Ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi is at home in the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood when Rachel Drummond, governess to the children in the great house on the same estate, comes to the door. Rachel says that the late Quentin Collins has risen from the dead and attacked her. Quentin was about to bury Rachel in his own disused grave when Magda’s husband Sandor showed up. Sandor fought Quentin, enabling Rachel to escape. Rachel cannot satisfactorily answer Magda’s questions about whether Sandor survived the fight, and Magda will not honestly answer Rachel’s questions about how Sandor knew to come to her aid.
Sandor makes his way back. Magda is overjoyed to see him and throws herself at him with undisguised affection. He responds with his usual grumpiness. At the end, she remembers that they are not alone, and she reverts to their usual form of pretend-quarreling. Their dialogue is great fun, and Grayson Hall and Thayer David make the most of every laugh line:
Sandor: Oh, shut up. I cannot hit you. My arm is too sore.
Magda: Oh, what a brave man you are.
Sandor: Yes.
Magda: What a brave man to fight a zombie, a brave, foolish man.
Rachel: He is a brave man. Thank you, Sandor.
Sandor: I don’t like to see a beautiful lady getting buried before her time.
Magda: But you could have been killed.
Sandor: Yes, that at least would have made you cry. Get me some hot water. My wrist is beginning to swell.
Magda: Oh, so now, I have to nurse you. It is better he should have finished you!
Sandor and Magda are the first happily married couple we have seen on Dark Shadows, and this scene shows them at their very happiest. It is not only a good bit of comedy, it is quite lovely.
Rachel is bookish and intellectually ambitious, very much the sort of young lady you might expect to find in charge of the education of the children in a wealthy family in the late Victorian age. She tells Sandor that she cannot accept that Quentin has risen from the dead and is roaming about as a zombie, even though she has encountered as much evidence of the fact as anyone could want. When Sandor urges Rachel to believe what she has seen, she asks what she will have to believe in next- “Ghosts? Witches? Werewolves?” Sandor affirms that he believes in all of those things, and Rachel replies that she cannot.
Well might Sandor believe in such beings. He is under the power of the new master of the Old House, Barnabas Collins, a vampire. Barnabas rises from his coffin in the basement at dusk, when Rachel is upstairs sleeping. Barnabas knows that Angelique, the same witch who made him into a vampire in the 1790s, is controlling Quentin and persecuting Rachel. When Quentin turns up in the basement, Barnabas remembers a ceremony he saw on Angelique’s home island of Martinique that reunited a zombie’s soul with his body and made him once more a living man. He sends Sandor to the attic to retrieve a packet of letters he wrote to his uncle Jeremiah in those days, describing the ceremony.
Jeremiah’s name will jolt longtime viewers. Angelique raised Jeremiah from his grave as a zombie in #393. Over the next five episodes he initially did Angelique’s bidding, then turned on her. They never did tell us that Jeremiah had returned to his grave, in spite of Angelique’s phenomenally vehement exhortations to him to do so. It’s too bad Barnabas didn’t remember these letters then, he might have been able to un-kill Jeremiah.
Or perhaps not. The ceremony is a total failure today, so maybe Barnabas just doesn’t have what it takes to reunite a soul with a body.
When Sandor and Quentin are fighting in the graveyard, we see a tombstone labeled “Laura Murdoch Radcliffe, born 1840.” The Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t have any examples of the phrase “Easter Egg” meaning hidden content of special interest to devotees until 1986, and for that matter this episode aired a few days before Easter began in 1969. So it is doubly premature to call this an Easter Egg. We learned in #181 that a woman named Laura Murdoch Radcliffe died (by fire!) in 1867, with her young son David in her arms; other Laura Murdochs have died that way in other years, and in #187 the residents of the great house decide that Laura Murdoch Collins is likely to take her own young son David to the same fate. The show has been dropping reminders of the Laura story lately, and any longtime viewers who can read this tombstone will appreciate the reference.
I suspect that the original audience for this particular Easter Egg was pretty nearly limited to the set decorators. The inscription is on screen for less than a second, and it is as clear as it is in the capture above for only a small fraction of that time. It’s hard to see even on a modern television; on a 1960s-vintage TV set tuned to an ABC affiliate, many of which had the worst reception in their markets, it must have been totally illegible to something like 99% of the audience. Moreover, it comes at the end of the fight scene, when most eyes were focused on Sandor’s falling figure. Not very many of the few thousand people who might have had a good enough picture to read the inscription would have been looking at it. And most of the audience who were tuning in at this point had joined the show after Barnabas was introduced, the month after Laura went up in smoke, her name unmentioned since. But in the age of streaming and DVDs, we can all appreciate the reference.
One day in 1897, Edward Collins convenes his siblings Judith, Carl, and Quentin for a family meeting in the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood. Their grandmother Edith died the night before. She was supposed to tell Edward a celebrated family secret, but did not do so. Edward is convinced she must have told one of the others, and declares that no one will leave the room until he finds out which.
Returning viewers know that Edith did not tell any of them, and we can imagine a half hour of nothing but the four Collinses of Collinwood sitting around staring at each other. Fortunately, Quentin points out that Edith was briefly alone with their recently arrived and thoroughly mysterious cousin, Barnabas Collins, and she might possibly have told him. Edward orders Carl to go to the Old House on the estate, where Barnabas is staying. Carl asks why it’s always him who has to do these things, and Edward angrily shoos him away. Louis Edmonds and John Karlen were both talented comic actors, and this little exchange is very funny.
In the Old House, Carl finds Sandor Rákóczi coming up from the cellar. He asks Sandor what he is doing there. Sandor says he lives there. Carl says that he’d heard Barnabas was living in the house now. Sandor says that Barnabas hired him and his wife Magda as servants. Carl laughs at that and says of Barnabas “He is an odd one, isn’t he?” Sandor gives him a fierce look, offended. Carl apologizes.
Carl explains that he has come to fetch Barnabas. Sandor says Barnabas won’t be back until after dark. Carl explains why they need him at the great house, and Sandor laughs. “You must have Gypsy blood! Nobody in the family trusts nobody else!” Carl laughs, too.
This scene may remind longtime viewers of the first time we saw Thayer David on this set, when he was playing crazed handyman Matthew Morgan. The dramatic date and the date of production were both 1966 then. Strange and troubled boy David Collins found Matthew hiding in the Old House, and agreed to help him avoid the police. Carl is a grown man, but he is as eager to please and uninterested in asserting dominance for any length of time as was the nine year old David. Further, he is so naive that he reacts with bewilderment to the idea that lust for money might be a motive for murder. Carl may not be less prejudiced against Romani people than are the rest of the Collinses, but his childlike qualities allow him to laugh at a joke that would have drawn a violent response from any of his siblings.
