Eleven year old Amy Jennings and her big brother Chris joined the show recently, and they are the stars today. Amy has discovered the ghost of Quentin Collins, who haunts a room in the long deserted west wing of the great house of Collinwood. Strange and troubled boy David Collins is rather miffed that Quentin prefers Amy’s company to his- after all, “Quentin Collins is my ancestor,” not Amy’s. They hold a séance in an attempt to bring Quentin to them. David has only participated in one séance, back in #186, when he went into a trance and gave voice to the late David Radcliffe, a boy who died (by fire!) in 1867. So he hasn’t had a chance to catch on that séances on Dark Shadows require a minimum of three people- the first to begin the ceremony and bark orders at everyone else, the second to go into the trance and act as medium, and the third to grow alarmed, try to wake the medium from the trance, and be sternly rebuked by the first. Since David and Amy have no third person, they have no chance of contacting Quentin.
Instead, a shadowy figure appears in the doorway. She is well-meaning governess Vicki, or a rough approximation thereof. David Collins’ scenes with Vicki had been the highlight of the first year of Dark Shadows, not because of the writing or the direction but entirely due to the rapport between actors David Henesy and Alexandra Moltke Isles. A few weeks ago Mrs Isles left the show, and Vicki was recast. Her brief appearance is Mr Henesy’s first scene with the new actress, Betsy Durkin. They can’t recreate his chemistry with Mrs Isles, and Vicki ran out of story long ago. As a result, the scene sounds a discordant note for longtime viewers, reminding us that Miss Durkin, whatever her talents, is here nothing more than a fake Shemp taking up screen time.
Unknown to the other characters, Chris is a werewolf. Chris accepts an offer from the Collins family to host Amy at Collinwood while he deals with his mysterious problems; in gratitude, he takes heiress Carolyn for a drink at the Blue Whale tavern. While there, he sees a pentagram on the barmaid’s face and hurriedly excuses himself. Later, he transforms into his lupine shape and returns to the barroom, not through the door this time but through the window. He kills the barmaid.
The barmaid appears only in this episode; she doesn’t even get a name. But we see her face in closeup often enough that she feels like a person. Even more importantly, she is wearing the same wig that Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, wore in her first four episodes (#1, #3, #7, and #12.) Since Maggie was also a server, working the counter at the diner in the Collinsport Inn, this wig tells longtime viewers that the werewolf’s victim could just as easily have been Maggie, one of everyone’s favorite characters.
Don Briscoe played Chris in his human phase, Alex Stevens as the werewolf. Stevens was credited not as an actor, but as “Stunt Coordinator.” Yet today, his credit card appears in between Briscoe’s and that of Carol Ann Lewis, who was cast as the luckless barmaid. Some of the original audience may have caught on that Stevens was the man in the character makeup, but others who noticed the odd billing order would have chalked it up as another of the show’s frequent imperfections.
Suave warlock Nicholas Blair wakes Frankenstein’s monster Adam from a nightmare. As we have seen from night-time glimpses of fisherman Joe Haskell and the unpleasant Jeff Clark, it is standard for the young men of Collinsport to go to bed fully dressed, wearing coats, ties, and shoes. Adam is the youngest man around, having been brought to life just this May, but he is wearing pajamas.
Many commenters on fan boards assume that Adam has poor personal hygiene, perhaps because he has spent so much of his short life cooped up in hiding places without running water. But he lives in Nicholas’ house now, and unlike most characters, including Nicholas himself, he has two changes of clothing- the clothes that apparently came with the corpses from which he was assembled, a bright green sweater heiress Carolyn gave him, and his pajamas. So I think we ought to assume that he keeps himself clean.
Earlier this night, Nicholas sicced vampire Angelique on old world gentleman Barnabas Collins in order to keep Barnabas from interfering with his plans for Adam. But he discovers that Adam and Barnabas have a Corsican Brothers-type connection, so that puncture marks have appeared on Adam’s neck. Adam is also weakened, and afraid of Angelique. Nicholas concludes that Angelique will have to leave Barnabas alone. She is deeply disappointed when he tells her of this, but cannot argue, as it is almost dawn and she must get back in her coffin.
We then cut to the Blue Whale, where an unshaven Joe is drinking. Joe is another of Angelique’s victims, and as a result of her power over him has lost his job, his fiancée Maggie Evans, and his self-respect. We were first introduced to Joe in this room, back in #3. In those days, he was a hardworking young fisherman who was too sturdily honest to be tempted by a bribe to spy on the ancient and esteemed Collins family. We have seen him back on this set many times, usually as a stalwart representative of whatever is wholesome and rational. But today he is one of the old drunks leaning on the bar.
Maggie enters. She walks up to Joe. He does not react, and she starts to walk away. She turns back to him and says hello. They have a sad little chat. She says he almost seems to feel about her the way he used to; he says she has no idea how he feels. She tells him what she expects him to say, that he won’t be able to explain to her what’s going on with him; he confirms that it is so. He asks if she is there to meet Nicholas; she says she is, and asks if there is any reason she shouldn’t. He says he supposes not.
Nicholas enters. He asks Maggie if she would like to sit at the bar, but she indicates a table. Joe looks at them, and we hear his thoughts as he wishes he could explain what Angelique has done to him. This gains poignancy for regular viewers, not only because of the contrast between the broken-down figure we see today and the robust young man who so often modeled health and sanity on this same set previously, but also because less than two weeks ago, in #599, Maggie knew all about what Joe was going through. She and Joe were ready to run off together when Nicholas used his sorcery to mind-wipe their knowledge away and reset the story to its current dismal status quo.
