampire curse. Adam will drain it from him, but will not suffer from its symptoms. If Adam dies, Barnabas will revert to active vampirism.

Angelique resumes tormenting Lang as Julia returns to the laboratory. Lang cannot keep his breath long enough to tell Julia his message or make it clear that she should listen to the tape. Angelique says that Lang has suffered enough for tonight, and that she will put the pin away. As she is about to do so, the door to the drawing room opens and housekeeper Mrs Johnson comes in. Mrs Johnson startles Angelique, who inadvertently drives the pin through the clay figure, killing Lang.

This is the second death to which Mrs Johnson has contributed. The two cases are very similar. She unknowingly gave undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins the information she needed to cast the spell that killed parapsychologist Dr Peter Guthrie. Guthrie resembled Lang not only in holding a terminal degree, studying the uncanny, and doing battle with an undead witch, but also in his use of a tape recorder. In #170 and #171, Guthrie recorded the audio of a séance; in #172, Laura erased the recording and replaced it with the sound of fire; and in #185, he was on his way to get his tape recorder to use at another séance when Laura cast the spell that killed him. Mrs Johnson is a menace to a very specific kind of person.

Barnabas comes to the great house and threatens Angelique, calling her by the name “Cassandra,” the alias under which she has married sarcastic dandy Roger Collins and found a place in the house. At first he says he will burn her if Lang dies. She pretends not to know what he’s talking about, and says that she will expose him as a madman. He looks at her neck and leans in, a sign that his vampire urges are coming back. The telephone rings, and Mrs Johnson enters. Angelique/ Cassandra explains their compromising position by claiming that she was fainting; with that, she shows that her threat to air her complaints is a bluff, since she could easily have demanded Mrs Johnson call the police.

Barnabas is getting thirsty. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Mrs Johnson says the call is for Barnabas. It is Julia reporting Lang’s death. Barnabas makes some grim remarks to Angelique/ Cassandra, then goes back to the laboratory and talks with Julia. She is distraught, but agrees to pick up where Lang left off.

We end with a dream sequence. Angelique has loosed a “Dream Curse” on the people of Collinsport. One after another, they have the same basic dream, in each case beginning with an appearance by the next person to have the dream beckoning them into a haunted house attraction and ending with a door opening to expose something the previous dreamers didn’t see. Julia’s dream begins with Mrs Johnson, telling us she will be the next up. It proceeds with her walking through a foggy room, including a clear shot of the fog machine. It ends with the sight of a skeleton wearing a wedding dress and the sound of Angelique’s distinctive laugh, telling us that the position Angelique has gained by marrying Roger is particularly dangerous to Julia. Since Julia lives in the same house as Angelique and they know all about each other, this is not exactly a major revelation.

Featuring a very special appearance by the fog machine. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The dream involves the beckoner’s voice reciting a little bit of doggerel. As it goes on, some beckoners say “through endless corridors by trial and error,” others say “through endless corridors of trial and error.” I prefer “of trial and error.” That implies that the corridors are themselves made up of decisions people have made and of the consequences of those decisions. Saying that the characters are moving through the corridors “by trial and error” means that the corridors exist whether anyone engages with them or not. We saw Angelique start the curse, so we know it isn’t something that has been out there in reality all along, and it expresses itself in dreams, not in anything that persists when people stop paying attention to it. Besides, the whole idea of drama is to show decisions and their consequences, so “of trial and error” is better on every front.

Episode 174: I can’t say it hasn’t been weird

Parapsychologist Peter Guthrie has been doing a lot in the three weeks since he first appeared on Dark Shadows, but today is the first time we see him upset. He made an audio recording of the séance that he organized in the great house of Collinwood last week, and now blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins has erased the tape and replaced it with the sound of fire crackling.

Dr Guthrie tells his friend, instantly forgettable young lawyer Frank Garner, that he isn’t sure exactly what it means to say that Laura erased the tape. Maybe there is some supernatural force that accompanies Laura but acts independently of her. Or maybe the force is one that grants her wishes, perhaps without her knowing it. Or maybe she herself is actively doing the strange things that everyone has been puzzling over lately.

