victoria winters – Page 13 – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 345: That place in Brazil

In Dark Shadows #3, man of mystery Burke Devlin mentioned that he started on the path to riches when he was in a bar in South America. Since then, he has mentioned his business interests on that continent several times, and the old standard “Brazil” has emerged as his informal theme song. Yesterday’s episode, one of the finest in the series, called back to the early days of the show several times, and today they close the loop on Burke’s connection to Brazil. His plane crashes in that country, and he dies there.

We learn of Burke’s fatal accident when housekeeper Mrs Johnson tells her employer, Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, that she has heard a radio report of an aviation disaster in Brazil. Mrs Johnson first came to work in Liz’ home, the great house of Collinwood, in #81. At that time Burke had sworn to wreak a terrible vengeance on the Collinses and Mrs Johnson was his secret agent. Burke renounced his quest for vengeance in #201, which was just as well, since it was never very interesting anyway. But they never told us that he had stopped paying Mrs Johnson or that she had stopped funneling information to him. So viewers who have been watching all along may wonder if she really did just happen to be listening when the radio announced that a Varig flight had gone down outside Belém. Maybe she was in touch with some associate of Burke’s who told her more than she could repeat to Liz. Or maybe not, but in any case it is satisfying to be reminded of the connection.

Burke was engaged to marry one of Collinwood’s residents, well-meaning governess Vicki. When she is told that Burke is missing and presumed dead, Vicki declares that she is certain he will come back. Vicki was originally the audience’s point of view character, an outsider to whom everything we did not know had to be explained. We now know many things she does not, but in this declaration she once more seems to be closer to us than to the other characters in her knowledge. She knows, as we do, that she lives in a soap opera and no major character is likely to stay dead permanently, especially not when his death is supposed to be the result of a plane crash in a faraway jungle.

On the other hand, Burke has been fading in importance for a long time. After his revenge story fizzled, he never really found a new reason to be on the show. His relationship with Vicki might have made things happen when he was still in conflict with the Collinses. She would then have found herself torn between her lover and the family that had all but adopted her. But once Burke and the Collinses patched things up, there was no obstacle between him and Vicki. In the last few days, it has seemed that she might even be able to stay in the house and keep her job after marrying him. There has been a theme where Burke tried to gaslight Vicki out of believing in supernatural phenomena that he himself had plenty of evidence to suppose were real, but that was less a storyline than a speed bump. Burke’s part was recast after the charismatic Mitch Ryan showed up for #252 too drunk to work; since then he has been played by the woefully miscast Anthony George, and it has been obvious that the character needed to be written out of the show before he did permanent damage to George’s career. So maybe Burke won’t come back after all.

Meanwhile, in the Old House on the same estate, vampire Barnabas Collins is moping around while mad scientist Julia Hoffman works on her notes about her attempt to turn him into a real boy. When she asks if there is anything she can do to lighten his mood, he sarcastically suggests that they play a game of cards or of cribbage. She’s up for either one, but he says that he won’t be happy until Vicki comes to him. He doesn’t know about Burke’s accident, but has somehow convinced himself that Vicki’s personality will eventually disappear and be replaced with that of his long-lost love Josette, and that as Josette she will be his bride. Barnabas goes on so long about how wonderful it will be when the Josettified Vicki is in the house that we start to wonder just how the two of them will pass the time. The day may come when Barnabas is glad of a cribbage board.

Julia only recently committed her first murder. She and Barnabas killed her old medical school classmate Dave Woodard a week ago, and she is still reeling from the shock of it. One thing she has settled on is the fact that she is going to be linked to Barnabas for the rest of her life. It doesn’t seem likely that she will ever be able to tell anyone else about Woodard, and being a murderer is, like it or not, an important part of her identity. So no one other than Barnabas can ever really know her. She’s making the best of this by trying to fall in love with him, but his sick obsession with reenacting the plot of the 1932 film The Mummy with himself in the Boris Karloff role and a woman in her early twenties in Zita Johanns’ double role as the dead princess and her reincarnation would seem to leave her at an impasse.

