Discuss - Ep #0294

[Watching Project]

Robservations - #294

And if you'd care to look back, the first WP discussion topic for this ep:

Re: Discuss - Ep #0294

[DarkLady]

Wardrobe notes: When Sarah arrives to spring Maggie from Wyndcliff, she has somehow retrieved her cap. And sometime after Maggie leaves her room and we see her and Sarah on the hospital grounds, she is wearing a brown windowpane-check dress.

Barnabas spots the No Trespassing sign at the House by the Sea well before Burke or Vicki. You must have the eyes of a cat! Burke exclaims. It's just a matter of conditioning, Barnabas replies--with perfect truth, I guess. Vicki wants to go upstairs, but Burke quashes that idea. Barnabas, who says he's used to candlelight (he brought candles from Collinwood) goes up instead. Burke takes the opportunity to talk to Vicki about the possible future of the house--which can be rosy if we let it, he assures her. She stares out the window dreamily.

Once more, Sarah evades Maggie's questions about how she got into and out of Maggie's locked room. The poor little ghost is touchingly pleased when Maggie laughs for the first time since they met. Hand in hand, they set off for home singing "London Bridge"--which Maggie doesn't seem to mind one bit.

Just as Burke is all set to ditch Barnabas at the House by the Sea, Barnabas returns with handkerchief embroidered with the initials F.McA.C. [spoiler]Could they stand for "Flora McA[something] Collins"? We will meet her a long time from now.[/spoiler] Vicki has some scruples about taking it, but Barnabas says gallantly, I'm sure she would want you to have it. Burke glares at him.

At the BW, Barnabas treats Vicki to a scotch and water and Burke to bourbon. (It’s hard to imagine Vicki having hard liquor; I would have thought she would order a sherry. I suppose Barnabas got himself a Bloody Mary.)

While Barnabas goes to the bar, Burke and Vicki discuss the house. Seeing you going around testing floorboards was very comforting, Vicki opines. Burke says, I want to make your present and future more enticing than the past.

But who knows what would have happened if not for the appearance of the supposedly dead and buried Maggie Evans, very much alive and still holding Sarah's doll? Barnabas, the only one present who knew she wasn't dead, keeps his face turned from her, but she hardly seems to notice anything and suddenly collapses. WOW!

My notes tell me that this was the last episode shot in glorious black and white. Hooray!

[Lydia]

Wardrobe notes: When Sarah arrives to spring Maggie from Wyndcliff, she has somehow retrieved her cap.

If you check the captures in the Robservations, you'll find that in fact Sarah is capless.

Somehow Sarah found Maggie, and having found Maggie, did her bidding.  It's not surprising, but it doesn't give me any new information to help construct a Unified Theory of Sarah.  Hmm...when Julia told Barnabas that Maggie was alive, did that somehow help point Sarah in Maggie's direction?

Barnabas spots the No Trespassing sign at the House by the Sea well before Burke or Vicki. You must have the eyes of a cat! Burke exclaims.

It's strange, because Barnabas ought to have the eyes of a bat.  Maybe his echolocation is good enough so that he can detect the difference in paint colors on the No Trespassing sign.

The show's moving along at a good clip now.  I had forgotten that there was such a short time between Julia's bedroom confrontation with Barnabas and Maggie's escape from Windcliff.

Something about Vicky's dream house accentuates Burke's natural boorishness, while (for me, anyway) it increases Vicky's charm.  I love her daydream about the three-masted schooner, and wish it could have developed into a nice little subplot.  Maybe the captain's bride could turn out to be F McA C.

[IluvBarnabas]

Sarah may just have instinctingly knew where Maggie was, just like she seem to know instinctingly that Maggie needed her help when Maggie was still kept in the Old House Basement cell.

Burke may have been prepared to ditch Barnabas at the house, or he may have been joking. Joking or not, he should have seen that Vicki would never desert Barnabas, especially in a strange house, under any circumstances.

I swear, I thought all three of them were pretty much quarrelling, or close to it, on the charm of the house, or lack of it depending on one of the threesome's viewpoint.

Barnabas' little gift to Vicki has made Burke even more defensive. Burke declares he'll make Vicki forget all about the past....hate the past all you want Burke, but it's still not attractive to a girl when a man tells her he's going to do this and that and she's going to like it whether she will or not. He may not have intended it to sound like that, but it did to me...I don't know I may just be making a mountain out of a molehill.

Sarah has let Maggie to the Blue Whale....did Sarah know that's Sam favorite hangout? Yet he's nowhere in sight in this episode. Did she know Barnabas would be there?  I wouldn't like to think that Sarah would deliberately put Maggie in any danger, it was probably just luck.

Exciting cliffhanger.

