Over the years, nine writers were credited with scripts for Dark Shadows. This is the final episode attributed to Malcolm Marmorstein, who is not among the eight best of those writers.*
Well-meaning governess Vicki has told her depressing fiancé Burke that she will break off their engagement unless he ends his investigation of her friend, courtly gentleman Barnabas Collins. Burke comes to see her at home today, and she demonstrates her resolve. When Burke says something about how Barnabas can take care of himself, she replies “And I can’t?” Burke tells her that she can be unaware of the evil around her. She holds still, looking very much like the daughter of matriarch Liz. Burke eventually gives in, agreeing to apologize to Barnabas.
Barnabas comes by to give Vicki a book about the history of Collinsport. Burke asks to see him privately in the drawing room. When Burke apologizes to him, Barnabas offers to answer all of his questions. With obvious difficulty, Burke says that he doesn’t want any answers. Burke offers his hand, and Barnabas reluctantly shakes it.
Burke offers his hand while the portrait of Jeremiah Collins looks on. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
Burke says he will leave Vicki and Barnabas alone to discuss the book. Barnabas asks Burke to join them, but he declines. They are all smiles.
Once he is alone with Vicki, Barnabas repeats his offer to answer any and all questions about himself. With no apparent difficulty, she says that the only questions she has are about chapter two.
So an investigation which might have uncovered Barnabas’ many secrets and triggered a crisis is over, and in its place we have two people sitting on a couch where they plan to talk about chapter two of an imaginary book. That’s an anticlimax, but Vicki is so appealing when she is in control of the situation that the scenes are pleasant to watch.
Meanwhile, mad scientist Julia Hoffman is hanging around Barnabas’ house catching up on her own reading. She senses the presence of a ghost. She believes it is the ghost of Barnabas’ nine year old sister Sarah. The strains of Sarah’s theme song “London Bridge” play on the soundtrack, telling the audience she is right. Julia goes out into the woods to look for Sarah, then comes back into the house and looks around there, but doesn’t find her.
Barnabas comes home. Julia tells him she thinks Sarah was around. Barnabas is jealous his darling little sister will visit other people but not him. Barnabas claims that Sarah has been visiting his enemies and speculates that she has come back to destroy him. This is unwarranted- no one Sarah has visited has any plans to harm Barnabas, and she has shown enough power that she could have done him in long since if that were her goal.
Artist Sam Evans is at home with his daughter Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town. Sam is wearing a coat and tie while painting. I suppose that could be called “professional attire,” and Sam is a professional painter.
Professional attire.
Maggie’s main occupation these days is an important one on a soap opera. She is the resident amnesia sufferer. She can’t remember anything about the weeks she was missing and in the custody of a person or persons unknown to the non-villain characters on Dark Shadows. The only clue Sam, Maggie, and Maggie’s fiancé Joe have as to who abducted Maggie is that a mysterious little girl named Sarah has turned up and shared important information at key moments in Maggie’s travails. So they are desperate to find Sarah.
As the three of them talk about how elusive Sarah is, Maggie says that she seems to be able to disappear at will. Joe dismisses this idea out of hand. Regular viewers might find that a bit odd. During the storyline centered on undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, both Joe and Sam had definite encounters with supernatural beings, Joe with the ghost of Josette Collins in #179 and Sam with the same spirit on the several occasions she compelled him to paint pictures explaining the danger Laura represented. Sam has also seen Sarah appear in and disappear from a locked room. So we would expect at least one of the two men to hesitate for a moment before rejecting the idea that Sarah might be a ghost.
Sam and Joe decide that because strange and troubled boy David Collins has seen Sarah more often than anyone else, they should go visit him at the great house of Collinwood and ask him to lead them to Sarah. David is happy to talk about Sarah, but he tells them that he has no idea how to contact her. He also warns them that if they do get in touch with her, they will likely find that nothing she says makes much sense. David and his cousin Carolyn continue with their plans to take a bus trip to the nearby town of Bangor, Maine, while Sam and Joe search the grounds of the estate hoping to find Sarah in one of the spots David mentioned that he had run into her.
They see a swing moving in the breeze and jump to the conclusion that Sarah had been in it moments before. If they could hear the background music, they would know they were right- Sarah’s “London Bridge” cue is playing. Lacking this ability, they conclude that they have found nothing. They decide to go ahead and visit the Old House on the estate, home to courtly gentleman Barnabas Collins and Barnabas’ servant Willie. They hope that one of them will be able to tell them something about Sarah.
They find that neither Barnabas nor Willie is at home, but someone they know is there. Dr Julia Hoffman answers the door. When Sam followed Sarah’s directions and found Maggie at the end of her ordeal, she was in a terrible state, drained of blood and in a state of total mental collapse. Maggie was treated at a hospital overseen by Julia, who is qualified as a specialist in both hematology and psychiatry. Now Julia is settled in at Collinwood, masquerading as an historian writing a book about the old families of New England.
Sam wants to know why Julia is keeping up this imposture. He delivers a speech full of courteous words thanking her for spending so much time on Maggie’s case without remuneration, but his tone and body language prepare us for his angry response when Julia refuses to give him any specifics. He tells Julia that he has decided he doesn’t believe her. He gives her a piece of his mind, then storms off.
Joe stays behind and apologizes for Sam. Julia assures Joe she isn’t upset, and asks him to tell Sam that she is doing everything she can. After the two men are both out of earshot, Julia smiles and repeats “I am doing everything I can!” Without that mustache-twirling line, first time viewers might not have caught on that Julia is a Villain.
Sam and Joe go back to the Evans cottage. It is night time, Maggie isn’t in the parlor, and her bedroom door is closed. Sam goes up to the door and shouts her name repeatedly. When she answers in a groggy voice, he apologizes, saying he didn’t mean to wake her.