Julia presses Barnabas about his relationship with Josette. When he keeps insisting that the Josettified Vicki will come to him of her own free will, she asks if the original Josette ever did that. Barnabas’ silent grimace answers her question. She goes on to ask why Josette is so important to him if he was never very important to her. He says he will explain it all to her, but that they must have the proper setting. He leads her to the place of Josette’s death, the cliff at Widows’ Hill.

Barnabas has given us at least two versions of his relationship with Josette. In #212, he gave a speech to her portrait which implied that she was his grandmother, and that she sided with his father her son when he and Barnabas had a fateful clash. Soon after, Josette was retconned into Barnabas’ lost love. In #236, Barnabas was trying to brainwash Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, into thinking that she was Josette. He told her then that he had sailed with Josette from her home in the French West Indies to Collinwood, where she was to marry his uncle Jeremiah Collins. It was his task to teach her English on the voyage. Aboard ship, they fell in love. This reenactment of the tale of Tristan and Isolde ended as sadly as did the original, though the particulars of the story were not the same.

Now, Barnabas tells Julia that he met Josette for the first time when she arrived at Collinwood. He had taken no interest in his uncle’s betrothed until he saw her, but was stunned by her beauty and quickly fell in love with her. He found himself compelled to be “her good and faithful friend Barnabas,” a position he found humiliating. As a vampire, Barnabas is a metaphor for selfishness and cruelty, and so it is hardly surprising that he confines Julia to the same position with regard to himself and that he openly delights in her humiliation. It is a bit dizzying that she expresses so much sympathy for him, telling him in this scene that he never seems more human than when he talks about Josette.

In telling this latest version of the story, Barnabas says that as Josette came to feel that her youth was wasted on the elderly Jeremiah, it dawned on him that there was a way he could offer her eternal youth. This harks back to #233, when Barnabas told Vicki and Liz’ daughter Carolyn the story of Josette’s death, that she leapt off the cliff because she was being pursued by her lover. So we are to assume that Josette killed herself rather than let Barnabas turn her into a vampire. But it might suggest more than that. Whenever Barnabas met Josette, and whether it was aboard ship or on her arrival, he was not yet a vampire. We have not heard how he turned into one. Perhaps he involved himself in some kind of black magic in an attempt to keep himself and Josette young forever, and as a result he became a vampire and she fled from him to her death.

Vicki shows up and tells Barnabas and Julia about Burke. They are stunned. Julia’s reflex is to lean in and touch Vicki’s arm, Barnabas’ is to stagger back.

Barnabas quickly senses opportunity, and he shoos Julia away. He says that she was complaining of the cold and that for the sake of her health she ought not to stay. She is so obviously humiliated that only Vicki’s absorption in her own distress keeps her from noticing.

Barnabas plays the “good and faithful friend,” and Vicki looks over the edge of the cliff. She talks about the widows who have thrown themselves to their deaths from it over the years. She says that she had at first assumed that they were just “make-believe creatures,” but that if she thought Burke were really gone she would throw herself after them. Barnabas grabs her and urges her to stop such talk.

As this goes on, we hear the “Widows’ Wail,” a sound effect prominent in the early months of the show that the uninitiated mistake for wind, but that indicates something terrible is about to happen. When Vicki and Burke had their final conversation yesterday, they heard it, and he refused to admit its meaning. Vicki and Barnabas hear it now. The Widows bewail upcoming disasters, and Burke is already dead. Barnabas tells Vicki that she will be a bride very soon, and she nods and repeats, “A bride… very soon.” As she does, the Wail sounds louder than before.

Closing Miscellany

This episode includes one of the most famous bloopers in the entire series. When Liz is on the telephone getting the news about Burke’s plane crash, she refers to “That place in Brazil… (long pause)… (separate, equally long pause)… (fidget)… (different kind of pause)… Belém!” It is a wonder to behold.

This episode was taped on 16 October 1967. On the 28th of that month, Alexandra Moltke married Philip Isles. So, whether or not Vicki was going to become “a bride very soon,” her player was. The wedding announcement in The New York Times doesn’t mention Dark Shadows; it does mention that “Mrs David Ford” was part of the bridal party. That Mrs David Ford was Nancy Barrett, who played Carolyn, and her Mr Ford played Maggie’s father Sam.

