the tunnel to the beach – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 835: A past that runs parallel to our present

Stuffy Edward Collins was under a spell for several weeks that prevented him from keeping up with what has been happening on the estate of Collinwood in 1897. He knows that his distant cousin Barnabas is a vampire who originally died in the 1790s and has come back to prey on the living. From this, he has drawn the eminently logical conclusion that he is a character in a horror story, and that it is his responsibility to be the hero who destroys the undead ghoul.

Barnabas is beside himself. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

In fact, Dark Shadows stopped being that kind of show long ago. Others know that it is chiefly about time travel now. That point is made when we flash forward to the year 1969, from which Barnabas has traveled to prevent a disaster that had its roots in 1897. Barnabas’ friends Julia Hoffman and Timothy Eliot Stokes talk about the intersection of past and present, so that the events of 5 September 1897 are somehow also taking place on 5 September 1969. The show has been using anniversaries as substitutes for natural laws in this way since #157, broadcast and set in January 1967, and they spin this out much further today. In his post about the episode at his great Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn writes a big prose poem about the weirdness of the show’s conception of time at this point, it’s well worth reading.

When Barnabas first came on in the spring of 1967, it was set in contemporary times and the writers had a lot of fun with characters who mistook the genre of show they were on. Dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis heard the plot of Daphne du Maurier’s Frenchman’s Creek, concluded he was part of a Gothic romance, and wound up freeing Barnabas and becoming his blood thrall. That mistake continued to shape Willie’s character. Willie was forced to be Barnabas’ accomplice in the abduction and attempted brainwashing of Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. Willie listened to Barnabas’ own rantings about his motive being an attempt to recreate his lost love Josette, and kept imagining that he would somehow overcome Barnabas to rescue Maggie and become her lover. Willie also harbored a deep hostility towards Burke Devlin, who was left over from a period when the show really was inspired by Gothic romance.

Willie’s sometime friend Jason McGuire made a similar mistake, believing that the show was still the noir crime drama it was when it spent weeks on the question of where Burke’s fountain pen had got to. So he sleuthed out signs of where Willie went when no one was looking and where Barnabas got his money. All that Barnabas could contribute to that kind of story was murder, and so he unceremoniously strangled Jason in #275.

Local physician Dr Dave Woodard thought he was on the usual daytime dramas of the period. Actor Robert Gerringer had a lot of fun playing Woodard as if he were on The Guiding Light. There were whole episodes built around that conceit- for example, we spend #235 in the Collinsport Hospital, where everyone acts just as you would expect them to on any other soap, except for Maggie, who is there being treated for vampire bites. Woodard notices that his friend Julia is growing close to Barnabas, and in #324 comes to the logical daytime conclusion- they are having an affair. Eventually Woodard finds out that he has misidentified the genre of the show, but it is too late- Barnabas and Julia murder him in #341.

Today, that is to say 5 September 1897, Edward catches Barnabas and locks him in the prison cell in the basement of the Old House at Collinwood. Barnabas kept Maggie in that cell when she was his prisoner, and the ghost of his little sister Sarah helped Maggie find a secret panel that led to a tunnel to the beach. In #260, Maggie escaped through that tunnel at the last minute before Barnabas could kill her, and Barnabas himself later used the same tunnel to escape from the cell in #616. In #781, Edward made it clear that he knew all about the tunnel and expected everyone else at Collinwood to know about it as well. So it is no surprise when he tells Barnabas that he has blocked it off. In fact, he says that he has blocked “all” of the secret passages- we may wonder just how many escape routes there are.

Edward leaves Barnabas alone in the cell, saying he will be back before dawn. There is a writing desk in the cell; Barnabas remembers that Willie moved that desk to the front parlor for him in 1967, and so he describes his predicament in a letter to Julia and closes it in a secret compartment of the desk.

In 1969, nine year old Amy Jennings is in the parlor, playing with her dolls. One of the dolls is named “Amanda”; this will catch the attention of returning viewers. The 1897 story features a character named Amanda, who is an oil painting come to life. If artist Charles Delaware Tate could make his paintings come to life, as in Greek myth the sculptor Pygmalion made a statue come to life as a woman named Galatea, then perhaps we should find out who made Amy’s doll before we let it out of our sight.

Amy first came on the show in November 1968, at the beginning of the story that led from contemporary dress to the 1897 segment. Her very first night at Collinwood, Amy went straight to the room where the magic objects were hidden that would trigger that story. She often delivers her lines directly into the camera, as if she knows perfectly well where the audience is. Amy is at the opposite pole from Edward and such earlier characters as Willie, Jason, and Woodard- she not only knows what genre the show is, she’s read the flimsies for next month’s episodes and is getting a head start on them.