When Laura first came on the show, the audience was invited to weigh these same three alternatives. She was mysterious in speech, vague in manner, and ethereal in appearance. She seemed to be in more than one place at a time, and to conduct herself very differently in each place. She ate nothing, drank nothing, had no material possessions, and spent most of her time sitting motionless, staring into the fire.

Recently, Laura has become a more substantial being. We’ve heard her make threats and seen her cast spells to carry them out. She has materialized in rooms, but then gone on to join conversations in other rooms. She has met with other characters and planned strategies. We still haven’t seen her eat or drink, and it is still hard to get her attention when she’s by the fire. But she gets so agitated when she talks about how little time she has to achieve what she must do that she seems to be quite corporeal. So we are leaning pretty heavily towards Option 3, but it is interesting to see that Dr Guthrie’s view of Laura today is what ours was a month ago. That does make sense- his knowledge of her now is about what ours was then.

The idea of Laura is an interesting one, but her story is developed at the slowest possible pace. They’ve been filling time lately by harking back to story points from the early weeks of the show that didn’t lead anywhere when they were first introduced, and then giving us a scene or two in which they still don’t lead anywhere. Today, I was afraid this was about to happen again. Hardworking young fisherman Joe comes to the house to deliver some papers, and has a conversation with flighty heiress Carolyn. When Dark Shadows started, these two characters had been dating for a long time. They were bored with each other, and the audience was bored whenever the camera was pointed at them. They gradually broke up, and now Joe is seeing Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town. For a couple of minutes, it looks like we are about to have another scene in which Carolyn tries to start their relationship back up, leading to an endless recap of what happened between them to end it.

But that isn’t what happens at all. Instead, we have a sequence in which Carolyn and Joe talk about what is going on in their lives now and how they feel about it. Their attitudes towards their past influence that, but the main point is that Carolyn is more mature than she has ever been and Joe is more independent than he has ever been. If you were to analyze it in terms of plot points, you’d have something like “Joe offers to be Carolyn’s friend. She considers this offer from several points of view. He tells her that don’t have to be friends if she doesn’t want to be. She seems to want to be.” Hardly the stuff of a stirring adventure tale, but as they play it, the exchange goes a long way towards explaining why we care about these people. Carolyn was often exasperatingly selfish and impulsive in the early months of Dark Shadows, and Joe was such a one-dimensional Mr Nice Guy that you couldn’t imagine him doing anything to surprise an audience. But the woman and man we see today have real feelings and real problems, and a story about them could be exciting.

In the first week of Dark Shadows, we had a couple of brief glimpses of the administrative offices of the Hammond Foundling Home, a fictional institution in New York City where well-meaning governess Vicki lived before she came to Collinwood. A few times since, there have been scenes set in the town of Bangor, Maine. Today, we leave the northeastern USA for the first and only time in the entire series. They take us to Phoenix, Arizona.

A street in Phoenix, Arizona, where each car is driven by an office worker carrying money she has embezzled from an obnoxious guy in a cowboy hat.

The Phoenix police got their sign from the same place as the Collinsport sheriff’s office

Two policemen are filling out papers in an office there. One we have seen before. He is Lieutenant Dan Riley of the Maine State Police, and he has been hanging around asking Laura what if anything she knows about a woman whose charred corpse was found in what was left of her apartment in that city after it burned to the ground. The other is Lieutenant Costa of the Phoenix police.

Lieutenant Costa had been convinced that the woman who died in the fire was Laura Murdoch Collins, and all the scientific evidence his department has been able to gather has confirmed that identification. But of course there is a woman living in Maine who can also be proved to be Laura Murdoch Collins, so the authorities have decided to bury the remains as a Jane Doe.