From The New York Times, 29 October 1967

Neither Mrs Isles’ marriage to Philip nor Miss Barrett’s to David Ford lasted very long. Mrs Isles is still known as Mrs Isles, even though she was married to a doctor named Alfred Jaretzki for 33 years, ending with his death in 2014. By the time she met Jaretzki, she was a nationally known documentary filmmaker, and there is her son Adam Isles, the father of her three grandchildren and a former high official of the US government. So I suppose it made sense to stick with that name. In any case, I doubt very much that the widows were wailing for her.

My wife, Mrs Acilius, mentioned that even though we have seen the whole series before, she fully expected Barnabas to push Julia off the cliff. The episode pulled her in so completely that she didn’t stop to tell herself that she would have remembered if he’d done that.

Episode 344: Listen to the music, listen!

Strange and troubled boy David Collins is sitting on his bed. The ghost of his cousin Sarah is with him, playing “London Bridge” on her flute. She has told him that local physician Dave Woodard is dead, and he is depressed. She explains that she thought she had to tell him.

Sarah says she thinks that Woodard’s death was a terrible one and that it shouldn’t have happened. She denies knowing any more than that, and when David presses her for further information she becomes uncomfortable and vanishes.

David’s aunt, matriarch Liz, comes into his room to break the news to him about Woodard. She is startled to find that he already knows. She is distressed at his attitude of complete resignation. Woodard was the only adult who believed all of the facts about the supernatural menace looming over the great estate of Collinwood and the town of Collinsport that David and Sarah have shared with each other, and when David last saw him Woodard was trying to do something about that menace. David takes Woodard’s death as the end of all hope.

Downstairs, Liz meets her daughter Carolyn and well-meaning governess Vicki. She tells them how sad David is, and Carolyn goes up to see him. She starts talking about imaginary friends, and David asks if she means Sarah. Carolyn says that she doesn’t think Sarah is imaginary, and David replies “You don’t have to pretend. I don’t care.” He isn’t the least bit angry with her- he means exactly what he says when he tells her he doesn’t care how she feels about him.

Viewers who have been with the show from the beginning could see that reaction coming. For the first 24 weeks or so, Carolyn was a flighty heiress, a self-centered young woman who took no interest at all in her little cousin. Since then they have discarded that theme and Carolyn has become a mature and caring person. She and David have had some moments where she has seemed like a big sister. Still, she is still far less involved with him than is Vicki, and David doesn’t have any hopes that even Vicki will listen to him when he tells the truth about the strange goings-on. So when David says “I don’t care,” Carolyn is hit by a freight train that we’ve seen coming for a long time.

This new Carolyn won’t give up on David. She confides that when she was nine years old, she had a friend named Randy, a little boy who always wore a red sweater and who may or may not have existed. Carolyn admits that Randy may have been a ghost, and there is a moment when, as Danny Horn puts it on his Dark Shadows Every Day, “David stands up, and he looks at her, as if they’re really seeing each other for the first time in a long while.” The first time ever, I’d say- David and his father Roger only moved into the house a month or so before the show started, and by that time Carolyn was the character we first saw.

This isn’t the first time the audience has seen this side of Carolyn. In the opening weeks of Dark Shadows, she was one of several characters who had brief conversations with Vicki about the legendary ghosts of Collinwood, and she was the most persistent about laughing those legends off. But before the show had been on the air for five weeks, Carolyn admitted to Vicki that the legends were all true, and that she had tried to downplay them only because she liked Vicki and wanted her to stay.

That development is recapitulated in this scene. Where Vicki had reacted with confusion, telling herself that she ought to be concerned about Carolyn’s mental health but unable to quash a sickly feeling that she might be right, David reacts with wonderment. He is beyond trying to do anything about the horrors that he knows are in progress, let alone appealing to anyone to join him in fighting them, but we can see him absorbing the information that Carolyn is not at all the person she had led him to believe she was.

Once Carolyn stops pretending she does not believe in ghosts, we see why she and the other adults in the family are so insistent about keeping the door shut on the supernatural back-world behind the main action. “London Bridge” starts playing on the soundtrack; Carolyn and David can both hear it. As it goes on, David declares that something terrible is about to happen. It will be an accident- no one will cause it, no one wants it to happen. But it can’t be stopped. Carolyn asks how he knows, and he says he just does.

