Well-meaning governess Victoria Winters has vanished into the past, sarcastic dandy Roger Collins is on a long business trip overseas, and matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard is in the grips of a paralyzing depression. That leaves a shortage of adults in the great house of Collinwood, and old world gentleman Barnabas Collins has left his own house on the estate to be of assistance. He is fussing over Liz and insisting that she take the sedatives permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, MD, prescribed for her. Liz says that all she cares about is that someone take Vicki’s place in the lives of the children in the house, Roger’s son David Collins and houseguest Amy Jennings. To address that concern she orders Barnabas to telephone Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, and ask her to replace Vicki starting tonight.
Maggie is in her house talking with her ex-boyfriend Joe Haskell about his plan to move out of town soon when the telephone rings. Soon the two of them are in the drawing room at the great house, where Barnabas fills them in about recent developments.
Joe is Amy’s cousin. He has been doing what he can to fill the void left in her life by the deaths of her parents and her brother Tom, and more particularly by the puzzling refusal of her brother Chris to settle down and live with her. Amy comes downstairs and sees Joe; she is delighted to spend time with him while Maggie is upstairs with Liz, accepting the offer.
Amy’s delight gives way to alarm when she sees a pentagram superimposed on Joe’s face. She does not know what the returning viewers do, that Chris is a werewolf and the pentagram is the mark of his next victim, but she does know that it is a sign that Joe is in great danger. She pleads with him not to go to Maggie’s house and collect her things; she tells him that if he stays at Collinwood tonight, he will be safe. Joe dismisses her concerns as the result of staying up past her bedtime.
Joe enters the Evans cottage. While he is looking over the list Maggie gave him, he hears growling noises outside the window. He turns to look, and sees the window shatter and the werewolf jump through the glass.
The episode has a definite high point and an equally definite low point. The high point comes when Amy is staring at the full moon, which she senses is associated with something very bad. She cries as she does so. That is a powerful enough image that the following scene, when Barnabas sees her tears, asks her what is wrong, and she hugs him, is quite effective.
The low point comes when we see the werewolf sleeping on his bed. A werewolf can be terrifying if you catch only brief glimpses of him, and then only when he is in the middle of attacking someone. But this furry little fella isn’t scary at all. You keep expecting him to start flopping his legs because he’s dreaming about chasing a bunny. It generates a bad laugh that undercuts the final scene of the attack on Joe.
Whooooo‘s the goodest boy? Are you the goodest boy? I bet you are! Screenshot by Dark Shadows Every Day.
Amy has a couple of great one-word lines, too. Barnabas asks, “Amy, what are you doing with the door open?” To which she replies, “Nothing.” Later, Joe asks “Well what was all that you two were talking about?” To which she replies, “Nothing.” She really is a kid!
When Dark Shadows began in June of 1966, hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell was dating flighty heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard. The two of them were bored beyond words with each other. They only kept going out because Carolyn’s mother, reclusive matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, was determined that they should get together, and neither of them wanted to disappoint her. For months, we were subjected to one scene after another of Joe and Carolyn having nothing to say to each other while we waited for Liz to give up on them.
Joe and Carolyn finally called it quits in #84, and shortly afterward Joe started seeing Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. The audience has been rooting for Joe and Maggie ever since, but because there are too few obstacles to their romance for them to have a storyline of their own, we sometimes go months at a time without seeing them together.
Now, Joe has become the blood thrall of vampire Angelique, and Angelique’s master Nicholas has designs on Maggie. If Nicholas and Angelique were ordinary criminals and she were blackmailing Joe or had hooked him on drugs, this would be an archetypal soap opera situation. The supernatural twist makes it specific to Dark Shadows among the daytime serials of its period, but the story is still so deep in the genre’s wheelhouse that it is no wonder they’ve spent three days in a row luxuriating in it.
There’s a lot of emphasis on bachelor’s quarters this time out. Maggie lives alone, but we see so much of and hear so much about her late father’s paintings today that it feels as if the Evans cottage is still his house and Maggie is still his little buddy. That makes her relationship with Joe feel all the more urgent. She is waiting to make a home with him so that her adult life can begin.
We see Joe’s apartment as well. It is apartment 24, the default number for a Collinsport bachelor pad. Dashing action hero Burke Devlin lived in suite 24 at the Collinsport Inn in the first year of the show, and Humphrey Bogart-esque lawyer Tony Peterson lived in apartment 24, presumably in some other building, in the fall of 1967. Joe is sitting in his apartment 24 and staring at a glass of booze when Maggie knocks on the door. She tells him that his boss called her at home and told her that Joe hasn’t shown up at work lately. If Joe doesn’t call soon, he’ll have to fire him. Joe says he won’t call the boss, since he can no more explain the nature of his trouble to him than he can to Maggie.
We also see Nicholas’ house. Even though he is keeping Angelique on the premises, Nicholas is very much a bachelor. He peers into his magic mirror and sees Willie Loomis, servant to old world gentleman Barnabas Collins. Willie is asleep in his room in Barnabas’ house. The only other time we saw Willie’s room was in #328, when Barnabas framed Willie for terrible crimes he had himself committed against Maggie. Now, Nicholas uses his mirror for a magical video call with Willie. He interrogates Willie about an evil plan of his that is playing out in Barnabas’ house.
On Dark Shadows Before I Die, John and Christine Scoleri caught this screenshot of Nicholas making an unfortunate gesture while he is telling Maggie what he thinks of Willie:
Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, was under the influence of vampire Barnabas Collins in May and June of 1967. At the beginning of that period, she spent her days sick in bed at home, and at night regained strength and insisted on going out. When her father Sam and her boyfriend Joe tried to keep Maggie in, her adorable personality vanished and she raged at them.
