Barnabas Collins became a vampire just a few weeks ago, and he doesn’t yet know what powers his new condition has brought him. On the chance that he might be able to raise the dead, he goes to the fresh grave of his ex-fiancée Josette. He whines about how much he misses her until the sound of her sobbing can be heard. She begs him to let her rest. Later, she appears to him in her former bedroom in the Old House on the estate of Collinwood, and shows him that in her ghostly form her face bears the severe disfigurement inflicted when she fell to her death while fleeing from him.
The audience is supposed to be in suspense at whether Barnabas will reach Josette. Unfortunately, the show ruins the surprise right at the outset, when Kathryn Leigh Scott delivers the opening voiceover. These monologues are spoken by an actress who appears in the episode, so we know that we will be seeing Miss Scott, and therefore Josette. It’s true that Miss Scott uses a very different voice for the opening monologues than she does for Josette or any of her other characters, but fans will recognize her right off.
Viewers who have been with Dark Shadows from the outset will recognize some connections with earlier episodes. Josette’s sobbing sounds more than a little like the mysterious sobbing heard several times in the basement of the great house of Collinwood in the first months of the show. They strongly hinted that the ghost of Josette was the source of this sobbing, only to give another explanation for it later.
Josette tells Barnabas that “the dead must rest!” This was a catchphrase of one of the funniest characters on the show, the Caretaker of the old cemetery. When we heard it from Josette, my wife and I laughed out loud.
Josette also commands “Do not disturb my rest.” A “Do Not Disturb” sign hung on a tombstone would be an apt symbol of Dark Shadows‘ view of the afterlife, since death on the show is usually about as temporary and as subject to interruptions as a stay at a cheap motel.
When Josette convinces Barnabas that she must not rise from the dead, not because she would have to prey upon the living as he does, but because she is ugly now, Mrs Acilius and I remembered two things. It’s true that when we saw Josette’s ghost in the first 73 weeks of the show, when it was set in 1966 and 1967, her face was almost always at least partly obscured. There were some brief exceptions, but in her most important appearances, when Miss Scott played her in #70 and #126, her face was completely veiled. So perhaps she bears her wounds then as well.
Our other recollection was not of Dark Shadows at all, but of the original Star Trek. And I do mean the original one, the first pilot, shot in 1964. At the climax of that one, our heroes commit themselves to die rather than stay on the planet where they have been trapped, as conditions there are such that no human being could possibly live a worthwhile life. When one woman says she wants to stay behind, they see that she is, contrary to the illusory appearance they have seen so far, severely disfigured. At that, the captain instantly accepts that she is right to stay. No uggoes allowed in space! Usually I’m reluctant to bring up the labels that end in “-ism,” but that ending and this one seem to be examples of looks-ism so extreme that they would be frankly genocidal if taken as a guide to real-world action.
When Dark Shadows first aired in June 1966, it kept hinting that behind the action we saw there was a back-world of supernatural presences some of whom might eventually interact with the characters. Often these hints occurred in conversations between a character native to the village of Collinsport and newly arrived governess Vicki. The local would use the word “ghost” metaphorically to refer to unresolved conflicts around the estate of Collinwood, Vicki would shriek “You don’t mean you believe in ghosts!?,” and the other would say that he damn well did believe in ghosts and that if Vicki stuck around long enough she would, too.
The first ghost whose name we heard was Josette, mentioned in #5 as a grand lady from France who came to town to marry Jeremiah Collins, was unhappy with him, and threw herself to her death from the precipice known as Widows’ Hill. Josette manifested herself on camera in #70 and rescued Vicki from murderous groundskeeper Matthew Morgan in #126. In that climactic encounter, we saw Josette and a group of other wraiths. Joining the ghosts of women who jumped from Widows’ Hill at various points in the 19th century was the ghost of Bill Malloy, who had been a living character in the first ten weeks of the show and had shimmered into view as a ghost and sang a song in #85. This assemblage suggests that the spectres haunting Collinwood know each other and act with a common purpose at least occasionally.
The first supernatural menace to appear on the show was undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, mother of strange and troubled boy David. Josette warned several characters of the threat Laura posed to David. Josette herself was unable to fight Laura directly. In #165, she manifested in the room where Laura held the sleeping David, but had to retreat when Laura ordered her to go. Thereafter it was up to Vicki, advised by Josette, to organize the opposition to Laura. If #126 showed that the benevolent spirits can act together to defeat a threat from a mortal man, #165 and its aftermath showed that they must withdraw into the back-world when the enemy is of an uncanny nature.
In April of 1967, vampire Barnabas Collins succeeded Laura as the show’s new danger from beyond the grave. In #212, Barnabas went to the Old House at Collinwood, the place where Josette is most present, and told her portrait above the mantel that her power was at an end. In #223 and #240, Josette’s friend David felt her absence from the Old House and lamented that the family had lost its tutelary spirit. With that, we bid farewell to the wispy presences we had seen in #126. A vampire is too dynamic an adversary for them. It seemed for a period that the show had simplified its ontology- there are those who live by the laws of nature we know, there is Barnabas, and that is that.
That period ended in #255. Barnabas has passed himself off as a cousin from the Collins family’s long-lost English branch and settled in to the Old House. He is keeping Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, as a prisoner in a barred cell in the basement. Maggie looks out her window and sees a little girl in 18th century garb sitting in the corridor. The girl is holding a doll and singing “London Bridge.” She does not respond to Maggie’s attempts to get her attention.
In the next several episodes, we learn that the little girl’s name is Sarah, that she has a big brother, and that she can’t find anyone she knows. Even if the closing credits hadn’t immediately given away the fact that she is the ghost of Barnabas’ little sister, we would be able to gather that she is a supernatural being who was pulled out of the back-world when Barnabas rose from the grave. For the next 22 weeks, Sarah keeps popping up in the world of 1967. We wonder what she will do next, when she and Barnabas will confront each other, and what other paranormal beings are waiting to erupt into the visible world.
In #365, the major characters held a séance to contact Sarah and ask her what she was trying to tell them. Sarah spoke through Vicki and said that she would not appear to them again. She also said that she wanted to “tell the story from the beginning.” With that, Vicki vanished from the table and a woman in an 18th century dress appeared in her place. The woman identified herself as Phyllis Wick, governess to Sarah Collins, and demanded to know where she was. Meanwhile, Vicki found herself in the year 1795, in Phyllis’ place. At a stroke, the back-world and the foreground are interchanged.
Now it is 26 January 1796, Sarah’s eleventh birthday. She is not having a happy one. Last night she found Barnabas in the family mausoleum with blood smeared on his face. She may not know that he has become a vampire, but she knows that something has gone horribly wrong with him. She runs off and hides behind a tombstone. By the time faithful servant Ben finds her and carries her home, she is severely weakened by exposure. She cannot speak, but mouths Barnabas’ name and looks distressed. Her mother Naomi and cousin Millicent keep vigil at her bedside.
Night falls; Barnabas rises again, and Ben tells him that Sarah is gravely ill. Barnabas resolves to visit her. Unable to talk him out of this plan, Ben offers to help him get into her room unobserved.
Ben relieves Naomi and Millicent, then ushers Barnabas into the room. Barnabas tries to reassure Sarah. Eventually she warms to him. She regains the power of speech, and with her first words she asks her brother to hold her. He does. She tells him she will always love him, then dies in his arms.