Maggie comes out of her bedroom holding a wooden doll in eighteenth century garb. The doll wasn’t there when she went to sleep, and is the sort of thing Sarah would have, so she concludes that Sarah must have been in her room while she slept. Returning viewers will recall that when Sarah visited Maggie in #297 and found that she couldn’t remember her, she became upset and took away the doll she had previously given Maggie. This is a different doll, but it does confirm that Sarah is still watching over Maggie.
Closing Miscellany
This is one of only two episodes in which Nancy Barrett and David Ford share a scene. In #85, Miss Barrett’s Carolyn and Ford’s Sam were in the Blue Whale tavern at the same time; today, Carolyn, Sam, Joe, and David stand in the foyer of the great house talking about Sarah. It’s interesting that the two actors worked together so seldom, because from 1967 to 1969, Miss Barrett was known socially as Mrs David Ford.
At the climax of his scene with Julia, Sam tells her that she “should have been a member of the diplomatic corps…because you’re a master of the evasive answer!” So far as I’m concerned, the Foreign Service is one of the most honorable professions there is, and this is a shameful swipe at one of the most selfless, patriotic, and often heroic groups of people our country is blessed to produce. Writer Malcolm Marmorstein often cranks out mediocre scripts, but this smear marks a new low even for him.
Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, can’t stand being cooped up in her house all the time waiting for the person who abducted her and held her prisoner to be identified. Since she has amnesia covering the entire period of her captivity, her father Sam and her boyfriend Joe have to recap the whole storyline to her before they agree to go with her to the local tavern, The Blue Whale, where they can meet with other people who will help them recap the storyline that followed.
At the Blue Whale, a couple stands at the jukebox and play the theme from “A Man and a Woman.” We see that Bob the Bartender is back on duty. The other day, someone else was in his place, so it’s a relief to know that he’s still around.
At The Blue Whale.
Joe enters, and finds well-meaning governess Vicki alone at a table. He joins her, and she explains that she is waiting for her depressing fiancé Burke. Joe explains that he is waiting for Maggie and Sam. They start recapping while Bob brings them drinks and the couple dances. The couple must be out-of-towners- they aren’t good dancers, exactly, but neither are they doing the Collinsport Convulsion.
Unusually competent dancing.
Maggie and Sam arrive. “A Man and a Woman” continues to play while everyone compares notes about a mysterious little girl named Sarah who seems to have had some connection with Maggie during the time she was missing. Everyone tells everything they know, except Vicki. This is odd- Vicki is the one who brought up the topic of the little girl and who keeps pressing it forward, but she does not mention that she saw Sarah at the top of the stairs in the house occupied by courtly gentleman Barnabas Collins.
Burke enters. Maggie, Sam, and Joe excuse themselves. Burke has been so dreary in recent weeks that it’s hardly surprising Maggie would rather resume hiding in her house than be around him.
Vicki is upset with Burke. Barnabas complained to her yesterday that Burke was having him investigated. She demands that he shut the investigation down at once, issuing an ultimatum that she will end their engagement if he does not. Burke sounds smarter than he has in months as he explains his reasons for thinking there is something sinister about Barnabas. Unlike all the scenes where Burke was angrily asserting that Vicki was crazy for saying that she had seen and heard things we had also seen and heard, Vicki stands her ground. She won’t give an inch, and she immediately comes up with plausible explanations for all of Burke’s observations.
When Burke starts talking, the background music shifts from “A Man and a Woman” to “Brazil.” We have heard this tune behind Burke at the Blue Whale many times; it really is his theme song. When it plays, we know that we’re supposed to focus on him. When he starts talking about Maggie, it shifts again, to one of the “Blue Whale” dance tunes Robert Cobert wrote for the show. That tells us that Burke is no longer the subject- instead, we are paying attention to the overall story of Dark Shadows.
As it happens, returning viewers know that Burke is right about Barnabas and Vicki is wrong. We also know why Vicki didn’t volunteer that she saw Sarah at Barnabas’ house- she does not want to cast any suspicion on her friend. But we also know that the Dark Shadows has been fun since Barnabas joined the cast, and that no stories are going on that do not center on him. If Barnabas is caught, there won’t be a show for us to watch. Besides, it’s great to see Vicki finally standing up to Burke, even if it isn’t on one of the many occasions when he is wrong. Nor is Anthony George even struggling to play him. He is a cold actor who is at a loss when Burke is supposed to be reacting ferociously to provocations or exuding passion in love scenes, but this scene is right up his alley, with Burke cool, forceful, and intelligent. Alexandra Moltke Isles gets a real workout having to dominate the scene when George is in his wheelhouse, and she pulls it off admirably.
Sarah Collins has taken her friend and distant cousin, strange and troubled boy David Collins, home with her. Since Sarah is a ghost, her home is in a mausoleum. She has decided to show David one of the most interesting features of the place.
As we open, David is following Sarah’s instructions. He is standing on the sarcophagus of her mother and pulling a metal ring in the mouth of a stone lion’s head. The ring comes forward and a panel opens, revealing a room that was hidden for more than a century and a half.
The lion’s head.Pulling the ringThe panel opens
The first time we saw the panel open was in #210, when dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis happened upon the ring and ended up releasing vampire Barnabas Collins from his coffin in the hidden room. Now that we see this gimmick again and see it in color, it’s starting to seem odd that all you have to do to open the panel is pull the ring. The ring stands out as the only piece of metal in the tomb. Anyone entering the space would be tempted to tug on it, if only to polish it. If you’re wanting to make sure your vampire doesn’t get loose, I’d think you’d install a more secure system. Maybe you could add two or three additional decorative doodads to the wall, one of which you turn, say, three quarters of the way to the left, the other of which you turn some other way, and between them they release the ring.
