The Dark Shadows Daybook: March 25

Taped on this day in 1968: Episode 460

By PATRICK McCRAY

As Barnabas and Victoria face certain doom, will Joshua, Ben, and destiny unite to propel them into the future? Barnabas Collins: Jonathan Frid. (Repeat; 30 min.)

After the brisk execution of Nathan Forbes, Barnabas instructs Joshua to ensure that this is his son’s last night as a vampire. Joshua vows to do so, but with a curious uncertainty. When it comes time, he cannot pull the trigger, and instead has Ben Stokes chain him in suspended animation. Joshua later honors Barnabas’s request and grants Ben his long overdue freedom. Later, before Victoria is taken to the gallows, Peter Bradford vows that he will find her in time. 

We begin with the death of Nathan Forbes. Now, on the other end of one apocalypse, Barnabas is free to unleash the full extent of his wrath. He is no doubt saturated with self-recrimination; he did not allow the dead part of his heart to triumph over the living part, to a literally eternal regret.  Perhaps by unleashing his inner evil, he could’ve done more good in the world. It’s a lesson he will carry with him, whether he remembers its impetus or not. Barnabas has only one foe left to destroy: Himself.  He asks Joshua to do the honors, but Joshua tellingly procrastinates the attempt until the next day. His father says, enigmatically, that he doesn’t know what lies beyond the grave. He may be speaking existentially. Or he may be forming a plan to send Barnabas to another time. Perhaps to be free of the troubled son. Perhaps with the hope that Barnabas will find an enlightened future.  

In this moment, Joshua fixates on rewriting the present. You could argue that it’s for the posterity of the Collins family. And that may very well be somewhat true. But I think there is a more profound truth here. I think Joshua is developing the plan for Barnabas — to be discovered in a future where the burgeoning fidelity to science can conquer the curse of Angélique. Perhaps it’s foolishness. Perhaps it’s vainglorious. These are the sorts of decisions made in the world devoid of women and their anchoring influence. Yes, men are rash. Yes, they are cowardly. Yes they are drunk on a strange, fatalistic optimism. But these are risks that men, left to their own devices, are famous for. It is the blindness of “who dares wins,“ and in times of total desperation, daring is the only choice some have. By reshaping what will become history, Joshua is preparing a safe perch on which his son can land. Now, business concerns are secondary for the patriarch. His wife is gone. His brother is gone. His daughter is gone. All he has is his son. And all he can guarantee is passage to a tomorrow beyond the reach of the shattered present. Although he will later go through the pantomime of attempting to shoot Barnabas in his coffin, I wonder if he had any intention of ever really doing so.

Before they part, Barnabas has just two requests: free Ben Stokes and attempt to liberate Victoria Winters. Joshua responds that he will do both. 

Dark Shadows reveals its deepest value, commitment, when the characters can knowingly face death rather than have it sprung upon them. Their’s is world with little control. These are the few moments where control is possible. The characters savor them with gravitas and clarity. It is the same kind of commitment that Barnabas will show Quentin nearly 200 years in the future (and only 45 years in the future) as he assures the execution-bound scientist that he will fulfill all of his final requests. That’s not just Barnabas speaking. That’s Joshua speaking. 

Jonathan Frid and Louis Edmonds tackle their final scene with heartbreaking finesse. Crying is not the most powerful thing an actor can do on stage. Rather, it is the attempt not to cry that seizes audiences. In these moments, Frid and Edmonds seize. In a medium of love scenes, there is none more poignant.

The scene will repeat itself later in the episode as Victoria and Peter say farewell. When Peter vows to find her in time’s wilderness, it’s as if he has been subconsciously inspired by Joshua. Just as Barnabas will find some kind of peace in the future unknown, Peter will find Victoria. These are not just wishes or speculations. These are not predictions. These things happen with the tortured confidence of men who seem to have been to the eras they foresee and are reporting back. 

Joshua, yes, has a surface level of uncertainty. But he shows commitment nevertheless. And if the viewer should have any doubt that this optimism has feet of clay, Peter’s commitment promises the viewers that Dark Shadows is one universe in which they can have confidence. Yes, Joshua is indulging in history‘s greatest lie. But sometimes it takes a lie to preserve everything that would be lost on the altar of truth. In such cases, life is too precious to squander on the vanities of honor and honesty. They are luxuries reserved for the untested and the fortunate. Joshua is neither.

It’s an episode of haunted goodbyes, but like Ben Stokes contemplating the future, while it is the end of one world, it is the beginning of another. We know, at last, who Barnabas truly is. We know why. We know some of the threats he will face. And we know the heart with which he will face them.

Dark Shadows, as we know it, is finally ready to begin.

It’s the sixth anniversary of the Dark Shadows Daybook. Sharing these moments and insights with you has been the highlight of my life of over a half decade. I want you to know how grateful I am if you are still reading these words and if they have done anything to help deepen your love for this story. 

