“I will know to trust them, to lead them through the mysteries that will make them respond.”
And Julia Hoffman seeks to find the secret to his behavior in a mysterious box, which he somehow brought from the past.
You will give up your curious belief that you have a right to know everything about me!
Well, I’m tired of understanding!
But this box… it frightens me.
Nothing must happen to you. I must make quite sure that nothing ever does.
Here we are, living in the twentieth century, the most exciting century the world has ever known. I mean, we’re sending men to the moon!
I hate sarcastic women!
Barnabas, I don’t know if I’m being silly or not.
You’re far too important a person to have anything happen to you.
You’re giving far too much importance to that telegram.
Tell me so that I will make no mistake, in this most important moment in time.
They will be strangers, but you will know them.
The sign of the Naga. The sudden knocking at the door.
Monday: She’s Me.
Dark Shadows bloopers to watch out for:
Barnabas tells Carolyn, “You must do — well, you — nothing must happen to you.”
Megan goes to get the telegram to show it to Julia, but it’s not in the place where she expects it to be. Then she spies it off-camera, and says, “Oh! It’s — um. Let me get it.” She dashes out of frame to grab it.
While Carolyn is talking to Barnabas in the Collinwood drawing room, there’s a moment when something goes wrong with the sound, giving one of Carolyn’s lines a breathy echo.
Julia reminds Barnabas, “Barnabas, we know the significance of the Tate portin — portrait of Quentin.”
Trying to get rid of Julia, Barnabas walks over to the coat rack. He picks up his own cape, then puts it back and grabs Julia’s coat.
In Barnabas’ dream, when he asks Oberon, “Where will I find them?” you can see the boom mic hovering above Oberon, in the top left of the screen.
Monday: She’s Me.
— Danny Horn
Dark Shadows Every Day 
That expression of Julia’s in the screen capture at the very top, I don’t think I’ve seen that one before. Is it her “pouty little girl who isn’t getting what she wants” look? Blink once, and you miss at least half a dozen Julia looks.
And that Barnabas look, fourth frame down with the caption “Nothing must happen to you”: Finally, Frid’s Barnabas has achieved a look that he didn’t even have as a bloodthirsty creature of the night — bloodless.
I wonder what was going on with Christopher Bernau when they were doing this episode. There were times when I thought Louis Edmonds’ Roger was a little too queeny for his part, but in this one Bernau takes a set of stereotypically gay inflections and mannerisms and dials them up to the max. I wonder of the script called for Megan to keep grabbing him and rubbing herself on him, or if Marie Wallace improvised that on the spot as an attempt to make it credible to the audience that they are a married couple. Sort of stop, drop, and roll for a figurative sort of flaming.
I like Bernau a lot, and on GUIDING LIGHT he would use a toned-down version of those same inflections and mannerisms as an integral part of a performance that created a character who is endlessly mysterious, not only in regard to his sexuality. But in this one he’s not only supposed to be happily married to Marie Wallace’s character, he’s also supposed to be an endearingly conventional guy from the late 60s. The scene where Philip talks about his mistaken idea that new mothers would fall over each other to buy an antique crib while Megan smiles at his naïveté, coupled with his introduction as someone whose role in the shop is largely about fixing damaged clocks, presents him as someone who is comfortable in traditionally masculine settings, but who, once he reaches beyond the manly realm of mechanical repair, has to rely on wild speculation. If he were a different sort of guy, we could read him as bisexual, or as someone who always thought of himself as gay until he met Megan and things just happened, or as some kind of transperson, or whatever. Life is complicated! But Philip isn’t complicated, not as written, and so for him to sound like a more obviously gay version of Charles Nelson Reilly is quite distracting.
Gawd yes, acillius, what is wrong with him? Both he and Megan…and I’m particularly sorry to have to include Megan, since I lurve Marie W…are getting on my last gay nerve! lol
I think I’ve figured it out- as Jerry Lacy joined the show to do his Humphrey Bogart imitation and David Selby spent so much time doing his Joseph Cotten imitation, Bernau was doing a Jack Benny imitation. Those mannerisms may not have read as gay when Benny used them in the 1930s, but things have changed since then.
Glad to see you included two of my favorite lines from this episode, Danny; namely, “They will be strangers, but you will know them.” (Really, Oberon? I’m sorry, but either they will be strangers, or you will know them. You can’t have it both ways.), and “The sudden knocking at the door.” (Again I’m sorry Oberon, but has there ever been a gradual knocking at a door?)
Today is the sixth anniversary of the appearance of this post, which makes it the 56th anniversary of the first broadcast of Dark Shadows. In our world, that may not mean very much. But since Dark Shadows uses anniversaries the way stories set in universes where the usual laws of physics apply use cause and effect, I think it should be mentioned.