Be that as it may, Barnabas’ old coffin is still in the hidden room. Sarah announces they will be opening it, and David resists the idea. He debates with Sarah for a while before curiosity gets the better of him.
Sarah the psychopomp. David wants to let the dead rest.David’s resistance crumbles.
He is shocked to see that it is empty. David asks Sarah why an empty coffin would be put in such a place, and she happily tells him that it wasn’t always empty. There was someone in it once, but he got up and left. David protests that the dead don’t walk away, to which Sarah replies that “Sometimes they do.”
David is shocked.Nobody’s home.
When David first met Sarah in #256, she was outside Barnabas’ house, puzzled that she couldn’t find her parents or anyone else she knew. Now it is starting to seem that she knows that she is a ghost haunting a time long after her own, but Sarah’s lines here are the first clear indication that she knows what is going on with her brother Barnabas.
David’s bafflement that the coffin is empty echoes #273. In that episode, matriarch Liz was shocked to find that the chest seagoing con man Jason McGuire buried in her basement did not contain the murdered remains of her husband. Liz kept asking “Why is there nothing there?” David seems almost as appalled as his aunt had been at the sight of some clean fabric unadorned with a rotting corpse. A few days after Liz found out Jason hadn’t really buried her husband in her basement, Barnabas killed Jason. Regular viewers will already have this story in mind, because in #276 Barnabas and his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie buried Jason in the floor of the very room David and Sarah are visiting at this moment. Clearly Barnabas would not be happy were he to find out that David knows about the room.
That wasn’t the first vacant grave in Dark Shadows. From #126 to #191, the show was mainly about David’s mother, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. As the Laura arc progressed, graves of various women named Laura Murdoch were revealed to be empty. Now Laura’s son is coming face to face with an unoccupied coffin, suggesting to loyal fans that he may yet learn something about his own origins.
To Sarah’s consternation, David says he has to go home. He tells her that if he does not, his governess, the well-meaning Vicki, will be upset with him. He simply refers to Vicki by name, as if Sarah already knows who she is. Regular viewers have reason to believe she does know who Vicki is, but it is not clear why David assumes that he can just say “Vicki” without explaining to Sarah who he means. Sarah swears David to secrecy about the existence of the room.
By the time David gets back to the great house of Collinwood, it is 9:30 PM and Vicki is indeed worried about him. Apparently no one else is at home; certainly, no one else has missed David. Vicki sits David down on a seat that’s been in the foyer from the beginning of the series, but which has only been used once or twice before. They have an earnest little talk that recalls the scenes they shared in the first 39 weeks of Dark Shadows, when their complicated relationship was the one storyline that consistently worked.
Rarely used seat.
David describes Sarah to Vicki. It finally dawns on her that Sarah is the little girl she saw on top of the stairs at Barnabas’ house in #280. When the light flashed in Vicki’s eyes, my wife, Mrs Acilius, shouted at the screen “Tell him!” Vicki and David again look like the fast friends they had become by #140, so we would indeed expect her to tell David that she thinks she has seen Sarah, and to tell him where and when she saw him. If she and David join their lines of inquiry and work together to find out about Sarah, the plot will move more quickly and on a much bigger scale than it can so long as everyone pursues their own questions in isolation.
Vicki catches on.
But, Vicki is also very fond of Barnabas, and reluctant to believe anything bad about him. Sarah has been seen in several places connected to the abduction of Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. Vicki doesn’t want anyone to add Barnabas’ house to that list, so perhaps it is not a “Dumb Vicki” moment when she decides to keep the information to herself.
Meanwhile, Barnabas is at home. He is irritated with mad scientist Julia Hoffman. Julia is attempting to cure Barnabas of vampirism, and he is dissatisfied with the progress of the treatment. He is also irked that Sarah broke Maggie out of the mental hospital where Julia was keeping her locked up, and blames Julia for failing to ghost-proof the place. He declares that Julia is “a meddlesome and domineering woman,” and that he, as a native of a different century, has no intention of tolerating such a person.
Barnabas and Julia discuss Vicki’s depressing boyfriend Burke. Burke has been investigating Barnabas, and his operatives have come upon some information that would raise questions Barnabas would have a hard time answering. Julia agrees that Burke must be stopped, and urges Barnabas to let her handle the matter. He says that he will take care of it, and that he will do so with “finesse” of a sort unfamiliar to the loutish inhabitants of the twentieth century.
Barnabas’ masterful finesse consists of telling Vicki what Burke is doing and asking her to make him stop. Those eighteenth century guys must have been amazing, to come up with something so complex and subtle in just a couple of days.
Julia comes into the great house as Barnabas is leaving. She asks Vicki if David is back yet. Vicki tells her that he had been out playing with Sarah in some location he refuses to disclose. Barnabas tries to conceal his alarm with a laughing remark about leaving Vicki and Julia to investigate the mystery of David’s playmate.
David comes out of his room to ask for food. While Vicki goes to fetch the housekeeper for him, Julia meets him at the top of the stairs and they talk about Sarah. David points out that she is repeating questions she has asked in previous episodes. He tells her that he doesn’t mind questions and neither does Sarah, but cautions her that the answers Sarah gives don’t make much sense.
The stained glass windows at the top of the stairs look great in color, and it is a relief when David shares the audience’s awareness that we’ve heard Julia’s lines before. Even so, the scene is a disappointment. David and Julia were fun to watch in their previous scenes because they were so relaxed together. Perhaps that was because David Henesy and Grayson Hall understood each other right away. Not only did they have similar ways of working as actors, but her son Matthew is about his age, so she might already have been familiar with a lot of things in his life that the other adults on set wouldn’t have known about.