Amy looks in the desk for a book to read to her dolls, and inadvertently opens the secret compartment. She eventually gives the letter to Julia; this is what prompts Julia and Stokes to have their talk about the ontological status of past events and what philosophers call “the reality of tense.” They know all about the time travel aspect of the show; Julia, in fact, has for some time been the closest thing the audience has in the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s to a point of view character, one who knows everything we do. She was certainly the first one to know that the show was transitioning from vampire horror to quasi-science fiction. She surprised Barnabas in #291 with a proposal to develop a medical treatment that might put his vampirism into abeyance.

In the letter, Barnabas refers to his “secret.” Stokes does not know what this is, and is not satisfied with Julia’s lame attempts to answer his questions about it. This makes sense to regular viewers; shortly after Stokes arrived in Collinsport, another mad scientist got hold of Barnabas and succeeded where Julia had failed in putting the symptoms of the vampire curse into remission. For all the time he has known Barnabas, Stokes has seen him moving about in the day, casting reflections in mirrors, eating food not derived from human blood, etc. In 1968 and 1969, his ignorance of his Barnabas’ past vampirism is not much more serious than his ignorance of the details of the automobile accident that killed Mr Hanson in 1956. But the vampirism came back in full force when Barnabas went to the past, so Stokes is at a loss as to what the letter means.

Julia decides that she will try to travel into the past using the same mumbo-jumbo that transported Barnabas there. While Stokes reads up on that, Julia and Amy make a stop at the great house on the estate, which is impenetrably haunted by the ghost of Quentin Collins. That errand seems to be going sideways when the episode ends.

Episode 782: Satan on the run

Vampire Barnabas Collins has been exposed and is in hiding. Most of those who would destroy him are as evil as he is, and none is as much fun to watch, so we’re on his side.

Stuffy Edward Collins catches Barnabas’ blood thrall Charity Trask in the basement of the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. Barnabas sent her there to fetch some soil from his original grave which he will use to make a new coffin habitable. Edward asks Charity what she is doing in the basement; she lies and claims that she can’t remember. This is an interesting moment for fans of Dark Shadows. Nancy Barrett’s acting style is uninhibited and often larger-than-life; one suspects that she was often accused of overacting. But Charity really does overact. In the contrast between her one-dimensional, exaggerated manner when she feigns amnesia and Miss Barrett’s own very noisy but highly textured performances, we see the definitive refutation of any such charge.

Charity got into the basement through a tunnel that connects the beach below Widows’ Hill to a prison cell in the basement of the Old House. In #260, set in 1967, we saw that the tunnel was in place when Barnabas and his little sister Sarah were living beings in the eighteenth century, that Sarah was aware of the tunnel, and that their father Joshua forbade her to tell Barnabas about it. Sarah’s ghost told Barnabas’ victim Maggie Evans how to escape through the tunnel. When Barnabas pursued her through it, we could see from his reaction that he was seeing the tunnel for the first time. The other Collinses of the 1960s were unaware of the existence even of the cell, let alone of the tunnel.

Now it is 1897, and when Charity mentions the tunnel to Edward he impatiently responds that he knows all about the tunnel. His tone suggests that he would expect Charity to know that he knows about it; evidently it is no secret among the residents of Collinwood. Since Edward’s twelve year old son Jamison is one of those residents, and Jamison’s daughter Liz and son Roger will be the adults at Collinwood in the 1960s, one wonders how that knowledge was lost in the seventy years separating this time-travel story from the principal time frame.

In the last scene, Barnabas is in Charity’s bedroom, about to chow down on her bloodstream. We pan from a two-shot to a closeup of Charity. She gives a thirty five second speech about how it isn’t safe for him to stay long, since her father knows that she is under Barnabas’ power and is lying in wait for him. Thirty five seconds is evidently how long it took for Jonathan Frid to put in Barnabas’ fangs, because when we pan back to him they are showing and he is ready to bite. At that moment, Jamison’s nine year old sister Nora walks in and reacts with horror to the sight of Barnabas with his mouth on Charity’s neck.

Nora, shocked. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Episode 781: Sympathy somewhat disturbing

When vampire Barnabas Collins first appeared on Dark Shadows in April 1967, regular viewers may have thought they knew what to expect. They had just spent four months focused on undead blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, mother of strange and troubled boy David. David’s well-meaning governess Victoria Winters gradually realized that Laura was a deadly threat to him. After some initial confusion, Vicki rallied the other characters in opposition to Laura. Ultimately Laura went up in smoke and David escaped her clutches, choosing Vicki and life over his mother and death.

In many ways, the Laura story was modeled on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. So when Laura’s successor as supernatural menace was an out and out vampire, we may have expected further mining of that source. Barnabas bit and abducted Vicki’s friend Maggie Evans. As the daughter of drunken artist Sam, Maggie had played a key role in the “Revenge of Burke Devlin” storyline. But that storyline fizzled in the show’s early months, and by #201 even Burke Devlin lost interest in it. Maggie was at that point surplus to requirements, and when Barnabas added her to his diet we might have suspected that she would die and rise as a vampire. As Mina and the group she led in Dracula had to destroy her friend Lucy when Lucy rose as “the Bloofer Lady,” so Vicki and her friends would have to destroy Maggie. Vicki herself would then stake Barnabas. The average viewer would have expected this to be the sign to move on to the next menace; those who were aware of TV ratings and programming decisions might think it would be Dark Shadows‘ way of going out with a flourish before its impending cancellation.

