Category: Episode commentary

Episode 15: I think he’s beginning to trust me

I left two comments about this episode on John and Christine Scoleri’s Dark Shadows Before I Die. A long one about its place in the overall development of the show’s stories:

This is a vitally important episode. The scene in David’s room is the first of many in which David Henesy and Alexandra Moltke Isles act their way out of weak writing to establish a relationship between two characters who can always make a connection with each other. Their body language, tones of voice, etc, triumph over some remarkably tedious dialogue to show us what people look like when they’re starting to trust each other. The growth of that relationship is really the only story that works in the first 42 weeks of the show. The big events involving characters we’ve only heard about or who will soon be recast matter insofar as they represent developments in that story, and other events don’t matter at all.

The scene that Liz and Roger play out in the drawing room while Vicki and David are talking upstairs is important in its own way. That these conversations are going on simultaneously is an example of the mirroring of Vicki and Liz that is such a strong motif in the first 42. Vicki is open and uncomplicated as she tries to talk David down from his superheated hostility to his father; Liz is guarded and double-minded as she tries to talk Roger back up to fear of Devlin. In the contrast between the two women, we see the difference between the innocent one with no past, and the frightened one with nothing but a past.

The contrast between father and son plays out in those scenes, and also in the two brief scenes between them. Roger’s narcissism renders him utterly childish, making no effort to take his son’s feelings into account or to understand Devlin’s motives. David’s fear and pain drive him to mimic adult behavior with absurd and indeed horrifying results. Liz tries to make Roger grow up, as Vicki tries to free David to be a child, but Roger’s inability to take anyone’s feelings but his own seriously dooms both efforts.

The moments between Liz and Vicki call for comment. Later on in the series, these characters will be stuck in many frustrating scenes where they inexplicably fail to pass on information that would resolve story points. At first glance, Vicki’s failure to tell Roger about Burke’s presence in the garage and Liz’s failure to pass the word of it on to him after Vicki tells her may seem to be the first of those failures. But Vicki has no reason to trust Roger, and very little to suspect Burke of wrongdoing. On what she’s seen of Roger so far, she can only assume that if she tells him what she saw he will jump to the most sinister possible conclusion and enlist her in his mad campaign against Burke. Liz seems relatively reasonable, at least on the topic of Burke Devlin, so by telling her Vicki is both satisfying an obligation and reducing the likelihood that she will be a party to slander. Indeed, Liz and Vicki tell each other quite a bit about themselves, much more than they will later on.

And a short one about a point that bothers many viewers:

Oh, and Liz’s failure to repeat Vicki’s news to Roger isn’t a problem. Liz is deeply preoccupied, and Vicki’s report wouldn’t be particularly interesting to anyone who hadn’t been watching the show.

Episode 14: We’re all pals again

We see David looking for a place to hide a small metal valve. He settles on Vicki’s underwear drawer. She catches him going through it; he runs off, and she finds nothing missing. She would apparently rather not think about what he was doing in that particular drawer. Later, he will claim that he was trying to slip a present into the drawer- a seashell, at first; then, a magazine.

Alone in the upstairs hallway, Vicki sees the locked door to the closed-off part of the house open and close, apparently by itself. At first, she thinks it’s David playing a prank on her, but he comes out of his room so soon after that there doesn’t seem to be any way he could have done it. The show has been using the idea of ghosts in episode after episode to suggest that something big is about to happen; now, for the first time, we see an event that is either a supernatural manifestation or an elaborate, Scooby Doo-esque hoax perpetrated by some unknown person for some unknown reason. So what she’s doing now- looking for David, trying to figure out what he’s been up to- is directly connected to something that is disturbing the supernatural back-world of Collinwood. It may be a while before the back-world erupts into the foreground, and even longer before it crowds out everything else and becomes the whole show. But that little valve represents the first irretrievable step on the path that will lead to what Dark Shadows became.

This is also the first episode in which Vicki gets to make someone laugh. Carolyn says that she and Joe will probably go to a movie, because “What else is there to do in this town?” To which Vicki replies “You could get into a fight in a bar.” It’s also the last episode in which Vicki is allowed to make a joke. Humorlessness one of the things that will eventually squeeze the life out of the character. Alexandra Moltke Isles delivers her one good joke well enough that it clearly could have been otherwise. Those of us who wish Vicki had stayed at the center of the show all the way through can’t help but feel sad that it wasn’t to be.