Carl insists that Sandor go home with him and tell Edward that Barnabas is away. Again, this shows Carl’s childishness. He wants to prove to Edward that he did as he was told and went to the Old House. In fact, Edward is appalled to see Sandor in the great house, and can barely stand listening to him.
While Sandor is leaving, Judith stops him. Sandor is astounded that she is speaking to him at all. She tells him that her grandmother may have tolerated his presence in the Old House, but that she and her brothers will not. Sandor and his wife Magda are to leave the property within twenty four hours. Judith does not give Sandor a chance to tell her that Barnabas has hired them as servants.
On the terrace, Quentin finds Rachel Drummond, the new governess. The two of them look very good together. In fact, Quentin’s seductive manner and Rachel’s response to it make them the most attractive couple we have seen on the show, by a long way.
They talk about the house. Quentin mentions that no one has been in the room on top of the tower since 1796, 101 years ago. Later that night, Rachel will see a light burning in the room, and she will rush into the drawing room to tell Edward about it.
She comes in after a meeting between Edward and Judith. Judith came to tell her brother about something entirely new to the audience. She says that the matter relating to the tower room is going well. Maidservant Beth goes to the room three times a day, and Beth also goes into town regularly to take money to a Mrs Fillmore.
This will interest returning viewers. The other day, Quentin found Beth going into town with a parcel and an envelope containing $300 in cash. Beth said Judith gave her permission to go to town to conduct personal errands, and claimed, absurdly, that she had saved the money from her salary. We now know that she was taking the money to this Mrs Fillmore for some purpose of Edward and Judith’s. Later, Quentin found Beth taking a tray of food upstairs. He asked who was supposed to eat it; she said it was for Edith. When he pointed out that it was more than Edith could eat, she said Judith would be eating with her. In Edith’s room, Beth told Judith about this. She said they would have to be more careful now that Quentin was back home, and dismissed her to take the rest of the food “upstairs.” We now know that this “upstairs” is the tower room, and that Beth is helping Judith and Edward to hide someone there of whose presence in the house Quentin is unaware.
However much this may interest us, it does not interest Edward at all. He is outraged that Judith so much as mentioned the matter to him, saying that he wants her to handle it without notifying him in any way. She objects that they will have to talk about it sometimes; he does not agree.
When Rachel enters and tells them about the light, Edward detains her with a disquisition about the impossibility of the tower room being lighted while Judith scurries off and goes upstairs. After a while, Edward takes Rachel back to the terrace and shows her that the room is dark. He asserts that it was also dark when she looked at it earlier, and it has been dark for over a hundred years.
Longtime viewers will recognize this scene. In March 1968, Dark Shadows was set in 1796, and Barnabas had just become what he is again now, a vampire. Barnabas’ father, haughty overlord Joshua, confined him to the tower room while he tried to find a way to free his son of his curse. Barnabas’ mother Naomi saw lights in the tower room, as did his second cousin Millicent. When Naomi told Joshua about the lights, he pretended not to see them, and when Millicent told her husband Nathan she had seen the lights, he, for his own reasons, also pretended not to see them. Those pretenses led each woman to go to the room, resulting in madness for Millicent and suicide for Naomi. Quentin tells Rachel that the tower room has been closed since 1796 because “a woman killed herself” there; that is an explicit reference to Naomi.
Like Edward and Judith, Joshua and Naomi were played by Louis Edmonds and Joan Bennett. It is a sign of how much more dynamic the 1897 section is than the 1790s section that Judith is an active participant in whatever scheme is going on, not simply a helpless person who stumbles upon a terrible secret and promptly kills herself.
We begin the part of Dark Shadows set in the year 1897 with an episode featuring a glittering script, a strong cast, and a hopeless director. Henry Kaplan’s visual style consisted of little more than one closeup after another. The first real scene in the episode introduces us to Sandor and Magda Rákóczi, a Romani couple who live in the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. They bicker while Sandor throws knives at the wall. Thayer David really is throwing knives, but since we cut between closeups of the targets and of the actors we cannot see anything dynamic in that action. He may as well be whittling.
Magda ridicules Sandor’s pretensions as a knife-thrower and as a patent medicine salesman, and busies herself with a crystal ball. She tells him that when “the old lady” dies, they will have to leave Collinwood. He says he knows all about that. She wants him to steal the Collins family jewels so that they can leave with great riches. He eventually caves in and sets out for the great house on the estate, more to escape her nagging than out of greed.
Regular viewers will remember that we heard Magda’s name in December 1968. The show had introduced two storylines, one about the malevolent ghost of Quentin Collins and the other about werewolf Chris Jennings, and the characters were starting to notice the strange goings-on that Quentin and Chris generated. The adults in the great house had no idea that Quentin was haunting them or that Chris was a werewolf, so they held a séance in #642. Speaking through heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard, Magda mentioned “My curse!” and said that “He must not come back!” It was clear in the context of the episode that the “He” who “must not come back” was Quentin. Chris was a participant in the séance, and he broke the circle before Magda could explain what she meant by her “curse.” Séances held in #170 and #281 were cut short by the person whose secret the medium was about to expose; that it is Chris who interrupts this one would suggest to longtime viewers that Magda not only knew Quentin, but that the curse she is about to explain was the one that made Chris a werewolf. Carolyn and her uncle Roger Collins talked a little about Magda in #643, and psychic investigator Janet Findley sensed the ghostly presence of a woman whose name started with an “M” in #648. We haven’t heard about Magda since.
As the living Magda, Grayson Hall manages rather a more natural accent than Nancy Barrett had when channeling her concerns about “my currrrrssssse.” The exaggerated costumes Hall and Thayer David wear make sense when we hear them reminiscing about the old days, when they made their livings as stage Gypsies with a knife-throwing act, Tarot card readings, and a magic elixir. Even the fact that Magda is peering into a crystal ball during this scene is understandable when they make it clear that they are staying in the Old House as guests of the mistress of the great house, an old, dying lady who enjoys their broadly stereotypical antics. But there is no way to reconcile twenty-first century sensibilities to Hall and David’s brownface makeup. Some time later, Hall would claim that one of her grandmothers was Romani. If that was a lie, it is telling that only someone as phenomenally sophisticated as Hall could in the 1970s see that she would need to invent a story to excuse playing such a character.
Objectionable as Sandor and Magda are, their dialogue is so well-written and so well delivered that we want to like them. Moreover, the year 1897 points to another reason fans of Dark Shadows might be happy enough to see Romani or Sinti characters that they will overlook the racist aspects of their portrayal. It was in 1897 that Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published, and it depicted the evil Count as surrounded by “Gypsy” thralls. The character who has brought us on this journey into the past is Barnabas Collins, and upon his arrival he found that he was once more a vampire.
