Mad scientist Julia Hoffman and suave warlock Nicholas Blair each want to find Frankenstein’s monster Adam before the other does. Julia is sure that occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes knows where Adam is; while he sits at a chessboard and plays both sides of a game, she asks Stokes to tell her. He says he wants answers to some questions of his own, but the audience knows that the information he wants is just what Julia will never tell him.
Nicholas takes a less conventional approach. He raises the ghosts of a couple of the dead men whose corpses supplied the raw materials from which Adam’s body was constructed. One lacks a right arm, the other a head. He asks them where Adam is, and they turn in unison to point with their left arms at the great house of Collinwood. It’s such a smoothly coordinated move that it looks like they must be spending their time in the afterlife starting a boy band.
The Boneyard Boys showing off their signature move, the Postmortem Point. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
The arm donor is played by David Groh, who less than a decade later would become a star as Joe on the sitcom Rhoda. Groh was such a charismatic performer that it’s hard not to think of speaking parts on Dark Shadows that other actors played badly and wonder what would have happened had he played them instead. I went on about that in a comment I left on Danny Horn’s Dark Shadows Every Day in 2020; here, I will just mention that if Groh, instead of the lamentably unaccomplished Craig Slocum, had played ex-convict Harry Johnson, we would probably have seen a red-hot love triangle in which Harry vied with Adam for the affections of heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard.
Earlier in the episode, Adam had asked Stokes why it was not allowed for him to kiss Carolyn. Thayer David makes the most of this scene. Stokes freezes and looks up when Adam starts posing his questions, then seems genuinely shaken when he says that he is inadequate to the task of answering them, since he himself has never raised children. We can see that, in that moment, Stokes feels as incomplete as Adam. It’s touching to see Stokes’ usually supreme self-assurance give way to shamefaced uncertainty. When Stokes tells Adam to put away his budding sexual desires and to concentrate on his books, we catch a glimpse of the tragic side of Stokes’ own celibate, scholarly life.
But not even a father of twenty would be prepared for this situation. In the ten weeks he has been alive, Adam has become fluent in English and able to read with facility; he has the body of a grown man and moves with agility and force. Yet he knows absolutely nothing of human relationships beyond a basic understanding of the words “Friend” and “Kill!” It is hard to imagine that anyone has ever lived who needed the instruction Adam needs now.
Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, expert on the occult, finds himself laboring under the direction of Julia Hoffman, MD. Stokes does not understand why Julia insisted on leaving the long abandoned shack where a very tall, very mysterious man named Adam seemed to be suffocating, he does not understand why Julia has buried her friend Barnabas Collins in an unmarked grave in the woods, and does not understand why Julia has concluded that Barnabas is alive and they must dig him up. Julia tells Stokes she will answer his questions when the exhumation is complete. Stokes keeps digging. They reach a coffin. They open it to find Barnabas. Julia detects a faint “pulsebeat” in his wrist. Before Stokes can raise his questions, Julia says she wants to be alone with Barnabas and reminds Stokes that Adam needs attention.
Back in the shack, Stokes finds heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard with Adam. Earlier, Carolyn was distraught, unable to find a “pulsebeat” in Adam’s wrist, but now he is up and moving, apparently quite well. Stokes says that Julia is on her way, and Adam becomes agitated. He hates Julia and Barnabas, but has never explained to Stokes or Carolyn why. Carolyn decides to hide him in the long-deserted west wing of her family’s home, the great house of Collinwood. Stokes sees many drawbacks to this plan, but can suggest no alternative.
Only Stokes is still in the shack when Julia comes. He will not tell her where Adam has gone, and she will not answer any of his questions. With a smile, he tells her that he looks forward to understanding Barnabas’ secret. At this, she looks uneasy, clearly not welcoming that prospect.
Barnabas was, for 172 years, a vampire. His curse went into remission earlier in 1968, and he has been virtually human since #490, when he took part in an experiment that brought Adam to life as a Frankenstein’s monster. Julia ordered Barnabas’ servant Willie to bury him the other day, because she was afraid he was about to become a vampire again, but yesterday she figured out that Adam’s existence was keeping that from happening.
When Barnabas is unearthed, he is afraid that he has reverted to vampirism. Julia shows him his reflection in her compact mirror, proving to him that he is still human. The first time they did the vampire/ mirror bit was in #288, when Julia saw that Barnabas did not cast a reflection in a compact mirror and thereby confirmed her suspicion that Barnabas was a vampire. That led him to try to kill her. Now they are fast friends, and the same gimmick, with the opposite result, brings them a moment of shared joy.
