In his 1957 novel David and the Phoenix, Edward Ormondroyd depicts a friendship between a benevolent Phoenix and a preteen boy named David. The Phoenix’ enemy is a bespectacled man known simply as The Scientist. At the end of Chapter 8 (“In Which David and the Phoenix Visit a Banshee, and a Surprise is Planted in the Enemy Camp,”) the two of them play a nasty trick on The Scientist which temporarily disarms him. In Chapter 9 (“In Which David and the Phoenix Call on a Faun, and a Lovely Afternoon Comes to a Strange End,“) the Phoenix warns David that he will be back:
He could not help laughing now and then over the Scientist’s defeat. But whenever this came up, the Phoenix would shake its head with a kind of sad wisdom.
“My boy, there are certain things, such as head colds and forgetting where you have left your keys, which are inevitable—and I am afraid that the Scientist is, too.”
“Oh, Phoenix, you don’t think he’ll come back, do you?”
“Yes, my boy, I do. I can see the whole train of events: He will recover from his fright. He will be curious about the Wail, and will return to investigate it. Once here, he will remember us, and we shall have to take him into account once more.”
“Oh. Do you think it’ll happen soon?”
“Oh, no, my boy, nothing to worry about for the time being. But we must remember that it will happen some day.”
“Yes, I guess you’re right. I think he’s hateful!”
“I cannot disagree with you there, my boy. Of course, I have no doubt that, in general, the advancement of science is all to the good. Knowledge is power. But on days like this I sometimes wonder…. Does it not seem to you that the highest aim in life at the moment is to enjoy the sunlight and allow others to do the same?”
“You’re right, Phoenix—but then, you always are. I was just thinking the same thing. It’s funny … I mean … well, you know. Why can’t people leave other people alone—and—and—well, just enjoy themselves and lie in the sun and listen to the wind?”
“That is the way of the world, my boy. Getting and spending, and all that sort of thing. But come! Why should we worry over the follies of the rest of the world? A day like this was made for living, not thinking. Begone, dull care!”
And they would forget the Scientist and watch a pair of butterflies chase each other instead.
Dark Shadows’ Phoenix is the none-too-benevolent Laura Murdoch Collins, and its David is her son. Laura has not told her David of her true nature. She desperately needs to persuade him to leave his home and to follow her into the flames of her next pyre. Evidently she has to be sparing about the details of what she has in store for him if she is to win him over. So in our story, David will not help the Phoenix do battle with The Scientist.
We open today with Laura staring hard into the flames of the hearth in her cottage on the great estate of Collinwood, casting a spell on her enemy. This enemy, like the one Ormondroyd’s Phoenix confronted, is a scientist, but he has a name. He is Dr Peter Guthrie of the psychology department at Dartmouth College, of all places.
Guthrie is in the drawing room of the great house, some distance away, stumbling about and gasping under the pressure of Laura’s spell. Well-meaning governess Vicki enters and urges Guthrie to “snap out of it!” He tells her that he can’t, and continues writhing about while Laura’s staring eyes are superimposed above his image.
All seems lost for Guthrie, when David strolls into Laura’s cottage and calls to her. She doesn’t react. David finally puts his hand on his mother’s shoulder and shakes her, breaking her concentration. At first she wants him to go away so that she can resume casting her spell on Guthrie, but when he becomes angry she asks him to stay. She has been saying that she has very little time to complete the task that brought her to Collinwood- evidently she is not sure she will have time to repair even one quarrel with David.
In the great house, Guthrie is recovering. Vicki tells him that his symptoms are those which reclusive matriarch Liz exhibited shortly before she lapsed into a catatonic state from which she has yet to recover. They are sure that Laura is responsible. David returns and they talk with him. They realize that he interrupted Laura while she was casting a spell. David goes off to have a dinner which will be followed with two desserts- cake and ice cream. Vicki and Dr Guthrie are starting to make a plan to oppose Laura when the front doors of the house fly open and reveal her standing there.
Laura’s appearance in the doorway is a very effective moment. It seems that Laura has come to the house to intimidate Vicki and Dr Guthrie, to show that while he may have escaped her spell and they may have learned something about her methods, she can move so much more quickly than they can that they are after all helpless against her. Once that point has been made, there isn’t much reason for the episode to go on.
Diana Millay and John Lasell do what they can with the scene between Laura and Guthrie in the drawing room, which is a lot- Millay was superb at blitheness, John Lasell at conscientiousness, and those are the notes their characters strike throughout the exchange. But the lines don’t make any sense. Guthrie asks Laura if she isn’t surprised to see him up and around- why would she be? He knows that she was interrupted before her spell could be completed. He tells her what he does and doesn’t know about her supernatural powers. Why would he tip his hand that way? He tells her that once he has figured her out, he plans to reveal his knowledge to the world. So he is letting her know that he hasn’t revealed anything yet, and won’t reveal anything or recruit any allies if she can stop him before he gets all the answers. Guthrie has been represented as a shrewd operator up to this point- apparently the spell Laura started casting on him has knocked his IQ down by three or four standard deviations.
Another question that comes up when we see Laura confronting Vicki and Dr Guthrie in the foyer is why she doesn’t attack Vicki. It was Vicki, through her boyfriend Frank, who brought Guthrie to Collinwood. Flighty heiress Carolyn is temporarily in charge at Collinwood in the absence of her mother Liz, and Carolyn is dependent on Vicki for a hundred things. Carolyn is an opponent of Laura’s and would likely be immobilized if Vicki were out of action. Laura’s estranged husband, Roger, relies on Vicki to look after David, and would be even more eager than he already is to get rid of David if he had to take care of the boy himself. Laura’s sometime boyfriend, dashing action hero Burke Devlin, is the closest thing she has to an ally. Vicki has some influence over Burke, and has used it to bring him to question whether he ought to trust Laura. In every connection, Vicki is Laura’s chief adversary. Yet Laura has not attacked her directly, and the show has not explained why she hasn’t.
It isn’t like they don’t have time to develop a story point that would explain this. They have had as many as three episodes in a row (for example, #161, #162, and #163) which consisted entirely of conversations in which characters recapped conversations from previous episodes, conversations which themselves were nothing but recap of still earlier episodes. They could have dumped some of that recap and shown us some kind of event that would have explained why Vicki hasn’t yet been a target of Laura’s power.
Acilius on Dark Shadows 