zita johanns – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 884: Departure date

It is November 1897, and time traveler/ recovering vampire Barnabas Collins is searching through the burned remains of a cottage recently occupied by famed artist/ criminal lowlife Charles Delaware Tate. Barnabas finds a pair of glasses just outside the front door and a length of chain just inside. The glasses belonged to Tate’s master, evil sorcerer Count Petofi, the chain to a creature named Garth Blackwood whom Petofi and Tate summoned from the depths of Hell. When Barnabas was last in the house, Blackwood had taken Petofi prisoner there and announced his intention to kill him. Petofi couldn’t get far without his glasses, and the chain was Blackwood’s very favorite murder weapon. So Barnabas has reason to believe both of them died in the fire.

Tate shows up. Barnabas demands he paint another portrait of Quentin Collins to replace the one destroyed in the fire. Quentin is Barnabas’ friend and distant cousin, and, because of some magical powers Petofi long ago gave Tate, the portrait kept Quentin from turning into a werewolf. Tate is a jerk about Barnabas’ demands, as he is a jerk about everything, but finally says he will comply. He tells Barnabas to come back to the ruins of the cottage at 10 PM to pick up the portrait. Barnabas is surprised to hear that Tate can work so quickly, and Tate does not explain why he needs so little time. But after all, the important thing is simply that the magic spell is renewed- the portrait doesn’t have to have any particular aesthetic quality. Perhaps a simple sketch will serve that purpose as effectively as did the full oil painting Tate did previously.

Meanwhile, back at the great house of Collinwood, Quentin’s sister Judith is busy with a project of her own. She is torturing her husband to death. He is the odious Gregory Trask, so she has the audience’s sympathy, at least up to a point. She has had Trask bricked up in Quentin’s old room. There is a telephone there which can receive incoming calls, but not make outgoing calls. Judith has been using it to torment Trask. Today, she directs Trask’s attention to two objects which he has somehow overlooked in his time in the room. One is a portrait of Amanda Harris, a woman he tried to seduce while he had Judith imprisoned in a sanitarium. The other is a loaded gun. When she calls him for the last time, she does not receive an answer, evidently because he has shot himself to death.

Judith is the third role Joan Bennett played on Dark Shadows. In the parts of the show set in the 1960s, she plays matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Liz is a depressive personality who keeps trying to kill herself. When from November 1967 to March 1968 the show was set in the 1790s, she played Naomi Collins, Barnabas’ mother, who actually did kill herself when she found out that her son was a vampire. Now she plays someone who, though she was introduced as a psychologically fragile individual, does not kill herself, but drives one of the major villains to commit suicide. Judith’s method of disposing of Trask is not morally defensible, but it is interesting to see Bennett playing a more assertive character.

Trask’s discovery of the portrait of Amanda leads to an interlude in New York City, a place the show hasn’t taken us since #8. Quentin is in a hotel lobby there, waiting for Amanda. She is surprised to see him. They had been lovers, and had planned to leave Collinsport together. He did not meet her at the train station. She had told him that if he did not, she would understand that he had given up on their relationship, so she had gone ahead without him. She says she is so overjoyed at the sight of him that she won’t ask for explanations, but he gives one anyway. He tells her about the portrait. Since she herself came to life as the result of another of Tate’s magical paintings, she can’t very well dismiss the story out of hand. He says that because he does not know where the portrait is, he cannot be sure he won’t become a mindless ravening beast at the next full moon, so he will have to leave her.

Oddly, Judith takes time out from her torture of Trask to perform the same function of motherly talk-to that Liz and Naomi often served. Kitty Soames, the dowager countess of Hampshire, has been staying at Collinwood for the last eight weeks, and is engaged to marry Judith’s stuffy but lovable brother Edward. Contrary to what her title would suggest, Kitty is an American woman in her twenties. Judith sees Kitty coming downstairs with two leather overnight bags. Kitty explains that she will be leaving at once and never returning. She has realized that she cannot marry Edward. She says that she has not told Edward this. Judith says that she is disappointed that they will not be sisters, but that she admires her for facing the truth and doing something about it.

Later, Barnabas comes to the great house. He finds Judith worried that Kitty’s bags are still in the foyer, though she has been gone for hours. He says that he knows where she is. She is waiting for him. They will be married later tonight. Judith is bewildered by this. Barnabas says that they will come back after their wedding and tell Edward what they have done, and that they will then leave Collinwood forever. She is sad to think that they will be going.

In fact, Kitty is two people at once. The young dowager shares her body with the soul of the late Josette DuPrés, whom Barnabas loved when he was a living being in the 1790s and whom he tried to recreate when he was a vampire in the 1960s. Ever since Kitty arrived at Collinwood in #844, Josette has been forcing her way into her conscious mind, triggering psychotic episodes and from time to time pushing Kitty aside and living through her body. Now Kitty is in the bedroom once meant for Josette in the Old House on the grounds of the estate. Josette’s voice keeps speaking to Kitty through the portrait of her that hangs there, urging her to let go and accept her place as part of a combined entity that will love Barnabas and live with him in the bonds of matrimony. Kitty struggles against the voice. For a time she hopes Barnabas will help her thwart Josette’s attempt to come back to life and take the leading part in their symbiotic existence, but when he enters he urges her to give up the fight and become Josette.

