The Dark Shadows Daybook: November 13

By PATRICK McCRAY

Taped on this date in 1967: Episode 365

When Sarah begins appearing in David’s bedroom, Vicki travels back to 1795 to straighten her hash out. Vicki: Alexandra Moltke. (Repeat; 30 min.)

To address Sarah’s ubiquity, Barnabas reluctantly agrees to participate in a seance. Of course, a blackout results in Vicki changing places with the original governess, Phyllis Wick… from 1795. This is precisely where Vicki finds herself.

We are one episode away from 1795, which is when the future began.

Dark Shadows is taking a television show on vacation for the first time since Lucy. If Desi had jumped off the balcony of the Tropicana Club, Ethel had tried Harpo Marx for witchcraft, and Fred Mertz had posed around the set in Nathan Forbes’ first trousers (don’t claim you don’t know what I’m talking about), would I Love Lucy and the 1795 storyline be synonymous? My work is done.

It’s also a move more daring than the introduction of Barnabas, himself. We are sampling the core of Dark Shadows; everything else is watching Dan Curtis forge new alloys with the metal found in this mine. If this is the show’s first ultimate trip, 365 is like watching the main characters pack. Of course, none but one are going, and they are all going, in a certain sense. Curtis and his company are not just giving us a last glimpse before the trip, but he’s also getting ready for next spring and their return.

The return from 1795 is a reboot for the show.  Yes, it’s Dark Shadows, but it knows it’s Dark Shadows. It knows its bread and butter is Barnabas, and he’s evolved into a hero. Of course, villains make the best heroes because they have more choices in front of them, and thus, a greater capacity for action. At this point, the producers make a point of having him soft-pedal the evil in favor of seeing him reflect in 365 that this life is not one that he chose. Gee, Barnabas, what do you mean? And cue time travel. It almost makes me wonder if Sarah’s recent appearance were a cosmic preparation for the journey back. Not to prepare the characters so much as the audience. And why not a seance as the time machine? Dark Shadows never exactly ran on practicality. Here, more than anywhere, it runs on metaphor.

Here, we see a mix of who the characters have been and who they’ll become upon Vicki’s return.  Roger is fussy and particular, and yet he has a winning enthusiasm for the whimsy of a séance. Carolyn is merging debutante sophistication with a more sober kind of confidence that she gains after being chosen by Barnabas. She will need that increasing sense of backbone to deal with Adam. Barnabas and Julia are still at each other‘s throats, but the impression of stalemate has never been stronger. Fate has them both by the shorthairs, and they will eventually need each other there to survive. They are not friends. It will take threats like Angelique to forge that relationship, but the potential is finally there.

Sarah is again the catalyst for this major action. It’s appropriate that they exorcise her with this. Indeed, after 1795, I don’t recall her even being mentioned. It’s as if the pipe to the afterlife is clogged up, and all it takes is a seance-driven time trip to unplug it and let the kid through. Sarah is the quintessential Little Girl Lost, and that figure is the driving metaphor of the show until Willie opens the coffin. Liz, lost to guilt. Maggie, lost to an alcoholic father on the wrong side of the lobster boat dock. Carolyn, lost to being one of the only ones on the RIGHT side of the lobster boat dock. And Vicki, completing the Lilith Fair lineup that inaugurated the show, so lost she just doesn’t understand. It’s a central theme to the show and the ultimate ambassador to lonely women at home -- their prime demographic. Ultimately, it was a demographic that wanted a view (of Jonathan Frid) rather than a mirror. Why not burn it out completely by taking Vicki away in time as well as space?

The Collins family rarely met a problem that couldn’t be addressed via seance, and 365 runs with the notion so far and fast that it drops Vicki off in 1795… maybe just because. Perhaps she just wants a friend, and this is ultimately easier than constantly appearing as a ghost. We never see her again because she only has one charge left in the battery… just enough to get Vicki back to 1968. How does she know to do this? It could be that her first act as a ghost was to send Vicki back home after the 1795 trip. Sarah’s engineered time travel before… just kind of backwards.

