Tag: willie loomis

Episode 587: How can you hate yourself so much?

In April 1968, mad scientist Eric Lang promised Barnabas Collins that he could cure him of vampirism. The cure was an experimental procedure modeled on the one in Hammer Studios’ 1967 film Frankenstein Created Woman. A body constructed of parts salvaged from several fresh corpses was to be associated with Barnabas, and when the procedure was complete Lang expected Barnabas’ body to be dead and his mind to awaken in the constructed body. After Lang’s death, Barnabas’ friend, Dr Julia Hoffman, completed the experiment. To their surprise, the procedure ends with both Barnabas and the new man alive. Barnabas named the new man Adam. They take Adam to the dungeon in Barnabas’ house, and keep him there in horrifyingly bad conditions until he escapes. Adam of course hates Barnabas and Julia.

Lately, Adam has been hiding out in a long-deserted part of the great house of Collinwood. Heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard took pity on him and has been looking after him there. He has fallen in love with Carolyn, to her embarrassment and his frustration. Carolyn has delegated the day-to-day responsibility for looking after Adam to unsightly ex-convict Harry Johnson. Adam’s former protector, occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes, visits from time to time. Adam’s most frequent and most influential visitor is suave warlock Nicholas Blair. Carolyn and Stokes are good, Nicholas is evil, and Harry is just distasteful.

When Nicholas found out about Adam, he forgot about whatever plans he may previously have had and focused on the goal of founding a new humanoid race. He has talked Adam into demanding Barnabas and Julia repeat the experiment to build a mate for him. Adam threatened to kill well-meaning governess Vicki Winters unless they complied. Now there is a patchwork female corpse and a lot of scientific equipment in Barnabas’ basement. All that is missing is a woman to donate her “life force.”

Barnabas and Julia were plotting to use Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. When Barnabas was a vampire in May and June of 1967, he abducted Maggie and tortured her in an attempt to erase her personality and replace it with that of his lost love, the gracious Josette. When that evil scheme collapsed, Maggie escaped and Julia used her preternatural powers of hypnosis to block her memories. Ever since, Maggie has had no idea of what happened during those two months, and she has thought of Barnabas as a wonderful person. Barnabas wants Julia to use those same powers first to bring Maggie to the basement lab, and then to block her memory in case she survives.

Barnabas’ much-put-upon servant, Willie Loomis, overheard this plan. Willie has a crush on Maggie. He tried to talk Barnabas and Julia out of their fell intentions, and when they would not listen he tried to persuade Maggie to leave town. She wouldn’t listen either, so he took it upon himself to abduct Maggie. He stole some chloroform from the lab, broke into her room, and took her to the hidden chamber inside the old Collins family mausoleum.

We open today in the front parlor of the Old House, where Adam is coolly explaining to Barnabas that he does not want Maggie to donate the “life force” for his mate. Barnabas angrily explains that it must be Maggie, because Julia has proven that she can control her. Besides, Maggie lives alone, so she can go missing for several days before anyone knows she is gone. Barnabas is the chief protagonist of this show, by the way.

Adam says that the only woman whose “life force” he wants to animate his bride is Carolyn. Barnabas says that this is impossible. Adam has been gradually learning the details of the experiment that brought him to life; only now does Barnabas tell him that in the original plan, he would die and come back to life in his body. Adam is bewildered by this. “How could you hate yourself so much that you wanted to change your body?” Barnabas does not want to confess his his former vampirism, so Adam doesn’t get an answer.

Adam meets Nicholas at the gazebo on the grounds of the estate. Nicholas wants him to ignore everything Barnabas said, but Adam is giving deep thought to all of it. It was Nicholas’ idea that Carolyn should provide the “life force,” and Adam enthusiastically agreed, believing this meant that his mate would be like her. He says now that he and Barnabas do not recognize themselves in each other, and Nicholas tries to brush this very apt observation off by saying that Barnabas would hide his similarities. Adam demands Nicholas assure him that Carolyn will not be subjected to any violence. She must want to participate in the experiment. As my wife, Mrs Acilius, pointed out, that condition is indeed a similarity with his “life force” donor- Barnabas had been preoccupied with the idea that Maggie and his other female victims would eventually come to him of their own will. While Nicholas is trying to quell the big guy’s concern, Willie happens by.

Adam starts to figure everything out, and wants to reason with Nicholas.

Adam hides while Nicholas confronts Willie. He puts a magic zap on Willie to compel him to release Maggie. After Willie goes, Nicholas tells Adam he will use the same painless technique to cause Carolyn to cooperate. Adam is skeptical, but Nicholas assures him that his doubts will be settled when he sees that Maggie is free before daybreak.