Maggie eventually escaped from Barnabas, and mad scientist Julia Hoffman erased her memory of the ordeal. Since then, Barnabas’ vampirism has gone into remission. Julia has taken up residence at the great house of Collinwood and has become Barnabas’ fast friend.
Julia drops in at Maggie’s house today. Maggie says she is worried about Joe. He has been standing her up for dates, hasn’t reported for work for three days, and won’t answer his phone.
After Julia leaves, Joe comes in through the back door. He is pale, sweaty, and wild-eyed, obviously ill. He faints for a second. Maggie goes to call a doctor. Joe protests against this idea, almost shrieking, and Maggie relents. He asks her to keep him in the house overnight no matter what he says or does; this is very much the sort of thing Maggie used to say when she was falling under Barnabas’ power. Also like Maggie in those days, minutes later Joe announces that he will be leaving the house and that Maggie has no right to keep him from going. Maggie tries to block the door; Joe grabs her, flings her aside violently, and rushes out.
Kathryn Leigh Scott and Joel Crothers do an excellent job with this last bit of business. Yesterday and the day before, there was a fight scene that was so poorly done I couldn’t get a screenshot that didn’t look like a joke. But the choreography is perfect here. The actors really make it look like Joe is throwing Maggie to the floor, and in her closeup at the end of the sequence Miss Scott convinces us Maggie is hurt.
The similarity between Maggie’s behavior in May 1967 and Joe’s now is no coincidence. He is the victim of Angelique, formerly a wicked witch, now a vampire under the control of suave warlock Nicholas Blair.
After he had asked Maggie to keep him in the house no matter what he said and before he told her he was going to leave no matter what she did, Joe talked to her about going away from Collinsport, far away, going anywhere at all, anywhere from which they would never come back. It’s a poignant moment. Once there were other places for Joe and Maggie, and once there were ways to go there. When art dealer Portia Fitzsimmons called on Sam in this room in #193, Dark Shadows had run out of story. For all we knew, Sam might have gone to New York and taken Maggie and Joe with him, and the show might have reinvented itself to follow them there. But Sam is dead now, Mrs Fitzsimmons is long forgotten, and outside Collinsport there is nothing but a mental hospital. Even Hell seems to be located in a corner of Barnabas’ basement, and Purgatory in the woods outside.
The House by the Sea
Nicholas lives in a house by the sea. Collinsport is a fishing village, so a lot of its people probably live in houses by the sea, but there are two that we have heard referred to as “The House by the Sea,” and this is the second of them.
Barnabas and Julia know that there is a vampire on the loose and are pretty sure that Nicholas is to blame for that fact. Maggie mentioned to Julia that Nicholas will be coming to her house at 5 PM to buy a painting, and so Julia suggests to Barnabas that they go to Nicholas’ at that time and search.
They find the door unlocked. The green screen behind them has an image that makes it look as if the house is floating in the sky. Maggie’s house has always been the place the show has taken us when it wanted to give us a feeling of realistic kitchen sink drama; the effect of this background outside Nicholas’ front door is to tell us that we are leaving that world behind and entering an exotic, paranormal space.
As they enter, Julia has second thoughts about trespassing. Now it is Barnabas’ turn to insist they probe forward.
They split up. Barnabas runs into Joe. The two men ask each other what they are doing there, and each tells a lie about having business with Nicholas. They then take turns ordering each other out of the house. We end with a view of Angelique’s coffin, its lid opening.
In his post about this episode on Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn remarks on the recapping that permeates the dialogue and reckons it as writer Sam Hall’s critique of the ongoing storylines. That assessment will be familiar to those who, unlike Danny, have been watching the show from the beginning. When Ron Sproat joined the writing staff in October 1966, his first several scripts featured a systematic inventory of the available narrative material, with each plot very explicitly marked as suitable or unsuitable for further development.
In its first year, very little happened on Dark Shadows; now, it has swung to the opposite extreme, and there is a climax at every commercial break. But the result is oddly similar. They don’t take the time to explore the overall situation, so that little seems to be at stake even when a spectacular event takes place. No matter how much happens per minute of screen time, it feels like the pace is slow. We see suave warlock Nicholas in the gazebo on the grounds of the estate of Collinwood summoning his subordinate, the wicked witch known variously as Angelique and Cassandra, and hear him complain that she has spent weeks attempting to do what she should have accomplished in minutes. Thus Hall assures us that the pace will be picking up.
Angelique/ Cassandra comes to the gazebo, to which Nicholas refers as a “ga-ZAY-bo” in a bit of Collinsport English Angelique/ Cassandra herself introduced in #489. There, the two of them quarrel about her dilatory approach. They stand behind columns and look like debaters at podiums.
Maybe I’m reading too much into the set design, but in one of the photos Angelique and Nicholas are sperated by a statue of a Goddess (I assumed Venus). Wouldn’t it be awesome if it was Venus and that statue between them was to represent Angelique’s love for Barnabas blocking her efforts at villainy? More likely that the shot just looked better composed with the statue in the middle but how awesome if it was meant to be subtle symbolism! 🙂
“lakeplacidskater,” posted 25 February 2015 on Danny Horn, “Episode 528: This Tawdry Affair,” 21 November 2014.*
The statue appears to me to represent not Venus, but a harvest goddess. She is fully clothed, and there is a sack at her feet which seems to be full of grain. That makes a lot less sense than does the suggestion “lakeplacidskater” made. The Collinses derive their wealth from fishing and shipping, not from farming, so it is surprising that they would put a symbol of agriculture in such a prominent place. Perhaps she stands for wealth in general, but not for so much wealth that the family could afford to commission a statue of a sea goddess. And neither a bountiful harvest in particular nor wealth in general is any sort of obstacle between Nicholas and Angelique/ Cassandra. I suppose the visual metaphor might be emphasizing the image of the two of them as debaters, with the goddess serving as moderator.
