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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Recovering vampire Barnabas Collins is dead, and this time it seems like he might stay that way. At least it seems so to his friend Julia Hoffman, MD, and his servant Willie Loomis; they’ve buried him, and are talking about what to do next. Julia decides they should tell people Barnabas went on a long trip, and that they themselves should leave the area before dawn. They will go to a sanitarium called Windcliff. Julia will resume her duties as its chief, while Willie will take a job there doing whatever he can handle.
Julia orders Willie to pack his things; he asks if he should pack Barnabas’ things also. Julia is impressed that Willie thinks of this. Perhaps he is remembering his onetime friend Jason McGuire, whom Barnabas killed in #275. Jason was hated by all and was under orders from the sheriff to leave town when he fell afoul of Barnabas, and so it was easy for everyone to assume he had simply gone away. Still, in #277, sarcastic dandy Roger wondered why Jason hadn’t taken his clothes or his shaving kit. No one ever tried to tie up that loose end, but perhaps Willie learned of the problem and made a note of it for the next time he had to conspire to conceal a death.
Willie goes directly from Barnabas’ freshly dug grave to Maggie Evans’ house. Willie has an unwholesome preoccupation with Maggie. Longtime viewers will remember Willie’s menacing approach to her in #202 and #207, before Barnabas got hold of him and turned him from a dangerously unstable ruffian into a sorely bedraggled blood thrall; those who are mindful of the period when Dark Shadows first became a hit will remember May and June of 1967, when Maggie was Barnabas’ prisoner and Willie tried desperately to lessen her suffering; and first time viewers will be startled by the beginning of the scene, when we see Willie peeking through the window at Maggie. When Barnabas’ vampirism went into remission, his former victims tended to return to the personalities they had before he bit them. Willie has not quite become the rapey goon he was in his first two weeks on the show, but neither is he the first man a woman would choose to be alone with.
Willie!
Since she is The Nicest Girl in Town, Maggie has long since forgiven Willie what he did when he first came to Collinsport. And Julia used a magical version of hypnosis on Maggie to induce amnesia covering the whole period of her involvement with Barnabas and to leave her with warm feelings of goodwill for him. But it’s late at night, so when Willie knocks, she is reluctant to let him in. He insists, and she relents.
Willie tells her he will be going away soon to take an exciting new job. Maggie says that she is sure everyone will miss him. At first he repeats the story that Barnabas is going away on a long trip, but then he starts crying. When Maggie asks why, he tells her Barnabas has died. He asks her to keep this secret, but the most she will agree to do is to wait until he leaves town to start talking about it.
Meanwhile, Julia has gone to the great house of Collinwood, where she has been a houseguest for about a year. Before she goes upstairs to pack, she stops and tells Roger’s wife Cassandra that Barnabas is dead.
Julia knows that Cassandra is actually Angelique, the wicked witch responsible for Barnabas’ woes. It would seem that the whole point of covering up Barnabas’ death would be to keep Angelique/ Cassandra from finding out about it. Yet Julia not only goes out of her way to tell her, she also declares to her that she will continue to fight against her.
Angelique/ Cassandra spits out that Julia is in love with Barnabas, to which Julia replies “Not nearly as much as you are.” For some time, the show has been developing the theme that Julia would like Barnabas to be her lover. In their post about the episode on Dark Shadows Before I Die, John Scoleri said “So Julia’s true feelings are finally on the table.” To which Christine Scoleri replied, “Where have you been? Julia’s feelings have been on the table, the wall, the floor…pretty much everywhere for a long time.”
Willie’s visit to Maggie and Julia’s to Angelique/ Cassandra mark a difference between the first year of Dark Shadows and its later phases. When the show started, the characters were too good at keeping secrets, with the result that very little happened. They took this to such an extreme that one of the two principal storylines with which the show began- well-meaning governess Vicki’s attempt to find out who her parents were- died out altogether because reclusive matriarch Liz and her lawyers, the only characters who knew anything about it, would never talk.
Now, the characters involved in the action don’t keep secrets from each other at all, with the result that events comes thick and fast, but it is hard to build complex alliances or to explore nuanced relationships. They still conceal information from Vicki, Liz, Roger, and other characters left over from the early days, rendering them background figures with little to contribute to the story. Video game enthusiasts might call them “NPCs”- non-player characters.
Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes, occult expert, enters. Stokes tells Julia that a man named Adam appears to be dead. Julia goes with him to an abandoned shack in the woods where she examines Adam’s body and pronounces him dead. When Stokes tells her that Adam exhibited sharp pains in his neck starting at about 11 PM, that he called out for Barnabas, that his strength appeared to ebb for no apparent reason, and that he then died, Julia’s eyes widen. Suddenly Adam comes back to life. He starts gasping for air and miming a struggle against an invisible barrier just above his face. Julia tells Stokes she will have to go. He protests that she must stay with her patient. What she says next doesn’t mean much to Stokes, and would mean less to a first-time viewer:
JULIA: He is suffocating- I may know why. No, it’s impossible! But it may be that they are the same. Experiment- perhaps Adam is why-
STOKES: What are you talking about?