Barnabas turned out to be a hit. The idea of a vampire on a daytime soap was such an oddity that a sizable new audience tuned in out of curiosity, and Jonathan Frid’s portrayal of Barnabas’ scramble to impersonate a living man native to the twentieth century resonated with so many of them that he became a breakout star. So they had to figure out a way to make him a permanent part of the cast. That meant Maggie couldn’t die. In the first place, they couldn’t risk making Barnabas responsible for the death of so likable a character. Second, as the survivor of the horrendous abuse Barnabas inflicts on her Maggie would have a new function, as the witness who might emerge to expose him and wreck the show. Third, while Maggie was in Barnabas’ clutches Kathryn Leigh Scott proved herself such a versatile actress that it would obviously damage the show to lose her. So Barnabas not only failed to kill Maggie, he completed only two homicides in the whole of 1967. Each of his two victims was a male character who had run out of story. As a result, the killings and the victims were quickly forgotten.

Barnabas’ nonlethal vampirism made it easier to keep the cast intact, but it also drained him of the lurid novelty that had made him such a draw. To reassure the audience that Barnabas really was a bloodthirsty fiend from the depths of Hell, the show had Vicki come unstuck in time in #365. She found herself in the 1790s, when Barnabas first became a vampire. That gave us a whole cast of characters whom we did not expect to see again once the show returned to contemporary dress. So Barnabas was free to slaughter people to his heart’s content.

The 1790s flashback was a hit in the ratings. When Vicki brought us back to 1968 in #461, the makers of the show had to figure out a way to keep the momentum going. They cured Barnabas of the effects of the vampire curse and surrounded him with a hectic parade of other refugees from 1930s horror movies- mad scientists, Frankensteins, witches, werewolves, and a couple of fresh vampires. After that Monster Mash period exhausted itself, they took us through a long, deliberately paced segment focusing on just two stories, one about a tormented werewolf and the other about a ghost who takes possession first of two young children, then of the whole estate of Collinwood. Barnabas, who has come to see himself as a good guy and the protector of the family, tries to cure the werewolf and reason with the ghost. His efforts instead transport him back in time to 1897.

In that year, Barnabas is a vampire again. He keeps saying that his only goal is to prevent the evils that will befall the family in 1969, but he is as uninhibitedly murderous as he ever was in the periods when he was unambiguously a villain. In Friday’s episode, he murdered one of the principal members of the Collins family, prankster Carl Collins, uncle of the Jamison Collins whose daughter and son are the adults at Collinwood in the 1960s. Barnabas had become so careless after so many killings that he left Carl’s body propped up behind the curtains in the windows of the drawing room, where it fell into plain view moments after Barnabas’ foe the Rev’d Gregory Trask entered. In this episode, Trask enlists Edward Collins, brother of Carl and father of Jamison, to help him hunt Barnabas.

My wife, Mrs Acilius, points out that when we see a character closing the doors to the drawing room, that person is in charge of the house. So in the early months of the show matriarch Liz was the one to close the doors; when Liz was taken to a hospital and her daughter Carolyn was in charge, Carolyn closed the doors. When Vicki was fully in command of the campaign against Laura, she closed the doors to consult privately with her lieutenants. When Trask and Edward go into the drawing room to discuss the situation, it is Trask who closes the doors. Vicki was good, so consistently so that she had to be written out of the show months ago. But Trask is overwhelmingly evil. That he has ascended to the rank of door-closer means that virtue has no stronghold anywhere.

Edward and Trask go to the Old House on the estate, where Barnabas has been staying. They find Barnabas’ reluctant sidekick, broad ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi. Magda denies that Barnabas is in the house and pretends not to know what Trask and Edward are talking about when they say that Barnabas is a vampire. Trask slaps Magda in the face; we have seen many face-slaps on Dark Shadows, but so far as I can recall this is the first delivered while the slap-ee has her back to the camera. Since he does not have to swing his hand very close to Grayson Hall’s face, Jerry Lacy can therefore put full force into the gesture, making it look like Trask is delivering a truly brutal blow to Magda. Afterward, Magda rubs her face and vows revenge on Trask. She quotes a rather confusing “old gypsy saying”: “Walk fast and the Devil will overtake you; walk slow and misfortune will catch you. You’d better not walk slow, because I will never be far behind.”