This is Sharon Smyth’s last appearance on Dark Shadows. As a child, she had some rather obvious limitations as an actress, a fact Sharon Smyth Lentz cheerfully acknowledges nowadays. During her first 22 weeks, she was playing a ghost, so there were many scenes where all she had to do was seem vague and detached and she could be effective. The story moved very slowly during that period, giving the writers and directors time to figure out her strengths. Near the end of it, she excelled in two scenes with a lot of dialogue. In #348 she had a complicated, serious conversation with heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard, and in #364 she had her confrontation with Barnabas. Supported by Nancy Barrett and Jonathan Frid, she executed those scenes very well indeed.
In 1795, Sarah is alive and the plot moves at a breakneck pace. Under those conditions, it would have taken intricate advance planning to craft scenes that would have been in Sharon Smyth’s range. But the writers of Dark Shadows rarely had time to do any advance planning. When the show was moving slowly enough, they could usually hit all the major points the audience would expect to see, but there are some glaring omissions in 1795. Young Daniel Collins will be played by David Henesy, who also plays David Collins. Since the relationship between Vicki and David had been the core of the first 39 weeks of the show and the relationship between Sarah’s ghost and David had been one of the most intriguing elements of the 22 weeks she was haunting Collinwood, it is particularly disappointing that we barely see Vicki with Sarah and never see Sarah and Daniel together at all.
I first saw Dark Shadows on the SciFi Channel, as it was then called, in the 1990s. I saw a handful of episodes on random mornings when I happened to be off work. They whetted my curiosity about the show, but I left it to chance until I saw an episode with Sarah’s ghost. Then I decided to set my VCR and watch regularly until I found an explanation for what was going on with her. The whole idea of supernaturalism is that there are phenomena which defy explanation, so of course I never reached that point. Naturally, I got hooked on the show within a couple of weeks.
On his Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn rather unfairly, albeit hilariously, griped that “Sharon stopped acting after Dark Shadows, or possibly during.” When she looks back on her days as a child actress, Mrs Lentz talks about how excited her mother was to meet show biz celebrities, and says that her main gratification was in pleasing her. But she has fond memories of many castmates, and says that her favorite person to run lines with was Jonathan Frid. So there is something sweet about her ending her time on the show in his arms.
Late in 1966, the ghost of Josette Collins emerged from the supernatural back-world behind the action of Dark Shadows and rescued well-meaning governess Vicki from homicidal groundskeeper Matthew Morgan. Early in 1967, Vicki and several other characters worked closely with the ghost of Josette to thwart the evil plans of undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. After these experiences, Vicki felt so close to the ghost that, to some, it seemed possible that her personality might disintegrate and she might become a sort of reincarnation of Josette.
In November 1967, the back-world and the foreground traded places. Vicki came unstuck in time and found herself in 1795, where Josette and others whom she had met as uncanny entities are alive and she is the alien interloper from another world. Vicki did not in any way adapt to her new surroundings, and immediately brought suspicion on herself. Now she is in jail, spelled “gaol,” awaiting trial on charges of witchcraft.
Josette visits Vicki today and begs her to lift the curse that has brought a mysterious and apparently terminal illness to gallant gentleman Barnabas Collins. Despite her situation, Vicki is shocked that Josette believes her to be a witch. Unable to persuade her of her innocence, Vicki tells Josette that she is a time-traveler and sends her off to look for a book she brought with her from the future. Josette interprets this as a confession of witchcraft, and when she finds the book makes it clear that she could not possibly have interpreted it as anything else.
If the show had kept the memory of Vicki’s friendship with Josette’s ghost fresh, this might have been a powerful scene. But Josette’s ghost receded from the action after the Laura story ended in #191, and in #223 and #240 it was made explicit that she is no longer a palpable presence on the estate of Collinwood. We’ve barely heard of Vicki’s connection to Josette in recent months. By this point, even viewers who have been with the show from the beginning are unlikely to make a connection between Vicki’s behavior in her scene with Josette and those old stories. Instead, we see yet another case of Vicki being a tiresome fool.
Disappointing as that scene is, it is not the low point of the episode. That came in the scene immediately before. Actor Jack Stamberger appears as a doctor called to treat Barnabas. Doctors on Dark Shadows are ineffectual figures brought on to fill time, unless they are mad scientists who take a bad situation that is troubling one or a few characters and make it so much worse that it can be a major narrative arc. Stamberger’s part is of the former sort.
It is a particularly objectionable specimen of the category. The other G.P.s usually started with at least a theoretical possibility that they might do something to advance the plot, or turn out to be old friends with established characters who could show a new facet of their personalities in interaction with them, or at least bring out some unusual medical equipment that would be fun to look at. They’ve already foreclosed all of those possibilities before this doctor appears, so the scene is advertised as a waste of time.
Worse, watching Stamberger’s performance is like sticking your head in a bucket of itching powder. His scene partners, Kathryn Leigh Scott, Lara Parker, and Grayson Scott with dialogue, and Jonathan Frid with moans and anguished facial expressions, are all totally committed to the period setting, and really do seem like gentlefolk inhabiting a mansion in a previous century. Stamberger doesn’t even try to do what they are doing. He puts on a growly voice that might have been acceptable if he were playing a trail-boss in a Western, but that doesn’t have much place in any scene set indoors. It certainly doesn’t make sense for a man in genteel surroundings who talks about nothing but how helpless he is. He doesn’t maintain eye contact with any of the ladies long enough to put himself into the same space with them. He bungles most of his lines, and even those he speaks as written he follows by shuffling his feet, breathing heavily, and looking around. Dark Shadows was, for all practical purposes, done live; if videotape editing had been freely available, it’s hard to imagine director Lela Swift wouldn’t have stopped the scene and taken the time to smack him upside the head.
On his Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn argues that Addison Powell was, as he stylizes it, THE WORST ACTOR EVER TO APPEAR ON DARK SHADOWS. I’m not sure who deserves that title, but today Stamberger locks up the award for Most Irritating Performance.
Mad scientist Julia Hoffman is hanging around her new base of operations, the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood. She is getting ready to perform an experiment which, if successful, will convert vampire Barnabas Collins into a real boy. She learned of Barnabas’ existence when treating his former victim Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. Julia answers a knock on the front door, and sees her old acquaintance, addled quack Dave Woodard.
Woodard has no idea what Julia is up to. So far as he knows, she is still on board with his own idiotic scheme, in which he, along with Maggie’s father Sam and her fiancé Joe, has told everyone in town that Maggie is dead in hopes that her captor would forget about imprisoning girls and draining their blood. In fact, Julia has told Barnabas that Maggie is alive and has lured him into cooperating with her project by promising to keep Maggie in a state of amnesia so that she will not represent a threat to him.
In yesterday’s episode, Sam and Joe called on Woodard and complained that Julia is staying at Collinwood while Maggie is a hundred miles away. They demanded that Woodard take her out of Julia’s care. Woodard tells Julia today that her conduct is growing “more and more unethical.”
Last week, Julia was able to forestall Woodard’s threat to take her off the case by playing dumb. This time, she has to take him partly into her confidence, telling him that Maggie encountered the supernatural and that her case represents an opportunity to find a crossing point on the boundary between life and death. She dangles the possibility of great fame before him, saying that the doctors who make the breakthrough she sees coming will go down in history. When he presses for details, she says that there is great danger in what she already knows, and that she must not tell him more.
Woodard has been on the show for months, and has been stuck in just two modes the whole time. When he’s with a patient, he makes a show of brisk dissatisfaction, as if trying to convince them that they oughtn’t to take their disease so seriously that they give up. This mode was as far as Richard Woods, the first actor to play Woodard, got in his two appearances (in #219 and #229.) When he is talking with someone else, Woodard struggles to find the words to express his bafflement at the terrible case he is treating. These two modes didn’t make Woodard a source of suspense. They were just filler between his announcements of what the script called for him to do next.
