The Dark Shadows Daybook: October 25

By PATRICK McCRAY

Taped on this day in 1967: Episode 354

When Barnabas learns that Julia is leading tours of his bedroom while he sleeps, will the doctor finally be out... for good? Julia: Grayson Hall. (Repeat; 30 min.)

As Barnabas firms up his alliance with his new assistant and spy, Carolyn, Julia uses her powers of hypnosis to reveal the truth of his dark side to Victoria. When Barnabas discovers this, predictably, he vows revenge.

One of the most satisfying things in watching Dark Shadows is seeing characters develop on an arc. Some of the arcs are fairly brief, like Quentin, Jeb, or Adam. Some of them are wildly macroscopic, like the one Barnabas follows. Usually, when a character finishes their arc, they’ve gone from bad to good. Barnabas is an exception to this. He goes from good, if naïve and a little selfish, to evil-in-the-name-of-self-preservation (with some extremely fuzzy lines in there), and then back to a good that is rigorously and heartbreakingly tested again and again. Helping him along that path is a character who has an arc of her own, Julia Hoffman. Her arc is neither endless nor brief, but it ends long, long before we say goodbye to her. 

Although I am a huge fan of both Grayson Hall and Julia Hoffman, I can also acknowledge that many people are not. They have issues with her acting style and they have issues with the character. In both cases, it’s arguably understandable, especially in the case of the character. In her own way, for the first leg of her journey on the show, Julia Hoffman may be its most interesting and insidious villain. She is quietly and single-mindedly determined, realistic in her humanity, and as carefree in the viciously destructive in the use of her abilities as Angelique. Diabolically, Julia manages to make herself indispensable to Barnabas despite all of this. And at the heart of the matter, the beauty of the character’s evil lies in her potential for good. Not only is she situationally vital, again and again, but she has the capability of being a far greater force for help than she is for harm. So you kind of have to keep her around.

If you watch the entire series, it becomes easy to forget how wicked she can be before she accepts that it’s better to have a distracted Barnabas, unable to reciprocate her affections than no Barnabas at all. In the early days, the other greatest threat to Barnabas is probably Barnabas, himself. (With a little help from Dave Woodard.) But once she is humbled by the fact that someone else cures him, and once the greater threats of Nicholas Blair and Angelique enter the 20th century, love takes over in an entirely different way, and she shapes up.

In the process, Julia mirrors Barnabas in the department of unrequited affection. In fact, because her maturity allows her to accept the fact that he is not a puppet to be manipulated into loving her, she surpasses Barnabas and Angelique, both of whom continue to chase lovers who are, by and large, never going to be interested in them. It is a painful, subtle, gradual, and quiet triumph for Julia, and by comparison, Barnabas and Angelique seem all the more melancholy and lost. We appreciate the severity of their challenge and feel deeply for their inability to “get over it“ because, by example, Julia could.

But when she’s bad, she is really bad, and whether it’s trying to poison Barnabas or poison Victoria’s  mind against him in the ugliest fashion, her ruthlessness is nearly boundless. For a character who is — somewhat thanks to the arguably unflattering haircut that she sports throughout most of the show — one of the most spiritually masculine on the series, her penchant for manipulation and character assassination makes her also one of the most feminine. By comparison, Angelique is actually extremely masculine. She thinks in terms of power structure, “king of the mountain,“ and gaining authority through direct attack and visceral revenge. It does not take Julia long to know that she never even stands a chance in the battle for Barnabas, so the best she can do is stick around and, if not just poison him, poison his entire social world. Long before (in the storytelling, at least) Angelique ever made his life miserable by revealing his secret to a lover, Julia begins infecting Victoria’s mind and heart with the ugly truth. But whereas Angelique used abilities that were patently naughty from the start, Julia destroys using powers designated for healing. In other words, she’s got a lot of ‘splaining to do, and she spends the next several years doing just that. We spend so much time watching Barnabas atone that it’s easy to ignore the fact the Julia has her fair share of atonement to accomplish, also.

In this episode, we get to see her at some of her delicious worst, partially driven by the fact that Barnabas now has a far more compliant and capable assistant. For now. In the world of  Barnabas Collins, it is frequently just “for now.” One of the show’s great and quiet ironies is that he will eventually go from being the man surrounded by untrustworthy assistants to being assisted by those who often mistrust him. But for now? Barnabas has to sleep sometime, and Julia knows it. and Barnabas knows that Julia knows it. And she knows that he knows that she knows it. And he knows that she knows that he knows…..

This episode was broadcast Nov. 2, 1967.

The Dark Shadows Daybook: NOVEMBER 2

By PATRICK McCRAY

Taped on this day in 1967: Episode 356

Julia secrets her notebook from Carolyn and Barnabas. It’s location? The foyer’s grandfather clock. Barnabas tells Julia that she’s a dead woman as soon as it’s found, but Julia counters by saying it will be released to the outside world if it’s found. She and Carolyn come to a stalemate over it… until the Collinwood clock refuses to chime.

