In Friday’s episode, Julia baited Barnabas into coming to her room to strangle her. But she knew he was coming, and waited quietly in the corner. Now she steps into the moonlight, and delivers some absolutely explosive dialogue.
Julia: I know what you are. You’re Barnabas Collins — the only Barnabas Collins, who died over a hundred and thirty years ago.
Barnabas: That’s an absurd statement.
Julia: Don’t try to deny it. I’ve investigated you thoroughly, and I’ve seen you in your coffin.
Barnabas: You realize that such knowledge puts you in great danger.
Julia: Well, of course. That’s why I took the precaution of putting a dummy in the bed.
Which is an unbelievably badass thing to say. Whenever someone asks you for an example of why Dark Shadows is the most surprising and therefore the greatest television show of all time, you can direct them to this scene.
(Note: There is a very good chance that nobody will ever ask you this question. But it’s good to be prepared, just in case.)
Of course, because this is Dark Shadows, the sublime takes a hairpin turn toward the ridiculous within forty-five seconds.
Barnabas backs Julia up against a bedpost and snarls, “What is it you want?”
Gasping, she answers, “You.”
With fire in his eyes, the vampire growls, “I don’t know what you mean, but it doesn’t matter. Because… I am going… to KILL YOU! Miss Hoffman.”
And then he stands there and glares at her. There’s a bit of an awkward pause, because he’s supposed to be strangling her, and he forgot. Apparently, if you want Jonathan Frid to start strangling somebody, you need to write START STRANGLING HER on the teleprompter.
So Grayson Hall — who will basically spend the next four years of her career as a backup teleprompter for Jonathan Frid — reaches over with her left hand and tugs at his wrist, to remind him that he’s supposed to be grabbing her throat. He takes the hint, and the scene continues.
Now her problem is how to get him to stop strangling her, so she tells him that she’s a doctor, and she makes him a surprising offer — he doesn’t have to live this life.
Naturally, he’s stunned.
Julia: I’ve spent my lifetime studying conditions such as yours.
Barnabas: How could you have done this? Have there been others like myself?
Julia: No. You’re the only one I’ve encountered. That’s why you’re so important to me, that’s why I need you.
Barnabas: Need me?
Julia: From the time I entered medical school, I’ve been fascinated by the relationship of life to death. I believe that one is a continuance of the other, and that someday they will merge, and that life will not terminate. That day is close at hand, now that I’ve found you.
People often describe Dark Shadows as if it was only the sum of its influences — you mix together Jane Eyre, Dracula, The Telltale Heart and The Turn of the Screw, apply heat, serve for five years. But as far as I know, this plot point is completely original to Dark Shadows.
Stumbling along from day to day, groping for some way to extend the vampire storyline, the Dark Shadows writers have come up with a bizarre, laughable and utterly brilliant idea.
So: get ready for the science.
Barnabas: What is this… theory of yours?
Julia: Whole blood is insufficient to sustain you. That’s why you constantly have to replenish your supply.
Barnabas: If I were to permit you… what would you do?
Julia relaxes, shifting into the confident tone of a lecturer. She’s got him hooked now, and she knows it.
Julia: Well, the basis of your problem is the destructive nature of your blood cells. There’s an imbalance which causes more cells to be destroyed than replaced. My objective then, is to alter the cellular structure of your blood, by introducing a new plasma into your arterial system.
Barnabas: You begin to intrigue me, Dr. Hoffman. You begin to intrigue me very much.
Yeah, no kidding. This is one of those moments where you can’t wait for them to come back from the commercial break because who knows what the hell they’re going to say next.
Barnabas takes Julia over to the Old House, where they can talk about crackpot science without worrying about being overheard by a sensible person.
They give Willie an update.
Barnabas: Willie! Dr. Hoffman will be spending some time here.
Willie: Doctor…?
Barnabas: Yes. Dr. Hoffman has fooled us all. She’s been investigating us very carefully.
Willie: Has she?
Barnabas: Yes, she knows everything.
Willie: Well, what’s gonna happen?
Barnabas: That remains to be seen. You see, Dr. Hoffman is a very… unique doctor.
So, here’s a question: What kind of a doctor is Dr. Julia Hoffman?
She started out as a “blood specialist”, but she’s also been treating Maggie with hypnosis, to help her uncover repressed memories of her abuse. She has quickly moved beyond even the catch-all expertise of the TV doctor, and become kind of a cross between a mad scientist and a sorceress.