Today, though, they are both having trouble with their lines. That keeps them from making enough eye contact with each other to sell the scene. David Henesy keeps looking at the teleprompter, which he could evidently read from the top of the stairs with only a little squint; Grayson Hall couldn’t read from that distance, but she does tilt her head back and look up when she’s searching her memory for her next line. Since the characters aren’t looking at each other, we don’t feel an emotional connection between them.
Hall has to thread a particularly small needle in this scene. Julia is trying to make her interest in Sarah seem casual in the same way Barnabas affected a lack of interest in her, by delivering lines about her with a jokey inflection. We know that she is urgently concerned with finding Sarah, and her efforts have to leave David unsure whether she really is the easygoing adult he has so far taken her to be or whether she is trying to pull a fast one.
In the course of a friendly chat between two people who obviously like each other, onetime Academy Award nominee and frequent Broadway luminary Hall could certainly have accomplished all of this. But in the course of this awkward encounter, it all falls flat. Especially so with Julia’s last line to David. After he has told her how difficult it is to get a straight answer from Sarah, she puts on a goofy voice and says that she’ll keep that in mind if she ever meets her. Since she isn’t looking at him when says this, it comes off not as an affectionate gesture acknowledging that they’ve run out of things to say, but as a high-handed dismissal. Even though she pats him on the shoulder and he smiles after that line, it still doesn’t seem that David would come away from the interaction with as complex an emotional response as he is supposed to have. Most likely he would just be irritated with Julia, as indeed the audience is likely to be.
“I’lll kee-e-ep that in mind.” Departure.
We end back at Sarah’s place. Barnabas is in the cemetery looking pathetic. He hears the strains of “London Bridge” coming from the mausoleum. We see Sarah sitting on her mother’s sarcophagus moving her fingers on her recorder far more rapidly than the music we hear would call for. She looks more like she’s playing a rock ‘n’ roll number.
Jammin’ with the Junior Funky Phantom of 1967.
Barnabas calls out to Sarah. He identifies himself as her brother and says that he has come to take her home. He goes into the mausoleum only to find that she has vanished. Wracked with sorrow, he pleads with her to come back, saying that he loves her and needs her. He touches the plate marking her grave. This underscores the futility of his desire to take her home. Leading him here, it is she who has brought him to what is in fact her home, and what ought also to be his.
Sad Barney.The impassable barrier.
This shows us a Barnabas we can sympathize with, but it also sets him on a collision course with David. Barnabas has been so harmless lately that we might wonder if his part is going to be recast with a purple felt puppet counting “Vun peanut butter saand-veech!” If he sets out to kill a child, he’ll be back on track as a horrifying menace.
Besides, David is not just any child- as the last bearer of the Collins name, David’s survival has a great symbolic importance to the show. He was central to everything that happened on Dark Shadows in its first 39 weeks. So if Barnabas becomes a threat to David, it will be a case of conflict between the current main character and the previous main character. Since Vicki originally represented the audience’s point of view and is still a major character, the divided loyalties between Barnabas and David that we first see influencing her behavior today could create a high level of dramatic tension. Especially so if Barnabas turns her into a vampire, and she winds up like Lucy in Dracula, the “Bloofer Lady” who herself preys on children.
Sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie Loomis tries to tell his master, vampire Barnabas Collins, that his plans for well-meaning governess Vicki Winters are unlikely to come to fruition. Barnabas wants Vicki to volunteer to become his vampire bride, a goal he has done remarkably little to advance. Even when Vicki invited herself to spend the night in his house, he couldn’t be bothered to bite her. Now she’s getting serious about her depressing boyfriend, Burke Devlin, and Willie thinks Barnabas has missed his chance.
Barnabas responds to Willie’s opinion as we might expect- he grabs him by the throat and threatens to kill him. He sends him away with orders to follow Vicki and Burke on their date and to report on every detail of their conversations.
Mad scientist Julia Hoffman is trying to cure Barnabas of his vampirism, and she brings him substantially the same message, along with a command to leave Vicki alone. Barnabas has enough hope that Julia’s experiments will succeed that he can’t treat her as he does Willie. So he evades her questions, pouts at her orders, and sulks when he finds himself having to go along with her.
The scene looks very much like the interactions we saw in the early months of the show between matriarch Liz and her brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger. Those were sometimes echoed in the interactions Vicki had with her charge, Roger’s son strange and troubled boy David. The bossy big sister/ bratty little brother pattern is on its way to becoming the signature relationship of Dark Shadows.
Meanwhile, Willie has been following his orders. He saw Burke and Vicki make several laughably awkward attempts to kiss each other, then heard Burke propose marriage to Vicki. Vicki asked for time to think it over.
When Willie reports this to Barnabas, he says he is sure she will say yes. Barnabas says that there will be no marriage, and proclaims “Burke Devlin must die!”
Vampire Barnabas Collins creeps up on well-meaning governess Vicki from behind. He touches her neck, and she is startled.
Stifling a giggle
This scene plays twice. First, before the opening title sequence, then again immediately after. The first time around, Vicki stifles a giggle when she sees Barnabas. The second, she seems frightened.
Frightened
Barnabas does not bite Vicki. He apologizes for startling her. She says that no apology is needed, and she stands very close to him. They talk about the Moon and the night and about what incredible romantics they both are.
Incredible romantics
In #285 and #286, Vicki contrived to get Barnabas to invite her to spend the night in his house. In #293, she invited Barnabas to tag along on a date she was having with her depressing boyfriend Burke, and while Burke stood there she had eyes only for Barnabas. In this conversation, Vicki reluctantly turns down an invitation from Barnabas so she can go on some more dismal dates with Burke.
Mad scientist Julia Hoffman interrupts Barnabas and Vicki. After Vicki excuses herself to get ready for her date, Julia demands that Barnabas leave her alone. Barnabas says that he means her no harm. This is all too believable- twice before today, we have seen Barnabas enter a room where Vicki was sleeping and leave without biting her. It’s starting to seem unlikely that she will ever have a place in the vampire story. Since the vampire story is the only plot going on Dark Shadows, that leads us to wonder why she is still on the show.
