Category: Episode commentary

Episode 2: Wouldn’t be the first, you know

Marc Masse’s Dark Shadows from the Beginning is in one of its accessible phases now, and his discussion of episode 2 includes some interesting comparisons between the finished episode and Art Wallace’s story bible for the series, Shadows on the Wall. For example:

Here is Art Wallace’s introductory description of Joe in Shadows on the Wall: “Joe Haskell is twenty-one. A rugged New Englander with a deep love of the sea, Joe is a young man of natural dignity and quiet ambition.”

But the viewer’s first impression of Joe Haskell is that of a sap, cuckolded into brooding over a mug of beer while his date plays the field before his very eyes.

And:

During the scene with Elizabeth and Carolyn in the drawing room, episode writer Art Wallace lifts two of Carolyn’s lines directly from his story outline in Shadows on the Wall. These are: “Besides, how do you expect me to go away and leave you alone in this beautiful nuthouse?” and “All I can say for her, mother, is she must be out of her mind.” In the story outline, the lines are written as “Besides, how do you expect me to get married and go off and leave you alone in this beautiful nuthouse.” and “All I can say for her is she must be out of her mind.”

The scene at the Blue Whale and Carolyn’s mood when she arrives home and the topic of discussion with her mother coincide exactly as given by Art Wallace in Shadows on the Wall: “Carolyn’s in a vile mood. The boy she’d been with had been a dud….had started an argument in the juke joint. There’d been a free-for-all, and her evening had been ruined.”

Then:

In this episode Elizabeth is seen playing the piano in the drawing room. The reason for there being a piano in the drawing room comes from the character of a previous work by Art Wallace, which he drew on when creating the character of Elizabeth Stoddard. In The House, a one-hour production for NBC-TV’s Television Playhouse broadcast on September 8, 1957, Caroline Barnes is a wealthy recluse in a New England fishing village who occupies her time as a piano teacher.

In Art Wallace’s story outline for Shadows on the Wall, when Victoria Winters arrives at Collinwood it is the month of October.

In later posts, Masse will clarify that the 1957 version of The House was actually Wallace’s second treatment of the story that would later give rise to the characters of Elizabeth and Carolyn Stoddard. Three years before, a thirty-minute anthology series called “The Web” had broadcast his first version of it. That version, as shown at a Dark Shadows convention, has been posted on YouTube:

Episode 1: Who’s talking?

In 281 of the posts that follow, I link to comments I made on Danny Horn’s great blog Dark Shadows Every Day. Danny starts with episode 210 and makes only a handful of remarks, most of them highly disparaging, about the first 42 weeks of the show. As a particular fan of that period of the show, that distressed me when I first started reading him, but I found that it gave me an opportunity to make substantial contributions to the comment section. I could always find something in those early stories that gave extra depth to whatever was going on in the later installments.

Now, Mrs Acilius and I are watching the show through a second time, again starting with episode 1. I’d so much enjoyed commenting on Danny’s site when we were watching 210-1245 from March of 2020 to April of 2021 that I decided to start commenting on a blog that covered the first 42 weeks. So I’ve left many comments on John and Christine Scoleri’s Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The Scoleris haven’t assembled the kind of community that made Danny’s comment section a big party. I still get responses to comments I left on Danny’s site, almost a year and a half after his final post. I have yet to get a reaction to any of my comments on Dark Shadows Before I Die. So I’m thinking of just recording my thoughts here.

The Scoleris aren’t the only bloggers who discuss the first 42 weeks of the show. There’s also Marc Masse, a.k.a. Prisoner of the Night, whose (fiercely controversial) Dark Shadows from the Beginning is occasionally viewable, usually private. And of course Patrick McCray, whose Dark Shadows Daybook set the standard for online commentary on the show. Neither of those sites has an open comments section, which is why I’ve been contributing to the Scoleris. There are also podcasts, Facebook groups, Reddit threads, etc, but I’m not into any of those.

Asking who to talk to and how to get through to them brings episode 1 to mind. Vicki comes to an unfamiliar town, and the audience comes to an unfamiliar show. She’s a stranger looking for someone to talk with; we’re viewers of a daytime soap, a genre that consists almost entirely of conversation. Everyone Vicki meets is talkative enough, but most of their talk is about how they aren’t speaking. The lady sitting next to her on the train goes on about what a nasty place Collinsport is. The fellow who gives her a ride from the train station responds to the innkeeper’s warm greeting with an ostentatious refusal even to acknowledge that he knows him, let alone to engage in conversation. The server at the lunch counter announces to Vicki, before she’s had a chance to say two sentences, that she regards her as a “jerk.” The family she will be working for is represented by a lady who won’t answer her brother’s questions as to who Vicki is and why she hired her, a reticence that is made all the more ominous when a private investigator reports on their strange, unfriendly ways. Dark Shadows fandom is far less forbidding than the situation Vicki faced!