David communes with the spirits. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The little girl we saw in the opening is Sarah, but in this moment we realize she is not the whole of Sarah. The girl is only one manifestation of an unfathomably vast complex of phenomena. The world in which the action appears to be taking place is a tiny, fragile thing by comparison with forces like Sarah. If the characters stray from their little paths of denial and evasion the whole thing may at any moment dissolve altogether, thrusting the back-world into the foreground and leaving them adrift. After a few minutes of David’s soothsaying, Carolyn protests that “None of this is real, it can’t be!” But it’s too late- she knows that it is all too real, and the world of love affairs and hotels and motorcycles and dress shops and restaurants in which she has spent the last 69 weeks trying to find a place is a dream from which she is already starting to awaken.

Meanwhile, Vicki and her depressing fiancé Burke have declined Liz’ offer to live in the west wing of Collinwood when they are married. Liz had hoped to keep Vicki around so that she could help with David. When Burke asks if he should talk to David, Liz tells him not to bother. Carolyn already talked to him, Liz explains, and so far from calming David down she got herself upset too.

That response would suggest that Liz wants to tranquilize David, not to communicate with him. On the heels of the scene between David and Carolyn, it tells us more. Liz has lived in Collinwood longer than anyone, and she has struggled harder than anyone to keep the non-supernatural fore-world in operation. After Carolyn’s experiment in facing facts comes so close to sweeping the “logical explanations” away once and for all, we can see what Liz is trying to protect by keeping David quiet.

Burke is leaving the house, about to go on a business trip to South America, when David emerges from his room and says goodbye. David’s tone makes it clear that it is a final farewell. Burke keeps telling David that he will come back, but David is certain that Burke will die. Burke is shocked by David’s attitude, and says that perhaps they should live in the west wing after all. Vicki is thrilled by the idea.

Burke and Vicki go to a terrace outside the house. There, they hear the wind whistling through the rocks along the shore. On Vicki’s first night in the house, she heard from Liz’ brother Roger the legend of “The Widows’ Wail,” according to which this sound is a warning from the spirits of the widows who haunt the area. In those days, Vicki had little patience for ghost stories, and the “Widows’ Wail” seemed to be the easiest of all the legends to dismiss. But the wind blows every night, and she’s only heard it make that sound on a handful of occasions, usually right before something terrible happens. She’s also seen multiple ghosts, done battle with a humanoid Phoenix, and encountered what anyone with access to old movies would recognize as evidence that a vampire is operating in the vicinity. So she hears the Widows’ Wail the same way regular viewers of the show do, as the sound of the supernatural back-world blasting through and knocking everything else down.

Vicki hears the Widows’ Wail. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

When Vicki pleads with Burke not to go to South America, he replies “Don’t tell me you’re starting to believe all that stuff!” For months now, Burke has been gaslighting Vicki, pretending that she is crazy for believing in supernatural phenomena, including phenomena he himself witnessed and previously acknowledged. But hearing the Widows’ Wail, which was a prominent topic in the early days, and seeing the black and white imagery of the kinescope, we can remember a more appealing version of Burke. Back then, Burke was one of several longtime residents of Collinsport who used the word “ghost” figuratively in conversation with Vicki, each time prompting her to exclaim “Surely you don’t believe in ghosts!?,” to which he would reply that it was entirely possible that there were literal ghosts at Collinwood. For a moment, we see that Burke, and forget the gaslighting abuser. That moment lasts just long enough that we can share David’s sorrow and Vicki’s terror at Burke’s imminent death.

Episode 343: Not as a monster

Vampire Barnabas Collins is in a chirpy mood. He and his associate, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, have just committed the premeditated murder of Julia’s medical school classmate Dave Woodard. As we saw when Barnabas made his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie to help him hide the corpse of seagoing con man Jason McGuire, nothing makes him happier than forcing someone to help with the killing of a former friend.

I think the actors were placed behind the laboratory apparatus intentionally, to highlight the characters’ helplessness and isolation.

