Category Archives: Sam Hall

Episode 462: No Place Like Home

April 1968, Sam Hall, , , , , , , , , ,

“I think I expected a haircut to make me feel all new. It doesn’t.”

Victoria Winters is back from her trip to the 18th century — and like all young people coming back from break, she has a bullet wound in her shoulder, a barely coherent memory of what happened, and a new boyfriend who she doesn’t know how to contact.

Now, Julia Hoffman — who has just revealed that she’s a doctor — is providing some unorthodox therapy, spinning a medallion in Vicki’s face and interrogating her under hypnosis. Let the healing begin.

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Episode 461: Leave Me Hanging

April 1968, Sam Hall, , , , , ,

“I’m back, I’m back! I didn’t die, I didn’t die!”

And meanwhile, in the present, everybody is still standing around in the drawing room, waiting patiently to finish the scene that they started four months ago.

This is a weird thing for a TV show to do. It’s so weird, in fact, that the opening narration — which usually lasts about thirty seconds and doesn’t mean anything — actually goes on for three minutes, all the way through the opening titles and into the first scene, just to make sure we know what’s going on.

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Episode 456: An Illogical Explanation

March 1968, Sam Hall, , , ,

“Unless they are hiding him. They hide people here, you know.”

Daniel comes in through the window. That’s the thing I don’t understand.

Victoria Winters, time-displaced girl governess, is currently on the run after shooting herself in the shoulder, breaking out of prison and killing a guy, in that order. Fleeing the scene of her latest felony, she’s teamed up with ten-year-old Daniel Collins, who’s brought her back to Collinwood to hide.

Daniel enters the house by climbing in through the drawing room window. He looks around in the foyer, makes sure that nobody’s there, and then he opens the front door and motions for Vicki to come in.

Now, there are lots of reasons why this sequence has baffled the finest minds of our generation. For one thing, hiding Vicki in Collinwood is a ridiculous plan. The one person that they’re all afraid of right now is Lt. Nathan Forbes, who lives there. On top of that, Daniel stows Vicki in the study, which is a place that Nathan knows where it is. They have an enormous mansion full of rooms to choose from, and Daniel stashes Vicki behind one of the four doors that you can see from the foyer.

But the thing that gets me is: why doesn’t Daniel just walk in through the front door? All he’s doing is checking that the coast is clear. The only thing that climbing in the window accomplishes is taking the risk that someone will ask him why he’s climbing in the window.

So that’s where we are, as we begin our final week in 1795. We’ve moved beyond characters being stupid, into a whole new realm of nonsensical behavior. There’s got to be an illogical explanation for all of this.

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Episode 455: Food and Medicine and a Plan

March 1968, Sam Hall, , , , ,

“You bungling fool!”

Yup. Still doing this.

We’re now at day four of this “Vicki on the lam” sequence, with no end in sight. Vicki is still hiding in the secret room in the Collins family mausoleum, with a bullet hole in her shoulder and a price on her head. She’s acquired a ten-year-old, Daniel, who’s also on the run, because Nathan is paying Noah to kill Daniel so that Nathan can get his hands on Millicent’s money, and so on. It’s all fairly dreary, and there isn’t a vampire in sight.

The good news is that Noah, the speed bump who walks like a man, is going to be shot and killed today. The bad news is it takes about twenty minutes to get there, and there’s nothing we can do but wait.

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Episode 450: Scary Godmother

March 1968, Sam Hall, , , ,

“Your hand will burn if you touch me!”

Her name is Bathia Mapes. Even that doesn’t make sense.

It’s difficult to say exactly how we got here; it all seems like a dream. A year ago, Dark Shadows was a daytime soap opera that did a couple of mild ghost stories. And now it’s 170 years ago, where a French aristocrat from Martinique is praying over a candle, trying to bring a witch to the house to cure a vampire who’s locked in a tower upstairs. The door slams open, and there’s the sound of thunder, and then in walks this magical Yiddish elf.