When Julia asks Woodard if, when he was in school, he dreamed of making a major contribution to the science of medicine, he gets a thoughtful look and says “Well, of course.” This is the first moment we have seen Woodard outside his two modes. When Julia tempts him with the idea that he will go down in history as the co-discoverer of the most fundamental truth imaginable, he displays an emotion that might lead to him to any of a number of exciting, story-productive actions. The first scene in the first episode credited to writer Gordon Russell manages the astounding feat of turning Dr Woodard into an interesting character.
We cut to the woods on the estate. We see the ghost of Barnabas’ nine year old sister Sarah sitting on a rock crying. All of Sarah’s previous scenes started with some other character on camera, then proceeded to Sarah making a mysterious entrance. That’s what we would expect of a ghost, after all. This time, Sarah is all by herself at rise. The first time we saw a ghost was in #70, when the ghost of Josette Collins emerged from her portrait and danced around the columns of the Old House. That was a solo appearance as well, but people had been in the Old House talking about Josette immediately before, so she was manifesting herself in response to attention from the living. Here, we see a ghost on her own, processing her emotions, hoping someone will come and hang out with her.
Strange and troubled boy David Collins shows up and asks Sarah why she is crying. She says she can’t find Maggie. David breaks the news to her that Maggie is dead. Sarah laughs, and assures David that she is still alive. When David insists that Maggie is dead, Sarah tells him that he may know “about leaves and everything,” but she knows “who’s dead, and who isn’t.”
Less than a week ago, in #288, David saw a portrait of Sarah and wondered aloud if the girl he has met is her ghost. In the first 39 weeks of the show, he was on intimate terms with Josette and some of the other ghosts. When he first met Barnabas in #212, he asked him if he were a ghost, and was disappointed to hear that he was not. So returning viewers expect David to ask Sarah the same question. Indeed, David has always interacted with ghosts as if they were people with whom he could pass the time of day, share thoughts and feelings, and get to know better from one encounter to the next. Seeing Sarah crying by herself should validate this attitude. But instead, David has developed Soap Opera Goldfish Syndrome, forgetting information which everything we have seen has led us to expect he will remember.
David insists Sarah come home with him to the great house of Collinwood and have dinner with the family. She tries to decline politely, but he will not take “I’ve been dead for centuries” for an answer. He gets Sarah into the foyer, then goes to the drawing room to announce her presence. He finds Julia there, with well-meaning governess Vicki and Vicki’s depressing boyfriend, fake Shemp Burke Devlin. By the time David gets the adults into the foyer, Sarah has disappeared.
Vicki is suffering from an even more frustrating version of Soap Opera Goldfish Syndrome. She had had extensive dealings with the ghosts of Collinwood on many occasions between #85 and #191, and that had been the basis of her bond with David. Vicki’s interactions with the supernatural reached a climax when she led the opposition to David’s mother, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, from #126 to #191. Since then, Josette has spoken through Vicki at a séance and she has seen Sarah.
But lately, Vicki has started to deny that there are ghosts. This is in response to Burke’s demands. Burke lost his connection to the story months ago, and he’s been trying to gaslight Vicki into dismissing all of her spectral encounters as signs of mental illness so that she will join him on the show’s discard pile of useless characters. In Friday’s episode, Vicki had apparently decided to give in to Burke and make herself believe that there were no supernatural beings at work around Collinwood. As a result, her scenes in that episode were unbearably dreary.
Before David brought Sarah home, Vicki had been dreary again. She’s excited about some old house she saw, and wants Burke to go look at it with her. As David’s governess, Vicki’s compensation consists largely of room and board, so as long as she has her job her interest in any particular piece of real estate isn’t going to lead to story development. If she quits the job and marries Burke, she will be giving up on ever being part of the action again. So her rambling about “the house by the sea” is suspenseful only to fans of Vicki who are afraid she will vanish into the background of the show.
When David starts telling the adults about Sarah, Vicki launches into the same garbage Burke has been giving her, talking down to him about imaginary friends and insinuating that anyone who believes in ghosts is soft in the head. Burke, who had previously been David’s great friend, joins in this abusive behavior. After David indignantly stalks away, Julia gets very uptight and lectures Vicki and Burke about the need to stifle David’s imagination and discourage him from telling them things they don’t already know. This scene is effective, but the effect is claustrophobic- by the end of Julia’s little speech, we feel like the mad scientist is holding us prisoner.
Vicki and Burke decide to leave to look at the house, and Vicki finds Sarah’s cap on the floor. That’s such a great moment that not only do we leave the episode no longer disappointed in David’s goldfish memory, we can even forgive Vicki’s.
The closing credits run over an image of the foyer with Sarah’s cap on the table. My wife, Mrs Acilius, thought it would have been hilarious if Sarah had marched in and taken the cap while the credits were rolling. I’d have liked to see that too, especially if, after putting it back on, Sarah had turned to the camera and put her finger to her lips, telling the audience to keep quiet about what we had seen.
We cut back and forth between an opulent estate called Collinwood and a mental hospital called Windcliff.
At Collinwood, we spend our time with well-meaning governess Vicki. From the beginning of Dark Shadows, Vicki has been the audience’s main point of view character. The audience is now made up chiefly of people who want to see how they are going to fit vampire Barnabas Collins into an ongoing series, and Barnabas’ principal concern is getting hold of a woman, erasing her personality, and replacing it with that of his lost love Josette. So of course Vicki is fascinated with Barnabas and fantasizes about being Josette.
Matriarch Liz has functioned as a blocking figure. Her goal has been to keep her secrets. Her actions in pursuit of that goal have slowed story development in a largely futile attempt to create suspense. She’s fresh out of secrets, but is still trying to put the brakes on. She keeps complaining that Vicki’s interest in Josette is unwholesome.
Liz has a point. Barnabas has settled on Vicki as the next subject of his experiment. To that end, he has given Vicki Josette’s music box. When he was trying his lunatic plan on Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, he had given Maggie the music box. Evidently the music box has some kind of magical power over the women to whom Barnabas gives it. When she opens it, Vicki sits for hours staring vacantly into space listening to its simple tune.
The previous night, Vicki had worn Josette’s dress at a costume party Barnabas hosted in his house on the estate. The party ended in a séance in which Josette spoke through Vicki. Liz mentions this possession as a sign that Vicki is becoming too involved with Josette. Vicki doesn’t see anything out of the ordinary. She blandly exclaims “It’s happened before!” Indeed, the show’s first séance, in #170 and #171, climaxed with Vicki channeling a message from Josette. Liz points out that this doesn’t make it better.
Vicki goes to Barnabas’ house to return the dress. She and Barnabas’ sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie take it to Josette’s restored bedroom upstairs. There, she blissfully tells Willie she wishes she could wear Josette’s clothes all the time. Remembering what Barnabas did to Maggie and knowing his plans for Vicki, Willie winces. He hates the things Barnabas does, but is too far under his power to actively oppose him. Vicki goes on about how close she is coming to feel to Josette, and Willie winces harder. She tells him that she has been listening to the music box for hours at a time, and he shouts “You shouldn’t do that!” When she asks why not, he takes a second to come up with something that he can say. He tells her she might damage the mechanism. Still blissful, she says, “Oh, I’ll be careful.”
Willie tells Vicki that tomorrow is Josette’s birthday. Vicki is delighted with this information. She resolves to go to the cemetery and lay flowers on Josette’s grave. When she tells Liz of this plan, Liz objects to it. Because of Liz’ function as a blocking figure, her opposition implies that it will advance the plot. To appease Liz, Vicki agrees not to go alone, but to take Liz’ fellow narrative speed-bump Burke Devlin.