Barnabas goes to the great house, and sees wicked witch Angelique/ Cassandra standing on the terrace. She was the one who cast the spell that prompted Julia and Willie to think they ought to bury him, and Julia had told her that he was dead. She is rather surprised when he shows up. He taunts her with the failure of her attack on him, she pretends not to know what he is talking about, and he goes along his merry way. Alone, she vows that she will soon regain her power over Barnabas.
Recovering vampire Barnabas Collins is dead, and this time it seems like he might stay that way. At least it seems so to his friend Julia Hoffman, MD, and his servant Willie Loomis; they’ve buried him, and are talking about what to do next. Julia decides they should tell people Barnabas went on a long trip, and that they themselves should leave the area before dawn. They will go to a sanitarium called Windcliff. Julia will resume her duties as its chief, while Willie will take a job there doing whatever he can handle.
Julia orders Willie to pack his things; he asks if he should pack Barnabas’ things also. Julia is impressed that Willie thinks of this. Perhaps he is remembering his onetime friend Jason McGuire, whom Barnabas killed in #275. Jason was hated by all and was under orders from the sheriff to leave town when he fell afoul of Barnabas, and so it was easy for everyone to assume he had simply gone away. Still, in #277, sarcastic dandy Roger wondered why Jason hadn’t taken his clothes or his shaving kit. No one ever tried to tie up that loose end, but perhaps Willie learned of the problem and made a note of it for the next time he had to conspire to conceal a death.
Willie goes directly from Barnabas’ freshly dug grave to Maggie Evans’ house. Willie has an unwholesome preoccupation with Maggie. Longtime viewers will remember Willie’s menacing approach to her in #202 and #207, before Barnabas got hold of him and turned him from a dangerously unstable ruffian into a sorely bedraggled blood thrall; those who are mindful of the period when Dark Shadows first became a hit will remember May and June of 1967, when Maggie was Barnabas’ prisoner and Willie tried desperately to lessen her suffering; and first time viewers will be startled by the beginning of the scene, when we see Willie peeking through the window at Maggie. When Barnabas’ vampirism went into remission, his former victims tended to return to the personalities they had before he bit them. Willie has not quite become the rapey goon he was in his first two weeks on the show, but neither is he the first man a woman would choose to be alone with.
Willie!
Since she is The Nicest Girl in Town, Maggie has long since forgiven Willie what he did when he first came to Collinsport. And Julia used a magical version of hypnosis on Maggie to induce amnesia covering the whole period of her involvement with Barnabas and to leave her with warm feelings of goodwill for him. But it’s late at night, so when Willie knocks, she is reluctant to let him in. He insists, and she relents.
Willie tells her he will be going away soon to take an exciting new job. Maggie says that she is sure everyone will miss him. At first he repeats the story that Barnabas is going away on a long trip, but then he starts crying. When Maggie asks why, he tells her Barnabas has died. He asks her to keep this secret, but the most she will agree to do is to wait until he leaves town to start talking about it.
Meanwhile, Julia has gone to the great house of Collinwood, where she has been a houseguest for about a year. Before she goes upstairs to pack, she stops and tells Roger’s wife Cassandra that Barnabas is dead.
Julia knows that Cassandra is actually Angelique, the wicked witch responsible for Barnabas’ woes. It would seem that the whole point of covering up Barnabas’ death would be to keep Angelique/ Cassandra from finding out about it. Yet Julia not only goes out of her way to tell her, she also declares to her that she will continue to fight against her.
Angelique/ Cassandra spits out that Julia is in love with Barnabas, to which Julia replies “Not nearly as much as you are.” For some time, the show has been developing the theme that Julia would like Barnabas to be her lover. In their post about the episode on Dark Shadows Before I Die, John Scoleri said “So Julia’s true feelings are finally on the table.” To which Christine Scoleri replied, “Where have you been? Julia’s feelings have been on the table, the wall, the floor…pretty much everywhere for a long time.”
Willie’s visit to Maggie and Julia’s to Angelique/ Cassandra mark a difference between the first year of Dark Shadows and its later phases. When the show started, the characters were too good at keeping secrets, with the result that very little happened. They took this to such an extreme that one of the two principal storylines with which the show began- well-meaning governess Vicki’s attempt to find out who her parents were- died out altogether because reclusive matriarch Liz and her lawyers, the only characters who knew anything about it, would never talk.
Now, the characters involved in the action don’t keep secrets from each other at all, with the result that events comes thick and fast, but it is hard to build complex alliances or to explore nuanced relationships. They still conceal information from Vicki, Liz, Roger, and other characters left over from the early days, rendering them background figures with little to contribute to the story. Video game enthusiasts might call them “NPCs”- non-player characters.
Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, occult expert, enters. Stokes tells Julia that a man named Adam appears to be dead. Julia goes with him to an abandoned shack in the woods where she examines Adam’s body and pronounces him dead. When Stokes tells her that Adam exhibited sharp pains in his neck starting at about 11 PM, that he called out for Barnabas, that his strength appeared to ebb for no apparent reason, and that he then died, Julia’s eyes widen. Suddenly Adam comes back to life. He starts gasping for air and miming a struggle against an invisible barrier just above his face. Julia tells Stokes she will have to go. He protests that she must stay with her patient. What she says next doesn’t mean much to Stokes, and would mean less to a first-time viewer:
JULIA: He is suffocating- I may know why. No, it’s impossible! But it may be that they are the same. Experiment- perhaps Adam is why-
STOKES: What are you talking about?
JULIA: Barnabas- I buried him- alive!
Regular viewers know that Adam is a Frankenstein’s monster created in an experiment begun by mad scientist Eric Lang. Shortly before he died of wounds inflicted by Angelique/ Cassandra, Lang recorded an audiotape in which he explained that as long as Adam lives, Barnabas’ vampirism will remain in remission. Julia has not heard that tape, but the audience has, time without number. We also know that when Barnabas was sealed up in a wall from #512 to #516, Adam experienced the pains that Barnabas suffered. In these lines, we see Julia for the first time beginning to understand the true nature of the connection between Adam and Barnabas.
Stokes’ approach to Julia is as indiscreet in its own way as were Willie’s to Maggie and Julia’s to Angelique/ Cassandra. Adam hates Julia and Barnabas, because they abused him shockingly in his first weeks of life, and forbade Stokes to bring her. Julia’s closing outburst is also an extreme indiscretion, as Stokes is basically a law-abiding person who could not be expected to help Julia and Willie cover up their many crimes. Again, we have come a long way from the days when the show would drop a major story rather than have a recurring character breach attorney-client privilege.
Like the Scoleris, Danny Horn was in good form when blogging about this part of the show. His post on Dark Shadows Every Day about this episode makes a number of penetrating observations about the connections between Julia and Willie’s opening scene at the grave and absurdist plays like Waiting for Godot and Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
A magical bat has bitten recovering vampire Barnabas Collins on the neck and Barnabas appears to have died. Barnabas’ friend Julia and his servant Willie have a conference to discuss their next steps. Barnabas had expected such an attack, knowing that the witch who made him a vampire in the first place has been working to renew her curse. Willie laments the situation, crying out, “Aw, now we’re gonna hear the dogs howlin’ again!” Evidently that’s the bad part.
Barnabas had directed Julia and Willie to drive a stake through his heart once it had stopped beating. They can’t do it. They decide to bury him in the woods instead. Willie mentions a cross; a silver cross inside the lid of his coffin had kept Barnabas immobilized for the 171 years before Willie inadvertently released him to prey upon the living in April 1967, so perhaps that’s how they plan to show mercy to their friend.
Once Willie has dug the grave and put Barnabas’ coffin in it, he and Julia decide to pray. She takes the lead, kneeling and throwing dirt, presumably including stones, onto the coffin. Dark Shadows avoided the topic of religion almost completely until repressed spinster Abigail Collins made her first appearance in #367; she and the Rev’d Mr Trask, introduced in #385, presented a wildly unfair, highly entertaining lampoon of eighteenth century New England Congregationalism. Recently the show has been lurching towards a vaguely friendly attitude towards Christianity. If Julia keeps strewing stones onto the grave once it is filled in, we might think that this friendliness extends to Judaism as well.
Meanwhile, a very tall man named Adam is having a bad time. Adam is a Frankenstein’s monster, and when he was created he drew the effect of the vampire curse from Barnabas. He does not feel the effects of that curse, but he does suffer pain when Barnabas is injured. When heiress Carolyn calls on Adam at the old shack in the woods where he is hiding, she finds that his neck hurts where Barnabas was bitten. When Julia declares Barnabas dead, we cut back to the shack, where Adam has stopped moving. Occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes has joined Carolyn; he feels Adam’s wrist, and in a bit of Collinsport English that is becoming increasingly prominent on the show says that he can find no “pulsebeat.”
Barnabas was bricked up in a wall from #512 to #516, and Adam felt his pain during that period. So it is no surprise to returning viewers that Adam suffers along with Barnabas now. We also have heard countless repetitions of something neither Julia nor Willie has ever heard, an audiotape in which Eric Lang, the mad scientist who created Adam, explains that as long as Adam lives Barnabas will be free of vampirism. So we doubt that Barnabas’ curse will return, and hope that Adam’s suffering will be the clue that leads Julia and Willie to rescue Barnabas from being buried alive. Since Julia and Willie have no idea where Adam is and Adam hates them both, it’s as difficult to see how they could find out what he’s going through as it is to see how Barnabas could get out of the grave any other way. In that difficulty is the suspense with which the episode ends.