Nicholas dominates Angelique/ Cassandra thoroughly and rather cruelly. Viewers who remember her from the portion of Dark Shadows set in the late eighteenth century may be taken aback by this. In those days, her power often seemed to be limited only by her own carelessness. That made for something of a shapeless narrative, since no one could oppose her effectively. Not only does Nicholas reduce her to a lowly state today, but he himself bungles a simple task when he sets out to do something nasty to well-meaning governess Vicki. Thus we see that the villains will have their work cut out for them.
Later, Vicki is in bed at her friend Maggie’s house. She has gone there to escape a curse Angelique/ Cassandra has placed that has caused several people to have the same nightmare. Since Maggie was at home when she was the first person to have the nightmare, and Vicki’s boyfriend Peter was sleeping there when he had it, it is hard to understand why Vicki thinks it is a place of safety.
We have several closeups of the face of the clock while Vicki goes to sleep. It’s an Ingraham eight day clock, apparently they wanted to make sure we knew that. When Vicki finally nods off, Angelique/ Cassandra materializes in the room with a jar of rose water that is supposed to make Vicki have the nightmare. Ever since the days when humanoid Phoenix Laura Murdoch Collins was on the show, we’ve been seeing undead witches materialize in people’s bedrooms while they sleep. This time, Maggie walks in and sees Angelique/ Cassandra. She screams at the sight. All of the women in the cast were required to scream frequently, so frequently that fans become connoisseurs of screaming. Kathryn Leigh Scott was one of the better screamers, not far behind Clarice Blackburn, so that makes for a satisfying ending.
*I can’t help but point that when “lakeplacidskater” left her post, all the members of the cast were still alive. Humbert Allen Astredo would die in 2016 and Lara Parker in 2023; Alexandra Moltke Isles, Roger Davis, and Kathryn Leigh Scott are still with us.
For nineteen weeks from November 1967 to March 1968, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the late eighteenth century. Among the more interesting characters introduced in that period were fanatical witchfinder the Rev’d Mr Trask; roguish naval officer Nathan Forbes; fast-talking con artist Suki Forbes; and streetwalkers Ruby Tate and Maude Browning. All five of these characters were murdered by vampire Barnabas Collins, and all five of them are among those who return today for an impromptu trial of Barnabas.
Barnabas killed Trask by luring him to his basement and bricking him up in an alcove, as Montresor did to Fortunato in Edgar Allan Poe’s 1846 story “The Cask of Amontillado.” Some other characters invited themselves to the basement yesterday and held a séance there. As a result of the séance, the bricks fell away and Trask came back to life. Now, Trask has confined Barnabas to the same alcove. He declares that he will give him a trial before he bricks him up.
In the eighteenth century, Trask was the prosecutor in the trial of time traveling governess Vicki Winters. Victoria was convicted of witchcraft and sentenced to death. Vicki’s trip from the 1960s to the 1790s inverted Barnabas’ displacement in time; as Vicki’s witchcraft trial was so chaotic it did not seem to follow rules of any kind, neither does the murder trial Trask improvises for Barnabas fit any conceivable model of procedure. Vicki’s trial stretched over two weeks, from #427 to #437; Barnabas’ begins and ends today, during the second half of the episode.
Trask conjures up Nathan, Suki, Ruby, Maude, and Barnabas’ first homicide victim, his uncle Jeremiah, to serve as a jury; he conjures up a man named Ezra Simpson, of whom we have never previously heard, to act as judge. Trask is the prosecutor, and Nathan is his sole witness. This court of “the damned!,” as Trask calls them, recalls the rogues who confront Jabez Stone as jurors and judge in Stephen Vincent Benét’s 1936 story “The Devil and Daniel Webster.” Unlike Jabez Stone, however, Barnabas does not have a right to counsel.
Trask asks Nathan how he died. After Nathan says that Barnabas strangled him, Trask asks him how Suki died. Barnabas objects that Nathan shouldn’t be allowed to speak for others; regular viewers sympathize with this, since Suki, played today as she was originally by Jane Draper, was sensational every second she was on screen, and when we saw Miss Draper again we were happy to think that she would have another chance to show what she could do. Barnabas also shouts at one point that he is innocent; this is less likely to attract the audience’s sympathy. Mrs Acilius and I certainly got a good laugh from it.
Barnabas asks to be allowed to present a defense. Trask invites him to question Nathan. He is about to do so when Nathan smiles at him, turns around, and vanishes. Trask explains that Nathan has already said all that needs to be said. Later, Trask looks at the recompleted wall and laughs with vicious glee, delighted at what is behind it.
Barnabas has neither the powers nor the limitations of a vampire now. The effects of the curse went into remission when mad scientists Eric Lang and Julia Hoffman created a man from parts scavenged from the cemetery and connected Barnabas to him as they electrified him and brought him to life. Barnabas named this man Adam.
Now Adam has escaped from the horribly abusive home Barnabas and Julia provided for him. He has found a friend in Sam Evans, an artist who was blinded when Barnabas enlisted him in one of his hare-brained schemes. Sam is teaching Adam to speak, and is so impressed with his ability to learn that he wonders aloud if he will be able to teach him to paint professionally.