Joe leaves the bar and goes to Nicholas’ house to call on Angelique. She is surprised to see him. She didn’t summon him, and she isn’t hungry. She tells him to go away. He says that he’s lost everything because of her, and that she is all he has left. She says he doesn’t have her either, because she is done with him. To make him even more miserable, she takes him to Nicholas’ magical mirror, which can be used to spy on whomever the user chooses, and shows Joe that Nicholas has walked Maggie home. Joe hears Maggie agree that she might fall in love with Nicholas, and watches them exchange a long, passionate kiss.
Joe asks Angelique if she cares that she has utterly ruined his life, to which she replies “Not particularly.” He says that he hates everything he has become, and that he despairs of ever being anything else. He picks up a letter opener intending to stab Angelique. Unable to bring himself to attack her, he sticks it into his own belly.
Joel Crothers was dissatisfied with the part of Joe and with Dark Shadows generally. In a couple of months, he will leave the show and take a role on another soap. Very few viewers would have been likely to know that was coming in 1968, but Joe was a popular character who was chronically underutilized. He would have had many fans who might have shared Joe’s fear that the show will leave him in the state to which this storyline has reduced him.
This episode features the first appearance on Dark Shadows by an actor of color, and the only speaking part any non-White performer ever had. (CORRECTION: Mr Nakamura, played by Sho Onodera in #903, has a couple of lines.) This fact is made even more depressing because that performer fits so perfectly into the show that a first time viewer would assume she had been a major player from episode #1.
Beverly Hope Atkinson plays an unnamed nurse who meets suave warlock Nicholas Blair when he is trying to make his way into a hospital room occupied by Tom Jennings, a victim of one of Nicholas’ evil schemes. She firmly refuses him admittance. When Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, enters and asks to see Tom, the unnamed nurse smiles brightly and says “Of course, Maggie!” in a tone that makes it sound like they’ve been friends all their lives. She then shuts the door before Nicholas can follow. He asks her why Maggie can go in and he cannot, and she tells him sternly that Maggie has permission from the doctor.
I have a fanfic idea about Atkinson’s nurse that I originally posted as a comment on Danny Horn’s Dark Shadows Every Day. I can’t find it there, but here is a copy of it:
In the first 42 weeks of the show, when the supernatural was in the background and the stories were slow, it would have been easy to have a couple of tea party scenes at the Evans cottage where Maggie and her lifelong friend, Unnamed Nurse, recap whatever is going on. Those scenes could have led to a whole exploration of the tension between the working-class people in the village and the jerks in the big house on the hill. That in turn could have led to the introduction of Unnamed Nurse’s family, headed by Unnamed’s parents, Mr and Mrs Nurse, including her brothers, Young Mr Nurse and Master Nurse, and her sister, Moody Miss Nurse. We could then have seen the ancestors of the Nurse family in each of the flashback segments and analogues of them in Parallel Time.
At some point in my musings about this idea, I decided the family should be named “Wilson” (if I had a reason for this, I’ve forgotten it, but I now think of Atkinson’s character as Nurse Wilson,) and that in a flashback segment we should learn that they are descended from free persons of color who settled in Collinsport before the Civil War and were the first proprietors of the Collinsport Inn. Some wicked deed by a member of the Collins family knocked them out of the entrepreneurial class long ago, and they’ve been working their way back up the socio-economic ladder ever since.
We met Maggie in #1 as the waitress at the diner in the Collinsport Inn. She, her late father Sam, and her fiancé, hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell, have been Dark Shadows‘ main representatives of the people in the village. Her house, the modest counterpoint to the mansions on the Collins family’s great estate, has been familiar to us from the beginning, and is the place where we have seen most vividly what the Collinses’ doings have meant for the people who work for their businesses and live in their town. So, as a frequent visitor there, the nurse could have given a whole new dimension to the drama, showing that it isn’t just one family whose lives hang in the balance, but that a whole community is exposed to the consequences of what happens on the hill.
The Blue Whale
Joe is sitting alone at a table in the Blue Whale tavern, and he looks terrible. He’s pale and fidgety, looking around and periodically jumping up to peek out the window.
Maggie comes in and joins Joe. At first she is angry with him- he stood her up last night, without so much as a telephone call. She sees how upset he is and her anger is mixed with worry. He pounds on the table while the camera is tight on her. Her startled reaction reminds us of the early months of the show, when Sam was a self-pitying drunk and Maggie was a sophisticated portrait of an Adult Child of an Alcoholic.
After that moment, Maggie gets very quiet. When Joe says with alarm that it is getting dark, she responds that “It usually does, at this time of day.” It’s inherently funny to hear someone make that kind of matter-of-fact statement in response to an inexplicably intense remark, but also poignant to those of us who remember Maggie’s early interactions with Sam. From childhood on, simple rationality must have seemed to Maggie like a joke in the face of the overpowering irrationality at the center of her life.
As it happens, Joe is indeed exhibiting addicted behavior. But he isn’t hooked on alcohol. Instead, he is under the power of a vampire. Angelique, who was once the wicked witch who first made Barnabas Collins a vampire, found herself reduced to bloodsucker status when she displeased Nicholas. At Nicholas’ direction, she bit Joe the other day, and now Joe is desperate to hear her summons and report for another bite. She does call, and he does dash out, leaving a bewildered Maggie behind.