Episode 13: Worst thing that ever happened to this house, him comin’ back

Vicki visits Matthew in his cottage, the first time we’ve seen that set. She hopes that he will tell him something about her past. He doesn’t, but he does go on about the Burke Devlin trial. After he has brought up the Devlin trial he asks her why she’s interested in it. She says she isn’t, he scowlingly demands she stop talking about it. She’s bewildered. That might have been meant to be a joke, but if so it doesn’t land- George Mitchell’s Matthew is just too intense, too tortured, for that kind of joke to work.

Vicki’s effort to befriend Matthew fails as completely as does her attempt to get information about her origins, but the cottage set goes a long way towards making it seem that it might succeed. We see Matthew cooking and sharing a meal with Vicki in an intimate setting, and for all his strange ferocity he is very talkative. When she answers a question of his with a lie that is sure to anger him violently if he discovers it, we are in high suspense, hoping against hope that she will not be found out.

The caretaker’s cottage isn’t the only set we see for the first time in this one. We also follow Vicki into the garage at Collinwood. She finds Burke there with a wrench in his hand, standing next to the open door of Roger’s car. Burke explains this odd situation by claiming that he had been thinking of buying a similar car and wanted to look Roger’s over. Vicki is suspicious, and says that Mr Collins wouldn’t like his being there. Burke asks her to keep it secret, an invitation she pointedly refuses to accept.

Unlike the caretaker’s cottage, which is a staple set of the series almost up to the very end, we only see the garage a few more times. That’s a shame, I think. The show is so much about the house that the stories would all be richer if they gave us more of a sense of the physical realities of the house and its functioning. Simply placing a scene in the garage, where people are handling tools and standing in front of machinery while they talk about whatever it is that’s going on in the story, can accomplish that without the need to dwell on anything technical or mundane.

Also, the garage is where cars are kept. A scene there can establish a connection with the outside world. Often the show intentionally builds a claustrophobic sense in the audience, but sometimes they simply have a long string of episodes set entirely in the house and get us feeling more confined than we have any need to do. In those periods, a scene set in the garage could let just enough air in to keep us from being distracted by the closeness of the quarters.

Episode 12: You can still hear the widows

Roger and Vicki encounter each other on the peak of Widow’s Hill. Roger remarks it is the highest point in the area. At the end of their conversation, Vicki will call to Carolyn, inviting her to join them “down here.” This may seem to be a blooper, but since we hear “down” used to mean “up” in a later episode, I speculate that it’s a peculiarity of Collinsport English.

Little happens to advance the plot in this episode, but between Roger’s announcement that he and Vicki are standing on the highest point in the area and Vicki’s invitation to come “down here,” we hear a lot about the ghostly legends of the place. After the scene in episode 11 where the ghosts are troubling Elizabeth while David is doing something mysterious involving motor grease and little pieces of metal, it seems that the show is using the ghosts as a sign that something big is happening. Certainly the “Widow’s Wail” is a striking sound effect, and Louis Edmonds does a good job of selling the idea that Roger really does believe in all the legends about the house that his social position might require him and Elizabeth to ridicule publicly.

It’s a bit jarring that Carolyn drifts into the scene asking what Vicki and Roger are doing- “planning a suicide pact?” She had just told Vicki about the legend that a third governess would die by jumping off the cliff, and the series story bible still calls for Roger to throw himself to his death from it. So you might think it would be in questionable taste to bring that particular topic up just now.

There’s also a scene in the Evans cottage where Maggie (Kathryn Leigh Scott) tries to get Sam (Mark Allen) to tell her what’s been bothering him. In episode 11, Conrad Bain had triumphed over a weak script and Mark Allen’s relentless whine to turn what might have been a lot of tedious recapping into a compulsively watchable scene. At the beginning of this scene, Kathryn Leigh Scott is mustering such powerful emotions that it looks like she might be about to accomplish the same feat, but Allen has switched from whining all his lines to bellowing them. So the scene is a dead loss.

Episode 11: “‘Straight from the bean to you!’ I wonder who writes that junk.”

One of the great challenges of writing a serial is fitting enough recap of previous story points into each installment that new viewers can catch up without putting so much in that you bore the regulars. A time will come when Dark Shadows gives up recapping altogether, but in these early weeks they are scrupulous about soapcraft.

In episode 11, much of the recapping takes place in a scene between innkeeper Mr Wells (Conrad Bain) and drunken artist Sam Evans (Mark Allen.) The story justification for Mr Wells telling Sam everything the audience might need to know about Burke Devlin and the Collinses is that Sam’s daughter Maggie, who runs the restaurant in the inn, is about to return to work, and Mr Wells doesn’t want her to see her father drunk. He knows that as long as Sam thinks he might have something new to tell him about Burke, he will sit there and drink coffee.

