Parapsychologist Peter Guthrie has been doing a lot in the three weeks since he first appeared on Dark Shadows, but today is the first time we see him upset. He made an audio recording of the séance that he organized in the great house of Collinwood last week, and now blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins has erased the tape and replaced it with the sound of fire crackling.
Dr Guthrie tells his friend, instantly forgettable young lawyer Frank Garner, that he isn’t sure exactly what it means to say that Laura erased the tape. Maybe there is some supernatural force that accompanies Laura but acts independently of her. Or maybe the force is one that grants her wishes, perhaps without her knowing it. Or maybe she herself is actively doing the strange things that everyone has been puzzling over lately.
When Laura first came on the show, the audience was invited to weigh these same three alternatives. She was mysterious in speech, vague in manner, and ethereal in appearance. She seemed to be in more than one place at a time, and to conduct herself very differently in each place. She ate nothing, drank nothing, had no material possessions, and spent most of her time sitting motionless, staring into the fire.
Recently, Laura has become a more substantial being. We’ve heard her make threats and seen her cast spells to carry them out. She has materialized in rooms, but then gone on to join conversations in other rooms. She has met with other characters and planned strategies. We still haven’t seen her eat or drink, and it is still hard to get her attention when she’s by the fire. But she gets so agitated when she talks about how little time she has to achieve what she must do that she seems to be quite corporeal. So we are leaning pretty heavily towards Option 3, but it is interesting to see that Dr Guthrie’s view of Laura today is what ours was a month ago. That does make sense- his knowledge of her now is about what ours was then.
The idea of Laura is an interesting one, but her story is developed at the slowest possible pace. They’ve been filling time lately by harking back to story points from the early weeks of the show that didn’t lead anywhere when they were first introduced, and then giving us a scene or two in which they still don’t lead anywhere. Today, I was afraid this was about to happen again. Hardworking young fisherman Joe comes to the house to deliver some papers, and has a conversation with flighty heiress Carolyn. When Dark Shadows started, these two characters had been dating for a long time. They were bored with each other, and the audience was bored whenever the camera was pointed at them. They gradually broke up, and now Joe is seeing Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town. For a couple of minutes, it looks like we are about to have another scene in which Carolyn tries to start their relationship back up, leading to an endless recap of what happened between them to end it.
But that isn’t what happens at all. Instead, we have a sequence in which Carolyn and Joe talk about what is going on in their lives now and how they feel about it. Their attitudes towards their past influence that, but the main point is that Carolyn is more mature than she has ever been and Joe is more independent than he has ever been. If you were to analyze it in terms of plot points, you’d have something like “Joe offers to be Carolyn’s friend. She considers this offer from several points of view. He tells her that don’t have to be friends if she doesn’t want to be. She seems to want to be.” Hardly the stuff of a stirring adventure tale, but as they play it, the exchange goes a long way towards explaining why we care about these people. Carolyn was often exasperatingly selfish and impulsive in the early months of Dark Shadows, and Joe was such a one-dimensional Mr Nice Guy that you couldn’t imagine him doing anything to surprise an audience. But the woman and man we see today have real feelings and real problems, and a story about them could be exciting.
In the first week of Dark Shadows, we had a couple of brief glimpses of the administrative offices of the Hammond Foundling Home, a fictional institution in New York City where well-meaning governess Vicki lived before she came to Collinwood. A few times since, there have been scenes set in the town of Bangor, Maine. Today, we leave the northeastern USA for the first and only time in the entire series. They take us to Phoenix, Arizona.
Two policemen are filling out papers in an office there. One we have seen before. He is Lieutenant Dan Riley of the Maine State Police, and he has been hanging around asking Laura what if anything she knows about a woman whose charred corpse was found in what was left of her apartment in that city after it burned to the ground. The other is Lieutenant Costa of the Phoenix police.
Lieutenant Costa had been convinced that the woman who died in the fire was Laura Murdoch Collins, and all the scientific evidence his department has been able to gather has confirmed that identification. But of course there is a woman living in Maine who can also be proved to be Laura Murdoch Collins, so the authorities have decided to bury the remains as a Jane Doe.
Regular viewers might be puzzled as to why Lieutenant Riley had to go all the way to Arizona. The Phoenix police had a body to identify, and Riley asked Laura some questions on their behalf. But he never had an investigation of his own to conduct. Seeing him here, we might jump to the conclusion that there was more to Riley’s task than we saw on screen, though we can’t really imagine what it might have been. The performance of John Harkins as Lieutenant Costa goes a long way towards selling this idea; Harkins’ guest spots would become a staple of prime time network television in the 1970s and 1980s, and it’s easy to see why. His embodiment of a weary cop having to give up on an important case he’s been working on for a long time lets us believe that the premise makes sense. His scene partner, Vince O’Brien, doesn’t undercut Harkins. Riley seems as weary as Costa, though he doesn’t do anything special to express his weariness
Riley and Costa go to the morgue. This is a large set, well realized visually and even more so acoustically. The actors’ voices echo musically while the camera zooms steadily in on them. They open the vault in which the unidentified body was deposited, and find that it is empty.
Acilius on Dark Shadows 