At Windcliff, Maggie is in session with her therapist, Dr Julia Hoffman. As a result of her time as Barnabas’ prisoner, Maggie has amnesia and can speak only with difficulty. In his effort to Josettify Maggie, Barnabas combined his own supernatural powers with sensory stimuli like the music box that were supposed to elicit the responses he had in mind. Now Julia is trying to recreate those stimuli in her effort to recover Maggie’s memories and restore her personality.
At one point, Maggie tells Julia about a sweet scent that regular viewers know to be that of Josette’s jasmine perfume. As she does so, music starts playing on the soundtrack that we have heard when Josette’s ghost has appeared. When this happened, my wife, Mrs Acilius, said “Josette is there.” Later in the episode, when Vicki is in Josette’s room with Willie, Vicki takes a whiff of the perfume. The music strikes up then too. Josette’s ghost hasn’t manifested since March- maybe the ghost’s musical cue is now the perfume’s.
Their use of sensory stimuli is not the only way in which Julia is a reverse-image reflection of Barnabas. Barnabas is a vampire, so we expect to hate him and oppose his plans. But he is also the character who makes the show fun to watch, so we find ourselves wanting to see more of him. Further, he evolves into a comic villain, with whom we identify as we see him scramble to keep his madcap schemes from backfiring. And the longer we see him, the more of actor Jonathan Frid’s personality comes through, and Frid seems to have been adorable.
Julia is a doctor trying to help a patient we know and care about, so we expect to like her and cheer her on. Yet she always seems more than a little sinister. She takes a stern, occasionally impatient tone with Maggie today, which we might think is part of her therapeutic technique. But in her previous appearance, in #265, she took the same tone with Maggie’s father, boyfriend, and family doctor, none of whom is her patient. More than once in that episode, she made remarks suggesting that she suspected that Maggie’s condition was the result of an encounter with an undead monster, then refused to explain what she meant. We wonder why she would withhold such information. At the end of today’s installment, she insists that Maggie return to a place where something terrible happened to her. When Maggie begs her not to make her go back there, we see a closeup of Julia’s face with a look of satisfaction that led Mrs Acilius to say “Julia can do ‘evil face’ as well as Barnabas can.”*
Julia’s E-face
Julia’s grim satisfaction mirrors ours. Ever since Liz gave her great show of reluctance at Vicki’s plan to lay flowers at Josette’s grave, we’ve been wondering what kind of progress a stop at the cemetery could possibly represent for the story. Julia has unwittingly answered that question for us. The place she is going to take Maggie is, of course, that very cemetery.
*Mrs Acilius had a lot to say about Julia as Barnabas in reverse, this whole section is derived from her insights.
Vampire Barnabas Collins is giving a costume party in his home at the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood. His distant relatives, the living members of the Collins family, are dressed as their ancestors from Barnabas’ own time as a living being. The whole thing was impossibly dull until the mischievous and witty Roger Collins suggested they have a séance. Now well-meaning governess Vicki is in a trance, channeling the spirit of Josette Collins.
The last time Josette took possession of Vicki at a séance was in #170 and #171. At that time, Josette delivered her message in French. Since Vicki could not speak French (but Alexandra Moltke speaks it fluently,) that was evidence enough to convince even the most skeptical that something was going on. Today Josette speaks English. The characters are all sure that she is the one speaking, but it doesn’t have the same effect on the audience as did that earlier irruption of a language we had not expected to hear.
I do wonder if the decision not to use French came at the last moment. Even though Vicki/ Josette’s voice is loud and clear, the others make a show of struggling to understand what she is saying and seize on a word here and there (“Something about ‘run!'”,) as people do when they are listening to someone speak a language they don’t quite understand. Perhaps writer Joe Caldwell wasn’t quite up to writing in French, and the Writer’s Guild wouldn’t let Alexandra Moltke Isles or any other Francophones on set make a translation. Or maybe they thought that the switch to French wouldn’t be as effective the second time as it was the first.
Josette is telling the story of her death. A man was chasing her, and fleeing him she threw herself off the peak of Widow’s Hill to the rocks below. Barnabas interrupts and breaks Vicki’s trance.
When the others scold him for stopping Josette before she could reveal the name of the man who ran her off the cliff, Barnabas says that the name could not have been of any importance, since whoever it was who drove Josette to kill herself must have been dead for “almost 200 years.” The others do not suspect that he was that man. They do not know that he is a reanimated corpse; they think he’s just English.
When Dark Shadows started, the stories of the tragic death of Josette and of the building of the great house of Collinwood were set in the 1830s. In the weeks before Barnabas’ introduction in April of 1967, they implied that Josette’s dates were much earlier, sometime in the 18th century. Last week, they plumped for the 1830s again. But Barnabas’ line about “almost 200 years ago” puts us back to the 1700s.
After the séance ends, we have evidence that this bit of background continuity might start to matter. Vicki looks at the landing on top of the staircase and sees the ghost of Barnabas’ 9 year old sister Sarah watching the party.
It seems that when Barnabas was freed to prey upon the living, he unknowingly brought Sarah with him. Sarah has been popping in and out quite a bit the last few weeks, and she has already made some important plot points happen. We’re starting to wonder just how many more beings will emerge from the supernatural back-world into the main action of the show. The opening voiceover today tells us that “the mists that have protected the present from the past are lifting,” so perhaps they will have to nail these dates down sooner rather than later.
The whole party had accepted instantly that Vicki was channeling the spirit of Josette and none of them ever comes to doubt it. But when she says that she saw a little girl at the head of the stairs, they get all incredulous. By the end of the episode, Vicki will have encountered so much disbelief on this point that she herself will decide that she must have been hallucinating.
Back in the great house, Roger is still overjoyed that the séance turned out to be so exciting. His sister Liz and Liz’ daughter Carolyn consider this to be in terrible taste. But Roger won’t give an inch. He has some great lines, exiting with “I think that all of the unhappiness of all of my ancestors is my rightful heritage, and you shouldn’t try to keep it from me. Good night, ladies.” Both Patrick McCray, in his Dark Shadows Daybook post about this episode, and Danny Horn, in his Dark Shadows Every Day post, make insightful remarks as they analyze the fun Louis Edmonds has playing Roger.
Carolyn approaches Vicki to speak privately. She tells her that she isn’t bothered that fake Shemp Burke Devlin is dating Vicki. Vicki’s response to this is “What?” Carolyn reminds Vicki that she used to be interested in Burke and was initially jealous of Burke’s interest in her. But she assures her she doesn’t feel that way any longer. Vicki smiles, nods, and looks away. Carolyn then says “He’s really very nice!” Vicki answers “Who?” “Burke!” says Carolyn. Again, Vicki smiles, nods, and looks away.
This is probably supposed to tell us that Vicki is coming under some kind of spell associated with Barnabas, but in fact it is likely to suggest something quite different to the audience. Burke was originally a dashing action hero played by Mitch Ryan. Dark Shadows never really came up with very much for a dashing action hero to do, but Ryan’s skills as an actor and his charismatic personality always made it seem that he was about to do something interesting. Several weeks ago, Ryan was fired off the show after he came to the set too drunk to work.
Since then, the part of Burke has been played by Anthony George. George was a well-trained actor with an impressive resume, and by all accounts was a nice guy. But he cannot dig anything interesting out of the character of Burke as he stands at this point in the series. The only scene in which George has shown any energy so far was in #267, when Burke had lost a dime in a pay phone. The rest of the time, he has blended so completely into the scenery that it is no wonder Vicki can’t remember him from one line to the next.