JULIA: Barnabas- I buried him- alive!
Regular viewers know that Adam is a Frankenstein’s monster created in an experiment begun by mad scientist Eric Lang. Shortly before he died of wounds inflicted by Angelique/ Cassandra, Lang recorded an audiotape in which he explained that as long as Adam lives, Barnabas’ vampirism will remain in remission. Julia has not heard that tape, but the audience has, time without number. We also know that when Barnabas was sealed up in a wall from #512 to #516, Adam experienced the pains that Barnabas suffered. In these lines, we see Julia for the first time beginning to understand the true nature of the connection between Adam and Barnabas.
Stokes’ approach to Julia is as indiscreet in its own way as were Willie’s to Maggie and Julia’s to Angelique/ Cassandra. Adam hates Julia and Barnabas, because they abused him shockingly in his first weeks of life, and forbade Stokes to bring her. Julia’s closing outburst is also an extreme indiscretion, as Stokes is basically a law-abiding person who could not be expected to help Julia and Willie cover up their many crimes. Again, we have come a long way from the days when the show would drop a major story rather than have a recurring character breach attorney-client privilege.
Like the Scoleris, Danny Horn was in good form when blogging about this part of the show. His post on Dark Shadows Every Day about this episode makes a number of penetrating observations about the connections between Julia and Willie’s opening scene at the grave and absurdist plays like Waiting for Godot and Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
Yesterday, recovering vampire Barnabas opened the door to his closet. Hardworking young fisherman Joe fell out, and Barnabas saw Frankenstein’s monster Adam at the window, laughing menacingly. Adam has many reasons to hate Barnabas, and Barnabas concludes that Adam wants to frame him for the murder of Joe.
A commenter on John and Christine Scoleri’s Dark Shadows Before I Die, posting under the name “Grant,” pointed out that in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s novel Frankenstein the Creature kills someone and frames one of Frankenstein’s closest friends for the crime. The reference seems to be pretty obvious.
Barnabas’ friend, mad scientist Julia, shows up. She finds that Joe is not dead. She says that he has, in a bit of Collinsport English we have heard once or twice before, “a pulsebeat.” She and Barnabas have a long conversation about a variety of topics, several of them highly incriminating, while Joe lies on the floor. Julia goes off to attend to another matter, and Barnabas’ servant Willie comes. Joe is still on the floor while Willie argues against Barnabas’ orders to take Joe to the hospital. Barnabas, who had told Julia that Adam must have “wanted Joe to be found here,” dismisses Willie as “absurd” when he says that Adam is trying to frame them.
When Willie was first on the show, he was a dangerously unstable ruffian who was determined to rape all the young women and beat up their boyfriends. In #210, he accidentally released Barnabas, who enslaved him and turned him into a nice guy. Now that Barnabas’ vampirism has gone into remission, Willie has taken several steps back to his old ways. He whines that if Joe dies, his fiancée Maggie might turn to him. Barnabas finds this idea “insane,” and Willie tells him that Maggie has recently stopped by the house and talked to him more than once. This is true, and Barnabas’ reaction makes it clear that it is the first time he has heard it. He responds that he is not interested in discussing Willie’s “mental aberrations,” and tells him that if Joe dies he will tell the police about Willie’s interest in Maggie. That leaves Willie no choice but to help get Joe to the hospital.
Julia has gone off to see well-meaning governess Vicki. Vicki is about to have a nightmare that is part of the “Dream Curse.” Three months ago, wicked witch Angelique decreed that one person after another would have the same dream. After Vicki has it, the dream will pass to Barnabas, and Angelique means for it to reactivate his vampirism. Vicki doesn’t seem to know that Barnabas was a vampire, though she has had many clues, as for example when he kept biting her and sucking her blood. I suppose she just thought he had a really aggressive make-out technique. But she does know that Barnabas is supposed to die if he has the dream.
Julia urges Vicki to come with her to Windcliff, a sanitarium she runs, and promises that she will get the best of care there. But she finds that Vicki is resigned to having the dream. Julia reports this to Barnabas, and tells him that she wants to go away with him, far away from Vicki. Vicki can’t pass the dream to Barnabas unless she describes it to him after she has it, and she won’t be able to do that if she can’t find him. Barnabas refuses to go, reminding Julia that those who have the dream suffer terribly until they pass it on to the next person. When he says “You know how I feel about Vicki,” Julia gets a brief closeup, and her reaction reminds us that she is supposed to be harboring an unrequited love for Barnabas. This is rather an easy point to forget. Barnabas and Julia spend all their time together and tell each other all their secrets. Since there doesn’t seem to be any such thing as sexual contact in the world of Dark Shadows, it’s hard to see how her feelings could be much more requited.
Julia urges Barnabas to run away with her.“You know how I feel about Vicki.”