Adam develops a sudden pain in his wrists. He moans “Barnabas! Hurt!” A shot of Barnabas hanging by his wrists in the basement alcove is laid over a closeup of Adam. Evidently the bond between them is such that Adam can sense Barnabas’ pain, even though they are miles apart. Apparently it is mid-1840s day on Dark Shadows; the scene in Barnabas’ house recalls “The Cask of Amontillado,” and the scene at Sam’s house is based on Alexandre Dumas’ 1846 novella The Corsican Brothers. “The Devil and Daniel Webster” was set in that decade or a bit earlier, and while Frankenstein was written in 1818 many adaptations of it, including the one Dark Shadows creator Dan Curtis would make in 1973, are set in the 1840s.
Adam becomes agitated. He cannot explain what is happening to him, no matter how patiently Sam asks. Sam’s son-in-law-to-be Joe Haskell comes in; Adam brushes against Joe as he runs out the door. Though Joe is a tall and sturdy man, Adam is so tremendously strong that this casual contact sends him flying.
It dawns on Joe that Adam is the man who abducted heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard and then fell from the cliff on Widows’ Hill. Sam calmly replies that he had already figured that out. Joe is shocked that Sam hasn’t called the police; Sam replies that Adam is as disabled as he is, and that he means no one any harm. Joe is not at all convinced of the second of these points, and worries that “Barnabas! Hurt!” might not have reflected a fear that Barnabas is hurt, as Sam thinks it does, but might rather express Adam’s resolution to hurt Barnabas. Joel Crothers and David Ford bring out the full comic value of this scene; Mrs Acilius laughed at the blandness with which Ford’s Sam confirms that he knows who Adam is.
Joe goes to Barnabas’ house to warn him, but finds it locked and apparently empty. Later, Julia goes there too. She has a key, and lets herself in. She doesn’t see any evidence that Barnabas is or has been home; she goes downstairs, and is mystified to see that the alcove wall, which was broken when she was there for the séance, is now bricked up again.
Several times, Dark Shadows has contrasted Barnabas’ home, the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood, with the Evans cottage, a working class residence in the village of Collinsport. Today they draw this contrast in sharp relief. The basement of the Old House is always dark, but even the upstairs is lit by candles today; the scenes in the Evans cottage, taking place at the same time, are sunlit. The basement is the most haunted part of the most haunted house on the haunted estate, and eight characters in costume dress materialize from thin air there; the Evans cottage is a part of the modern world where Sam and Joe can use reason to arrive at agreement about facts, even if they make different judgments about the significance of those facts. When Julia and Joe go to the Old House, each wanders about alone, finding no one to talk to; at the Evans cottage, even Adam is able to have a conversation, and while there he can receive a message from Barnabas by some mysterious means. Trask seizes control of the basement of the Old House to make a parody of the criminal justice system and enact his vengeance on Barnabas; in the Evans cottage, Sam refuses to call the sheriff because he wants to shield Adam from punishment for the crimes he inadvertently committed.
From #133, artist Sam Evans was compelled to paint a series of pictures that explained the evil intentions of undead blonde witch Laura Murdoch Collins, estranged wife of sarcastic dandy Roger Collins. In #146, Laura put a stop to Sam’s work by starting a fire that burned his hands so badly it seemed for a time he might never be able to paint again.
Sam shares his home, the “Evans cottage,” with his daughter Maggie, who is The Nicest Girl in Town and a waitress at the diner in the Collinsport Inn. Between her earnings there and the paintings Sam sells, the Evanses make a living, but it isn’t such a grand living that he can turn down any commissions, even very eccentric ones. Moreover, his work space entirely dominates the interior of the cottage. In the early days of the show, Sam’s old friend Burke Devlin often stopped by, and the conversation always turned to reminiscences of Burke’s youthful days of honest poverty. Nowadays the most frequent visitor is Maggie’s fiancé, hardworking fisherman Joe Haskell. Sam is delighted with the prospect of this upwardly mobile laborer as a son-in-law. When a representative of the moneyed world visits Sam or Maggie at home, as New York art dealer Portia Fitzsimmons did in #193 and old world gentleman Barnabas Collins did in #222, the contrast between their manner and the humble surroundings is meant to jolt us. The Evans cottage is therefore our window on the working class of Collinsport. When the troubles of the ancient and esteemed Collins family have an effect there, Dark Shadows is telling us that the whole town is dependent on the businesses they own and suffers as a result of their problems.
Yesterday, Barnabas came back to the cottage and brought Sam a very odd commission indeed. He presented a painting of a lovely young woman in eighteenth century garb and offered Sam $500* to paint over the image so that before morning the woman would look to be “about 200 years old.” Sam wasn’t in a position to refuse that much money, even though Barnabas wouldn’t explain why he wanted him to do such a thing.
If Sam knew what the audience knows, he would likely have turned the job down even if Barnabas had offered $500,000,000. The woman in the portrait is Angelique, and like Laura she is an undead blonde witch. In the 1790s, Angelique cursed Barnabas and made him a vampire. In #466, Barnabas’ vampirism went into remission. Shortly thereafter, the portrait made its way to the great house of Collinwood, where Roger became obsessed with it. In #473, Roger returned from an unexplained absence with a new wife. She is Angelique, wearing a black wig and calling herself Cassandra. From #366-#461, Dark Shadows had been a costume drama set in the 1790s; during this segment, we saw that Angelique was a far more dynamic and brutal menace than Laura ever was. Sam would hardly want to involve himself in a battle with this wiggéd witch.
For his part, Barnabas first appeared on camera in #210 and #211. But his portrait was first seen hanging in the foyer at Collinwood in #205, having been prefigured in #195. Dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis became obsessed with the portrait of Barnabas. Willie could hear a heartbeat pounding from the portrait in #208 and #209, and followed its sound to the crypt where Barnabas was trapped in his coffin. As Roger’s obsession with Angelique’s portrait would bring her back to the world of the living, so Willie’s obsession with Barnabas’ portrait led to his return.