Today, Julia wants to stop her attempt to cure Barnabas of vampirism, but he won’t hear of it. When she tells him she might try to kill him instead of curing him, Barnabas relishes telling her that he trusts her completely. She does knock him out of his blissful state when she suggests that if she manages to turn him into a real boy, he might have a conscience. He gives a little speech in which he says some brave things about being willing to accept the punishment fitting a man who had done the things he has done if he also gains the ability to love as a man can love. Jonathan Frid puts enough into this speech that it is possible to sympathize with Barnabas in the moment that he is delivering it.

That moment doesn’t last very long. By the end of the episode, we are back on this set, where Julia says that “someone” might love Barnabas as he is, and he takes delight in her humiliation as he makes it obvious that he knows she is referring to herself.

Some say that Barnabas’ speech about wanting to love is meant to make the character more likable, but it has the opposite effect when he so smoothly transitions back into this gleeful cruelty. The other day, Julia told Barnabas that she had wondered whether he was capable of feeling any emotions at all, but we see in this scene what we’ve seen all along, that he is nothing but emotion. Except when he is acting, trying to convince the living members of the Collins family that he is their long-lost cousin from England, his feelings are right on the surface. For a minute or two, he has some feelings about love and justice, and we see those very clearly. But that is a brief interlude in the middle of his entirely gratuitous torture of Julia. We are left in no doubt that he takes an utterly unmixed pleasure in causing her pain. We’ve already seen very cold villains on Dark Shadows and before the series ends we will see more, but by the end of this scene Barnabas claims the crown of most detestable character ever to appear on the show. It’s so hard to imagine how he could possibly sustain such a level of malignity that it’s no wonder viewers still keep tuning in to see what he will do next.

The main theme of the episode is the contrast between Barnabas’ relationship with Julia and his relationship with well-meaning governess Vicki. For the first 39 weeks of Dark Shadows, Vicki was the audience’s main point-of-view character; now Julia is the one who knows what we know, and who makes things happen when she learns new information. Seeing Barnabas first with one woman, then with the other, we see how the show has been changing since he joined the cast.

Barnabas eavesdrops on Vicki’s conversation with her depressing fiancé Burke on the terrace at the great house of Collinwood, then slides in and claims to have inadvertently overheard the last few words of their conversation. Burke gives Barnabas a dirty look, then excuses himself to do some telephoning while Vicki and Barnabas stay on the terrace and talk for a little while.

Barnabas has some vague idea of seducing Vicki, an idea he has been remarkably desultory about pursuing. In this scene, he does the only thing he has ever really got round to doing about it, which is to listen sympathetically while Vicki tells him her troubles. This time, she’s trying to convince herself that she wants what Burke wants, which is to get away from Collinwood and start a new life somewhere else. It isn’t an exciting situation, but Alexandra Moltke Isles delivers her lines with so much urgency that it holds our attention.

Vicki shares her anguish with her kindly friend Barnabas

Julia eavesdrops on this conversation. She looks miserable. Whatever she may have had in mind when she first came to Collinwood, Julia is stuck with Barnabas for the foreseeable future. Not only has Julia murdered one of her oldest friends for Barnabas’ sake, she has involved herself so deeply in so many of his activities that it is unclear how she would go back to the successful professional life she had before she met him even if he were destroyed. If he is going to spend his time hanging around other women, she faces a drab prospect.

In the drawing room, Burke, Vicki, and Julia talk about the death of Dr Woodard. Julia can’t bear the topic, and excuses herself to go out to the terrace. There, she catches a glimpse of Woodard’s ghost. Julia screams, Burke and Vicki come, and all she can do when they ask what’s wrong is to keep jabbering that “he wasn’t there.”

There are some rough patches in the script today. For example, in the opening, Julia is touching the equipment when Barnabas exclaims “Don’t stop!” This is puzzling- she doesn’t appear to be stopping anything. And when Julia says “He wasn’t there,” Vicki has to ask “Who wasn’t there?” A person might reflexively say such a thing, and Mrs Isles’ rapid delivery of the line and simultaneous movement of the neck and the shoulders suggest such a reflex. That’s probably the best choice any actor could have made, but the line still gets a bad laugh. Barnabas and Julia’s successive eavesdropping expeditions also come off as some kind of joke, and all the scenes take too long. The whole thing could have used another trip through the typewriter. Still, writer Joe Caldwell was at his best with miniature character studies, and while he may not have had the time he needed to give this one his usual polish, the actors still have more than enough to show what they can do. It’s a fairly good outing, all things considered.

