Tag Archives: sproatnapped

Episode 599: Live, Die, Repeat

October 1968, Ron Sproat,

“He must have had a plan — and it must have been diabolical!”

The one great misconception that everyone believes about Dark Shadows is that the lead vampire, Barnabas Collins, gets “redeemed” once the show reveals how he was cursed to become one of the living dead. The idea is that Barnabas started out on the show as a cruel, remorseless villain, but then we go to the 18th century to see his backstory — and by the time we come back, he’s become “sympathetic,” and we’re supposed to like the guy.

In fact, Barnabas’ only real pivot in 1968 is that he starts out as a partially inept villain, and becomes a totally inept villain. Apparently, if you’re bad enough at being a bad guy, you can circle back around to good guy.

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Episode 579: Sproatinger’s Cat

Ron Sproat, September 1968, , , ,

“I promise you, Julia, we’ve only seen the beginning of this.”

“Julia, I’m puzzled,” Barnabas says. “Terribly puzzled. I’ve just come from Collinsport.”

Julia asks, “What happened?”

“Nothing has happened, that’s what’s wrong.”

Julia says, “I don’t understand,” and then Barnabas says “Third base!” because it’s just that kind of day.

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Episode 555: All Tied Up

August 1968, Ron Sproat, ,

“Please, take pity on me. Don’t torture me like this.”

It’s a Ron Sproat script today, which means that Vicki’s locked up and she’s not getting away any time soon. This is a bit of an obsession with Sproat, an old-school soap writer who knows that the only question worth asking is: What are we going to do tomorrow? If he can’t come up with a good answer to that question, then he stuffs a girl into a closet and keeps her there for a week.

Now, to be fair, it was Gordon Russell who actually put Vicki in stir this time; Sproat is just the guy keeping her here. But I don’t see any reason to be fair today. If life was fair, I’d have enough material to stretch this out to a full blog entry. And yet, here we are.

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Episode 539: Grieve a Little Grieve

July 1968, Ron Sproat, , , , ,

“I’m not delirious. You know what she is.”

One of the things that you learn when you watch Dark Shadows is that there are several different kinds of weird. This is not a particularly helpful thing to learn, and learning it will not improve your life in any measurable way. It just happens, and there’s not much you can do about it.

There’s the everyday, domestic kind of weird, which involves eccentric people doing unusual things — say, a college professor taking an enormous feral Frankenstein home with him, and teaching it to read the word “clock” off a flash card.

There’s the fancy, bespoke kind of weird, which involves people acting in a completely illogical way just for the sake of an exciting cliffhanger — like burying their dead friend in the woods, and then realizing that he’s come back to life, and they only have half an hour to dig him up again.

And then there’s the kind of weird where you honestly have no idea why the scene that you’re watching even exists. That’s the kind we’re going to be talking about today, thanks to scriptwriter Ron Sproat, among other mistakes.

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Episode 503: Lock Her Up

May 1968, Ron Sproat, ,

“I promise, no harm will come to you.”

Sproat: Threat, or menace? That is the question on the table.

Ron Sproat is part of the Dark Shadows writing team, and unfortunately, he’s not the good part. He’s the guy who thinks it’s okay to not do anything interesting on Wednesday, so you can save up the plot movement for Friday — and if not this Friday, then maybe next Friday.

Sproat’s other noticeable failing is his obsession with locking women and children up in a room and then just leaving them there. Just in the last year, he’s confined Maggie and Vicki for several months each, plus Josette for a few days and David for a week.

At the moment, we’ve got Adam, our new Frankenstein monster, who’s closed his first official rampage by kidnapping Carolyn and bringing her to an abandoned root cellar somewhere in the woods.

Yesterday, Sam Hall wrote the episode that brought Carolyn to the root cellar, and then who leaves her there for two days? Mr. Ron “I Never Met a Lock I Didn’t Like” Sproat.

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Episode 493: Revenge of the Baby-Sat

May 1968, Ron Sproat, , , , , ,

“A man — No! He was a monster! A monster!”

You know that you’re in for a good day on Dark Shadows when the episode opens with everybody who has a speaking part all standing in a line and facing the teleprompter.

That means two things: there are four people on a cramped set that can really only accommodate one and a half, and the actors can’t memorize their lines because the things that they’re supposed to say don’t mean anything. In other words, it’s a Ron Sproat script today.

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Episode 422: Confining Women

February 1968, Ron Sproat, , , , ,

“Aunt Natalie, I don’t mean to be impatient with you, but I think these questions are annoying.”

Josette is wearing a ring.

I’m making that super clear right up front, just in case anyone has a hard time processing the concept. It’s a hard ring to miss — it’s gold, with a big black onyx stone, and it’s usually seen in the company of a vampire. But now the ring is on Josette’s finger — Josette being the young woman you can see here, the one standing behind the enormous ring — and that is apparently a compelling dramatic situation.

You can tell that it’s important, because this is a five-minute scene, and Josette is under strict instructions to keep the damn ring in shot as much as she possibly can. This involves making several hand gestures which do not occur in nature.

Josette’s aunt, the Countess Natalie, is concerned about this, because she believes that the ring is connected to a witch’s spell, which will lead to Josette’s death.

Exasperated, Josette says, “Why do you persist in this ridiculous nonsense about witches?” which would be a perfectly reasonable question, except that’s not what Josette thinks, and therefore Ron Sproat is trying to kill me.

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Episode 390/391: The Princess

December 1967, Ron Sproat,

“Well, if you went to her and told her that, just told her that she wasn’t involved in any way.”

Okay, back to the writers’ room. Ever since we started this uncertain and frightening journey into the past, almost all of the episodes have been written by Sam Hall and Gordon Russell. I talked the other day about Russell’s recent game-upping, and obviously Hall is beautiful and perfect, so the show has been, on the whole, amazing.

And then along comes Ron Sproat, who’s my third favorite out of three.

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Episode 360: Crazy Lady on the Loose

November 1967, Ron Sproat, , , , , ,

“Don’t start imagining a lot of things just because someone we barely know is acting peculiar.”

All week, I’ve been talking about Sam Hall, the new writer who just joined the show. He wrote the last three episodes, and now he passes the baton back to Ron Sproat, who tends to be lackluster and frustrating. And today, just to prove the point, Sproat turns in a script that appears to be made mostly of reconstituted episode parts. Damn it, Sproat! Get it together.

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