It’s the wee hours of the morning, and hardworking young fisherman Joe comes to his fiancée Maggie’s house. Maggie had telephoned Joe and asked him to come right over. Joe can’t imagine what Maggie wants. In the chaste world of Dark Shadows, there is no word for “late night booty call.”
Joe finds Maggie and her friend Vicki waiting for him in their nightgowns. Maggie tells him that she had heard a noise in the bedroom where Vicki is staying, that she went in to investigate, and that she saw a ghost whispering into Vicki’s ear. Vicki tells him that she is staying at Maggie’s house to escape the power of a witch who is trying to make her have a nightmare that Maggie and others have already had, and that if she does have the nightmare it will spell doom for Barnabas Collins, who hasn’t been on the show for a week and a half. Joe gets more and more befuddled as the women go on about these matters. When they mention occult expert Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, Joe perks up. Stokes is a topic on which he has a definite opinion. He thinks Stokes broke into Maggie’s house while she was away mourning for her father Sam, that he is harboring a fugitive named Adam who was involved in Sam’s death, and that he is in general a slippery sort. When Vicki says she is planning to call on Stokes the following day, Joe insists on accompanying her.
Stokes is slow to answer the door when Joe and Vicki knock. Vicki tells Stokes about her experience the night before, and Stokes replies that he can do nothing for her unless she leaves the town of Collinsport.
Joe finds some beginning reader’s flashcards and asks Stokes what he is doing with them. Stokes claims to be tutoring a three year old nephew in reading. Joe hears footsteps in the back bedroom. He wants to go to investigate, as Maggie had investigated sounds in her back bedroom, but Stokes denies him permission, claiming that there are cleaning people working in there. Joe seems to suspect what the audience already knows, that neither the nephew nor the cleaning people exist and Adam is in the bedroom.
Thus compromised, Stokes is off his guard when Joe reaches into his pocket and takes out a stickpin bearing the monogram “S.” Stokes confirms that it is his, and Joe says it was found in Maggie’s living room. Stokes suggests he dropped it there when he visited Sam. Joe argues this could not have been so, and Stokes is compelled to accept his reasons. He claims to have let himself into Maggie’s house through the unlocked door hoping to find her and offer his condolences, and that when he found no one home he left right away.
Later, Joe lets himself into Maggie’s house and grabs a rifle. Maggie asks him what he is doing. He refuses to explain himself and insists on going away with the weapon. She objects quite forcefully, as one would expect, but cannot stop him. Throughout the first 106 weeks of the show, Joe has been an unfailingly kindly and conscientious fellow; longtime viewers will therefore be as shocked as Maggie is to see Joe behaving in this way.
Joe returns to Stokes’ place. Stokes is unsettled to see him with a gun. Joe declares that he has come to conduct a thorough search for Adam. Stokes orders him out of the house. Joe refuses to go, and Stokes threatens to call the police. Joe encourages him to call them. The two start to scuffle, and Adam bursts in from the bedroom. Joe points the gun at Adam, and Stokes urges him to put it down. Joe and Adam both run out the door. Stokes is looking on and urging Joe not to fire when we hear a shot.
Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes has been harboring a fugitive in his apartment for some time. The fugitive, known only as Adam, is a very tall, extremely strong man whose vocabulary was limited to a handful of words when he met Stokes. He has been learning at a prodigious rate, and can now carry on conversations. Stokes gives Adam a break from reading the dictionary and asks him to recount his earliest memory.
Adam speaks once more in isolated monosyllables as he tells the story of waking up on a table and seeing old world gentleman Barnabas Collins. Barnabas’ friend, psychiatrist/ blood specialist Julia Hoffman, then jabbed him with a needle. After a car ride, he found himself chained to a wall in a small room where Barnabas’ servant Willie Loomis was bad to him. Adam broke the chain and attacked Willie, then Barnabas beat him. Stokes is trying to decide what to make of this story when a knock comes at the door. He sends Adam to read the dictionary quietly in the back bedroom while he deals with his visitors.
They are well-meaning governess Vicki Winters and her boyfriend, an unpleasant man named Peter. Vicki wants Stokes to hypnotize Peter in hopes of breaking through the total amnesia that covers all of his life up to the last few months. Stokes sends Vicki away, and puts Peter under.
Peter tells him that a mad scientist named Lang compelled him to assist in the construction of a Frankenstein’s monster, and that Barnabas and Julia were in on the project. Stokes puts two and two together. He brings Adam into the room, and Peter identifies him as Lang’s creation. Still under hypnosis, Peter refuses to regress any further into his past, fearing that he, too, might be one of Lang’s products.