Episode 311: Attached to children

Both Danny Horn and Patrick McCray wrote fine blog posts about this episode. I have a few things to add to what they’ve said.

When vampire Barnabas Collins and his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie approach the Tomb of the Collinses, strange and troubled boy David hears them talking about mysterious little girl Sarah. Since Sarah had made him promise to keep her connection to the place secret, he opens the panel to the concealed chamber she had shown him and hides there. To his horror, he hears Barnabas order Willie to open the panel. Still trying to keep Sarah’s secret, he hides in the coffin in the center of the chamber while Willie and Barnabas walk around it. He hears them talk about Barnabas’ relationship with Sarah and Willie’s discomfort with the chamber.

They don’t mention that Barnabas is a vampire, or that he was the one who imprisoned Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl In Town. But they say enough that David should be able to figure out all of Barnabas’ secrets. Once he has heard Barnabas say that he was left to comfort Sarah after their dog was put down, it isn’t much of a leap to conclude that Sarah is his little sister. And once he’s heard Barnabas ask Willie if he is frightened by the “contents” of the chamber, he should know that there is something in there more than can be seen at a first glance.

In episodes #301 and #306, we were reminded of Jason McGuire, whom Barnabas killed and forced Willie to bury in the floor of this chamber. We also saw the chamber itself in #306, so that regular viewers would be sure to think of Jason’s grave. If David should repeat Barnabas’ comment about the chamber’s “contents” at the right time, Jason might yet be exhumed. So Barnabas has created an extreme danger to himself with his big mouth. Since it does not seem that Dark Shadows could continue if either Barnabas or David were to destroy the other, we are in suspense as to how they will get out of this situation.

After Barnabas and Willie leave, David gets out of the coffin and finds he cannot open the panel from the inside. Willie had used a gadget hidden in the stairs to open it, the first time we have seen this device. As David starts to panic, he hears the strains of Sarah’s signature tune, “London Bridge.” He turns away from the panel, looks at the blank walls of the chamber, and starts calling on Sarah.

In his post, Danny Horn asks “Has David just figured out that Sarah’s a ghost?” I think it’s more complicated than that. In #288, David happily considered the possibility that Sarah might be a ghost, and throughout the series he has been on easy terms with several ghosts. So I think he has assumed she was a ghost all along, and was just too tactful to bring it up when he was talking with her.

Back in the great house of Collinwood, well-meaning governess Vicki is on the terrace, worried about David’s disappearance. Barnabas peeks at her through the gate, as he would do if he were not allowed to look at her. Then he just walks up and starts a conversation with her, leaving us to wonder what the whole peeping-Tom act was about.

Vicki is so concerned for David that she starts crying. Barnabas tells her to put her head on his shoulder, which she does. He seems to be trying to restrain himself, but she has such a long, pretty neck, and it’s right there, and he’s so very thirsty…

Snack time. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Patrick McCray says of this moment:

As Barnabas lunges in to bite her, my concern and sympathy is challenged as I ponder her almost athletic lack of awareness. Of course, I’ll inevitably side with the person getting her throat ripped out… but it won’t stop me from wondering why she’s practically painting a landing strip on her neck. Vicki? You have a generation of young people idolizing you.

Today, the discussion isn’t even a metaphor. No, she’s not asking for it. No one is. So, what is the message that we’re supposed to take away from a dangerous conversation like this? For a person constantly asking questions about everything — and never understanding what she hears — Vicki is the picture of unawareness. Evil is evil. An attack is an attack. And awareness is power. Ironic that her would-be attacker, Barnabas, is frequently even more unaware than is she. However, if anyone on a soap paid attention at all, the stories would last ten minutes. But that’s the point. The more the characters lack focus, the more we learn its value. David is the most aware character on the show, and in this episode, he learns the most he ever will in one night. Pity it’s from inside a coffin.

