windcliffe – Page 2 – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 276: Into the room

For the first 54 weeks of Dark Shadows, reclusive matriarch Liz was paralyzed by the fear that someone would enter the locked room in the basement of the great house of Collinwood and find the murdered body of her husband Paul Stoddard buried there. For the last 16 of those weeks, seagoing con man Jason McGuire exploited that fear to blackmail Liz.

It turned out that Liz didn’t actually kill Stoddard and there never was a corpse hidden in the basement of the great house. There is, however, a corpse hidden in the basement of another house on the same estate. During the daytime, Liz’ distant cousin Barnabas Collins is a dead body resting in a coffin in the basement of the Old House. He gets up at night to feed on the blood of the living, lure the unwary to their damnation, and deliver rambling monologues about how sorry he feels for himself. Unlike Stoddard’s supposed grave in the great house, Barnabas’ coffin is not kept in a locked room, so the parallel has been incomplete.

Today, Barnabas decides to complete it. Trying to find and steal Barnabas’ jewels, Jason had broken into the Old House. He made his way to the basement, where he stumbled upon the coffin. He opened it, and Barnabas strangled him. Now, Barnabas orders his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie to help him carry Jason’s body to the secret room in the mausoleum where Barnabas himself was imprisoned and undiscovered for “nearly 200 years.”

Before they leave the basement, Barnabas tells Willie about his sister Sarah, who died when she was very young and innocent. After they leave, Sarah’s ghost appears and puts Jason’s sea cap on Barnabas’ coffin.

Sarah places Jason’s cap. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

Episodes #1-#274 had all opened with voiceover narrations delivered by Alexandra Moltke Isles in character as well-meaning governess Vicki. Starting Friday, they gave the opening monologues to one of the actresses who happened to be in the episode to deliver as an unnamed external narrator. Today, this spoils a surprise. We haven’t seen Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, for a while, and aren’t sure when we will see her again. When Kathryn Leigh Scott delivers today’s opening voiceover, we know we will see Maggie today.

Barnabas had held Maggie prisoner for several weeks. He had borrowed a plan from the 1932 Universal film The Mummy. He would erase Maggie’s personality and replace it with that of his long lost love Josette. Once he had done that, he would kill her and she would rise from the dead as a vampiric version of Josette. Maggie did not go along with the plan, and Sarah’s ghost helped her to escape. Barnabas managed to scramble Maggie’s memory before her father found her, and she is now in treatment at a sanitarium called Windcliff.

Maggie’s hometown doctor, addled quack Dave Woodard, is visiting the director of Windcliff, Dr Julia Hoffman. Woodard wants to show Maggie a sketch Maggie’s father, artist Sam Evans, made when the ghost of Sarah visited him to tell him where to look for Maggie. Julia resists, Woodard insists. While Julia delays, she feeds the fish in the aquarium in her office. We see enough of the aquarium to suggest that Julia is the keeper of a world within a world, a little enclosure with its own rules.

Woodard shows Maggie the sketch. After a moment, she says “Sarah.” She tells them that Sarah visited her in the room where she was confined, that she told her a riddle that showed her how to escape. She becomes too upset to talk. She starts miming her search for a loose brick in the wall of the cell, then sings a verse of Sarah’s signature tune, “London Bridge.” She is shouting words from “London Bridge” when the nurse drags her down the hall, back to her room. Julia declares that the whole thing was a waste of time, a judgment in which Woodard does not concur.

Sam’s sketch of Sarah. Apparently the drawing was done before Sharon Smyth was cast as Sarah, when they planned to give the part to Harvey Keitel in drag. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

Meanwhile, Barnabas and Willie take the body of Jason to the tomb of the Collinses and bury it in the secret room. They talk about the people buried in the part of the structure known to the public- Barnabas’ parents and his sister Sarah. Barnabas confirms that Sarah is the one he was telling Willie about in the basement, the friend he knew long before he met Josette. He reminisces about repairing a doll of hers the night before she died. We see the plaque giving her dates as 1786-1796, implying that Barnabas met Josette after 1796. They leave, and Sarah appears.

Liz had last seen Jason the night she thought she killed Stoddard; his reappearance would lead to the opening of the locked room and the exposure of its secret. Barnabas last saw Sarah in 1796; her reappearance, today’s events suggest, might lead to the opening of all the rooms Barnabas wants to keep closed and to the exposure of all his secrets.

Episode 265: Unusual as doctors go

Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, has escaped from vampire Barnabas Collins, but not before Barnabas put the zap on her brains. She is being treated at Windcliff Sanitarium, under the care of Dr Julia Hoffman.