Going back to the literary influences for a moment, the character that she most resembles is Professor Van Helsing from Dracula.
In Bram Stoker’s novel, Jonathan Seward describes Van Helsing as “a philosopher and a metaphysician, and one of the most advanced scientists of his day; and he has, I believe, an absolutely open mind.”
That “open mind” is key, because for both Dr. Van Helsing and Dr. Hoffman, the boundaries of medical science are too limited to understand and deal with the vampire menace. This “condition” is partly a physical one, which can be described in terms of flesh and blood. But it’s also a spiritual failure, a moral lapse which drives well-bred gentlemen to give in to their appetites for blood and sex and a general deflowering of the innocent.
So Barnabas isn’t sure what to make of Julia’s mind-opening offer. He flip-flops several times during the episode, vacillating between hope and fear.
While Julia is in the basement, picking out a room to use as a laboratory, Barnabas talks things over with Willie.
Willie: You’re gonna kill her?
Barnabas: I’m afraid I’ll have to. I went to her room tonight with that intention, but she anticipated me, was waiting for me. I planned to bring the body back here — but now, she’s made that so much easier for me.
Willie: She told me what she was gonna do. The kind of experiment she was gonna make. Well, what about that, Barnabas? Can she really cure you?
Barnabas: I don’t really know.
But this isn’t really an “experiment”, is it? Julia said that Barnabas is the only individual with this condition that she’s ever encountered. There’s no control group, no accumulation of data. She hasn’t even examined Barnabas yet. She’s diagnosed him and devised a complicated treatment plan, based entirely on an analysis of Maggie’sblood.
Here’s how she describes the first steps of her plan:
Julia: The first thing I have to do is purge your entire arterial system. There won’t be any discomfort, and there won’t be any aftereffects. Now, I think I’ve done enough for one day.
So that sounds simple enough, right? “I have to purge your entire arterial system.” Why would you imagine that might cause discomfort? Patients are such crybabies sometimes.
Clearly, we’ve left actual medical science far behind, and entered the realm of alchemy. In the Middle Ages, alchemy was both a proto-science and a philosophical tradition, based on the idea that achieving material perfection — for example, turning lead into gold — was the key to spiritual and moral perfection.
If you look at her plan as a metaphor — and that’s the only way you can look at it, because medically it’s nonsense — then “purging the arterial system” is another way of saying that she’s going to cleanse him of his destructive and antisocial impulses. Her plan to “introduce a new plasma” is basically a spiritual reawakening, the redemption of the antihero.
So Barnabas’ indecision about Julia’s plan is ultimately a moral and spiritual question. Is there enough human empathy left in his undead heart? Can he learn to trust, and to feel?
Okay, that’s a no. He grabs her by the throat, and tells her once again that I am going to — KILL you!
But she’s got one more ace up her sleeve, and she chokes out: “Maggie Evans!”
Barnabas: She’s alive?
Julia: And well hidden.
Barnabas: What has she said?
Julia: Nothing specific as yet. I traced you through my own deductions. At present, she’s suffering from traumatic amnesia. But eventually, she will recover. And then she’ll tell everything she knows.
So with that, it seems like Julia has all the ingredients that she needs to transmute Barnabas’ lead heart into gold, and lead him to a new understanding of empathy and human connection.
Or… maybe not.
Barnabas: But she’ll do that whether you’re alive or dead.
Julia: No, she won’t. Because if I’m alive, I will be in charge of her treatment. And I can see to it that her amnesia… remains permanent.
Okay, so she’s not perfect either. This might get a little complicated.
Tomorrow: I Know Who’s Dead.
Dark Shadows bloopers to watch out for:
Barnabas has the ring on his left hand again, so it’ll be in shot when he’s got Julia up against the bedpost.
Barnabas tells Willie, “My existence may not have been what it should be, but at least I have permanence.” (The sensible way to say that would be: “My existence may not be what it should have been.”)
Julia tells Barnabas that Maggie hasn’t said anything about him yet: “I traced her — traced you through my own deductions.”
Barnabas tells Julia, “I have re-evalued our relationship, and I have come to the conclusion that it is not possible to trust you.” He means re-evaluated.
While Barnabas is telling Willie that he can’t trust Dr. Hoffman, a fly settles on his forehead. When Julia enters the scene, Barnabas takes a little swat at the fly. It flies away for a second, and then comes back and settles on his cheek.
https://darkshadowseveryday.com/2013/12/23/episode-291/
Okay, let’s see where we are. Yesterday, Dr. Julia Hoffman — the noted blood specialist and dangerous lunatic — managed to convince a vampire that she should hang out in his haunted mansion and purge his arterial system. She seems to feel that somehow this will be beneficial for humankind, and who’s going to argue with her?
