DARK SHADOWS 635
DARK SHADOWS 635
Nancy Barrett. It is
The narration mentions a
remote corner of the great estate that we later find out is Widow’s Hill. Sure
didn’t look like Widow’s Hill but it seems as if it changes each time it is
shown. Julia asks Barnabas what happened. He says he is all right, Julia says,
“Thank God.”
Blair is gone forever, Julia
rejoices.
“Nicholas is gone. Nicholas is gone.” We
heard ya the first time! Julia continues, “The danger is over.” Around here?
The drama queen says,
“Barnabas, Barnabas!” She seems to hug him and he hugs her! Are these two a couple now?
Julia has given Maggie a
sedative and she is asleep upstairs. Barnabas thinks they have to deal with
Adam. Ya think? Julia says, “I don’t know how.”
Adam in the last episode,
covered Eve with the sheet or blanket and covered her up to her face. Now, the
sheet/blanket is not over her face and seems to be gone entirely. Maybe so they
can show that wig again.
What is with DS and pills?
Sedatives? Carolyn tells Vicki to take two sleeping pills and she does. They
wonder why she can’t sleep. UHM, maybe because she found a man in her room that
had FANGS!?
Or maybe because Barnabas
pretty much told her that…there are vampires! I never realized Vicki knew that
before her character left the show.
Carolyn had gone away
suddenly according to Vicki. Carolyn said it was because she suddenly felt
lost; that she was attracted to someone so she went away. Makes sense? “Well, I
became very attracted to someone and he went away.”
“I didn’t know you were
seeing anyone.”
She is not in love with that
someone but was fond of him. I’d go with
Barnabas’s previous assessment that SHE IS in love with Adam.
Anyway he is outside the door
listening as Carolyn goes on about how she thinks about him often. When Carolyn
leaves Vicki’s room, Adam ducks down….where? Did he go down a hallway that was
previously unseen? Is the door to the West Wing still that door at the end of
the hallway? If so it seems as if there is now another or new hallway doing
right. Or was that a room he ducked into like a hiding Bugs Bunny character???
In any case the hallway looks different.
Adam goes into Vicki’s room,
covers her mouth and starts to let her go so she can dress warmly. She screams.
Carolyn comes in and Adam slaps Vicki down. Carolyn checks her, “Oh, thank God,
she’s still breathing.”
Carolyn questions Adam. He
says, “You wouldn’t understand.” “No, I
don’t understand!” She yells at him to
look at her. She reminds him of the Adam that asked her to read the love sonnet
to her. That is the Adam that is a gentle sweet man that showed
tenderness.
Adam is insane now sort of,
“If you had loved me…” Carolyn cannot
sway him from taking revenge and he won’t tell her on whom (WHY NOT?). She
tries to call the police and he rips the phone wire out of the wall.
In a very exciting sequence
and shocking at that, Adam approaches
Carolyn who is sure he will not attack her…and he does. He chokes her down and
it seems as if she might be dead! He takes Vicki out.
In a nice transition, we see
darkness of the room or the hall and then Barnabas’s cape as he comes down the
hallway. He finds Carolyn alive. She tells him Adam is like a wild, savage
animal now. Of course Barnabas tells her nothing. Is this the first time she
admitted to, well knowing more about Adam?
In another….and I must say an
Adam on the rampage IS unnerving and scary…in another great sequence, Julia is
worrying (complete with Julia-isms of pacing and holding her hands up and then
dropping them and sighing) when Adam comes in to the Old House and starts being
intimidating, following her around the drawing room of the Old House and making
her nervous.
Before that, it was scary as
she starts to hear the lab machinery turn on.
As Adam vs Julia around the
room, she mentions that Adam threatened Barnabas a hundred times. WE KNOW! She tells him Nicholas is gone, “Chances are
he’ll never return.”
They discuss how Blair is not
his friend because as Adam says, Blair made too many promises that he did not
deliver on. He then keeps staring at her and it makes her nervous.
She wants to get her bag
because a sedative might do him good. He stops her. Julia brazenly makes her
way to the cellar door and is about to go down to find out what’s happening
there when…frighteningly, Adam attacks her from behind! She screams,
“AAAAAAAAAA!” Love it when Grayson screams. Is it like a man would scream?
Don’t know but it is different.
Barnabas finds Julia on the
steps that go upward. That’s odd. Did Adam place her there? It is also odd he
didn’t kill her. Does he feel as if she is like his mother? “He’s doing
something down there, I don’t know what.”
In any case, Adam seems to be
main villain of the piece now. Julia and Barnabas go to the cellar door and
look through the barred window. It is locked from below. Vicki is on the table
and hooked up to the machinery (but I can’t recall if she has anything on her
head or attached to her).
Okay now oddly----Frid and
Grayson at times when the camera cuts to them, seem to be talking to each other
NOT in character or waiting for their take. It makes me think how boring acting
might be at times. The camera takes them anyway. At one point, Frid puts his
finger into a nostril and seems to be…it’s too scary to think about but its
VERY funny. He takes his finger out and…gosh, seems to flick something off it!