It was at the Blue Whale that we first met Joe, back in #3. Then, he was an upstanding young man who indignantly rejected the attempts of one of the Collins family’s sworn enemies to bribe him into spying against them. We’ve seen him in the tavern many times since then, always as the doughty representative of the wholesome and intelligible world against the sinister and supernatural. For example, in #215 it was a deeply troubled Joe who brought the news to Maggie and others at the Blue Whale that the cows on his uncle’s farm had been somehow drained of blood, news which turned out to be the first sign of vampirism in the area. This is the first time we’ve seen the Blue Whale since #358, back in November, and the first time a scene has closed with the formerly very familiar Blue Whale jukebox dance tunes in even longer than that. Longtime viewers see a loop closing. Joe leaves the place where he has most often shown himself as one who dwells in the daylight and goes down to the deepest dark.
Once Joe is gone, Nicholas enters. He engages Maggie in conversation, and talks his way into the seat Joe vacated. Soon he is doing magic tricks for her and she is agreeing to have dinner with him. He brings up the idea of staying out all night, and she seems amenable. Where is her old friend the nurse when you need her?
The Fix
Joe lets himself into Nicholas’ house, a place by the sea that he is renting from the Collinses. Angelique is there. Joe laments his dependency on her, and asks if she was the one who attacked Tom, whom he identifies as his cousin. Perhaps the son of the uncle whose cows fell victim to Barnabas long ago! She doesn’t bother to deny it. She tells him that they will both visit Tom tonight. She bites Joe.
Joe visits Tom, who has emerged from the coma in which Angelique’s first bite left him. He tells Joe all about Angelique’s attack on him. He says he knows how bizarre the story sounds, but that he hopes that if he has Joe to vouch for him he will be able to make the police take it seriously. Joe gives Tom a few perfunctory assurances, then opens the window. Joe explains that he is doing this because it is hot in the room. Tom does not agree that it is hot, but Joe insists, and Tom is too ill to argue long.
Joe leaves, and we jump forward to 2 AM. The window is still open- apparently no nurse was on duty. Perhaps the hospital thought Beverly Hope Atkinson’s character did such a good job on the day shift that the patients could just cruise along through the night. We hear a bat squeaking, and Angelique appears. She bites Tom.
In Barnabas’ first weeks on Dark Shadows, the show made heavy use of the idea that vampires can enter a lodging only when they have been invited. For example, he went to the diner after hours so that Maggie would have to invite him in, and later went to her house and stood just outside the front door for a noticeably long time before she explicitly asked him to enter. They haven’t done anything with that idea in a long time, but neither have they very clearly contradicted it. Perhaps Joe’s opening of the window is the invitation Angelique needs to make her way into the hospital.
Mad scientist Julia Hoffman has been trying to cure Barnabas Collins of vampirism. We open today with Julia fleeing from Barnabas in terror. You’d think he’d be used to this reaction, but she’s been pretty cozy with him for a long time, so he knows she isn’t doing it for the usual reason. He demands to know why, and she tells him it’s to do with his appearance. He can’t use a mirror, so he touches his face. He realizes that, as an unforeseen side effect of Julia’s treatments, he is starting to look his age. Considering that he’s about 200 years old, the typical look would be a pile of dust, so he is quite upset about the situation.
Barnabas accuses Julia of intentionally botching the experiment because he refused to let “our relationship become all you wanted.” For the last couple of weeks, Julia has been responding to the realization that she is going to be connected to Barnabas for the rest of her life by trying to fall in love with him. He has observed this attempt, and answers it by pouring scorn on her. The other day, we saw her struggling to hold back tears at the end of an episode. She keeps her cool this time, and dismisses this particular accusation quickly.
One of the aspects of Barnabas’ sudden aging that bothers him the most is that he will have to cancel a date to watch the sun rise with well-meaning governess Vicki. Julia can hardly keep from laughing out loud when she says that “Foregoing an appointment with Vicki must be a bitter pill.” Barnabas responds “Spare me your sarcasm!” Even before she decided she would have to cultivate a romantic interest in Barnabas, Julia often showed signs of impatience when conversing with Vicki. She often rolled her eyes as soon as Vicki wasn’t looking, and sometimes plastered on a smile and spoke to her very slowly. But this is our first direct confirmation that Julia thinks Vicki is an idiot.
The Vicki/ Julia relationship is the first time on Dark Shadows that one major character is oblivious of the fact that another holds her in disdain. That adds a fresh wrinkle to their scenes together, as we wonder if Vicki will catch on to Julia’s real attitude towards her.
Barnabas orders Julia to run up to the great house of Collinwood and tell Vicki that he won’t be able to watch the sunrise with her. Julia opens the front door to comply, and sees Vicki standing there. She has overheard the last part of their conversation. Barnabas sits in a high-backed armchair with his back to her and claims that he has an illness he is afraid she will catch if she comes too close to him. He also claims that he will be leaving town on a long business trip later in the morning. When Vicki points out that these two things don’t fit together, he makes a lot of statements that don’t add up to much more than throat-clearing.
It’s also odd that Vicki, who like the other residents of the great house of Collinwood does not know that Julia is a doctor, doesn’t seem to notice that she’s wearing a lab coat, much less to wonder what she’s doing in Barnabas’ house in the pre-dawn hours. The whole scene is so ridiculous that the comedy must be intentional, on the part of the director and the actors if not of writer Ron Sproat.
After Vicki goes, Barnabas says he will have to save himself by reverting to his bloodsucking ways. Julia is shocked by the thought that the horrors will resume, and laments that she will be “partially responsible” for them.
