bloopers – Page 7 – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 87: She came to us from nowhere, and now it seems she has disappeared into nowhere

Hardworking young fisherman Joe is spending the evening with Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town. It’s their first date. Maggie impresses him with her knowledge of ships, and he sings a verse of “What Do You Do With a Drunken Sailor?” It may not sound like much, but the actors, Kathryn Leigh Scott and Joel Crothers, sell it so well that we’ll be rooting for Joe and Maggie for years to come. The final moment of the scene comes after Joe leaves. Maggie looks directly into the camera and says to the audience, “Goodnight, pal.”

In the great house of Collinwood, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins greets his niece, flighty heiress Carolyn, on her return home. Carolyn is upset because Joe has broken off their relationship and is having a date with Maggie. The story of Joe and Carolyn was a bore, largely because the two of them never had a scene with any fraction of the sweetness we see between Joe and Maggie today. There was nothing at stake in their quarrels, because they had nothing to lose if they simply gave up on each other.

Roger tells Carolyn that well-meaning governess Vicki hasn’t been seen for hours, and that he promised Carolyn’s mother, reclusive matriarch Liz, that he would sit up waiting for Vicki’s return. Carolyn is worried as well, and asks Roger why he isn’t actively searching for her. He says she’s probably fine. When Carolyn says that people don’t just disappear, he reminds her of family friend Bill Malloy, who disappeared not so long ago, but then turned up. Considering that Bill turned up in the form of a corpse washed ashore by the tide, it is perhaps unsurprising that Carolyn does not find Roger’s analogy particularly comforting.

After Roger persuades Carolyn to toddle off to bed, he makes sure he’s alone (well, alone except for the stagehand in the lower left-hand corner of the screen.)

Once assured that no one mentioned in the script can see him, Roger returns to the drawing room and opens a secret passage we’ve never seen before. After he disappears into it, Carolyn comes to the drawing room and is baffled at his absence.

The suggestion that Carolyn doesn’t know about the secret passage is characteristic of the show. From the beginning, Vicki has represented our point of view. She started off knowing nothing about the other characters, and everything had to be explained to her while she was on camera. If Vicki knows just what we know, Carolyn, who grew up in the house where most of the action is set, can be presumed to know a great deal we do not. When they reveal a secret to us, they can amplify its importance by showing that Carolyn isn’t in on it. They’ve done this several times, mostly in situations having to do with the murky origins of Roger’s feud with dashing action hero Burke Devlin. Carolyn’s ignorance of the secret passage is particularly effective- it’s right there in the most important room of the only house she’s ever lived in. If she doesn’t know about it, it must be a very well-kept secret indeed.

We go with Roger into the secret passage. He shines his flashlight directly into the camera, creating a halo of light around it. This would not seem to be a desirable visual effect, yet we will see it many, many times in the years to come. This is the second appearance of the effect. The first time came when Roger’s son, strange and troubled boy David, was leading Vicki into the abandoned Old House in episode 70. Now we see it when Roger himself is entering another abandoned space, one where he might meet Vicki.

It’s hard to believe that the repeated use of this effect was altogether unintentional.

All the more so because of what follows Roger’s entry into the passageway. His journey through it actually does seem to wind through a very large space. In the opening narration, Vicki had said that the house is made up of 80 rooms, retconning the total of 40 given in the second episode. Roger’s trek up one flight of stairs, down another, up a spiral staircase, around corners, past windows, etc etc, seems like it must take him past enough space for at least that many. Perhaps the sequence would be a bit more attractive with less time spent focused on Roger’s feet, but all in all it is as effective a creation of space as Dark Shadows would ever do. If there had been Daytime Emmy Awards in 1966, Lela Swift would have had every right to expect to win Best Director for conjuring up this illusion of vast, winding corridors without editing or going outside the tiny studio space available to her.

Roger does indeed discover Vicki’s whereabouts. He hears her calling for David from behind a locked door, promising David not to tell anyone he imprisoned her there if he will let her out now. Roger does not simply let Vicki out. Instead, he makes some loud noises, then puts on a ghostly, wavering voice and calls out to Vicki that she is in great danger as long as she stays in Collinwood. He seems to be having trouble keeping a straight face when he makes these spooky sounds. Vicki isn’t laughing, and returning viewers aren’t either- in Friday’s episode, she and we saw the ghost of Bill Malloy in the room, and heard that ghost warn her that she would be killed if she stayed in the house much longer.