Edward and Trask search the Old House and find nothing. At dusk, Barnabas emerges from the secret room behind the bookcase in the front parlor. Magda hadn’t thought to look there, and Trask and Edward didn’t know the room existed. Barnabas says he will have to find a new hiding place for his coffin. Magda says she will do whatever she can to help him. Barnabas is surprised at her support for him; after all, he has bitten and enslaved her husband Sandor, and his destruction would mean Sandor’s restoration. Magda has an atypical moment of speechlessness, after which she says that Trask is an “animal” and must be punished at all costs.

Trask and Edward went back to the main house early in the morning to look for the plans to the Old House. It apparently took them all day to find them. By the time they have gone through them and identified all of its secret rooms, Barnabas is already up. They come back to the Old House and find the empty coffin in the secret room. Trask says that he will make the coffin “unusable” for Barnabas before daybreak. He leaves Edward, who is carrying a gun loaded with silver bullets, to guard the house.

Barnabas goes to one of his blood-thralls, Trask’s daughter Charity. He tells Charity that he is “in serious trouble” and commands her to go to the basement of the Old House. There, she will find some soil from his original grave, which he needs to prepare his new resting place. He tells her about a tunnel from the beach to the basement which she can use to elude detection by Edward. Since Barnabas has just materialized in Charity’s room and will shortly materialize in the secret room in the Old House while Edward is standing on the other side of the bookcase, we wonder why he can’t use that same power to get into the basement himself.

Barnabas finds that the coffin is topped with a cross. He can’t get close enough to take hold of the coffin and move it, so presumably even after he gets the soil he needs he will have to plunder a mortuary showroom to get a fresh resting place before dawn.

The unusable coffin. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Charity does go to the basement. She puts some soil in her purse, then knocks over a crate, attracting Edward’s attention. She does not run away, but merely hides in an alcove until Edward comes down, sees her in shadow, and orders her to show herself.

Episode 616: When a woman has a man in her power

In June 1967, vampire Barnabas Collins locked his victim Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, in the prison cell in the basement of the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. The ghost of Barnabas’ little sister Sarah appeared to Maggie several times while she was in the cell. Sarah told Maggie that no one could know she had been to the cell, and particularly warned her not to tell her “big brother” she had seen her. With some reluctance, Sarah eventually gave Maggie a clue that led her to a hidden passage. Sarah’s father had sworn her to secrecy about the passage, and that not even her big brother knew about it. Maggie finally puzzled out the clue, enabling her to escape just moments before Barnabas came to the cell with the intention of killing her. When Barnabas chased Maggie through the hidden passage in #260, the wondering expression on his face confirmed that he had never had any idea the passage was there.

From November 1967 to March 1968, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the years 1795 and 1796, the period when Barnabas and Sarah were living beings and the Old House was their home. We saw how cruelly their father, haughty overlord Joshua, treated his indentured servant Ben, and we saw that Joshua had the great house of Collinwood built with a prison cell in its basement. Joshua confined Ben to that cell in #401. With that, we could be sure that Maggie’s cell was already in the basement of the Old House when Barnabas and Sarah lived there, and could surmise that Joshua really did forbid the living Sarah to share with Barnabas or anyone else what she had found about the hidden passage.

The show never explained how Sarah found out about the passage. We might imagine her hiding and watching Joshua or someone else do maintenance on the cell. But the fact that Joshua kept the existence of the escape hatch from Barnabas suggests he wanted the option of locking his son in the cell. Why not his daughter as well? Perhaps Sarah found the passage while confined in the cell herself. Or perhaps some other, older ghost appeared to her while she was there and told her about it. That the clue she gives Maggie is in the form of a rhyme (“One, two, away they flew…”) would suggest this latter possibility. Sarah may have memorized the rhyme as she memorized the lyrics to “London Bridge” and may have solved the riddle as Maggie solves it.

Shortly after Dark Shadows came back to a contemporary setting in March 1968, Barnabas was cured of vampirism. That cure was stabilized in May, when he donated some of his “life force” to the creation of Frankenstein’s monster Adam in an experiment completed by his friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman. Barnabas and Julia locked Adam up in the basement prison cell for the first weeks of his life. Vampires and mad scientists are metaphors for selfishness, so it is hardly surprising that they are horribly bad parents. But if Joshua was in the habit of locking his children in that same cell, the moments when Barnabas takes fatherly pride in the imprisoned Adam take on a special pathos. It really does seem like a normal situation to him.

Adam escaped from the cell in #500, demolishing the doorway in the process. Today we see that it has been rebuilt. Perhaps to Barnabas, a house just isn’t a home unless it has a prison cell in the basement.

Now, Barnabas has himself become the blood thrall of a vampire, his ex-wife Angelique. Discovering the bite marks, Julia decides to address the situation by locking Barnabas and his servant Willie in the cell. Barnabas won’t be able to get out to heed Angelique’s summons, and Willie hangs a cross over the door to keep her from materializing inside it.