Julia’s shock doesn’t last long. She urges Barnabas to choose Vicki as his first victim. She is absolutely gleeful about this idea.
Barnabas is miserable- he has already passed up several prime opportunities to bite Vicki, including an occasion when she invited herself over to spend the night in his house and one on the terrace of the great house when she virtually pressed her neck into his mouth. There have been times when we have expected Vicki to draw an arrow on her neck and write next to it the words “MR VAMPIRE, BITE HERE!” But Barnabas doesn’t want to let go of the fantasy that Vicki’s personality will somehow disappear and be spontaneously replaced with that of his lost love Josette. His attachment to this fantasy suggests that Barnabas is as bored with the actually existing Vicki as is Julia.
Back in the great house, Vicki tells heiress Carolyn that Barnabas was in a strange mood. Carolyn says that Vicki has become quite fond of Barnabas, and Vicki says that she is more than fond of him. She has come to rely on him. Since Vicki’s depressing fiancé, Burke, is missing and presumed dead, there is no reason why this shouldn’t mean that Vicki will fall in love with Barnabas. No reason, that is, except Barnabas’ obvious lack of interest in her.
Later, we see Carolyn and her old friend, hardworking young fisherman Joe, sitting at the Blue Whale tavern. Yesterday, Carolyn had a visit from the ghost of ten year old Sarah Collins. As a result, she believes that her young cousin, strange and troubled boy David, was probably telling the truth when he claimed to have seen various weird things.
Carolyn tries to enlist Joe in an effort to investigate David’s stories, but he won’t have it. He admits that Sarah exists. He has to- lots of people have seen her and she has made several observable things happen. Besides, Joe himself encountered the ghost of Josette in #179, so he can’t very well deny that there are such things as ghosts. But like other characters who have admitted that one or another supernatural being exists, he snaps right back to a frame of reference that doesn’t allow for the supernatural, or even for the unusual. Joe asks Carolyn if she really believes that there is “something sinister about Barnabas,” as David’s visions would imply. She admits that she doesn’t.
While Vicki sleeps, Barnabas materializes in her room. He stands there watching her, as he has done before. This time, his wizened appearance shows that it is a matter of urgency that he feed on someone. But he still can’t bring himself to bite her. Even when his existence is hanging in the balance, he just isn’t into Vicki.
After Barnabas loiters for a while trying to talk himself into doing what he so plainly has no desire to do, Carolyn comes to Vicki’s door. She apologizes for waking Vicki, and explains that she thought she heard someone in the room. Vicki isn’t upset at the interruption, but grateful for Carolyn’s concern. The two are startled when they see the silhouette of a giant bat outside Vicki’s window.
Mad scientist Julia Hoffman and vampire Barnabas Collins are visiting Dr Dave Woodard in his office. Woodard has stolen the notebook in which Julia has recorded the truth about Barnabas and is planning to hand it over to the sheriff. At Barnabas’ insistence, Julia has prepared a hypodermic with a potion that will induce a heart attack. He orders her to give Woodard the lethal injection.
In her reluctance to kill her onetime friend, Julia suggests that Barnabas turn Woodard into a vampire. Julia believes she will soon find a cure for vampirism. So, Woodard will just be one more patient who will benefit from her imminent success. Neither he nor Barnabas receives her brainstorm with any great enthusiasm.
Woodard claims that, even if he became a vampire, he would have free will and would be able to fight Barnabas and destroy himself. He then asserts that Barnabas, too, has the ability to do the right thing. As viewers of drama, we are predisposed to believe that characters whom we hear talking and who have motivations we can understand are at liberty to choose what they will do, so we may believe that Woodard is right. But we haven’t seen any evidence to support his contention.
Julia keeps trying to postpone the killing. Exasperated with her procrastination, Barnabas tells her to hand him the hypodermic. She does so. As he is about to give the shot, Woodard claims to see the ghost of Barnabas’ little sister Sarah. Barnabas is so desperate to see Sarah that he falls for this and lets Woodard go. Julia calls out “Stop him!”
Barnabas is furious that Woodard has hit him at his most sensitive spot. As he regains his grip on Woodard, he jabs him in the shoulder with the needle. While Woodard crumples at his feet, Barnabas picks up on the words Woodard had earlier used to describe him, exclaiming “Loathsome I am, and evil! You can mock me for that, but leave my pain alone!” Even after that exclamation, Barnabas asks Julia if Sarah really was there. We don’t see her, but we do hear the strains of “London Bridge,” a song that has always before told us that Sarah is present.
Barnabas places Woodard’s corpse in the desk chair. He appears to be enjoying himself hugely while he taunts Julia for her squeamishness. He asks her, as a medical doctor, to verify that Woodard is dead; she can’t bring herself even to look at the body. She wants to leave immediately; he asks if she plans to leave the needle on Woodard’s desk. Once she puts the murder weapon in her purse, she again wants to rush out; he asks if she is planning to leave the notebook in Woodard’s pocket.
Even after they return to his house, Barnabas continues tormenting Julia. He tells her she will soon grow accustomed to her new identity as a murderer. She resists the label, and he magnanimously agrees to share half the responsibility for the killing. She says she will stop trying to cure him and go away; he tells her that will no longer be possible. They need each other more than ever now. When he tells her that he is her only friend, she hears Woodard’s voice saying “You no longer have friends.” As those words sound, so do the notes of “London Bridge.”