Vampires are metaphors for extreme selfishness, and Barnabas usually plays to type. It is startling that he tells Julia that any part of his motivation for sticking around is his wish to spare Vicki suffering. But he also talks about his long vain struggle against Angelique in terms that immediately make it clear that whatever goodwill he might have for Vicki is a distant third behind his usual ruling passions, self-pity and laziness, but still, her well-being is among his considerations. That sets him apart from her ostensible boyfriend, a man variously known as Peter and Jeff. As Christine Scoleri points out on Dark Shadows Before I Die, Vicki might never have had the dream at all if Peter/ Jeff hadn’t refused to listen to her explanation of the curse and insisted that she stay where he could visit her easily, yet now that she is suffering from the dream and its effects he is nowhere to be seen. Christine speaks for all of us with her summary of Peter/ Jeff’s character- “What a louse!”
Vicki has the dream. Barnabas beckons her into the haunted house attraction where the bulk of it has always taken place before. She keeps telling him that she doesn’t want to have the dream, not for her sake, but for his. She opens three doors that show Halloween gimmicks we’ve seen before, then opens a fourth behind which she sees the Sun. The Sun shrinks into the distance, and she walks through the door, following it. Her face dissolves into an image of the Sun; the Sun dissolves to the exterior of Barnabas’ house. We cut to the interior, looking at the doors. A small dot of Sun appears there. It expands until it fills most of the screen. The doors open, and the Sun gives way to Vicki. She enters, and sees Barnabas lying on the floor by his desk. He is bleeding from two small wounds on his neck.
Part of the dream is a bit of doggerel that has never made much sense. The last lines are “Ahead a blazing light does burn, And one door leads to the point of return.” These lines are almost explained today. Each door exposes a symbol of something that is frightening either to the dreamer or to Barnabas or to both. Vicki isn’t afraid of the Sun, but she knows that Barnabas has a strange and intense relationship with it. In #277, he harangued her about his hatred for the Sun; in #347, he made plans with her to watch the Sun rise, plans which he had to break under very strange circumstances in #349. So now we know that the “blazing light” is the Sun, which vampires cannot withstand.
Of the ten characters who had the dream before Vicki, only strange and troubled boy David, her charge and dear friend, was able to walk through any of the doorways. In his case, he walked into a gigantic spider web and was caught there, just a few feet beyond the entry. But Vicki is on the path that “leads to the point of return,” and she goes to a different set altogether.
Had Barnabas’ introduction not brought a new audience to the show, Dark Shadows would probably have been canceled in June 1967. In that case, the final episode would have been #260, and it surely would have ended with Vicki, who was in those days the show’s main character, driving a stake through Barnabas’ heart. That she and the Sun overlap in the same space on the screen suggests that by passing the dream to Barnabas she will fulfill her original destiny and become his destroyer.
When Vicki looks into the parlor and sees Barnabas bloodied and lying on the floor by his desk, we are reminded of #405. In that episode, we saw that Angelique originally turned Barnabas into a vampire by sending a bat to bite him in this room. At that time, he fell, not by his desk, but by the staircase. That’s very close to where Joe was lying for the first half of the episode, so they have to do some rearranging to avoid suggesting an identity between them. Barnabas’ vampirism is so much the foundation of the show’s success that virtually everyone in the audience expects him to relapse sooner or later, but they are being careful not to raise the question of whether Joe will also join the ranks of the undead.
Until the dream, the episode is made up of long scenes with a great deal of dialogue. That isn’t unusual for Dark Shadows. It is unusual that the scenes play out with very little background music. I wonder if director Jack Sullivan decided that a spare sound design would set the right mood for the very ambitious dream sequence. I think it paid off- the dialogue scenes felt slow, but Vicki’s dream achieves the surrealistic quality it needs.
One of the main themes Danny Horn developed on his blog Dark Shadows Every Day was his ridiculously exaggerated impatience with the character of Vicki and his severe bias against Alexandra Moltke Isles’ acting. That gave me something to talk about in his comments section, and was part of the reason I started this blog. Danny’s post about this episode very nearly makes up for his incessant Vickiphobia. He alternates stills of Vicki with epigrams written in her voice, and the result is just magnificent, worth anyone’s while to read.
A stranger comes to the great house on the estate of Collinwood and introduces himself as Nicholas Blair, brother of Cassandra Blair Collins. Cassandra’s husband Roger Collins is shocked; Cassandra had never mentioned that she had a brother. Moreover, she has been missing for the last 24 hours, and Roger is convinced something terrible has happened to her. Roger’s distant cousin Barnabas Collins and Dr Julia Hoffman are also shocked, but for a different reason. They know that Cassandra is actually Angelique, a wicked witch who, in the 1790s, turned Barnabas into a vampire. She recently returned to the world of the living when Barnabas’ vampirism went into remission, and she tried to implement a plan to bring it back in full force. When Angelique/ Cassandra went missing, they hoped it meant that she had been defeated. Nicholas’ arrival replaces their hopes with the fear of new battles.