Kitty is alone in the room when she suddenly finds herself wearing Josette’s white dress. She floats off the floor and into the portrait. Barnabas enters just in time to see Kitty merge with the portrait. He reaches up to the Kitty/ Josette entity in the frame above the mantel, and he and Kitty both disappear from the screen at the same time.

Josette puts Kitty in the picture. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Josette was first mentioned in #5 as the lady who went over the cliff at Widows’ Hill, and her ghost emerged as the tutelary spirit of Collinwood in the months that followed. In #70, our first view of the Old House involved the first truly ambitious special effect, when Josette’s ghost, who was Kathryn Leigh Scott in a veil and a white dress, emanated from the portrait and took three steps from it down to the floor. When Miss Scott’s Kitty rises up into the same portrait today, longtime viewers will see that momentous little journey in reverse.

Barnabas was not dreamed of until long after Josette’s ghost emerged. When we first saw him in the Old House in #212, he delivered a speech to her portrait telling her that her power on the estate was ended, and for several weeks afterward strange and troubled boy David Collins, who had been the ghost’s close friend, lamented that he could no longer feel her presence. In those days it sounded like Josette was Barnabas’ grandmother, and she had sided with his father in the fateful conflict that led to his becoming a vampire.

Later, Josette was retconned as Barnabas’ lost love. In a plot borrowed from the 1932 film The Mummy, Barnabas decided that Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, was Josette’s reincarnation, and he tried to torture her into accepting this fact. Maggie resisted Barnabas. She ultimately escaped, only to have her memory of his abuse wiped clean by her psychiatrist, Barnabas’ accomplice and future best friend Julia Hoffman, MD.

Maggie was another Kathryn Leigh Scott character. When Miss Scott played Josette in the 1790s segment, the show was sticking to its source material, in which Zita Johanns played Imhotep’s victim Helen Grosvenor in the contemporary sequences and his lost love, Princess Ankh-Esen-Amun, in the flashback to ancient Egypt. It also left us with the uncomfortable feeling that perhaps Barnabas was onto something when he devised his horrifying program of cruelty towards Maggie. Sure, his methods were wrong, but if she “really” was Josette, he wasn’t just crazy.

With Kitty, they take us a step further. Barnabas’ attempt to Josettify Maggie made the show so bleak for so many weeks that longtime viewers will flinch at the thought that Kitty would be right to yield to Josette’s importunings, and even more at the idea that this will lead to a happy marriage between the Kitty/ Josette symbiont and Barnabas. Yet within the context of what we have seen in the 1897 segment, these would seem to be plausible conclusions. The body they share is as much Josette’s as it is Kitty’s, and Kitty has nothing to lose by merging fully into the being who lurks in the substrata of her mind.

For his part, Barnabas’ relationship to Kitty represents almost as drastic a departure from the personality he showed in his relationships to Miss Scott’s previous characters as the reinvention of Josette as his lost love rather than his estranged grandmother did in his early days on the show. He does not abduct her, torture her, or even give her Josette’s hypnotic music box. It is Josette’s ghost, always before shown as a benevolent force, that keeps pressing the transformation on Kitty. Barnabas is a gentle and considerate lover to the Josette part of the Kitty/ Josette complex, and is solicitous to the Kitty part. When Barnabas disappears with Kitty, we reverse not only the walk Josette’s ghost took in #70, but also the speech he gave in #212. So far from wanting to expel Josette from the world of the living as he did then, or turn her into his vampire bride as he tried both with Maggie in 1967 and with the living Josette in 1796, he wants to revive her as herself.

Barnabas’ function on the show, both when he is an outright villain and when he is trying to be the good guy, is to create problems that other characters will have to solve. So this moment of benevolence and rationality cannot last. It is the ultimate indication that the 1897 segment has indeed ended. But it is a beautiful little thing, for the few minutes it lasts.

This episode marks the final appearance of Trask and of Judith. We will see Kitty again tomorrow, but only in a reuse of today’s closing scene. After that she will only be implied as a feature of Josette’s unconscious mind.

Episode 695: Collinwood belongs to the ghosts now

The ghost of the evil Quentin has driven the living members of the Collins family from the great house on the estate of Collinwood. They have taken refuge in the Old House on the estate, home to their distant cousin, old world gentleman Barnabas. Quentin wants to take possession of children Amy and David. Knowing of his plans for them, David and Amy sneak into the great house to recover and destroy the antique telephone Quentin first used to communicate with them. The children do not find the telephone there, and governess Maggie comes to the house and takes them away. Later, Maggie goes to their rooms in Barnabas’ house. She discovers that the children are missing, and Quentin’s telephone has appeared in David’s room.

Dark Shadows first became a hit in the late spring and early summer of 1967, when Barnabas was a vampire and Maggie was his victim. That story was chiefly modeled on the 1932 film The Mummy. As Boris Karloff’s Imhotep saw Zita Johanns’ Helen as the reincarnation of his lost love Ankh-Esen-Amun, so Jonathan Frid’s Barnabas saw Kathryn Leigh Scott’s Maggie as the reincarnation of his lost love Josette. As Imhotep took Helen prisoner and tried to replace her personality with Ankh-Esen-Amun’s, so Barnabas took Maggie prisoner and tried to replace her personality with Josette’s. As the movie showed us flashbacks to Imhotep’s time as a living being with Zita Johanns playing Ankh-Esen-Amun, so from November 1967 to March 1968 Dark Shadows became a costume drama set in the 1790s and featuring Miss Scott as Josette. Even Frid’s acting style and mannerisms were strongly reminiscent of Boris Karloff’s.