Regular viewers might be puzzled as to why Lieutenant Riley had to go all the way to Arizona. The Phoenix police had a body to identify, and Riley asked Laura some questions on their behalf. But he never had an investigation of his own to conduct. Seeing him here, we might jump to the conclusion that there was more to Riley’s task than we saw on screen, though we can’t really imagine what it might have been. The performance of John Harkins as Lieutenant Costa goes a long way towards selling this idea; Harkins’ guest spots would become a staple of prime time network television in the 1970s and 1980s, and it’s easy to see why. His embodiment of a weary cop having to give up on an important case he’s been working on for a long time lets us believe that the premise makes sense. His scene partner, Vince O’Brien, doesn’t undercut Harkins. Riley seems as weary as Costa, though he doesn’t do anything special to express his weariness

Riley and Costa go to the morgue. This is a large set, well realized visually and even more so acoustically. The actors’ voices echo musically while the camera zooms steadily in on them. They open the vault in which the unidentified body was deposited, and find that it is empty.

Episode 172: The sound of fire

Friday, Dark Shadows showed us its first séance. Yesterday, the people who attended that séance tried to figure out what it meant. Today, word of the séance starts to get out to people who weren’t there.

These three episodes also involve wrapping up a lot of loose ends that only people who watched the show from the beginning will remember. Friday’s episode harked back to the ghostly image we saw in #30. Yesterday’s episode drew a line under the alarmingly inappropriate crush flighty heiress Carolyn had on her Uncle Roger in the first few weeks of the show. Today, dashing action hero Burke Devlin shows that he is still laboring under a misunderstanding that led him to a dead end in #89 and #99.

In those episodes, Burke was trying to take his revenge on the ancient and esteemed Collins family by hiring the most valued employees away from their cannery. He was confident he would succeed in this plan because he had more money than the Collinses. In #89, he explained that confidence to his lawyer with a bunch of cliches rich guys use when they are villains in old movies: “Money talks. Money buys loyalty. Everyone has their price. Name it and you can buy them. Some just come a little higher than others, that’s all, but everyone is for sale.”

Those men all rebuffed Burke’s offer, as hardworking young fisherman Joe had refused Burke’s attempt to buy his loyalty in #3. Burke believes that the Collinses’ power comes from their money. His failures suggest that it is more nearly the other way around. The Collinses dominate the town of Collinsport because the population is so much in the habit of deferring to them that they can’t really imagine any other way of life. Simply by living in town, they have been indoctrinated into an ideology that puts the Collinses at the center of everything. Though from the perspective of the outside world Burke may have come back to town as a representative of high finance and large-scale capitalism, in the eyes of the locals he might as well be trying to start a communist revolution.

The one Collinsport resident who has agreed to take Burke’s money as payment for working against the Collinses is Mrs Johnson. For many years, Mrs Johnson had been the faithful housekeeper to cannery manager Bill Malloy. In her first appearances, Mrs Johnson talked of her unrequited love for Bill and her conviction that the Collinses were responsible for his death. Wanting revenge on them, she agreed to Burke’s plan to take a job as housekeeper at Collinwood and to give him whatever information she could gather. He has been paying her ever since.

Today, Mrs Johnson comes to Burke’s room and announces she has some information she would give him even if he weren’t paying her. This remark will strike regular viewers as absurd. Those who remember Mrs Johnson’s early appearances know that her motivation for joining with Burke was not his money, but her drive for vengeance. Those who have seen her since, including earlier in this episode, know that she always tells everyone she meets everything she knows. Her usual conversational gambit is to declare “I mind my own business, and expect others to do the same!” and then divulge the entire contents of her awareness, including everything she learned by her incessant eavesdropping on everyone in the house.

In Mrs Johnson’s case, Burke is overlooking not only the power of ideology, but also the persistence of personal habits. Mrs Johnson not only does not need to be paid to give information; no amount of money could keep her from giving information. She can’t be incentivized out of telling too much, because she doesn’t know that she is doing it. She is perfectly sincere when she says “I mind my business!” or “I’m not a gossip!” or makes any of her other usual protestations.