This scene takes place on a new set, a courtyard with a terrace and a fountain. It looks very much like a set in the 1965 film The Sound of Music, the one where the Countess who is supposed to marry Captain von Trapp has the conversations that remove her from the love triangle and leave the path open for von Trapp to marry Maria. That movie was such a big hit that it seems likely that they had it in mind when they designed this set for scenes concerned with the love triangle involving Vicki, Burke, and Barnabas.
Julia’s intervention leads some to believe that there is another love triangle budding in which she will vie for Barnabas’ affections, but I don’t see any trace of that in Julia’s stern manner today. She simply seems to be concerned that Barnabas stop preying on people while she performs the experiments that are supposed to cure him of vampirism.
In later years, Grayson Hall would claim that she decided on her own initiative to play Julia as if she were in love with Barnabas. She said that by the time the writers and directors caught on to what she was doing, they had received so much enthusiastic fan mail that they had to let her go on doing it. In response to this story, Danny Horn makes some uncharacteristic remarks in his post about this episode on Dark Shadows Every Day:
It’s a great story, especially because it appeals to the audience’s secret belief that the actors really are the characters that they play. We love to believe that, especially for daytime soap opera characters, who we spend time with every day.
But really, everybody who watches television believes that the characters are real. That’s why we love to hear about unscripted moments that were invented during rehearsal. As intelligent adults, we understand that writers and directors and producers create the characters, and then the actors show up and say the words. But there’s a little child inside of us, who wants to be told that Julia Hoffman is real, and she lives inside Grayson Hall.
Danny Horn, “A Human Life,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 2 Jaunary 2014.
As the blog went on, Danny put more and more emphasis on the chaotic process by which Dark Shadows was created. I suspect this passage was something he wrote in haste. Even at this early stage, he had made it clear that he knew that it was not true that “writers and directors and producers create the characters, and then the actors show up and say the words.” By the time he finished in 2021, his main theme had long been that the real subject of Dark Shadows was “a team of under-resourced lunatics desperately struggling every day to make the most surprising possible show.” That team most definitely included actors padding their parts in ways they could do only because the show was done live to tape, with edits never done if not absolutely necessary, and often not done even when they were.
Julia visits Vicki’s room and helps her choose an outfit for her date with Burke. Julia urges Vicki to avoid Barnabas, because he has a crush on her and it would hurt him to encourage him in it. Vicki says that she has never seen any sign of such a crush. Nor have we- he has talked with his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie about a plan to take Vicki as his next victim. Aside from giving her an enchanted music box that is supposed to brainwash her, he has been remarkably leisurely about the whole thing. If anything, she is the one who has been pursuing him.
Vicki and Burke are out by the fountain. He remarks that she has been very quiet, and she refers to having a lot on her mind. This raises our hopes that she is thinking about what Julia told her and is going to ditch Burke and go to Barnabas. They start talking about their wretched childhoods. Previously, we had heard that Burke’s mother died when he was young and that his alcoholic father supported the family by making lobster pots; now Burke tells us that when he was nine his father left the family. It’s hard to see much point in this retcon; most likely the writers had just forgotten about the earlier story.
Vicki mentions that there was one nurse at the Hammond Foundling Home whom she liked. In the early days of the Dark Shadows, she would often reminisce about her ridiculously bleak experiences growing up in this fictional orphanage. Usually she would get a faraway look in her eyes and smile, then tell some story that started with an appalling horror and got worse and worse as it went. This time, she again stares off into the distance and smiles, so that viewers who have been watching from the beginning brace themselves to hear that the nurse turned out to be the worst abuser of all, or that she was murdered in front of Vicki while the other children laughed, or that she ran the kitchen the winter they ran out of food and had to resort to cannibalism. But no, Vicki is just sharing a pleasant little memory. The show is a lot less hard-edged now that it’s about a vampire.
Not that they’ve stopped presenting horrible images altogether. No, they show us Burke kissing Vicki.
When Burke was played by Mitch Ryan, he was a great kisser, a talent he displayed with Vicki among others. But Anthony George does not appear to have seen anyone kiss before he attempts it. As he points his lips at Alexandra Moltke Isles, she stiffens her neck, a move that may have suggested excitement if her partner were doing something recognizable as a sign of affection, but that in this context looks like she’s suffering from whiplash. After his first failed effort, he rests his head on her shoulder and looks miserable.
Attempted kissAfter the failure
We pull back from Burke’s fumbling and see Barnabas at the gate to the courtyard, looking forlorn. I’m sure the writer and director wanted us to take this image as a sign that Barnabas is feeling sorry for himself, but the scene he’s been watching with us is so dreary that we would all have the same look on our faces.
Barnabas has seen the sorry spectacle
Some attribute George’s phenomenally bad kissing to his sexuality. I don’t buy it. Joel Crothers was also gay, and we’ve seen Joe Haskell give convincingly sultry kisses to two actresses. Louis Edmonds was gay too, and when Dark Shadows finally gives him an on-screen kiss two years from now he will do just as well. And the actresses unanimously testified that Jonathan Frid was the best kisser in the cast. Furthermore, the other conspicuously inept kisser on the show was the emphatically heterosexual Roger Davis (whom we have yet to see.) So George’s failures in this department are his alone, and do not reflect on any demographic group of which he was a member.
In the house, Vicki and Burke continue their vain struggle to kiss. Julia walks in and apologizes for intruding. She does not leave, nor does she take her eyes off Vicki and Burke. That makes sense- after all, she is still an MD, and it would appear that whatever is wrong with Burke might require some kind of medical intervention.