Once he’s had his fun, Roger opens the door. After another flashlight halo, Vicki recognizes him. Alexandra Moltke Isles gives us one of the finest moments of acting in the entire series, when Vicki throws her arms around Roger, her bodily movement as smooth as any ballet dancer’s but her voice jagged, and says that “David is a monster, you were right!” Up to this point, Roger has been brutally hostile to his son, Vicki heroically friendly to him. Her determination to befriend David has become so central to her character that hearing her make this declaration makes it seem that she is permanently broken.

Vicki struggles to hold back her sobbing long enough to tell Roger that she saw the ghost of Bill Malloy. That’s an episode-ending sting- Roger wants everyone to forget about Bill’s death, and if his ghost starts popping up he is unlikely to get that wish.

Mrs Isles was a “head actor,” one who found the character’s innermost psychological motivation and worked outward from that. That heavily interiorized style would be one of the things that left her in the dust, along with similar performers like Joel Crothers and Don Briscoe, in the period when Dark Shadows was a hyper-fast paced, wildly zany show about vampires and werewolves and time-travel and God knows what. But in the period when Art Wallace and Francis Swann were writing finely etched character studies, she consistently excelled. In this little turn, she shows that when it was logical for her character to go big, she could go as big as any of the stars of the show in those later days.

Episode 66: The appearance of hospitality

Downstairs in the great house of Collinwood, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger and dashing action hero Burke have another of their quarrels. Upstairs, well-meaning governess Vicki tells reclusive matriarch Liz about her shockingly lonesome childhood. Nothing happens to advance the plot, but the actors make Francis Swann’s dialogue sparkle.

Roger and Burke’s conversation revolves around one of the two major storylines introduced in episode 1, The Revenge of Burke Devlin. Liz and Vicki’s revolves around the other, Victoria Winters’ Quest to Learn Her Origins. The investigation into the death of beloved local man Bill Malloy has suggested that one or both of these may become interesting, though by now that prospect has been reduced to rather a low order of probability.

The real themes of the conversations are the real themes of the whole series- loneliness and denial. As Vicki goes on about how solitary her childhood was at the Hammond Foundling Home, Liz’ face shows one expression of agony after another. When Liz tells Vicki that she can understand loneliness, Vicki tells her that she could leave the house if she wanted to do so. Liz replies with a note of absolute finality- “No. I couldn’t.” Vicki tries to open a new topic, mentioning Liz’ daughter Carolyn, but the barriers have gone up.

Roger insisted on talking to Burke alone. The two of them go round and round, not answering each other directly or telling each other anything new. They can’t talk productively to each other, but can’t talk to anyone else at all. The unresolved, unexplained past they share binds them together and shuts everyone else out. As he leaves, Burke declares that he will return to Collinwood- “possibly to stay.” He’d been telling Liz that he wanted to buy the house, and in previous episodes we’ve seen him scheming to drive the family to bankruptcy and collect their assets. But in this context, his line sounds less like a threat to take the house from the family than like a proposal to move in with them.

There is also a memorable production fault. A camera bounces out of control and gives the audience a view of the lights above the set:

Episode 54: A proper charge

At the end of yesterday’s episode, dour caretaker Matthew admitted to reclusive matriarch Liz that he had found a drowned man on the beach, that the man was missing plant manager Bill Malloy, and that he had pushed the body out to sea and watched it float away. Liz then called the sheriff.

As today’s episode opens, Liz’ ne-er-do-well brother Roger doesn’t know about Matthew’s confession. We see him in his office, countermanding orders Bill Malloy had given and acting like he has Malloy’s job. On his blog Dark Shadows from the Beginning, Marc Masse interprets this as an indication of guilty knowledge on Roger’s part:

Roger has evidently just implemented a new system that has effectively replaced Bill Malloy’s previous methods for operations at the plant. This indicates that Roger knows for certain that Malloy will not be returning as plant manager, which enshrouds him with an additional layer of suspicion given how as of the close of episode 53 only two people knew for certain that Bill Malloy was in fact dead: Matthew Morgan and Elizabeth Stoddard, and as of today’s episode the sheriff. Roger will be informed of Malloy’s demise later on that day when his sister calls him away from the office to have him return to Collinwood, and Roger will feign surprise upon hearing the news, but it’s evident from his phone conversation above that he was somehow already aware of Malloy’s fate.

