Strange and troubled boy David has tried to murder his father, is in danger because of his fascination with his mother, and has dreams which, if interpreted correctly, will explain his problems. Today, his mother tells him with coquettish gestures and a purring voice that a man should know how to tend a fire, and tells him he can put a log in her fireplace any time he wants. There is something somehow familiar about this storyline, as if it were making a reference to a theory that was influential among highly literate New Yorkers in 1967.
The episode begins with well-meaning governess Vicki and her boyfriend, instantly forgettable young lawyer Frank, recapping recent events that suggest to them that David’s mother, blonde fire witch Laura, is a creature of the supernatural. Frank thinks of Dr Peter Guthrie, a professor at Dartmouth College who specializes in the paranormal. He identifies Dr Guthrie as a parapsychologist, suggesting that he would be housed in Dartmouth’s Department of Psychology and Brain Science. Evidently that department was known in those days for its faculty members’ adherence to the thought of someone called Sigmund Freud. I suppose I should look that Freud fellow up and see what his ideas were.
As Conard Fowkes plays him, Frank is utterly believable as someone you would meet in a lawyers’ office in central Maine in the mid-1960s. He is so much a citizen of the daylight world of facts and logic and the recognized laws both of nature and of the state that it is surprising that he is willing to acknowledge evidence suggesting that he is in the presence of supernatural forces. Surprising, but not interesting- Fowkes shows us Frank simply accepting the facts once he has seen them and agreeing with Vicki’s interpretations once he has heard them. He does nothing to suggest that any particular emotional process is making it difficult for Frank to take a place in a world with ghosts and witches, still less that there is any unknown side of his personality that has prepared him for this information. In the hands of a livelier actor, the fact that Frank has the name and phone number of a parapsychologist at his fingertips would be a revelation that would leave us wanting to know just what else Frank knows that Vicki might find exciting. As it is, Frank generates all the dramatic interest of a search through the Yellow Pages.
Acilius on Dark Shadows 