Stokes calls on Vicki at the great house of Collinwood. Vicki says that it makes no difference to her what Peter’s background is; Stokes tells her that she is lying, because if that were the case she would not have taken Peter to him to be hypnotized. When Dark Shadows began, Vicki represented the audience’s point of view; since then, she has tended to be simply a Good Person. It is extremely rare to hear any suggestion that she might have a selfish motive, and even rarer for her to be credibly accused of deception. For Vicki fans, it is intriguing to think that the show might allow her to be a complex character who has secrets and behaves unpredictably.
Stokes meets the suave Nicholas Blair, whom Vicki introduces as the brother of Cassandra Collins. Stokes knows that Cassandra is a wicked witch, and he recognizes Nicholas as a man he saw months ago in an antique shop handling a curio associated with Cassandra. Nicholas denies that he was that man, saying that he is new to the area and there are many people who look like him. Nicholas is such a distinctive looking man that he must know that Stokes will know that he is lying, but it does put a stop to the conversation.
Stokes tells Vicki that she must leave Collinwood at once. He explains that if she does not, she “will have the dream,” that “Barnabas Collins will be your beckoner,” and that this means Barnabas will die. She protests that she cannot have “the dream,” because Sam Evans died before he could tell it to her. He insists that Nicholas and Cassandra will find a way to make her have it. This will be total gibberish to anyone watching for the first time. Regular viewers will know what it means, but most of them will wish they didn’t, since it refers to a slow-moving, heavily repetitious plot that they had hoped the show had decided to abandon.
Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes (Thayer David) comes home and greets his house-guest Adam (Robert Rodan.) He says that he envies Adam his freedom from the responsibility of attending lectures delivered by people who are “inferior” to him. However snobby Stokes’ attitude towards his faculty colleagues may be, we immediately see that it does not extend to people who lack educational credentials. He takes out a deck of flashcards with words as short as “car” and as long as “dictionary” and is delighted with Adam’s ability to read them aloud.
The Professor takes pleasure in his pupil’s progress.
From November 1967 to March 1968, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the 1790s and Thayer David played Stokes’ ancestor Ben, a servant indentured to the mighty Collins family. We saw kindly scion Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid) teach Ben to read. Barnabas became a vampire in those days; his vampirism went into remission only a few months ago, when he went through an experimental treatment that involved Adam’s creation as a Frankenstein’s monster. To the extent that Adam is Barnabas’ responsibility, Stokes is repaying his ancestor’s debt to him in kind.
Barnabas and his friend Dr Julia Hoffman (Grayson Hall) knock on Stokes’ door. Stokes does not know that Barnabas used to be a vampire or what he and Julia had to do with Adam’s creation, but he knows enough to distrust them deeply. He insists Adam hide in the back bedroom before he will let Barnabas and Julia in.
Barnabas and Julia tell Stokes that they telephoned him earlier. He explains that he was out, and they say that someone answered the phone and breathed audibly into the receiver, but did not speak. Before he can suggest they misdialled, they notice that his receiver is still off the hook. He speculates that his cleaning lady, who obviously does not exist, must have done it. He furrows his brow and sounds quite stern when he expresses his disapproval of this imaginary person’s behavior. Barnabas and Julia can’t do anything with that, so they change the subject to the matters they originally wanted to discuss.
Those amount to a recap of the storyline concerning wicked witch Cassandra Blair Collins, who in the 1790s was known as Angelique Bouchard Collins. As Angelique, she was the one who made Barnabas a vampire. She returned to the world of the living in the spring of 1968 in a bid to reactivate that curse. Now she has gone missing, and Barnabas and Julia are hoping she is gone forever. While Stokes is in the dark about Barnabas’ past and his true nature, he knows plenty about Angelique/ Cassandra. He tells Barnabas and Julia that to test their hypothesis, they must find the portrait of Angelique that turned up shortly before Angelique/ Cassandra herself returned.
Barnabas and Julia search for the portrait in the great house of Collinwood, where Angelique/ Cassandra has been living as the wife of Roger Collins (Louis Edmonds.) Julia keeps Roger busy downstairs while Barnabas roots around in Roger and Angelique/ Cassandra’s bedroom. The soundtrack plays a recording of Barnabas’ thoughts about his search while we see him staring at the room. When these interior monologues were new to the show, they tended to be very informative. Lately they’ve had less substance, and this one is totally unnecessary.
It turns out that the search itself was equally unnecessary. As soon as Barnabas makes his way back to the drawing room, Roger pulls out the portrait and shows it to him and Julia. Roger found it in the back of a dark closet, but is badly faded, as if it had been left in direct sunlight for a great many days. Barnabas and Julia know that the portrait has some mysterious connection with Angelique’ Cassandra’s physical being, so this is grounds for hope that she is on the way out.
That hope is dashed within seconds. Barnabas answers the front door, and finds a stranger. The man tells Barnabas he should have recognized him at once- “Cassandra’s husband!” Barnabas was briefly Angelique’s husband, 172 years before, but does not bring that up. Instead, he directs the man’s attention to Roger. The man is unfazed when Roger announces that he, not Barnabas, is married to Cassandra. The man then introduces himself as “Cassandra’s brother!” Barnabas and Julia react with shock.
