Episode 40: Their shrieks and their moanings

In the teaser, Bill asks Sam for a cup of coffee. When Sam brings it, the music abruptly stops, to start again when the cup is in Bill’s hands. Apparently the hand-off was an occasion that called for a respectful silence.

Bill proves to be quite an effective action hero. He spends one lunch hour plying Sam with Sam’s own liquor, and Sam tells him that Roger has demanded he leave town and has threatened to kill him, because he has information that could send Roger to prison. That’s more than Burke and his private detectives have managed to dig up in years of snooping.

Roger wanders from the Evans cottage to the restaurant to Collinwood, in each place to be told that it’s the middle of a working day. By the third time this happens, it’s worth a chuckle.

Roger encounters Burke and brings Carolyn’s ring back from him. This thwarts Carolyn’s plan to get a date with Burke by deliberately leaving it behind. She goes to see him anyway. He tells her that shenanigans with rings were a cliche in comedies written long before they were born. At that line, the theater types involved in making Dark Shadows would probably think back to examples reaching back to Shakespeare and beyond, all the way to Plautus and the ancient Greeks.

Burke refuses to take Carolyn to an appointment he has in the city of Bangor. I was going to write “He refuses to take her to Bangor,” but that’s almost as venerable a comic cliche as are hijinks with rings.