That may not quite work out. Willie made the worst possible choice of hiding place when he stashed Maggie in the hidden chamber of the mausoleum. Barnabas took her to that chamber for torture when she was his prisoner, and shortly after she awoke there her memory started to come back. By the end of today’s episode, she remembers that Barnabas was her captor. When Willie returns, he will find that he has quite a problem on his hands.

Episode 584: Terribly familiar

Recovering vampire Barnabas and mad scientist Julia are under pressure to create a female Frankenstein’s monster. The process they are using requires draining the “life force” from a woman into a constructed corpse. The other day, Barnabas announced they would force the role of donor onto Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town and one of his former victims. When Barnabas’ servant Willie heard of this plan, he was horrified. Willie has a crush on Maggie, and is determined to spare her this fate.

Now, Willie has abducted Maggie and is hiding her from Barnabas and Julia. Barnabas is worried about what will happen if they cannot find another woman to use in the experiment. Julia says “If worse came to worst, I could do it.” Barnabas points out that only she is prepared to operate the equipment, and that she could not do that if she were serving as donor. She makes a feeble suggestion that their onetime lab tech, an unpleasant man named Peter who prefers to be called Jeff, might run the equipment. Barnabas says that Peter/ Jeff does not have her training. In any case, Barnabas had to fire Peter/ Jeff because he had reason to believe he was trying to sabotage the experiment, so he can scarcely trust him now.

This is not the first time Julia has offered to solve a problem by destroying herself, only for Barnabas to turn her down. In #350, when Barnabas was still a vampire and was desperately thirsty for blood, Julia volunteered herself as his victim. Barnabas was sufficiently moved to address her for the first time as “Julia” rather than with a distinctly contemptuous pronunciation of the title “Doctor,” but he still said the reason he was refusing was that he had use for her medical expertise. Barnabas’ cruel plan for Maggie suggested that he isn’t really any nicer now than he was as a vampire; this echo of that moment would suggest that he hasn’t even stopped seeing Julia, who after all loves him, as a kind of higher servant.

Willie has taken Maggie to the hidden chamber inside the old Collins family mausoleum. It was in this chamber that Barnabas was trapped in his coffin from 1796 until Willie inadvertently freed him to prey upon the living in #210. When she was his prisoner in #248, Barnabas took Maggie to that chamber and shut her up in the coffin there. While Willie tries to assure Maggie that she will be safe as long as she is with him, the memories that Julia used her preternatural powers of hypnosis to erase start coming back.

We see a flashback, not to Maggie’s time at Barnabas’ mercy, but to #283, when she was Julia’s patient at Windcliff Sanitarium. Julia took her on a trip to the old cemetery north of Collinsport, and they went into the mausoleum. Julia did not know about the hidden chamber, and did not understand why Maggie became upset when they were in the publicly known part of the mausoleum. Maggie remembers visiting the mausoleum with Julia, and cannot remember why it frightened her to be there. But the fact that she recognizes the chamber as part of the mausoleum means that her memory of what Barnabas did to her is coming loose.

Maggie’s memory. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

This creates a truly suspenseful situation. Maggie is an audience favorite with connections to several other characters, and so it seemed unlikely anything Barnabas and Julia did would result in her leaving the show. But if she remembers what they did to her and tells the police about it, they will go to prison. Since Barnabas and Julia are the source of all the action on Dark Shadows, that would mean the end of the series. So her memory coming back sets up a crisis that might be resolved with a significant change.

Perhaps Barnabas and Julia will force Maggie to donate her “life force” with the consequence that her body dies and she wakes up in the newly created woman, who just so happens to look exactly like her but to have a drastically different personality. That seems plausible, since the long-running storyline of her romance with hardworking young fisherman Joe seems to be over, the minor theme of her relationship with her hard-drinking father Sam had been resolved long before Sam died a few months ago, and we have reason to expect her to move out of her house, which has long served as our window into the working class of Collinsport. If Maggie is running out of story, they may very well decide to keep Kathryn Leigh Scott on as another character.

Closing Miscellany

The flashback is not made of tape cut from #283. It couldn’t be- the show was in black and white then, and is in color now. So they recreate it. It’s kind of adorable to see Julia in her old wig.

This was not the episode they intended to shoot. It was the dress rehearsal. Shooting the flashback scene put them so far behind schedule they didn’t have time to do the episode, and they had to send this footage to the network. I believe that is the only occasion they ever resorted to that desperate expedient. The camera is out of focus much of the time and occasionally does not seem to be pointed in the right direction, the microphones are misplaced so that it sounds at one point like Julia is referring to Maggie as “Greg,” booms and other equipment intrude into the shots, and the actors frequently blow their lines. In other words, it is in no way different from any other episodes.

