Every episode of Dark Shadows begins with a voiceover narration. This is how today’s goes:
My name is Victoria Winters. The brightness of the morning cannot mask the fact that the night has been marked by a restless, fitful sleep, especially for one young woman who has been disturbed by strange premonitions and events that she does not fully understand.
We then see the drawing room of the great house at Collinwood, where two young women are both showing signs of disturbance. There’s no way of telling which one the narration is referring to. Flighty heiress Carolyn is pacing and talking, while well-meaning governess Vicki is clenched tight playing solitaire. This sloppy mismatch is the first sign that we’re dealing with a script by Malcolm Marmorstein, the worst writer on Dark Shadows.
Vicki and Carolyn are worried about strange and troubled boy David. David has spent the night with his mother, blonde fire witch Laura, and is not back yet. They are convinced that Laura is dangerous, but cannot be sure how or to whom. Marmorstein’s awkward dialogue stumbles up to a climax in which Vicki tells Carolyn that visiting parapsychologist Dr Peter Guthrie had said he was inclined to organize a séance. Considering that he first discussed that idea in a conversation with the two of them yesterday, Vicki’s announcement of this as news and Carolyn’s incredulous reaction will leave returning viewers mystified.
David comes home. He’s fine. He tells Vicki that he sensed the presence of the ghost of Josette Collins watching over him in his mother’s cottage, and that he knows he is safe wherever Josette is. What the audience knows, but neither Vicki nor David does, is that Laura and Josette had a confrontation while he was sleeping, and that Josette retreated. Josette is not strong enough to defeat Laura by herself. When David goes to sit by the fire and stare at it in a trance-like state, as his mother habitually does, we wonder how Vicki and the others will put together a strong enough force to help Josette save David. That’s a suspenseful sequence, effectively realized.
Hardworking young fisherman Joe comes to the house on a business matter. He and Carolyn have a conversation about their defunct romance. Carolyn says that she has matured since those days, and that she is free to give it another try. Joe says he is not free. For a show with so many ghosts and ghoulies, it’s surprising that Dark Shadows inspires the greatest fear in its fans when they threaten to bore us yet again with a tedious dead-end storyline like the Carolyn/ Joe relationship. It’s certainly a relief when Joe is so firm as to leave no doubt that we’re finally done with that.
Joe has transferred his affections to Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. We dissolve to an extreme closeup of the laughing mouth of Maggie’s father, drunken artist Sam Evans. Sam is in the local tavern, The Blue Whale, with a drink in his hand, a crony on either side of him, and some music we haven’t heard before on the jukebox.
Maggie and Joe are at a table, where he is trying to make her jealous by telling her of Carolyn’s interest in him, and she can’t stop watching her father and fretting about his drinking. The two of them talk a bit about how Sam’s drinking has reversed the roles of parent and child. That’s the big theme of Maggie in the first 42 weeks of the show, that she is an Adult Child of an Alcoholic. It’s because she’s had to cope with Sam’s addiction that Maggie is so nice to everyone, and also because of it that she has a habit of starting her lines with a little laugh that doesn’t always make sense in context. As the show goes on, Sam drinks a lot less and Maggie gets involved in a wider variety of stories, but that weird little laugh, the union card of many an ACoA, stays with the character to the end of her time on the the series.
Maggie leaves Joe alone at the table while she confronts Sam. She doesn’t stop him drinking, but she does manage to wreck the good mood he and his buddies had going. In the course of their talk, they recap the conversation Sam had with Dr Guthrie Thursday.
Dashing action hero Burke Devlin comes in and sits down with Joe while Maggie is scolding Sam. The two of them have been at odds over Carolyn, and now discover that neither of them is interested in her any longer. Joe seems irritated that his list of reasons to dislike Burke has grown shorter.
When Maggie returns to the table, Burke exchanges a few friendly words with her. He then goes to the bar to buy Sam a drink. Maggie voices her dismay at this plan, and even Bob the bartender gives a dark look at the idea of serving Sam yet more booze. But Burke ignores them both.
Burke wants to know about the conversation Sam had with Dr Guthrie. They recap the conversation Sam had with Maggie a few minutes before. Burke is in love with Laura, and may be under her influence. This conversation raises the prospect that Burke will be an ally of Laura’s against Vicki and her team. Its similarity to the conversation Maggie and Sam had so shortly before suggests that the Evanses may also make themselves more useful to Laura than to the good guys. The repetition grates hard enough on the audience that it is an inefficient way of making that point, but the point itself does add to the suspense.
Most episodes of Dark Shadows have only five credited actors and no extras. This one has seven credited actors and a bunch of extras, including featured background player Bob O’Connell as the bartender. There have been several episodes the last couple of weeks with only four actors; apparently they’ve been saving up to splurge on this one. It is by no means the dullest installment of this period of the show, but neither are there any of the thrills or major story developments you would expect from a high-budget episode. Frankly, it’s rather worrying that this is what they lay out the big bucks for now. Is this as exciting as the show is going to get?
Acilius on Dark Shadows 