zombie – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 725: Imagination, properly channeled

In April 1967, Barnabas Collins showed up at the great house of Collinwood, home of Elizabeth Collins Stoddard and her family. Liz (Joan Bennett) was isolated, embattled, and under the control of a blackmailer. When a courtly gentleman claiming to be a distant cousin from England showed up, apparently wanting nothing from her but her friendship, she quickly accepted him, even giving him the Old House on the estate to live in. As Barnabas’ eccentricities became ever more difficult to ignore and bizarre and terrible events piled up around him, Liz steadfastly refused to entertain the idea that Barnabas might be anything less than perfectly trustworthy. Since Barnabas was in fact a vampire escaped from his grave to prey upon the living, this refusal tended to push Liz further and further to the fringes of the story.

Now Barnabas has traveled back in time to the year 1897. Joan Bennett again plays the mistress of Collinwood. Like Liz, spinster Judith Collins has agreed to let Barnabas stay in the Old House and do some work on it, presumably at his own expense. Unlike her, Judith is not desperate for friendship, and she is not at all sure Barnabas is someone she should trust.

Today, Joan Bennett is in closeup while a recorded monologue in her voice tells us what Judith thinks of Barnabas:

What is happening to all of us? Until Barnabas arrived, everything seemed the same. But what has Barnabas to do with it? Something, something, I’m sure. He knows too much, he’s involved himself so quickly, as if he were the center of it.

Judith trying to figure out Barnabas. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Had Liz ever thought in those terms for one second, Barnabas would have been exposed and destroyed and Dark Shadows would have gone back to telling stories about the Collins family cannery. But 1897 is a more dynamic setting, in which no one has much time to wonder where Barnabas goes during the daylight hours or why he keeps his cellar door locked.

Today’s great crisis concerns Judith’s brother Quentin and her twelve year old nephew Jamison. Quentin died the other day, which you might expect to mark an ending of sorts. But as it happens, his body is roaming about as a zombie and his spirit has taken possession of Jamison. Yesterday Judith permitted Barnabas to do some mumbo-jumbo that lured Quentin back to his coffin, and, with the help of Judith’s surviving brother Carl, Barnabas buried Quentin and filled the grave with cement. But before the episode was over, Quentin had made his way out of the ground and abducted governess Rachel Drummond. For his part, Jamison is still possessed.

Today, Barnabas announces to Judith that she must let him take Jamison to Quentin’s grave, where he will perform another ceremony. Judith is appalled, as one might expect her to be, but yields to him. By the time Barnabas and Jamison come back to the great house, Judith is entertaining a visitor. He is the Rev’d Mr Gregory Trask.

When longtime viewers see Jerry Lacy wearing a cassock, they will expect to hear Trask’s name and title. Mr Lacy played another Rev’d Trask from December 1967 to March 1968, when Dark Shadows was set in the 1790s, the period when Barnabas first became a vampire. That Trask was a fanatical witchfinder whose zeal was matched only by his ineptitude. Wicked witch Angelique was able to manipulate Trask for her own purposes, and he earned Barnabas’ most cordial hatred.

When Barnabas sees Gregory Trask, he blurts out his surname. Puzzled, Trask asks if they have met. Barnabas does not answer, but immediately begins to display his hostility towards the newcomer. Barnabas is a poor tactician who has a habit of volunteering to his enemies exactly what he thinks of them. His interactions with the first Trask were a case in point, and we see him falling into the same pattern with this second.

Trask has come to Collinwood at the invitation of Judith’s brother Edward, father of Jamison and of nine year old Nora. Just four weeks ago Edward brought Rachel to the great house to be Nora and Jamison’s governess; last we saw, in #715, Edward was optimistic Rachel would work out well in her position. But now he has called Trask to come and take the children away to a school he operates, eliminating the need for a governess.

With Quentin lumbering around the house and Jamison spouting off about his possession, Judith and Barnabas cannot keep Trask from figuring out what is going on. He sits Quentin in a chair, intimidates Jamison into kneeling, sends Barnabas and Judith out of the drawing room, and starts praying for help. When Barnabas tries to enter, Trask tells him he can do nothing but help the devil, and slams the doors in his face. Judith and Barnabas are left standing in the foyer, wondering what will happen.