Episode 583: Act of treachery

Some time ago, mad scientist Eric Lang promised Barnabas Collins that he could cure him of vampirism. His cure involved building a Frankenstein’s monster and draining Barnabas’ “life force” into it. Lang expected that this experimental procedure would end with Barnabas’ body dead and his consciousness awakening inside the newly constructed creature.

Lang died before he could complete the experiment. Barnabas’ friend, Dr Julia Hoffman, picked up where Lang left off. To their surprise, both Barnabas and the new man lived. Barnabas was freed of his curse, but he and Julia turned out to be the worst parents conceivable. They took the new man, whom they named Adam, to the prison cell in the basement of Barnabas’ house and kept him chained to the wall, alone for all but a few minutes a day, with nothing to stimulate his mind. Adam eventually escaped, and quite understandably hates Barnabas.

Adam has fallen under the influence of suave warlock Nicholas Blair. Nicholas persuaded Adam to go to Barnabas and threaten to murder well-meaning governess Vicki and everyone else Barnabas cares about unless he provided him with a mate. Barnabas enlisted Julia to take charge of the process and his servant Willie to steal dead bodies to use for parts. Now there is a constructed female corpse on a table in Barnabas’ basement and an apparatus to use in its animation. All that is missing is a woman to donate her “life force.”

Yesterday, Barnabas’ servant Willie overheard Barnabas telling Julia that he wanted her to hypnotize Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, so that she would submit to the procedure. When Barnabas was a vampire, he took Maggie as his victim, keeping her in the cell where Adam would later be chained. After Maggie escaped from Barnabas, Julia hypnotized her to forget her ordeal. She now believes that Barnabas is just peachy.

Today, Maggie is on the terrace at the great house of Collinwood. She is having coffee with Vicki. The two of them are lamenting the fact that their fiancés have both become strangely distant lately, leading to the end of their engagements. Some of the fan-sites mention that both Kathryn Leigh Scott and Alexandra Moltke Isles have moments during this sad scene when they seem to be stifling laughter. In the years since the show ended, several of the actresses have said that Louis Edmonds had a habit of making wickedly hilarious remarks to them immediately before a taping that would involve a deeply serious scene, and that it would take everything they had not to burst out laughing at the worst possible moments. Edmonds’ character Roger Collins isn’t in this episode, but maybe he was on set for some other reason.

Barnabas shows up and talks with each woman separately. While Vicki is away getting a cup for Barnabas, Maggie tells him she might be leaving town soon. He is distressed to learn she may not be available for the crimes he is planning against her. After Maggie leaves, Vicki mentions that her charge David just left on a camping trip, and “It was quite something getting him off.” On Danny Horn’s Dark Shadows Every Day, a commenter named “Chris” remarked on this:

During the outdoor coffee scene after Maggie leaves Vicky with Barnabas, is the funniest blooper ever…….

Vicky, paraphasing: “I was getting David ready for his trip to Boston.”

Actual finish: “It was quite something getting him off.”

And then, she buries her face in the coffee cup, knowing that everyone is holding back laughter, and the awkward pause goes on forEVER.

Comment left by “Chris” at 7:57 AM Pacific time, 21 March 2016, on “Episode 583: Every Woman We Know,” by Danny Horn, on Dark Shadows Every Day (12 February 2015.)

To which I replied, “Vicki, no, he’s only twelve!”

When Mrs Isles is trying not to laugh, she bites her upper lip. She visibly does that before lifting the coffee cup to cover as much of her face as she possibly can, and the pause does go on a long time. So it could be that “Chris” is correct. I can only imagine Edmonds saying that now we know why they stopped showing the audience what goes on when Vicki and David are alone together.

While Maggie was Barnabas’ prisoner, Willie came to be very fond of her. Barnabas eventually framed Willie for his own crimes against Maggie; Willie was sent off to the mental hospital Julia is in charge of. After a few months, he was released. Willie came back. Since his return, Willie has been firmly convinced that Barnabas is his friend. Willie is also in love with Maggie. These attitudes thrust Willie into a crisis when he learns of Barnabas’ cruel plan for Maggie.

At first Willie tries to persuade Julia to refuse to bring Maggie into the experiment; she will not. Then he tries to stab the constructed body. Barnabas caught him before he could plunge the knife in, and threatened to kill him if he tried again.

Later, Willie goes to Maggie’s house and tries to persuade her to leave town immediately because “people” will hurt her if she doesn’t. When she asks what people, he with great reluctance tells her that “Barnabas, he’s involved… Now look, it’s not his fault- but he’s in it whether he likes it or not.” When Maggie expresses disbelief that Barnabas could be a part of any plan to hurt her, Willie says “I’ve got my loyalties to Barnabas, because he’s been good to me. And I’m being as loyal to him as I can be.” Even first-time viewers who do not know that Barnabas was a vampire who fed on Willie, beat him unmercifully, killed his friend Jason and forced him to dispose of the body, etc, will remember the opening of today’s episode when Barnabas greets Willie with a death threat. When we see that Willie sincerely believes that Barnabas has been good to him, we know that we are seeing a man who is as utterly lost as he can be.

