Friday’s episode ended, not with a cliffhanger, but with a visitation from the supernatural, as we saw the ghost of Josette Collins descend from her portrait and pirouette around the columns of the mansion she haunts. Today, Roger and Vicki sit in the diner, where he gives her a lecture about the sardine-packing business.
The apparition of Josette was the climax of an episode featuring more exterior footage than we have seen thus far. Today, we have several more location inserts, as we see Roger and Vicki walking around the village of Collinsport. As that one came to a climax with a new set- the Old House- this one also ends with our first look at a new set- the outside of the front doors of the great house of Collinwood.
These attention-getting moves prompt us to look for something big. The makers of the show tell us in so many words that the business story isn’t it.
After Roger has told Vicki a few facts about the sardine industry, she asks how the fishermen know where to look for sardines. He makes it clear that he has reached the limit of his willingness to discuss the topic with a dismissive, “Oh… luck. And experience.” Only when his enemy Burke comes in and he wants to look busy does Roger return to the subject with gusto. After Vicki has toured the cannery, Burke asks if Roger showed her “the place where they cut the heads off the fish.” Neither of those characters would watch a show about the sardine industry, or expect anyone else to do so. When they tell us that the business Burke is scheming to seize from Roger’s family doesn’t seem like exciting narrative fodder even to the two of them, the makers of Dark Shadows are telling us to forget about the business stories and focus on the sort of thing we saw at the end of Friday’s installment.
There is one bit of trivia that I hold onto from this episode. Vicki mentions to Roger that she finds it amusing that the family’s wealth began with the whaling industry and now comes from sardines- from the greatest giants of the sea to some of the tiniest fish in the ocean. An origin as whalers fits with the idea they have at this period of the show, that the Collins family first became wealthy in the 1830s.
Later, they will push them back in time, and present them as having already been rich long before then. That would rule out whaling as the first source of the Collinses’ riches. The New England whaling industry was a creation of the nineteenth century. The region’s wealth prior to that time was founded on cod fishing.
One of the major themes of the show in this period is that the Collinses are much less rich and operate on a much smaller scale than they did in the past. The transition from whales to sardines is an obvious metaphor for that decline. So obvious, in fact, that Vicki’s remark is rather a tactless one.
Acilius on Dark Shadows 