In the opening teaser, we see Sam working on the painting. He tells it that he can’t understand why Barnabas would want to disfigure such a pretty face, then resumes his task. The camera zooms in on the painting, as it had zoomed in on Barnabas’ portrait in #208 and #209, and the soundtrack plays the same heartbeat. Sam doesn’t react- he can’t hear it. It is addressed to the audience, especially to those members of the audience who remember the show as it was 13 months ago.
Angelique/ Cassandra is in the gazebo on the grounds of Collinwood. She is wearing a hooded cloak to conceal the aging she has already experienced as a result of Sam’s work. Her cat’s paw Tony Peterson, a local attorney, shows up, responding to her psychic summons. She entrances him with a flame and he tells her that the artist who has been in touch with the Collinses most frequently of late is Sam Evans. From this she concludes that Sam is aging her portrait at Barnabas’ bidding. Before Angelique/ Cassandra and Tony can go their separate ways, heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard comes upon them.
Tony and Carolyn met in #357. In that episode, he was an instance of Jerry Lacy’s Humphrey Bogart imitation. A hard-boiled materialist, Tony had grown up in Collinsport as a working-class boy. He resented the Collinses and attributed all of their unusual characteristics to their wealth and social prominence. At that time, Barnabas was still a vampire and Carolyn was under his power. As a blood thrall, she knew that there was more to life than could be explained by Tony’s reductive logic, but she wasn’t free to offer any explanations. When Tony saw Barnabas biting Carolyn in #463, he interpreted their embrace as a sign of a sexual relationship.
Now their roles are reversed. It is unclear what Carolyn remembers from her time under Barnabas’ control; Nancy Barrett often plays the character as if she remembers everything, but the dialogue doesn’t give her much support for that, and in this scene she is as this-worldly as Tony was in the Autumn of 1967. She interprets Tony and Angelique/ Cassandra’s meeting at the gazebo as proof positive of an adulterous liaison, and declares she will report it to Roger. When Tony tells her that Angelique/ Cassandra has some mysterious power, Carolyn is dismissive, declaring that the Collinses are the ones who have all the power in this town. Tony tries to explain that the power Angelique/ Cassandra has is of an entirely different order from the power their ownership of capital gives the Collinses, and Carolyn responds with unconcealed contempt.
Angelique/ Cassandra knocks on the door of the Evans cottage. Sam opens the door. She ignores his objections and enters. While he keeps ordering her to get out of his house, she stands next to the portrait as he has aged it and points out her resemblance to it. He is astounded, but keeps telling her to leave. She says that she has no grievance against him and that no harm will come to him if he hands the painting over to her. He refuses. She heads out.
Angelique/ Cassandra has barely closed the door behind her when Sam has trouble seeing. After a moment, he realizes he has been struck blind. She comes back in, takes the painting, tells him she warned him, and leaves.
Over the years, several members of the cast said on the record that Sam’s blindness was actor David Ford’s idea. He thought that if he could wear dark glasses it wouldn’t bother the audience that he read all his lines off the teleprompter.
In 2022, a commenter on Danny Horn’s post about this episode on his blog Dark Shadows Every Day identified the portraits of Angelique as the work of ABC Art Department specialist Joseph Guilfoyle:
You asked if anyone knew who painted these portraits. I can verify that the portraits of Angelique were painted by Joseph Guilfoyle. He was an artist in the Art Department at ABC. He was my Godfather and his daughter remembers this very well as it made her a bit of a celebrity at the time. Portraits were not commissioned out but instead were created in the Art Department as it was filled with many talented artists.
Also worthy of note are the two facial makeups representing Angelique’s aging. It’s no wonder they didn’t have the personnel to make David Ford’s fake mustache look convincing when they were lavishing all the work on turning Lara Parker into two quite distinct old crones.
The costumers were involved in a famous production error in the final scene. Angelique/ Cassandra’s hooded cloak cuts off above her knees. There is no old age makeup on her legs, which are featured from every angle, making a ludicrous contrast with her face and wig.
The late Dr Eric Lang built a Frankenstein’s monster with the intention of draining the “life force” from recovering vampire Barnabas Collins into it. Wicked witch Angelique turned Barnabas into a vampire in the first place, and has returned to the scene to thwart this experiment and make Barnabas once more an undead abomination preying upon the living. Angelique struck Lang dead with one spell, and with another has started a “Dream Curse” that has for the moment compromised the ability of the senior mad scientist in town, Barnabas’ best friend Julia Hoffman, to pick up where Lang left off.
In Lang’s laboratory, Julia and Barnabas recap the plot. Under the stress of the Dream Curse, Julia is having trouble controlling her emotions. At one point she refers to her crush on Barnabas. Every time she has mentioned this before, Barnabas has been a huge jerk about it, ridiculing her and reminding him of the crimes they have committed together, including murder. This time, he is warm and kindly. His non-obnoxious response marks a significant change in their relationship.
Lang left an audio message for Julia on his tape recorder. He said that if she does the experiment and Barnabas and the Frankenstein’s monster, whose name is Adam, both live, neither Barnabas nor Adam will be a vampire. But if Adam dies, Barnabas will revert. His recovery is already hanging by a thread, as he feels ever stronger cravings for blood.