After he fails to talk Maggie into getting on the next bus out of town, Willie goes back to the lab and steals a bottle of chloroform. He knocks over a stool; the noise brings Barnabas. Barnabas glances around the room, concludes that he is alone, and leaves. We see Willie cowering behind a table. Barnabas’ brief visit to the lab makes Willie seem even more pitiable. Barnabas doesn’t know where Willie is, does know that he has access to the lab, and has seen him trying to sabotage the experiment. Even so, he has so little regard for Willie’s ability to take action that he doesn’t see any need to do a real search. We hear his thoughts in voiceover as he thinks “There’s no one here.” Seeing Willie making himself small, we might suspect that Barnabas would have the same thought even if he were looking directly at his onetime slave.

Willie hiding.

Meanwhile, Barnabas encounters Adam on the terrace at the great house. Adam says that he will murder Vicki tonight unless Barnabas returns to the lab and gets back to work.

Willie breaks into Maggie’s bedroom. She awakens to find him pressing a cloth to her mouth. She screams, he apologizes, and the chloroform takes effect. He hears Barnabas let himself into the house and call for Maggie; when Barnabas comes into the bedroom, he finds the room vacant and the French windows open. We first saw this room in May 1967, when Barnabas was a vampire taking Maggie into his power. In those days, her father Sam and fiancé Joe were horrified to find that she had disappeared from it, leaving the windows open. That was because she was answering Barnabas’ call. Now Sam is dead and Joe is estranged from Maggie, and it is Barnabas’ turn to find that Maggie is gone. When he does, Adam’s threat to kill Vicki replays in his thoughts.

Episode 582: Everything seems to be my fault now

Recovering vampire Barnabas Collins goes into his basement, where an experiment is being planned that is intended to bring a female Frankenstein’s monster to life. He finds lab tech Peter, who prefers to be called Jeff, running the equipment with electrodes attached to the constructed body. He demands to know what Peter/ Jeff is doing. Peter/ Jeff makes some lame excuses, and Barnabas fires him.

As it happens, Peter/ Jeff is under the influence of Angelique. In the 1790s, Angelique was the wicked witch who made Barnabas a vampire. Recently, she defied her master, suave warlock Nicholas. Nicholas punished Angelique by stripping her of her powers and making her a vampire. The Frankenstein experiment involves draining the “life force” from a person into the constructed body. Barnabas served as the “life force” donor in a previous experiment that brought a man called Adam to life, and was freed from vampirism as a result. Angelique is trying to force Peter/ Jeff into conducting the experiment with her as donor, hoping for the same result. She was in the lab, strapped to a table next to the one bearing the body, when Barnabas entered, but used her vampire powers to vanish before he could see her.

The mad scientist who is in charge of the experiment is Barnabas’ best friend Julia. Barnabas and Julia meet in the basement lab and puzzle over Peter/ Jeff’s conduct. Barnabas concludes that Peter/ Jeff was trying to destroy the body because he knew the failure of the experiment would set off a series of events that would put Peter/ Jeff’s ex-fiancée Vicki in danger, and Peter/ Jeff now hates her so much he wants her to be killed. Julia dismisses this idea as absurd, but Barnabas seems really to believe it.

Barnabas and Julia talk about their need for a woman to serve as the creature’s “life force.” Barnabas announces that he has chosen Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town. In May and June of 1967, Barnabas was a vampire and Maggie was his victim. After Maggie escaped Barnabas, Julia hypnotized her into forgetting what he was and what he had done to her. Barnabas may no longer be bound by Angelique’s curse, but when he says that he has decided that Maggie is “the body” they will use, Julia responds that he still sounds very much like “the old Barnabas.” In a cold voice, Barnabas observes that “You don’t like to be reminded of him, do you.” She objects to the idea of forcing Maggie to take part in a procedure that may well kill her, but he tells her that he is sure she will agree with him once she has given it some thought.

My wife, Mrs Acilius, points out that Barnabas’ expectations of other people suggest that even though he is now a human being, he is still as alienated from others as he was when he was a vampire. Vicki broke her engagement with Peter/ Jeff, therefore it makes sense to him that he would want her to be brutally murdered. Julia abused her medical skills to cover up his crimes against Maggie, therefore he expects her to use them again to commit more crimes against the same victim. He has plans for Maggie; so far from trying to gain her consent, he calls her “the body,” as if she were a slab of meat. His sarcastic line to Peter/ Jeff, “Everything seems to be my fault now!,” drives this home for regular viewers. Almost every bad thing that has happened in and around the town of Collinsport for a very long time is entirely his fault, and he ought to know it.

