Five scenes today, none of which advances any ongoing storylines, but each of which is effective in its own way.
In the great house of Collinwood, well-meaning governess Vicki and flighty heiress Carolyn bicker about reclusive matriarch Liz’ plan to marry seagoing con man Jason. Carolyn is disgusted by her stepfather-to-be and jealous of Vicki’s closeness to her mother. Since the show has been hinting heavily that Vicki is Liz’ biological daughter and dangling the prospect that the resolution of the Liz/ Jason story will reveal this to all the characters, it is intriguing when Carolyn tells Vicki that she has become her mother’s “second daughter- or should I say only daughter. You always wanted a family, and now you have one.”
We see artist Sam Evans in his cottage. Sam is part of a lamebrained scheme to protect his daughter Maggie from the unknown person who tried to kill her by pretending that she is dead, and he is on the telephone with one of his comrades in this plan when a knock comes at the door. It is Vicki come to console him. She talks about how Maggie was her first friend when she came to town, and Sam is so touched he almost breaks down and tells her the truth.
One of Sam’s comrades is Maggie’s boyfriend, hardworking young fisherman Joe. We see a location insert of a seagull, then cut to Joe eating his lunch nearby.
The shot of the gull and the docks makes a point about visual storytelling. Yesterday, Vicki was hanging out on the beach with hopeless schlub Burke Devlin* when she started describing footprints in the sand, a freighter on the horizon, etc. When Vicki stares off into space and tells us about them, we laugh out loud. If they had shown them to us instead, we would have accepted them as metaphors for the transience of life, as we accept these images today as metaphors for whatever they are supposed to be metaphors for.
Carolyn stops by. In the first months of Dark Shadows, Joe and Carolyn were a couple. By the time the narrative found them, they were bored with each other and there was no reason for them to stay together. Yet the process of their breaking up took up a considerable amount of screen time.
That remarkably pointless arc has been over for some time, but it keeps coming up when Carolyn and Joe talk to each other. In this scene, Carolyn starts off by expressing her condolences about Maggie, apologizes for having been cruel to Joe during their time together, and then the two of them talk about some other stuff that’s happening on the show. Joe has to work at keeping a poker face lest he give away the secret about Maggie. The result of his struggle is to make him look noble in Carolyn’s eyes. It’s quite a touching little encounter. I first saw it on the SciFi Channel, as it then was, in the 90s, and have remembered it quite clearly ever since.
Back at Collinwood, Vicki and Carolyn compare notes on their condoling trips and apologize to each other for their quarrel. Moments later, another quarrel is breaking out. Carolyn cuts it short by leaving.
In the Evans cottage, Sam and Joe talk about their meetings with Vicki and Carolyn. They assure each other that it is all-important that they stick with their plan and tell no one that Maggie is alive.
*The show used to feature Mitchell Ryan as dashing action hero Burke Devlin. Yesterday, Anthony George took over the role, and reinvented him as a hopeless schlub.
Acilius on Dark Shadows 