Since those days, Maggie’s memory has been repeatedly erased and Barnabas has been cured of vampirism. More than once, there were stories suggesting Maggie’s memory might come back and blow the whole show up, but those always ended with yet another mind-wipe. Several times lately, the show has gone out of its way to emphasize that they will not be revisiting that theme. There are two such moments today. David complains that the Old House is “like a prison”; Maggie, who was for long weeks kept in the barred cell in the basement, doesn’t miss a beat before replying “For a very good reason!”

In 1967, Barnabas’ only interest was recreating the history of the Collins family. His attempted Josettification of Maggie was part of that antiquarian project. Today, we catch a glimpse of what he might have been hoping for in that period. He and Maggie are sitting in the parlor reading family histories, and she glances at him with a fond smile. Granted, if his original project had been successful Maggie would have forgotten her own name, they would both have been vampires, and no living human would be safe from their creeping terror, but between feedings the two of them would probably have sat around like this.

Episode 497: Acting like ourselves

Mrs Johnson, housekeeper in the principal mansion on the great estate of Collinwood, isn’t herself. She had a nightmare a week ago, and ever since has been plagued with a compulsion to tell its details to strange and troubled boy David Collins. She knows that if she does, David will have the same nightmare, the same compulsion to tell it to some third person, and that if he does that person will suffer the same complex. She doesn’t know that the nightmare is part of a curse sent by wicked witch Angelique, or that at the climax of the curse old world gentleman Barnabas Collins is supposed to revert to the vampirism that afflicted him from the 1790s until last month. But she does know that it is part of something horrible, and she has tried desperately to keep it from continuing.

Mrs Johnson spent a couple of days with her sister in Boston to stay far from David, but she kept having the nightmare there. She has given up, and has come back to Collinwood. She does not go straight home to the great house, but stops first at the Old House in the estate. Barnabas lives there, but it is Barnabas’ friend Julia Hoffman she sees. Julia had passed the dream to her. Julia urges Mrs Johnson not to tell David about it. She replies that she knows she should not tell him, but that she has no more choice in the matter than Julia had in telling her.

This scene will raise a question in the minds of regular viewers. Julia is a medical doctor doubly qualified in hematology and psychiatry; she also has developed a method of hypnosis so powerful that she can virtually rewrite a subject’s memory, confining even very intense recollections to the depths of the unconscious mind, sometimes after an acquaintance of only a few minutes. Why doesn’t she try to hypnotize Mrs Johnson into forgetting the dream? All she actually does is slap her and repeat her command to avoid David.

David turns up. His father has sent him to ask Julia to come to the great house at her convenience. Julia tries to manage the situation by sending Mrs Johnson home first and keeping David in the house for a while. After Mrs Johnson leaves, Barnabas’ servant Willie enters and tells Julia there is an emergency in the basement. David agrees to wait for her to come back, but once she is gone he shouts that he will be playing outside.

We follow David out the front door, and find that Mrs Johnson is there waiting for him. She comes up on him from behind and says she has something to tell him. This scene will startle regular viewers. For nineteen weeks, from #365 to #461, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the 1790s. In that period, Clarice Blackburn played repressed spinster Abigail Collins and David Henesy played Daniel Collins, heir to the Collins fortune. We first saw Daniel in #431, when his Aunt Abigail intercepted him on this very spot and scolded him for playing at the Old House. Abigail was enforcing rules and believed she was acting in Daniel’s best interests; now the same actors invert the scene, showing us Mrs Johnson doing something she knows to be wrong and harmful to David.

Mrs Johnson sneaks up on David. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, isn’t herself. Some emerald earrings mysteriously appeared in her purse the other day, and when she tried them on she got a faraway look on her face, began speaking in a voice different from her own, and a tinkling music played on the soundtrack. Today her boyfriend Joe tells her that he took the earrings and showed them to a jeweler and to the police. The jeweler valued them at $15,000* and the police said that they didn’t match the description of any jewelry that had been reported missing. Maggie was not only irked that Joe had taken the earrings without her permission, as anyone might be, but when he tries to get her to agree that such expensive things don’t just materialize out of thin air her usual level-headedness and cheerful disposition vanish and she becomes childishly defensive. Maggie does not know that Barnabas’ servant Willie placed the earrings in her purse as an attempt to reestablish the connection the two of them had when she was Barnabas’ prisoner in the Old House. As a result of Julia’s hypnosis, she does not even remember what Barnabas did to her. But after she runs Joe off, she is compelled to go to the Old House.

Again, regular viewers will recognize an echo of an earlier episode, in this case one that aired a year ago. When Maggie was Barnabas’ victim in May 1967, she snapped at Joe and drove him out of her house as she does today. Then too, she headed for Barnabas once Joe was gone.