Windcliff Sanitarium. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

Dr Hoffman’s old acquaintance Dr Dave Woodard shows up with Maggie’s father Sam and boyfriend Joe. Woodard and Hoffman are Dark Shadows ‘ current versions of Bram Stoker’s Dr John Seward and Professor Abraham Van Helsing. As Seward called Van Helsing in when he needed help solving the mystery he encountered treating the victims of Count Dracula, so Woodard has called the expert Dr Hoffman in to help him solve the mystery he has encountered treating Barnabas’ victims. As Van Helsing refuses to answer any of Seward’s questions when they first start working together, so today Dr Hoffman refuses to answer any of Woodard’s questions about the case. There is one departure, in that Dr Hoffman combines Seward’s occupation as chief physician at a sanitarium with Van Helsing’s role as mysterious expert from out of town.

Dr Hoffman tells Dr Woodard that she believes it will be bad for Maggie to see Sam and Joe, but she consents to the visit as a way of discouraging them from trying to come back. When Sam and Joe join them in her office, she attends to her aquarium. In the post about this episode on Dark Shadows Before I Die, Christine Scoleri points out that this is a rather direct way of telling us that there is something fishy about Dr Hoffman.

Fishy doctor. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

When Sam and Joe go to Maggie’s room, she has a mad scene. She starts singing “London Bridge,” gets to an obscure verse running “Take the key and lock her up,” and starts screaming “Lock her up!” over and over. It’s magnificently terrifying.

In his post on Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn raves about Grayson Hall’s performance as Julia Hoffman. Rightly so, she will quickly make herself indispensable to the series. He includes a lot of screenshots of her face, showing the wide variety of expressions she uses. I have a more complicated response to this aspect of her style.

As many screenshots as Danny gives of Grayson Hall’s face in his post, I presented even more screenshots of Lovelady Powell’s face in my post about #193, where Powell plays art dealer Portia Fitzsimmons. What impressed me about Powell’s performance is that she takes one of the most basic rules of screen acting- choose one of your eyes and look at your scene partner only with it- and builds a whole character around it. Her left eyelid is all she needs to command the stage and leave an indelible impression.

Hall was at the opposite extreme. She ignores the one-eye rule, and virtually every other piece of guidance professionals give about how to create a character on camera. She uses every muscle at every moment. Her broad, stagy approach works well for Dark Shadows, and the three actors with whom she shares her shots today stay out of her way. Still, she does make me miss Powell’s dominating simplicity.

With Julia’s introduction, all of the actors in the photo I use as the header for this blog have joined the cast of Dark Shadows. There is also a version of the picture where the actors are frowning.

Here’s the smiley version. I’ve marked each player with the number of the first episode in which s/he appeared:

Episode 261: Nine, ten, home again

Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, has solved a riddle posed by the ghost of nine year old Sarah Collins. The solution led Maggie to a secret panel through which she has escaped from the cell in which she has been imprisoned by Sarah’s big brother, vampire Barnabas Collins. Barnabas is chasing Maggie through the corridors on the other side of the panel.

Maggie has reached two doors, both of which appear to be locked. The other day, Sarah had visited Maggie in the cell and played “London Bridge” on her recorder. Maggie hears a few notes of that same tune, and one of the doors opens. She runs through the door, closing it behind her. She finds herself in another maze of corridors. She hears the music again, and follows it to a stairway. A moment later, we cut to Barnabas going through the other door and heading in Maggie’s direction.

Maggie finds herself on the beach. She staggers about and collapses. Apparently her escape took more strength than she had left after her long imprisonment. Barnabas makes his way to the beach and stands over Maggie, declaring that he has defeated her. She screams.

Maggie’s father, Sam Evans, is on the beach. Sarah had visited him at home and told him he might find Maggie if he went there that night. Sam hears Maggie’s scream and calls out. Barnabas retreats while Sam runs to Maggie.

Barnabas hides behind a rock and stares hard at Maggie. When he first sucked Maggie’s blood, Barnabas gained great power over her mind. She has shaken free from that to the point where she can try to kill him and run away from him, but maybe he still thinks he can put some kind of zap on her.

In the hospital, Sam, addled quack Dr Woodard, and Maggie’s boyfriend Joe discover that Maggie has amnesia and thinks she’s ten years old. She greets Sam as “Papa,” a title Sam says she hasn’t used in “a long time.” She did call him that in #200, but that was an ultra-dramatic moment, so maybe he means it has been a long time since she used it when she was calm and cheerful. Sam tells Woodard about Sarah. Maggie reacts to Sarah’s name, which is surprising since Sarah never gave it to her. Maggie has Sarah’s doll, which the men find puzzling but don’t ask her about.

Woodard has an idea. The three of them will tell everyone that Maggie is dead, and she will go to Windcliff, a nursing home a hundred miles north of town, which would put it someplace near Mount Katahdin. There, she will be in the hands of Dr Woodard’s colleague Julia Hoffman.

After Sam and Joe have agreed to this, we see Barnabas enter the hospital. A clock prominently featured on the wall shows that it is 3:30 AM. Barnabas asks to see Maggie. Dr Woodard asks him how he knew she was in the hospital. He claims that he has heard a rumor to that effect from everyone in town. Woodard says he isn’t surprised. Collinsport must be rather an odd place if everyone is up and exchanging rumors at that hour.

