At the end of yesterday’s episode, dour caretaker Matthew admitted to reclusive matriarch Liz that he had found a drowned man on the beach, that the man was missing plant manager Bill Malloy, and that he had pushed the body out to sea and watched it float away. Liz then called the sheriff.
As today’s episode opens, Liz’ ne-er-do-well brother Roger doesn’t know about Matthew’s confession. We see him in his office, countermanding orders Bill Malloy had given and acting like he has Malloy’s job. On his blog Dark Shadows from the Beginning, Marc Masse interprets this as an indication of guilty knowledge on Roger’s part:
Roger has evidently just implemented a new system that has effectively replaced Bill Malloy’s previous methods for operations at the plant. This indicates that Roger knows for certain that Malloy will not be returning as plant manager, which enshrouds him with an additional layer of suspicion given how as of the close of episode 53 only two people knew for certain that Bill Malloy was in fact dead: Matthew Morgan and Elizabeth Stoddard, and as of today’s episode the sheriff. Roger will be informed of Malloy’s demise later on that day when his sister calls him away from the office to have him return to Collinwood, and Roger will feign surprise upon hearing the news, but it’s evident from his phone conversation above that he was somehow already aware of Malloy’s fate.
That’s a possible interpretation, and I certainly thought of it the first time I saw the episode. On the other hand, Malloy has been missing for more than a day, and was last seen drinking in a bar. So even if he were to walk in the door in prime physical condition at this very moment, he would be in a poor position to defend himself in workplace politics. Roger could easily claim that he was simply moving to fill a vacuum. The show is keeping Roger viable as a suspect, but is not committing itself to the idea that he is the guilty party.
Whatever Roger knows about the situation, dashing action hero Burke knows less. But Burke seems to think of himself as very knowledgeable. He storms into Roger’s office and confronts him with the fact that Malloy was trying to prove that Roger, not Burke, was responsible for the killing that sent Burke to prison years before. Burke makes many accusations against Roger, some of which the audience knows to be true, but none of which he is yet in a position to prove.
The scenes in Roger’s office are intercut with scenes in the drawing room in the mansion at Collinwood. There, the sheriff is talking with Liz and Matthew about Matthew’s confession. Matthew asks the sheriff if he will be arrested now. To which the sheriff replies, “I can’t think of a proper charge.” He jokes about “burial without a license,” then goes on to warn Matthew that he has laid himself open to suspicion.
This is a moment when you can tell you’re watching a show made in 1966. Seven years later, coverage of investigations into the Watergate affair would give the American public an intensive eighteen-month tutorial in criminal law concerning obstruction of justice and related offenses. Ever since that time, residents of the USA have known that you are risking jail any time you make things difficult for the police. Prior to that, however, this was not well-known even among lawyers who practiced in areas other than criminal law.
Watergate itself illustrated this. Several of the major figures in that matter were lawyers, and many of them, including Richard Nixon himself, genuinely did not know that it was an offense for a person who had not been involved in a crime to cover that crime up. You can hear Nixon on the White House tapes telling his legal aide John Dean that because Dean didn’t know about the Watergate burglary in advance, the things Dean had done to hinder the investigation of the burglary can’t possibly put him in danger of prosecution. In his memoirs, Dean admits his own ignorance of the relevant law, confessing that he first read the federal statutes on obstruction of justice not when he was in law school, not when he was studying for the bar, not when he was a staffer for a commission tasked with rewriting the federal criminal code, but in his office at the White House, after he’d been running the Watergate cover-up for nine months. He reports in that same book that several other White House staffers who were lawyers shared his ignorance. Many of them would go on to confirm this aspect of his account.
In light of the legal education that Watergate provided the people of the USA, the sheriff sounds like an idiot. That same education ruined other old shows. Perry Mason, for example- ridiculous as it is that every episode ends with the guilty party jumping up in court and shouting “I did it!,” if you’re into the story you feel enough poetic justice in those endings that they don’t really bother you. But Mason himself can hardly make it through five minutes without committing every crime with which Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, and Dean would be charged and a few more besides. Perry Mason broadcast its final episode in May of 1966, so that show, not the Watergate news, was the law school the original audience had attended.
Miscellaneous:
The episode opens with footage of Louis Edmonds walking around outdoors on a waterfront. They play some nice sound effects of sea-birds over it.
The sheriff we see in this episode is Sheriff Patterson, the first of that name. He is played by Dana Elcar, a fine actor who would be ubiquitous on American television and cinema screens in the 1980s. If we’re heading into a major story arc dominated by a mystery story, it’s a relief to know that the policeman role will be in such trustworthy hands. The part will be re-cast many times in the years to come, and never again as well. Then again, none of the subsequent Sheriffs Patterson will be as important as is this first.
Since there is a good deal of overlap between fans of Star Trek and fans of Dark Shadows, I might mention that this was the episode that aired on the day Star Trek premiered.
There was a great deal of Anglophilia involved in the making of Dark Shadows: the mid-Atlantic accents, the plots lifted from English literature, etc. So it may not be a coincidence that a dark-haired, small-chinned matriarch named Elizabeth presides over the family at the center of it. Indeed, Joan Bennett looked enough like the northern European royals that when they wanted to cast an actress who resembled her closely enough to set the audience wondering how their characters were related, they settled on the daughter of a Danish count. So I might also mention that I am writing this on the day Britain’s Elizabeth II died.
There are two big flubs. At one point when they’re about to cut from the drawing room back to the office, we hear a loud noise and some garbled voices in the background. My wife, Mrs Acilius, wondered if this was Josette Collins trying to make herself heard.
At the very end of the episode, as announcer Bob Lloyd is intoning “Dark Shadows is a Dan Curtis production,” a figure walks in front of the camera. You can just see the top of his head. The Dark Shadows wiki refers to the figure as “a crew member.” Marc Masse says it’s probably Mitch Ryan. John and Christine Scoleri speculate on their blog Dark Shadows Before I Die that it might be Dan Curtis himself. To me it looks like more the hairdo Thayer David is wearing as Matthew Morgan than like either Ryan’s hairdo as Burke or Dan Curtis’ hair- there seems to be some grey in it, and it looks to be more matted than either wavy or curly.
Acilius on Dark Shadows 