Well, I guess Dr. Woodard will. It’s been a whole two episodes since the last time he came over and said sensible things to Julia, and here he is again. Apparently he thinks that it’s “unethical” for Julia to abandon her patient, Maggie, in the middle of a very delicate and intense course of treatment.
He’s right, of course. In fact, we learned yesterday that Julia is planning to ensure that Maggie’s amnesia will be permanent, in order to protect the monster who abused her.
Unfortunately, if Woodard succeeds in getting Julia to take more responsibility for Maggie’s treatment, then the story gets less interesting. So, on behalf of the entire audience, I would like to shake his hand, tell him he’s one hundred percent correct, pin a medal on him, and then send him out to play in traffic.
But as we’ve seen, Julia can talk her way out of anything. In this case, she chooses the most fiendish weapon in the liar’s arsenal. She tells him the truth.
Julia: I believe that Maggie Evans came face to face with the supernatural, in a way that frightened her beyond anything you or I can understand. I can’t convince her that what terrified her doesn’t exist, because I know it does exist!
Woodard: Are you, a scientist, telling me that the supernatural exists?
By the way, yes, they call it “the supernatural”, and then they just carry on as if that’s a single specific thing that you can have a conversation about. Apparently “the supernatural” is the new “the past”.
Along the way, Julia picks up a scary new tactic.
Julia: If I’m right — medicine is about to break through the ultimate barrier between life and death. You realize that the doctors who helped make that breakthrough will go down in history.
Woodard: Between… life and death?
Julia: Dave, when you were in medical school, didn’t you dream of making some major contribution? Well, that could happen now, for both of us.
Woodard: But Julia, I’ve got to know a great deal more than I know now!
Julia: And you will! I’ll tell you, because I need your skill and knowledge, to help see me through.
Woodard: Well, I’ll help you any way that I can.
It’s fantastic. She could get him to do anything. So that’s another mark in the win column for the monsters.
Meanwhile, David’s playing in the woods, and guess who he runs into? The supernatural. It’s just sitting there, crying.
This is the ghost of Sarah Collins, who we haven’t seen for a couple weeks. She’s the vampire’s kid sister, and she befriended Maggie when Barnabas was holding her prisoner. Now, Maggie’s hidden away in a sanitarium, and everybody thinks that she’s dead.
David asks why Sarah’s crying, and she says she’s lost her friend.
Sarah: Her name was Maggie. She’s lost, and I miss her.
David: Well, Sarah, I’m sorry that you miss her so much, but… if it’s Maggie we’re looking for, well, we better not look any more. Here, why don’t you help me look for different kinds of leaves?
Personally, I’ve never tried that specific method of cheering up a grieving person, so for all I know, maybe it works. I’ll try it out and let you know how it goes.
Sarah asks why she should stop looking for Maggie, and David breaks it to her that Maggie’s dead. Sarah chuckles.
David: What are you laughing about?
Sarah: She isn’t dead at all! She’s just lost!
David: Everyone else says she’s dead.
Sarah: Well, everyone else is wrong.
David: How can you be so sure?
Sarah: You know about leaves and everything. Well, I know who’s dead, and who isn’t.
So that’s that. Sarah seems to have some kind of weird ghost sense that’s shorting out at the moment: “Sometimes I almost know where she is, but then it all fades away, and I begin to cry again.” I could probably come up with some kind of crackpot theory to explain how her ghost senses work, but really they’re just making it up to fit whatever’s convenient for the episode. And that’s how “the supernatural” works.
So all of that is rather far-fetched, but it’s practically a documentary compared to what happens next.
Julia and Burke are talking in the Collinwood foyer when all of a sudden Vicki bursts through the door and announces, “The most wonderful thing has happened. I’m in love.”
Burke has been dating Vicki for several months, so at this point I guess nothing fazes him; he just stands there and asks her what the hell she’s talking about.
And she says, “It’s with a house. I found the most enchanting old house in the world — it’s on the end of the North Road, by the sea. I must have passed it hundreds of times, only this is the first time I’d ever really noticed it. Burke, it’s like it was just waiting there. Just for me.”
Okay, let’s do a quick review of Vicki’s financial affairs.
