Drunken artist Sam Evans meets with dashing action hero Burke Devlin in Burke’s hotel room. They recap the events of the previous episode. Burke accuses Sam of killing their mutual friend Bill Malloy. Sam’s anguished denials convince Burke that he is innocent.
Well-meaning governess Vicki encounters high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins at the mansion where they both live. They recap the events of the previous episode. Vicki is in no way impressed by Roger, responding to his charm by bluntly telling him that she knows what he is trying to get her to tell him, to his attempts at intimidation with bland indifference, to his offer of a higher-paying job at the home of friends of his in Florida with a polite refusal, and to his exclamation “Miss Winters, you’re a fool!” with a cheerful “Probably.”
It’s a pleasant 22 minutes for fans of the four actors and of their characters, even if screenwriter Art Wallace isn’t exactly tearing through story material at a breakneck pace. On his blog Dark Shadows from the Beginning, Marc Masse shows that this episode is intricately connected with #37, that there are several visual and verbal echoes that pair shots in this one to specific shots in that one, and that if we examine those pairs of shots we will gather more than a little information pertinent to the mystery of Bill Malloy’s last moments. He also acknowledges that, while these echoes are so numerous and so precise that they must be deliberate, it is unlikely that more than a tiny percentage of the original audience was aware of them:
Such minute and momentary details are fine in an episodic drama presentation of thirty minutes to an hour or in a movie that runs ninety minutes to two hours, where the mind can log these accumulating details as they are made available; but to just drop a subtle clue, like the face of the foyer clock, toward the end of a Monday episode and expect the viewer, all however many millions of them, to recall such a seemingly random instance more than three weeks later is just one of the limitations inherent in serialized drama that the producers have to work around.
Perhaps this is one reason the show has done so well in the age of streaming video and online discussion, when obsessive fans can watch and rewatch every episode, read about them all, and share their own thoughts. Tellers of mystery stories find themselves committed to slowly doling out clues throughout the whole development of the plot, including subtle clues that few people will catch the first time through. That’s built into the genre, and is hard to avoid doing even if the mystery story comes to us in a form like 1960s daytime television that simply cannot deliver that information effectively to an audience. What must have been frustrating or mystifying or outright invisible to the original audience can now be central to our enjoyment of the episodes.
Dark Shadows Commentary 