Episode 724: There has to be truth to make a story

Ethnic stereotype Magda Rákóczi is at home in the Old House on the great estate of Collinwood when Rachel Drummond, governess to the children in the great house on the same estate, comes to the door. Rachel says that the late Quentin Collins has risen from the dead and attacked her. Quentin was about to bury Rachel in his own disused grave when Magda’s husband Sandor showed up. Sandor fought Quentin, enabling Rachel to escape. Rachel cannot satisfactorily answer Magda’s questions about whether Sandor survived the fight, and Magda will not honestly answer Rachel’s questions about how Sandor knew to come to her aid.

Sandor makes his way back. Magda is overjoyed to see him and throws herself at him with undisguised affection. He responds with his usual grumpiness. At the end, she remembers that they are not alone, and she reverts to their usual form of pretend-quarreling. Their dialogue is great fun, and Grayson Hall and Thayer David make the most of every laugh line:

Magda overjoyed to be reunited with Sandor. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Magda: Oh, the hero!

Sandor: I am all right.

Magda: Oh, my big, bad, bold hero.

Sandor: Oh, shut up. I cannot hit you. My arm is too sore.

Magda: Oh, what a brave man you are.

Sandor: Yes.

Magda: What a brave man to fight a zombie, a brave, foolish man.

Rachel: He is a brave man. Thank you, Sandor.

Sandor: I don’t like to see a beautiful lady getting buried before her time.

Magda: But you could have been killed.

Sandor: Yes, that at least would have made you cry. Get me some hot water. My wrist is beginning to swell.

Magda: Oh, so now, I have to nurse you. It is better he should have finished you!

Sandor and Magda are the first happily married couple we have seen on Dark Shadows, and this scene shows them at their very happiest. It is not only a good bit of comedy, it is quite lovely.

Rachel is bookish and intellectually ambitious, very much the sort of young lady you might expect to find in charge of the education of the children in a wealthy family in the late Victorian age. She tells Sandor that she cannot accept that Quentin has risen from the dead and is roaming about as a zombie, even though she has encountered as much evidence of the fact as anyone could want. When Sandor urges Rachel to believe what she has seen, she asks what she will have to believe in next- “Ghosts? Witches? Werewolves?” Sandor affirms that he believes in all of those things, and Rachel replies that she cannot.

Well might Sandor believe in such beings. He is under the power of the new master of the Old House, Barnabas Collins, a vampire. Barnabas rises from his coffin in the basement at dusk, when Rachel is upstairs sleeping. Barnabas knows that Angelique, the same witch who made him into a vampire in the 1790s, is controlling Quentin and persecuting Rachel. When Quentin turns up in the basement, Barnabas remembers a ceremony he saw on Angelique’s home island of Martinique that reunited a zombie’s soul with his body and made him once more a living man. He sends Sandor to the attic to retrieve a packet of letters he wrote to his uncle Jeremiah in those days, describing the ceremony.

Jeremiah’s name will jolt longtime viewers. Angelique raised Jeremiah from his grave as a zombie in #393. Over the next five episodes he initially did Angelique’s bidding, then turned on her. They never did tell us that Jeremiah had returned to his grave, in spite of Angelique’s phenomenally vehement exhortations to him to do so. It’s too bad Barnabas didn’t remember these letters then, he might have been able to un-kill Jeremiah.

Or perhaps not. The ceremony is a total failure today, so maybe Barnabas just doesn’t have what it takes to reunite a soul with a body.

When Sandor and Quentin are fighting in the graveyard, we see a tombstone labeled “Laura Murdoch Radcliffe, born 1840.” The Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t have any examples of the phrase “Easter Egg” meaning hidden content of special interest to devotees until 1986, and for that matter this episode aired a few days before Easter began in 1969. So it is doubly premature to call this an Easter Egg. We learned in #181 that a woman named Laura Murdoch Radcliffe died (by fire!) in 1867, with her young son David in her arms; other Laura Murdochs have died that way in other years, and in #187 the residents of the great house decide that Laura Murdoch Collins is likely to take her own young son David to the same fate. The show has been dropping reminders of the Laura story lately, and any longtime viewers who can read this tombstone will appreciate the reference.

I suspect that the original audience for this particular Easter Egg was pretty nearly limited to the set decorators. The inscription is on screen for less than a second, and it is as clear as it is in the capture above for only a small fraction of that time. It’s hard to see even on a modern television; on a 1960s-vintage TV set tuned to an ABC affiliate, many of which had the worst reception in their markets, it must have been totally illegible to something like 99% of the audience. Moreover, it comes at the end of the fight scene, when most eyes were focused on Sandor’s falling figure. Not very many of the few thousand people who might have had a good enough picture to read the inscription would have been looking at it. And most of the audience who were tuning in at this point had joined the show after Barnabas was introduced, the month after Laura went up in smoke, her name unmentioned since. But in the age of streaming and DVDs, we can all appreciate the reference.