Barnabas’ much-bedraggled servant, Willie, overhears this conversation. He has a crush on Maggie, and is horrified that Barnabas wants to endanger her life. He talks with Julia, pleading with her to refuse to conduct the experiment unless Barnabas chooses another woman. She will not agree. He tells her that she doesn’t know what it is like to think of someone you care about on that table; she tells him that he is wrong, because she watched Barnabas go through it.

Julia admits to Willie that she has feelings for Barnabas.

This is the first time we have seen Julia explicitly tell Willie that she has feelings for Barnabas. He looks stunned; she leaves before he can say anything else. If Willie were not caught off guard by Julia’s frankness, he might have said that it was different for Barnabas. He volunteered to be the “life force” donor, and laboring under the vampire curse he had little to lose even if the worst happened. But they do not plan to give Maggie a choice, and she is a healthy young woman with everything to live for.

The episode ends with Willie in the basement lab, raising a scalpel to stab the constructed body. This is a nice bit of ring composition, taking us back to the day’s starting point. But we saw Peter/ Jeff try to stab Adam with that same scalpel a few days ago, and that effort was a ridiculous failure. Moreover, the constructed body isn’t alive yet, and if Julia could sew it together from dead parts surely she could repair any damage Willie might do. So we don’t end with much suspense.

Episode 574: Another girl

When Dark Shadows began in June of 1966, hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell was dating flighty heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard. The two of them were bored beyond words with each other. They only kept going out because Carolyn’s mother, reclusive matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, was determined that they should get together, and neither of them wanted to disappoint her. For months, we were subjected to one scene after another of Joe and Carolyn having nothing to say to each other while we waited for Liz to give up on them.

Joe and Carolyn finally called it quits in #84, and shortly afterward Joe started seeing Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. The audience has been rooting for Joe and Maggie ever since, but because there are too few obstacles to their romance for them to have a storyline of their own, we sometimes go months at a time without seeing them together.

Now, Joe has become the blood thrall of vampire Angelique, and Angelique’s master Nicholas has designs on Maggie. If Nicholas and Angelique were ordinary criminals and she were blackmailing Joe or had hooked him on drugs, this would be an archetypal soap opera situation. The supernatural twist makes it specific to Dark Shadows among the daytime serials of its period, but the story is still so deep in the genre’s wheelhouse that it is no wonder they’ve spent three days in a row luxuriating in it.

There’s a lot of emphasis on bachelor’s quarters this time out. Maggie lives alone, but we see so much of and hear so much about her late father’s paintings today that it feels as if the Evans cottage is still his house and Maggie is still his little buddy. That makes her relationship with Joe feel all the more urgent. She is waiting to make a home with him so that her adult life can begin.

We see Joe’s apartment as well. It is apartment 24, the default number for a Collinsport bachelor pad. Dashing action hero Burke Devlin lived in suite 24 at the Collinsport Inn in the first year of the show, and Humphrey Bogart-esque lawyer Tony Peterson lived in apartment 24, presumably in some other building, in the fall of 1967. Joe is sitting in his apartment 24 and staring at a glass of booze when Maggie knocks on the door. She tells him that his boss called her at home and told her that Joe hasn’t shown up at work lately. If Joe doesn’t call soon, he’ll have to fire him. Joe says he won’t call the boss, since he can no more explain the nature of his trouble to him than he can to Maggie.

We also see Nicholas’ house. Even though he is keeping Angelique on the premises, Nicholas is very much a bachelor. He peers into his magic mirror and sees Willie Loomis, servant to old world gentleman Barnabas Collins. Willie is asleep in his room in Barnabas’ house. The only other time we saw Willie’s room was in #328, when Barnabas framed Willie for terrible crimes he had himself committed against Maggie. Now, Nicholas uses his mirror for a magical video call with Willie. He interrogates Willie about an evil plan of his that is playing out in Barnabas’ house.

Willie in Nicholas’ mirror. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

On Dark Shadows Before I Die, John and Christine Scoleri caught this screenshot of Nicholas making an unfortunate gesture while he is telling Maggie what he thinks of Willie:

Nicholas is not impressed with Willie. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Every Day.

Episode 570: Are you being profound?

When we first met Willie Loomis in March 1967, he was a dangerously unstable ruffian who came to the town of Collinsport and eventually to the great house of Collinwood in the train of seagoing con man Jason McGuire. Willie was such a violent and unpleasant fellow in those days that it was difficult to see why even a villain like Jason would choose to be associated with him.