Left to right: Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid); Willie Loomis (John Karlen); Julia Hoffman (Lady Elaine Fairchilde.) Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

We cut to Maggie’s house. Maggie’s memory of her ordeal as Barnabas’ victim has been wiped from her mind a couple of times. She receives a visitor, the suave Nicholas Blair. Unknown to Maggie, Nicholas is a warlock and Angelique’s master. He has a crush on Maggie which has distracted him from his managerial responsibilities, which to be frank he had not been handling very diligently in the first place. Maggie gives Nicholas several pieces of news that he really ought to have been aware of for some time. She tells him that her ex-fiancé, Joe Haskell, is still alive; that she visited Joe twice while he was at the Old House recovering from some injuries; that Joe is now in the hospital under police guard; and that Joe tried to kill Barnabas and keeps vowing that he will try again, since he believes Barnabas is trying to kill him. Nicholas is flummoxed by all of this, and meekly goes along when Maggie insists on visiting the Old House to pay a call on dear, sweet Barnabas.

The scene in Maggie’s house has an odd feature. We’ve just had a closeup of Willie hanging a cross above the door in the cell to keep Angelique away. In the early days of the vampire storyline, it was not at all clear that the cross would deter vampires in the world of Dark Shadows, since Barnabas was often seen strolling comfortably through a cemetery where half the grave markers were cross-shaped. It was not until #450, during the 1790s flashback, that we saw Barnabas recoil from a cross. In #523, we learned that the cross also immobilizes Nicholas. Yet Maggie is today wearing a dress the front of which is dominated by a red cross, and it doesn’t bother Nicholas a bit. The show is drifting into a spot where it may have to stop and spend time explaining its theurgy. Does the cross only work against a demonic creature if it is specifically aimed at that creature? Or if the person setting it up knows about the creature? Or is there some other qualification? It’s getting confusing.

At the Old House, Julia tells Maggie and Nicholas that they cannot see Barnabas, because he is resting. Maggie keeps insisting, and Julia shifts her ground, claiming that Barnabas went out, she knows not where. When Julia says this, Maggie is incredulous, but Nicholas brightens. Evidently he wants to believe that Barnabas has gone off to respond to Angelique’s call, and accepts Julia’s statement happily. Maggie apologizes for demanding to see Barnabas, and she and Nicholas leave.

Meanwhile, Barnabas is scheming to get out of the cell. While Willie is complying with his request to pour a glass of water, Barnabas bashes him on the head with an empty bottle. He then goes to the hatch for the secret panel, remembers that “Maggie found it a long time ago!” and figures out how to open it. Since we saw Willie open the hatch and show Adam Barnabas’ jewel box in #494, you would think Barnabas already knew how it worked. At that time, it also seemed that the passage behind the hatch had been sealed up, so that it no longer led to the beach. Apparently we aren’t supposed to remember that. Barnabas crawls out and closes the hatch behind him before Julia comes back.

As Barnabas, Jonathan Frid usually moves in the stateliest possible manner. When he escapes from the cell today, the camera lingers on him crawling, driving home the contrast with his typical gait. That is quite different from what we saw in #260, when he followed Maggie into the hatch- then, we saw him move toward the opening, but cut away before he had to take an ungainly position. Today, the makers of the show want us to hold the image of a crawling Barnabas in our minds.

Crawling suggests Barnabas’ weakness under Angelique’s power, certainly, but in this setting it suggests more. This is the house where he was born, and what he is crawling into is a lightless passage that it looks like he will have to squeeze through to emerge outside. He has regressed not only to infancy, but all the way back to birth. If Joshua did indeed confine him to this cell in his childhood, Barnabas would likely have experienced that same regression in those days as well.

The sign of the cross reminds us of one who said that we must be born again to receive a life in which our hopes will be fulfilled more abundantly than we can ask or imagine; Barnabas labored for 172 years under a curse that compelled him to die at every dawn and revive at every sunset, but perhaps even before that he was the prisoner of a cycle of abuse that forced him to experience the trauma of birth over and again, each time finding himself in the same narrow space, a stranger to all hope. Indeed, when Barnabas first became a vampire in the 1790s, he put his coffin in this basement, near the cell, and he persisted in putting it there even after it became obvious that it was very likely to be discovered. That persistence made no logical sense in terms of Barnabas’ need for operational security, but if he saw his vampirism as a continuation of his childhood experience of confinement in the basement cell, it would make all the sense in the world. That is his place, that is where he belongs, that is his reality.

Episode 494: They were meant for me

From #227 to #260, Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, was under the influence of vampire Barnabas Collins. As Barnabas tried to brainwash Maggie so that her personality would disappear and that of his lost love Josette would take its place, she began to rebel against him. From #251 until she escaped in #260, Barnabas kept Maggie locked up in a prison cell in his basement.

Throughout this whole period, Barnabas’ sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie Loomis tried to spare Maggie the worst. Willie anonymously telephoned Maggie’s friend Vicki in #230 so she and her friends could interrupt Barnabas’ first attempt to take Maggie into custody; while Maggie was Barnabas’ prisoner he several times pleaded with Barnabas to show her mercy; and when in #260 Barnabas had decided to kill Maggie with extreme cruelty, Willie brought a glass of poison to her cell so she could die painlessly.