[DarkLady]

You are absolutely right, Lydia--Sarah is, in fact, bareheaded when she comes to rescue Maggie. *blush*

Burke was rather defensive, and I think that when they were at the BW, Vicki was trying to placate him by saying that she felt comforted when he tested the floorboards. Probably not the best evening any of them has ever had, although Vicki did get the handkerchief.

[Joeytrom]

The House by the Sea storyline was supposed to become the main storyline after Barnabas was destroyed. 

In an interview on one of the DVDs, writer Malcolm Mamorstein said that DC told him to kill off Barnabas around this time but MM said he didn't think it was a good idea to lose such a great character, so he introduced this storyline and slowly started the downfall of Barnabas at the same time to see which way the show should turn.

[Lydia]

Thanks for the information, Joeytrom.  I'm pretty sure I've seen all of the interviews on the DVDs, but I had forgotten that bit.  So Barnabas was going to be killed off, and Frank Garner was gone as if he had never existed, and Vicky would be left with Burke the Boor, whereupon any woman of sense would naturally flee into the fantasyland offered by the House by the Sea.  Oh, gosh, it's so easy to imagine how the storyline would go, and it sounds like fun.  The grass is always greener, and the sea is always bluer, on the other side of the parallel time divide.  Unfortunately Barnabas is also deader on the other side of that parallel time divide.  Oh, well, maybe they would have brought Jonathan Frid back in a few months as another character.

Sarah may just have instinctingly knew where Maggie was, just like she seem to know instinctingly that Maggie needed her help when Maggie was still kept in the Old House Basement cell.

I don't think it's that simple.  At Windcliff, Sarah told Maggie that first she couldn't find Maggie, and then she could hear her just a little so she listened very hard - or something like that.  It seems to me to be plausible that there's some connection between Barnabas and Sarah, and that Sarah couldn't hear Maggie at all until a psychic path (or something) was set up from Maggie to Julia to Barnabas to Sarah.

[Janet the Wicked]

Just as Burke is all set to ditch Barnabas at the House by the Sea, Barnabas returns with handkerchief embroidered with the initials F.McA.C. Vicki has some scruples about taking it, but Barnabas says gallantly, I'm sure she would want you to have it. Burke glares at him.

It seems to me that the hankercheif thing was supposed to lead to something, but never did. They make such a big deal out of the initials, one has to wonder what they had in mind.

[DarkLady]

Thanks for that info., Joeytrom! I don't have the DVDs, so any scraps like that are always fascinating. I guess we owe Barnabas's continued existence to Malcolm Marmorstein.

I did once read a novel in a which a house enchanted the people who moved in and fulfilled all their dreams while they never knew they were prisoners. Only one young woman realized what was happening and escaped, but had to leave her fiancé behind.

I think the handkerchief was going to be one of the clues to the never-continued story of the House by the Sea.

[Lydia]

DarkLady, this is fascinating.  Do you remember the name of that novel?  I wonder if Dan Curtis had it in mind when he thought up the House by the Sea storyline.  Anthony George always intended to be a short-termer on the show, so the "leaving the fiancé behind" bit would have been a great way to unload Burke - much better, I think, than the one that was eventually used.

[DarkLady]

I had to do a little research, but it was Someone in the House, by Barbara Michaels. I adore her books and have read them all. Unusual for her, the ending was a bit of a bummer. I don't know when it was published, but it was many years ago now. If the DS writers had used a similar ending, it would have made for a very interesting story line!

[alwaysdavid]

Vickie's house reminds me of the movie "The Univited" but it's been do long that I can't recall ll the details but it involved a secluded house by the sea, people who came to live there and ghosts.   It is hard to believe that the nurse is so easily tricked and nobody contacts Collinsport people in the know within the time it took Maggie to get to Collinsport.

[Lydia]

Someone in the House, by Barbara Michaels.

Thanks, DarkLady!  We live in a wonderful century: I was able to get the book on Kindle and read it this weekend.  It was written too recently to have been an inspiration on Dark Shadows, but the idea is still very interesting - as is the ending of the book, which leaves an interesting question for the reader to ponder.

[DarkLady]

I'm so glad you liked it, Lydia! I recommend everything else she's written, as well as the Amelia Peabody series, which she wrote under the pseudonym Elizabeth Peters. (Her real name is Barbara Mertz, and she has a Ph.D. in Egyptology from the University of Chicago.)

The Uninvited is one of my favorite movies! It involves a brother (Ray Milland) and sister (I forget) who buy a house in Cornwall. Lots of mists and ghosts, along with amazingly good special effects for the time. I was (ahem!) grown up when I first saw it, but one ghost in particular is truly frightening. Very nice music score too.

[Janet the Wicked]

The Univited airs next month on the 10th on TCM at 10:00 P.M. EST.