I’ll see you all at Collinwood. Someday. 

This episode hit the airwaves March 29, 1968.

The Dark Shadows Daybook: March 25

By PATRICK McCRAY

Taped on this date in 1968: Episode 460

1795 concludes as a dead man becomes a reluctant time traveler, and a reluctant time traveler confronts what may be her final moments. Victoria Winters: Alexandra Moltke. (Repeat; 30 min.)

After surviving Forbes’ crossbow bolt, Barnabas kills the sailor, then implores Joshua to destroy him, free Miss Winters, and liberate Ben Stokes. Joshua only succeeds in the latter. Instead, he has Barnabas sealed in his coffin under a silver cross and chains. Victoria’s case is too far gone. She hangs as a witch, but Peter’s vow to find her in time echoes in her ears. 

As we turn our eye to the past with 1795, the camera cannot focus any more tightly than on its last moments. Instead of pulling back out to give us a widescreen view of the world of Dark Shadows, it pushes in on four sets of faces. Four relationships. Four models of our best choices. The order of them flows with an organic necessity in an almost Maslowian ascension.  Barnabas and Forbes; Joshua and Barnabas; Ben and Joshua, and; Peter and Victoria. 

Justice. Compassion. Respect. Optimism.

They are relationships which end on defining choices. Forbes chooses murder and Barnabas chooses to protect himself and others. Then, Barnabas chooses to end his own life while liberating the deserving, and Joshua chooses the cowardly unknown rather than a bravely bleak certainty. Ben chooses fealty to social order and Joshua disrupts that order by meddling with the class structure he so thoroughly represents. Finally, instead of ending on regret, which is hard not to do when the last image is a dropped noose, the episode concludes with a sense of optimistic mission. After the future is protected from bullies like Forbes, we see that it is finally safe for family, friendship, and love. Those choices may have dark trappings, but underneath the darkness is a fierce optimism and resistance to corruption. 

That resistance to decay will drive Collinwood, creating the yin-yang that drives the series. If Gothic literature is “about” the inevitability of decomposition, Dark Shadows is wrongly pidgeonholed in that genre. It is, rather, anti-Gothic. Liz should have committed suicide. Joshua should have staked Barnabas and shot himself. Quentin should be the one dead in the sealed room, consigned by a silver bullet. The Widows should be at rest, for an empty Collinwood is devoid of those to taunt or haunt. None of this is the case. Even if Liz remains a prisoner to punish herself. If she’s punishing herself, it must mean that she matters. It’s one thing to be unworthy of existence. Forbes is unworthy of existence. Liz, however, is worthy of both punishment and recovery. Barnabas is worthy of a similar chance. The love he inspires elicits the salvation of cowardice from Joshua, perhaps the most decisive Collins that the program will present. In a world of justice and consequence, some people simply screw up. Or are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or are victims of passion. But they are not volitionally evil. They are haunted because a haunting is a message, and messages are meant to inspire change among the living. Perhaps that change is to move them into a house free of specters. What is a ghost but a restless memory that baffles with sorrow rather than comforting with joy? 

If any force moves the characters on Dark Shadows, it is the past. The show ends in a haunted room, but what room at Collinwood isn’t? If the past is a puzzle to be solved, it requires embracing the present. Quentin may have been a father so negligent that his children were kept secret from him, but he can guard Jamison, Nora, and even Edward once he discovers this. Just as Barnabas can change, he can credit Angelique with the same capacity, loving who she is rather than hating who she was. Joshua may be too sentimental to end Barnabas’ life, but his refusal comes with the hope and confidence in a future replete with knowledge lacked by his present. Their last moments are a simple gaze that says more than all of the dialogue on the show. Brutus may be tormented by James and Amanda, but he can be freed by the example of those with a love stronger than he, himself, experienced. It is a strange optimism. The show begins and ends with forms of hauntings, and the final and arguably most explored one exists to be solved, and by a solution to heal… not just the tortured soul who cast it, but the descendants who share his vices of envy, greed, and wrath. They, however, have the one thing he lacks -- the capacity to overcome them. His curse exists not to torture the worst, but to reveal the best; that is the definition of confidence. 

For an installment where the heroine is hanged until dead by a corrupt and superstitious society, and where the hero, longing for death, is sentenced to an unlivable life with a torturous curse, under the symbol of a god whose image is excruciating, sealed in the smallest space possible, under chains, within a hidden room, behind a door no one knows is a door, protected by a lock that no one knows is a lock… well, on Dark Shadows, those are good things. 

In Collinsport, those aren’t perils. They’re possibilities.

This episode was broadcast March 29, 1968. 

The Dark Shadows Daybook: March 18

By PATRICK McCRAY

Taped on this date in 1969: Episode 717

Can Rachel Drummond recruit Barnabas to confront the danger of the tower room before it consumes her? Barnabas: Jonathan Frid. (Repeat; 30 min.)