Victoria Winters: Left at a foundling home as a baby. Apparently not adopted. Left the orphanage a year ago, when she became a live-in governess for a ten-year-old boy who appears to be doing his Introduction to Botany homework with a ghost.
In other words: She lives in a mansion, but she has exactly no money. She’s probably renting the clothes she’s wearing right now. So while admittedly I don’t have any specific data at my fingertips about the Maine real estate market during the summer of 1967, I’m pretty sure she can’t afford a house, no matter how they may feel about each other.
She goes on.
Burke: Vicki, what’s this house like?
Vicki: The house is very old. It faces onto the sea. In fact, it’s almost part of the sea. And there it sits, like a dowager queen, waiting for the ocean to bring her beautiful gifts from all over the world.
Spoiler alert: She’s going to keep talking about this house for the rest of the week, and on into next week. This will take the place of what otherwise would be an interesting television show.
Vicki: It was wonderful. Finding it, and standing there, and listening to the sea, and feeling that I really belonged there. And the house knew it. And the sea knew it. And I knew it, too, and we were all very happy there together.
It’s awful, and depressing. We’ve been having so much fun lately, with Julia and Barnabas and the supernatural. And now this idiot girl runs onto the screen, babbling about some random house that she can’t afford, and the show comes to a complete stop.
There’s a whole other scene after this, about David bringing Sarah back to the house, but she disappears before anyone else sees her. It turns into another Snuffleupagus sequence, except she left her bonnet behind on the floor.
But why bother? Vicki’s in love with a house. Apparently that’s a plot point.
Tomorrow: Untouched.
Dark Shadows bloopers to watch out for:
When David leads Sarah into Collinwood, he doesn’t shut the front doors all the way, and you can see a gap between the two doors. Everyone who touches the doors today seems to have some kind of trouble; at one point, Vicki has to slam them shut.
Behind the Scenes:
This is the first episode written by Gordon Russell. Over the next few months, two of the show’s three writers will be replaced. Joe Caldwell and Malcolm Marmorstein will leave, and are replaced by Gordon Russell, and Sam Hall, who starts with episode 357. Russell and Hall become a writing team that takes them through the end of this series, and then on to another soap opera, One Life to Live.
Tomorrow: Untouched.
Dark Shadows episodåe guide – 1967
Okay, now we’re talking. Right out of the gate today, the first thing we see: dark red liquid bubbling in a glass jar. It’s connected with tubes and wires to a bunch of other equipment, and there’s a grinding motor noise that indicates that there’s some kind of complicated machinery at work.
Backing up a step, we see Dr. Julia Hoffman in a pale blue lab coat, squinting at equipment and making adjustments. She’s in a basement room, with brick walls, exposed timbers and huge cobwebs. The doctor uses a pair of tongs to grab chunks of dry ice, and she drops them into a huge bubbling cauldron.
That cauldron is full of more dark red liquid. It’s a bubbling cauldron of blood. This is mad science, we’re actually watching mad science.
And it’s about damn time. They’ve been sitting on this “finding a cure for the vampire” story for a month, just letting it simmer in the background while Barnabas and Julia dealt with one manufactured crisis after another. We spent all that time arguing in the drawing room, and there was a bubbling cauldron of blood downstairs that we didn’t even know about.
Barnabas walks into the room, and Julia turns off the motor. He objects.
Barnabas: Why did you do that? It was magnificent!
Julia: I only wanted to test it.
Barnabas: Well, obviously, it works!
And he’s right — if it’s bubbling and making a noise, then that means it works. He must have taken an elective in mad science.
Julia: No, there are still a few details to fix.
Barnabas: But you explained to me previously that it only needed a test to prove that the acids had activated. Well, I’d say that you’ve succeeded admirably… as you always do.
And he’s right, it is magnificent. Just look at it, bubbling away. Acids are activating all over the place.
But Julia isn’t happy; she doesn’t want to go on with the experiments anymore. She’s done. The other day, she helped Barnabas kill Dr. Woodard, because Woodard had learned about these experiments. A first murder can rattle anyone.
But it’s too late to turn back; he’s already got a speech prepared.
Barnabas: I’m sorry, but you’ve given me one irretrievable gift… hope.
He walks a few steps, and strikes a pose.
Barnabas: The hope of becoming human again. The hope of being able to love, and not destroy. Even the hope itself is a hint of what it must be like to be a human being.