Vicki excuses herself to go to bed, and Burke asks Julia to join him in the drawing room. There, he denounces Vicki for her “vivid imagination,” a terrible quality that must be stamped out. He tells Julia that Vicki has experienced two hallucinations recently. We know that these were not hallucinations at all, but actual visitations from the ghost of Sarah Collins. Burke doesn’t know that. However, he does know of another sighting which led him to angrily accuse Vicki of being insane, when she saw Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, walking in a cemetery. At the time, everyone thought Maggie was dead, but now that it has been revealed she is alive, he removes the incident from his bill of particulars against Vicki.
Burke is furious with Vicki for having an imagination and wanting to be part of the story
Burke and Vicki, like most of the other characters, believe Julia’s cover story that she is an historian researching the Collinses for a book about the old families of New England. He asserts that helping Julia with her project is having a bad effect on Vicki, because she must “live in the present.” Julia asks if this means that she must live with him. Burke agrees that it does.
To Burke’s surprise, Julia agrees that Vicki should stop helping her and stay away from anything suggestive of past centuries. The two of them talk about how Vicki must be watched and controlled lest her imagination “run wild.” Julia is a mad scientist in league with a vampire, so this sort of talk is to be expected from her, but Burke is supposed to be on Vicki’s side. His frank intention to crush her imagination, expressed alternately with undisguised rage and airy paternalism, is as repulsive as anything we have seen from Barnabas.
Upstairs, Vicki is asleep. Barnabas opens the door and walks into the room. Again he thinks about biting her, again he doesn’t. He opens the enchanted music box, looks at her a bit longer, and leaves the way he came. If Barnabas doesn’t get off the dime soon, Vicki may marry Burke and become useless forever.
Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, has come back to Collinsport. This is a surprise to everyone. Months ago, Maggie had escaped from an unknown captor who drained her blood and deranged her mind. Maggie’s family doctor, addled quack Dave Woodard, had persuaded her father and her fiancé to join him in telling everyone that she was dead and to lock her up in a mental hospital a hundred miles north of town. Evidently, Woodard thought that if the captor believed he had got away with his crimes, he would turn into a solid citizen and a good neighbor.
The mental hospital where Woodard sent Maggie was administered by Dr Julia Hoffman, an MD whose specialties in psychiatry and hematology made her seem like the perfect person to oversee Maggie’s care. Unfortunately for Maggie, Julia is also a mad scientist. She has for years dreamed of finding a vampire on whom she can try an experimental treatment that will turn him back into a human. Julia quickly recognized Maggie’s condition as a symptom of vampire attacks, and eventually identified Barnabas Collins as the vampire who held Maggie prisoner. She has now met Barnabas and promised to keep Maggie in a state of amnesia so long as he cooperates with her experiments.
Yesterday, the ghost of Barnabas’ nine year old sister Sarah liberated Maggie from Julia’s hospital and transported her back to Collinsport. This had such a great effect on everyone that the show is now in color.
Barnabas goes to the great house of Collinwood and tells Julia that Maggie has come back. He declares that he will have to kill her. Julia forbids him to kill Maggie, on the grounds that doing so would ruin years of her work. Talented a liar as Julia is, she comes up with this so quickly and in such a tense situation that it is hard to believe it is not her true reason for wanting to leave Maggie alive.
Barnabas clarifies the matter further when he says that he will kill Julia first. He follows Julia around the drawing room, apparently thinking of strangling her then and there. She keeps talking, and he can’t resist responding. The telephone rings, and she answers. It is Woodard, calling her to come to his office and take over treatment of Maggie. Julia triumphantly assures Barnabas that once she has done her work, Maggie will never remember what he did to her.
In Woodard’s office, Maggie’s memory is rushing back. She tells her friend Vicki that when she was being held prisoner she spent time in a special room where she smelled a sweet, powerful fragrance and heard a special kind of music. She had told Julia about those sense impressions in a session in #282, and when in #289 Vicki told Julia about a special room in Barnabas’ house where there was a jar of jasmine perfume and an antique music box, Julia had reconstructed Barnabas’ entire plan. When she hinted to Vicki that Barnabas was trying to recreate the late Josette Collins, Vicki had become defensive and stormed off, indicating that Julia is casting an unflattering light on something Vicki has been looking at through a romantic lens.
The camera is tight on Vicki’s face when Maggie mentions the room, the fragrance, and the music. Vicki’s face darkens in response to each point, a little bit more each time. She seizes on the key word of each statement, rephrasing it as a question- “Special room?… Special scent?… Special music?” So far on Dark Shadows, every plot has come to its climax as a result of Vicki figuring out what’s going on. So each of these reactions generates its own little jolt of suspense.
Special room?Special scent?Special music?
By the time Julia gets there, Maggie is saying that she remembers everything. Julia hustles Woodard out of the room, and is alone with Maggie when Maggie says that Barnabas Collins was her captor. She describes him as a creature from the world of the dead. She allows that this description is difficult to believe, but Julia assures her that she believes everything she tells her. Julia then tells her that they must stabilize her memory so that she will not regress to the miserable state she was in when first they met. She takes out a jeweled medallion and hypnotizes Maggie.
Woodard waits outside his office while Julia works on Maggie. Finally, Julia opens the door and asks if he would like to see the change in her. Woodard eagerly goes into his office.
He asks Maggie how she is. As she answers, she sounds just like she did before she fell into Barnabas’ clutches. She has regained her Adult Child of an Alcoholic habits of advertising her happiness by starting every utterance with a laugh in her voice and putting exaggerated stress on almost every syllable with a rising pitch. She tells him that “Apparently, there was something wrong with my memory, but I’m fine now.” He asks what happened to her when she was gone, and she has no idea what he means. She remembers falling asleep in her own bed, and then she found herself here with Dr Hoffman. If he could just tell her what happened in between, she’s sure she will be just fine.