Barnabas is at his most compelling in these scenes, thanks to the actor who plays him. Jonathan Frid’s style of acting was rather old-fashioned even in 1967, but his achievement today is extraordinary. He takes us on a dizzying ride from horror at the brutal killing of Dr Woodard, to pity for the vastly lonely man longing for his little sister, and back to horror at Barnabas’ glee in bestowing the title of murderer on Julia. I can’t imagine any performer doing a better job.
The killing of Dr Woodard is quite a shock. It is only the second premeditated murder we see on Dark Shadows. Undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins used black magic to cause parapsychologist Peter Guthrie to have a fatal car crash in #186. There’s no magic this time- this is a plain old death by poisoning. We also saw Barnabas kill seagoing con man Jason McGuire, but that was not a premeditated act. Jason opened Barnabas’ coffin at sunset, and Barnabas, apparently by reflex, strangled him. That’s a reflex many of us might understand, I’m certainly not at my best when I first wake up. So when Barnabas wrestles with Woodard and jabs him with the needle, we are entering new territory.
When Julia and Barnabas are back in his house, she throws the needle into the fireplace. The Dark Shadows wiki disapproves of this action:
The destruction of the murder weapon was taken more lightly in this scene than it would have been in real life. The heat from a normal fireplace would not be hot enough to melt glass. The metal needle would have been blackened, and if someone looked through the ashes thoroughly, it would have been discovered. Had the syringe been discovered, Woodard’s death would have been ruled a homicide.
Dark Shadows wiki, episode 341.
I don’t see why the presence of a warmed-over medical sharp in Barnabas’ fireplace would mean that “Woodard’s death would have been ruled a homicide.” The police haven’t made any connection between Woodard’s death and Barnabas’ house. Even if they had, they would have no reason to suppose a hypodermic needle in his fireplace would have anything to do with Woodard. Julia is keeping it quiet that she is a medical doctor, but it isn’t a secret from the authorities. She spends most of her time at Barnabas’ house and is treating him for what she believes to be a rare blood disease, so she’s likely to have all sorts of medical supplies there. It is never specified what the chemical was that caused Woodard’s death, but if it was potassium chloride, it would have had the effects Julia describes and the heat of the fireplace would be sufficient to cause it to disappear without a trace in a little flash of dark purple flame. And of course potassium chloride dissolves in the bloodstream so completely that even a large dose of it cannot be detected in a normal postmortem examination. Unless they had dripped some of it into Woodard’s ashtray, Julia and Barnabas would have no reason to believe that the police would be looking for potassium chloride.
Julia moves to throw her notebook into the fire after the needle. Barnabas intercepts it in a move that looks so much like what you’d see on a basketball court that I count it as a blooper.
In between the scenes with Barnabas and Julia, there is some stuff with the sheriff and artist Sam Evans. The sheriff ambles into The Blue Whale tavern and finds Sam starting his fourth shot of whisky. They talk about Woodard, and Sam insists they go to his office to look for him. For the first 40 weeks of Dark Shadows, Sam’s alcoholism was a substantial story element, part of the “Revenge of Burke Devlin” arc. When that arc finally dried up in #201, Sam’s alcoholism went away. He’s a social drinker now. Still, he used to be the town drunk, and apparently that’s a higher post than sheriff. The sheriff follows Sam’s orders and accompanies him to Woodard’s office.
They knock on the office door. There is no answer. Sam suggests they break the door down. They haven’t tried to turn the knob, so they have no reason to suppose it is locked. Returning viewers will recall that yesterday Julia just walked into the office, without even knocking, and she and Barnabas did not lock the door behind them. So we can be fairly sure it is not locked. Still, orders are orders, so when the Town Drunk (Retired) says it’s time to break the door down, the sheriff watches him respectfully. Of course the whole set is made of a sheet of plywood, so when Sam “flings himself” against the door, he has to maintain a ludicrous gentleness to keep any part of it standing.
Inside, they find Woodard dead in his chair. Their response is bewildering. At first they are going to call for help, but then decide that because Woodard is dead there is no point. Eventually the sheriff remembers that he ought to call the coroner. They also take turns declaring that they believe Woodard’s death was the result of foul play.
Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, can’t stand being cooped up in her house all the time waiting for the person who abducted her and held her prisoner to be identified. Since she has amnesia covering the entire period of her captivity, her father Sam and her boyfriend Joe have to recap the whole storyline to her before they agree to go with her to the local tavern, The Blue Whale, where they can meet with other people who will help them recap the storyline that followed.
At the Blue Whale, a couple stands at the jukebox and play the theme from “A Man and a Woman.” We see that Bob the Bartender is back on duty. The other day, someone else was in his place, so it’s a relief to know that he’s still around.
At The Blue Whale.
Joe enters, and finds well-meaning governess Vicki alone at a table. He joins her, and she explains that she is waiting for her depressing fiancé Burke. Joe explains that he is waiting for Maggie and Sam. They start recapping while Bob brings them drinks and the couple dances. The couple must be out-of-towners- they aren’t good dancers, exactly, but neither are they doing the Collinsport Convulsion.
Unusually competent dancing.
Maggie and Sam arrive. “A Man and a Woman” continues to play while everyone compares notes about a mysterious little girl named Sarah who seems to have had some connection with Maggie during the time she was missing. Everyone tells everything they know, except Vicki. This is odd- Vicki is the one who brought up the topic of the little girl and who keeps pressing it forward, but she does not mention that she saw Sarah at the top of the stairs in the house occupied by courtly gentleman Barnabas Collins.