Nicholas at first assumed that Barnabas was Angelique/ Cassandra’s husband, and told him “I should have recognized you anywhere!” This is a sure sign of trouble- Barnabas, who was in fact briefly married to Angelique in 1796, has not been out of the state of Maine since 1795, and has never been photographed. Nicholas says that he has recently been on Martinique, where Barnabas first met Angelique in the eighteenth century, and that he is a “citizen of the world” with no fixed address. He assures Roger that it is Cassandra’s way to disappear abruptly, and that she is sure to return.
Roger, Julia, Barnabas, and Nicholas in the drawing room.
Roger takes Nicholas to the bedroom he and Angelique/ Cassandra share. He shows Nicholas a portrait of Angelique which returning viewers know to have a mysterious connection with Angelique/ Cassandra’s physical being. Roger leaves the room, and Nicholas talks to the portrait. He asks Angelique if she can hear him, and a musical cue associated with her plays on the soundtrack. The cue cuts out, and Nicholas follows up with another question. Dark Shadows stood out from the daytime soaps of the period in having an orchestral score instead of an organ accompanying the action. The meta-theatrical touch of a character who can hear that score is a major departure. It is something people at the time would have seen in animated shorts from Warner Brothers, but likely not anywhere else. Since the biggest and fastest-growing share of Dark Shadows’ audience at this point was children under the age of 13, there was a risk that adult viewers might take that association with cartoons as a sign that it was time for them to find something else to do with their mid-afternoons.
Back in his own house on the same estate, Barnabas finds his servant Willie Loomis holding a rifle. Willie says that he is afraid that man named Adam will come to the house. Barnabas dismisses that fear and orders Willie to put the rifle away. Willie objects. Barnabas repeats the command and leaves. Willie grumbles, but does as he was told. We see a face peering in at the window.
The face belongs to hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell. Returning viewers know that Barnabas held Joe’s fiancée Maggie prisoner from May to June of 1967 and was extremely cruel to her. When the case was being investigated, Barnabas framed Willie for those crimes. Willie was sent to a mental hospital, and Barnabas had Willie released and brought him back to work for him some weeks ago. Joe thinks that Willie is the perpetrator, and has no patience with him. He knocks on the door and demands Willie let him in.
Joe insists that Willie tell him what he knows about Adam. Willie tries to evade his questions. When Willie says that Adam dislikes him, Joe responds”that means he knows you.” Joe twists Willie’s arm while repeating his questions. Once Joe releases him, Willie runs off and comes back with the rifle. He points it at Joe and orders him out of the house. Joe complies, but says that he will be back, and that he will be having words with Barnabas.
Later, Willie is in the basement. Some bricks are missing from a wall, exposing a skeleton hanging from the ceiling. Viewers who have been with Dark Shadows all along will recognize the basement of Barnabas’ house as a redress of the set that represented the basement of the main house in the first year of the show. The spot with the missing bricks was where a door stood that was always locked in those days. For the first 54 weeks of Dark Shadows, matriarch Liz thought that her husband’s corpse was buried behind that door. That belief turned out to be mistaken, but now we see that there are indeed human remains in the most similar possible spot. We might wonder what else Liz might have been less wrong about than at first sight appeared.
We watch Willie preparing to fill in the missing bricks, leaving the skeleton in place. After all, judging by Liz’ old way of thinking, that’s what ought to be in a space like that. We hear Willie’s interior monologue. He is making himself laugh with a pun on his own name when a stagehand wanders into the shot.
Uh, hello?
That moment of unintentional humor gives way to a scene rich in intentional comedy. Willie goes upstairs and finds that Nicholas has let himself into the house. Nicholas entrances him and extracts information from him. Willie tells him about a meeting with a ghost- “the one downstairs,” he specifies. Nicholas directs Willie to sit down, to remain in a blissed-out state until he leaves, and then to forget all about their encounter.
Nicholas goes to the basement, looks at the skeleton, and calls it “Reverend Trask!” Willie hadn’t given him this name; evidently he recognizes Trask the same way he recognized Barnabas.
We open with a reprise of yesterday’s close, with mad scientist Julia Hoffman and servant Willie Loomis in the basement of the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. They hear a sobbing in the air; Julia knows it is the sound of the ghost of gracious lady Josette. Yesterday, the sobbing sounded like Kathryn Leigh Scott, who played Josette in the part of Dark Shadows set in the 1790s; today, it is a recording used in the early months of the series when a mysterious sobbing was heard coming from the basement of the great house on the estate. That sobbing was implied at that time to be Josette also, but in #272 it turned out to be matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Using the same recording for Josette, and playing it on a redress of the set used for the basement at the great house, would seem to be a way of admitting to longtime viewers that it was a mistake to resolve the Mystery of the Sobbing Woman that way.
The performer on the old recording is Florence Stanley. Stanley would become nationally famous in the 1970s as Bernice, wife of Sergeant Fish on Barney Miller and later on a spinoff series titled Fish. Fish was played by Abe Vigoda, who will later appear in a couple of episodes of Dark Shadows. I doubt very much Stanley and Vigoda ever talked with each other about their experiences on the show, but it makes me happy that they were both alums.