That part of the discussion is too much metaphor to ignore.
Patrick McCray, “The Dark Shadows Daybook: August 22,” The Collinsport Historical Society, 22 August 2018.

Again, I think it’s a more complicated. I think we have to analyze Vicki’s behavior at three levels of intentionality. First, there’s the in-universe level, the sort of analysis of her motives another character in the same story might give if they had the same information we do. If that character saw Vicki’s depressing fiancé Burke angrily telling her she was crazy for saying that she had seen and heard things that we have also seen and heard, refusing to give her even the most basic information about himself and airily dismissing her questions as a morbid preoccupation with “the past,” and telling other people that her imagination will “run wild” unless he monitors and controls her, they might very well think that Vicki is tired of Burke’s abusive ways. To that character, there would be nothing “athletic” about Vicki’s failure to suspect Barnabas- it is perfectly natural for her to want to think the best of a man who has always been pleasant and respectful to her, unlike the blatant villain she is supposed to marry.

The second level of intentionality is of Vicki’s usual function in the narrative. Up to this point, every storyline has come to its climax when Vicki found out what was going on. She is still the audience’s main point of view character, and as such she naturally tends towards the center of the action. All of the action lately has been in the vampire story, so we expect her to involve herself deeply in it. In the first weeks, when it was possible that Barnabas, as the second in a parade of supernatural nemeses, would be destroyed and make way for a third as undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins had made way for him, we expected Vicki to be the one who drive the stake into his heart. Now that it is clear he is on the show for the long haul, we are expecting Vicki to become his victim, and presumably to become a vampire herself. As the protagonist, she is actively working to get more deeply involved with Barnabas. She hasn’t yet resorted to “painting a landing strip on her neck,” but she did invite herself to spend the night at Barnabas’ house in #285 and #286, and it wasn’t her fault she left in the morning still having all her blood.

Vicki the unappreciated fiancée wants only a friend who will respect her; Vicki the protagonist wants to be part of the main story. The tension between the incompatible goals of these two aspects of Vicki is expressed in the third level of intentionality, which Alexandra Moltke Isles expresses in the choices that make up her performance. Mrs Isles takes every opportunity to show that Vicki is more strongly drawn to Barnabas than to anyone else, most definitely including Burke. That attraction brings the character back to life. After a few days when she was trying to submit to Burke’s abuse and ignore “the past,” Barnabas asks her to intercede with Burke on his behalf and she comes roaring back, an assertive character who will not give an inch even when Burke makes some good points.

It is the sight of this strong Vicki that introduces a conflict into the audience’s feelings. On the one hand, we don’t want to lose her, and if she does not become a vampire, it’s hard to see a future for her on the show. On the other, it would be a terrible betrayal for Barnabas to repay her trust in him by doing such a thing to her. All the more so because we’ve spent so much time seeing Vicki become close to David, and if she follows the pattern set in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, vampire Vicki will be a threat to all children.

Our sadness at that betrayal would be a deep emotion of exactly the kind soap operas are supposed to create. That so shocking a crime would lead to a more meaningful and more suspenseful story and a richer part for our favorite character would guarantee that we would surprise ourselves by forgiving Barnabas for it and cheering when he and Vicki become a couple. So, I think a savvy audience watching Dark Shadows up to this point would have to expect to see just that story play out.

Episode 309: The tougher the better

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.

Jeremiah watching over three pals. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

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.

“The only questions I have are about chapter two.” Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

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.

*In his post about this episode on Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn links to an October 2012 article in which Marmorstein nursed his wounds about getting fired off the show. Producer Bob Costello and writers Joe Caldwell and Sam Hall are all quoted disputing Marmorstein’s version of events.

Episode 308: Master of the evasive answer

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.

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.

David doesn’t have the answers. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

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.

Julia twirling her mustache. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

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.

Episode 307: A man and a woman

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.

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.

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.

Episode 306: Private little investigations

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 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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Episode 300: Burke Devlin must die

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.

Barnabas agrees to do as Julia says. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

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!”

Episode 299: When darkness falls

Vampire Barnabas Collins creeps up on well-meaning governess Vicki from behind. He touches her neck, and she is startled.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.