Burke enters. Maggie, Sam, and Joe excuse themselves. Burke has been so dreary in recent weeks that it’s hardly surprising Maggie would rather resume hiding in her house than be around him.
Vicki is upset with Burke. Barnabas complained to her yesterday that Burke was having him investigated. She demands that he shut the investigation down at once, issuing an ultimatum that she will end their engagement if he does not. Burke sounds smarter than he has in months as he explains his reasons for thinking there is something sinister about Barnabas. Unlike all the scenes where Burke was angrily asserting that Vicki was crazy for saying that she had seen and heard things we had also seen and heard, Vicki stands her ground. She won’t give an inch, and she immediately comes up with plausible explanations for all of Burke’s observations.
When Burke starts talking, the background music shifts from “A Man and a Woman” to “Brazil.” We have heard this tune behind Burke at the Blue Whale many times; it really is his theme song. When it plays, we know that we’re supposed to focus on him. When he starts talking about Maggie, it shifts again, to one of the “Blue Whale” dance tunes Robert Cobert wrote for the show. That tells us that Burke is no longer the subject- instead, we are paying attention to the overall story of Dark Shadows.
As it happens, returning viewers know that Burke is right about Barnabas and Vicki is wrong. We also know why Vicki didn’t volunteer that she saw Sarah at Barnabas’ house- she does not want to cast any suspicion on her friend. But we also know that the Dark Shadows has been fun since Barnabas joined the cast, and that no stories are going on that do not center on him. If Barnabas is caught, there won’t be a show for us to watch. Besides, it’s great to see Vicki finally standing up to Burke, even if it isn’t on one of the many occasions when he is wrong. Nor is Anthony George even struggling to play him. He is a cold actor who is at a loss when Burke is supposed to be reacting ferociously to provocations or exuding passion in love scenes, but this scene is right up his alley, with Burke cool, forceful, and intelligent. Alexandra Moltke Isles gets a real workout having to dominate the scene when George is in his wheelhouse, and she pulls it off admirably.
Vampire Barnabas Collins has an idea that well-meaning governess Vicki Winters ought to be his next victim. Vicki has given him one opportunity after another to advance this goal, and he has failed to take advantage of any of them. Now Vicki’s depressing boyfriend Burke Devlin has proposed marriage to her, and she is considering it seriously.
As we open today, Barnabas is telling his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie that he plans to kill Burke immediately. Willie talks him out of this plan, explaining the many difficulties of getting away with that particular crime. I was hoping he would bring up one of my favorite fanfic ideas, that Barnabas could bite Burke and enslave him. That would not only allow Barnabas to use Burke’s money and shady connections to establish his identity more securely, but would also give Burke, who after all used to be a very important character, a memorable storyline before he is written out of the show.
Barnabas says that “Devlin is an obstacle” who “must be destroyed.” Burke is indeed an obstacle to narrative development. Even in the first year of Dark Shadows, when Burke was a dashing action hero played by the charismatic Mitch Ryan, none of his storylines really worked. The show gave up on the last of those storylines forty weeks ago, when Burke formally renounced his pursuit of revenge against the Collinses in #201. Since then he’s been altogether surplus to requirements, and when the woefully miscast Anthony George took over the part in #262 he went from dashing action hero to hopeless schlub.
In recent months, Burke has been unpleasantly sullen whenever Vicki tries to connect herself to the vampire story, gaslighting her with angry demands that she deny the existence of supernatural phenomena he himself formerly knew to be real and infantilizing her with assertions that her imagination will run wild if he doesn’t control her. He is a blocking figure in a plot that is already moving too slowly. As an abusive partner to Vicki, who is still our main point of view character, he is quickly earning the audience’s hatred. So Barnabas is mistaken in saying that Burke “must be destroyed”- the character Ryan created has already been destroyed.
Barnabas goes to the Blue Whale tavern, where Burke is buying drinks for two old drunks who are laughing at his jokes. He and Burke sit at a table and have a conversation in which they compare their relationship to a contest. Burke compares it to a card game played for high stakes, Barnabas to a saber duel.
In later years, Jonathan Frid cited this as his favorite scene in all of Dark Shadows. I always like to see The Blue Whale, I like the moment when Barnabas objects that “You make me sound so evil,” and I’m glad Frid had a good time. But George is too bland for the scene to have a real impact. He was a cold actor who could excel when his character was driving the scene and knew more than he was telling. That ability doesn’t help him here. Burke simply reacts to Barnabas with bewilderment, and George had no real flair for reacting to his scene-mates.
The old drunks leave, and Bob the bartender starts setting chairs up on tables. Burke observes that it’s closing time. Barnabas goes, but Burke stays behind. Apparently he lives in the tavern now. He picks up the pay phone and asks for the international operator. He wants to talk to an agent of his in London. He is going to check on Barnabas’ “cousin from England” story.
Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, is a patient in a mental hospital run by a mad scientist who is in league with the vampire who kept her prisoner. So there are bars on the windows of her room, and a lock on the outside of the door. The vampire, Barnabas Collins, scrambled her memories before she escaped from him, and the mad scientist, Julia Hoffman, intends to keep her in her amnesiac state.
We see Maggie at the barred window, begging for someone to help her go home. At that, her friend, the ghost of nine year old Sarah Collins, materializes in the room. Maggie hugs Sarah, and Sarah apologizes for taking so long to find her. Sarah assures Maggie that she can help her get home, but tells her she will have to do what she says.