Now, Barnabas’ vampirism is in remission. He has brought Willie back to work for him, arranging his release from the mental hospital where he was confined after Barnabas framed him for all of his crimes against Maggie. It is by no means clear what effect Barnabas’ loss of his vampire powers has had on Willie. At times he seems to be confused and childlike; at times, to be the dangerously unstable ruffian he was before he fell into Barnabas’ clutches. But he is still fascinated by Maggie, and still longs for her friendship. The very night Barnabas brought him home from the hospital, Willie sneaked off to visit Maggie and tell her he was innocent.

For her part, Maggie’s memories of her experience with Barnabas were excluded from her conscious mind when mad scientist Julia Hoffman hypnotized her. The other day, Maggie had a nightmare as part of the “Dream Curse,” and in the course of the nightmare she heard the sound of Josette’s music box, which Barnabas forced her to listen to while in captivity. She also saw a skull with eyes, suggesting that her deepest fear has to do with the dead watching her. Since Barnabas, as a vampire, was dead and yet kept Maggie under surveillance, this image combines with the music to suggest that Maggie’s memory might soon return.

Today, Willie is minding Adam, a Frankenstein’s monster whom Julia brought to life in a procedure meant to cure Barnabas of his vampirism once and for all. Barnabas and Julia have no idea what to do with Adam, and so they have chained him up in Maggie’s old cell. Barnabas’ jewel box is stashed behind the secret panel Maggie used to escape from the cell, and Willie shows Adam some of its shinier contents to calm him.

Among the shiniest are a pair of emerald earrings. Barnabas has been talking to Willie as if Willie remembers everything that happened when he was his blood thrall, yet Willie has not confirmed that this is so. When he sees the earrings, Willie gets very intense. He says that he saw Josette wearing them, then realizes that it was Maggie. Perhaps Barnabas, by modeling the conversations they used to have, is inadvertently providing the therapy Willie needs to recover his memory.

Willie decides to give the earrings to Maggie. He goes to Maggie’s house and peeks through the window. He sees her with her boyfriend Joe. When he came to the house the other day to tell Maggie he never meant to hurt her, she was terrified and Joe stated as a matter of fact that he would kill Willie if he ever came near Maggie again. Willie does not knock on the door to greet the two of them.

Instead, he slips into the house while they are out of the room. He plants the earrings in Maggie’s purse, and is gone by the time she and Joe come back. Maggie finds the earrings. The tinkling sound of Josette’s music box plays on the soundtrack while she looks at them. She is fascinated:

The earrings drive Maggie crazy. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Maggie says that the earrings “remind me of something- something I’ve forgotten. I know they don’t belong to me yet. But somehow when I look at them, I seem to think they were meant for me- I mean from the start. They are lovely, a very beautiful and thoughtful gift. Only a man who has gazed into my eyes with deepest love would know they were meant for me.” As she delivers these lines, Kathryn Leigh Scott fades out of Maggie’s voice, into the tones she used while playing Josette from #370 to #430.

Barnabas’ attempt to turn Maggie into Josette would have reminded many viewers at the time of the 1932 film The Mummy, in which the undead Imhotep (played by Boris Karloff, whose voice Jonathan Frid often seems to be imitating as Barnabas) abducts the beautiful young Helen Grosvenor, whom he believes to be the reincarnation of his lost love, the Princes Ankh-esen-amun. In that movie, Helen and the Princess were both played by Zita Johanns, suggesting that Imhotep was onto something. From November 1967 to March 1968, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the 1790s and we saw that Maggie and Josette are both played by Kathryn Leigh Scott, suggesting the same about Barnabas. The bleakness and horror of Barnabas’ treatment of Maggie in the summer of 1967 makes this suggestion a daring one, and that Maggie makes a speech blissfully describing the one who looked at her and saw Josette as a “man who gazed into my eyes with deepest love” in the middle of an episode that begins and ends in the cell where he confined her and planned to torture her to death is more daring still.

I don’t think the risk pays off. Miss Scott was usually one of the most reliable performers on Dark Shadows. She found Maggie in her relationship to her father Sam, whose drinking problem was a major story point for the first 40 weeks of the show, and articulates the character as a series of very intelligent answers to the question “How would an Adult Child of an Alcoholic respond to this situation?” This scene presents her with a very complex challenge, as she is supposed to show that the earrings have jarred loose some fragment of a memory but to keep us guessing just what that fragment is. Joel Crothers plays Joe’s disquiet at the appearance of the earrings with a simplicity that sets Miss Scott up for a star turn. But she doesn’t seem to have any idea what to make of her lines. For the first time on the show, she is physically stiff and vocally overbearing. As a result of her atypical overacting, the scene does not deliver the sense of mystery and foreboding it requires. It just leaves the audience confused.

