Category Archives: Gordon Russell

Episode 327: David vs the Goldfish People

Gordon Russell, September 1967, ,

“Why should he be afraid of a harmless piece of jewelry?”

Yesterday, Julia was just minding her own business in the drawing room, trying to hypnotize David into forgetting that his cousin is a vampire. But he recognized her medallion from the prophetic dream that he had the night before, and he ran out of the room screaming.

Shocked, Elizabeth says, “Miss Hoffman, I hope you can explain all of this,” but there’s not much to explain. All Julia has to do is show them the medallion, and David freaks out again. He gets sent to his room. End of story.

So it turns out that it’s super easy to terrorize a child. This show is like a how-to manual on gaslighting ten-year-olds. I can’t wait to try it; somebody get me a ten-year-old.

Continue reading Episode 327: David vs the Goldfish People →

Episode 326: A Time Like This

Gordon Russell, September 1967, , , , , , ,

“He isn’t dead all of the time. Just some of the time!”

We open the new week with a reprise of David’s dream from Friday’s episode. I’m not usually a big fan of repeating a dream sequence, but in this case it’s entirely justified.

For one thing, this dream delivers some long-overdue plot development — David finally realizes that his friend Sarah is a ghost, and his cousin Barnabas is a vampire. Plus, Friday’s episode was a black-and-white kinescope copy, and today we get to see the dream in full color. Well, in two colors anyway, namely: yellow and purple.

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Episode 325: The Spirited Child

Gordon Russell, September 1967, , , , ,

“I died, and everyone brought me such pretty flowers.”

Today’s episode opens with young David wearing pajamas and a robe, walking all the way downstairs to the foyer. He positions himself in front of the 18th century portrait of Barnabas, looks at it, and then makes what appears to be a conscious, deliberate decision to freak the hell out.

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Episode 324: The Wrong Man

Gordon Russell, September 1967, , , , ,

“The eyes in the painting… They were alive! I could feel them!”

At the top of the show today, Elizabeth finds young David standing in the foyer, staring at the 18th-century portrait of Barnabas. She asks David what’s wrong, and he suddenly runs upstairs and slams the door. Perplexed, Liz looks at the portrait.

And unfortunately, that’s as close as we’re going to get to the vampire today. Elizabeth is actually just coming back from four weeks of summer vacation, and we hardly noticed. But Barnabas is at the heart of every storyline now, and if he takes even one day off, the show starts to sag.

This is the first episode without Barnabas in two weeks. That portrait is going to get a workout today.

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Episode 323: Fire at Will

Gordon Russell, September 1967,

“I haven’t spent the evening browsing through anything.”

At the end of yesterday’s episode, the trap was sprung — thinking that Maggie’s memory had returned, the kidnapper came to Maggie’s room in the middle of the night, and was shot by the police.

Today’s episode starts with a reprise of that scene, and darn it, the guy shows up and gets shot all over again. People in teasers just never learn.

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Episode 318: Interesting Times

Gordon Russell, September 1967, , , , ,

“I heard the dogs howling, Barnabas. I know what you’re up to!”

When we last saw our heroes, they were in the Collins family mausoleum, trying to figure out what happened to young David during the days that he was missing. They know that there’s some connection between David, the mysterious little girl named Sarah, and the secrets locked in the mausoleum.

That’s all pretty straightforward, at least as much as Dark Shadows ever can be. The problem is that there are four characters in the mausoleum right now — two on one side of the secret panel, and two on the other — and it’s not clear which side “our heroes” are supposed to be.

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Episode 317: The X-Files

Gordon Russell, September 1967, , , , , , ,

“When I came into your room that night to kill you, I should have gone through with it.”

Today’s episode opens with Dr. Julia Hoffman walking into the Old House to find Barnabas getting ready to leave. Technically, she’s supposed to be coming over to continue her experiments; she believes that she can cure Barnabas of being a vampire. This usually involves injections, seasoned with dialogue about the structure of his blood cells.

But we’ve seen that situation so many times lately that they apparently don’t even need to mention the experiment anymore. Julia just walks in, and asks Barnabas what he’s up to. He calls her “doctor” a few times, but otherwise there’s no mention of the cure, or any other reason that she might be strolling in this evening. It’s actually surprising that she even bothers to knock on the door. Things have become noticeably casual at the Old House.

The main topic of the week is whether young David knows Barnabas’ secret, and what Barnabas is going to do about it. Julia urges him not to do anything rash, and he tells her to mind her own business. You’d think that watching people talk about murdering a child would be inherently interesting. Apparently, that is not always the case.

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Episode 316: The Big Bad

Gordon Russell, September 1967, , ,

“Maybe, maybe! What assurance have I with maybe?”

Okay, it’s Monday, which means that it’s time to check in with our lunatic premise of the week. Unfortunately, the current scenario is so far outside the limits of normal televisual narrative that a thumbnail summary just sounds hopelessly tangled.

Here, I’ll show you. All last week, young David was trapped inside the secret room in the Collins mausoleum. He was brought there by a mysterious little girl named Sarah, who he doesn’t realize is the ghost of one of his 18th-century ancestors. She showed him the trick of getting into the secret room, so that he would see the empty coffin where Barnabas, who David doesn’t realize is a) Sarah’s big brother and b) a vampire, was chained up for 170-odd years until c) Willie let him out.

But Sarah didn’t show David how to get out of the secret room, so he was trapped for a week, until she suddenly turned up again and showed him the hidden door mechanism. As David left the mausoleum on Friday, he ran straight into Barnabas.

Now Barnabas thinks that David knows that he’s a vampire, but he doesn’t, although David does know that Barnabas thinks that David knows more than he’s saying that he knows, which he does. There, that’s you all up to date.

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Episode 315: Between Sentiment and Survival

Gordon Russell, September 1967, , , , ,

“The only possible explanation for David’s disappearance is that he vanished.”

It’s now going on five days since David got locked in a box, and doesn’t it feel like forever? This is something that people miss if they don’t watch one episode every day, the way that the original audience did. And by “people”, obviously, I mean everybody in the world except me.

After all, you’re free to skip around and watch any episode you want. And here I am, committed to this one-episode-a-day format, trapped with David in a secret room of my own making.

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Episode 307: Total Recall

August 1967, Gordon Russell, , ,

“Until we know it doesn’t exist, it exists!”

We kick off today with a real stop-the-presses moment — Maggie Evans puts a sweater on. This is more controversial than you might imagine.

She tells her father that she’s going out, and he says that he can’t allow it — it’s too dangerous. Sam has been protecting her for the last two weeks by keeping her indoors, and she’s going out of her mind. I know exactly how she feels; I’ve been watching this storyline.

This is actually a moment when there’s a perfect correspondence between the character and the audience. She’s bored; she wants to go outside and do something exciting. Her over-protective father is the enemy of the audience — he doesn’t want her to leave the house, because something might happen.

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