Maggie doesn’t find Barnabas at the Old House. Instead, she sees Willie. Barnabas had framed Willie for his crimes against Maggie, and Willie was confined to the mental hospital Julia runs. Barnabas and Julia have brought him back to the Old House to help with their latest nefarious scheme. Willie had been Barnabas’ blood thrall; it is not clear to the audience just what effect it had on Willie when Barnabas’ vampirism went into remission. When we first see him today, he is playing with an unloaded rifle and grinning maniacally, reminding us of the dangerously unstable ruffian he was before Barnabas first bit him.

Maggie knocks on the door and asks Willie if she can come in. He falls over himself inviting her. He becomes the friend he tried to be to her during her imprisonment. She says she knows that he wasn’t the one who hurt her, and he is overjoyed. She seems blissful. He asks her out on a date; she says that Joe wouldn’t like it. Before Barnabas, Willie propositioned all the young women and threatened all their boyfriends, and at first this approach, like his gleeful handling of the rifle, suggests that dangerously unstable ruffian is back. He assures Maggie that he only wants friendship, but after she leaves he picks the rifle up again and says that Joe will be out of the way soon.

Maggie finds herself strangely at home. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

For her part, Maggie’s behavior does not represent a reversion to her time as Barnabas’ prisoner. Rather, the earrings seem to have done what Barnabas tried to do when he bit her, imprisoned her, and subjected her to a series of role-playing exercises. Her personality is showing signs of giving way to that of Barnabas’ lost love, gracious lady Josette. In #260, Barnabas told Maggie “You are Josette!”; in #370, we saw that he was right, inasmuch as Kathryn Leigh Scott played both characters, as Zita Johanns had played both Helen Grosvenor and Princess Ankh-Esen-Amun in the 1932 film The Mummy, from which Barnabas’ Josettification project was borrowed. The tinkling melody that plays on the soundtrack when Maggie wears the earrings is that of Josette’s music box; this could be a sign that her memory of what Barnabas did to her is coming back, since he forced her to listen to the music box for hours on end. But the voice she speaks in at those times is the voice Miss Scott used as Josette, and her blissfulness reminds us of Josette’s first scenes with her beloved Barnabas, not of Maggie’s captivity in the ghoul’s dungeon.

Back at Collinwood, Mrs Johnson watches David sleep. She tells him she is sorry for what she has done and for what he will suffer. Clarice Blackburn was always good, but she outdoes herself with this speech. It is a beautiful performance.

David has the nightmare. The first several dream sequences in the Dream Curse storyline ended with the dreamer opening a door, seeing something scary, and screaming. David’s goes a step further. There is a gigantic spider web behind the last door he opens. He not only sees it, but is tangled in it when he starts screaming. He awakes, still screaming, and Mrs Johnson holds him.

*Equivalent to $135,796.52 in 2024’s money, according to the CPI Inflation Calculator.

Episode 494: They were meant for me

From #227 to #260, Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, was under the influence of vampire Barnabas Collins. As Barnabas tried to brainwash Maggie so that her personality would disappear and that of his lost love Josette would take its place, she began to rebel against him. From #251 until she escaped in #260, Barnabas kept Maggie locked up in a prison cell in his basement.

Throughout this whole period, Barnabas’ sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie Loomis tried to spare Maggie the worst. Willie anonymously telephoned Maggie’s friend Vicki in #230 so she and her friends could interrupt Barnabas’ first attempt to take Maggie into custody; while Maggie was Barnabas’ prisoner he several times pleaded with Barnabas to show her mercy; and when in #260 Barnabas had decided to kill Maggie with extreme cruelty, Willie brought a glass of poison to her cell so she could die painlessly.

Now, Barnabas’ vampirism is in remission. He has brought Willie back to work for him, arranging his release from the mental hospital where he was confined after Barnabas framed him for all of his crimes against Maggie. It is by no means clear what effect Barnabas’ loss of his vampire powers has had on Willie. At times he seems to be confused and childlike; at times, to be the dangerously unstable ruffian he was before he fell into Barnabas’ clutches. But he is still fascinated by Maggie, and still longs for her friendship. The very night Barnabas brought him home from the hospital, Willie sneaked off to visit Maggie and tell her he was innocent.

For her part, Maggie’s memories of her experience with Barnabas were excluded from her conscious mind when mad scientist Julia Hoffman hypnotized her. The other day, Maggie had a nightmare as part of the “Dream Curse,” and in the course of the nightmare she heard the sound of Josette’s music box, which Barnabas forced her to listen to while in captivity. She also saw a skull with eyes, suggesting that her deepest fear has to do with the dead watching her. Since Barnabas, as a vampire, was dead and yet kept Maggie under surveillance, this image combines with the music to suggest that Maggie’s memory might soon return.

Today, Willie is minding Adam, a Frankenstein’s monster whom Julia brought to life in a procedure meant to cure Barnabas of his vampirism once and for all. Barnabas and Julia have no idea what to do with Adam, and so they have chained him up in Maggie’s old cell. Barnabas’ jewel box is stashed behind the secret panel Maggie used to escape from the cell, and Willie shows Adam some of its shinier contents to calm him.

Among the shiniest are a pair of emerald earrings. Barnabas has been talking to Willie as if Willie remembers everything that happened when he was his blood thrall, yet Willie has not confirmed that this is so. When he sees the earrings, Willie gets very intense. He says that he saw Josette wearing them, then realizes that it was Maggie. Perhaps Barnabas, by modeling the conversations they used to have, is inadvertently providing the therapy Willie needs to recover his memory.