In addition to the strengths of the dialogue, the acting, and the intertext, there is also a weakness in this episode that softens the blow of the brownface. Today the picture is so muddy that it is possible to overlook the makeup. That’s Kaplan’s fault. It would often be the case that one or the other of the cameras wasn’t up to standard, but when the director was a visual artist as capable as Lela Swift or John Sedwick, there would always be at least some shots in a scene using the good camera, and others where the lighting would alleviate some of the consequences of the technical difficulties. But Kaplan doesn’t seem to have cared at all. He had made up his mind to use a particular camera to shoot the Old House parlor with a subdued lighting scheme, and if that camera was not picking up the full range of color, too bad. He’d photograph a lot of sludge and call it a day.
Meanwhile, a man knocks on the door of the great house. He is Quentin, and the person who opens the door is Beth Chavez. We first saw these two as ghosts in #646. Beth spoke some lines during the “Haunting of Collinwood” story, but Quentin’s voice was heard only in his menacing laugh.
We already know Quentin as the evil spirit who drove everyone from the house and is killing strange and troubled boy David Collins in February of 1969. His behavior in this scene is no less abominable than we might there by have come to expect. He pushes past Beth to force his way into the foyer, does not bother to deny that he has come back to persuade his dying grandmother to leave him her money, pretends to have forgotten someone named “Jenny,” makes Beth feel uncomfortable by saying that her association with Jenny makes her position in the house precarious, orders Beth to carry his bags, twists her arm, and leeringly tells her that she would be much happier if she would just submit to his charms. David Selby sells the scene, and we believe that Quentin is a villain who must be stopped. But Mr Selby himself is so charming, and the dialogue in which he makes his unforgivable declarations is so witty, that we don’t want him to go away. He establishes himself at once as The Man You Love to Hate.
In an upstairs bedroom, the aged Edith Collins is looking at Tarot cards. Quentin makes his way to her; she expresses her vigorous disapproval of him. She says that “When Jamison brought me the letter, I said to myself ‘He is the same. Quentin is using the child to get back.'” Quentin replies “But you let me come back.” She says that she did, and admits that he makes her feel young. With that, Edith identifies herself with the audience’s point of view.
The reference to Jamison and a letter reminds regular viewers of #643, when Magda’s ghost caused a letter from Quentin to fall into Roger’s hands. It was addressed to Roger’s father, Jamison, and was written in 1887. It read “Dear Jamison, You must return to Collinwood. I need your help. You must intercede with Oscar. Only you can save me.” They’ve revised the flimsies quite a bit since then; now it is 1897, Jamison is 12, and we don’t hear about anyone named Oscar.
Not about any character named Oscar, anyway. Edith tells Quentin that “Men who live as you do will not age well.” Quentin tells Edith that she ought not to believe in the Tarot, because “This card always has the same picture and people change, even I.” On Dark Shadows, which from its beginning has taken place on sets dominated by portraits, these two lines might make us wonder what it would be like if it were portraits that changed while their subjects remained the same. Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray was published in serial form in 1890 and as a novel in 1891, and it was a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic. The dialogue is so witty that the characters must be well-read, making it quite plausible that Quentin’s remark was meant to remind Edith of the book. Especially so, since Wilde was released from prison in 1897, bringing him back to public notice in that year.
Edith tells Quentin that old and sick as she may be, she can still out-think him. She declares that all of her grandchildren will get what they deserve. All, that is, except Edward. Roger mentioned Edward in #697, naming him as his grandfather and Jamison’s father. Edith says that Edward is the eldest, and therefore she must tell him “the secret.” There is a note of horror in her voice as she says this; Quentin misses that note, and reflexively urges her to tell him the secret. She only shakes her head- the secret isn’t a prize to contend for, it is a burden to lament.
Isabella Hoopes plays this scene lying on her side in bed, a challenging position for any performer. Her delivery is a bit stilted at the beginning, but after she makes eye contact with David Selby she warms up and becomes very natural. I wonder if the initial awkwardness had to do with Kaplan. He held a conductor’s baton while directing, and he used to poke actresses with it. I can’t imagine a person in bed wearing a nightgown would have an easy time relaxing if her attention was focused on him. Once she can connect with Mr Selby, though, you can see what an outstanding professional she was.
Quentin goes to the drawing room, and finds Sandor behind the curtains. He threatens to call the police, and Sandor slinks back to the Old House. Magda berates him for his failure to steal the jewels, and he insists there are no jewels in the great house.
Meanwhile, Barnabas is in his coffin, trying to will someone to come and release him. In #210, dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis had become obsessed with Barnabas’ portrait in the foyer of the great house, so much so that he could hear Barnabas’ heart beating through it. Barnabas called Willie to come to the secret chamber in the old Collins family mausoleum where his coffin was hidden. In his conscious mind, Willie thought he was going to steal a fortune in jewels. His face distorted with the gleeful expectation of that bonanza, he broke the chains that bound the coffin shut, and Barnabas’ hand darted out, choking him and pulling him down.
In the Old House, an image suddenly appears in the crystal ball. We can see it, the first time they have actually projected an image in such a ball since the first one made its debut in #48.
Magda notices the image, and tells Sandor to look. He recognizes the old mausoleum. She says that the jewels must be in “the room,” implying that they already know about the hidden panel and the secret chamber behind it. Sandor says it is absurd to imagine Edith going to and from the mausoleum to retrieve pieces of her jewelry collection. Magda ignores this, and urges him to go there. He reluctantly agrees to go with her.
The two of them are heading for the door when they hear a knock. It is Beth, come to say that Edith wants to see Magda. Edith wants what she always wants- to be told that Edward will return before she dies. Sandor says Magda can’t go, but Beth says she will regret it for the rest of her life if she does not. Magda tells Sandor to go on his way without her, and says that she will bring Edith some ancient Gypsy cards, cards older than the Tarot. When she talks about Romani lore, Magda taunts Beth- “but you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?” Her sarcastic tone implies that Beth has tried to conceal her own Romani heritage.
Sandor opens the secret panel and looks at the chained coffin. He tells himself the jewels can’t be hidden there, then decides he may as well open it anyway- if he doesn’t, Magda will just send him back. Longtime viewers remembering the frenzy in which Willie opened the coffin in #210 will be struck by the utterly lackadaisical attitude with which Sandor performs the same task. Men’s lust for riches may release the vampire, but so too may their annoyance with the wife when she won’t stop carping on the same old thing.
When Willie opened the coffin, it lay across the frame lengthwise and he was behind it. When he raised the lid it blocked our view of his middle. We could see only his face when he realized what he had done, and could see nothing of Barnabas but his hand. The result was an iconic image.