Episode 260: One, two, away they flew

Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, has been a prisoner of vampire Barnabas Collins for a long time now. Barnabas is planning to kill her tonight. We spend the opening scene with Barnabas’ sorely bedraggled blood thrall, Willie Loomis. We hear Willie’s thoughts as he does the housekeeping. Willie wishes he could save Maggie, but Barnabas has too much power over him. The most he can do is bring her a poisoned glass of milk and invite her to drink it if she wants to die an easy death.

Willie is not Maggie’s only friend. The ghost of Barnabas’ nine year old sister, Sarah, materializes in Maggie’s cell. Sarah asks Maggie why she is crying. Maggie tells her that if she doesn’t get out of the cell very soon, she will die. Sarah is distressed to hear this- “You mustn’t die- I don’t want you to die.”

Maggie hasn’t figured out that Sarah is a ghost, and keeps asking her how she manages to get in and out of the cell. Sarah usually evades this question, but now she says that there is a way. She came upon it accidentally, long ago, and her father ordered her not to tell anyone, not even her brother. She will be punished if she tells. If her father put her in the prison cell in their basement intentionally, Sarah’s fear of punishment is quite understandable.

Sarah overcomes her fear sufficiently to share a riddle with Maggie which she says will give her the answer:

One, two, away they flew.

Three, four, by the door.

Five, six, count the bricks.

Seven, eight, the clue is “grate.”

Nine, ten, home again.

Maggie asks Sarah to repeat the riddle, and she says she can only say it once. Maggie tells her where to find her own father, Sam Evans, and asks her to tell Sam that she has seen her. Sarah disappears.

Sarah’s fear of punishment will ring a bell for regular viewers. Strange and troubled boy David Collins is so intensely afraid that his father, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger, will punish him by sending him away to a boarding school or a jail that he tried to murder Roger. Later, David left his favorite person, well-meaning governess Vicki, to be decapitated by crazed handyman Matthew Morgan because he was afraid that if he helped Vicki his father would find out he had earlier defied him and would punish him. Now, Maggie is in mortal danger because another Collins child, one who lived in a previous century, has a similar fear of punishment. The cell in the basement of the Old House was there before slavery was abolished in the area in 1783; perhaps Sarah’s fear and David’s are a bequest from the slaves and indentured servants whom their forebears locked up in it.

We cut to the Evans cottage. Sam is an artist, and is working. Sarah materializes in the living room. Sam had locked the door and Sarah won’t explain how she got in, but he seems to be delighted with her anyway. She is impressed with his paintings and asks him to paint a picture of her. He offers a drawing instead. When she agrees, he picks her up and sets her on a stool. She flashes a grin at being picked up. She asks if she can keep the drawing when he is done with it.

The most fun Sarah has had the whole time she’s been dead

Sam tells Sarah that her dress is very pretty. He then mentions that you don’t see many dresses in its style. She asks if that means he doesn’t like it. When Sam says that all he means is that it isn’t the sort of thing other little girls wear, she says she doesn’t play with other little girls so she doesn’t care what they wear. She seems to be getting worked up about this, so Sam calms her down with, “All right, all right, I see.” This little exchange gave my wife, Mrs Acilius, a laugh. Sarah may have been born in the same year as Jacob Grimm, but she is very much a nine year old girl.

While Sam draws Sarah, she steers the conversation to Maggie. She asks Sam if he looked for Maggie on the beach under Widow’s Hill. He says he’s looked everywhere he could. She repeats her suggestion that he look for her on the beach. He says he is sure he won’t find her there. She responds “You might, if you go there tonight.” Disturbed by this, Sam looks up, and finds that Sarah has vanished.

This surprises us almost as much as it surprises Sam. Sarah had made it clear that she very much wanted to keep the drawing, yet she disappears before Sam is finished. Evidently, it wasn’t within her power to stay.

Back in the cell, we see Maggie and hear her thoughts as she tries to remember Sarah’s riddle. Like Willie’s voiceover internal monologue in the opening scenes, Maggie’s goes on too long. We can see that Maggie is in an upsetting situation and understand why Sarah’s presence confuses and distracts her. That makes it clear she would have difficulty remembering the exact wording of the riddle, but we really don’t need to hear her go over every part of it.

By the time Maggie finds the loose brick that triggers the opening of the secret panel, Barnabas is already rising from his coffin. We cut between Barnabas walking through the basement and Maggie struggling to open the panel. It may sound like we’re describing filler when we say that we see Barnabas traversing three distinct corridors between his coffin and Maggie’s cell, but it doesn’t feel that way. Not only do these shots build suspense as we wonder if Maggie will get out before he reaches her, but in Barnabas shown as a hunched, solitary figure in narrow spaces sketched in shades of gray we see the representative of a world bleak beyond endurance. We can see why the first serious feature film about a vampire, F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), devoted so much screen time to showing Count Orlok skulking about the corridors of his castle.