The scene between Mr Wells and Sam is an example of something that becomes ever more important to Dark Shadows as it goes on: good acting trumping not-so-good writing. And good acting trumping bad acting- while Mark Allen is the worst actor on the show, Conrad Bain is phenomenally good. He single-handedly takes what must have looked in the script to be a terribly dull scene and makes it completely absorbing. I can imagine a show entirely composed of him looking into the camera and telling stories, and that show would be great. No wonder he went on to have such a big career in television!

Episode 10: To the death of the monster

Carolyn is in Burke’s hotel room, where he charms her and tricks her into believing that he’s planning to leave town soon. I suppose the definition of “dashing” would be a charming fellow who makes things happen, things you wouldn’t have predicted and of which you aren’t sure you can approve. Burke is at his most dashing in scenes where he’s trying to enlist the women and children of Collinwood to his side. With Carolyn here, with Vicki back in episode 7, most of all with David in episode 30, we wonder what exactly he’s trying to do. He’s not so good with the men- when he tries to recruit Joe Haskell to his intelligence-gathering operation in episode 3, he ends up baldly offering him a bribe.

Liz and Roger are in the drawing room, where she demands he be less openly hostile to his son David. Unknown to them, David and his toy robot (a Horikawa “Attacking Martian,” which sold for $4.22 in 1966, not including two D batteries) are hiding behind a chair listening to Roger’s brutal denunciations of the boy. Unknown, that is, until Roger goes to the brandy bottle for his second drink, when the Attacking Martian starts attacking Roger.

Roger all but assaults David in response. David flees his father’s rage. He runs out of the house, telling Roger he hopes Burke Devlin gets even with him. Roger is as bleak and maladroit in these interactions as Burke is glittering and skillful in his handling of Carolyn. Again we see Art Wallace’s use of intercut scenes to bring out a comparison between characters.

After the second part of the scene in Burke’s room, David slips back into the house to find his Aunt Elizabeth asleep in a chair, muttering about ghosts. After all the talk about ghosts in the first two weeks, Elizabeth’s muttering about them seems significant- perhaps we are to think that her dream is a message from the ghosts who linger about the house, a sign that something is happening that will stir them up. Elizabeth awakes, and sees that David is in front of her, smeared with grease and holding a small object. He won’t answer any questions or let her see what he has in his hand. Before she can pursue the matter, Carolyn appears in the foyer, bringing an unexpected guest- Burke Devlin. Confronted with this shocking sight, she forgets all about David.

Episode 9: There are no ghosts here

The episode begins with Bill Malloy at the front desk of the Collinsport Inn, using the telephone to call Burke Devlin’s room. Burke hangs up on him. It ends with Carolyn Stoddard standing on the same spot, making the same call. Burke invites her up. Marc Masse has a nice discussion on his blog of what this pair of scenes means within the formal structure of the show at this point.

Carolyn tells Vicki about Josette and the two governesses who fell to their deaths from Widow’s Hill, and about the legend that a third governess will follow. Liz declares “There are no ghosts here,” but uses the word “Poltergeist” in a little speech about ghosts, a sufficiently sophisticated term in 1966 to suggest that someone using it has done serious reading about the supernatural. Coupling these lines with Burke’s statement in episode 7 that there are literal ghosts at Collinwood and other remarks that Roger and Carolyn have made in other episodes, the show is going out of way to keep the possibility open that there will be literal ghost stories.

Episode 8: The famous ghosts of Collinwood

Vicki calls the Hammond Foundling Home in an attempt to verify Liz’s claim that someone there recommended her for the job. We see Ms Hopewell, director of the home, in her office. The office is a nice glimpse of the world Vicki left to come to the house, and of the show’s idea of what was going on in the buildings around the NYC studio where it was produced.

Liz frets over Carolyn’s reluctance to marry Joe, Joe frets over the idea that his recent promotion was arranged to ease that reluctance, and everyone frets over Burke’s latest doings. Liz blames Carolyn’s hesitancy, and perhaps all the rest of her woes, on “the famous ghosts of Collinwood.” Like everyone else in these early episodes, she uses the word “ghost” figuratively, but with the door conspicuously open to the possibility that we will be hearing literal ghost stories later on.

Episode 7: Nowhere- Everywhere- Perhaps I was here.

Vicki and Burke run into each other at the Collinsport Inn where Maggie serves them coffee, Roger lets himself into the Evans cottage where he makes demands of Sam, Maggie tells Roger that Burke and Vicki are sharing a table and he runs away.