Willie decides to give the earrings to Maggie. He goes to Maggie’s house and peeks through the window. He sees her with her boyfriend Joe. When he came to the house the other day to tell Maggie he never meant to hurt her, she was terrified and Joe stated as a matter of fact that he would kill Willie if he ever came near Maggie again. Willie does not knock on the door to greet the two of them.

Instead, he slips into the house while they are out of the room. He plants the earrings in Maggie’s purse, and is gone by the time she and Joe come back. Maggie finds the earrings. The tinkling sound of Josette’s music box plays on the soundtrack while she looks at them. She is fascinated:

The earrings drive Maggie crazy. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Maggie says that the earrings “remind me of something- something I’ve forgotten. I know they don’t belong to me yet. But somehow when I look at them, I seem to think they were meant for me- I mean from the start. They are lovely, a very beautiful and thoughtful gift. Only a man who has gazed into my eyes with deepest love would know they were meant for me.” As she delivers these lines, Kathryn Leigh Scott fades out of Maggie’s voice, into the tones she used while playing Josette from #370 to #430.

Barnabas’ attempt to turn Maggie into Josette would have reminded many viewers at the time of the 1932 film The Mummy, in which the undead Imhotep (played by Boris Karloff, whose voice Jonathan Frid often seems to be imitating as Barnabas) abducts the beautiful young Helen Grosvenor, whom he believes to be the reincarnation of his lost love, the Princes Ankh-esen-amun. In that movie, Helen and the Princess were both played by Zita Johanns, suggesting that Imhotep was onto something. From November 1967 to March 1968, Dark Shadows was a costume drama set in the 1790s and we saw that Maggie and Josette are both played by Kathryn Leigh Scott, suggesting the same about Barnabas. The bleakness and horror of Barnabas’ treatment of Maggie in the summer of 1967 makes this suggestion a daring one, and that Maggie makes a speech blissfully describing the one who looked at her and saw Josette as a “man who gazed into my eyes with deepest love” in the middle of an episode that begins and ends in the cell where he confined her and planned to torture her to death is more daring still.

I don’t think the risk pays off. Miss Scott was usually one of the most reliable performers on Dark Shadows. She found Maggie in her relationship to her father Sam, whose drinking problem was a major story point for the first 40 weeks of the show, and articulates the character as a series of very intelligent answers to the question “How would an Adult Child of an Alcoholic respond to this situation?” This scene presents her with a very complex challenge, as she is supposed to show that the earrings have jarred loose some fragment of a memory but to keep us guessing just what that fragment is. Joel Crothers plays Joe’s disquiet at the appearance of the earrings with a simplicity that sets Miss Scott up for a star turn. But she doesn’t seem to have any idea what to make of her lines. For the first time on the show, she is physically stiff and vocally overbearing. As a result of her atypical overacting, the scene does not deliver the sense of mystery and foreboding it requires. It just leaves the audience confused.

Episode 370: Foreign to both of us

On Wednesday, we met a new arrival from Paris by way of the island of Martinique. She is Angelique, maidservant to the Countess DuPrés and onetime bedfellow of rich young gentleman Barnabas Collins. Barnabas is engaged to marry the countess’ niece Josette, and is anxious to keep Angelique in the background. Angelique does not share either of Barnabas’ goals.

At rise, Angelique meets Barnabas’ uncle Jeremiah in the front parlor of the manor house of Collinwood. She has found a toy soldier and asks Jeremiah about it. When he identifies it as one of the toys Barnabas was most fond of in his boyhood, he volunteers to take it to the playroom himself. She asks to keep it for a while, so that she can study its workmanship. He doesn’t object, and exits. Once she is alone in the parlor, Angelique starts talking to herself. She says that she will use it to cause Barnabas unimaginable pain. This is the first direct suggestion we have seen that Angelique is involved in witchcraft.

Time-traveling governess Vicki enters. She tells Angelique that they should be friends, because they are both servants in the house, and it is a foreign setting to both of them. Angelique asks what Vicki means by describing herself as foreign, since she is an American. Vicki realizes that she can’t tell someone she has just met that she is a time traveler thrust here from 1967 by the ghost of the little girl she is supposed to be educating, and so she mutters something about how Angelique wouldn’t understand. After they part, we hear Angelique musing that Vicki has no idea what she understands. At no point does Angelique show any interest whatever in becoming friends with Vicki.

Later, we see Angelique alone in her room with the toy soldier and Barnabas’ handkerchief. She is talking to herself about her evil plans again when she is interrupted by a knock at the door. She hides the things and answers it. Barnabas enters.

Barnabas renews the effort he made at the end of Wednesday’s episode to friendzone Angelique. Again, she isn’t having it. After he leaves, she takes the soldier and the handkerchief back out and tells them that she has decided to wait for Josette’s arrival to enact her revenge on Barnabas.

She won’t have to wait long. Josette’s father, André, is entering the parlor, grumbling about the lack of servants at Collinwood. He beckons his daughter, and she follows him into the house. She is played by Kathryn Leigh Scott.