That’s a possible interpretation, and I certainly thought of it the first time I saw the episode. On the other hand, Malloy has been missing for more than a day, and was last seen drinking in a bar. So even if he were to walk in the door in prime physical condition at this very moment, he would be in a poor position to defend himself in workplace politics. Roger could easily claim that he was simply moving to fill a vacuum. The show is keeping Roger viable as a suspect, but is not committing itself to the idea that he is the guilty party.

Whatever Roger knows about the situation, dashing action hero Burke knows less. But Burke seems to think of himself as very knowledgeable. He storms into Roger’s office and confronts him with the fact that Malloy was trying to prove that Roger, not Burke, was responsible for the killing that sent Burke to prison years before. Burke makes many accusations against Roger, some of which the audience knows to be true, but none of which he is yet in a position to prove.

The scenes in Roger’s office are intercut with scenes in the drawing room in the mansion at Collinwood. There, the sheriff is talking with Liz and Matthew about Matthew’s confession. Matthew asks the sheriff if he will be arrested now. To which the sheriff replies, “I can’t think of a proper charge.” He jokes about “burial without a license,” then goes on to warn Matthew that he has laid himself open to suspicion.

This is a moment when you can tell you’re watching a show made in 1966. Seven years later, coverage of investigations into the Watergate affair would give the American public an intensive eighteen-month tutorial in criminal law concerning obstruction of justice and related offenses. Ever since that time, residents of the USA have known that you are risking jail any time you make things difficult for the police. Prior to that, however, this was not well-known even among lawyers who practiced in areas other than criminal law.

Watergate itself illustrated this. Several of the major figures in that matter were lawyers, and many of them, including Richard Nixon himself, genuinely did not know that it was an offense for a person who had not been involved in a crime to cover that crime up. You can hear Nixon on the White House tapes telling his legal aide John Dean that because Dean didn’t know about the Watergate burglary in advance, the things Dean had done to hinder the investigation of the burglary can’t possibly put him in danger of prosecution. In his memoirs, Dean admits his own ignorance of the relevant law, confessing that he first read the federal statutes on obstruction of justice not when he was in law school, not when he was studying for the bar, not when he was a staffer for a commission tasked with rewriting the federal criminal code, but in his office at the White House, after he’d been running the Watergate cover-up for nine months. He reports in that same book that several other White House staffers who were lawyers shared his ignorance. Many of them would go on to confirm this aspect of his account.

In light of the legal education that Watergate provided the people of the USA, the sheriff sounds like an idiot. That same education ruined other old shows. Perry Mason, for example- ridiculous as it is that every episode ends with the guilty party jumping up in court and shouting “I did it!,” if you’re into the story you feel enough poetic justice in those endings that they don’t really bother you. But Mason himself can hardly make it through five minutes without committing every crime with which Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, and Dean would be charged and a few more besides. Perry Mason broadcast its final episode in May of 1966, so that show, not the Watergate news, was the law school the original audience had attended.

Miscellaneous:

The episode opens with footage of Louis Edmonds walking around outdoors on a waterfront. They play some nice sound effects of sea-birds over it.

The sheriff we see in this episode is Sheriff Patterson, the first of that name. He is played by Dana Elcar, a fine actor who would be ubiquitous on American television and cinema screens in the 1980s. If we’re heading into a major story arc dominated by a mystery story, it’s a relief to know that the policeman role will be in such trustworthy hands. The part will be re-cast many times in the years to come, and never again as well. Then again, none of the subsequent Sheriffs Patterson will be as important as is this first.

Since there is a good deal of overlap between fans of Star Trek and fans of Dark Shadows, I might mention that this was the episode that aired on the day Star Trek premiered.

There was a great deal of Anglophilia involved in the making of Dark Shadows: the mid-Atlantic accents, the plots lifted from English literature, etc. So it may not be a coincidence that a dark-haired, small-chinned matriarch named Elizabeth presides over the family at the center of it. Indeed, Joan Bennett looked enough like the northern European royals that when they wanted to cast an actress who resembled her closely enough to set the audience wondering how their characters were related, they settled on the daughter of a Danish count. So I might also mention that I am writing this on the day Britain’s Elizabeth II died.