Back in the Old House, Barnabas talks to Josette’s portrait. In the months from #70 to #192, it was established that Josette can hear you if you do this. Several times she manifested herself either as a light glowing from the surface of the portrait or as a figure emerging from it. In #102, we saw strange and troubled boy David Collins having a conversation with the portrait- we could hear only his side of it, but it was clear that Josette was answering him.
The first time we saw Barnabas in the Old House, in #212, he spoke to the portrait. At that point, Josette was not yet his lost love. It seemed that she was his grandmother, and that she had sided against him in some terrible fight with his father Joshua. He ordered Josette and Joshua to leave the house to him. The next time David tried to talk to the portrait, in #240, it seemed that they had complied- David could no longer sense Josette’s presence in it.
Barnabas had spoken briefly to the portrait the other day, but today he makes his first substantial address to it since banishing Josette and Joshua in #212. Again he entreats her to go, but for a very different reason. Now he says that she is lost to him forever, and must allow him to live in the present. Since he has been scheming to capture a woman, erase her personality, replace it with Josette’s, and then kill her so that she will rise from the grave as a vampiric Josette, this sounds like he has decided to make a big change in his relations to the other characters.
It turns out that he hasn’t, but the writers have decided to change their relationship to their source material. Barnabas’ original plan was identical to that which Imhotep, the title character in the 1932 film The Mummy, had pursued in his attempt to replicate his relationship with his long-dead love Princess Ankh-esen-amun. Imhotep met Helen Grosvenor, whom he regarded as the reincarnation of Ankh-esen-amun because they were both played by Zita Johanns, and subjected her to the same treatment Barnabas first inflicted on Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, and now plans to try on Vicki.
Maggie is played by Kathryn Leigh Scott. The audience in 1967 would not have known that Miss Scott also played the ghost of Josette in some of her most important appearances. However, they would have noticed when David saw Maggie dressed as Josette in #240 he assumed it was the ghost, because her face was “exactly the same” as it had been when she manifested herself to him previously. So we have the same reason to believe that Maggie is the reincarnation of Josette that Imhotep had to believe that Helen was the reincarnation of the princess, and we therefore assume that Barnabas, like Imhotep, was trying to take possession of both the ghost and the living woman.
But after Barnabas tells Josette to go away, he declares that if he is to have her, she must be someone from the present. This sequence of words is nonsensical in itself, but harks back to a theory he had laid out to his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie in #274: “Take the right individual, place her under the proper conditions and circumstances, apply the required pressure, and a new personality is created.” Jonathan Frid would always sound and move like Boris Karloff, but now his project of Josettery is inspired less by Imhotep than by the various “mad doctors” Karloff played in the 1940s. Of course, in the 1960s real-life mad scientists such as Stanley Milgram and John Money were performing experiments on human subjects for which Barnabas’ statement might have served as a motto. So Barnabas is coming to be less a merger of Dracula and Imhotep than of Dracula and Dr Frankenstein.
One of the devices by which Barnabas tries to place women “under the proper conditions and circumstances” for Josettification is a music box which he bought for the original Josette and may or may not have given her.* He gives this to Vicki. To his satisfaction, she is reduced to a complete stupor when she hears it play. She is in that state when the episode ends.
* In #236, he says he never had the chance to give it to her. In subsequent episodes, he implies the opposite.
Vampire Barnabas Collins and his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie Loomis talk about the man Barnabas killed the other day, seagoing con man Jason McGuire. Willie has been in town, and assures Barnabas that no one misses Jason. They say a few words about Barnabas’ plan to take control of well-meaning governess Vicki, erase her personality, and replace it with that of his long-lost love Josette. Barnabas then decides to invite the residents of the great house of Collinwood to a costume party.
In the drawing room of the great house, matriarch Liz and her brother Roger talk about the family business. Liz hasn’t willingly left home for 18 years, for reasons that were never very interesting and that the show has now promised to stop bothering us with. So Roger urges her to stop working from home and start coming to the office. She reflexively says that she can’t, but then agrees that she will. It’s an interesting moment of psychological realism- even if Liz’ original motive for cooping herself up had nothing to do with agoraphobia, such a long immurement would breed tenacious habits.
Liz and Roger wonder about Jason. He had been living at Collinwood while blackmailing Liz, and now has disappeared. They are glad to see the last of him, but are puzzled that he didn’t take any of his belongings. Even his razor is still in his room.
That will also strike regular viewers as odd. Willie had been staying at Collinwood when Barnabas claimed him, and they were able to get Willie’s things out of the house without anyone noticing them come or go. You’d think they’d have done the same with Jason’s things, just to prevent any suspicion forming.
Part Two. Gone the Sun
Barnabas comes by the great house. Vicki greets him at the door. He invites her to come outside and look at the scenery. He chats about the loveliness of the sea and the Moon, then starts hating on the Sun. “I find the daylight harsh and cruel, whereas the night is kind and soft… When one considers that the Moon takes on its beauty by reflecting the rays of the Sun, it seems inconceivable that the sun could be so ugly… One cannot even look upon it without being blinded; it burns the skin, it scorches the Earth.” The episode was taped in New York City on 5 July 1967, a fairly hot day, so the part about how the Sun “scorches the Earth” was at least topical.
In reply to this, Vicki says of the Sun that “our whole universe revolves around it. We can’t exist without it… man was designed to live with it.” Vicki may overstate the scientific case with her reference to “the whole universe,” but she is putting the matter into a powerful mythological context. In trying to alienate Vicki from the Sun, Barnabas is trying to lure her into his private world away from the common light in which communities of people live. His world is cut off from the cycle of growth, fertility, aging, and death which the Sun traditionally represents.
Further, the Sun is in many cultures a symbol of the masculine, and its relationship to the Earth represents the union of male and female. Barnabas’ plans for Vicki will short-circuit her sex life and replace it with something that is essentially solitary. Perhaps this aspect of the vampire myth explains why so many pubescent girls in the late 1960s embraced Barnabas. Though within his narrative universe he is a blood-sucking creature of Hell, in terms of the situation such girls are actually uneasy about he is a Non-Threatening Boy who will not push her into something she isn’t ready for.
That may also be part of the reason why LGBTQIAAPP+ people have had such a complicated reaction to the image of the vampire over the years. On the one hand, the vampire promises an escape from compulsory heterosexuality. On the other, that escape leaves in place a whole cosmic order centered on opposite sex relationships. It leads to an absolute dead end of isolation, sterility, and parasitism. A figure like Barnabas shows that a real liberation for sexual minority groups can come only in the course of revolutionary change on the grandest scale, not as a result of individual adventures.
Part Three. A Family Party
Barnabas invites Liz, Roger, and Vicki to his party. Liz initially declines. While Barnabas and Vicki wait in the study, presumably going into greater depth about how ugly the Sun is, Roger exhorts her to give up her reclusive ways. She agrees.
Barnabas explains that he has clothing that belonged to their ancestors in the late eighteenth century, and that he will make it available to his guests. He will dress as his “ancestor” (actually himself,) Barnabas Collins. Roger and Liz will dress as Barnabas’ parents, Joshua and Naomi Collins. He turns to Vicki and says “You will be Josette Collins.” The credits roll.
Vicki reacts to Barnabas’ casting her as Josette
Vicki was excited when Barnabas first invited her to the party, but looks pensive when Barnabas tells her that she will be Josette. My wife, Mrs Acilius, pointed out that for Vicki, Josette is still an active presence. Josette’s ghost appeared and spoke to her in #126, and interacted with her and her friends many times during the arc centering on Roger’s ex-wife, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. Further, Barnabas’ house had been Josette’s stronghold in the months between her first appearance in #70 and Barnabas’ arrival there in #212. As far as Vicki is concerned, Barnabas is asking her to dress in the clothing of the mistress of the house and to impersonate her while she watches. That would make anyone feel silly.
