Has Dark Shadows outgrown Victoria Winters?

Warning: The following column contains spoilers for the 2012 DARK SHADOWS movie.

I've had the opportunity in recent weeks to revisit the early days of DARK SHADOWS. I've been writing about these episodes in the new DARK SHADOWS DIARY feature, and took a look at how Marilyn Ross handled these pre-Barnabas Collins stories in the line of paperback novels. It feels a little like going home, but in a way I've never really left.

None of us have. Because DARK SHADOWS won't let us.

Alexandra Moltke

I don't mean that in a romantic sense. It just seems like the entire concept of DARK SHADOWS can't escape the arrival of Victoria Winters at Collinwood, even when it's entirely unnecessary. Those early stories have created a number of problems for later interpretations of DARK SHADOWS, beginning with HOUSE OF DARK SHADOWS in 1970, right up to this year's film by Tim Burton. With the exception of NIGHT OF DARK SHADOWS, later interpretations of the original television series sought to "reboot" the story with the introduction of Barnabas Collins. The problem facing writers from the very beginning has been: What do you do with Victoria Winters?

Originally played by Alexandra Moltke, the Collinwood governess was the television show's heroine when the series launched in 1966. The mystery of her heritage, specifically her potential relationship to the Collins family, was the driving focus of the series ... until a certain vampire knocked on the front door of the mansion. Victoria later became the romantic foil for Barnabas Collins, but there was little doubt that she had been usurped as the central protagonist of DARK SHADOWS. When Moltke left the show, other actresses tried to fill her shoes, but it was too little, too late. Victoria Winters had become an obsolete concept and was written out of the series.

The show continued quite well without her, with the bulk of the romantic "heavy lifting" displaced to the shoulders of Kathryn Leigh Scott's "Maggie Evans." The two characters conceptually merged in the series when Evans was inexplicably made governess of Collinwood, with the two characters literally becoming one in the Tim Burton movie.

Joanna Going

The 1991 "revival" series also struggled to make use of Victoria Winters. The character, as played by Joanna Going, became a surrogate for the audience, a glorified tour guide for the world of Collinsport. She (again) became a romantic foil for Barnabas Collins, but the mystery of her relationship to the Collins family was dropped entirely. There was little for Victoria Winters to do in the series besides react to the events around her. It was a character with no goals, and was consequently lifeless. It's worth pointing out that the 1991 series was the first time Josette and Victoria became "spiritually" related, a plot point that emerged again in the 2012 film as the Maggie/Victoria/Josette knot became fully tied.

So, what's next for DARK SHADOWS? If the story is revived again it seems likely that it will be as a television series instead of a feature film. If the Tim Burton movie showed us anything, it's that DARK SHADOWS is simply too big to be contained to a two-hour movie. The story has to be about something more than Barnabas Collins being freed from his tomb. The residents of Collinsport are more than just prey for a vampire, and it's the richness of character that keeps audiences coming back to the original series as later interpretations are slowly forgotten.

But where does this leave Victoria Winters? As a character, she was the victim of natural selection when DARK SHADOWS evolved from a gothic romance into a funky brew of horror and science fiction. While its a source of constant disappointment to fans that the show's original mystery was never resolved, Dan Curtis figured out there was more to the show than Victoria Winters. Its most successful iteration, HOUSE OF DARK SHADOWS, dropped the conceit entirely, and was better for it. Still, Curtis felt the need to revive it for the 1991 series, as did Tim Burton in 2012. Neither had any success making us care about Victoria.

The biggest problem with using Victoria Winters as your hero is it requires writers to combine two very different television shows into a single narrative. One story tells of the arrival of a governess to Collinwood in search of her lost family. The other is a horror story about a vampire let loose upon the world after 200 years of bondage. Neither have much in common besides setting, and Barnabas' romantic interests in a woman who might be a relative adds an icky layer of incest to the tale. But using Victoria Winters while dropping her backstory is also a pointless endeavor, because that backstory is the only thing that makes her interesting.

As a fan, I hope the next creative team to carry the torch for DARK SHADOWS figures out how to properly incorporate the character into a new story, or decides to abandon her entirely. I've got no interest in seeing yet another regurgitation of Victoria Winters In Name Only.

What are your thoughts on the subject?