In these interactions, we see Burke using his considerable charm to try to get information out of Vicki, Roger using his social position to try to bully Evans the father while Evans the daughter exposes his cowardice, Sam wallowing in self-pity, Maggie letting information out indiscriminately, and Vicki taking it all in, cautiously.

Marc Masse’s post about this episode on his Dark Shadows from the Beginning has some interesting stuff. Both Mitch Ryan as Burke and Mark Allen as Sam are required to talk with their mouths full; both of them have mishaps, which he records with gifs showing matter falling out of their mouths. He also has these intriguing paragraphs about the character of Sam Evans:

One thing about the Evans cottage you notice in this episode is that when Sam walks in the door you can see houses across the street, a setting that would suggest a quiet, cozy cul-de-sac near the waterfront. Sam has neighbors, but none ever come calling. One gets the impression that Sam is troubled about something and just wants to be left alone, but time and again unwanted trespassers will just keep barging in, like this nervous, frightened man who lives in a mansion on the hill who busts in to order him around and warn him to keep certain information secret that might be damaging to the both of them. There will at one point be a cannery plant manager who just walks in without knocking while he and Roger are arguing about Burke Devlin, the plant manager telling Sam that if he wants privacy he should keep his door locked. But even that wouldn’t work, because as time goes on the trespassers will only become more aggressive: a fire goddess who, by staring into a blazing fireplace miles away, can make Sam fall asleep on the sofa with a lit cigarette to ignite a nearby newspaper so that he burns his hands badly enough that he can no longer paint; a newly risen vampire who sneaks in through the French windows to make a blood bank of his daughter; a Frankenstein monster who lets himself in for food and shelter and who knows where the cutlery is kept; a werewolf that doesn’t even bother with locked doors and just crashes in through the nearby window. The Evans cottage is a hub of activity for invasive beings with criminal intent.

But now, in the relatively sane and quiet summer of sixty-six, all Sam Evans has to do for a little peace of mind is assure his unwanted patrician visitor that he will not do or say nothing to jeopardize the agreement the two apparently made that ties them together like conspirators – because that’s what they represent to the viewer, two people who keep information away from others, information the viewer at this point is also not fully privy to.

But the one salvation for Sam Evans is that, unlike Roger Collins, he does seem to have some remnant of a conscience about whatever unsavory information ties these two unlikely co-conspirators together, and therefore a soul that may be worth saving.

Marc Masse has more use for Mark Allen’s acting than I do- I would say that he tends to be monotonous, his voice either a constant whine or a series of bellows. So I find it difficult to think of Sam Evans #1 as a soul worth saving. But this is a most insightful passage.

Episode 6: “Winters! Victoria Winters!”

Looking for David in the basement of Collinwood, Vicki encounters caretaker Matthew Morgan. No one has bothered to tell Matthew that a new person will be coming to the house, so he assumes she is a burglar and confronts her accordingly. Liz shows up, telling Matthew that Vicki belongs in the house and telling Vicki that she doesn’t belong in the basement.

In week one, Liz refused all requests for information about who Vicki was and why she hired her to be David’s governess. But at least she had told the other members of the household that Vicki would be coming. She hasn’t told even that to Matthew, notwithstanding the fact that, as she will explain to Vicki in this episode 13, Matthew is a “strange and violent man.” By taking the job and living in the house, Vicki, our point of view character, has made herself dependent on Liz; we the audience are also dependent on Liz, in that the stories in these first months all revolve around actions Liz will or won’t take. So it’s doubly unnerving that she is so very stingy with information.

George Mitchell, who plays Matthew here and in his next few appearances, is the sort of actor we often see in the first 42 weeks of the show. He is essentially a miniaturist, who builds a character one finely etched mannerism at a time. His successor in the role, Thayer David, worked at the opposite extreme, becoming the first exponent of the Dark Shadows house style of acting (often called “Go Back to Your Grave!” because of Lara Parker’s explanation of it.) Without that style, the show wouldn’t have become what it did in the period which people remember, so I can’t regret the recasting. But I do wish we could somehow see what it would have been like had George Mitchell carried the character through his whole arc of development. He could have played something I think Art Wallace could have written, a closely observed, sensitively explored psychological study.

There’s another what-might-have-been moment when Vicki tries to make friends with Matthew. He introduces himself to her with a gruff “Morgan! Matthew Morgan!” To which she replies, mimicking his down-east accent, “Wintahs! Victoria Wintahs!” It isn’t much of a joke, and Matthew isn’t amused. But it’s hard not to wonder what Vicki might have become if she’d been allowed to make the occasional joke as the series went on.