Few, if any, shows discover themselves as this radically different than they were in their inception. But is it? For Dark Shadows, variety is the point. Where does Vicki go? Dark Shadows? From where has she come?

Exactly.   

This episode was broadcast Nov. 17, 1967.

The Dark Shadows Daybook: November 13

By PATRICK McCRAY

Taped on this day in 1968: Episode 628

With Nicholas falling head over heels and Angelique getting a little too cozy, Diabolos finds that the water may be too hot even for him! Diabolos: Duane Morris. (Repeat; 30 min.)

In a shadowy underworld, Angelique rats on Nicholas to a cloaked figure named Diabolos. He puts her in charge of Nicholas’ punishment. Meanwhile, Julia reveals  Eve’s death to Nicholas. He relates this to Adam, and it seems as if they might need to leave town. Suddenly, a hypnotized Maggie appears and from her mouth, Diabolos tells him that his trial is imminent. 

And now, Diabolos. And by “Diabolos,” I mean Satan.

In an era when horror is chic, it can be hard to remember exactly how taboo the genre once was. Even in parts of the American south of 1997, it was far easier to find secular school teachers afraid to put up witch/ghost/skeleton Halloween decorations than it was to buy a devil costume. So, crank the WayBack Machine thirty years, and the rural reactions to Dark Shadows are sadly predictable. Parts of the country bullied TV stations into censoring the program and Jack Chick’s minions festooned windshields with tracts against the show. 

It’s an occasionally free country, so good for them. And good for Dan Curtis and ABC for doubling down. No one’s going to cite the appearance of “Diabolos” as a profound blow for civil liberties on the level of Captain Kirk kind of kissing Uhura, except....

You know, any time someone tells you not to do something, and they tell you not to do it because of reasons you can’t see, smell, or poke with a stick? It can be considered a cosmic obligation to do it. Even if they called him “Diabolos,” his appearance was a political statement. It was a rejection of the reasons that many people objected to the show. Normally, storytellers avoid pulling out their biggest guns. Doing so leaves them no other place to go. But not only was it a bold gesture of narrative, “going there” was about as eeevil as you could get. Once that went on the air and no one was fired, Curtis was pretty much safe to do anything else.

It doesn’t hurt that Diabolos is a ludicrous figure, dressed in a monk’s robe and seated behind a desk on a little dais, like the host of a Vatican game show. I know what they were going for -- a kind of ancient-yet-neutral officiousness. To either side of the desk in the smoky, wrought iron hellcave, little gargoyles adorn his workspace, making me wonder if he picked them out himself or if he had a decorator find them in the Infernal equivalent of Hobby Lobby. He’s a tall guy, and he doesn’t have much leg room under his desk. Does this bother him? Is it for his posture, because if so, it’s working.

Diabolos is also irritable at being disturbed, but takes appointments, anyway. He doesn’t get the latest news. He begins sentences with things like, “From what I know….” What? “From what I know?” What kind of underworld overlord is he? He can’t keep tabs on things better than that? He has no real idea what Nicholas is up to, staying ignorant of his ace agent having an affair behind his back. Then, he fumblingly trusts Angelique, despite her being on secret double probation, to punish him? For a guy who wants a master race to rule humanity, Diabolos seems like he’s just going through the motions nowadays. He even sounds bored.

Which is great. For all of the snarling, ranting, cursing, howling, and blood spurting that we could see the devil doing, instead, he’s just a guy at a desk, like any other network executive. If he had a putting set or a Newton’s cradle, with those four balls that rocked back and forth, I wouldn’t be surprised.

Later, when he contacts Nicholas, he has to go through Maggie’s mouth to do so, which is another piece of bureaucracy that must frustrate him. It turns the show into a supernatural Get Smart episode, which works, since Humbert Astredo sounds like Don Adams. At least he gets his own lighting, which is, predictably, red. Of course, why he gives Nicholas a day to prepare for judgment is beyond me. Not much to do in hell, I suppose, so he has to stretch it out.  I know I would.