Maggie crawls into the secret passage. She doesn’t close the panel behind her. Not only doesn’t Maggie know that Sarah is a ghost, she doesn’t know that Barnabas is Sarah’s brother. When Sarah says that not even her brother knows about the secret panel, she is telling us, but not Maggie, that Barnabas is unfamiliar with this way. We know that if Maggie had closed the panel, Barnabas wouldn’t have known where to look for her, and so we might yell at the screen urging her to do that. But since it is his house, she has to assume that he does know about the panel, and she knows that he might be at the door any second. So it is rational for her to forget the panel and use all of her time moving forward.

The gap between Maggie’s knowledge and ours again adds to the suspense as we watch her flee from Barnabas through the twisting passages beyond the panel. We only see one path, but the looks on the actors’ faces as they look from side to side tell us that there are several. Maggie is moving cautiously, choosing her way with care, the sensible thing to do if Barnabas is familiar with the passages. Since we know that it is new to him as it is to her, we want her simply to pick a path and run.

Maggie finds two heavy doors, both of them apparently stuck. Barnabas looks around, seems bewildered, and takes a breath. He shouts a speech at Maggie, claiming that she has no chance of escape because he can hear her. He can’t hear much while he’s shouting, so we want her to take advantage of that and bash away at one of the doors during his speech.

Barnabas wondering at part of his house he never knew existed

Maggie with two closed doors in front of her and an angry vampire behind her

This episode ends the 52nd week of Dark Shadows. When ABC* picked the series up in 1966, it gave executive producer Dan Curtis a 26 week commitment, carrying production to #130. After that, the network renewed it for the then-standard 13 week period. The first renewal carried them to #195, the second to this episode. Until just a couple of months ago, the ratings were so low that no one thought it was likely that it would get a third renewal. When the vampire was introduced in April, viewership started to pick up, preventing cancellation and requiring them to come up with a story that they could keep telling.

I do think we can see traces here and there of the original plan. The first part of the plan seems to have been to copy Bram Stoker’s Dracula far more thoroughly than they wound up doing.

The two female characters on the show who had or were about to have boyfriends when Barnabas was introduced were Maggie and Vicki, who are both seeing men who are cut out to be stout-hearted action heroes. The two female characters in Bram Stoker’s Dracula who had boyfriends were Lucy Westenra and Mina Murray, who were both seeing men who emerge as stout-hearted action heroes. Dracula feeds on Lucy, prompting several other people to band together to try to save her. Dr John Seward, MD, contacts his old Professor, the brilliant Abraham Van Helsing, to advise the group. Despite their best efforts, Lucy dies and rises as a vampire, the “Bloofer Lady” who feeds on the children of east London. Lucy’s boyfriend has to destroy her body to free her soul of the vampire curse.

If the show was about to be canceled, it would have been a favor to Kathryn Leigh Scott to have Maggie suffer Lucy’s fate. Going out with a splash like that would certainly have given her something to lead with as she looked for her next job. But once it was decided that the show would continue beyond #260, it was out of the question to lose a character as popular and versatile as Maggie. When the network ordered 65 more episodes, Maggie had to be saved.

The Van Helsing analogue was actually named on screen. In #242, the show’s equivalent of Dr John Seward, addled quack Dr Woodard, said that he was going to call in a specialist to consult on Maggie’s case, a Dr Hoffman, who is “one of the best men in the field.” We haven’t heard about this man since Dan Curtis found out the show was going to be renewed, suggesting that they’ve abandoned the idea to hew quite so closely to Dracula.

In Stoker’s novel, once Van Helsing has corrected the group’s knowledge deficits concerning vampires, Mina emerges as its leader. Attempting to be gallant, the men cut Mina out of their operations, with the result that Dracula escapes them and bites her. Mina is able to resist his influence so far that she can play a pivotal role in the Count’s final destruction.

The first time Dark Shadows modeled a storyline on Dracula, the menace was not a vampire, but undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. In that arc, the men formed a group of stout-hearted heroes advised by Dr Peter Guthrie and led by well-meaning governess Vicki. Guthrie and Vicki were plainly Van Helsing and Mina. Laura killed Guthrie, so he can’t come back to help in the fight against Barnabas, but Vicki is still around, still the chief protagonist, and still the one likeliest to lead the opposition to a villain.

Indeed, Barnabas has expressed interest in Vicki as a replacement for Maggie, and in #233 he blurted out an obvious threat when he realized she was getting uncomfortably close to figuring out the truth about him. So, had Dark Shadows ended with this episode, it is likely that it would have ended with Vicki overcoming Barnabas’ power and driving a stake through his heart.

Of course, the vampire is the source of the ratings, and Vicki and Maggie are needed for future story development. So the makers of the show can’t use any of those plot elements. What in the world they can do is a question that does not, as yet, have a clear answer. So they have been stalling and stalling. Sooner or later, the stalling will have to end.

*The American Broadcasting Company, that is, not the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.