Farewell, dangerously unstable ruffian- hello, sorely bedraggled blood thrall. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
When Sandor opens the coffin, its end is toward us. We see Barnabas at the same time he does. Barnabas’ hand darts up, and also for some reason his foot. The camera zooms in as Barnabas clutches Sandor’s throat. Unfortunately, the shot is so dimly lit that not all viewers will see this. My wife, Mrs Acilius, has eyesight that is in some ways a bit below average, and she missed it completely, even on a modern big-screen television. It’s anyone’s guess how many viewers would have known what was going on when they were watching it on the little TV sets of March 1969, on an ABC affiliate which was more likely than not the station that came in with the poorest picture quality in the area. As a result, the image that marks the relaunch of Barnabas’ career as a vampire is nothing at all. There is so much good stuff in the episode that it easily earns the “Genuinely Good” tag, but Kaplan’s bungling of this final shot is a severe failure.
Dark Shadows showed its first exorcism in #400. At that point the show was a costume drama set in the 1790s. The fanatical Rev’d Mr Trask was convinced that time-traveling governess Victoria Winters was a witch and that she was hiding in the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. He stood outside that house with a forked stick. He set the points of the stick on fire and shouted commands for the forces of darkness to come out.
Vicki was indeed hiding in the house, but she was not alone there. The actual witch, the wicked Angelique, set a fire of her own. She built a house of cards and burned it to cast a spell that caused Vicki to see flames in her room and respond by running out into Trask’s clutches. What surrounded Vicki were special effects superimposed on the screen, but what was in Angelique’s room was real fire, and it flared alarmingly close to actress Lara Parker’s lovely face. You’d think they’d have learned from #191, when an on-camera fire went out of control and nearly killed the entire cast, or perhaps from #290, when an off-camera electrical mishap led to fire extinguisher noise almost drowning out some dialogue. But apparently the prevailing philosophy was no injuries, no problem, so they went right on playing with fire.
Today we have another unsuccessful exorcism, and its failure leads them to make another attempt to burn down the set. Occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes is informed that the evil spirit of the late Quentin Collins is haunting the great house of Collinwood and taking possession of strange and troubled boy David Collins. Stokes follows Trask’s rubric of standing outside the house, pointing a forked stick at it, and shouting inhospitable remarks at the spirits, but he doesn’t set fire to the points of the stick as Trask had done. There is a lot of excitement while he is performing the ritual, and once he finishes all of it dies down. Unsure of the outcome, he arranges to stay the night; while he is getting ready for bed, the curtains in his room catch fire. These are not special effects images; the curtains are really on fire, they are burning rapidly, and they are putting out a lot of smoke. The little building at 442 West 54th Street where Dark Shadows was made was packed with sets made of plywood and crammed with props, many of them highly flammable. Several sets were draped with huge fake cobwebs; I’m not sure what those were made of, but I doubt it was anything that would make a fire marshal very happy. It’s just amazing anyone who worked on the show lived to see 1971.
There is a lot of very good stuff in this one. All of the acting is top-notch. David Henesy and Thayer David had scenes together as several characters, first as David Collins and crazed handyman Matthew Morgan in 1966, then as young Daniel Collins and much put upon indentured servant Ben Stokes when the show was a costume drama set in the 1790s, and now in 1969 as Ben’s descendant Professor Stokes and David. Those scenes all crackled, and today when Stokes catches David hiding behind the secret panel in the drawing room, demands he tells him the truth about what is happening to him, tricks him into admitting that he is afraid of Quentin, and warns him of the dangers ahead, the two make the exchange work magnificently.
There is also a scene in the drawing room between David Collins, his cousin Carolyn Collins Stoddard, and permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman while Stokes is performing the exorcism. He has to shout and writhe around a lot during this scene, very difficult things for child actors to do convincingly. But Mr Henesy had been acting professionally for four years before he joined the cast of the show in 1966, at the age of nine, and had studied acting under several distinguished teachers, among them Uta Hagen.
That background pays off; violent as the symptoms of the incipient possession are, Mr Henesy does not overplay them. It helps that he has support from Grayson Hall and Nancy Barrett; Hall plays Julia as firmly in control of herself, but obviously uneasy with the situation, while Miss Barrett shows Carolyn’s anxieties mounting until she shouts that David might be in real trouble. Since he is in convulsions and the crepuscular sound of the creaky old waltz that plays when Quentin is exercising power is emanating from the walls of the house, it would seem obvious that David is in real trouble. The line shows that Carolyn is starting to panic. When we see that neither the determinedly calm Julia nor the increasingly anxious Carolyn is having any particular influence on David’s emotions, we know that they are coming from someplace far removed from his visible surroundings.
Thayer David joined the cast of Dark Shadows in August 1966, taking over the role of moody handyman Matthew Morgan from George Mitchell starting with #38. In that first episode, Matthew brawled in a barroom and left dashing action hero Burke Devlin gasping. The main storyline of the next few months was the investigation into the death of beloved local man Bill Malloy; it turned out Matthew had unintentionally killed Bill when they got into a fight and Matthew didn’t know his own strength.
Those two events explain the recast. George Mitchell was a slender little man whose white hair and craggy face made him look older than his 61 years. He was a fine actor, but no one would have believed that he could win a fight with Burke or that he was so strong that he would accidentally kill Bill. David was Mitchell’s equal in acting ability, but more importantly was a burly fellow in his late 30s.
Today, we hark back to David’s original function on the show. The setting is the year 1796; vampire Barnabas Collins has traveled back from the 1960s to rescue his fellow time traveler, well-meaning governess Victoria Winters, from death by hanging. David plays another servant. As Matthew was fanatically loyal to matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, so Ben Stokes is utterly devoted to Barnabas. Ben finds roguish naval officer Nathan Forbes and visiting Countess Natalie DuPrés about to drive a stake through Barnabas’ heart. Ben demands they stop; Nathan aims his pistol in Ben’s direction and squeezes the trigger. The gun misfires. Ben reflexively clutches at his chest, but finding he is not hurt he advances on Nathan. They fight. As Matthew was so strong he could not fight Bill without accidentally killing him, so Ben accidentally kills Nathan. Ben then tells the countess he doesn’t want to hurt her and that she will be all right if she stays put until he can figure out what to do; she is unable to assure him she will do so, and in his attempt to restrain her he inadvertently kills her, too.
Barnabas had originally lived in the eighteenth century. He passed from that time into the 1960s because he was chained in his coffin in 1796 and discovered in 1967 by would-be grave-robber Willie Loomis. Now, he has rescued Victoria, and he is eager to go back to 1969, when he is free of the effects of the vampire curse. He traveled back by standing in an old graveyard and calling to the spirit of Vicki’s boyfriend, an unpleasant man known variously as Peter and Jeff, to pull him into the past. He went to the same graveyard yesterday and tried the same trick in reverse. Peter/ Jeff isn’t in 1969, so he calls instead to his friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman. That didn’t work, so he decided to have Ben chain him in the coffin and take the long way back.