I love this scene. Remember what I said the other day about Joe Caldwell being a great writer? He’s writing four of the episodes this week. Yesterday was the obligatory useless law enforcement episode that they still think they need to have after a murder, but the rest of the week is this: Melodramatic speeches about what it means to be human, delivered by a vampire in his secret basement laboratory.
It’s an impossible scheme, really — to take the psychopath who took obvious pleasure in cold-blooded murder only two episodes ago, and guide him through a moral reboot that will make him the hero of the show. But maybe there’s a science behind this madness after all.
Barnabas: If I can love and not destroy, surely forgiveness can be found.
Julia: For what you’ve done?
Barnabas: Perhaps not. But let me love first, as a human being loves, and if there’s still no forgiveness, well, let me take the punishment… not as a monster, but as a man.
And that’s the point, really, that he’s got a desire to change. That’s not quite the same thing as remorse, but it’s pointing in the right direction.
Then he walks over to the huge bucket of bubbling blood, and says, “I wonder what I’ll be like, as a human being?” And you can just feel the acids activating.
Over at Collinwood, Vicki and Burke are having another little quarrel about where they’re going to live when they get married. They’ve been doing a lot of this lately. She doesn’t want to quit her governess job and leave David right now, because he’s become emotionally disturbed, and he needs her.
Vicki and Burke have had a series of conversations about this, and they don’t seem to be getting anywhere. It usually looks like they’ve reached some kind of understanding by the end of a given episode, but the next time we see them, they’re back at it. This is what they do now.
But there’s a larger agenda at work here. Vicki and Burke can stay trapped in this little circular argument for as long as they like, because ultimately the writers aren’t invested in helping them work it out.
This is a soap opera, and what really matters is the love triangle, an experimental apparatus lashed together with tubes and wires, connecting a tangle of loose storylines.
On their own, Burke and Vicki don’t generate a lot of heat. She’s young and pretty and not very bright; he’s wealthy and he wants to marry her. They have no obstacles in their way, and they’ve spent the last several weeks trying to determine which enormous mansion they’ll move into after the wedding.
But when you get a third party involved, there’s a chance for some interesting chemistry.
Unfortunately, the Burke/Vicki/Barnabas triangle was pretty comprehensively nerfed more than a month ago. Vicki told Burke to stop being suspicious of Barnabas, Burke gave in, and the storyline just kind of rolled over and died.
But it turns out that wasn’t the real love triangle after all. Burke’s about to be taken off the board, and the real triangle is Barnabas, Vicki and Julia. That situation has a lot more potential, because Julia has a hypnotic medallion, several terrifying secrets, and a bubbling bucket of blood. Chaos will ensue.
Like any mad science experiment, it’s hard to say exactly how the love triangle is going to end up. But it bubbles and it makes noise, and that’s a good place to start. Let’s chuck some more dry ice in there, and see what happens.
Tomorrow: Haunted.
Dark Shadows bloopers to watch out for:
At the start of the first scene, while Julia is adjusting her equipment, someone in the studio has a loud coughing fit.
When they come back from the titles, it sounds like Barnabas and Julia started the scene too early. Barnabas begins the scene by saying, “Nonsense! You’ve done nothing but take chances,” which doesn’t relate to anything. This has happened a few times since episode 333, when a scene started while Dr. Woodard was halfway through the word “-peared”. They need to get a handle on the timing.
When Barnabas brings up Woodard’s murder, Julia says, “I didn’t kill anyone.” Barnabas is supposed to say, “You handed the hypodermic needle to me,” but he messes up the rhythm of the line. He puts stress on the wrong end of the sentence, so it comes out as “You handed the hypodermic needle to me,” which doesn’t mean anything.
As you can see in the picture above, there’s a huge boom mic shadow obscuring Julia’s face during the entire terrace scene. It’s still there every time they cut to her reaction.
Alone on the terrace, Julia is supposed to be startled by a ghost, which appears and vanishes using a Chromakey effect. But they mess up the timing, so Julia turns around and screams after the ghost has already come and gone.
Behind the Scenes:
Peter Murphy plays the ghost of Dr. Woodard here, silently gesturing to Julia on the terrace. Murphy started on the show a couple weeks ago, as the recast for the crazy old Caretaker. We’ll see him again next week, standing in for Burke in Vicki’s dream.
Tomorrow: Haunted.
On a lighter note...
https://www.yahoo.com/news/m/3661274f-9f01-3bc9-97c5-11cf9b82b3c7/ss_united-passenger-befouled-the.html
United passenger befouled the bathrooms so badly the plane had to land
