“It’s hard to believe that a few hours ago you were collapsing all over the place.”
It’s sunset at Collinwood, and Willie’s out of bed. Jason enters the sickroom and finds Willie putting on his shoes, and here we go again.
Come on, guys, hurry it up! There’s a good story here, just waiting to be told. All we need is for Barnabas to stay away from the livestock for five minutes and start paying attention to the humans. But not today, apparently.
“There were even those who would like to have considered Barnabas Collins dead. But he lived on. He lived on, and outlived all his enemies.”
Yesterday, we left Jason creeping up to the mausoleum, saying, “Willie?” And that’s where we pick up again today, except now he goes inside and says it some more. This is a seriously committed game of Where’s Willie. Jason spends a whole minute pacing around the small mausoleum set, then stops and whispers, “Willie?” Look, dude, unless Willie is a foot and a half tall and invisible, I’m pretty sure he’s not here.
“Forgive me. Nothing that ever happened here was funny.”
Vicki comes to the Old House looking for David; it’s after dark and he’s probably run straight to the haunted house. Someone comes down the stairs, and she’s relieved when she sees that it’s Barnabas — she thought it might be someone dangerous.
After an awkward silence, Barnabas gestures upstairs, and says, “I was revisiting my ancestral past.” Naturally, Vicki doesn’t say anything. How do you respond when someone tells you that he’s revisiting his ancestral past?
“My name is Victoria Winters. There are no limits to the things some men will do.”
The story so far: Don’t worry about it. Seriously. Yes, you’ve missed 209 episodes, but it’s 1967 and nobody has Hulu. As a genre, soap operas are perpetual-motion narrative engines designed for the continuous onboarding of new viewers, and Dark Shadows in this period is even slower than average. The interesting thing is still 20 minutes in the future; you’re just in time.
Dark Shadows Every Day 