Barnabas is unhappy to wake up this evening. He leaves his crypt to find Ben using a shovel to pat down some earth nearby. He asks why Ben did not chain the coffin as he was instructed. Ben tells him about Nathan and the countess; evidently he is only now finishing their shallow graves. Ben has never murdered anyone before, so he asks Barnabas’ expert opinion about the next steps. Barnabas tells him to get rid of the countess’ things and to tell whoever asks that she left for Paris.
The reference to Paris is a bit unexpected to longtime viewers. When the countess first appeared in #368/369, she said that she chose to live on the island of Martinique because metropolitan France had become a republic. She and her servant Angelique came to Collinwood along with the countess’ brother André DuPrés and André’s daughter Josette, who was at that time engaged to marry the still-human Barnabas. André is identified as the owner of a sugar plantation on Martinique.
In 1796, France was of course still a republic. But the Terror had ended shortly after the execution of Robespierre in the summer of 1794. Among the beneficiaries were the real-world counterparts of the DuPrés family, the vaguely aristocratic owners of a sugar plantation on Martinique. Their name was Tascher; the daughter of the family was named, not Josette, but Josephine, the widow of the Vicomte de Beauharnais. Josephine was imprisoned in Paris during the Terror, but she was freed, reunited with her son, and restored to her property by June 1795. In May of 1796, Josephine would marry an up-and-coming artillery officer named Napoleon Bonaparte. It would indeed be plausible that the countess would want to go back to Paris and take the opportunity to reestablish a life there.
After the story of Matthew Morgan and the consequences of the death of Bill Malloy ended in December 1966, Dark Shadows was for 13 weeks dominated by the battle between undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins and the forces of good, led by Victoria with assistance from the ghost of Josette. Laura was the show’s first supernatural menace.
The ghost of Josette had been introduced in #70 as the tutelary spirit of the long-deserted Old House on the estate of Collinwood. Matthew held Victoria prisoner in the Old House late in 1966, and in #126 he decided to kill her. Josette led the other ghosts out of the supernatural back-world that exists somewhere behind the action to save Victoria by scaring Matthew to death. During the Laura story, Josette’s ghost was deeply involved in the action, literally painting a picture to explain to the characters what was going on.
Prompted by Josette’s ghost, Victoria figured out that Laura was going to burn her son, strange and troubled boy David Collins, to death on the anniversary of similar immolations. This would turn out to be a key turn in Dark Shadows’ world-building. When you are telling stories about supernatural beings, you can’t rely on the laws of nature or logic to shape the audience’s expectations. You need to give them some other mechanism of cause and effect if you are going to create suspense. So from that point on, the show would use anniversaries as causal forces. “It happened exactly one hundred years ago tomorrow night!” means it will happen again then.
That was the basis of Barnabas’ trip to 1796 and of his hope to return by standing on the same spot. Tombstones indicating that Victoria and Peter/ Jeff had been hanged materialized at times related to the anniversaries of those events, and Barnabas must leave 1969 at a certain point to arrive at a certain point in 1796. Eight o’clock on a given night in 1796 corresponds to eight o’clock on a given night in 1969, and those are the times when Barnabas and Julia go to the graveyard from which he vanished and call out to each other.
Even though the conjoined eight o’clocks don’t facilitate Barnabas’ return trip, the structure of today’s episode plays on the same idea of intercutting timelines. We alternate between scenes of Barnabas and Ben in 1796, and of Julia and Willie in 1969. Barnabas bit Willie and enslaved him when he opened his coffin; by the time Barnabas was cured of the effects of the vampire curse, Willie had let go of any hard feelings about that. Barnabas has made the Old House his home, and Willie voluntarily lives there as his servant. Julia has been a permanent guest in the great house on the estate since 1967, but now is apparently staying at Barnabas’.
Julia is determined that Barnabas will return by rematerializing on the spot from which he vanished, and she keeps going back there. Willie doesn’t believe this will happen, but in a long interior monologue comes up with the idea that he might reappear in his old coffin. In her turn, Julia dismisses that idea. They quarrel about these competing absurdities, and Willie decides to put his hypothesis to the test. He goes to the old mausoleum to check on the coffin, and finds it empty. He returns to the house to report this to Julia.
Julia decides it’s time to sleep, so she goes upstairs- apparently to her own bedroom. Seconds later, a ghost appears to Willie. He recognizes it as Josette. She vanishes, and he calls Julia. When Julia comes he tells her that Josette had never appeared to either of them unless Barnabas was in danger. As far as I can recall the audience has never known Josette to appear to Willie or Julia at all, and Barnabas is always in danger, so that remark is a bit of a mystery to longtime viewers.
In the days leading up to Willie’s discovery of Barnabas in April 1967, he, and he alone, heard a heartbeat coming from the eighteenth century portrait of Barnabas that hangs in the foyer of the great house. While he is talking with Julia, Willie turns to the portrait of Barnabas that artist Sam Evans painted in May 1967 and hears the heartbeat again. Julia cannot hear the heartbeat. Willie combines the sound of the heartbeat with the sight of Josette and concludes that Barnabas has returned and the old coffin is no longer empty. We cut to the hidden room in the mausoleum. Chains materialize around the coffin, and we see Barnabas inside it, struggling to escape.
We may wonder if Barnabas has been struggling that way every night since he was chained there in his attempt to return to the 1960s. That would be 173 years, added to the 171 years the first time. It would seem that 344 years confined to a box would make Barnabas even screwier than he is. In a much later episode, we will see Barnabas released after a long entombment and he will be surprised that more than one day has passed. The 2012 film adaptation of Dark Shadows includes a humorous scene based on the idea that time does not pass for Barnabas while he is chained in his coffin. But when he was first released in April 1967, there were indications that he had undergone a nightly torment through the centuries, and the closing image of Barnabas in the box today echoes those indications.
Nathan’s death marks the final appearance of actor Joel Crothers, who has been one of Dark Shadows’ most valuable cast members since his debut in #3, when he played hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell. We said goodbye to Joe last week; it was nice to have another glimpse of Crothers in his villainous role before he left for the last time.
Occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes is searching the room in the long-deserted west wing of the great house of Collinwood where heiress Carolyn has been hiding Frankenstein’s monster Adam since #539 in July. Strange and troubled boy David Collins saunters into the room and greets him with a casual “Hello, professor.” When a flustered Stokes makes up a story about Carolyn sending him to the room to look for some old books, David calmly replies, “Oh, I thought you might be looking for Adam.”