Julia and Barnabas play the tape today, but leave the room before it gets to the part with the message. Lang’s voice plays to an empty set. Addison Powell didn’t do a very good job playing Lang on screen, and he’s no better as a voice actor. Powell appeared in a number of feature films, including hits like The Thomas Crown Affair and Three Days of the Condor, but is best remembered for a series of commercials he did in the 1980s as “The Gorton’s Fisherman.” I remember those spots- I thought he was an actual fisherman they’d hired to read copy. Usually I’m uneasy with the idea of taking a job away from an actor, since I know lots of very talented people who have spent years training in that craft, never to make a living at it. But Powell was so bad I wish my original impression had been correct.
Julia has reached out to Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, a scholar of the occult, for help with the Dream Curse. When she met with him yesterday, she did not identify Angelique as the witch. She couldn’t tell him anything about the experiment or about Barnabas’ vampirism without confessing to her many crimes. Today, Stokes is trying to fill in the blanks Julia left so that he can help to oppose the Dream Curse. He calls on Barnabas at Lang’s house. He breaks down Barnabas’ resistance and learns that the witch is Angelique, whom he knows under her alias of Cassandra Blair Collins.
Stokes next calls on Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, at her house. Maggie was the first person to have the dream, and she gives Stokes a detailed description of it. This gives Kathryn Leigh Scott an opportunity to look into the camera and emote, which is always worth seeing.
There are a lot of shots today using mirrors. In their post on Dark Shadows Before I Die, John and Christine Scoleri include several screenshots of these and of ambitious camera angles from other episodes.
Recovering vampire Barnabas Collins hopes that mad scientist Eric Lang will be able to free him of his curse once and for all. Since wicked witch Angelique, who put the curse on Barnabas in the first place, has come back to the great estate of Collinwood, Barnabas found a twelfth century Sicilian talisman with the power to protect against witches and gave it to Lang with instructions that he was to keep it on his person at all times. Several days ago, Angelique drove Lang to the point of death, and he survived only because he managed to touch the talisman at the last moment. Even so, Lang refuses to wear the talisman or even to keep track of it. Now Barnabas is with Lang in his study, whence they discover that the talisman has been stolen. Lang asks Barnabas if he can get another one for him. Barnabas looks at Lang as if he were the world’s stupidest man, and tells him that such objects are extremely rare.
The whole business with Lang and the talisman is a prime example of what Roger Ebert called Idiot Plot, in which the story would end immediately if the characters showed as much intelligence as the average member of the audience has. If Lang were played by a good actor, he might be able to hold our interest through a few of these inexplicable actions. Both Alexandra Moltke Isles, as well-meaning governess Vicki, and Dana Elcar, as Sheriff George Patterson, were cast as the Designated Dum-Dum in a number of episodes, and each managed to survive longer than one might have expected. Mrs Isles kept the audience on board for Vicki by making us wonder how anyone could absorb the torrent of bizarre information drowning her. Elcar made the sheriff watchable by making speculate he might only be pretending to be clueless. But as Lang, Addison Powell is just dismally bad. Not only does he not invent a way to make Lang seem like he might be secretly smarter than the script makes him out to be, he does not show any sign of ever having acquired even the most basic acting skills. When Lang seems to think Barnabas can take him to Talismans-Я-Us to replace the priceless object he has lost, the audience loses whatever patience it may have had with him.
Lang’s assistant, a former mental patient named Peter who insists on being called “Jeff,” is quitting after months of helping Lang steal body parts from fresh graves. Peter/ Jeff tells Barnabas that he will be staying in town. That’s bad news for Barnabas, but much worse news for the audience. Peter/ Jeff is played by Roger Davis, who is a far more skilled actor than Addison Powell but, if anything, even less pleasant to watch. His characters are either full of rage or insufferably smug, he often manhandles his scene partners, and when he raises his voice he projects, not from the muscles of his pelvic floor, but from his anal sphincters, causing him to sound like he is suffering from severe constipation.
Lang tells Barnabas he needs a new assistant as soon as possible. Barnabas says he knows just the man. He is Willie Loomis. As Peter/ Jeff was a patient in an institution for the criminally insane when Lang found him, Willie is a patient in such an institution now. Willie was Barnabas’ servant for the first months he was in the 1960s, when Barnabas was a vampire rampaging through the village of Collinsport. Barnabas eventually took the heat off himself by pinning some of his crimes on Willie, packing him off to the mental hospital.
Willie was a fan favorite. Largely this was because actor John Karlen was as capable as Addison Powell was inept and as likable as Roger Davis is repellent. But the writers, too, always found fresh ways to make Barnabas’ conversations with Willie interesting, and when mad scientist Julia Hoffman teamed up with Barnabas she and Willie were great fun to watch together. The idea of Willie replacing Peter/ Jeff, in whatever capacity, is something to cheer for.
We cut to the cottage where Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, lives with her father Sam. Maggie is wearing a pair of trousers which may well be the weirdest things ever shown on Dark Shadows. According to a blog called 1630 Revello Drive,* they are based on an article of women’s clothing traditional in India called a gharara. Surely no one in India ever made such things out of this brightly colored floral quilt. If this garment can exist, we would be foolhardy to rule out the possibility of ghosts or vampires or time travel or witches or anything else.
Maggie answers a knock on the door and finds Peter/ Jeff. Vicki had arranged for him to rent a room at the Evans cottage. Shortly after he arrives, Vicki comes. Peter/ Jeff tells her she doesn’t know much about him, and asks what she will do if it turns out he is someone she hates.
The next thing we see after that question is Peter/ Jeff with his shoe, a shoe he wears while robbing graves, on Maggie and Sam’s coffee table. Anyone who saw that might well conclude that Peter/ Jeff is such a clod that any civilized person would be tempted to hate him.
That isn’t an ottoman, buddy.