Sarah apologizes for taking so long to come
At Sarah’s direction, Maggie stands in the corner behind the door and calls the nurse while Sarah sits on the bed. The nurse opens the door and sees Sarah, but not Maggie. Maggie slips out and closes the door behind her, locking Sarah and the nurse in the room. The nurse tries the door, looks back, and sees that Sarah is nowhere to be found. The camera stays with her for a long moment as she looks around in bewilderment. As Nurse Jackson, Alice Drummond does a great job with this stage business.
Meanwhile, back in Collinsport, there is a misdemeanor in progress. Well-meaning governess Vicki, her depressing boyfriend Burke, and Barnabas are sneaking into an old vacant house that has captured Vicki’s fancy. Barnabas astounds Burke with his ability to see in the dark as he describes the “No Trespassing” sign, and refers to the same ability as he volunteers to explore the upper storey of the house while Burke and Vicki stand around on the ground floor.
Burke has taken Vicki’s interest in the house as a marriage proposal, and keeps talking about how they should furnish it when they live there together. The only thing he says that gets much of a reaction from her is a disparaging remark about Barnabas, which elicits flash of anger. Yesterday’s episode included a couple of clues that Vicki’s infatuation with “the house by the sea” might lead her, not to Burke and irrelevance, but to Barnabas and the center of the action. Her forceful response to Burke’s Barnabas-bashing renews those hopes.
Burke has spoken ill of Barnabas
Barnabas comes back from the upstairs with a handkerchief bearing the initials “F. McA. C.” He makes a present of it to Vicki. When she objects to this act of theft, he assures her that whoever it belonged to would want her to have it. That too picks up on hints from yesterday, when Barnabas indicated by his typical slips of the tongue that he had a connection to the house that he didn’t want the other characters to know about. We haven’t yet heard of anyone living or dead with the initials “F. McA. C.,” so presumably we are supposed to start waiting to hear a fresh story about Barnabas’ earlier existence.
Somewhere to the north, Maggie and Sarah are sitting in the woods. In recent days, we have heard several times that the mental hospital is a hundred miles from Maggie’s home in Collinsport, so if they are going to walk the whole way and take breaks it will be a while before they get back.
Maggie asks Sarah how she got into her room. “Do you really want to know?” Maggie says she does. “The same way I got out.” How did she get out? “The same way I got in!” At that, Maggie laughs. Sarah first met Maggie when she was Barnabas’ prisoner, and she remarks that this is the first time she has heard her laugh. She tells her she ought to do it all the time.
Apparently, an early draft of the script called for a truck driver to pick Maggie up and take her back to town. But that couldn’t be. How will Sarah get Maggie to Collinsport from the hospital? The same way she got to the hospital from Collinsport, of course.
In Collinsport, Vicki, Burke, and Barnabas are sitting at a table in the Blue Whale tavern. While Barnabas gets the drinks, Vicki tells Burke that he and Barnabas are extraordinarily unalike. Burke says he takes that as a compliment, a remark to which Vicki reacts with displeasure.
Burke has repeated his offense
We can sympathize- sure, Barnabas is a vampire, and that is sub-optimal in a potential husband. But it doesn’t make him the opposite of Burke, who has been draining the life out of Vicki lately with his demands that she steer clear of anything that might be interesting to the audience and become as dull as he is. The real difference between Burke and Barnabas is that Barnabas drives one exciting plot point after another, while Burke makes nothing happen.
Barnabas comes back to the table, and the conversation returns to the “house by the sea.” Burke is about to propose marriage to Vicki. Suddenly, the jukebox stops playing and everyone falls silent. It is as if something has entered the room that everyone can feel but no one can see. The door opens, and in walks Maggie.
Vicki is the first to see her. She calls her name. Barnabas reacts with alarm. Maggie walks slowly towards their table. She approaches Barnabas, who tries to remain very still. She takes a long look at him, walking around to get the best angle. She touches her head, calls out “No!,” and faints. And that is what you call a “cliffhanger ending.”
For sixteen weeks, from March to June, seagoing con man Jason McGuire had lived the high life blackmailing reclusive matriarch Liz. Now the blackmail scheme has blown up in Jason’s face, and the police have given him until sundown to clear out of Collinsport. Looking for someone else to exploit, Jason has come to the Old House on Liz’ estate, where her distant cousin Barnabas lives with Jason’s onetime henchman Willie.
Jason lingers outside a window. He sees Willie bring Barnabas a chest full of jewelry. He hears Barnabas and Willie talking about Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, whom they abducted, held prisoner, and, they believe, killed. He is still listening when Barnabas and Willie start talking about well-meaning governess Vicki, to whom Barnabas plans to give the same treatment.
A bit later, Jason finds Willie in the woods outside the house. He demands Willie meet him in the Blue Whale tavern at noon the next day and give him a pile of jewels from the chest. He tells Willie that he knows what he and Barnabas did to Maggie and what they are planning to do to Vicki. Willie agrees to the meeting.
We cut to the tavern. Jason is waiting at the bar when Vicki comes in. She grimaces at the sight of Jason, then asks Bob the bartender if he has seen Liz’ daughter Carolyn. Bob shakes his head no.
Jason insists on talking to Vicki. We do not know what to expect from this conversation. Jason is a villain who has often taken pleasure in being cruel to Liz and other characters, and the scenes in which he threatened Liz were so repetitious as to constitute cruelty to the audience. He believes that Barnabas is a serial killer of women, and his plan to squeeze money out of Barnabas requires him to turn a blind eye while he continues in that career. On the other hand, Jason showed genuine and unselfish concern for Willie when he was ill, and actor Dennis Patrick has taken every opportunity to play him as a comedy villain, with whom we can empathize while he scrambles to keep his lies from being exposed. So we can easily imagine Jason wanting to give Vicki some kind of warning.
