At the end of Friday’s episode, dashing action hero Burke Devlin and the sheriff caught high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins digging up a fountain pen from under a rock. It appears to be the fountain pen Roger had stolen from well-meaning governess Vicki. Some think that Roger stole the pen and hid it because it is evidence implicating him in the death of beloved local man Bill Malloy. Today, Roger is in the sheriff’s office.
Accompanied by Richard Garner, the Collins family’s lawyer, Roger talks and talks, admitting that he saw Bill that night, badly injured and face-down in the water. He jumped to the conclusion that Bill was dead, and left the scene without notifying anyone. He also admits that he concealed evidence that he believed the police would find relevant to the investigation. As if that weren’t enough, he admits that he lied to the police time and again, most recently the night before, and is caught in yet another lie when he gives a nonsensical explanation of his plan to meet Bill that night.
Garner makes only one feeble attempt to interrupt Roger’s torrent of self-incriminating remarks. When the sheriff questions Vicki, Garner takes the opportunity to ask her some questions of his own, questions which produce even more information that is adverse to his client’s interests. On their site Dark Shadows Before I Die, John and Christine Scoleri feature commentary on Garner’s performance from a lawyer friend of theirs. Setting aside the utter hopelessness of Garner’s work from a real-world perspective, this friend analyzes his conduct by contrast with the standards set by other TV lawyers:
This brief addendum will review the competence of Garner using a “TV Lawyer Competency Rating” (TVLCR) scale. This WAG scale is based on my estimation of how a general audience might rate a TV Lawyer’s performance. I have supplemented these TVLCR scores with some comments reflecting real-world practices.
http://dsb4idie.blogspot.com/2016/11/episode-106-112166.html
Even by those standards, Garner doesn’t come out very well:
Garner strikes me as the go-to civil attorney for the Collins family who got dragged into this murder case just because they are familiar with him. Based on Garner’s poor competency rating as a TV Lawyer, Roger Collins should fire him and instead reach out to Raymond Burr or Andy Griffith.
Soap operas typically generate suspense by sharing information with the audience that some, but not all, of the characters have. We wonder when the secrets will be revealed, and how those to whom they are revealed will react when they finally get the news.
By the end of today’s episode, all of the characters will know almost everything the audience knows. Even what the characters don’t know, they’ve heard of. For example, Roger and drunken artist Sam Evans have not confessed the guilty secrets they share to any of the other characters, but everyone seems to have figured out more or less what they’ve been up to. Not everyone believes in ghosts, but it’s all over town that Vicki and her charge, strange and troubled boy David Collins, have seen ghosts in and around the great house of Collinwood, and even the most skeptical are not in a hurry to hang around the place after dark.
This is the next-to-last episode credited to writer Francis Swann. Swann will fill in for the new writers a week from Wednesday, but today is really the end of the Art Wallace-Francis Swann era of the show. From tomorrow, the new team of Ron Sproat and Malcolm Marmorstein will be holding the reins. By bringing all the characters up to at least our level of knowledge about the ongoing storylines, Swann is clearing the decks for Sproat and Marmorstein to set up their own crises and dilemmas.
Swann’s great strength is his ability to give actors room to show what they can do. Today’s episode is a case in point. Just when Garner’s disastrous intervention in the sheriff’s questioning of Vicki has led us to wonder if he’s all there, he has a moment when he opens his eyes wide and looks out the window. As Hugh Franklin plays it, that’s enough to make us wonder what’s on Garner’s mind, and to think he might be about to do or say something interesting.
Of course stage veteran Louis Edmonds thunders delightfully as the wildly indiscreet Roger, and of course TV stalwart Dana Elcar does an expert job of presenting the sheriff as a skilled professional firmly in control of the situation. There might be a crying need for a defense attorney to intervene when a suspect is blabbing as freely to the police as Roger is to the sheriff, but there is no need for a third actor to get in the way of Edmonds’ and Elcar’s interplay. Standing in the background between those two, Franklin occasionally gives a slight facial expression that underlines some point or other, but never upstages them.
In the first half of the episode, Alexandra Moltke Isles’ Vicki has to give some long speeches full of recapping, and in those she takes the character through several distinct shades of discomfort. She begins with diffident nervousness, builds up to frightened indignation, and ends with pure sadness.
Later, flighty heiress Carolyn comes into the sheriff’s office and pleads with Vicki to say that her beloved Uncle Roger couldn’t be a criminal. In front of the sheriff and Garner, all Vicki will say is that the two of them should leave. As Carolyn, Nancy Barrett makes the most of the melodramatic turn, but Mrs Isles takes possession of the scene with her few words spoken in a quiet, husky voice we haven’t heard before. Those brief remarks cap the progression we saw her making in her speeches earlier, and define the mood she is still in during a conversation between Vicki and Carolyn in Collinwood later. Vicki’s feeling for the pity of it all holds the episode together, and leads us back into the texture of the life of the family at the center of the story.
Acilius on Dark Shadows 