Woodard tells Barnabas that Maggie is dead. She never recovered consciousness, so she wasn’t able to tell anyone what happened to her. Barnabas manages to keep from smiling until after he turns his face away from the doctor.

Barnabas’ obvious relief when Woodard tells him that Maggie is dead makes an interesting contrast with the shot of him behind the rock on the beach. Maggie’s amnesia is such a stark change from her mental state in the last couple of weeks that it seems Barnabas must have made a successful attempt to project psychic power against her. But those transmissions go in only one direction- he can’t sense that Maggie is still alive.

This is the first time we hear the name “Julia Hoffman.” Woodard first mentioned Dr Hoffman in #242, when she was a blood specialist and a man. Julia still has expert knowledge about blood, but is now primarily a psychiatrist.

There is a legend among fans of Dark Shadows that Julia transitioned from male to female as the result of a typographical error. Ron Sproat is supposed to have put the name “Julian Hoffman” in the script, but a typist left the “n” off the end of the first name. Executive Producer Dan Curtis liked the idea of a female Dr Hoffman, and they ran with it.

The Dark Shadows wiki explains that the evidence does not support this charming tale. Various members of cast and production staff told various stories over the years to explain the switch, and no surviving paperwork can settle the question for us. It certainly is true that the storylines sometimes took wild U-turns based on last-minute decisions by Curtis and others, and some of those decisions were so whimsical that they may as well have been based on typographical errors. But it is also true that we’ve never heard the name “Julian,” and the near-rhyme of “Julian Hoffman” would be the first awkward-sounding name on Dark Shadows. Further, Woodard stopped mentioning Hoffman weeks ago, likely before ABC had decided to renew the show beyond #260.

If they are going to make another 13 weeks of Dark Shadows, they are going to need new characters and new storylines. They must have responded to the renewal with some story conferences during which the producers, the writing staff, and others tried to flesh out some possibilities.

The writers appear to have decided there would be a secret passage from the Old House to the beach by #238, when well-meaning governess Vicki mentions that the Old House is very close to the sea. That was a retcon that would startle viewers who remembered previous episodes that suggested it was deep in the woods. But it wasn’t clear then that Maggie would be the one escaping by that passage. She was ranging freely through the house at that point, and wasn’t locked up in the cell until #251. Until that point, it was possible Maggie would become a vampire and be destroyed like Lucy in Dracula, leaving Vicki to be the Final Girl who escapes from Barnabas’ clutches and defeats him.

Months ago, they brought parapsychologist Dr Peter Guthrie on the show to help fight undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. In #183 and #184, Guthrie offered to help Laura if she would renounce evil and participate in his research. That suggested the possibility that a complex relationship might arise between the male visiting expert and the undead female menace. Laura was a one-shot monster, on a mission to burn her son David to death and bound to vanish after the attempt, and so could not stay on the show indefinitely. She could respond to Guthrie’s offer only by killing him the night after he made it. But now an undead male menace is here for the duration, so a female visiting expert might be able to pick up the marker Guthrie laid down.

There are a lot of jokes in Dark Shadows fandom about Julia’s two specialties. Psychiatry and hematology don’t usually go hand in hand. I’ve dreamed up a little fanfic that satisfies me about this. I shared it in a comment on Danny Horn’s Dark Shadows Every Day:

The story I made up for myself is that Julia started out as a blood specialist but switched to psychiatry. She was interested in rare diseases, the rarer the better. She found that in hematology, there’s so much money to be made from developing treatments for the most widespread disorders that a researcher with an emphasis in the exotic is constantly fighting an uphill battle for funding and recognition.* Even those colleagues who had an abstract appreciation of the importance of studying rare disorders had to work within a system where all the institutions push them towards the biggest projects possible.

Psychiatry, on the other hand, always had room for the unusual.** In fact, Julia discovered that high-strung rich people would pay a great deal of money to be told that whatever happens to be bothering them at the moment is not the same kind of problem that one of their servants might have, but is a mental aberration hitherto unattested in the annals of psychiatry.*** So she switched to that field and quickly made enough money to open her own, hugely profitable, mental hospital. But she never stopped working in rare blood diseases, and the experiments she was able to finance by flattering the vanity of her wealthier patients earned her such a reputation in a male-dominated field that even her old acquaintance Dave Woodard would commit sexist slips of the tongue and say of “Hoffman” that “he” is “the top man in the field” of rare blood diseases.

Lucrative as Windcliff was, Julia’s true love was never money, or even science per se, but the exotic. When she found herself as the best friend/ frequent accomplice/ bossy big sister of an honest-to-wickedness vampire, surrounded by ghosts and witches and werewolves and Frankensteins and time travelers and interdimensional anomalies and who knows what else, there was never any question of her going back to the office.

*I have no reason to believe this was true in the real world in the middle decades of the twentieth century, or that it is true today. It’s simply part of the fictional world in which I see Julia.
**(Same note)
***(Same note)
“Acilius,” comment left 23 January 2021 on “Episode 1042: Still Another Murderer,” Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn, 2 July 2017