i'm with andre here...i love these episodes too.i was enthralled when i first watched them.
where as maggie reminded barnabas of someone else here it's vicki herself that barnabas is falling for.

and this is getting close to the episodes where vicki spends the night at the old house...and i still get goosebumps when i think of them.it sounds corny but during these months the show did approach something "magical".

"Camp" is something you have to set out to be....it's not something you stumble upon by accident.  Think of the early "Batman" series with all those crazy "villains" like "The Penquin" and "The Riddler".  The show was WRITTEN TO BE THAT WAY!!

Dark Shadows was never WRITTEN to be "campy".....but some have used that term because of certain actor's mannerisms and vocal delivery.  The plots may have been outlandish, the acting idiocincratic, the directing highly stylized.....but the show was not written to be camp!!

rainey,i disagree

camp is absolutely NOT something that one has to set out to be.it often only happens in retrospect.

silly shows like 'batman" aside look at the work of the great mid-century actresses.bette davis,judy garland,joan crawford,gloria swanson and even joan bennett.if you asked any of these actresses in 1945 if they intended to produce a volume of work later perceived as "campy" i can assure you the answer would have been no.they intended to turn in good performances in the style of the period.

movies like "all about eve" and "sunset boulevard" only achieved camp status later when new audiences saw them and the world around them had changed.camp often does happen by accident.

that said,i doubt that the d.s. writers set out to write a campy show.but one has to accept that there is that perception out there.

i do think that with the adam storyline the show began to veer toward high camp.whether the writers did this intentionally or not is up for speculation.what i do think that they did intentionally with this storyline was for the first time to actively court those "kids that ran home from school" as it's intended audience.where as the earlier stories were probably aimed at a traditional "soap opera" viewer(housewives and perhaps teenage girls)this had a more adolescent sensibility.

even so most of the actors played it all very straight.i think there were two exceptions however.
humbert allen astredo as nicholas blair and thayer david as professor stokes always seemed to be winking slightly at the audience i thought.like they knew that the material they were playing was absurd.

did anybody else catch this?

it was sooo dated!it was shot in the washed-out natural palette popular in the late 1970's.it looked like a gothic ralph lauren ad.that's not to say there wasn't beauty there as well.

but frank langella's blow-out was more than i could take.

while i generally like to think that victoria winters was the prettiest girl that has ever lived on this planet ever

...i have to conceed that above the knees vicki gets rather stocky.so the miniskirted maggie evans won my vote for best gams.

they do say that "the legs are the last to go" so props must also be given to liz.

julia:"now you must listen to me vicki...you will never remember and you will never forget.....at least for the next few episodes until this entire plot development is dropped and never mentioned again."

for various reasons episode 535 is an all-time favorite of mine.
i loved the scene where barnabas followed vicki around the drawing room,begging her to tell him the dream.it was shot in a really cool way.

and let's not get started with julia making contact with cassandra!