We haven’t seen David since #541. The only time we saw him interact with Adam was when they crossed paths in the woods in #495, and in none of the countless scenes featuring Adam cooped up in this dusty little room has David been mentioned. Yet today he tells Stokes that he visited Adam there many times, and that the two of them became great friends. I take that to mean that Ron Sproat, writer of today’s script, wanted to show us a lot of conversations between David and Adam and was overruled by the producers. It’s a major disappointment Sproat didn’t get his way. David Henesy and Robert Rodan would have been a wonderful pairing. David Collins tells Stokes that Adam told him last night that he would be leaving Collinwood before morning, and that he would never return.
Carolyn enters the room and tells David to go. He eavesdrops on her conversation with Stokes. He hears Stokes acknowledge that he is in the room without her permission, confirming that he was lying when he claimed Carolyn sent him there. He stays long enough to hear that Stokes is anxious to find Adam because he is afraid he is in danger. He goes off to look for the big guy.
During Carolyn’s conversation with Stokes, it becomes clear that she does not remember the events of the previous night. Since that night stretched over 13 episodes, that is quite a gap. During it, a mate was created for Adam; Carolyn participated in the first attempt at that procedure as the donor of the “life force.” She did that under the influence of suave warlock Nicholas Blair; Nicholas later enlisted her in another task, after which he erased her memory. Perhaps she forgot everything she did while his spell was upon her. That would explain why she doesn’t remember anything about Adam’s mate or about his passionate goodbye kiss. The show was so much more interesting during the little interval when Carolyn knew what was going on that it is almost as big a disappointment to learn of this mind-wipe as it is to hear that we were denied a chance to see a friendship develop between David and Adam.
David goes to Eagle Hill cemetery to look for Adam. He sees Willie Loomis, bedraggled servant of David’s distant cousin Barnabas Collins, emerge from the old Collins family mausoleum. David hides behind a tombstone until Willie is gone.
David wonders what Willie was doing in the mausoleum. He goes inside, and decides to open the panel to the hidden chamber. There, he finds Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, bound and gagged. He calls her by name, and we cut to commercial.
This situation will be familiar to longtime viewers. In #124, David found his governess, the well-meaning Vicki Winters, bound and gagged in a secret room in the Old House on the estate. That time, he panicked and left Vicki still restrained.
After the commercial break, we spend some time with Willie and Stokes in the Old House, where Barnabas now lives. Thayer David plays Stokes. In #124, he played Matthew Morgan, the crazed handyman who was holding Vicki prisoner. Seeing him in this house with Willie at this point in the episode ensures that those of us who saw it will remember #124 and wonder how David’s response to the situation with Maggie will compare to his failure to help Vicki.
Willie then goes back to the mausoleum and finds David sitting on one of the coffins in the publicly known part. He asks David what he is doing there. David answers in a roundabout way. We start to wonder if he may have reverted to his old form and left Maggie where she was. But he eventually gets around to describing how Maggie behaved when he was untying her. Willie is terribly upset to find that Maggie is gone.
Willie abducted Maggie and locked her up in the mausoleum because Barnabas and mad scientist Julia Hoffman were planning to impose the role of “life force” donor on her. While there, she remembered that in May and June of 1967 Barnabas was a vampire who fed on her, imprisoned her, tried to replace her personality with that of his lost love Josette, and tortured her when she resisted. Willie doesn’t see any way to let her out when she has information like that. In the middle of today’s episode, Kathryn Leigh Scott and John Karlen have a big scene in the mausoleum as Maggie defies Willie and he begs her to be nice to him. They do an excellent job, but it is quite a relief to be out of that dungeon.
Act One consists of recovering vampire Barnabas and mad scientist Julia standing around Barnabas’ front parlor recapping various ongoing storylines.
Danny Horn devotes his post about this episode to a detailed analysis of this scene. He shows that Jonathan Frid’s performance and Grayson Hall’s are open to many objections. They fall short in such technical categories as “knowing their lines” and “standing on their marks” and “having the slightest idea what is going on.” But they are fascinating to watch nonetheless. Danny declares that “[t]he point of these scenes is to see how long two adults can stand around in a room saying preposterous things to each other.” Frid and Hall operate at such a high level of tension that the prospect of either of them breaking character generates enough suspense to keep us on the edge of our seats.
Patrick McCray wrote two separate posts about this episode. In the one that went live 13 September 2017, he too focuses on the performances in Act One. He writes:
Poor Jonathan Frid. He must have had a rough night. I am usually oblivious to his infamous (and completely understandable) line trouble, but in this one, it is so palpable that I totally understand why he retired from TV after DARK SHADOWS left the air. In his early dialogue with Grayson Hall, you can see sheer terror in the eyes of both performers as Barnabas haltingly recalls a trip to the hospital. This is followed by the “Frid Surge,” where Barnabas becomes far more committed and energetic when he turns to face the teleprompter. Of course, this gives him that great sense of vulnerability that was the secret to Barnabas’ success.
This is the only post on the Collinsport Historical Society tagged “Frid Surge”; that’s too bad, I’d like to see that phenomenon tracked throughout the series. I should also mention that Patrick goes on in this post to express his “confidence that Frid could have acted the doors off the collected ensemble had the poor guy just been given another frickin day to study his sides.”
Barnabas and Julia’s recap scene ends when an unexpected visitor barges in. He is an unpleasant man named Peter, who prefers to be called Jeff. Peter/ Jeff is fiancé to well-meaning governess Vicki, whom Barnabas and Julia know to have been abducted by Frankenstein’s monster Adam. Adam came to Barnabas’ house yesterday and threatened to kill Vicki unless Barnabas and Julia created a mate for him.
Peter/ Jeff was assistant to Eric Lang, the mad scientist who created Adam, and he knows that Barnabas and Julia were connected to the experiment. He does not know for sure that Adam is Lang’s creation, that Barnabas and Julia brought Adam to life after Lang’s death, or that Adam has abducted Vicki. He does, however, have grounds to suspect that each of these things might be true. In this scene, he announces his suspicions to Barnabas and Julia. They huddle in one corner of the room while he shouts his lines in his singularly irritating voice. They deny all three of his points. One of the commenters on Danny’s post, “Straker,” summed up their reaction admirably:
Frid and Hall were too professional to show it but I sensed they were both annoyed when Roger Davis marched in and started yelling. It’s kind of like how you feel when you’re at a party and the host’s five year old son throws a tantrum. Sort of an embarrassed tolerance.
