Even the dullest, most routinely soap operatic episodes of Dark Shadows have a couple of moments when you can tell they were being made by people with artistic ambition. This one is a case in point. Bill brings Liz some unwelcome information. Look at the composition of the shot:
They hold it like that for about a minute, and Joan Bennett’s response to the closeup really shows you how she came to be the movie star she was in the 1940s. It really is great.
In the same sequence, Carolyn hears for the first time that her adored Uncle Roger is in trouble. They cut to her for just a fraction of a second, which makes her reaction all the more effective:
The last shot is also a fine bit of visual story-telling. After his attempt to get Liz to face facts, Bill returns to the Blue Whale, and takes a seat in an even danker part of the bar than he’d occupied previously.
There’s also a good moment when the banker is presenting his visit as routine and Liz, who in the episodes earlier this week had been shown time and again to be in a precarious financial state, combines a faultlessly well-composed smile with hands trembling so hard her teacup almost cracks against its saucer.
And that’s it. The story points are a lot of tedious stuff about people we’ve never seen and relationships that aren’t going anywhere. Most of the actors do their best, but even in that department there is one notable exception.
The banker is played by Patrick McVey, a veteran character actor who could usually be relied upon to turn in a solid performance. He does well enough with the lines he remembers, but he takes most of his dialogue straight off the TelePrompTer. Marc Masse counts 22 shots of McVey catching up on his reading. That takes you out of the show, so that you start noticing everything else that’s wrong. In particular, the banker at one point tells Liz that anyone who might buy up her outstanding notes could put her out of business in a moment, and that in fact someone has been looking into the price of those notes. She asks who, he says “I don’t remember his name.” Mrs Acilius and I laughed out loud at that, saying to the screen “Isn’t it printed on the TelePrompTer?” Obviously the script called for the banker to deliver that line, and maybe if McVey had known his part we could have overlooked the absurdity of it, but as it stands, it is the most memorable moment of the entire episode.
Acilius on Dark Shadows 