In this orgy of suspicion and insinuation, if feminine eyebrows were arched any higher, they’d be cracking through the floor of David’s bedroom. More than any episode of SEINFELD, this is truly an episode about nothing... but posturing, going from icy standoff to icy standoff that you just know is going to go nowhere. The stakes are high enough to make people cranky, but compared with Quentin’s ghost forcing the family out of Collinwood or Laura trying to burn David alive, things are clearly not at a “to the batpoles” level of emergency. I can’t imagine this didn’t bore the writers. And yet, there are things to consider. Barnabas must know that Julia is stubborn enough to not surrender the notebook. Why doesn’t he just bite her and extract the information? Perhaps, on some level, he knows that it would be wrong. Or simply a pain to deal with. And if the notebook were found, so what? They would appear to be the ravings of a pathological liar who’d been scamming the family for months, pretending to be a biographer. Good riddance. However, he needs Julia for one thing: reverse whatever whammy she has on Vicki. And that’s a noble purpose, indeed. At least he has Carolyn. I’ve always enjoyed the perverse Barnabas-Carolyn relationship. She’s the one agent for Barnabas who seems to take pride in her work. She may be ineffectual, but that doesn’t mean she’s not trying. Overall, however, Barnabas truly faces the Curse of the Metrosexual. He’s surrounded himself with women who spend all of their time either making him miserable or trying to tear each other apart. I’m not saying that he needs to become an MRA and spend all of his time watching soccer in his man cave, but he’s clearly in need of a Quentin to hang out with.

There are other reasons, related to production, as to why this section of the series is so stagnant. Burke is dead, and with him, the last of the pre-Barnabas tension is forever gone. Barnabas can’t remain a villain, and Julia is too interesting a Jiminy Cricket to do away with. Besides, Grayson Hall's husband, Sam, was about to see his first script for the show filmed the very next day! Yep, on November 3, episode 357 was Sam’s debut on the show. It wouldn’t be long before his punchy gravitas vitalized the show. I think what we’re seeing are the last gasps of Barnabas-as-villain winding down. We are just less than two weeks from the 1795 flashback, a storyline that would humanize Barnabas, bring in two real villains, and wind up back in a future where Barnabas would be cured quickly before he and Julia would team up against years of truly malevolent foes. I’m sure that the staff had figured out this general tonal shift. At the same time, they were stuck with two more weeks of programming. No storyline could be so vast as to be unsolvable in two weeks… nor could it be so innocuous that viewer tension would drain away before the great experiment of the 1795 origin story.

In the top 10 charts at this time was the Strawberry Alarm Clock’s “Incense and Peppermints,” a song that is an immediate ambassador to the era, used for great effect in BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS and AUSTIN POWERS: INTERNATIONAL MAN OF MYSTERY. 

The Dark Shadows Daybook: NOVEMBER 2

By PATRICK McCRAY

Taped on this date in 1970: Episode 1142

Gerard, thinking he’s rid himself of Judah’s head, is none too pleased to have a cultist named Charles Dawson present him with it. Gerard is unable to resist the seductive power of Judah’s head, and after donning the Mask of Baal, becomes completely possessed by the warlock. Delighted to be among the living once more, “Judard” counts the loyal descendants of his coven and plots revenge against Angelique (once known as Miranda) and the Collinses -- those responsible for his execution. A witch trial should be a perfect way to do so. Dawson admonishes him to be careful… he’s powerful, but the body of Gerard is not immortal. Later, “Gerard” takes the opportunity of the time in and around Roxanne’s visitation to encourage Trask to blame her death on the occult. Could it be Barnabas? Gerard and Dawson then seduce a classmate of Roxanne’s, Lorna Bell, into an occult ceremony. When her dead body is discovered with the “mark of the devil” (similar to the symbol on Quentin’s ring) on it, Trask concludes that Quentin is the guilty occultist.

Imagine, a DARK SHADOWS storyline with so much action and plot that it moves with the tight pace of a weekly series, only with the frequency of daily installments. I can see why this might have been disorienting to viewers of 1970, numbed by the glacial pace of the Leviathan and PT storylines. Ultimately, it’s a reason to celebrate. 1840 is reaching its fever pitch, layering the patterns of the past on top of one another with the bonding mortar of irony, this time with a witch trial wherein the Collinses are more than accusers or casual bystanders… now, they’re on trial, themselves. By this point in the series, the SHADOWS saga must be nearing its end. As DARK SHADOWS turns on itself, it doesn’t rehash past storylines; it refines and reconfigures them to reach the show’s grandest and darkest intensity. This is no longer wine; it’s grappa. Resurrected Masters of the Black Arts! Occult Ceremonies! Maidens Murdered by Cursed Daggers! Masks of Baal! A Trask Driven by Love and Regret! The Devil’s Ring! And Revenge! Revenge! REVENGE!!

Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?

In theaters at this time, you would have had the opportunity to see what is arguably the best Sherlock Holmes movie ever made -- that you may have never seen -- THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES. Written and directed by the man behind both SUNSET BOULEVARD and SOME LIKE IT HOT, this film fuses both of those works with an elan that is decidedly Sherlockian and proto-steampunk to boot. And let's not forget that it features Christopher Lee as Mycroft!  Originally intended as a stately, roadshow release, it was cut down at the eleventh hour and opened on October 29, 1970. Thanks to its episodic nature, it survives despite the cuts. Still, the film has a strangely epic sense of sweep, thanks in no small part to Miklós Rózsa’s score, by turns bombastic and poignant. The CHS says check it out.