Comment left by “Straker” at 6:21 am Pacific time 31 July 2020 on “Episode 557: A Race of Monsters,” by Danny Horn, Dark Shadows Every Day, 1 January 2015
Roger Davis as Peter/ Jeff, in one of the most subtle moments of his performance. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
After Peter/ Jeff’s scene, it is Barnabas’ turn to be an unwelcome guest. He calls on occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes. Barnabas and Julia suspect that Stokes may be the evil mastermind who has turned the previously gentle Adam toward evil plans. When Stokes hears Barnabas knocking on his door, he looks up and rasps to himself “Go away… No one is home…” This is one of my favorite lines in the whole series. Stokes was quite cheerful when he first involved himself in the strange goings-on, but as he has found himself drawn deeper and deeper into the unholy world of Collinsport he has come to regret his decisions.
Stokes is quite impatient with Barnabas’ demands that he tell him what he knows and his refusal to reciprocate with information about himself. It is only because Vicki is in danger that Stokes tells Barnabas anything at all.
Stokes already knows how Adam came into being, and Barnabas tells him about Adam’s conversation with him. This brings up a question about the scene with Peter/ Jeff. Why couldn’t Barnabas and Julia have trusted Peter/ Jeff with as much information as Barnabas here gives Stokes? Peter/ Jeff can no more go to the police than Stokes can, he will not tell Vicki anything about Lang’s experiment, and Barnabas and Julia have no reason to suspect him of being behind Adam’s turn to evil. These questions don’t come to mind during the scene with Peter/ Jeff, partly because he is so disagreeable a presence that we want him off screen as soon as possible, and partly because it has long been Barnabas’ habit to tell his enemies everything he knows while he zealously guards his secrets from potential helpers.
Patrick McCray’s second post about this episode, published 30 July 2018, includes an analysis of Thayer David’s portrayal of Stokes:
Professor Eliot Stokes gains fascinating dimension in 557. Normally, jovial and helpful, we see his protectiveness of Adam reveal an irascible and sternly just man within. Anton LaVey extolled “responsibility to the responsible,” and there are few other places where Barnabas gets both barrels of that. Stokes is perhaps the most inherently good man in Collinsport since his fellow freemason, Bill Malloy, took his last diving lesson. (Ironically, at the hands of Thayer David’s first character.) Stokes’ prime reason for siding with Adam and not Barnabas? The former vampire and Julia have withheld vital information for months. Yes, they have necessary trust issues, but this is Stokes we’re talking about. Adam may be a wildly unpredictable man-beast, capable of leveling Collinsport to sand before breakfast, but he’s also (until later in the episode) a prime graduate of Rousseau’s Finishing School for Noble Savages. He’s nursed greedily on the milk of morality that spurts abundantly from the ripe and straining teat of of Eliot Stokes’ moral tutelage. It takes a Nicholas Blair — so often Stokes’ foil — to teach him the less savory lessons in humanity. Stokes knows that there’s only so much danger in which Adam can find himself… Victoria Winters is another matter.
Barnabas passes the baton to Stokes, who becomes the third character in the episode to pay an unwelcome visit. He goes to Adam. He asks the big guy who has taught him to be cruel and amoral, and gets nothing but lies in return. He tries to persuade him that he must not hurt an innocent person, and Adam angrily declares that it is “fair” for him to make Barnabas watch him kill Vicki if Barnabas will not make a mate for him.
In Patrick McCray’s 2017 post, he praises Robert Rodan’s performance as Adam:
Robert Rodan issues a highly cerebral, emotionally packed performance. Rodan never receives the credit he deserves. Much of Adam’s stint on the show finds him equipped with an eloquent, even sesquipedalian command of the language. His inner conflict is as existential as it gets… Where do you turn? Rodan balances this absurd chimera of conflicts with effortless aplomb that makes Cirque du Soleil look as clumsy as a Matt Helm fight scene.
Robert Rodan is an unsung hero of an actor, delivering his existential angst with passion and truth. It’s a shame that his identification with an eventually unpopular character was probably a factor in Rodan not being recycled by Dan Curtis, despite being the dark-haired, blue-eyed “type” that typified the ruggedly handsome, DS norm (such as Selby, Lacy, Crothers, George, Ryan, Prentice, Storm, Bain, etc.)
While I always found the sight of Conrad Bain a guarantee of a fine performance, I can’t say it ever occurred to me to class him as “ruggedly handsome” in the way that one might class the other men Patrick lists. There’s no accounting for taste, I suppose.
Mad scientist Julia Hoffman and suave warlock Nicholas Blair each want to find Frankenstein’s monster Adam before the other does. Julia is sure that occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes knows where Adam is; while he sits at a chessboard and plays both sides of a game, she asks Stokes to tell her. He says he wants answers to some questions of his own, but the audience knows that the information he wants is just what Julia will never tell him.
Nicholas takes a less conventional approach. He raises the ghosts of a couple of the dead men whose corpses supplied the raw materials from which Adam’s body was constructed. One lacks a right arm, the other a head. He asks them where Adam is, and they turn in unison to point with their left arms at the great house of Collinwood. It’s such a smoothly coordinated move that it looks like they must be spending their time in the afterlife starting a boy band.
The Boneyard Boys showing off their signature move, the Postmortem Point. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
The arm donor is played by David Groh, who less than a decade later would become a star as Joe on the sitcom Rhoda. Groh was such a charismatic performer that it’s hard not to think of speaking parts on Dark Shadows that other actors played badly and wonder what would have happened had he played them instead. I went on about that in a comment I left on Danny Horn’s Dark Shadows Every Day in 2020; here, I will just mention that if Groh, instead of the lamentably unaccomplished Craig Slocum, had played ex-convict Harry Johnson, we would probably have seen a red-hot love triangle in which Harry vied with Adam for the affections of heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard.
Earlier in the episode, Adam had asked Stokes why it was not allowed for him to kiss Carolyn. Thayer David makes the most of this scene. Stokes freezes and looks up when Adam starts posing his questions, then seems genuinely shaken when he says that he is inadequate to the task of answering them, since he himself has never raised children. We can see that, in that moment, Stokes feels as incomplete as Adam. It’s touching to see Stokes’ usually supreme self-assurance give way to shamefaced uncertainty. When Stokes tells Adam to put away his budding sexual desires and to concentrate on his books, we catch a glimpse of the tragic side of Stokes’ own celibate, scholarly life.
But not even a father of twenty would be prepared for this situation. In the ten weeks he has been alive, Adam has become fluent in English and able to read with facility; he has the body of a grown man and moves with agility and force. Yet he knows absolutely nothing of human relationships beyond a basic understanding of the words “Friend” and “Kill!” It is hard to imagine that anyone has ever lived who needed the instruction Adam needs now.