There are two big flubs. At one point when they’re about to cut from the drawing room back to the office, we hear a loud noise and some garbled voices in the background. My wife, Mrs Acilius, wondered if this was Josette Collins trying to make herself heard.

At the very end of the episode, as announcer Bob Lloyd is intoning “Dark Shadows is a Dan Curtis production,” a figure walks in front of the camera. You can just see the top of his head. The Dark Shadows wiki refers to the figure as “a crew member.” Marc Masse says it’s probably Mitch Ryan. John and Christine Scoleri speculate on their blog Dark Shadows Before I Die that it might be Dan Curtis himself. To me it looks like more the hairdo Thayer David is wearing as Matthew Morgan than like either Ryan’s hairdo as Burke or Dan Curtis’ hair- there seems to be some grey in it, and it looks to be more matted than either wavy or curly.

Episode 38: The Count in his castle

Vicki first met Matthew in the basement of Collinwood, back in episode 6. So the basement is Matthew’s territory. Not even the cottage where he lives is more so. Before we ever saw it, we heard him go on about how it was a gift from Liz. When we do see him there he’s having an uncharacteristic moment, baking muffins. The basement is the dusty, forbidding workspace is where we expect to find a dusty, forbidding workman like Matthew.

In his remarks on episode 37, Patrick McCray complained about “writing shortcuts that occasionally make Victoria look like a moron.” I didn’t quote him in my post on that episode, because I don’t agree with his assessment of the scene- he thinks Vicki is falling for Roger’s obvious lies, I think she is disregarding them because she knows she has him where he wants him and is about to squeeze some information out of him. But this opening scene is definitely a case of Idiot Plot. Vicki chased David into the basement in episode 6, only to be menaced by Matthew and scolded by Elizabeth; she followed the sound of the sobbing woman there in 37, to be yelled at by Roger. Those were moments of hot pursuit, when she could claim that in the heat of the moment she forgot Elizabeth’s prohibition on going to the basement. But now, she’s just looking for some books. There’s no reason she couldn’t have asked Liz about the books before going to the basement. What’s more, she’s going after those books only because David, last seen telling her he’d make her wish she had never come to the house, suggested she go after them. I realize she’s had a stressful few days, but unless she’s had a massive head injury off-camera, going to the basement at David’s suggestion is inexplicable.

Of course, the out-of-universe explanation is obvious- a new actor is taking over the role of Matthew, and they want to introduce him on this set. On the one hand, the scene is a reprise of the first introduction of Matthew, thereby making it clear that this is a new start for the character. On the other hand, because it is his territory, and our point of view character is trespassing there, he is all the more menacing to us than he would be if we met him in someone else’s space.

I think Danny Horn described Thayer David’s acting style well when he said that “He’s loud, and disruptive, and he plays to the balcony. Not this balcony, naturally; I mean the balcony in the theater next door.” He’s relatively subdued in his first outing as Matthew, but the appliances the makeup shop constructed on his face prepare us for the titanic approach he’ll be taking in the weeks ahead.

Matthew goes upstairs. In the foyer, a more or less neutral space among the residents of the estate, Liz gives him a shopping list to take into town. She then asks him into the drawing room, her home base. There, she asks him to do something horrible- take the blame for Roger’s car crash. He is shocked at the request, and asks for an explanation. She doesn’t give him one, but he agrees anyway. Thayer David’s anguished face shows the terrible price Matthew is paying for Liz’ insistence on covering up what really happened between David and Roger.

This encounter closes the story of Roger’s crash. Along with the Mystery of the Locked Room, Vicki’s search for something David might like, and the talk about ghosts, it ties Thayer David’s Matthew in to four of the stories we’ve been following.

We next see him in town, ordering coffee at the restaurant in the Collinsport Inn. There he’s tied in to a fifth story, The Revenge of Burke Devlin. The Inn is Devlin’s territory, and Matthew encounters him there. Still unhappy because of Liz’s shocking request, Matthew is in no mood to be diplomatic with the known enemy of the family he is sworn to serve. He tells Devlin that if he makes trouble for Liz, “I’ll kill you.” Devlin tries to reason with him, asking if it makes a difference whether the family deserves trouble, to which Matthew does not respond kindly.