A major cast member of the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s as Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, Miss Scott has played Josette’s ghost more than once. She created the part in #70, when she was the shimmery figure who emerged from Josette’s portrait in the very house we are in today and danced among its pillars. She reprised the part in #126, again in this house, when Josette led the other ghosts in rescuing Vicki from crazed handyman Matthew Morgan. For some months Barnabas, who is in 1967 a vampire, held Maggie prisoner here and tried to replace her personality with that of Josette. Barnabas often seemed convinced that Maggie really was Josette, and when strange and troubled boy David saw Maggie wearing Josette’s dress in #240 he said that her face was “exactly the same” as it was on the many occasions when he had seen Josette’s ghost.

Barnabas’ plan to Josettify Maggie is drawn from the 1932 film The Mummy, in which the undead Imhotep (Boris Karloff) is released from his tomb, holds Helen Grosvenor (Zita Johanns) prisoner, and tries to replace Helen’s personality with that of his lost love Princess Ankh-Esen-Amun. In that movie, there is a flashback to ancient Egypt, where we see that Zita Johanns also plays Ankh-Esen-Amun and we realize that Imhotep’s crazy plan was rooted in some supernatural connection between the two women. The connection between Josette and Maggie has been equivocal until now- Miss Scott was always veiled when she played Josette’s ghost, and stand-in Dorrie Kavanuagh was the one wearing the dress in #240. Moreover, after Maggie got away in #260, Barnabas soon turned his attentions to Vicki, and decided he would try the same gimmick with her. But now we see that Barnabas really was onto something with regard to Maggie, and we wonder where it will lead. I remember the first time we watched the show, my wife, Mrs Acilius, reacted with great excitement to Josette’s entrance in this episode and exclaimed “Of course! Maggie is Josette!”

Vicki spent the first three days of this week telling the actors what parts they played in the first 73 weeks of Dark Shadows, an annoying habit. But there is a reason for it. She knew Barnabas and Sarah as supernatural beings in 1967, so she will recognize them as the same people here. And Josette’s looks reveal her connection to Vicki’s friend Maggie, so she will recognize that. Since only Angelique, of the characters we have met so far in 1795, is played by someone who did not appear previously, the writers are in a difficult position with regard to all of the other members of the company.

I wish they had solved that problem by having Vicki show up in 1795 unable to speak. The suggestion I made in my post about #366 is that she could have materialized in the midst of the accident that upset the carriage bringing the original governess, Phyllis Wick.* Vicki could have sustained a slight injury that left her mute for a week or so, could have had voiceover monologues registering her recognitions of Barnabas, Sarah, and Josette/ Maggie, and would not have had audible monologues when she saw the others. By the time she could talk again, Vicki would know that she was supposed to pretend to be Phyllis Wick.

Clearly Vicki is supposed to get into some kind of trouble in 1795; she is still the heroine, and the first rule of all soap operas is that the heroine must always be in danger. But she is supposed to be seeing the events that started the phase of the Collins family curse that involves Barnabas’ vampirism, and those events did not involve a governess who went around calling people by the wrong names and blurting out information she learned from reading the Collins family history. The logic of the plot requires that whatever trouble Vicki gets into is more or less the same trouble Phyllis Wick would have got into, and the appeal of the character requires that the audience watch to see what kind of con artist Vicki might turn out to be. Both of those imperatives demand that she try to masquerade as Phyllis.

Vicki does manage to keep herself from telling André and Josette that they are being played by the actors who took the parts of Sam and Maggie Evans in other parts of Dark Shadows. She can’t help staring at Josette, however. Josette is quite cheerful when she asks Vicki why she is staring; André, a more conventional aristocrat than his relaxed daughter, is visibly annoyed with Vicki’s impertinence.

Josette asks Vicki why she is staring at her. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

There was an opportunity here for Vicki to show some quick thinking. She could have told Josette that Barnabas has gone on at length about her appearance, and that she is amazed at the accuracy of his descriptions. That would have endeared her to Josette as the bearer of the message that her fiancé is very much in love with her, and would have reassured her that, while Vicki is an attractive young woman who lives under Barnabas’ roof, she is not a rival for his affections. As it is, Vicki just mumbles something about not having known she was staring.

Angelique enters. She and Josette rush into each other’s arms and speak French. Miss Scott tells a funny story about that moment. She and Lara Parker had talked about the script and agreed that two Frenchwomen excited to see each other after a long separation ought to greet each other in French, and they persuaded the producer of their point. Only when they got the revised script with the dialogue in French did it dawn on them that neither of them could speak the language. Fortunately, several other members of the cast were fluent in it, and coached them through.

We can see that Josette really regards Angelique as a friend. Viewers who have been with the show from the beginning will remember Josette’s ghost as a powerful and stalwart force for good, and will also know that Maggie is The Nicest Girl in Town. So whatever grievance Angelique may have against Barnabas, and however unjust may be the social system that has exalted Josette and subordinated Angelique, when we see Angelique faking friendship for Josette while planning to make her watch her lover suffer, we know that she is really evil.

Barnabas enters. Josette tells him that her long, difficult journey was worthwhile now that she is with him. This is a very sharp retcon. In #345, mad scientist Julia Hoffman asked Barnabas if Josette ever came to him of her own free will, and he responded with a silent grimace that left no doubt as to the answer. Now, we see that she has gladly sailed from Martinique to central Maine in late autumn to be with him.