EWL! He also seems to be talking to himself. Or to her.
In his head Adam sees Julia!
Would you want that? He also sees Carolyn, both of the images trying to make
him stop his revenge. It does not deter him.
His crying over Eve makes him
seem pathetic but also…unsympathetic as he never really cared all that much
about her anyway. He’s being self absorbed and thus for a very long time is
torturing Vicki with the experiment stuff. She moans throughout and stretches…or
something. Barnabas and Julia seem to
come in from the secret room. Barnabas has a gun. Adam tells him that if he
kills him, “…you will revert to what you were!”
He tells them he doesn’t know
what that means but he heard the full tape of Eric Lang’s and knows that
whatever Barnabas was, he does not want to go back to that. Barnabas says, “You
don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Julia thinks it might be
true. Adam’s heard the tape.
“IDK what you were but I know
you don’t want to me to die.”
He is about to throw a switch
that Julia tells Barnabas will electrocute Vicki. Barnabas shoots him…and it
seems to hit his shoulder. Adam sinks to the floor but his hand goes up to the
switch to pull it down…he starts to.
I thought Barnabas smashed
the equipment or some of it?
There is a man in the Old
House credits. The camera zooms in so as not to see him. I think it might be
Frid. There is also a white line. What all this means is beyond me.
Review: WOW! What a
cliffhanger. Not only if Vicki about to be killed but if Adam dies (he might!)
Barnabas will revert to a vampire. I’m imagining that viewers back then wanted
Barnabas to become a vampire again. Not sure if Barnabas is more interesting as
a vampire or as what he is in 1968. The entire episode is well done and a way
to reach a climax in a storyline. Carolyn’s confrontation with Adam is stunning
and exciting. One might think she was going to calm him down but it doesn’t happen! And Julia
being attacked has such a nerve wracking build up…Rodan is excellent in all of
this. In a less capable actor’s hands (hello Roger Davis, Hello Don Briscoe),
it could have been a disaster but Rodan makes Adam dripping with sarcasm, hate,
malice, confusion, and revenge seeking behavior in a such a way as to make me
almost believe that this situation could happen. He’s excellent. With strong
actors playing the villains (Parker, Humbert, Rodan), it makes the heroes shine
even more. Good episode not to be missed. With Vicki screaming, where were the
other members of the family? On a vacation? I also don’t remember Carolyn’s
trip being mentioned in the past. I do know that she told Roger she was going
to go away and something about her nerves but that was more a ploy to help in
the experiment.
John: Your 'friend' has been gone a long time, Carolyn? In soap-opera time, didn't Adam just leave a day or two ago?
Christine: Maybe she was referring to good ol' Tony Peterson and not Adam.
John: Where the hell is everyone else in Collinwood while Vicki and Carolyn are being attacked upstairs? Hell of a day for Roger, David, Elizabeth, Mrs. Johnson and that loser Harry to all have the day off.
Christine: It's not the first time the young ladies have been attacked and screaming for help with no one to come running in response. I guess when it happens often enough the residents fail to notice.
John: So Adam demonstrates that no one ever really knew how to run the experiment. But the random turning of dials had a great effect causing pain on the person on the operating table, despite their not being connected to anything—not even electrodes. Was anyone else surprised it took Barnabas so long to do something while Vicki continued to cry out in pain?
Christine: Well, he needed to give Adam a chance to remind us of Dr. Lang's tape so we could wonder all weekend if we may get Vampire Barnabas back on Monday if his shot proves to be fatal.
Dark Shadows bloopers to watch out for:
In act 1, when Barnabas and Julia open the iron door to go down into the basement, there’s a quick glimpse of one of the studio lights overhead.
Carolyn clearly hands Vicki one sleeping pill, but says, “Here, take these.” At the end of their scene, Vicki says, “I think those pills are beginning to work.”
In act 3, Barnabas and Julia are standing at the locked basement door, peering through the grill and calling to Adam. They’re clearly not sure whether the camera is on them or not, and Julia looks surprised when Barnabas says a line. After a moment, he decides they’re not on camera anymore, and he does a quick nose-cleaning.
As the end credits begin, Jonathan Frid walks past the Old House drawing room set. We can see his shadow pass by on the right side, then his arm, and finally a glimpse of his face as he realizes what’s happening and ducks out of the shot.
AND Dan on his blog goes nuts with this:
And then, through the mist of the dry ice machine, we see a shower of sparks, and there’s Julia, rising through the sky in her secret personal gyrocopter that she kept folded up in her medical bag for just such an emergency, and as she rises, she scatters a fistful of sedatives into the open mouths of the stunned authorities, and everybody slumps into a peaceful doze as she steers her copter towards the setting sun, and she makes a break for it, grinning and waving cheerfully at the carnage she’s left behind, and at last, at long last, Julia Hoffman is finally free.
Comments
Post a Comment