The next month, Willie inadvertently freed vampire Barnabas Collins from his coffin. Barnabas bit Willie and transformed him into a sorely bedraggled blood thrall. That version of the character was so heavily beaten down and so sincerely remorseful that it was easy to wish him well, but he was so thoroughly dominated by Barnabas that no one else could get close to him.

In March 1968, Barnabas’ vampirism went into remission. His other victims regained their old personalities and apparently forgot about their time under his power. It is unclear just what effect Barnabas’ re-humanization has had on Willie. In #483, his first episode after Barnabas’ cure, Willie ran through the whole range of behavior he had shown in the preceding year. For a time, it seemed he might not remember that Barnabas had been a vampire. During that period, Barnabas assumed that Willie remembered everything, treated him as if he did, and after a couple of weeks of that treatment Willie and Barnabas were having the same kinds of conversations they had in the old days. Perhaps Barnabas accidentally gave Willie the therapy he needed to get his memory back.

Today, we open with Barnabas and Willie bickering in the front parlor of Barnabas’ house. They have been out hunting Tom Jennings, a vampire who has been feeding on Barnabas’ friend Julia. Willie says Barnabas has a reason for being so concerned about Julia, and Barnabas says that of course he does. He describes Julia’s current functions in the plot, and Willie says that isn’t what he’s talking about. Barnabas gets flustered, then asks “Are you being pro-fouuuund?”

Jonathan Frid lingers on the second syllable of “pro-fouuuund” until the whole audience is likely to be laughing. The whole scene is funny, because it shows us sides of Barnabas and Willie that we always suspected existed, but that we never expected to see. As my wife, Mrs Acilius, pointed out, Barnabas has been so phenomenally selfish for so long that it is excruciatingly difficult for him to admit that he is willing to put a friend’s interests ahead of his own. And seeing Willie tease him about his feelings shows that the former slave and master are now buddies. Willie is neither menacing nor cringing, but is sympathetic enough and self-confident enough that anyone could enjoy his company. At long last, we know why Jason fell in with him, and what Willie lost, at first by his descent into criminality, and later as Barnabas’ victim.

Willie needles his old pal Barnabas. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

An unexpected visitor drops in. It is Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, mistress of Collinwood and escaped mental patient. Liz tells Barnabas that she saw Julia in a room with a coffin. Barnabas takes a while to put the pieces together, but it finally dawns on him that Liz is describing Tom’s lair. He goes there, and finds Julia unconscious on the floor next to the coffin.

Barnabas carries Julia into his house. Liz announces that Julia is dead. Barnabas assures her that she is still alive. Even though she is clearly breathing, Liz refuses to believe him.

Later, Liz goes up to Julia’s bedroom. She sits by Julia and tells her that she knows she was part of the conspiracy to bury her alive, but that she forgives her. The whole story of Liz’ fixation on this supposed conspiracy is pretty dull, but Joan Bennett was an extraordinary talent. When she has a scene like this, she can sell Liz as effectively as if she were at the center of an exciting arc.

Just before dawn, Barnabas and Willie go to Tom’s coffin with a mallet and stake. Willie keeps pointing out that the sun isn’t up yet, but Barnabas opens the coffin anyway. It’s empty. Willie panics and runs off. It’s unclear why Barnabas opened the coffin- maybe he turned in early in his time as a vampire, and assumed Tom would do the same. At any rate, the episode ends with a lot of rather awkward stage business as Barnabas and Tom wrestle and Tom bares his fangs. This poorly choreographed fight scene leaves us with a laugh as sour as the laughs from the intentionally funny scene between Barnabas and Willie at the opening were sweet.

Episode 566: Too much sunlight

Permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman asked housekeeper Mrs Johnson to add more draperies to those already on the window of her room. In #361, she had asked Mrs Johnson to remove all the draperies. Evidently Julia fixates on window treatments when she isn’t feeling well.

Julia’s trouble today is that she has been bitten by vampire Tom Jennings. She is trying to keep this fact from everyone, including her friend Barnabas Collins and Barnabas’ servant Willie Loomis. Since Barnabas was himself a vampire for 172 years and Willie was for many months his victim, they are particularly well-positioned to recognize the signs of vampirism, and both do know that Tom is now an undead bloodsucker. At Barnabas’ direction, Willie sneaks into Julia’s room; the gleeful look on his face as he lets himself into a lady’s bedroom suggests that the personality he had before Barnabas bit him, when he was a dangerously unstable ruffian who threatened to rape all the young women and beat up their boyfriends, is not entirely gone.

