Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, is at her job running the restaurant in the Collinsport Inn. Not that she’s working, exactly. There are no customers; the only other person there is her boyfriend, hardworking young fisherman Joe.
They’re hugging and kissing, and Joe is bringing up the idea of marriage. Maggie doesn’t think they can get married, since she has to look after her father, drunken artist Sam. Joe doesn’t think that is much of a problem. In previous episodes, we’ve seen that Joe likes Sam and doesn’t mind helping Maggie with him. He does say that he would rather Sam not come along on their honeymoon, and suggests that Sam might be ready to cut back on his drinking. Maggie isn’t getting her hopes up.
Flighty heiress Carolyn comes into the restaurant and asks to speak with Joe privately. Carolyn is Joe’s ex and Maggie is worried the two of them will get back together, but since she only wants to go to a table where they will be in Maggie’s line of sight she goes along with the idea. We do see Maggie looking vigilantly at them while they talk.
As it happens, Carolyn isn’t trying to win Joe back. She wants him to help Dr Peter Guthrie, visiting parapsychologist, in his efforts to determine whether her aunt, Laura Murdoch Collins, is the reincarnation of two women who died by fire in 1767 and 1867. Guthrie hasn’t told Carolyn what exactly he is planning to do, but he has said he needs the help of a strong young man and that what he is going to do is “not strictly legal.”
Carolyn leads off by telling Joe that she is going to ask him to do something to help her mother, reclusive matriarch Liz, who is in the hospital with a mysterious ailment. Joe immediately agrees to do anything that will help Liz. When she starts explaining that she wants him to work with Guthrie, and that Guthrie is a parapsychologist, Joe is incredulous. At length, he reluctantly agrees to go, and to keep what he will do secret from everyone, even Maggie.
When he tells Maggie that they have to cancel their date so that he can go to Carolyn’s house, she is dismayed. He assures her that he is not getting back together with Carolyn, but that Carolyn made him promise to keep it a secret just what he will be doing. Maggie vows to fight if Carolyn does try to take him back.
This scene is the current phase of Dark Shadows in a nutshell. It appears to be a more-or-less typical daytime soap opera of the sort you would see on American television in February of 1967, where good-looking young people in wholesome, everyday settings struggle about who will have a conspicuously chaste romance with whom. That’s what Maggie thinks she is watching when she keeps her eyes on Joe and Carolyn.
But in fact the series is heading towards becoming a full-time supernatural thriller, and stories like those are going to be tossed out and left by the roadside before long. That development doesn’t bode well for Joe and Maggie. Joe tells her today that their relationship is “the simplest thing in the world”- he loves her, she loves him, that’s all you need. Of course, a couple is only allowed to be on screen in a soap opera if they are participants in a conflict of some kind, and are only the main figures in a storyline if they are in conflict with each other. But the show Maggie thinks she’s on might supply them with conflicts that would make sense to the sensible, practical-minded people she and Joe are written to be.
When they start dealing with ghosts and fire witches and who knows what else, Maggie and Joe will have a limited amount of time to show us how level-headed real-world people might react to supernatural crises. Once they’ve exhausted that theme, they will have either to adapt to their new surroundings and become different sorts of people or to leave the show. The prospect of reconceiving the characters might be good news to the actors Kathryn Leigh Scott and Joel Crothers. But Maggie and Joe would be appalled to hear that they will have to discard their personalities and invent new ones, and Joe’s alarmed reaction when Carolyn starts talking about parapsychology is a foretaste of what the characters will be going through as this comes upon them.
As the show’s representatives of Collinsport’s working class, Joe and Maggie are the designated representatives of daylight sanity. From the first week of Dark Shadows, we’ve known that Carolyn and the other residents of the great house of Collinwood are in too close proximity to the supernatural back-world of ghosts and ghoulies for that kind of attitude to be possible.
That contrast is dramatized in three moments in today’s show. In the opening portion, Carolyn and Dr Guthrie spend approximately 500 hours* in the drawing room of the great house recapping all the uncanny elements of the current storyline. When Guthrie asks Carolyn if she has considered the idea of reincarnation, she says that she has considered it and dismissed it. When he starts in with an explanation of how the idea of reincarnation connects to their conflict with Laura, Carolyn is all in.
When Carolyn is in the restaurant telling Joe about Guthrie the parapsychologist, Joe says he is surprised she is taking this sort of thing seriously. “I always thought you were a level-headed girl.” Regular viewers may be startled by this comment. In the last few weeks, Carolyn has had to take over her mother’s duties as head of the household and of the family business, and has shown some maturity in discharging them. But the whole time Joe and Carolyn were a couple, she was fickle and irresponsible to the point of madness. In this context, where Joe is conscious of Maggie’s eyes on him and is trying to project a particular image of himself, he rewrites the history of his relationship with Carolyn. He isn’t the sort of fellow who would spend years chasing after a flighty heiress- he is a sensible man who would only ever be involved with an equally sensible woman. That self-image is going to take a beating as he participates in the kinds of stories we’re going to see from now on.
In the last scene, Joe is in the drawing room and Guthrie puts the same question to him that he had earlier put to Carolyn- has he thought about the idea of reincarnation? Joe says he’s never thought about it, and flatly refuses to entertain the notion. Finally he absorbs Guthrie’s request that he help open the graves of the previous Laura Murdochs, but he never says he believes in reincarnation, and he never shows the enthusiasm that Carolyn has for Guthrie’s theories. Carolyn can afford to be enthusiastic- she’s lived in the great house all her life, and so has never been more than one step away from the unearthly. But Joe is giving up a substantial part of his identity by even being in the same shot as Guthrie, and once he shows up with a shovel in a graveyard at night, the Joe we’ve known will be on his way out.
*The counter on my computer says the scene between Carolyn and Guthrie in the drawing room lasts only 6 minutes and 44 seconds, but I’m sticking with my estimate of 500 hours.
Acilius on Dark Shadows 