Barnabas and Josette are alone, and he wants to kiss her. She is bashful and says that their parents might be upset if they don’t wait for the wedding. He says they might pretend to be, but that in reality it is expected. That is a sweet little conversation, and it ends in a sweet little kiss.

Angelique is back in her room. She twists Barnabas’ handkerchief around the neck of his toy soldier.

Angelique casts a spell. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas starts choking and collapses.

Barnabas collapses. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The episode ends with Barnabas on the floor, apparently asphyxiating, while Josette looks on in horror.

Wednesday, Barnabas made it clear that he had his affair with Angelique because he didn’t think Josette could love him. That gives Angelique a perfectly understandable motive for seeking revenge on him. A rich man exploited his position to trifle with her, a servant, giving no thought to her feelings or interests.

The selfishness and entitlement Barnabas exhibited thereby is jarring in the mild-mannered, apparently egalitarian fellow we have seen so far this week, but it fits perfectly with his behavior as a vampire in 1967. Seen from another angle, his behavior is consistent with everything the Collinses have done to get themselves in trouble since we first met them. He was tempted to take advantage of Angelique because he had underestimated his own lovability and despaired of making a real connection with Josette.

Barnabas is still underestimating himself and Josette now. Never once does it occur to him to come clean to her about what he did with Angelique. While Josette would no doubt be saddened to learn that her beloved fiancé had dallied with her pet servant, as a rich French girl from Martinique she has after all lived her whole life among wealthy men surrounded by enslaved women, and so could hardly have been shocked by what Barnabas had done. Surely she would have decided to go ahead with the wedding, and she would have known to be wary of Angelique.

By failing to trust Josette with the truth about his misdeeds, Barnabas puts her and himself at Angelique’s mercy. We think of 1966, when matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard and her brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins, were both prisoners of shameful secrets they dared not share even with each other. In 1967, when those secrets were finally laid bare to the whole world, Liz and Roger found they were free to go on about their business as if nothing had happened. In Barnabas’ petrified silence, we see all of the shadows that have kept his relatives in darkness for so long.

*Whom Dorrie Kavanaugh played in her brief appearance at the end of #365.

Episode 281: All the unhappiness of all my ancestors

Vampire Barnabas Collins is giving a costume party in his home at the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood. His distant relatives, the living members of the Collins family, are dressed as their ancestors from Barnabas’ own time as a living being. The whole thing was impossibly dull until the mischievous and witty Roger Collins suggested they have a séance. Now well-meaning governess Vicki is in a trance, channeling the spirit of Josette Collins.

The last time Josette took possession of Vicki at a séance was in #170 and #171. At that time, Josette delivered her message in French. Since Vicki could not speak French (but Alexandra Moltke speaks it fluently,) that was evidence enough to convince even the most skeptical that something was going on. Today Josette speaks English. The characters are all sure that she is the one speaking, but it doesn’t have the same effect on the audience as did that earlier irruption of a language we had not expected to hear.

I do wonder if the decision not to use French came at the last moment. Even though Vicki/ Josette’s voice is loud and clear, the others make a show of struggling to understand what she is saying and seize on a word here and there (“Something about ‘run!'”,) as people do when they are listening to someone speak a language they don’t quite understand. Perhaps writer Joe Caldwell wasn’t quite up to writing in French, and the Writer’s Guild wouldn’t let Alexandra Moltke Isles or any other Francophones on set make a translation. Or maybe they thought that the switch to French wouldn’t be as effective the second time as it was the first.

Josette is telling the story of her death. A man was chasing her, and fleeing him she threw herself off the peak of Widow’s Hill to the rocks below. Barnabas interrupts and breaks Vicki’s trance.

When the others scold him for stopping Josette before she could reveal the name of the man who ran her off the cliff, Barnabas says that the name could not have been of any importance, since whoever it was who drove Josette to kill herself must have been dead for “almost 200 years.” The others do not suspect that he was that man. They do not know that he is a reanimated corpse; they think he’s just English.

When Dark Shadows started, the stories of the tragic death of Josette and of the building of the great house of Collinwood were set in the 1830s. In the weeks before Barnabas’ introduction in April of 1967, they implied that Josette’s dates were much earlier, sometime in the 18th century. Last week, they plumped for the 1830s again. But Barnabas’ line about “almost 200 years ago” puts us back to the 1700s.

After the séance ends, we have evidence that this bit of background continuity might start to matter. Vicki looks at the landing on top of the staircase and sees the ghost of Barnabas’ 9 year old sister Sarah watching the party.

Sarah watches the party. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

It seems that when Barnabas was freed to prey upon the living, he unknowingly brought Sarah with him. Sarah has been popping in and out quite a bit the last few weeks, and she has already made some important plot points happen. We’re starting to wonder just how many more beings will emerge from the supernatural back-world into the main action of the show. The opening voiceover today tells us that “the mists that have protected the present from the past are lifting,” so perhaps they will have to nail these dates down sooner rather than later.

The whole party had accepted instantly that Vicki was channeling the spirit of Josette and none of them ever comes to doubt it. But when she says that she saw a little girl at the head of the stairs, they get all incredulous. By the end of the episode, Vicki will have encountered so much disbelief on this point that she herself will decide that she must have been hallucinating.