Woodard is shocked, but Julia flashes a look of glee. She does remember to put on her worried face after Woodard looks at her, but the smile never really leaves her eyes.
That Julia was able to achieve so precise and extensive a mutilation of Maggie’s memory in so short a time would suggest that she spent the whole period Maggie was under her care laying the groundwork for it. That would in turn tend to confirm that her only interest in Maggie is as a tool to gain access to Barnabas as a subject for her experiment.
Closing Miscellany
As the opening title sequence begins, an ABC staff announcer says he brings “Good news! This program, Dark Shadows, is now being presented in color.”
Opinions may vary as to how good this news was. In the 1960s and 1970s, most television sets in the USA did not receive in color. So even programming that was made in color had to be composed first to look good in black and white. It took a big budget and a relaxed production schedule to make a show that would also benefit from color, and Dark Shadows never had either of those things. When a sense of atmosphere is especially important, as it usually is early in a storyline, it is best to watch the show with the color turned off.
Still, directors Lela Swift and John Sedwick were ambitious visual artists, and before long there will be some moments when they find ways to turn the muddy, cruddy TV colors of the era to their advantage. The camera operators will learn their craft even more quickly. Today, only a few closeups really meet broadcast standards, while every other shot is badly out of focus. There aren’t many other episodes like that, at least not until the woeful Henry Kaplan becomes one of the directors in December 1968.
This is not only the first color episode, but also the first one where the words “Dark Shadows” swoop and swirl around on the screen during the opening titles. I’m sure that was a very impressive effect in 1967.
When we saw Julia hypnotize Maggie in their sessions in the hospital, she shone a penlight in her eyes. This is the first time she uses the medallion. That is an example of the use of color- the medallion wouldn’t have been anything special in black and white.
Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, is a patient in a mental hospital run by a mad scientist who is in league with the vampire who kept her prisoner. So there are bars on the windows of her room, and a lock on the outside of the door. The vampire, Barnabas Collins, scrambled her memories before she escaped from him, and the mad scientist, Julia Hoffman, intends to keep her in her amnesiac state.
We see Maggie at the barred window, begging for someone to help her go home. At that, her friend, the ghost of nine year old Sarah Collins, materializes in the room. Maggie hugs Sarah, and Sarah apologizes for taking so long to find her. Sarah assures Maggie that she can help her get home, but tells her she will have to do what she says.
Sarah apologizes for taking so long to come
At Sarah’s direction, Maggie stands in the corner behind the door and calls the nurse while Sarah sits on the bed. The nurse opens the door and sees Sarah, but not Maggie. Maggie slips out and closes the door behind her, locking Sarah and the nurse in the room. The nurse tries the door, looks back, and sees that Sarah is nowhere to be found. The camera stays with her for a long moment as she looks around in bewilderment. As Nurse Jackson, Alice Drummond does a great job with this stage business.
Meanwhile, back in Collinsport, there is a misdemeanor in progress. Well-meaning governess Vicki, her depressing boyfriend Burke, and Barnabas are sneaking into an old vacant house that has captured Vicki’s fancy. Barnabas astounds Burke with his ability to see in the dark as he describes the “No Trespassing” sign, and refers to the same ability as he volunteers to explore the upper storey of the house while Burke and Vicki stand around on the ground floor.
Burke has taken Vicki’s interest in the house as a marriage proposal, and keeps talking about how they should furnish it when they live there together. The only thing he says that gets much of a reaction from her is a disparaging remark about Barnabas, which elicits flash of anger. Yesterday’s episode included a couple of clues that Vicki’s infatuation with “the house by the sea” might lead her, not to Burke and irrelevance, but to Barnabas and the center of the action. Her forceful response to Burke’s Barnabas-bashing renews those hopes.
Burke has spoken ill of Barnabas
Barnabas comes back from the upstairs with a handkerchief bearing the initials “F. McA. C.” He makes a present of it to Vicki. When she objects to this act of theft, he assures her that whoever it belonged to would want her to have it. That too picks up on hints from yesterday, when Barnabas indicated by his typical slips of the tongue that he had a connection to the house that he didn’t want the other characters to know about. We haven’t yet heard of anyone living or dead with the initials “F. McA. C.,” so presumably we are supposed to start waiting to hear a fresh story about Barnabas’ earlier existence.
Somewhere to the north, Maggie and Sarah are sitting in the woods. In recent days, we have heard several times that the mental hospital is a hundred miles from Maggie’s home in Collinsport, so if they are going to walk the whole way and take breaks it will be a while before they get back.
Maggie asks Sarah how she got into her room. “Do you really want to know?” Maggie says she does. “The same way I got out.” How did she get out? “The same way I got in!” At that, Maggie laughs. Sarah first met Maggie when she was Barnabas’ prisoner, and she remarks that this is the first time she has heard her laugh. She tells her she ought to do it all the time.
Apparently, an early draft of the script called for a truck driver to pick Maggie up and take her back to town. But that couldn’t be. How will Sarah get Maggie to Collinsport from the hospital? The same way she got to the hospital from Collinsport, of course.
In Collinsport, Vicki, Burke, and Barnabas are sitting at a table in the Blue Whale tavern. While Barnabas gets the drinks, Vicki tells Burke that he and Barnabas are extraordinarily unalike. Burke says he takes that as a compliment, a remark to which Vicki reacts with displeasure.
Burke has repeated his offense
We can sympathize- sure, Barnabas is a vampire, and that is sub-optimal in a potential husband. But it doesn’t make him the opposite of Burke, who has been draining the life out of Vicki lately with his demands that she steer clear of anything that might be interesting to the audience and become as dull as he is. The real difference between Burke and Barnabas is that Barnabas drives one exciting plot point after another, while Burke makes nothing happen.