Blast from the past. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Willie was himself staying at the great house of Collinwood, perhaps in this very room, when Barnabas first bit him. After he sees Julia, he goes back to Barnabas’ house and tells him about the contrast between her condition when he found her unconscious early this morning and her current state. She was dazed and weakened then, and now seems much stronger, but is strangely hostile. This so closely matches the description of Willie’s own condition in his early days as a blood thrall that there is no need for him to mention Tom to explain why there is such an urgent note of concern in his voice.

Barnabas goes to the great house and intercepts Julia returning from a session with Tom. After some verbal preliminaries, he pulls the scarf off her neck and exposes the vampire’s bite marks. Julia’s secret is out.

Tom has a substantial amount of dialogue today, the first we have heard him speak since he joined the ranks of the undead. Don Briscoe doesn’t seem to have found the character yet. There is a familiar note in the voice, but one I couldn’t place until much later in the series. Eventually, Briscoe will appear in a different role and not only imitate the voice of a famous actor of the past but wear a costume modeled on one that actor wore in his most celebrated parts. I won’t give away who it is, but once you’ve seen those episodes you will recognize that person’s voice every time Briscoe speaks.

Episode 562: The power of this house

Dangerously unstable ruffian Willie accidentally freed vampire Barnabas from his coffin in #210, and became his sorely bedraggled blood thrall. Barnabas has since been cured of his vampirism, more or less, and when first we saw Willie after that it seemed he might be about to revert to his old ways. But he has settled back into a life under Barnabas’ thumb. Today, he is digging up a grave, planning to steal a body for Barnabas and mad scientist Julia to use in creating a Frankenstein’s monster.

Willie is interrupted in this gruesome task when hardworking young fisherman Joe, walking through the graveyard, spots him and announces that he will be taking him to the sheriff. Joe is pale and has trouble concentrating; at one point he asks Willie about a voice only he can hear. Willie is in such a panic that he doesn’t notice the signs that Joe is ill. When Joe walks off, Willie is still pleading with him not to go to the police.

As it happens, Joe is not on his way to the sheriff’s office. He has been bitten by Angelique, formerly the wicked witch who made Barnabas a vampire, now a vampire herself. He is answering her summons. Were Willie not so terrified of the sheriff, perhaps he would have recognized a fellow sufferer of his old affliction.

Joe has been on Dark Shadows from the beginning, long before Willie and Barnabas joined the cast. For his first 112 weeks, he was the show’s most straightforward specimen of Healthy Man. His only foible was his tendency to lose track of his plans when he had the chance to help a neighbor. Now Angelique has transformed him into an addict desperate for a fix.

Joe needs a fix. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Joe and Willie represented opposite extremes of personality before they were bitten, and actors Joel Crothers and John Karlen were similarly remote from each other in their approaches to their work. Karlen used techniques like those popularized by Marlon Brando and James Dean to throw himself into a depiction of Willie’s emotions that could be compelling no matter how stale the dialogue he was given. Crothers could overcome weak lines as well, but he did it with a manner as precise and deliberate as Karlen’s was volatile and intense. For example, today he says “There are places I should be, other places,” which may not look like much in print, but his delivery shows a deep poetry in it.

Joe goes to Angelique in the house by the sea where she is staying. He wrestles with his compulsion to submit to her bite; she assures him that he will soon forget everything else in his life, including his love for his fiancée Maggie. Regular viewers will hear an unexpected echo in this; Maggie is played by Kathryn Leigh Scott, who in the part of Dark Shadows set in the 1790s played gracious lady Josette. It was her frustration that Barnabas loved Josette and not her that led Angelique to cast the spells that caused disaster in those days, culminating in her transformation of Barnabas into a vampire.

Joe awakens after the bite and tells Angelique about his encounter with Willie. Angelique’s master Nicholas appears. He instructs Joe to tell him what happened in the graveyard, and dismisses Angelique. We see Joe’s old gallantry one last time as he tells Angelique she doesn’t have to take orders from Nicholas. She tells him she does, and leaves him alone with Nicholas.

Nicholas tells Joe that he controls Angelique, and therefore controls him. Joe tells him he did not stop to tell the sheriff about Willie. It is Nicholas who wants a Frankenstein’s monster and has set up the scheme that is forcing Barnabas and Julia to try to make one, and so he is relieved to hear that. Nicholas gives Joe an order we do not hear.

Meanwhile, Willie is back at Barnabas’ house, still in a state of panic. Barnabas asks what is wrong, and he tells him that Joe found him digging up a grave and said he would go to the police. Willie wants to leave town at once, but Barnabas refuses.

Barnabas is figuring out how he can dump responsibility for the whole mess on Willie when a knock comes at the door. Thinking it is the sheriff, he sends Willie upstairs, telling him that if he talked to them he would only make it worse. It turns out to be Joe, come to tell Barnabas what he saw and explain that he decided that, since Willie saved his life a while ago, he won’t go to the police after all. Barnabas is very quiet and very courtly, sounding for all the world like Boris Karloff. After Joe leaves, Willie enters, jubilant to be off the hook. Barnabas is troubled by Joe’s obvious ill-health.

