“A patient’s fears are always real, because they’re rooted in the only ultimate subjectivity.”
Today’s episode opens with David in his bedroom, looking into his crystal ball and calling for Sarah. And since nothing interesting is going to happen for at least the next four minutes, I might as well tell you about the strike.
“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.
“Is it necessary to continue to threaten me? I know the status of our relationship.”
Today’s episode opens with a shot of David walking through the woods, with a sunny meadow behind him. This is the show’s first use of chromakey, a new special effects technique that they’ll come to rely on for all sorts of supernatural malarkey. This shot only lasts about ten seconds, but it’s an incredibly important moment in the development of the show. Also, it looks awful.
Chromakey is very familiar to modern viewers; it’s also called “bluescreen” or “greenscreen”. You film the actors in front of a colored screen, and then you replace that color with the input from a different camera. It’s used for TV weather maps, and for the news correspondents on The Daily Show reporting “live” from unlikely locations.
If the lighting is set up properly, and if the actor isn’t accidentally wearing something blue, then you can create the not-very-compelling illusion that the actor is standing in front of something. And if the lighting isn’t set up properly, then it looks like this.
“Our mistake is thinking that there are limits as to what can take place on this planet.”
Maggie’s still locked up at the Windcliff Sanitarium, recovering from her recent vampire abduction. Dr. Julia Hoffman — the noted blood specialist, psychologist and all-around smart person — is hypnotizing Maggie with a penlight, trying to bring her repressed memories to the surface.
They took a field trip to the Eagle Hill cemetery yesterday, and they found the Collins mausoleum, which triggered some frightening memories. Julia noticed that there was a grave marker for Sarah Collins in the mausoleum, and now she’s trying to learn if there’s a connection between the 10-year-old named Sarah who died in the 18th century and the little girl named Sarah who helped Maggie during her incarceration.
That is an incredible leap in logic, and I’m using the dictionary definition of “incredible”, as in: impossible to believe. Julia is going to make a lot of these intuitive leaps over the next week, making connections that no real human would ever make given the current information. And every single one of her batty conclusions is exactly correct.
Julia is therefore a completely unbelievable Sherlock Holmes type detective, who pulls insights out of the air and is right every time. And the audience loves her and believes in her anyway.
“It could be a matter of minutes. Then again, it could be a matter of hours.”
On Friday, we had the first genuinely suspenseful Dark Shadows episode, with an exciting cliffhanger that promised an unpredictable change in the status quo. Today, they have to deliver on that promise. Let’s see what happens.
“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.
Dark Shadows Every Day 