Barnabas comes back to the table, and the conversation returns to the “house by the sea.” Burke is about to propose marriage to Vicki. Suddenly, the jukebox stops playing and everyone falls silent. It is as if something has entered the room that everyone can feel but no one can see. The door opens, and in walks Maggie.
Vicki is the first to see her. She calls her name. Barnabas reacts with alarm. Maggie walks slowly towards their table. She approaches Barnabas, who tries to remain very still. She takes a long look at him, walking around to get the best angle. She touches her head, calls out “No!,” and faints. And that is what you call a “cliffhanger ending.”
Well-meaning governess Vicki was the main character of Dark Shadows in its first 39 weeks, and themost interesting storyline was her relationship to her charge, strange and troubled boy David Collins. That story came to its climax when David chose life with Vicki over death with his mother, blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, in #191, and Vicki hasn’t had much to do since.
Yesterday, Vicki told her depressing boyfriend, fake Shemp Burke Devlin, about an old vacant house that excites her. Since Vicki’s work with David is compensated mainly with room and board, the only way her interest in an empty house could lead to anything happening on the show would be if she quit her job, married Burke, and moved there with him. Since Burke has even less connection to the ongoing narrative arc than Vicki does, and has been spending his time lately demanding that she stop trying to attach herself to the story and settle in with him in his dead end far away from the plot, that is a dismal prospect.
All the action on the show is centered on vampire Barnabas Collins. In the opening scene, Barnabas talked with his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie Loomis about two women. One was Vicki. Willie was agitated that Barnabas is planning to bite Vicki. This is an odd thing to worry about- Vicki has gone out of her way to make herself available to Barnabas for biting, even contriving to spend the night in his house. But she still has all her blood, and no foothold in the vampire story. When Barnabas tells Willie that he does not intend to harm Vicki in any way, those of us who hope she will stay relevant to Dark Shadows have a sinking feeling that he might be telling the truth.
The other woman Barnabas and Willie discuss is mad scientist Julia Hoffman. In contrast to his assurances that he means no harm to Vicki, Barnabas muses openly that he might have to kill Julia at any moment. Observing Willie’s reactions, Barnabas comments that it is interesting that Willie is so concerned about Vicki, but utterly indifferent to Julia. If we remember Willie as he was before Barnabas enslaved him, this may not be so odd.
Before he became sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie Loomis, he was dangerously unstable ruffian Willie Loomis, menace to womankind. Willie tried to rape Vicki, among others, and his guilt over the use he made of his freedom when he had it is reflected in his solicitousness towards those whom he once used so ill. By the time he met Julia, he had been under Barnabas’ power for months, so he has made no choices concerning her that he can regret.
Barnabas shows up as Vicki and Burke are getting ready to visit “the house by the sea.” Barnabas slips a couple of times as he talks with them about it, revealing to the audience that he is familiar with the house. This raises our hopes- perhaps Vicki’s fascination with the house will lead her to Barnabas and relevance, not to Burke and oblivion. Vicki invites Barnabas to come along with her and Burke as they tour the house, and he agrees.
While Vicki is upstairs changing her clothes, Barnabas and Burke talk in the drawing room. Barnabas points out that little is known of how Burke became so rich so quickly in the years before he came back to Collinsport. Burke responds that far less is known of Barnabas than of him, that his entire life before this year is perfectly obscure to everyone. As Barnabas, Jonathan Frid plays this scene with more variety and subtlety of expression than any previous one, and as Burke, Anthony George gives a tight, forceful performance. It is the first time Dark Shadows viewers have glimpsed the reason George had such a long and busy career as an actor.
George was a cold actor who excelled at characters whose intelligence and determination were obvious, but whose feelings and intentions the audience could only guess at. That would have made him a fine choice for the part of Burke in the early months of the show, but these days he spends most of his time giving big reactions to bewildering news and the rest in passionate love scenes with Vicki. George was just awful at both of those. But in today’s duel with Barnabas, Burke is choosing his every word and gesture with care, putting him right in the center of George’s wheelhouse. Opposite the much warmer Jonathan Frid, the effect is electric.
It leaves me wondering what might have been. Mitch Ryan was compelling as Burke #1, but his hot style of acting pushed Burke’s emotions to the surface and took away some of the mystery that would have been needed to make the “Revenge of Burke Devlin” storyline a success. With George in the part, that story would probably still have fizzled, but it might have taken a bit longer to do so. And of course the part George has been struggling with, until this scene in vain, was written for Ryan. If the two had just traded places and the scripts had stayed the same, Burke #1 and Burke #2 might both have been strong characters.
Of course, they wouldn’t have stayed entirely the same. The writers watch the show and are influenced by what they see the actors doing. But they may not have changed as much as you might expect. Neither Ron Sproat nor Malcolm Marmorstein seemed to have much sense of what actors could do. It’s no wonder that George’s first good scene comes in the second episode credited to Gordon Russell. Perhaps if Russell had been with the show earlier, Burke #2 might have been more of a success.
The scene also brings up one of my favorite fanfic ideas. People are going to wonder about Barnabas’ background, and Burke needs to be written off the show. Why not solve both of those problems by having Barnabas enslave Burke, make Burke set up businesses in Barnabas’ name and use his shadier contacts to get Barnabas false identification papers, then kill Burke off once he has exhausted his resources? You could do that in such a way that the other characters would think Barnabas was a nice guy who was using his wealth to prop Burke up, consolidating his position in their eyes. You could also use it to connect Barnabas to the wider world beyond the estate, suggesting that he poses a menace not only to one family but to a whole community.
At length, Vicki comes back downstairs. Burke greets her first, but she barely acknowledges him. She has eyes only for Barnabas. Barnabas may not be in any hurry to bite Vicki, but she is bursting with readiness to get into the vampire story and back into the main action of the show.
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.
Dark Shadows Commentary 