A wedding is being held in the drawing room of the great house at Collinwood. Matriarch Liz is marrying seagoing con man Jason. Carolyn, Liz’s daughter by her first husband, Paul Stoddard, has a pistol in her purse, which she is planning to use to shoot Jason before the ceremony can be completed. Well-meaning governess Vicki is distressed, because Liz confided in her in #259 that she is marrying Jason only because he is blackmailing her. Liz killed Stoddard long ago and Jason buried the body in the basement, facts he will reveal if she does not comply with his demands. The other guests hate Jason, but they share neither Vicki’s understanding of the situation nor Carolyn’s sense of initiative, so they just stand around and scowl.
When the judge asks Liz if she takes Jason to be her lawful wedded husband, she exclaims that she cannot. She points to him and declares “I killed Paul Stoddard and that man was my accomplice.” Carolyn drops the gun, Vicki flashes a defiant look at Jason, and everyone else is stunned.
Vicki triumphant
The judge excuses himself. He claims that he might be required to act as a judicial officer in a case that could arise from what Liz is about to say. That may not make sense in terms of the laws or canons of judicial conduct actually in effect in the State of Maine in 1967, where what he has already heard would be far too much to avoid being called as a witness. But it fits nicely with the logic of Soap Opera Law, in which neither the police nor the courts may be notified of any criminal matter until the prime suspect has completed his or her own investigation.
Carolyn says “You killed my father.” Before Liz can say much in response, Carolyn announces that she was about to kill Jason. Vicki’s boyfriend, Fake Shemp Burke Devlin, finds Carolyn’s gun. For some reason, Burke holds the gun up. He points it at whomever he is facing. When Jason announces he will be leaving the room, Burke is pointing the gun at him and forbids him to go. Again, giving orders to a person on whom you have a deadly weapon trained may be a felony in our world, but it is all well and good under Soap Opera Law.
Liz mentions that Vicki already knows that she killed Stoddard and that Jason has been blackmailing her. This prompts Liz’ brother Roger to tell Vicki “That was a secret you had no right to keep.” Liz responds that, had Vicki told anyone, she would have denied it and sent her away. Liz then describes the events of the night eighteen years before when she and Stoddard had their final showdown. We see them in flashback, on this same set.
Stoddard told Liz he was leaving her, never to return. She replied that she did not object to his going, but that the suitcase full of bonds, jewels, and other valuable assets he was planning to take was Carolyn’s property and would have to stay.
When the show started, just over a year ago, Stoddard’s disappearance had been 18 years in the past. So it still is, moving its date from 1948 to 1949. At that time, Stoddard was last seen six months before Carolyn was born. Later, they would say she was a newborn when her father vanished. In the flashback today, he answers Liz’ assertion of Carolyn’s right to the contents of the suitcase by saying that he has been putting up with the child for two years. We saw her birth-date as 1946 the other day, so apparently they are planning to stick with the idea that she was a toddler when Stoddard was last seen.
Stoddard and Liz quarrel over the suitcase. He confirms that he and his friend Jason have a plan to convert its contents into a big bundle of cash. He is walking away from her when she takes a poker from the fireplace and hits him on the back of the head. This may be another deed entirely unjustifiable by real-world law, but under Soap Opera Law any act committed against a man who openly despises his two-year old daughter and tries to steal from her is outside the jurisdiction of the courts.
Stoddard fell to the floor, bled, and remained very still after Liz hit him. Shocked by what she had done, she reeled out of the drawing room and closed the doors behind her. As she stood in the foyer wishing she were dead, Jason entered the house. Liz sent him into the drawing room to look at Stoddard. He came out, told her Stoddard was dead, and offered to bury him for her. After all, everyone in town knew he was leaving- there need be no scandal to cloud Carolyn’s future.
Liz asks why Jason wants to help her- he was Stoddard’s friend, planning to help Stoddard steal from her. Jason explains that Stoddard is beyond help now. Liz goes along with his plan.
In this flashback, Jason’s Irish accent is convincingly realistic. It sounds like he’s from Antrim, or someplace else in Norn Iron. That’s a contrast with what we’ve heard so far, when he’s been more than a little reminiscent of this guy:
Hearts, moons, clo-o-overs
My in-universe, fanfic theory is that Jason hadn’t been home or spent much time with other Irishmen in the years between 1949 and 1967, and so his accent drifted into a music hall Oyrish. My out-of-universe theory is that Dennis Patrick spent some time with a dialect coach after joining the show, but by the time he had learned to sound plausible Jason’s silly accent was already such an established part of the character that he couldn’t change it.
When Jason was done with his work downstairs, he showed Liz the storage room where he buried Stoddard in the floor. We got a long, long look at that floor in #249, when it was clean and tidy and there were many boxes and crates on it. When Jason left it to Liz “18 years ago,” there was dirt piled up all over the floor, a shovel in the corner, and few boxes or crates. Evidently Liz cleaned it up herself and organized its contents at some point. That doesn’t fit with the idea she had before #249, that a person entering the room would immediately discover her secret. Since Liz had often gone into the room in the early months of the show, it never had made sense she would believe such a thing, but it is annoying to be reminded of it.
In voiceover, Liz tells us that when Jason left her with the key to the room she knew she would be a prisoner of the house forever. The episode then ends, after less than 18 minutes of scripted content. That’s the shortest installment so far. The closing credits roll slowly, so slowly that they run out of music. The names scroll by in silence for 25 seconds before ABC staff announcer Bob Lloyd says “Dark Shadows is a Dan Curtis production.”
That cannot have been Plan A. This episode has eight speaking parts, two segments of events set in different decades, voiceover narration, a costume change, etc. So there was plenty of stuff that might have proven impossible in dress rehearsal, requiring a quick rewrite that might have left them running a little short. But they’ve been ambitious before, and have never ended up like this. So I suspect that the late script change that got them into trouble was more complicated than that.
Art Wallace’s original story bible for Dark Shadows, titled Shadows on the Wall, called for the mystery of Vicki’s parentage to be resolved at the same time as the blackmail plot. Wallace’s first idea was that Vicki would be shown to be the illegitimate daughter of Paul Stoddard, and that Liz’ interest in her well-being began with guilt after she responded to the news of Vicki’s existence by attacking Stoddard. Wallace also said that if it were more story-productive, they could say that Vicki was Liz’ illegitimate daughter.
Casting Alexandra Moltke Isles as Vicki committed them to that second course of action. Famously, when Joan Bennett first saw Mrs Isles on set she mistook her for her daughter, and the show has often capitalized on their resemblance to present Vicki as a reflection of Liz. For example, notice how the two women stand in this shot from today’s episode:
Pay particular attention to their legs- it’s the same posture
Moreover, the ghost of Josette Collins took a lively interest in Vicki in the first 39 weeks of the show, and Josette is specifically a protector of members of the Collins family. If Vicki is Paul’s illegitimate daughter, she is not a Collins and not linked to Josette.