It’s the wee hours of the morning, and hardworking young fisherman Joe comes to his fiancée Maggie’s house. Maggie had telephoned Joe and asked him to come right over. Joe can’t imagine what Maggie wants. In the chaste world of Dark Shadows, there is no word for “late night booty call.”
Joe finds Maggie and her friend Vicki waiting for him in their nightgowns. Maggie tells him that she had heard a noise in the bedroom where Vicki is staying, that she went in to investigate, and that she saw a ghost whispering into Vicki’s ear. Vicki tells him that she is staying at Maggie’s house to escape the power of a witch who is trying to make her have a nightmare that Maggie and others have already had, and that if she does have the nightmare it will spell doom for Barnabas Collins, who hasn’t been on the show for a week and a half. Joe gets more and more befuddled as the women go on about these matters. When they mention occult expert Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, Joe perks up. Stokes is a topic on which he has a definite opinion. He thinks Stokes broke into Maggie’s house while she was away mourning for her father Sam, that he is harboring a fugitive named Adam who was involved in Sam’s death, and that he is in general a slippery sort. When Vicki says she is planning to call on Stokes the following day, Joe insists on accompanying her.
Stokes is slow to answer the door when Joe and Vicki knock. Vicki tells Stokes about her experience the night before, and Stokes replies that he can do nothing for her unless she leaves the town of Collinsport.
Joe finds some beginning reader’s flashcards and asks Stokes what he is doing with them. Stokes claims to be tutoring a three year old nephew in reading. Joe hears footsteps in the back bedroom. He wants to go to investigate, as Maggie had investigated sounds in her back bedroom, but Stokes denies him permission, claiming that there are cleaning people working in there. Joe seems to suspect what the audience already knows, that neither the nephew nor the cleaning people exist and Adam is in the bedroom.
Thus compromised, Stokes is off his guard when Joe reaches into his pocket and takes out a stickpin bearing the monogram “S.” Stokes confirms that it is his, and Joe says it was found in Maggie’s living room. Stokes suggests he dropped it there when he visited Sam. Joe argues this could not have been so, and Stokes is compelled to accept his reasons. He claims to have let himself into Maggie’s house through the unlocked door hoping to find her and offer his condolences, and that when he found no one home he left right away.
Later, Joe lets himself into Maggie’s house and grabs a rifle. Maggie asks him what he is doing. He refuses to explain himself and insists on going away with the weapon. She objects quite forcefully, as one would expect, but cannot stop him. Throughout the first 106 weeks of the show, Joe has been an unfailingly kindly and conscientious fellow; longtime viewers will therefore be as shocked as Maggie is to see Joe behaving in this way.
Joe returns to Stokes’ place. Stokes is unsettled to see him with a gun. Joe declares that he has come to conduct a thorough search for Adam. Stokes orders him out of the house. Joe refuses to go, and Stokes threatens to call the police. Joe encourages him to call them. The two start to scuffle, and Adam bursts in from the bedroom. Joe points the gun at Adam, and Stokes urges him to put it down. Joe and Adam both run out the door. Stokes is looking on and urging Joe not to fire when we hear a shot.
Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes (Thayer David) comes home and greets his house-guest Adam (Robert Rodan.) He says that he envies Adam his freedom from the responsibility of attending lectures delivered by people who are “inferior” to him. However snobby Stokes’ attitude towards his faculty colleagues may be, we immediately see that it does not extend to people who lack educational credentials. He takes out a deck of flashcards with words as short as “car” and as long as “dictionary” and is delighted with Adam’s ability to read them aloud.
The Professor takes pleasure in his pupil’s progress.
From November 1967 to March 1968, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the 1790s and Thayer David played Stokes’ ancestor Ben, a servant indentured to the mighty Collins family. We saw kindly scion Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid) teach Ben to read. Barnabas became a vampire in those days; his vampirism went into remission only a few months ago, when he went through an experimental treatment that involved Adam’s creation as a Frankenstein’s monster. To the extent that Adam is Barnabas’ responsibility, Stokes is repaying his ancestor’s debt to him in kind.
Barnabas and his friend Dr Julia Hoffman (Grayson Hall) knock on Stokes’ door. Stokes does not know that Barnabas used to be a vampire or what he and Julia had to do with Adam’s creation, but he knows enough to distrust them deeply. He insists Adam hide in the back bedroom before he will let Barnabas and Julia in.
Barnabas and Julia tell Stokes that they telephoned him earlier. He explains that he was out, and they say that someone answered the phone and breathed audibly into the receiver, but did not speak. Before he can suggest they misdialled, they notice that his receiver is still off the hook. He speculates that his cleaning lady, who obviously does not exist, must have done it. He furrows his brow and sounds quite stern when he expresses his disapproval of this imaginary person’s behavior. Barnabas and Julia can’t do anything with that, so they change the subject to the matters they originally wanted to discuss.
Those amount to a recap of the storyline concerning wicked witch Cassandra Blair Collins, who in the 1790s was known as Angelique Bouchard Collins. As Angelique, she was the one who made Barnabas a vampire. She returned to the world of the living in the spring of 1968 in a bid to reactivate that curse. Now she has gone missing, and Barnabas and Julia are hoping she is gone forever. While Stokes is in the dark about Barnabas’ past and his true nature, he knows plenty about Angelique/ Cassandra. He tells Barnabas and Julia that to test their hypothesis, they must find the portrait of Angelique that turned up shortly before Angelique/ Cassandra herself returned.
Barnabas and Julia search for the portrait in the great house of Collinwood, where Angelique/ Cassandra has been living as the wife of Roger Collins (Louis Edmonds.) Julia keeps Roger busy downstairs while Barnabas roots around in Roger and Angelique/ Cassandra’s bedroom. The soundtrack plays a recording of Barnabas’ thoughts about his search while we see him staring at the room. When these interior monologues were new to the show, they tended to be very informative. Lately they’ve had less substance, and this one is totally unnecessary.
It turns out that the search itself was equally unnecessary. As soon as Barnabas makes his way back to the drawing room, Roger pulls out the portrait and shows it to him and Julia. Roger found it in the back of a dark closet, but is badly faded, as if it had been left in direct sunlight for a great many days. Barnabas and Julia know that the portrait has some mysterious connection with Angelique’ Cassandra’s physical being, so this is grounds for hope that she is on the way out.
That hope is dashed within seconds. Barnabas answers the front door, and finds a stranger. The man tells Barnabas he should have recognized him at once- “Cassandra’s husband!” Barnabas was briefly Angelique’s husband, 172 years before, but does not bring that up. Instead, he directs the man’s attention to Roger. The man is unfazed when Roger announces that he, not Barnabas, is married to Cassandra. The man then introduces himself as “Cassandra’s brother!” Barnabas and Julia react with shock.
Dark Shadows Commentary 