Abe Vigoda and Florence Stanley as Phil and Bernice Fish.
Julia figures out that recovering vampire Barnabas Collins has been bricked up behind a wall in the basement by the vengeful spirit of eighteenth century witchfinder the Rev’d Mr Trask. She orders Willie to chisel away the bricks and rescue Barnabas. Willie is confused and frightened by what Julia has told him, and resists her command. As he chips away, he is interrupted first by a strange, sudden chill and then by the feeling of a hand on his shoulder. Julia conjured Trask up at a séance held on this spot a few days ago. But she at first refuses to acknowledge that he can be a real obstacle to Willie’s compliance with her commands, so she tells Willie to “shut up!” and get back to work. When Trask becomes visible to them both, Julia has no choice but to address herself to him.
Julia tells Trask that, as a man of God, he must know that murder is wrong. This changes nothing; evidently Trask’s moral theology has evolved considerably since his physical death. Then she tells him that if he wants to correct a terrible mistake he made in life, he should forget about Barnabas and turn to the witch he hunted then, who now calls herself Cassandra Collins and lives at the great house on the estate. Again, no change. When Julia says that Cassandra is the one who ultimately caused Trask’s own misfortunes and that if he is going to take revenge on someone, it should be her, he disappears and the cold, clammy feeling of a ghostly presence goes with him. Willie gets back to work, and they get Barnabas out of his predicament in the nick of time.
In the great house, Cassandra plays a scene with Elizabeth. Cassandra has caused Elizabeth to be obsessed with death, and now causes her to believe she is one of her own collateral ancestors, Naomi Collins, who died in 1796. Cassandra leads Elizabeth to Naomi’s tomb and shows her the stone wall plates inscribed with the dates of the people buried there.
Cassandra does some more spellcasting to deepen Elizabeth’s misery and confusion. Elizabeth resists and runs out; Cassandra laughs gleefully. Her laughter stops when Trask appears to her, a torch glowing in his hand. He tells her that she is the witch, and that he has come to burn her. He commands “Burn, witch, burn!” and she bursts into flames.
The scene in the basement is great fun, as is Cassandra’s confrontation with Trask. But the parts with Cassandra and Elizabeth drag. This is the second time Elizabeth has moped around hopelessly and thought of nothing but death; the first time was a year ago, in late June and early July 1967. It was deadly dull then, and is no better now. The show simply does not know what to do with Elizabeth, and usually wastes the great talents of Joan Bennett.
There are a couple of famous production faults at the tomb. When they get there, the plate over Naomi’s casket still reads “born, 1761; died, 1821,” as it did before the show settled on the 1790s as the decisive period. When Cassandra causes Elizabeth to see the tomb as incomplete and still awaiting Naomi’s interment, the inscription is covered by a piece of cardboard painted to match the stone and clumsily pasted on it.
A lot of wonderful acting in this one. We start off with Willie Loomis (John Karlen,) staggering into the cottage Maggie Evans (Kathryn Leigh Scott) shares with her father Sam (David Ford.) Yesterday, Maggie’s boyfriend Joe beat Willie up. Maggie invites Willie in, comforts him, tries to treat his wounds, and agrees to drive him home. Joe had excellent reasons for insisting Willie stay away from Maggie, and those reasons might lead returning viewers to react to the beginning of the scene with frustration. But Karlen and Miss Scott are so good together that they very smoothly defuse that frustration, and we soon find ourselves as absorbed in the scene as we were in the many scenes the same actors shared in May and June of 1967, when Maggie was the prisoner of Barnabas the vampire* and Willie, as Barnabas’ slave, was trying desperately to reduce her suffering.
A very tall man named Adam (Robert Rodan) comes to the open front door and announces “Willie bad!” Maggie has no idea who Adam is. Adam enters the cottage and clarifies his intention with a declaration of “Kill Willie!” Willie tries to talk Adam out of this plan, and reminds him of the good times they had together. Maggie tells Adam that Willie is hurt, and Adam looks concerned when he responds “Willie hurt?” Rodan gets the same flicker of light into Adam’s eyes that you might see in the eyes of a toddler who is intrigued to hear that someone is having feelings he wouldn’t have expected them to have. Before long, though, Adam is angry again. Maggie takes a hammer and tries to hit Adam, leading Adam to state a new plan- “Kill Maggie!”
Sam comes home. Sam befriended Adam during a trip Maggie recently took out of town. He tells Maggie to stand behind him. She does, and he talks to Adam about their friendship. Adam agrees that Sam is his friend and that he would never hurt him, but he refuses to agree when Sam tells him that Maggie is also his friend. Maggie makes a move that confuses Adam. Trying to get at her, Adam hits Sam very hard. Adam sees that he has knocked Sam down, and he runs away.
