I've been watching the Viki/Burke romance storyline for the first time, and find it kind of disturbing.  First of all, I can't imagine Mitch Ryan's Burke ever saying most of the things that Burke #2 does.  But this revised character is sending up all sorts of red flags for domestic violence in my view.  There is a deep conservatism and smarminess beneath his romantic gestures.   He is possessive, controlling, agressive and creepy.  He tries to tell Viki where she should and shouldn't go, condescends to her about her 'vivid imagination' and wants to decide for her who she should be friends with.  He has a fit when she doesn't do what he recommends.

When he proposes, she says she doesn't know if she should accept not knowing her identity and he tells her, "you'll have an identity, you'll be Mrs. Burke Devlin."  Which is so sexist and creepy that I imagine if Joe had said it to Maggie she would have screamed her head off.  Then he tells her in a passage that is supposed to be sweet that "I'll ask you again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day until you say yes..." which is ultimately harassment, proven by his continued impatience in waiting for her answer.  She asks about his past, and he refuses to tell her anything about it, saying it is none of her buisness and he is only interested in the future.  Right after she accepts his proposal, he demands she never go to the old house again while refusing to tell her why (this is as far as I've gotten.)

Burke #2 really seems like the kind of guy who the day after they're married and she refuses to follow some order of his, will slap her in the face hard enough to land on the floor and then later come back crying, begging for her forgiveness (this is how most marriages on Dark Shadows end up, really).  And Viki likely wouldn't know what to do, because her own past as an orphan has blinded her to this guy and how messed up he really is.   Mitch Ryans Burke painted himself as someone too ambitous to go after an orphaned governess, but Anthony George's seems to see as her easy prey, much more 'managable' then someone like Laura or Carolyn.   Just like Barnabas, he wants to feed off her vulnerabilities and use her, isolate her in a barren old house by the sea and cut her off from her support network.    I wish Frank Garner had stayed around, he would be so much better as a love interest.  But I absolutely hate Anthony George's Burke, I can't wait for him to [spoiler]take his plane ride[/spoiler] (though sadly jeff clarke isn't much better.)

I found the character rather flat and unmemorable, boring.  Perhaps if KLS was around they could have aged her with makeup and that would have made her seem more like the Josette we knew. 

I don't really understand why Maggie would be glued to Barnabas' side as a Josette clone once she became a vampire.  I think that's wishful if not highly deluded thinking on his part.  She could just turn into a bat and a fly away the second he wasnt looking, or she could get her own 'Willie' to kill Barnabas.  Paradoxically, it seems that being locked into a hopeless, tedious existance in that coffin for so many years destroyed Barnabas' ability to think long-term. 

This is so sad!  All those years of anticipation that we could get to see the enhanced, restored NODS cut that would more clearly tell the story in the script, and now it's all gone.  We get nothing.  Devastating and insulting. 

It's very interesting watching Liz unravel in these episodes, as she struggles under the weight of the great secret she's been carrying. Carolyn has grown up, spent her entire life living in this toxic atmosphere of hidden, buried emotions, lies, and secrets, so it is no surprise to me that she reacts this way.  That is how many families react, for instance when a child becomes open about how they were sexually abused by a family member as a child.  They don't want to hear, they deny, they will listen to anything that will immediately restore the (very unhealthy) equilibrium in the family.  The person who wants to tell the truth is labelled the bad one. 

Anyway, it's really sad to me that Jason can't just leave while he's ahead, or find a less intrusive way to blackmail Liz; he could have her buy him a house, and keep going to his job with a reasonable salary and be a parasite but far enough away for her to put it mostly out of her mind.  All or nothing doesn't always turn out well. 

[spoiler]Ben's death certainly was disgusting, but that's horror for you.   Judah taking control of Ben to decapitate him seems horrific to me,[/spoiler] and just what Judah would want to do, not ludicrous.

The ludicrous part is that the Collins family are actually shown to beleive that [spoiler]He tried to kill himself by cutting off his own head.[/spoiler]

Overall, I didn't find it scary, just stupid.  And bringing back a beloved character who already had a good ending to get rid of him in such a way is unforgiveable in my opinion.   That's why I said in my post, that the storyline takes away, it doesn't give.  Of course they did that a lot at the end of the show.   

While some of the more recent actors did get characters that brought something different, there were too many rehashes for my taste; a cheap pansity-faye knockoff, another Trask, another Angelique, another Roxanne, another HAA warlock, another patriarch for Louis, another Quentin hardly distinguishable from the others... And in the one case where maybe a knockoff could have been fun (i.e. if Grayson had played Magda's ancestor) we had to watch Julia travel through time and waste Grayson's talents on the same-old.

Thanks Gothic, I'll check out those sites. 

Looking at these panels people have posted, all the "dark shadows" do seem to be located in the cavernous wrinkles on Barnabas' face.  Ugly as hell...