Back in the house by the sea, Nicholas tells Angelique that he has received some alarming news from the hospital. The victim of her first bite, easygoing electrician Tom, is coming out of his coma. If Tom tells what he knows, Nicholas and Angelique will be exposed. Angelique has only been a vampire for a short time, and is unsure of her powers. But Nicholas has demonstrated sufficient ability that it is difficult to see Tom as much of a threat to him. The episode thus ends without any particular suspense.

Episode 561: Rob a grave

Hardworking young fisherman Joe has always been at his most appealing when he is going out of his way to help a new friend. My favorite example is #58, when strange and troubled boy David asks him for help deciphering a set of tide tables. He drops everything and is completely absorbed in the task.

Friday, we saw Joe’s impulse to help turned against him. Vampire Angelique claimed to be a prisoner of the suave and mysterious Nicholas. He wanted to take her straight to the sheriff’s office, but agreed to let her rest her head on his shoulder first. With that, she bit him, and he was enslaved.

Joe examines his wounds. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Today, old world gentleman Barnabas pays a call on Joe. Barnabas was a vampire himself for 172 years, and he knows that a vampire is operating in the area. He is deeply disquieted by what he sees of Joe, but does not attempt to diagnose his condition.

Barnabas came to the 1960s when dangerously unstable ruffian Willie opened his coffin in #210. Willie hoped to steal jewels, but was instead bitten and enslaved, becoming a sorely bedraggled blood thrall. Now that Barnabas’ curse has gone into remission, he controls Willie without supernatural means. He wants Willie to dig up corpses so that he and his friend, mad scientist Julia, can build a Frankenstein’s monster. On Friday, Willie tried to refuse, and Barnabas extorted his agreement by describing a scenario in which Maggie, the girl on whom Willie has a crush, might be killed if Barnabas and Julia do not complete their grotesque plan. Willie protests again today that he cannot “rob a grave.” Well he might protest- all of the trouble going on now started the last time he tried it.

The sun goes down, and we return to Nicholas’ house. Angelique rises. She hasn’t been a vampire long, and doesn’t know how to summon Joe until Nicholas tells her. From November 1967 to March 1968, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the 1790s, and Angelique was a wicked witch. Her spells, including the one that made Barnabas a vampire, so often misfired that it seemed she was new to witchcraft. Viewers who remember that phase of the show and see her today will be quite sure that Barnabas was the first vampire she ever made, and that she is on altogether unfamiliar ground.

While Joe is responding to Angelique’s summons, he crosses paths with Willie in the cemetery. The episode ends with Joe announcing he will take Willie to the sheriff. In itself, that doesn’t produce much suspense. We know that he has no choice but to go directly to Angelique. But since Nicholas is ultimately behind both Angelique’s vampirism and Barnabas and Julia’s attempt to stitch a person together, it does suggest that his skill at manipulating events might ultimately prove to be as faulty as is Angelique’s. Perhaps the next time Nicholas’ pawns bump into each other, there will be consequences that he cannot control.

Episode 560: Just too horrible

Barnabas Collins may not be a vampire these days, but he’s still at his best when he gets to be an absolute bastard. He has such an opportunity today. His bedraggled servant Willie Loomis has been refusing to steal corpses from their graves so that Barnabas and mad scientist Julia Hoffman can build a mate for Frankenstein’s monster Adam. At first Barnabas threatens to have Julia recommit him to the psychiatric institution she runs; Willie says he would rather spend the rest of his life as a mental patient than dig up dead bodies, and Julia tells him she won’t send him back to the institution in any case.

When Barnabas learns of this, he gets a sinister gleam in his eye and tells Willie that if Adam finds out Willie is refusing to help in the project, he might kill Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, on whom Willie has a crush. As Barnabas presses this idea on Willie, he seems more and more pleased with himself, and Willie becomes more and more distraught. When Willie finally caves in and agrees to do what he wants, Barnabas looks as happy as we have ever seen him.

Barnabas in his element. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Maggie is engaged to marry hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell. Joe has received a note asking him to call at the home of the suave and mysterious Nicholas Blair shortly after sundown. When he does, a woman named Angelique meets him and tells him Nicholas will be back soon. She tells Joe that Nicholas is holding her prisoner. As Barnabas shows to his best advantage when he is a cold villain, so Joe shows to his when he suddenly finds himself with a chance to help a new friend. He is great right up to the moment when Angelique embraces him and reveals the vampire fangs with which she will bite him.