We open in a hospital room where Sam Evans is in bed, wearing dark glasses. This would tell a first time viewer that Sam is blind, and also that he’s reckless about his glasses.
Sam is begging his daughter Maggie to bring her friend Vicki around so he can tell her about a dream he just had. Vicki shows up and invites Sam to tell her the dream. This leads to a dramatic musical sting and a cut to the opening title. The first time viewer, still worried that Sam might nod off and break his glasses, will be unlikely to see why Vicki’s willingness to listen to Sam’s dream should be a concerning development.
Sam starts to describe his dream. A knock on the door interrupts him. It is Timothy Eliot Stokes. Stokes orders Vicki out of the room. Stokes is wearing a suit, not a white coat, and is addressed as “Professor.” So it should be clear to the first-time viewer that he is not a medical doctor, has no authority in the hospital, and is not particularly close to Vicki, Maggie, or Sam. The women resist his commands, but when it becomes clear he won’t back down they humor him.
In the corridor outside Sam’s room, Vicki tells Stokes “I hope you have some explanation.” He replies “The situation required drastic action.” “Is that all you have to say?” “No, I might add you should be grateful to me.” Thus the first-time viewer learns that Stokes does not feel obligated to be polite to young, pretty women.
Stokes tells Vicki that “Your recent experience in the past has taught you some rather frightening things about witchcraft.” Vicki agrees with this statement. Maggie turns away and looks out into space, wondering what the heck these lunatics are talking about. At last the first-time viewer has an on-screen representative.
Stokes describes a “Dream Curse,” in which a series of people all have the same nightmare. Each dreamer is compelled to tell the nightmare to a particular person who appeared in it. That person then has the nightmare, featuring a third person, and awakens with the same compulsion to tell the nightmare to that person, keeping the cycle going. Vicki declares that she doesn’t know what Stokes is talking about, but Maggie seems to. Vicki grudgingly agrees not to go into Sam’s room, but refuses to leave the corridor.
Maggie reacts to Stokes’ explanation.
Returning viewers know that Maggie was the first to have the nightmare. It will also stretch their credulity that Vicki hasn’t heard about it. Maggie is one of Vicki’s dearest friends, and the nightmare was a terrifying experience that weighed on her for quite some time. The person Maggie passed the nightmare to was Vicki’s boyfriend Peter, who prefers to be called Jeff. Not only has neither Maggie nor Peter/ Jeff told Vicki about the nightmare, neither has any of the three people who have already had the nightmare and who live with her in the great house of Collinwood. These are heiress Carolyn, whom Vicki has addressed as “my best friend”; strange and troubled boy David, who is Vicki’s charge in her job as governess and who feels very close to her; and housekeeper Mrs Johnson, who habitually tells everyone everything she knows.
It will also be strange to those who have been watching the show that Stokes does not tell Vicki the key thing about the Dream Curse, that it is aimed at old world gentleman Barnabas Collins. Vicki is extremely fond of Barnabas; Stokes knows this, because in #509, he told her that he was doing battle with a witch whose goal was to kill Barnabas, and she was most eager to help him. If he told her that by listening to Sam’s account of the dream she would be bringing Barnabas one step closer to death, surely he would have persuaded her to go home. But, as my wife Mrs Acilius pointed out while we were watching the episode, that would let Vicki back into the story. Stokes, like Barnabas and several other major characters, is working to keep Vicki from becoming relevant to any ongoing plot.
Stokes has to leave the hospital to attend to another matter. While Maggie was leading the way out of the hospital room, he looked out the window and saw a man looking in. The man is Adam, a very tall, phenomenally strong, peculiarly inarticulate fellow whom Stokes met at Sam and Maggie’s cottage a few days ago. Stokes is eager to get to know Adam. He lets himself into the cottage and waits there until Adam comes by. Adam is confused to find him there, but Stokes quickly persuades him to come home with him. Stokes promises to give him food and become his friend. The two of them are quite cheerful as they walk out the front door.
The camera repeatedly focuses on a stickpin Stokes dropped on the rug, suggesting that he will get in trouble for having let himself into the cottage without Maggie’s permission. That suggestion is clearer to the first-time viewer than to those who know what’s been happening. Stokes had been in the cottage with Sam not long before, and could easily claim to have dropped the stickpin on that occasion.
Back in the hospital corridor, Vicki hears Sam crying out in agony. She goes to his room. Maggie joins her there, and Sam starts describing the nightmare. Maggie recognizes it as the one that caused her such distress when she had it, and her eyes dart to Vicki. She tells Vicki she doesn’t have to stay. Vicki insists, and a look of panic starts to form on Maggie’s face. Sam doesn’t get far into the nightmare before he dies.