We see Adam in the woods, and for the first time hear his voice in a pre-recorded monologue telling us his thoughts. “Afraid! Adam afraid! Adam bad! Adam hurt friend!” Rodan’s acting is more than sufficient to enable us to figure out that this was what Adam was thinking even without the monologue, but he does such a good job of voice acting that I don’t really begrudge it. Crude as the lines are, Rodan simultaneously expresses fine shades of fear and guilt through them.
Willie and Maggie have another scene in the Evans cottage. She is stern with him now, demanding to know what Willie knows about Adam. Willie denies that he knows anything, and she points out that when he was trying to calm Adam he appealed to several facts from their previous acquaintance. Willie tells a story to cover that up, essentially the same story Barnabas made up to tell the sheriff in #505. Maggie is a lot smarter than the sheriff- that isn’t saying much, chewing gum is a lot smarter than the sheriff- and even he didn’t buy this line when Barnabas was pushing it. She tells Willie in a firm tone that she will continue to ask questions until she gets answers she can believe. She explicitly tells him she will ask Barnabas. Maggie’s firmness and Willie’s barely controlled panic make for another gripping encounter.
Willie goes back home to Barnabas’ house. Barnabas’ best friend Julia Hoffman (Grayson Hall) is there. Willie tells Julia they have to find Adam before the police do, since he now knows enough words to get them all in a lot of trouble. Usually when Julia and Willie have their staff conferences, she is firmly in charge and full of ideas. But she is at a complete loss today. She has no idea how to capture Adam, and she doesn’t know where Barnabas is.
What’s more, Julia has just seen a ghost. She heard sobbing coming from the basement, and when she went down there she saw a woman in white whom she recognized as Josette Collins, deceased. Josette dematerialized in front of her. Now the sobbing starts back up, and Julia accompanies Willie to the basement.
Josette is already gone when they get there. Julia tells Willie what she saw earlier. She figures out that Barnabas is bricked up behind the wall where Josette’s ghost had stood. She explains her reasoning in terms that viewers who have seen the last several episodes will be able to follow, but which don’t make a bit of sense to Willie. His sharp befuddlement and her vague certitude make for a laugh-out-loud funny scene.
In the early months of the show, several characters heard a sobbing woman in the locked room in the basement of the great house of Collinwood. It was strongly implied in a number of those episodes that the woman was the ghost of Josette. In #272, matriarch Liz said that she herself was the one who did the sobbing. That didn’t fit very well with what we had seen, but by that point the show had reconceived Josette as part of Barnabas’ story and stopped involving her ghost in the action. Longtime viewers have a strong reminder of the “Sobbing Woman” story today, since Barnabas’ basement is a redress of the set used for the basement of the great house and the alcove where he is walled up is in the same place as the door to locked room in basement of great house.
*Maggie has amnesia about all that, and thinks Barnabas is her friend. His vampirism is in remission now.
Hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell is engaged to marry Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. Early in their relationship, Maggie warned Joe that they might never be able to get married, because her father Sam was an alcoholic and would always need her to come rescue him. Joe liked Sam, drunk or sober, and was always quick to lend him a hand. He didn’t seem to understand Maggie’s worries.
Now, it’s Joe who is worried, and Maggie who doesn’t understand why. Sam’s drinking doesn’t seem to be as much of a problem as it was then. But he has been struck blind, ending his career as a painter. Joe still wants to marry Maggie, and is still glad to help Sam. But Sam has befriended a very tall, phenomenally strong man named Adam, who is wanted by the police because he abducted heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard several days ago. Sam doesn’t consider the abduction to be a strike against Adam, whose ignorance of social customs he considers to be a disability equal to his own blindness. Joe is convinced that Adam is a violent felon and is alarmed that Sam insists on inviting him to the Evans cottage. Maggie has been out of town and doesn’t know about Adam.
Today, Joe finds a reason to be as alarmed about Maggie’s judgment of men as he is about Sam’s. Maggie was missing for some weeks in May and June of 1967, and when she was found she was so severely traumatized that she could barely talk. She spent months in a mental hospital called Windcliff after that, during which time she had regressed to childhood and developed a tendency to become wildly agitated. She seems to be her old self now, but she still has amnesia covering the whole period from her disappearance through her time at Windcliff.
Like the rest of the village of Collinsport, Joe believes that Maggie was abducted and brutalized by Willie Loomis, servant to old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, and that Willie was trying to kill Maggie when the police shot him in #322 and #323. When he survived his gunshot wounds, Willie was sent to Windcliff. In #483, Joe was appalled to find that Barnabas had arranged Willie’s release and brought him back to work for him. Joe informed Barnabas that he intended to kill Willie if he ever again saw him near Maggie.
Joe is on his way to the Evans cottage when he sees Willie heading for the front door. He confronts him and reminds him of what he told Barnabas. Willie tells him Maggie is no longer afraid of him, that they are friends now, that she visited him at Barnabas’ house earlier that evening, and that it wasn’t the first time she had gone there. Willie is going on about himself as Joe’s “competition” for Maggie’s attention when Joe hits him a couple of times and knocks him out.