Back in the great house, Roger is still overjoyed that the séance turned out to be so exciting. His sister Liz and Liz’ daughter Carolyn consider this to be in terrible taste. But Roger won’t give an inch. He has some great lines, exiting with “I think that all of the unhappiness of all of my ancestors is my rightful heritage, and you shouldn’t try to keep it from me. Good night, ladies.” Both Patrick McCray, in his Dark Shadows Daybook post about this episode, and Danny Horn, in his Dark Shadows Every Day post, make insightful remarks as they analyze the fun Louis Edmonds has playing Roger.

Carolyn approaches Vicki to speak privately. She tells her that she isn’t bothered that fake Shemp Burke Devlin is dating Vicki. Vicki’s response to this is “What?” Carolyn reminds Vicki that she used to be interested in Burke and was initially jealous of Burke’s interest in her. But she assures her she doesn’t feel that way any longer. Vicki smiles, nods, and looks away. Carolyn then says “He’s really very nice!” Vicki answers “Who?” “Burke!” says Carolyn. Again, Vicki smiles, nods, and looks away.

This is probably supposed to tell us that Vicki is coming under some kind of spell associated with Barnabas, but in fact it is likely to suggest something quite different to the audience. Burke was originally a dashing action hero played by Mitch Ryan. Dark Shadows never really came up with very much for a dashing action hero to do, but Ryan’s skills as an actor and his charismatic personality always made it seem that he was about to do something interesting. Several weeks ago, Ryan was fired off the show after he came to the set too drunk to work.

Since then, the part of Burke has been played by Anthony George. George was a well-trained actor with an impressive resume, and by all accounts was a nice guy. But he cannot dig anything interesting out of the character of Burke as he stands at this point in the series. The only scene in which George has shown any energy so far was in #267, when Burke had lost a dime in a pay phone. The rest of the time, he has blended so completely into the scenery that it is no wonder Vicki can’t remember him from one line to the next.

Back in the Old House, Barnabas talks to Josette’s portrait. In the months from #70 to #192, it was established that Josette can hear you if you do this. Several times she manifested herself either as a light glowing from the surface of the portrait or as a figure emerging from it. In #102, we saw strange and troubled boy David Collins having a conversation with the portrait- we could hear only his side of it, but it was clear that Josette was answering him.

The first time we saw Barnabas in the Old House, in #212, he spoke to the portrait. At that point, Josette was not yet his lost love. It seemed that she was his grandmother, and that she had sided against him in some terrible fight with his father Joshua. He ordered Josette and Joshua to leave the house to him. The next time David tried to talk to the portrait, in #240, it seemed that they had complied- David could no longer sense Josette’s presence in it.

Barnabas had spoken briefly to the portrait the other day, but today he makes his first substantial address to it since banishing Josette and Joshua in #212. Again he entreats her to go, but for a very different reason. Now he says that she is lost to him forever, and must allow him to live in the present. Since he has been scheming to capture a woman, erase her personality, replace it with Josette’s, and then kill her so that she will rise from the grave as a vampiric Josette, this sounds like he has decided to make a big change in his relations to the other characters.

It turns out that he hasn’t, but the writers have decided to change their relationship to their source material. Barnabas’ original plan was identical to that which Imhotep, the title character in the 1932 film The Mummy, had pursued in his attempt to replicate his relationship with his long-dead love Princess Ankh-esen-amun. Imhotep met Helen Grosvenor, whom he regarded as the reincarnation of Ankh-esen-amun because they were both played by Zita Johanns, and subjected her to the same treatment Barnabas first inflicted on Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, and now plans to try on Vicki.

Maggie is played by Kathryn Leigh Scott. The audience in 1967 would not have known that Miss Scott also played the ghost of Josette in some of her most important appearances. However, they would have noticed when David saw Maggie dressed as Josette in #240 he assumed it was the ghost, because her face was “exactly the same” as it had been when she manifested herself to him previously. So we have the same reason to believe that Maggie is the reincarnation of Josette that Imhotep had to believe that Helen was the reincarnation of the princess, and we therefore assume that Barnabas, like Imhotep, was trying to take possession of both the ghost and the living woman.

But after Barnabas tells Josette to go away, he declares that if he is to have her, she must be someone from the present. This sequence of words is nonsensical in itself, but harks back to a theory he had laid out to his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie in #274: “Take the right individual, place her under the proper conditions and circumstances, apply the required pressure, and a new personality is created.” Jonathan Frid would always sound and move like Boris Karloff, but now his project of Josettery is inspired less by Imhotep than by the various “mad doctors” Karloff played in the 1940s. Of course, in the 1960s real-life mad scientists such as Stanley Milgram and John Money were performing experiments on human subjects for which Barnabas’ statement might have served as a motto. So Barnabas is coming to be less a merger of Dracula and Imhotep than of Dracula and Dr Frankenstein.

One of the devices by which Barnabas tries to place women “under the proper conditions and circumstances” for Josettification is a music box which he bought for the original Josette and may or may not have given her.* He gives this to Vicki. To his satisfaction, she is reduced to a complete stupor when she hears it play. She is in that state when the episode ends.

* In #236, he says he never had the chance to give it to her. In subsequent episodes, he implies the opposite.