Again, there are actors who specialize in playing men who are compelling to watch when they do unpleasant things. Dark Shadows hit the jackpot in this regard when it cast Jonathan Frid as the vampire Barnabas. It narrowly missed doing so on other occasions. In the first year of the show, future movie stars Harvey Keitel (in #33) and Frederic Forrest (in #137) showed up as background players. Surely they would have taken speaking parts on the show at this point in their careers, and either of them could have made Peter/ Jeff almost as much of an asset as John Karlen made Willie, even if he did wantonly ruin people’s furniture.
Soap operas usually have multiple more or less independent storylines going simultaneously. Dark Shadows had trouble keeping that up, usually having an A story with all the action and a B story that never got off the ground and eventually dried up altogether. Now, in the spring of 1968, they have several equally dynamic arcs going at once. As a result, today’s episode is a bit of a jumble, as we catch glimpses of several loosely related events.
For the nineteen weeks stretching from #365 to #461, well-meaning governess Vicki came unstuck in time and found herself trapped in the 1790s. In that period, she met many people, among them gracious lady Josette and wicked witch Angelique. In the 1960s, one of Vicki’s closest friends is Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town. Like Maggie, Josette is played by Kathryn Leigh Scott. When Vicki saw Josette, she realized that Maggie had some kind of metaphysical connection to her. This was a daring move on the part of the show, since it means that vampire Barnabas was onto something in the summer of 1967 when he abducted Maggie and tried to brainwash her so that her personality would vanish and Josette’s would appear in its place.
Angelique has followed Vicki to 1968. She calls herself Cassandra, wears a black wig, and has married sarcastic dandy Roger, thereby securing residence in the great house of Collinwood. Vicki and Barnabas recognize Angelique/ Cassandra, and each knows that she is a deadly threat to everyone in and around the estate. For her part, Vicki is trying to hide her knowledge from Angelique; Barnabas has taken a different tack, and the other day let Angelique into his house where he proceeded to give her all the information she could possibly need to realize her evil intentions towards him. This is not because Barnabas cannot keep a secret. Vicki has tried to enlist him in the battle against Angelique, but he, now in recovery from the vampire curse Angelique placed on him in the 1790s, does not want Vicki to know the truth about him, and so he will not cooperate with her in any way. It’s only his enemies with whom Barnabas compulsively shares damaging intelligence.
Maggie comes to the great house to have a tea party with Vicki today. Angelique/ Cassandra opens the door, and cannot hide her shock at Maggie’s resemblance to Josette. She so blatantly stares at her that she has to admit that she is unnerved because Maggie looks very much like someone she knew a long time ago.
Vicki comes in, and Angelique/ Cassandra asks her, not in her usual mid-Atlantic accent, but in Lara Parker’s sweetly musical Tennessee voice, if she and Maggie are planning to use the drawing room. Vicki at once offers to use a different space, not only as would be correct for a member of the household staff speaking to one of the family, but in a relaxed and friendly way that betrays nothing of her knowledge of Angelique/ Cassandra’s true identity. While returning viewers know that Angelique/ Cassandra remembers Vicki from the 1790s, the Southern accent is so much more natural than her usual way of speaking that it suggests Vicki has managed to get her to let her guard down to some degree.
While Vicki and Maggie settle into the drawing room, Angelique/ Cassandra goes to a portrait of Barnabas that hangs in the foyer of the great house and delivers a speech to it. She tells the portrait that Maggie is the very image of Josette, and will therefore be the first victim of her latest evil plan. She is going to spam people’s dreams with a series of nightmares, and when the last person has had the nightmare Barnabas will be a vampire again. Evidently the dreamers of Collinsport didn’t have anti-virus programs installed in their brains, because Angelique/ Cassandra expects them all to be helpless before this morphean malware.
In the drawing room, Maggie is too preoccupied with Angelique/ Cassandra’s strange reaction to her to hear when Vicki asks her how she takes her tea. When she tells Vicki that Angelique/ Cassandra was shocked by the sight of her, Vicki amazes her by saying that she is sure she did react that way, and giving her the details of the reaction before Maggie reports them. Maggie asks Vicki to explain how she knew and what it means. Vicki explains nothing.
This is something of a reversal. In #1, Vicki met Maggie. Vicki had just arrived in Collinsport, and went to the diner where Maggie was the waitress. While Maggie served Vicki, she told her that Collinwood was haunted and that it was unwise to go there. Vicki did not at that time believe in ghosts and told Maggie so. Now, Vicki is the one serving the tea, and she is the one who knows far more about the supernatural than does Maggie. At least, far more than is in Maggie’s conscious mind- she has amnesia about her experience as Barnabas’ victim.
Vicki and Maggie’s tea party
Maggie is far more upset by Angelique/ Cassandra’s reaction to her than circumstances would appear to warrant. Vicki’s reticence is understandable, given the extreme complexity and improbability of her story, but she has always been so forthcoming with her friends that when Maggie asks why she is being so mysterious it seems quite likely that Vicki will tell her everything. Together, these two facts suggest to regular viewers that Maggie will eventually hear herself compared to Josette, that the comparison will jar loose the memory of what Barnabas did to her, and that she will go to the authorities. As an audience, we hope Barnabas will get away with his crimes, because the show is most fun to watch when he does. Now that Angelique has come to 1968, we have a morally defensible in-universe reason for this hope. Angelique is even more evil than Barnabas is, and without his active participation there is no hope she can be stopped.
Vicki’s reticence brings up another question. In the months before her journey to the past, she saw a great deal of evidence that Barnabas was a vampire. While in the eighteenth century, she saw so much more that upon her return Barnabas was certain she must have figured out his secret, and bit her to keep her quiet. When his vampirism responded to medical treatment, the symptoms of his bite went away. We wonder what Vicki knew at each stage of the story, and what she remembers now.