Joe goes into the house and tells Maggie what happened. She admits that she did go to Barnabas’ house earlier, that she talked to Willie, and that it wasn’t the first time. Joe reacts with incredulity and says that Willie tried to kill her. Maggie insists that Willie is innocent. Joe asks why she believes that; she can’t explain. He asks why she went to Barnabas’ house. Again, she can’t explain. She says that she does not know why she went there, but that she is sure it wasn’t to see Willie. Joe is shocked that Maggie can’t explain something she did just an hour or two before. He keeps asking, but she insists that she does not know why she went to the Old House.
Joe becomes more and more alarmed. Maggie turns away from him, and he grabs her arm. All the fansites remark on the roughness of this move; it looks like an act of domestic violence. It certainly is not what we would expect of Nice Guy Joe, who was Carolyn’s doormat in the early months of the show and has been a Perfect Gentleman in his relationship with Maggie since then. The 1960s were a particularly bad time for intimate partner violence on screen, so it speaks relatively well of actors Joel Crothers and Kathryn Leigh Scott, and especially of director John Sedwick, that this moment passes briefly. Joe doesn’t follow it up with any further violence, and Maggie seems to forget about it instantly, as if it were an accident. In those days, it might just easily have been highlighted as a proof of Joe’s manliness.
The arm-grab is not defensible, but Joe’s intense feelings in response to Maggie’s inability to explain her behavior are. Joe and Sam visited Maggie at Windcliff in #265. She didn’t recognize them and started shrieking lyrics to “London Bridge” in what I think is the single most frightening scene in the whole of Dark Shadows. Maggie’s amnesia blotted that out, but Joe can hardly have forgotten it. He also remembers Willie as he was in his first weeks on the show, when he seemed determined to rape all the young women and beat up their boyfriends. The idea of Maggie’s mental health regressing to such a low point that she would wander off with a man like that must terrify Joe.
#1. Sam recently went blind; that’s why Joe has to pick him up at the bar.
#2. “Cassandra” is really Angelique, who’s cast a complicated Dream Curse spell that will eventually lead to Barnabas’ death. The gift that she brought was pipe tobacco, laced with a magic powder that would make Sam have the dream.
#3. Professor Stokes is fighting Cassandra, and trying to stop the Dream Curse. He stole the pipe tobacco, because he doesn’t want Sam to have the dream.
#4. Willie has a crush on Maggie, so he stole a pair of Josette’s earrings from Barnabas, and left them in Maggie’s purse while she wasn’t looking. When she puts the earrings on, she has a flashback to the period when Barnabas held her captive, and tried to convince her that she was Josette — a period that should be blocked from her memory.
#5. Adam, the newborn Frankenstein, has befriended Sam, and is now looking for him…
[#6.] Barnabas… was chained up a couple episodes ago and trapped behind this wall. Now he’s kicking at the wall, desperate for someone to come and rescue him.
[#7. A] man… abducted Carolyn a few weeks ago.
[#8.] Cassandra putting a curse on Liz, and making her think about death all the time.
Danny might have mentioned several other stories that don’t come up today, but of which regular viewers are aware and on which the ones that do come up depend. For example, Barnabas’ vampirism has gone into remission, and as a result his sometime victims were freed of the effects of his bites. It is unclear what this means for them, particularly for Willie, who often seems to have become once more the dangerously unstable ruffian whom Joe and the others knew when he first came to Collinsport. Also, a man named Peter is dating well-meaning governess Vicki, and Vicki has trouble remembering that Peter would prefer to be called Jeff. That may not be too exciting, but it’s no duller than Liz moaning endlessly about death. We could also bring up strange and troubled boy David, who has come into possession of a tape recorder with a message that has been played for the audience approximately umpteen billion gazillion times, but that no character other than Adam has heard, and if anyone else does there will be consequences. And Harry, the ex-convict son of housekeeper Mrs Johnson, is staying at Collinwood, and may someday be mentioned again. If he is, there is a danger that the audience will once more have to watch Craig Slocum try to act, truly a grim prospect.
Danny argues that the dense packing of so many storylines into the show makes watching it a stimulating cognitive exercise that “actually teaches people how to process information more efficiently.” As this blog makes obvious, I enjoy this kind of complexity very much. Not only do I keep talking about how ongoing storylines relate to each other, I reach back and find echoes of plot elements from months or years before and consider the significance of the common themes they develop; I look at the way the show borrows stories from books and plays and movies and folklore and notice how they put those source materials in dialogue with each other; and sometimes, my dissatisfaction with stories that didn’t work leads me to think up other stories that might have turned out better, adding yet another layer of narrative accretion to the already extremely intricate existing dramatic text.