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Episode 449: Something Nasty in the Woodshed

March 1968, Sam Hall, , , , , , ,

“Strange things may happen. Ignore them.”

This week, Joshua Collins has learned that his dead son, Barnabas, has returned from the grave as a vicious undead serial killer, and he’s made a vow to do something about it. And this is how desperate Joshua has become — he’s willing to suggest a team-up with the Countess Natalie Du Prés, who he doesn’t even like that much.

But things have become pretty flexible, here in the dying days of the 1795 storyline.  They don’t have a lot of characters left, what with all the dying, so it’s hard to even get a decent bridge game going, much less a ritual of summoning.

So suddenly Natalie has the power to pray to a candle, sending out a psychic distress call to attract any passing occult-identified day-players. This is why we have a migrant witches problem.

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Episode 446: The Son Also Rises

March 1968, Sam Hall, , , ,

“You must have always had so much hatred in you. No one could be filled with it so quickly.”

Friday’s episode ended with stern patriarch Joshua Collins descending into the basement of the abandoned Old House, poking into the buried secrets that should never be poked into. As usual in these kinds of situations, he arrives at the bottom step just exactly in time to see the mystery box open, unleashing a dark and primal terror that destroys everything in its line of sight.

Judging by past performance, this means that Joshua’s about to be killed. Dark secrets are a powerful story engine, because there’s lots of associated activity — mostly inventing, refuting and refining alibis and cover stories. That fills up time, and fools the audience into thinking that they’re getting somewhere. If you let characters actually discover the truth, then after a while you need to hire a writer who can come up with something else for them to talk about, and that runs into money.

So Dark Shadows has settled into a gentle rut over the last six weeks, essentially funnelling a single-file line of cast members down these stairs, to their immediate and lasting disadvantage. Joshua is just the latest patsy in the popular game of Let’s Kill the Collins Family.

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Episode 443: Fan Club

March 1968, Sam Hall, , , , ,

“I lose track of time. The days are all the same here, and no one ever bothers to tell me what day it is.”

He is dead, alas! Reverend Trask is dead. The world is a little duller now — noticeably quieter — and we’re down another antagonist, which poses a real problem. We’ve been shedding characters like crazy as we approach the end of the 1795 storyline, and here’s the point where the cast really starts to look thin.

As we’ve seen recently, Barnabas has taken on a new role as the monster who hunts other monsters, kind of a cross between Godzilla and Dexter. That story structure turns out to be very productive for the show over the next couple years, but in order to work, you need an opponent who’s in the same weight class.

Angelique and Reverend Trask were both Barnabas-sized problems, and it was satisfying to see him take them on. Now that they’re gone, the only villain left is Nathan, who’s more of a charming con man than a threatening monster.

But he’s the best that we have to work with, so over the next week, we need to turn Nathan the adorable rascal into Nathan the predator.

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Episode 440: The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Vampires

March 1968, Sam Hall, , , ,

“You don’t know what you’re saying! The horror of that hand!”

In yesterday’s episode, vampire-about-town Barnabas Collins was down at the docks, looking for a bite to eat. He was just about to feed on streetwalker Maude Browning, but she screamed and fought him off, and it attracted attention. He scrambled away, leaving behind his signature silver wolf’s head cane.

So Barnabas needs to learn one of the fundamental rules of crime: If you’re going to go out and attack people, leave your identifiable accessories at home. This is no time for expressing your individuality; you need to be able to blend. This is why hipsters can’t be criminals.

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Episode 439: Something About That Hate

February 1968, Sam Hall, , , , ,

“I have feelings, Ben. I can hate. And I can do something about that hate.”

Henchmen. Right? It’s a complicated relationship.

Barnabas wakes up today and climbs out of his coffin, and the first thing he says is, “Good evening, Ben. Did you see Trask today?” That’s the kind of boss he is. Not a lot of small talk, just straight to business.

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