The only advantage we’ve ever seen of establishing Vicki as a non-Collins would be the possibility of a romance between her and Roger. Since Vicki the foundling-turned-governess is Jane Eyre and Roger the father of her charge is Mr Rochester, this is an obvious direction to go. The show took a few feints towards such a relationship in the early days, but those clearly led nowhere. Vicki came to town in #1 on the same train as Burke, so they are fated to get together. Roger and Burke openly hate each other and often seem to secretly love each other, making for a potentially explosive love triangle if Vicki comes between them, but neither Roger and Burke’s much-advertised enmity nor their barely concealed homoerotic connection ever developed into a very interesting story. The whole thing fizzled out completely months ago. So there doesn’t seem to be a point in resolving the question of Vicki’s parentage any other way than with Liz admitting maternity.
So the first question is, when did they decide that this episode would not include that admission? The short running time would seem to suggest that it was only a few days before taping.
The second question is, why did they make that decision? Liz’ line today that she would fire Vicki if she had betrayed her secret, coupled with all the remarks she has been making to Vicki in the last few weeks about how Carolyn is the one and only person she really cares about, would suggest that the producers and writers are thinking of moving away from the idea of Vicki as Liz’ natural daughter. But the directors are still committed to it, as are the actresses.
We begin to suspect that the producers and writers are hoping that the viewers who have joined the show since the vampire came on in April won’t care about Vicki’s origin, so that they can just drop the whole thing. Since the only storylines they have going are the blackmail arc, which Liz is bringing to its end with her confession today, and the vampire arc, in which nothing at all is happening at the moment, you might think they would be glad to fill some screen time with Vicki and the rest of them reorienting themselves around a newly revealed family relationship. But, maybe not!
A mysterious little girl in eighteenth century garb shows up outside the dungeon cell where vampire Barnabas Collins is keeping his victim, Maggie Evans. The girl stands with her back to Maggie’s cell and sings a couple of verses of “London Bridge” over and over while tossing a ball. Maggie pleads with her to stop singing, to get away before Barnabas and his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie Loomis catch her, and to tell someone that she has seen her. The girl does not acknowledge Maggie in any way.
Seconds after the girl has strolled slowly away, Willie comes by the same path she had taken. Maggie is bewildered that Willie didn’t see her. She urges Willie to escape from Barnabas. Willie gives a big speech about how he thinks about escaping all the time, and that when he is in his car he has sometimes tried to keep driving. But Barnabas’ power keeps pulling him back. Regular viewers will be interested in this confirmation that Willie has a car.*
At the great house of Collinwood, strange and troubled boy David Collins is impatient with the geography lesson his governess Vicki is trying to give him. In the first 39 weeks of the show, the only set which consistently saw interesting scenes was David’s room, where he and Vicki became friends during his lessons. They don’t have the studio space to build that set today, so this lesson is conducted in the drawing room. When flighty heiress Carolyn comes into the room, Vicki sends David to play outside. Since the interrupted lesson was about Australia, he hops away kangaroo-style.
Vicki and Carolyn talk about Carolyn’s boyfriend, motorcycle enthusiast Buzz. Buzz is a refugee from Beach Blanket Bingo, so broadly comic a figure that he might have been too silly even for the biker gang in that movie and its sequels. Unfortunately, Buzz doesn’t show up today, and Vicki and Carolyn’s conversation is a pure specimen of old-time soap opera earnestness. There is an odd moment when Vicki asks Carolyn “How far do you intend to go with Buzz?” and Carolyn answers “All the way!” At the end of the scene, Carolyn uses the phrase “all the way” again. She’s talking about her plan to marry Buzz, but “all the way” was such a familiar euphemism for sexual intercourse in the 1960s that it is hard to imagine it wasn’t intentional on some level. When Carolyn tells Vicki that she and Buzz will go “all the way” while Vicki watches, we wonder what weddings are like in Collinsport.**
David has gone to the yard around Barnabas’ house. We see a location insert of him on the swing set there. This footage is reused from #130, when we discovered that he was being watched by his mother, blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. Laura had died sometime previously, but it didn’t take.
Now, he is being watched again. The mysterious little girl from the dungeon has made her way up to the porch and calls to him as “Boy!” When he tells her his name is David, she says “I know.” She gives her name as Sarah, and asks him to play with her. They toss her ball back and forth, and he finds fault with her fondness for “London Bridge.” She says she used to go to school, a long time ago. She lives around there, but everyone she lives with went away and left her all alone. She excuses herself to go look for them. Willie then comes out of the house. David tells him about Sarah, and Willie shoos him away.
Playing catch as best you can when you’re on a tiny set, photographed in 4X3. Screenshot byDark Shadows Before I Die
That Sarah can come and go from the dungeon without being seen shows that she is one of the ghosts who haunt the house. David has seen several of these, but does not recognize her. Her behavior in the opening scenes leaves us wondering if she is aware of Maggie’s presence; if not, she may simply be an apparition, unable to interact with the living characters.
When Sarah meets David, not only is she able to converse with him, but her ability to play catch with him using the ball she brought with her shows that she has a physical body and that she can manipulate material objects. That makes it all the more puzzling that she did not answer Maggie. Was she ignoring her, or was she somehow less capable in the dungeon than she is on the porch?
When Sarah uses the words “a long time ago,” we suspect that she knows she is a ghost and she has been displaced to a future century. But then she becomes confused as to where her people are, and is filled with a terrible urgency to go look for them. Again it is ambiguous just what sort of being Sarah is and what she can do.
There is always a vagueness about the supernatural- if you could explain a phenomenon fully in words and measurements, it wouldn’t be in that category at all. The key to holding an audience’s attention with a story about ghosts and such is to intrigue them with questions that seem like they might have answers and to use them to lead to another, equally imponderable set of questions before the first set gets old. So it is a promising sign that Sarah is introduced while we are still asking what Barnabas can do, what he wants to accomplish, what he needs for survival, and how he got to be the way he is.
That we see David in a lesson with Vicki and then hear him talking with Sarah about how neither of them goes to school anymore is also interesting to regular viewers. Dark Shadows is just about a year old. It started with Vicki’s arrival at Collinwood, where reclusive matriarch Liz had summoned her to teach David. David and his father, Liz’ impecunious brother Roger Collins, had been living at Collinwood for about a month. Before then, they had lived in Augusta, Maine, where David went to school.
When Vicki showed up, Roger objected that he knew nothing about her, and Liz refused to tell him or Vicki how she knew that she existed or why she chose her to be David’s governess. The show has been hinting very heavily that Vicki is Liz’ biological daughter and that Liz is desperate to keep that relationship secret. It is also clear that Liz wants above all for David to grow into her idea of a male Collins, an idea to which her bratty little brother Roger does not in any way conform.
Barnabas’ plan for Maggie is a ghoulish parody of Liz’ for David. He wants to erase her personality and replace it with that of his long-lost love, Josette Collins. Over the generations since her death, Josette has become the patroness of the Collins family and the emblem of its perfect female member. And of course Barnabas is as anxious to hide the secrets in his basement as Liz is to hide those in hers. That Sarah appears to both Maggie and David emphasizes that Barnabas is a funhouse mirror reflection of Liz.
Back in the great house, David hears Buzz’ motorcycle and tells Carolyn that he is there for her. She can’t quite bring herself to tell David that she and Buzz are planning to get married, but does encourage his interest in going for a bike ride with Buzz. As she leaves, he brilliantly mimes motorcycle riding.
David gives Vicki a detailed account of his encounter with Sarah. She is disappointed he didn’t bring her home. Though it is her job to be David’s only friend, Vicki is no more enthusiastic about his isolation from playmates his own age than Willie is about Barnabas’ treatment of Maggie.
Back in the dungeon, Willie finds that Maggie has not eaten. They share a sad moment. He leaves, and Sarah reappears. Maggie talks to her. At first, she doesn’t respond. But then she turns to her and says “If you see my big brother, don’t tell him you saw me. He doesn’t like anybody to come down here.” Then she leaves, a spring in her step.
