DARK SHADOWS 621

Nicholas. No reprise. Is that 5:05 pm or am? Or some other time? A pacing and nervous Julia calls up to Willie asking if he’s dressed yet. “I’m coming! I’m coming!” he yells down.

“We’re his conscious, Willie, you and I.” She explains that is why this time he didn’t rely on them. He wanted to be part of the vampire but then did not. When he asks who would do this to him, making him like he was before, she answers, “Angelique, Angelique Collins.”

Julia recounts how the vampire called to her, “Come to me. Come to me.”

Willie asks why Julia talks about an Angelique like he should know who that is. “Idk any Angelique!” She asks him if he has ever seen that portrait Vicki bought in the Antique Shop, “The one with the blond woman with the strange, intense eyes?”

He has and Julia explains that is Angelique and she was married to Barnabas. He wants to go now and destroy her right now.

Nicholas returns home (where the heck did he go? Maggie’s?) to find Adam on the floor. “Will I never learn about Angelique, never?” He offers Adam some kind of liquor (Cherrie?). Separately, Willie and Julia look for Barnabas in the woods. A tree shakes a lot near Willie and he hasn’t even touched it. Nicholas still questioning Adam (who never mentions him taking the cross off Barnabas—does Adam know their connection enough to realize this could make HIM die too?), wonders if Angelique has finally succeeded at last…in killing Barnabas.

Willie and Julia meet up in the woods. Julia tells Willie that Angelique is not like Barnabas was. She killed Tom Jennings and just left him in the woods, “She doesn’t care what she does.” They both have the same feeling they’re not going to find him but Julia tells him she is not going to give into it.

She adds, “And neither are you!”

As Adam lays down on the couch, eyes closed, I can’t help but wonder if the scars look incredibly different and more and more of them are there?

Nicholas checks Adam’s pulse, we hear a squeak. Nicholas gets a voice over! He wonders if Dr. Lang’s message on the tape were true (what? Didn’t he already see proof of it?). He uses the word affinity which might be correctly used but that usually means a liking for or sympathy for. He wants to find Barnabas, wondering if Adam can live if Barnabas is already dead. He moves to use his mirror to find Barnabas but it is gone from the wall.

He already knows Angelique sent Adam to Collinwood and now knows she took the mirror.

Julia and Willie return to the Old House, defeated. She takes her gloves off and was telling herself that they’d have come home and find him here but he’s not there. They talk and he comes up with idea of staking her in his coffin, which he did before they left. She thinks it has to be at Nicholas Blair’s. There is a long pause as she looks at him and he seems to forget his lines and then he says, “Are you sure? You’re not sure?”

She thinks it is. Willie, as if he knows nothing about ANY of these characters, yells, loudly, “Well, WHY WOULD IT BE AT NICHOLAS BLAIR’S????”

He will get her the stake and mallet, already professing he will not ask any stupid questions (like he just did) and she claims to have some blood plasma downstairs left over from the experiment.

At first Nicholas bars Julia with his arm but tells him she is here to save Adam so he lets her in. he explains he wishes there were someone he could call as Adam is very ill, “Although, I don’t know how you knew that.”

“Mr. Blair, we’re going to have to be very honest with each other.”

“I will enjoy being honest with you, Dr. Hoffman.”

Great dialog.

Julia tells a pleading Adam that she and Blair are going to help Adam together. “I have no healing powers, Dr. Hoffman,” he tells her. But she tells him he has knowledge. She admits to him that knowledge in this particular case is better than medicine. She asks where the coffin is.

“You’ll have to forgive me for being bewildered but IDK what you’re talking about, Doctor.”

She gives him the stake.

He lies that he does not know about a coffin or a woman named Angelique.

“Really, doctor, you’ve uh, been reading too many gothic novels.”

She says, “Oh, why do you keep pretending that I don’t know about you?”

In their heated argument she says, “God! Do you want him to die?”

When he balks that she has not done one thing to help Adam, she will give him injections as she is an expert on this particular disease.

Julia sniffs.

1: 45 am: Barnabas and Adam both feel the injection. Barnabas is lying on what looks like it is supposed to be the ground of the woods and grass but it looks like a fake patch of lawn that the indoor set is made of and frankly it looks really silly. Barnabas calls for help now and we see the woods, out of focus and blurry.

Willie hears him and runs for him.