Even before Matthew came to town, Devlin had met another Collinwood resident at the restaurant. Carolyn sits at his table and notices he is reading The Count of Monte Cristo. She summarizes the plot, and realizes that it is one of the sources of The Revenge of Burke Devlin story-line. She’s so self-aware it wouldn’t be surprising if she and Burke started gossiping about what the new writers coming on board next week have in mind for their characters. She drops the subject, and immediately starts wheedling him for a date. When he begs off, she deliberately leaves a ring behind.

Back at Collinwood, Carolyn and Vicki talk on the landing overlooking the foyer. This is the first conversation we’ve seen in that space. A couple of times, we’ve seen David Collins standing up there by himself, looking menacing, or as menacing as a not-very-tall nine year old boy could. In the years to come, a succession of villains will take turns declaring themselves to be Master of Collinwood by standing on this spot and looking at the camera. The last of these will be the ghost of Gerard, played by an adult actor about the same height as the nine year old David.

This time, the space is not being used to suggest menace, even though the camera is shooting up at the same drastic angle. Instead, it is a relatively intimate place, separated from the public-facing foyer by the stairs and leading to the bedrooms. Carolyn and Vicki are there because they are at home. Carolyn confides in Vicki about her plan to leave the ring where Burke would find it, obligating him to call her and return it. Vicki confides in Carolyn about the sobbing woman, and Carolyn admits to having heard her many times, and to having lied when Vicki asked her about the sounds her first morning in Collinwood. The friendship between Carolyn and Vicki is settling in as a wide-open information exchange, a regular channel not only to keep the audience up to date on what’s happened in previous episodes, but to make it possible for characters to learn enough about what’s going on to make plans and take action.

Back down in the foyer, Liz talks to Vicki about the basement. Vicki tells her that she can’t believe in ghosts; Liz assures her there’s no one being held in the locked room. Liz offers Vicki the key to the room and invites her to let herself into it and search it. Vicki declines the offer. Liz repeats it, doing everything she can to show that she has nothing to hide. Vicki declines again, and turns away. As soon as Vicki can’t see her, Liz’ face resolves into an expression of immense relief.

Over the closing credits, ABC staff announcer delivers the usual blurb for “Where the Action Is.” He trips over the title. It sounds like he’s stifling a laugh or is distracted or something. Unusual to hear him commit a blooper!

Episode 37: Fatigue lines

Roger’s mounting anxiety about what Burke may learn from Sam leads him to alternate in each scene between yelling and begging. Depicting this, Louis Edmonds’ chews the scenery so hard that he momentarily loses track of Roger’s mid-Atlantic accent and slips into his native Louisiana drawl, yelling at Vicki “Jes supposin’ you a-tell me how long you wah standin’ in that doah-way?” Perhaps this is Marc Masse’s “David Ford Effect”– Ford came to the show from a long engagement as Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, maybe they’ve decided to transport Collinsport from Maine to the Mississippi Delta.

At the Evans cottage, Sam gives Maggie a sealed envelope to be opened in event of his death. Maggie is bewildered and upset. Surmising that her father’s trouble is to do with Collinwood, she wishes that the mansion would burn to the ground. Sam waxes philosophical, opining that “Ghosts of the past don’t live inside a home. They live inside each man. They fight for his soul.. twist it into something unrecognizable.”

Moments later we find out that Sam is wrong, ghosts totally live inside a home. In the middle of the night, Vicki is awakened by the same strange sobbing she had heard in episode 4. She follows it to the basement. Last time she was in the basement, in episode 6, Matthew found her there and spoke sharply to her. Now Roger finds her there and yells at her. As she had stood up to Roger in the drawing room earlier, so she stands up to him now. After their showdown, he even admits that he has heard the sobbing woman many times, and says that she may be “one of our ghosts.”

I divide the series into several periods, the first of which I call “Meet Vicki.” The major story-lines of the Meet Vicki period are all in a down-cycle during this episode. Roger’s panic and Sam’s melancholy are part of the Revenge of Burke Devlin story, but Roger’s activities today do nothing to advance that story, and Sam’s letter will become one of the most tedious MacGuffins in a series that is notorious for forcing the audience to sit through overlong contemplation of its MacGuffins. Roger’s angry reaction to finding Vicki in the basement touches on the Mystery of the Locked Room, which is connected with the question of why Liz became a recluse. Those stories haven’t advanced for weeks. The sobbing woman revives the question of whether the house is haunted. While Roger’s admission that he has heard the sobbing marks the first time one character knows what another is talking about concerning the ghostly happenings, it does not prompt any further action. The question of Vicki’s origins is at a stalemate, the romance between Carolyn and Joe is dead in the water, and David is so alienated right now that they can’t do much with Vicki’s attempts to befriend him.