Jason begins their talk with a question about Carolyn. Vicki tells him that Carolyn left the house because she believed the false story that he had used to blackmail Liz, and expresses her intense disapproval of him. He makes some defensive and self-pitying remarks, and Vicki continues to tell him how bad he is. He tells her that she will soon suffer hardships while he is far away, laughing at her. She says she doesn’t know what he means, and he refuses to explain. She says “There is nothing as sad as a hollow threat.” At no point in any of this had it seemed that Jason was about to warn Vicki of Barnabas’ plans.
As Vicki is going, Jason says he wonders who she really is and where she comes from. He then says that she does not know the answers to those questions. He says that he was in Collinsport 18 years ago, and he might know them. That stops Vicki in her tracks. She turns, looks at Jason, and asks him what he knows. He says that whatever he knows, he will take with him. She says that he is only trying to hurt her. He asks if he is succeeding. She goes.
Vicki wonders if Jason knows something
It has been a while since we last heard about Vicki’s quest to solve the riddle of her origins. That story element never amounted to much, in part because, as Wallace McBride pointed out in a Collinsport Historical Society post in 2020, the very first episode of the show ended by showing us Liz and Vicki as each other’s mirror images. From that point on, everything has pointed to Liz as Vicki’s biological mother. Art Wallace’s original story bible for Dark Shadows had suggested that Liz’ ex-husband Paul Stoddard would be revealed as Vicki’s father and some other woman as her mother, but Art Wallace also said that the story might be better served by saying that Liz was her mother by another man, and that seems to be what they have tacitly done.
Art Wallace’s plan had also been that Vicki’s origins would be revealed at the climax of the blackmail story. It is not clear when they gave up on that. Since the actual episode, #271, runs drastically short, it is possible that they changed their minds only a few days before taping.
One of the possibilities was that Liz would admit that she was Vicki’s mother and Jason was her father. They haven’t done much to suggest that there ever was a sexual relationship between Liz and Jason, so this possibility lurks far in the background. If it were to turn out to be true, Jason’s indifference to Barnabas’ plans for Vicki becomes all the more chilling. Since Stoddard was also indifferent to Carolyn’s well-being, it would give Liz’ two daughters something miserable to have in common.
Jason was a friend of Stoddard, so he might have some information that would be meaningful if they are going for a twist in which all the hints that Liz is Vicki’s mother by another man were false and another woman were her mother by Stoddard. At any rate, when Jason says that whatever information he has will leave with him, it seems that he is telling the audience that the quest for Vicki’s origins will never be resolved.
Willie shows up at the tavern and gives Jason one piece of jewelry. Jason is loudly dissatisfied with this. Willie leaves him.
Later, Jason breaks into the Old House. As he enters, three notes ring out on the soundtrack. I sometimes laugh at this three note motif with my wife, Mrs Acilius. Not only because “dum, dum, DUMM!” is a corny way to end a show, but also because it often follows a three syllable closing line. So if the last words spoken before we hear it are “I want more!,” we will sing “I- want- MORE!” Since Barnabas is a far more dangerous person than Jason knows, this time Mrs Acilius sang “You- are- DEAD!”
Carolyn Collins Stoddard is moping at the bar in the Blue Whale tavern. Bob the Bartender tells her she’s had enough to drink and suggests she go home. Ignoring the suggestion, she plays a Tijuana Brass-style number on the jukebox, then stands in the middle of the floor as if she were about to dance.
Bob is the second person to try to throw Carolyn out of a place today. In the opening, seagoing con man Jason McGuire caught her going through his things in search of a clue as to what he is using to blackmail her mother, matriarch Liz, into marrying him. He told her that after the wedding this evening, he will expect her to move out of what will then be his house.
Carolyn is the only customer in the Blue Whale until her ex-boyfriend, hardworking young fisherman Joe, comes in. She tells Joe she is waiting for her fiancé, motorcycle enthusiast Buzz. The last time we saw Buzz, in #262, he seemed to be losing all patience with Carolyn, and he never does show up at the tavern. It’s starting to seem as if Carolyn will soon find herself with absolutely nowhere to go.
When Joe tells her that she can’t fight McGuire, Carolyn seems to get an idea. She says that maybe she won’t marry Buzz after all. When Joe insists on driving her home, she agrees, with a flourish. We then see her back in the mansion, taking a pistol from a drawer and putting it in her purse.
The wedding is to take place in the drawing room of the mansion. When the judge asks Liz if she will take Jason to be her lawful wedded husband, she declares that she cannot. In a beautiful piece of choreography, four actors fall into place behind her so smoothly that it looks natural for people to line up and look at each other’s backs while talking. Director Lela Swift deserves a lot of credit for finding a perfectly logical way to get people into this perfectly absurd position.
As the guests are absorbing Liz’ statement that she cannot marry Jason, she points at him and declares “I killed Paul Stoddard, and that man was my accomplice.”
Closing Miscellany
We see Jason’s initials on some shoe-brushes in his room.
Jason’s shoe brushes
We’ve seen Bob the Bartender mouthing words in the background in many of the 36 episodes he has appeared in so far, but his refusal to serve Carolyn is only the fourth time he has spoken on camera, after #3, #156, and #186.
Dark Shadows Commentary 