Returning viewers will remember that the luckless Willie Loomis was interrupted in his attempt to tell Carolyn the nightmare in #506, and that when she next went to sleep she could have only the part of the nightmare he had described. So we wonder if Vicki will have the same problem.
We may wonder about something else. Stokes, as an expert on witchcraft, has several times said that a Dream Curse is designed to “end with a death.” We may wonder if Sam’s death will end it before it gets to Barnabas.
That would represent a stinging defeat for the witch. Sam was once a fairly important character, but long ago receded to the margins of the show. He made his debut in #5, and has been played by David Ford since #35. Originally he was a tormented alcoholic, driven to drink by his part in the injustice done long ago to dashing action hero Burke Devlin. Burke’s storyline fizzled out completely in #201, and since then Sam has made only intermittent appearances, mostly as support for Maggie, who is herself usually a secondary character. To launch an attack on the show’s breakout star and hit a tertiary player would be quite embarrassing to any villain. Maybe the witch’s next plan will wind up falling on Bob the Bartender, and the one after that will hit one of the sheriff’s feeble-minded deputies.
Kathryn Leigh Scott tells some stories about Sam’s death scene that do not fit with what is on the tape. In her 1986 book My Scrapbook Memories of Dark Shadows, she writes about the teleprompter falling over and making a loud noise and Ford shouting “Where is it!?” In appearances at Dark Shadows conventions, she has said that the lines Ford improvised to replace the ones he couldn’t read ran over time, and that in her desperation to get to the next break she pushed a pillow on his face and nearly smothered him while saying “Don’t die, Pop!” In his post on Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn says that Miss Scott’s “anecdote was entirely made up. None of that happened.”
I reserve judgment. Maybe the episode we have is a second take. It runs unusually smoothly up to Sam’s death scene, as if the cast had had more practice with its parts than usual. We know that, in spite of all the spectacular bloopers and other production errors they left in, they did sometimes start over, and the incidents Miss Scott described might well have been enough to warrant that.
In the first months of Dark Shadows, the audience’s point of view was represented by well-meaning governess Vicki, who needed to have explained to her everything we might want to know and who reacted to all the strange goings-on with the mixture of disquiet and curiosity that the makers of the show hope we will feel.
Vicki has long since been replaced as our representative by mad scientist Julia. We no longer want characters to tell us what has been going on, nor are we making up our minds about our moral evaluation of the events in the stories. We find ourselves in the middle of a whole clutch of fast-moving plots, trying to keep up with them all and hoping that nothing will stop the thrills. Julia’s loyalty to her best friend, sometime vampire Barnabas, and her supremely well-developed capacity for lying put her in the same position, and her vestigial conscience is no obstacle to any juicy storyline.
When Vicki was our on-screen counterpart, her charge, strange and troubled boy David, was the show’s most powerful chaos agent. David precipitated a series of crises that seemed likely to expose the secrets of the ancient and esteemed Collins family, to kill one or more of the major characters, or both. In #70, David led Vicki to his favorite playground, the long-vacant Old House on the estate of Collinwood. David would keep sneaking into the Old House even after Barnabas took up residence there in #218.
Today, David again lets himself into the Old House. He is caught there by Julia and a man he has not seen before. Julia is stern with him for entering the house without Barnabas’ permission; he defends his presence there, reminding Julia that she promised him he could play with the tape recorder on Barnabas’ desk. He asks who the man is.
The man introduces himself to David as “Timothy Eliot Stokes.” This is the first time time we have heard his middle name. Soon, the show will phase “Timothy” out, and his friends will address Stokes as “Eliot.” I suppose that’s because he’s a professor, and “Eliot” suggests Harvard.
Stokes introduces himself to David.
In 1966, Thayer David played crazed groundskeeper Matthew. Suspected of murder, Matthew hid out in the Old House and kept Vicki prisoner there until some ghosts scared him to death in #126. David didn’t believe Matthew was a killer and didn’t know he was holding Vicki, so when he stumbled upon him in the Old House he brought him food and cigarettes. Even after he found Vicki bound and gagged behind a hidden panel, he kept Matthew’s secret. When David meets another character played by the same actor on the same set, longtime viewers can see that Stokes is as genteel and urbane as Matthew was rough-hewn and paranoid. For her part, Julia recalls Vicki when she scolds David for sneaking into the Old House, but where Vicki was doing her job as David’s governess and trying to enforce the rules of the household as a governess might, Julia is scrambling to keep David from finding out about her own secret activities.