So the Meet Vicki period has reached a dead end. Tomorrow we’re going to meet someone else, and a new period is going to begin.

Episode 24: Have you ever sat on a wrench?

The entire episode is set in the Collinsport Inn- the lobby, the restaurant, and Burke’s room.

In episode 21, Vicki took Liz in hand as if she were Plato’s Socrates and Liz were some pompous Athenian aristocrat, leading her through a series of simple, seemingly innocent questions to a most uncomfortable conclusion. That took place in the drawing room at Collinwood, while Carolyn watched. In episode 24, Carolyn joins Burke and the sheriff in Burke’s room. It’s Burke’s turn to play Socrates, Carolyn’s to answer the questions, and the sheriff’s to be an audience. Burke’s questioning is not only effective at raising doubts in the sheriff’s mind, but also prompts regular viewers to bracket Vicki and Burke together and see them as a likely, indeed inevitable, romantic pair.

The scenes in Burke’s room also highlight Roger’s bizarre folly in telling Burke his evidence against him before going to the police. We saw Vicki try to talk Roger out of this in two episodes, and the sheriff commented on it later. Watching the well-prepared Burke cross-examine Carolyn as effectively as any defense attorney, it is all the clearer that Roger’s behavior was driven not by any rational calculation, but by some wild impulse he cannot entirely control.

The scenes in the lobby and the restaurant show us a quiet rewriting of some characterizations laid out in episode 1. In that episode, Burke stood in the lobby and refused to admit that he so much as knew the name of Mr Wells, the hotel clerk, simply because Wells was from the town from which he was sent to prison ten years before. Now he stands on the same set, warmly greets one of the policemen who made the case against him, and repeatedly tries to persuade him to join him for lunch. Also in episode 1, Maggie stood behind the counter of the restaurant and told Vicki that she considers her, as a member of the staff of Collinwood, to be a “jerk” practically as bad as the family that owns the house. In this one, Carolyn herself comes into the restaurant and she and Maggie have a warm, cozy chat, like old friends.

I suppose it was inevitable that they would retcon Burke into a hail-fellow-well-met and Maggie into a friend of at least some of the Collinses. After all, soap operas consist mostly of conversation, so characters who aren’t on speaking terms with each other are dead weight. Placing these scenes on the same sets used in episode 1 is an emphatic way to make it clear to viewers who remember that episode that the change is intentional and permanent.

The videography is also as ambitious as we ever see it in this show. The camera tracks fluidly through the lobby, showing us more of that set than we see in any other episode, ending in a low angle shot of the sheriff that makes him look ominous. Some of those tracking shots are too much for Michael Currie, the actor playing the sheriff- during his scene alone with Burke, he bumps into one camera, stumbles into a piece of furniture, and then the other camera hits him in the back of the head. After that, he stands with his back to Burke and his elbows bent in front of him, looking for all the world like he is urinating on the floor:

Currie is so physically awkward that when Burke asks the sheriff the rhetorical question “Have you ever sat on a wrench?,” it seems to be a pretty near certainty that the answer is yes.

Currie has a rough time in this episode with his lines as well as with his movement. Perhaps the single funniest blooper comes when he declares that a good memory “is what I’m paid for,” then forgets his next line. It’s also interesting when he calls Burke “Burt.” Bloopers are after all one of the things Dark Shadows is known for, so we can’t be too annoyed with him for those. Worse is what happens when he does remember his lines. He intones them all as if he were leading the Pledge of Allegiance.

In the months after Mark Allen left the show, the standard of acting on it was remarkably high. Every actor other than Currie consistently turns in performances so strong that watching an episode feels like a fine evening at the theater. And bad as he is, even Currie doesn’t keep his scene partners from delivering good performances. He just wasn’t ready for professional acting. So I don’t have the same need to complain about him as about Allen, but he does deliver the series’ first laugh-out-loud moments of incompetence, and it is a relief when he is replaced.

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.

Tag: bloopers