I think Danny goes overboard, though, in his presentation of his case. He suggests that an increase in the number of storylines per minute of airtime is equivalent to an increase in the intellectual power of the show. But analysis and collation of plot elements is only one of many kinds of mental activities audiences engage in, and is far from the most important one. If that was all you wanted, you wouldn’t need actors. When an actor creates a character, s/he transforms the story points into the experiences of a person and the audience into witnesses of those experiences. When the drama is well executed, those experiences, even if they can be assigned to some category that is familiar to us, strike us as fresh and unique. When that happens, you don’t need a large number of interlocking storylines to generate complexity- your responses, emotionally and intellectually, will be as complex as your own background can support.
The audience’s background matters. There’s an old saying that when you engage with a literary work, it isn’t just you who read the book, but the book reads you. I often see how true this is in my job as a faculty member in ancient Greek and Latin at a state university in the interior of the USA. When I teach courses on ancient Mediterranean literature in translation, students aged 18-25 have an entirely different reaction than do the “non-traditional” students, those coming back to school after some years doing something else. Most of the students who are in the traditional college age group make interesting connections with a wide variety of topics, while others in that group get bored and can’t see a point in reading old books. But of the dozens of students I’ve taught when they were over the age of 40, every single one has found the reading to be a deeply rewarding experience. The literature that we have from the ancient world was written for adults, and the average American post-adolescent is only going to get so much out of it.
At this point in 1968, Dark Shadows is very much a show for children. The biggest and fastest-growing share of the audience is under 13 years old. So if it is going to be a smart show, it’s going to be smart in the sense that IQ tests measure, transmitting large amounts of information and giving the audience a short period of time to absorb, analyze, and recombine that information before it is followed by another close-packed message. It’s no wonder that an actor like Joel Crothers would become discontented with the show and go away complaining that the cast was being crowded out. He has ever less basis for the hope that he will be able to present the audience with a recognizable human feeling and leave them with hard thinking to do about what that feeling means.
Adam the Frankenstein’s monster has abducted heiress Carolyn and taken her to an abandoned structure. Carolyn says the structure looks like a root cellar. She doesn’t have a television, or she would have recognized it at once. It’s the old Flintstone place.
Adam was created in an experimental procedure mad scientist Julia Hoffman completed, an experiment that Julia’s late colleague Eric Lang designed to free old world gentleman Barnabas Collins from vampirism. The experiment was a success, but Barnabas and Julia are the world’s worst parents. They have kept Adam chained to the wall of the prison cell in the basement of Barnabas’ house for the first three and a half weeks of his life. As far as Adam is concerned, it is normal for people to confine one another in underground spaces.
The cell was in the basement of the house when Barnabas and his little sister Sarah were growing up there in the eighteenth century; in #260, we found that Sarah had found a secret passage leading out of the cell, suggesting she must have spent a lot of time there in her nine years of life. Perhaps the cycle of abuse that Adam is perpetuating goes back a very long way.
Barnabas is out searching for Adam and Carolyn. Julia is in his house, along with his servant Willie. Julia finds that Willie has had a nightmare and is compelled to tell Carolyn about it. The nightmare is part of The Dream Curse. One person after another has the same dream, which the audience sees dramatized every time. Then that person wrestles with a compulsion to tell the nightmare to someone else. We usually see that, too. Finally, the person does tell the dream, giving a speech to repeat the material to us yet again. This time-waster will go on indefinitely, and is supposed to end with Barnabas reverting to vampirism.
Julia knows all about this. She had the dream herself, and has interacted with others who have had it since. Today, she tries to hypnotize Willie into forgetting the dream.
It is very strange Julia hasn’t tried this before. She has a phenomenal ability to use hypnosis to erase memories, so regular viewers would expect her to turn to that right away. When she starts giving Willie the instructions, kaleidoscopic colors pulse on the screen, suggesting that she will have yet another great triumph. Willie does have a vision of Carolyn in the Flintstone house, so Julia must have unlocked his capacity for extrasensory perception. But he still remembers the dream, and is still driven to tell it to Carolyn.
The sheriff comes by. He tells Julia and Willie about evidence that Adam has a connection with the house. They deny everything. Willie is a panicky mess. He is still upset because of the dream, and the barking of the police tracking hounds outside triggers his memories of the nights when Barnabas’ bloodlust prompted dogs to howl. Julia is able to parry all of the sheriff’s questions and observations, but she is too shaken to produce her usual stream of perfectly plausible lies.
Adam comes to the house. He is hungry, and it is the only place he has ever seen food. The sheriff sees him, threatens to shoot him unless he stops, and opens fire immediately. Adam isn’t killed; in fact, he is so healthy that it takes twenty (20) men to subdue him and take him to gaol.
The sheriff sticks around and tells Julia and Willie that Adam gave them a look of recognition. Julia dismisses that, and the sheriff protests “I’m not a stupid man!” Regular viewers know that he is in fact an utterly stupid man, and that Julia is extraordinarily intelligent. Typically, she wouldn’t need more than five seconds to distract him from whatever was on his mind and get him chasing after an imaginary squirrel. But she is so run down from the ongoing crises that she is reduced to challenging him to “Prove it!”
Dark Shadows Commentary 