Julia tells David to take the tape recorder and go home to the great house on the estate. As he makes his way to the front door, Stokes takes Julia aside and tells her that it will not be well if it is known in the great house that David has seen him. Julia hurries to David and tells him to keep quiet about the fact that he has seen Stokes. She says that she hates to ask him to lie; at this, I mimicked Julia and said “I know you share my devotion to the truth,” prompting Mrs Acilius to laugh out loud. Later, Julia will go to the great house, where she lives as a permanent guest, and David will cheerfully assure her that he kept her secret. The two of them seem quite relaxed together, leading us to believe that he will continue to do so.
There is a bit of irony in Julia’s harshness with David for entering Barnabas’ house without his permission. She and Stokes didn’t have Barnabas’ permission to be there, either. Indeed, if he had known what they were up to he would likely have objected most strenuously. Along with a man named Tony, they held a séance in the part of the basement where Barnabas kept his coffin when he was under the full effect of the vampire curse. They were trying to contact the Rev’d Mr Trask, a Puritan divine whom Barnabas bricked up to die in the eighteenth century. The séance was so successful that the bricks crumbled, exposing Trask’s bones, still held together somehow in the shape of a skeleton hanging from the ceiling. At the end of the episode, Trask has resumed his corporeal form and set about taking revenge on Barnabas by walling him up in the same spot.
Odd that Trask’s skeleton holds together after all the ligaments and tendons have rotted away, odder that there is a straight cleavage separating the top of the skull from the rest, oddest of all that the section is attached to the rest of the skull by a piece of Scotch tape.
Yesterday, wiggéd witch Angelique/ Cassandra sent her cat’s paw Tony to kill sage Timothy Eliot Stokes. Stokes pulled “the old switcheroo” on him, and Tony drank from the glass into which he had put Angelique/ Cassandra’s poison. Today, we learn that Stokes gave Tony an emetic to save his life. Stokes calls mad scientist Julia Hoffman, MD to examine Tony and assist with the next stage of the battle against Angelique/ Cassandra.
Recovered, Tony has no idea why he obeyed Angelique/ Cassandra’s command to kill Stokes, and is ready to surrender to the police. Stokes tells him he is under the power of a witch, and enlists him in the battle against her.
Stokes takes out the memoirs of his ancestor Ben, who was Angelique’s cat’s paw in the eighteenth century. He does some automatic writing in Ben’s hand and finds that they must contact the spirit of the Rev’d Mr Trask, a witchfinder who inadvertently helped Angelique in those days. Fortunately, Trask, like Tony, was played by Jerry Lacy, so it shouldn’t be too hard to get hold of him. Stokes also finds that Trask was walled up in “the coffin room,” which Julia tells him is for some mysterious reason a nickname given to the space at the foot of the stairs in the basement of the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. Stokes decrees that he, Julia, and Tony must go to this room and hold a séance there.
On his way to the Old House, Tony follows Stokes’ instructions and stops at the main house on the estate and tells Angelique/ Cassandra that Stokes is dead. This follows a scene between Angelique/ Cassandra and her husband, sarcastic dandy Roger, in which Roger complains about her lack of interest in him. Her mind isn’t on the game of chess they are playing, she hasn’t been attentive to him for several nights, and she refuses to go on a honeymoon. Angelique/ Cassandra ensorcelled Roger into marrying her so that she could have a perch at Collinwood, and he seems to be slipping out of the spell’s power.
Stokes, Julia, and Tony gather in the coffin room. They begin the séance. This is the fifth séance we have seen on Dark Shadows, but the first that does not include well-meaning governess Vicki. In four of the previous five, it had been Vicki who went into the trance. On the other occasion, it was strange and troubled boy David who became the vessel through which the dead spoke to the living. The first three times Vicki served as the medium, she channeled the gracious Josette Collins, and when David filled that role he gave voice to David Radcliffe. In those days, Vicki was closely connected to Josette, perhaps a reincarnation of her, as David was another version of the cursed boy David Radcliffe. The final time Vicki spoke for the dead, she spoke for nine year old Sarah Collins, with whom she was no more closely connected than were any of a number of other characters. Sarah has no present-day counterpart, so her appearance at a séance suggested that Dark Shadows was moving away from its use of necromancy as a way of connecting characters from different time periods.
This time, Tony goes into the trance. In #481, Angelique/ Cassandra told Tony that she chose him as her cat’s paw because he resembled Trask, so when he is the medium through whom Trask speaks we are returning to Dark Shadows‘ original conception of how séances work. Trask mistakes Stokes for Ben, as Angelique did in a dream visitation last week. The brick wall behind which Trask’s remains are hidden bulges and is about to crumble when we fade to the credits.
True fans of Dark Shadows know that the episode’s real climax comes during those credits. Thayer David strolls onto the set under Louis Edmonds’ credit for Roger. He even looks into the camera when he realizes what he has done.
Dark Shadows Commentary 