The last time a ghost spoke to an imprisoned woman was in the same house, in #126. That time, Vicki was bound and gagged and hidden in a secret room on the main floor by crazed handyman Matthew Morgan. When Matthew had gone to get an ax with which to decapitate Vicki, the ghost of Josette had appeared to her and said, in a perfectly cheerful voice,*** “Do not be afraid.” Josette didn’t untie Vicki or anything, she just told her that and vanished. Later in the episode, she and some other ghosts scare Matthew to death before he can kill Vicki. When Sarah goes away from the stunned Maggie and skips along the floor, regular viewers might remember that event and see a promise that Sarah has something up her sleeve.
Closing Miscellany
Sarah is identified in the closing credits as “Sarah Collins,” the name given in #211 for Barnabas’ sister who died in childhood. That rather blunts the surprise of her closing reference to her “big brother.”
Sarah’s identity raises a couple of other questions. Barnabas’ house was the original Collins family home, and he and Sarah would have lived there. The cell in which he keeps Maggie is covered with cobwebs, evidently a feature of the house from its beginning. When she tells Maggie that her big brother “doesn’t like anybody to come down here,” she is speaking from experience- the adults don’t like it when you go near the jail cell in the basement.
Slavery was a legal institution in Massachusetts**** until 1783, and indentured servitude under conditions not so far removed from those to which slaves were subject continued long after. The Old House has been described as a “huge mansion,” so presumably its owners would have held people under at least one of these statuses. As a Collins of the eighteenth century, Sarah’s blithe attitude towards someone held in the cell would seem to be chillingly appropriate.
Sarah’s address to David as “Boy!” when she knows his name is also interesting coming from her. To be sure, if she had called him by name before they met, he would have known right away that there was something very strange about her. Since he has seen many ghosts and knows that ghosts congregate in and around the Old House, he may have identified her as one right away.
On the other hand, during the “Revenge of Burke Devlin” storyline that ran from #1-#201, there was considerable doubt as to whether David was Roger’s natural son or Burke’s. That doubt came to a head when Laura was on the show. Laura only left 13 weeks ago, and Burke is still hanging around. As far as we know, the question may come back up, and David Collins may turn out to be David Devlin. In that case, Sarah may have chosen to call him “boy” because she is a Collins and therefore better than everyone who is not.
I posted a couple of long comments about this episode on Danny Horn’s Dark Shadows Every Day. I won’t copy them here, because they contain spoilers for people who haven’t seen the whole series. But I’ll link to them- under the post about this episode, I argued that Sarah’s introduction was the most important plot development in the entire series; and under a post about a much later episode, I wish one of the words in her closing line had been different.
*Regular viewers are interested in some weird stuff, what can I say.
**My wife, Mrs Acilius, is very much taken with the actresses’ recollections of how Louis Edmonds, who played Roger, would make them laugh so hard during rehearsals that it was sometimes difficult for them to stay in character during filming. She says it is just as well that Roger wasn’t in this episode, because there is no way they could have got through this scene if he had been.
***Provided by Kathryn Leigh Scott, who also plays Maggie.
Imperious eccentric Barnabas Collins wants to reinvent working girl Maggie Evans as a member of his class- genteel in manner, florid in speech, thirsty for the blood of the living. Willie Loomis does not believe Barnabas’ plan will work, but because of the nature of their relationship he of course helps him with it. Living in their house, Maggie sometimes seems to be well on her way to developing the traits Barnabas is trying to inculcate in her, but at other times protests that she will never change.
Maggie’s father Sam is a drinking man. He comes to the house today to get some cash from Barnabas. Sam doesn’t know about Barnabas’ project; his visit has nothing to do with Maggie. He is an artist, and is delivering a portrait Barnabas commissioned him to paint.
The episode ends with a musical number. Maggie is in the basement prison cell where Barnabas keeps her between elocution lessons. Through the bars of her door, she sees and hears a little girl in eighteenth century garb singing “London Bridge is Falling Down.” The girl sings an obscure variant of the song with a verse that runs “Take the key and lock her up, lock her up, lock her up. Take the key and lock her up, my fair lady.”
Up to this point, the Barnabas story has been a mashup of Dracula with the 1932 film The Mummy. There isn’t any particular reference to vampirism today. Maggie’s neck is uncovered throughout the episode, and we don’t even see the bite marks. It’s all about The Mummy and its possible sources.
Imhotep’s attempt in The Mummy to turn Helen Grosvenor into Princess Ankh-esen-amun may have been inspired in part by George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. Imhotep only has Helen in his custody for a few minutes of screen time and those minutes are so heavy with images of Egyptian antiquities, suggestions of magic, and the threat of extreme violence that they never find time for an explicit comparison.
Dark Shadows, on the other hand, keeps Maggie in Barnabas’ house for weeks and weeks, so it’s inevitable that sooner or later they would explore the connection. Thanks to Lerner and Loewe, the story of Pygmalion was very familiar to American audiences in 1967. It’s only surprising that Sam isn’t getting married in the morning, Maggie’s boyfriend Joe doesn’t tell us that he’s often walked down Barnabas’ street before, and Maggie never shouts at a race horse to move its bloomin’ arse. Considering the alarmingly awkward movements people in Collinsport make when music is playing, there was never any prospect she could have danced all night.
Just You Wait
Maggie uses the word “undead” to describe Barnabas. The first time we heard that word on Dark Shadows was in #183, when parapsychologist Dr Guthrie told blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins that he believed her to be “the undead.” Though Laura’s story owed many structural elements to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, not least Guthrie’s own depiction as a Van Helsing-like figure, she was not a vampire. So “undead” is not simply a euphemism for “vampire” on this show, though it is true they will avoid saying “vampire” until Barnabas’ 41st week.
Regular viewers who find a reminder of Laura in the word “undead” will be especially interested in today’s ending. When Laura was first on the show, she was a vague presence. There were indications that she wasn’t so much a person as she was a whole collection of phenomena, some of them physical, some of them purely spectral, each of them with its own purposes. As Laura became more dynamic, those phenomena resolved themselves into the deadly fire witch and her adversary, the benevolent ghost of Josette Collins.
Like Laura, Barnabas seems to have stirred up numerous uncanny forces with his arrival. The clearest indication of this so far has been the howling of dogs when he is forming an evil plan, a howling which is not related to his physical location and which, often as not, hampers his efforts. There have also been some shenanigans with the doors in his house which don’t seem to have a natural explanation and which he wouldn’t have had a motive to arrange. The appearance of the mysterious girl* suggests that this time, the antagonist will pull a whole new cast of characters out of the supernatural back-world behind the main setting of the show.
*The girl is a lot less mysterious than she ought to be, since the closing credits identify her as “Sarah Collins.” That’s enough to tell even first-time viewers that she is a member of the ancient and esteemed Collins family that is at the center of the show. It gives more away to regular viewers. The tomb from which Barnabas emerged has marked graves for his parents, Joshua and Naomi, and his sister, Sarah, who died in childhood.
And right before Sarah appears, Barnabas was looking at Josette’s portrait. From #70 to #191, that portrait would glow when the ghost of Josette was about to do something. So if we didn’t know her name, we might think that the girl was an ally Josette had recruited, or perhaps Josette herself in a different form than the adult ghost we have seen before. That in turn would send us into the weekend speculating about the ghostly adversaries who might be lining up to oppose Barnabas. Giving the name, even to viewers who’ve forgotten about Barnabas’ sister, limits our speculations to possible one-on-one confrontations.
Acilius on Dark Shadows 