Judith discovers that a madwoman named Jenny lives in the tower room. Rachel Drummond, sensing danger, goes to Barnabas for help. As their mutual attraction grows, he vows to investigate the strange happenings at Collinwood.

Da plane, da plane, and welcome to the briar patch.

Traditionally, this is the one where I am supposed to talk about Crazy Jenny and Marie Wallace’s Bold, Uninhibited Performance, because this episode really establishes the character... beautifully. Not only do we see her at her nearly-most-histrionic, but we see range in both Jenny and Wallace. Neither character nor actress is one-note, and for such an extreme character, kicking off with that means to establish the potential for suspense any time she is on screen. Indeed, Jenny is an authentic wild card, and we’re never allowed to get ahead of her. Not only that, she’s a poetic one. Her intelligence tells us scads about Quentin and his tastes, once we learn that she is his wife, and it makes her both a worthy opponent and a victim who’s fallen from the highest of mental towers. Oh, and she has a musical number, which reveals a predictably rich voice for Wallace, a stage vet who never did featured singing in musicals. It’s exactly the character debut you’d want, both quintessentially “Jenny” and teasingly unpredictable.

But I don’t want to talk about that, so you’ll find no mention of it here.

The secret rockstar of this episode is Barnabas and the side of him we see emerging. He even has swagger to his melancholy. For all of the high stakes and tension of Mission: 1897, he’s having the time of his life. How much of this seems real to him? We are still in the pilot stages for a Dark Shadows that is essentially its own spinoff. In 1897, the show distills and refines itself, and then reinvents the recipe with that clarified formula. It’s not just Dark Shadows, it’s Dark Shadows that knows it’s Dark Shadows… what that means, what that allows, and does so without a lazy sense of privilege. The star, Barnabas, is getting the same rebooted treatment. Barnabas is like a successful nighclub act that’s finally getting two shows nightly at Caesars, and isn’t wasting a moment. He has almost a giddy sense of confidence that redefines the character without erasing his essence.

1897 is the perfect place to bring out his best, and he has to be wondering why the hell he had to wake up in the day-glo cereal box of post-Camelot 1967 instead of here. 1897… the Future! Just enough advances from his native time to crackle with new wiring, which probably shocked Dirk Wilkins across the drawing room more than once when he installed it. And just enough proximity to his own era to still know how to dress for dinner and pen a decent thank-you letter. Everyone is kind of a variation on what he already knows, but with a bit more transparency, and wait, here comes Maggie, I mean Josette, I mean Rachel, and by Rachel, I mean eventually Kitty, and by that, I mean Josette. Ah to hell with it. It’s Kathryn Leigh Scott and we’re darned glad to see her, too. And this character seems to be open to dating. He’s got gypsies instead of Willie, and they’re twice as wise and on a familiar level of untrustworthy. Plus, they’re superstitious, requiring him to waste less time making threats. They know the score. I was going to say that the downside is no Julia, but after a week or so without her nagging, spying, moralizing, and guilting, I’ll just say, plus, there’s no Julia. She may be a friend, but, as I said, he’s on vacation. And instead of pretending he’s on a secret mission, he really is on a secret mission. The worst that happens is that he gets stuck there. Oh, don’t throw me in the briar patch. And maybe the timeline gets changed a little bit. So what? Big deal. He was a tourist there, too. He’s got the Old House. He’s got Maggie more than he ever had her before. He’s got lackeys. And everyone enjoys a good, poetic turn of  phrase rather than just staring at him like they’re going to beat him up in back of the Blue Whale and take his lunch money. But on what is basically his big date with Rachel, he is smoother than caramel cognac. And the old dog knows it. It’s like a Hammer production of James Bond. His scenes with Rachel have dialogue that’s practically musical.

“There’s nothing childish about attempted murder.”

“Here at Collinwood, old hates don’t die. They lie in wait for the innocent and the unsuspecting.”

“I’ve lived through danger before.”

“No one is quite what they seem… except me, of course.”

“Such a lovely hand. Why would anyone want to harm you?”

Cornier than Kansas on the 4th of July. And they work. Every syllable, sincere. That’s the secret. Rather than a nightmare of endless terror, it’s Barnabas’ ultimate dream, complete with kisses from The Josette Character for his evil-smashing bravado. It’s a beautiful moment, and it underlines what 1897 is, measuring his fall with the Leviathans and long struggle to rebuild. Which he does.

The only thing missing? Mr. Rorke and Tattoo greeting Barnabas as he departs from a seaplane next to Scatman Crothers, Steve Lawrence, and Marion Ross, and explaining for the audience the fantasy he and the island staff are about to fulfill.

Come to think of it, it may be my fantasy, too.

This episode was broadcast March 25, 1969.