Episode 723: A mindless hulk

Quentin Collins is dead, his sister Judith would have you know. Their brother Carl is not so sure, but Carl is quite daft. So when high-strung governess Rachel Drummond reports that Quentin has taken a seat in the rocking chair in her bedroom, Judith is exasperated. She orders Carl to stop quivering and go into Rachel’s room himself to look at the rocking chair. Carl obeys Judith, and sees that the chair is vacant. Judith then orders Rachel to accompany her to the drawing room to see Quentin resting in his coffin. To Judith’s consternation, they see that the coffin is empty.

Judith and Rachel wonder who is playing morbid games with Quentin’s corpse. Of all the residents of the great house on the estate of Collinwood, Carl would seem to be the most obvious suspect. He is not only mentally unbalanced, but is also an inveterate prankster whose practical jokes are often disturbingly unpleasant. However, Carl is quick to break into maniacal laughter when he sees that the targets of his japes are uncomfortable, and he is not laughing now. He seems to be quite sincerely terrified. So Judith sends Carl upstairs to see if the body has been returned to Rachel’s room.

While the ladies are alone in the drawing room, Judith and Carl’s distant cousin Barnabas arrives. Judith tells Barnabas what has happened. When Judith expresses puzzlement as to how a dead body could be moved in and out of Rachel’s bedroom without using the door to the corridor, Barnabas mentions that there is a secret panel in the room. Judith is startled. She asks Barnabas how he, who only arrived from England a few weeks before, could possibly know about that panel. He claims that he read a “rare volume” by “the architect of Collinwood.” Judith does not seem entirely convinced, but she lets this explanation pass unchallenged.

Carl does not find the body in Rachel’s room, but he does notice something behind the drapes in the corridor. He pulls them apart to see Quentin. Carl screams. Quentin lumbers towards Carl and begins strangling him. Carl collapses, and Quentin leaves him on the floor.

Carl comes to in the drawing room. He tells Barnabas, Judith, and Rachel what happened. Judith cannot believe that Quentin has risen from the grave, and Barnabas takes it upon himself to tell her about zombies. He claims to have seen a zombie and to have witnessed ceremonies used to put them to rest while he was a young man on the island of Martinique.

Barnabas shocks everyone with his arcane knowledge. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Judith agrees to let Barnabas try his mumbo-jumbo. While the ladies are upstairs, Barnabas and Carl are in the drawing room, burning some potpourri next to Quentin’s coffin. Quentin comes lumbering in, and they withdraw to the shadows. The fun Jonathan Frid and John Karlen had working together is one of the most enjoyable things to see on Dark Shadows, but they get a little bit carried away in the moment when Barnabas and Carl hide. As they scurry off, they are so obviously a couple of kids playing that we are distracted from their otherwise outstanding performances.

Quentin comes back and resumes his place in the coffin. At Judith’s insistence, Carl and Barnabas bury the coffin on the grounds and pour cement over it. Judith assures Rachel that this means Quentin will not come back. Rachel is disappointed when Judith says she believes that Barnabas has gone back to the Old House on the estate, where he is staying. Since they have had such an exhausting night and it is almost dawn, Judith assumes that Barnabas will want to go to bed. Judith herself does retire.

Barnabas comes back and tells Rachel that he had to make sure she was all right. She thanks him, and says that during the day she will be leaving Collinwood, never to return. He asks her to reconsider. He says that he wants to see her again, but that he has to leave immediately and he cannot possibly return until the following night. He will not tell her why. Regular viewers know that Barnabas is a vampire and that he will turn to dust if he doesn’t get back into his coffin in a few minutes and stay there until sundown. Barnabas doesn’t seem to think that his relationship with Rachel has come to a point at which he can share secrets like that with her, so he evades her questions and rushes off. Rachel heads upstairs.

We see the doors open by themselves and hear the wind. Thinking Barnabas has returned, Rachel hurries down. Baffled that no one is there, she goes outside. She turns and sees Quentin. He plods towards her, and she faints into his arms. This impressively well choreographed movement brings us to a dramatic conclusion.