One possibility is that she has known everything all along. That would put Vicki in an intriguing position if Maggie’s memory does come back. Vicki originally represented the audience’s point of view; if she turns out to have been aware of Barnabas’ crimes from the beginning, she will put us in the uncomfortable position of wondering what it tells us about ourselves that we are consistently on the vampire’s side.
Vicki changes the subject to her boyfriend, a man named Peter. Vicki met Peter in the 1790s, and like Angelique he has followed her into her own time. Also like Angelique, he keeps insisting that he has a different name. He wants to be called Jeff. Unlike Angelique, Peter/ Jeff is amnesiac, is under the control of mad scientist Dr Lang, and brings the show to a screeching halt every time he is on screen. Vicki asks if Peter/ Jeff can rent the spare room in the cottage Maggie shares with her father. Maggie has never met or heard of Peter/ Jeff, and wants more information before she commits to living with him. Vicki doesn’t have anything to tell her, inflaming Maggie’s curiosity to the point where she exclaims “I can’t stand it!”
Peter/ Jeff telephones from Lang’s laboratory, and Vicki gets Maggie to agree to meet him at her house in an hour. Unknown to Vicki, Lang is building a Frankenstein’s monster, and plans to download Barnabas’ personality into the body once it is completed. Peter/ Jeff has dug up graves and fetched body parts for Lang to use, but is tired of that sort of work and is eager to make a fresh start. Unfortunately for him, Barnabas requested that the body look like Peter/ Jeff. So Lang persuades Peter/ Jeff to call Vicki back to say he won’t be available to meet her and Maggie today after all. He then gives Peter/ Jeff a shot to knock him out, straps him to a table, and sets about cutting his head off. Peter/ Jeff comes to and complains about this; Lang, irritated, tells him he can’t very well have expected him to let him live, knowing what he knows.
Maggie has the dream Angelique has sent. It begins with Peter/ Jeff calling on her. Since they went out of their way to tell us Maggie has never seen Peter/ Jeff, this tells first time viewers that this sequence, as is typical of dream sequences on Dark Shadows, comes not from the character’s mind, but is the product of a supernatural agency. In the course of the dream, Maggie hears the sound of Josette’s music box; Barnabas made her listen to this when he was holding her prisoner. This again raises the prospect that Maggie’s memory will return. The rest of the dream is a concerto for fog machine. Technical director Lou Marchand is credited today; presumably he was the soloist. The fog immerses everything so completely that it is anyone’s guess what exactly Miss Scott is doing for most of the sequence.
Fake Shemp Burke Devlin is starting to suspect that there is something odd about old world gentleman Barnabas Collins. He suspects that Barnabas is not from England as he claims to be. More darkly, he is considering the possibility that Barnabas might be the one who abducted Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, and held her prisoner. As it happens, the audience knows that he is correct in both of these suspicions. We also know more- that Barnabas is a vampire.
Burke has hired investigators to probe into Barnabas’ past. Barnabas told him he lived near London with a cousin named Niall Bradford. Burke’s investigators have found that the last time a man of that name lived in London was 130 years previously. Dark Shadows has been going back and forth for months on whether Barnabas lived in the 1830s or in the eighteenth century. Yesterday they seemed to commit themselves to the earlier date, but now we’re back with the 1830s.
Burke asks Maggie’s doctor, addled quack Dave Woodard, to show him all of her medical records. Woodard protests that medical records are confidential. He then tells Burke everything he knows about Maggie’s case.
Burke calls on Maggie. She is back home, apparently well, but suffering from amnesia covering the entire period of her captivity. Unknown to any of the characters we see today, Maggie’s psychiatrist Julia Hoffman is a mad scientist in league with Barnabas, and she has wiped Maggie’s memory clean of any information that might threaten to expose him. Burke talks with Maggie and her boyfriend, hardworking young fisherman Joe, repeating everything Woodard told him a few minutes before.
Maggie and Joe tell Burke that she has had a few visitors since she came home. Maggie blithely mentions that Barnabas was one of those visitors. Burke is startled to hear this, and Maggie repeats that Barnabas dropped in to pay his respects.
During the fourteen weeks when Dark Shadows was driven by undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, Burke saw extensive evidence of supernatural doings. But he lately he has decided that he lives in the kind of world where the show took place in its first few months, where there might be hints of ghosts in the background, but all the action came from flesh and blood humans subject to the usual laws of nature. Since it doesn’t occur to him that a person might have powers like Julia’s, Maggie’s calmness when talking about a visit from Barnabas seems to prove that Barnabas is innocent.
Burke learns that Barnabas has been to see Maggie.
Maggie does say that there is just one memory she has that seems to be connected with her time in captivity. It is a bit of music- “a light, playful tune. A soft, tinkling sound.” She freely admits that it seems unlikely that this would have any connection with such an experience, and speculates that it may have been something she remembered from childhood.
In the great house of Collinwood, well-meaning governess Vicki is listening to the enchanted music box Barnabas gave her. Burke and Vicki are now engaged to be married. He comes to see her, and remarks on the music box. She accuses him of being jealous of Barnabas, and he keeps coming back to the music box. When she opens it for him, he remarks that it makes “a light, playful tune… a soft, tinkling sound.”
The episode ends with Burke listening to the music box and staring off into space. Barnabas gave the music box first to Maggie, then to Vicki, in each case hoping that she would listen to it until its magical quality caused her to believe that she was his lost love Josette. Seeing the look on Burke’s face as he listened, my wife, Mrs Acilius, said “Maybe Burke will start to think that he’s Josette.” Who knows, maybe he and Barnabas could be very happy together.
Dark Shadows Commentary 