“There must have been something about this bracelet that kept the animal from killing me.”
Okay, let’s get right into it, because pretty much everything happens today, and I don’t have time to mess around. This is one of those episodes your mother would have warned you about, if she was dead.
“If you want tomorrow to happen, you will see me now.”
Dark Shadows fans don’t like Betsy Durkin. This is an established fact; ask anyone.
The Dark Shadows audience is unbelievably tolerant when it comes to acting styles — we have to be, it’s a survival skill — but it seems like nobody in the world has a nice thing to say about the actress hired to replace Alexandra Moltke as girl governess Victoria Winters. She doesn’t look right, she doesn’t feel like Vicki, she’s not a good fit for the role. And it seems like the producers agreed, because Betsy only appears in ten episodes, and then they cut her loose. She’s bad at Vicki.
Except that this is not actually the case. Betsy Durkin is fine. There are some serious irritants who pop up on Dark Shadows over the years — like Harry Johnson, who’s in today’s episode, working as hard as he can to ruin his scenes. Betsy is nowhere near that level. Betsy is fine.
So let’s see if we can figure out why fans dislike her so much, as the recently reconstituted sexy vampire boy Tom Jennings climbs in through the window and tries to murder her.
“I don’t care if this danger that you’re so afraid of really exists, or if it’s just in your mind.”
Here, if you’ll pardon the expression, is the current storyline:
At the end of yesterday’s episode, Barnabas snuck into Maggie Evans’ bedroom, with the intention of luring her to the basement of the Old House, where she would be hypnotized and have her life force sucked out of her body in a Bride of Frankenstein experiment.
Today, Barnabas returns to Julia’s mad-science laboratory, and he’s got startling news. “Well, I got into the house,” he says, “went to her bedroom. The bed had obviously been occupied, but she wasn’t there.”
And then, with a shocked expression, he says, “Julia — she’s been kidnapped!”
“These people, they’ve got plans for you!”
Okay, time for another crackpot plot twist in the Bride of Frankenstein storyline. The writers have dug themselves into a rather unlikely hole, and they just can’t figure out what the hell to do about it.
Adam, the show’s resident Frankenstein monster, is demanding that Barnabas and Julia create a woman for him. They don’t really want to, because it’s gross and scary, but he’s threatened to kill girl governess Victoria Winters if they don’t, so they’re giving it a whirl. They’ve managed to assemble a lady monster out of dead person parts, and now their problem is that they need to suck the life force out of a living woman in order to get the Bride off the table and onto her feet.
Now Barnabas and Julia are standing around in their basement laboratory, discussing who they’re going to use for the life force. “I’ve thought about it endlessly,” Barnabas says. “I’ve considered every woman we know.”
Julia says, “Must it be someone we know?” and you can tell that she’s thinking, dude, we only know, like, five women. It’s not that big of a cast.
“I’m certain that’s a possibility.”
Well, here we are again.
The current storyline has hit something of an impasse — Adam, the enormous and lonely Frankenstein man, is demanding that Barnabas create a woman to be his mate. Barnabas, who has no idea how to do such a thing, tells Adam that he has no idea how to do such a thing. And that’s pretty much where we left off.
“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.
Continue reading Episode 449: Something Nasty in the Woodshed
“I am defending the right of this girl to be judged innocent until she is proved innocent!”
In the Salem witch trials in 1692, the case for the prosecution mostly relied on what they called “spectral evidence”, which means basically that they believed whatever the screaming girls said. Other techniques included the “touch test” — i.e., having the witch touch a screaming girl, to see if she stops screaming — and looking for a “witch’s teat”, which is just as grim as it sounds.
But you know what they didn’t do in Salem, or in any other witch trial in history? They didn’t tie the accused witch to a tree and leave her there overnight, expecting that the tree would be dead by morning.
They didn’t use this technique for two reasons. For one thing, it’s pretty unlikely that the tree would hold up its end of the bargain. The other reason is that it’s a completely bonkers thing to do, even by the generally loose standards of witch trial sanity.
I’m bringing this up because Dark Shadows is a daytime soap opera, and so obviously a discussion of the Puritan justice system is going to come up at some point. Continue reading Episode 386: Make Like a Tree
“That’s the first time you’ve ever called me by that name.”
Not very much previously, on Dark Shadows: Two days ago, David gave Carolyn the antique toy soldier, which he said would protect her. Then she was visited by the spirit of Sarah Collins, and she realized that the wild stories David’s been telling might actually be true. There, that’s your background on Carolyn’s character arc for the week — steadily building an awareness that David’s “fantasies” might be real.
So it’s a bit disappointing when David walks into the drawing room at the top of today’s episode, and hands Carolyn the toy soldier again.
David: I came to bring you this.
Carolyn: A toy soldier?
David: Yes. You should have it with you all the time.
Carolyn: Why?
Yeah, good question. I have several “why” questions of my own, starting with: Why doesn’t David climb up on a chair and smack her upside the head?
“I’d do almost anything to continue… but I won’t sacrifice a human life.”
It’s evening at the great estate of Collinwood, and governess Victoria Winters is standing outside on the terrace, alone in the moonlight. Then the peace of the night is shattered by the vampire, Barnabas Collins, approaching silently behind her.
Except it’s not shattered at all, really. Vicki is standing there, and Barnabas walks up behind her. Instead of doing something semi-normal like saying, “Hello, Miss Winters, what a lovely night it is, don’t you sometimes think that we would all be better off if we never had to see the harsh rays of the sun” or whatever, he chooses to approach silently, and reach out to touch her somewhere in the shoulder/neck region.
This gives her the opportunity to spin around with an alarmed shriek, and then we crash into the titles.
“He was going to turn me into something inhuman!”
Friday’s cliffhanger was kind of a game changer — Maggie broke free from the hypnotic trance she’d been in, and tried to drive a stake into the vampire’s heart. But it was too late; he woke up.
Now Maggie’s standing there with a stake in her hand, and what are you going to say at that point? I think you might have dropped this, I was just giving it back? It’s not easy to pull that off.
Dark Shadows Every Day 