One thing Burke and Mrs Johnson have in common is a tender regard for well-meaning governess Vicki. The séance was very hard on Vicki, because her body was the scene of a battle between the ghost of Josette Collins and blonde fire witch Laura. Josette had possessed Vicki in order to warn the company about Laura, but Laura used her own powers to drive Josette from Vicki before she could say her name. Now Vicki is spending the day sick in bed. After talking with Burke, Mrs Johnson goes back to Collinwood and takes it upon herself to keep anyone from bothering Vicki.

The first person to try to see Vicki is visiting parapsychologist Dr Guthrie. Mrs Johnson stands on the stairs and forbids him to go up. He tries to persuade her that, as a doctor, he might be able to help. She responds that the only way he will get to Vicki’s room is by knocking her down and walking over her. At that, he gives up and goes to the drawing room.

Laura then comes to the house and tries to see Vicki. Mrs Johnson takes exactly the same line with her. Laura is more aggressive than Guthrie had been, and tries to walk past Mrs Johnson. Mrs Johnson puts her arm in the way to physically block her. Laura too gives up and goes to the drawing room.

There, she finds Dr Guthrie listening to the audiotape he made of the séance and taking notes. We hear Vicki’s voice desperately muttering about “le tombeau vide” before he sees Laura and shuts the player off. He explains that he does not want anyone who was at the séance to hear the recording, as he does not want it to color their recollections.

Laura and Guthrie talk about the tape recorder and about his use of electronic devices in his work as a scientist. Not even actors as capable as Diana Millay and John Lasell can make this dialogue seem to have much point. But a few weeks ago, friend of the blog Courtley Manor called my attention to a 1957 novel for children, David and the Phoenix, by Edward Ormondroyd. I think there is a reference to that book in this scene.

Ormondroyd’s David is a preteen boy who climbs a mountain and finds himself in a magical realm where he comes face to face with the Phoenix. The Phoenix is initially guarded with David, but relaxes when David says that he doesn’t know any scientists. Evidently the Phoenix’ great goal is to be left alone, and scientists were to learn that there really was such a bird as the Phoenix that goal would forever pass out of reach.

Some of the similarities between Dark Shadows’ “Phoenix” storyline and David and the Phoenix may be the result of common source material. In #140, Laura tells David that her real home is a magical world that sounds quite a bit like the place Ormondroyd’s David stumbles upon. But from the 1930s through the 1960s, the legends of the Holy Grail were a staple of university English departments in the USA, and many of those associate the Phoenix with just such places. So it could be that both Edward Ormondroyd and Malcolm Marmorstein had read Wolfram of Eschenbach or someone like him. And “David” was an extremely common name for boys born in the USA in the 1940s and 1950s, so that could be a coincidence.

But when The Scientist appears in Ormondroyd’s book and emerges as the great enemy of the Phoenix, Ormondroyd presents The Scientist in terms of his equipment. He must wait for his equipment to arrive before he can act against the Phoenix, he puts a great deal of effort into transporting his equipment and setting it up, and he suffers his climactic defeat when the Phoenix sabotages his equipment. So readers of Ormondroyd’s book would have to see a nod to it in this conversation between Guthrie the Scientist and Laura the Phoenix.

After Laura has left, Guthrie calls urgently to Mrs Johnson. He asks her if she touched the tape recorder. She tells him she wouldn’t touch the machine with a ten-foot pole. He plays the tape back, and shows that the sounds of the séance have been replaced with the sounds of a crackling fire. Ormondroyd’s readers will remember that The Scientist did not give up after the Phoenix destroyed his equipment, and will expect Guthrie to try to find new ways to fight Laura.

When we heard the crackling on the tape, Mrs Acilius jokingly asked me when the show was made. “This was before Watergate, right?” Yes, indeed; Dark Shadows was not making a reference to the 18 1/2 minute gap in the Nixon tapes. While the consensus among scholars today is that that gap was caused accidentally, it is amusing to imagine that someone in the White House in those days was a Dark Shadows fan and took a page from Laura’s book. I guess the president’s daughter Tricia was into the show for a while, but even if the erasure were deliberate she wouldn’t have been a very likely suspect.