“Do you still believe we cannot gain help from the dead?”
Professor Stokes steps to the phone, and places a call. “Julia, thank goodness it’s you,” he says. “You must come here immediately.”
“What’s wrong?” says Julia.
“I’m afraid I’ve just killed a man,” Stokes says, and then the opening titles kick in.
See, I told you that Professor Stokes is amazing. Can you believe this guy? This is how he starts an episode.
“There was so very little meaning to our lives before tonight — and now there’s none. We exist, that’s all.”
Naomi runs into the house, and flies into Joshua’s arms. “I saw him,” she gasps. “He’s like an animal!”
She’s just come from the garden, where she saw her dead son bite his cousin Millicent on the neck. “Barnabas…” she cries. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why?”
Now, here’s the thing that she doesn’t say: “Help! Millicent is being attacked. Let’s all run outside and help her.” She doesn’t even mention Millicent until sentence five, at which point Joshua says, “Millicent — My God!” and rushes out to find her.
I mean, I get that Naomi’s upset — who wouldn’t be, under the circumstances — but she’s burying the lead here, to the detriment of grievously wounded family members. Can somebody remind me why we like her again?
“It’s like some nightmare. Such things just don’t happen.”
Don’t believe them! They tell you lies, nothing but lies. And worse than that — they’re boring lies, which make the world less interesting, and that is something I can never forgive.
They say that the point of the 1795 storyline is to make Barnabas a “sympathetic” character, which is some brand of vague applesauce that presumably means that we should “like” him, and agree with his goals. If we like Barnabas, according to this point of view, then we’ll be more likely to root for him, and we’ll want him to succeed.
This is entirely false, in every way that matters.
For one thing, we were all rooting for Barnabas pretty much from day one. Obviously, by “rooting for him” I don’t mean that we want to watch him murder small children. We just want to watch him.
We want Barnabas on the screen as much as possible, because he does improbable and surprising things. The show is more interesting when he’s around, for reasons that have nothing to do with whether you’d want to invite him over for a cookout.
Barnabas is a mess. He makes nothing but bad choices. He’s got a gorgeous, rich fiancee coming over to America to marry him, and what does he do five minutes before Josette walks into the house? He makes out with the maid.
And once he gets Angelique all worked up, he pulls away and says they have to pretend that this never happened, and she needs to be totally supportive of his upcoming marriage to the woman she works for. That’s the level of emotional intelligence we’re dealing with here.
It’s impossible to “sympathize” with Barnabas when he talks about his romantic future; it’s like rooting for a sea lion who wants to work on a space station. Yeah, he’s applied to graduate school. That’s fantastic. It’s not gonna happen.
“Loathsome I am, and evil. You can mock me for that, but leave my pain alone.”
Okay, it’s all blowing up. Dr. Woodard knows everything! He stole Julia’s notebook, and he’s read all about her experiments. Now Barnabas appears in Woodard’s office to confront him, and Julia’s there too, with a hypodermic needle full of blue look-like-a-heart-attack poison.
You know, there’s a better than average chance that something might actually happen today. This time I mean it.
“The clue is large! That doesn’t make any sense.”
Picture this: It’s 3:30, on a sunny Friday afternoon. It’s late June, so this might actually be the last day of school, and it’s 1967, so the kids are looking forward to a long, hot and mostly unsupervised summer. Mom’s been watching General Hospital, so the TV is tuned to ABC. The last notes of the Wurlitzer pipe organ playing the GH theme have faded away, as the kids pile into the house and throw themselves down on the living room floor.
And just at that moment, in a dirty prison cell in the basement of a haunted house, a man brings a tray of food to the pretty young woman who’s trapped there. They exchange a few words, and then he hands her a glass of poisoned milk.
Dark Shadows Every Day 