Julia keeps reminding Blair of the only conclusive cure: the stake and mallet. What she did is only temporary. “Mr. Blair I have done everything I can to make you be honest with me.”

She leaves but first tells him if he is the wise man she thinks he is, he will use the stake on Angelique.

Willie brings Barnabas back to the Old House. “My eyes! The sun! So bright!” He wants to stay down in the drawing room. Willie tells Barnabas that Julia is at Blair’s. Willie then asks, “Hey, Barnabas how…how come you…you never told me that…that you were married to Angelique?”

Julia arrives. She tells Barnabas there are no recriminations. She tells Willie to not be seen as he goes to her room in Collinwood to call from her room and call for an ambulance from Wyndcliffe to The Old house. Barnabas needs a transfusion and this way, Angelique will not know where he is.

Nicholas voice over. He knows Dr. Hoffman is right and Angelique will bring down the Master’s wrath if Adam dies. She became what she is as a punishment. This punishment must be the last. It seems he made a vampire as punishment but she gave him more problems. He goes to her coffin with stake and mallet, thinking she will feel no pain, no suffering. She will cease to exist without ever knowing it. NOTE: What is that Asian looking pagoda object on top of a small table?

Nicholas opens the coffin.

Review: Again, everyone is in top form. Blair and Julia really work together and Willie, given his history, also works well in this mix though it is amazing he does not know about Angelique. Certainly he knows about Cassandra? This is another good episode.

From Dark Shadows Daily:

Look at what Julia’s doing here. She says, “We must go to that coffin. I have the instrument that will make them both healthy again,” and then she reaches into her medical bag, pulls out a wooden stake, and sets it on the table.

This is the most badass thing a human being has ever done in the entire history of anything. It’s better than a mic drop — it’s a stake drop. You cannot get cooler than that.

The whole purpose of a television character is to make their show more interesting, and Julia Hoffman shows up every day and she does her goddamn job.

And she’s furious here, because the most direct way to improve this floundering storyline is for the badass doctor to actually team up with the Devil, and go vampire slaying together. I cannot overstate how much better the story would be, if he could just drop the nonsense for ten seconds, and report to work.

But he insists on just standing there, and acting like a dick. Julia says that she can give Adam some injections which will help him stay alive until the vampire’s defeated, and Nicholas concocts the most irritating possible response.

“You are psychic, Doctor,” he says. “You are prescribing without an examination.”

And Julia just can’t even with this. She rolls her eyes, and does a Jim Halpert-style take to the camera.

She is explicitly inviting Nicholas to stop being a tool for five seconds, and he’s deliberately sabotaging the show. He is actually trying to make the scene go slower.

Episode 621: Better Than Medicine | Dark Shadows Every Day

Dark Shadows bloopers to watch out for:

The first tree that Willie passes in the woods is already unstable; he actually puts out a hand to steady it as he goes by.

Julia has a little trouble getting her medical bag open while she’s confronting Nicholas. She manages it in time to hit Nicholas with the line “Where is the coffin?”, but it’s a close race.

There’s an extraordinary shot near the end of act 2 that begins with Barnabas moaning and writhing on the ground, and then it pulls back to reveal that he is in fact in a television studio, lying on a small patch of artificial turf. There’s also a studio light on a little stand. This lasts for five seconds, which doesn’t sound like a long time but it’s long enough.

From BEFORE I...

Our thoughts

John: Since the writers seem to be playing fast and loose with the rules, I'm curious if Barnabas dies and returns as a vampire, if the same would happen to Adam?

Christine: I think they may be rewriting the rules entirely. I still wonder if Adam will continue to house the vampire affliction for Barnabas, or if it was a one time deal.

John: So Barnabas keeps a supply of stakes and mallets at the old house? Pretty odd for a former vampire.

Christine: It's not so odd for him to have a backup supply for when he had to rescue his one true love from vampire Tom Jennings.

John: Curious how Blair continues to play coy with Julia. Amazing he doesn't just own up to what she already knows. Of course, setting him up to be the one to stake Angelique is rather poetic. But since it didn't happen today, I'm not holding my breath that it's going to happen tomorrow.

Christine: It will be interesting to find out if Blair cares more for his plan for Adam or his relationship with Angelique. He should not be surprised by her continued defiance when he does not follow through on the threats he makes. The magic mirror theft was a pretty brazen challenge to his authority.