This episode was broadcast Nov. 20, 1968. 

The Dark Shadows Daybook: November 7

By PATRICK McCRAY

Taped on this day in 1967: Episode 361

When Julia Hoffman squares off against vengeful ghosts, will she find her only safety in madness? Julia: Grayson Hall. (Repeat; 30 min.)

After escaping the bleeding burial site of Sarah Collins, Julia finds herself isolated at Collinwood. There, the ghost of Dave Woodard torments her, mocking her on the phone.

Not counting the terrifying prospect of watching endless episodes about a missing pen, horror on Dark Shadows falls into two eras. More than once, I have heard that Dark Shadows was far scarier in its earlier days, and I agree. For me, that has to do with something far more than the evil days of Barnabas Collins or the fact that we tended to see the earlier episodes at younger, more impressionable ages. The difference is in the origin of the fear, itself. 361 epitomizes the earlier brand of horror on the series, and given where it falls in the run, the installment also sends it off shrieking. 1795 is swiftly approaching, and when it comes to terror on the program, there is everything before and everything after.

Prior to the first flashback, no one knew anything about what was haunting Collinwood. Boy, Vicki, you think YOU don’t understand? Even Barnabas was an unreliable witness, because it was always possible that he was lying, driven mad by his time in the coffin, or both. The residents of Collinwood were born into (or arrived at) a fog of rumors, family legends, inexplicable events, and the overwhelming sense of doom it all composed. Look at Sarah. Maybe she’s making blood spurt from her own tomb. But maybe it’s Dave Woodard or maybe it’s Maybelline. Either way, I can’t go on the record to say what’s going on or whose friend or enemy she might be. All I know is that there’s blood on my shoes and Brewster’s is closed at this hour. She’s a kid... kind of. And that is about the closest we get to explaining her mercurial weirdness. Clearly, she has more power than we usually see her wield. That brings us into Riddle of Epicurus country. Why doesn’t she use it more? If she won’t, that makes her just plain mean. If she can’t, then is some greater force exerting control? Or worse, it’s probably something that, like Vicki, we just can’t understand. The early months of the program are full of legends just barely invading the real world. There’s nothing to hang on to, but there are just enough self-closing doors and materializing objects to remind us that we’re hopelessly outgunned. This is the era of a truly haunted, existential show where the forces of memory and the past obviously want something as they scare the bejeezus out of us, but they won’t tell us what. I don’t even know if they’re having fun while doing it. Like the weather, it may be a force that occurs for a mix of seemingly random, but wildly macroscopic events. No matter how unpleasant Gerard is, he ultimately has a goal. He has a clear-if-strage strategy to achieve it. In this era, there are no experts. Even the so-called authorities are powerless. That sense of constant victimization to the caprice of mystery is a profoundly existential brand of horror, and it kept us tuning in.

Until it had to deliver. And then we kept tuning in, anyway.

Once Vicki goes back in time, she takes us as eyewitnesses, and we become a shared audience to what the hell is really going on. After that, everything has a cause. Everything has a solution. Everything has a name. And we often spend just as much time hanging out with the Enemy as we do our heroes. Defeating it all might not be easy, but we are finally insiders to an extent that even Liz, Roger, and Carolyn, growing up in that madness, never were… until we all were, together. What we lose in fear, we make up for in adventure and all-around fun. We get to name and index the evil to such an extent that we even see the Devil’s office chair at one point. Death shows up at a bar, and in this case, it’s not the beginning of a joke. That’s a wonderful, three year payoff for loyally putting up with the mystery of Collinwood. We are all Collinses at that point.

361 takes us to such a point of fright -- at least as witnesses -- that the show really can’t top itself. Grayson Hall delivers a bravura performance in what is almost a one-woman show as the unseen torments her. She needs answers or she’ll break. So will we. 

This episode was broadcast Nov. 13, 1967.