Dark Shadows - Willie is Missing / The True Introduction of the Vampire

Episode 211...where on earth is Willie?!
 3/5

I won't lie: my high rating for the episode is essentially for the great final image of Barnabas, in person, standing next to his own painting from a long time past, in the Collinwood mansion. I got goosebumps watching it again after a few years, and I think you can just see Dan Curtis building to it the moment Barnabas arrives. There is a lot of the maid in this episode, talking with Jason at great length about the missing Willie Loomis, and later with Elizabeth when wondering if she should set a place at the table for him. Mrs. Johnson (Clarice Blackburn) is quite the nosy busybody, poking around with inquisitive questions and interjecting unsolicited comments perhaps not wanted. While Jason is interested in Johnson's conversations with Willie about the Collins family and especially the Barnabas painting, Elizabeth isn't fond of her intrigue in why Willie is missing when he's always around Jason (and why she'd want them two at Collinwood). Elizabeth is always trying her best to remain evasive, even as the questions of her past and associations with folks she should have no interest in continue to torment her. 

The past has always been a component of "Dark Shadows" regarding Elizabeth Stoddard, as her missing husband and why Victoria was specifically chosen to be David's teacher hounded her. Burke's presence in her and Roger's life prior to Barnabas was also a significant source of trouble and misery, but Jason and Willie's emergence certainly just made things worse. Her anxiety and frustrations the longer Willie isn't out of her life are quite present as Jason worriedly hunts the cemetery looking for him, believing he would be there to perhaps steal the reported Naomi Collins' jewelry. The episode features a caretaker (Daniel Keyes) going on and on about evil and how he could feel it while searching the mausoleum for clues of Willie's being there. Eventually Jason and the caretaker look for clues of Willie, carrying on dialogue about the concerns for remaining at the cemetery, "disturbing the dead", and how Willie was interested in "paying respects" to "his family" (pretending to be a Collins himself). Willie obviously has no scruples and Jason realizes why he was there, locating a half-smoked cigarette still resting on a coffin in the mausoleum. So while Willie is still not found, Jason is sure he's about somewhere, returning to the mansion empty-handed, getting scolded by an impatient Elizabeth. And with Barnabas arriving as her "cousin from England", further complications await her and the Collins family. The caretaker gave me a good giggle, the performance and dialogue of Keyes a bit overdone but nonetheless entertaining to me. I guess this was a tribute to those kinds of eccentric graveyard upkeep kooks who perhaps spend a bit too much time around the dead instead of the living. His "doom and gloom" approach, everything from the caretaker emphasizing pervasive evil thereabouts, is more than a bit exaggerated, but I'm a sucker for these horror mainstays...they crack me up.