This one is an exercise in nostalgia for people who have been watching Dark Shadows from the beginning.
We remember the days when high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins was the show’s chief villain, a man with so little sense of family loyalty that he openly hated his own son. That son, strange and troubled boy David, repaid his father’s hatred by trying to murder him. Roger has been off-screen for over six weeks; when he comes back today, the first thing he sees is the sheriff’s car in the driveway, and the first thing he hears is that the sheriff has come about David. He stiffens, and in a voice dripping with distaste asks “What about David?” When well-meaning governess Vicki explains that David is not suspected of a crime, but is missing, Roger scolds her for failing to earn her pay by keeping track of the boy. He seems to be far more irked by the money wasted on Vicki’s salary than by David’s disappearance.
When heiress Carolyn and hardworking young fisherman Joe come to report on their fruitless search for David, Roger turns his disdain on them, berating them for letting him get away in the first place. Seeing Joe and Carolyn together brings back memories of the early months of the show, when the two of them were dating and there was a whole storyline about how bored they were with each other. For that matter, we were reminded of the first 40 weeks when Vicki hesitated to tell Roger that she had been on a date with her depressing fiancé Burke Devlin- Burke had been Roger’s sworn enemy until he decided to peace out in #201.
Roger agrees to go with Joe on a search of the countryside. When Vicki and Carolyn are left alone in the drawing room, they have a conversation about how tired they both are. Each of them urges the other to take a nap, and each responds that she can’t sleep. Writer Malcolm Marmorstein was fired off the show a few days ago; he was perfectly capable of taking a conversation like that and making a whole episode out of it. Today’s episode is filler from the point of view of the overall plot, but the ludicrous pointlessness of this conversation is a rarity in the post-Marmorstein era.
Roger and Joe’s search is represented in a couple of shots done in front of a green screen showing outdoor locations. That casts our minds back to the black and white episodes, which occasionally spliced in location inserts. Most of that footage was taken before the series started principal photography, and none of it can be reused now that the show is in color. The last of these inserts came in #275, when Carolyn took a walk on the beach. Now Dark Shadows is shut within the doors of 442 West 54th Street forever, and its only memory of the outside is in these green screen shots.
Roger continues his flagrant display of indifference to David throughout this sequence. When he sees men in blue uniforms searching for David, he makes some acerbic comments about the incompetence of the local police.* When Joe points out a nearby cemetery where odd events have been taking place of late, Roger remarks on its dreariness and on the generally low aesthetic standard of cemeteries in central Maine. When Joe suggests searching there, Roger is appalled, and joins him only with loud reluctance.
After Roger says “down” meaning “up,” which is a feature of Collinsport English we heard in #12, In the cemetery, we get another reminder of the show’s past. The Caretaker, a doddering old fool played hilariously by Daniel F. Keyes, had a significant part in the story of Roger’s ex-wife, undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, appearing in #154, #157, #179, and #180, and appeared again in episodes #209 and #211, which dealt with the introduction of vampire Barnabas Collins.
When we find him today, the Caretaker is inspecting the area around the Tomb of the Collinses. Unknown to him, there is a secret chamber hidden inside this tomb. David is trapped in that chamber. The Caretaker opens the door to the visible part of the tomb and asks if anyone is there. He hears David’s voice calling for help from the other side of the wall, and jumps to the conclusion that he is hearing a bunch of ghosts. “There is no help for you!” he cries out. As he hurries away, he shouts, “You must rest!”
David is nothing if not obedient. A minute after the Caretaker told him he must rest, he sits down and falls asleep.
The Caretaker runs into Roger and Joe. He asks them if they are alive. As “You must rest!” harked back to his constant refrain in his previous appearances that “The dead must rest!,” so this greeting echoes his first line in his first scene, when he asked Vicki and her instantly forgettable boyfriend Frank if they were alive. Frank responded to that one calmly; with his personality, it was a question he probably got from a lot of people. By contrast, Joe is disbelieving and Roger scoffs.
When they tell the Caretaker they are looking for a boy named David, he replies “Yes, he is here,” then describes the death of a boy named David who is buried in one of the graves. His compulsion to tell us the circumstances of people’s deaths is another trait of his we remember from the Laura days, especially in his oft-repeated phrase “died by fire!”
The Caretaker tells them that he heard the voices of the dead in the tomb. He urges Roger and Joe to stay away from it. Roger tells him he will be happy to oblige, but Joe insists they search there. Roger declares that he is embarrassed by the very idea of going inside such a place, and says that if anyone finds out he did he will blame Joe. Again, Roger can barely restrain his eagerness to give up the search for David.
David is too deeply asleep to hear Roger and Joe in the outer chamber. Since they are there, Roger decides to take a moment and look at the plaques naming the people buried in the tomb. After all, they are his “incestors – incestors! I mean ancestors.” This is one of the most famous bloopers in the entire series. If Louis Edmonds hadn’t stopped, glanced back at Joel Crothers, repeated “incestors,” and corrected himself, I doubt many people would have noticed it. It was a suprisingly unprofessional moment, but who would have it otherwise? To the extent that the episode is a retrospective of Dark Shadows so far, it wouldn’t be complete without an attention-grabbing mess-up. If the camera isn’t going to drift away from the mark and show a crew member eating a sandwich, “incestors” is the least we can expect.
Since the episode is so much a review of the show’s bygone themes, it is understandable that some viewers are disturbed by a line in the first scene. Roger mentions to Vicki that, while he has just returned from a trip to Boston, matriarch Liz is staying on in that city a while longer. The Dark Shadows wiki objects: “Elizabeth has decided to stay in Boston. This is incredible, since she was still afraid to leave Collinwood a few weeks ago, even hesitant to go to the Old House.”
I don’t find it incredible. Liz’ hesitation about going out was last mentioned in #280, and by #298 she was not only quick to accept Burke’s suggestion that she go with him to inspect a property on the other side of town, but she was the one who talked Carolyn into coming along with them. Neither Carolyn nor Burke expressed surprise that Liz was the one who was enthusiastic about getting out of the house. With that, Dark Shadows told us that it had no further use for the “Liz is a recluse” theme. They may be taking us on a stroll down memory lane today, but they aren’t going to take us all the way to that particular dead end.
*In all fairness, the Collinsport police are exceptionally incompetent.
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