Episode 45: Where Burke Devlin’s pen is

Roger is trying to keep his hands busy today. Our first look at his office focuses on his dart board, and he spends a great deal of time handling the darts.

Carolyn stops in the office. Roger hugs her, calls her “Kitten,” and doodles with his pen while he and his niece flirt pretty daringly.

Bill, whom we just saw in the Blue Whale giving Burke a stern talking-to, comes to Roger’s office to continue his stern talking-to concert tour. He drives Carolyn away. Roger stops handling the pen playfully and handles the darts menacingly.

Later, Roger sees Carolyn at home. He finds out she had lunch with Burke and that Burke gave her his pen. He explodes at this and demands that she give up the pen. After a phone call from Bill (stern talking-to #3) and a commercial break, Roger simmers down. He apologizes and calls Carolyn “Kitten” again. She admits that she’s probably just hanging around Burke out of curiosity. She also tells Roger about the evidence that Burke is trying to put the family out of business. Roger takes this news calmly- after all, the Collinses’ cannery, fishing fleet, and other financial interests can hardly compare to the significance of who gets to touch Burke’s pen.

Roger’s obsession with where Burke Devlin’s pen is will become the show’s obsession for a couple of months. Anyone unsure whether there is some symbolic significance to this might have a look at the books, plays, and movies the makers of Dark Shadows and other intellectually ambitious New Yorkers were likely to be paying attention to in the summer of 1966. Maybe we can learn something about the ideas that were in the air if we look up the some famous thinkers on Google NGrams:

Looks like Marx was a biggie in those days- maybe Roger’s obsession with where Burke’s pen is illustrates the Marxist concept of commodity fetishism. That might also explain Roger’s relative disregard for the family’s capital holdings- he’s so caught up in the fantasy of value as something inherent in a physical object that he has lost sight of the actual source of his wealth.

Darwin was on people’s minds as well. Perhaps Roger’s fixation on Burke’s pen is the result of his genealogy- maybe the Collinses have been bred to their little niche for so many generations that they have emerged as a new species, one which does not have the same survival strategies as other humans and so does not share values and concepts which we would understand.

And there’s Einstein, also a popular preoccupation among people who aspired to advanced learning back then. One of Einstein’s most famous ideas was that time passes at different rates for different observers depending on how fast those observers are moving through space. There will be twenty or more episodes of Dark Shadows that focus largely or entirely on the question of where Burke’s pen is, and as we move through that narrative space there will be many occasions when it seems that time itself is about to grind to a halt. Could be that, I guess!

That leaves Freud. Hmm, looks like Dark Shadows was written and acted chiefly by people from Broadway, and that Freudianism was a major inspiration on Broadway in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. I suppose we’ll have to figure out what Freud would have made of a fascination with where Burke’s pen is. Then maybe we’ll have some idea what’s really going on with Roger.