book opens itself – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 902: I heard breathing

Heiress Carolyn Stoddard is working for her friends, Megan and Philip Todd, in their antique shop. She goes upstairs to tell Megan that Philip has telephoned. Carolyn hears heavy breathing coming from the room where a baby the Todds are taking care of sleeps. Megan comes out of the room and in a most imperious tone demands to know what Carolyn is doing there. She tells her Philip called, and asks about the breathing sounds. Megan sweetens up and says “It’s the radiator!” She says she’ll have to call the plumber about it. Carolyn is unconvinced.

Downstairs in the shop, Carolyn and Megan notice someone looking in the window. The shop is open for business and there is merchandise displayed in the window, but for some reason it unnerves them that they have attracted the notice of a potential customer. All we can see of the man is his clean-shaven upper lip. When Carolyn approaches the window, he runs away. The only sneaky man we have met so far in the current phase of the show is Carolyn’s long-absent and recently returned father Paul. Since Paul wears a mustache, the upper lip is enough to show us that this is a new character, at least new to the ongoing stories.

No mustache. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Carolyn and her mother Liz live in the great house on the estate of Collinwood. Also among the residents of the great house are Liz’ brother Roger Collins and Roger’s son, strange and troubled boy David. We cut to David’s bedroom, where a book opens by itself. We have seen books do this before on Dark Shadows, but I believe this is the first time I couldn’t see a cord being pulled. They really have come a long way with practical effects.

David reads aloud from the book, something about a child being cloaked in radiant garments. He is interrupted by his Aunt Liz. She asks him to notice that she knocked on the door, and tells him that she is learning to respect his privacy. She says she heard him reading aloud, and asks what it was. He says it was a school book. She starts talking about how terribly cold it is in his room. He brings up her ex-husband, Paul. Liz hadn’t known David was aware of Paul’s return, and gets very uncomfortable. She says he needs friends his own age, and hurries out of the room. Once she is gone, he goes through the room and gathers a lot of cash. Evidently David raised the subject of Paul to get the room to himself.

David does have one friend his own age, Amy Jennings. Amy lives in the great house, down the hall. We just saw Amy in #893 and #896, but she tends to be unmentioned in between appearances. Amy is a favorite of mine, and when they don’t use her name for long stretches I worry they are about to drop her from the show. It would have reassured me if Liz had named Amy as someone David ought to spend more time with.

Joan Bennett tends to do a lot of acting with her eyes when she plays a two-scene with David Henesy, and this is a good example. When Liz is pointing out her own good manners in knocking, it is her eyes that convey her mild amusement at the situation; when she is offering to help David with his schoolwork, her eyes follow him so closely that we notice all of the little movements he makes as he tries to get out of a tutoring session; when she talks about the coldness in the room, she looks from side to side, searching for the open window with increasing consternation; when he asks about Paul, her eyes bulge in their sockets, showing deep alarm. When she tells him he needs friends his own age, she raises her eyebrows, making it sound like a threat. Bennett had been so famous for so long that many of her scene partners would not react to what she was actually doing, but to what they expected her to do, forcing her to add Joan Bennett-isms to her performances. With Mr Henesy, she was free to work simply, and the result was consistently very effective.

Downstairs, Liz answers the telephone. To her disgust, Paul is calling. He tells her that if she doesn’t meet with him for a talk, she is in danger of losing Carolyn. She agrees to go to his hotel. Carolyn enters in time to catch the end of the conversation. Liz doesn’t want to talk about Paul with her any more than she did with David, and she exits.

Carolyn and David have a scene in the drawing room. She tells him he should go to bed; he says he wants to read the newspaper. He asks her if she hasn’t noticed that he has grown. Since the thirteen year old David Henesy was about the same height as Nancy Barrett, this question is worth a chuckle. David gets excited when he sees that Brewster’s Department Store in the village of Collinsport is going to be open nights until Christmas. He tears the Brewster’s ad out of the paper while Carolyn reminds him he can’t leave the house tonight. He says that of course he can’t, it’s late.

In his post about the episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn asked if David’s reaction to the Brewster’s ad is the only reference to Christmas in the whole series. His commenters responded that Christmas is also mentioned in #92, #123, #257, #810 (twice,) #887, and #1050. It’s hilarious to read through the thread and see the citations mount up. I sympathize with Danny, though- I tagged my posts about the first couple of episodes on that list with “Christmas,” because I, too, was sure that the holiday was only named once or twice in Dark Shadows.

Carolyn exits, and David sneaks out the front door. As he does, a man in a belted overcoat walks into the house. We see him only from the midsection down. He straightens the portrait of the Collinses’ distant cousin Barnabas that hangs in the foyer of the great house. This suggests that whoever he is, he has some connection with Barnabas. Carolyn comes back, and the man hides behind the curtains in the drawing room. This has been a favored hiding place for the last several months, suggesting that the man knows the house. Carolyn leaves, and the man goes out. If all he wanted to do was straighten that portrait, he could count his journey a success. Otherwise, it’s hard to see what the point of it was.

At the hotel, Paul struggles to explain his concerns to Liz. He is hampered by his own ignorance- he does not know exactly who is after him or what they want to do, but he knows they have some kind of sinister plan for Carolyn. Paul admits that Liz has no reason to believe anything he says, after his total failure as a husband, but he keeps urging her to take Carolyn and go far away, not telling anyone that they are going. She is exasperated with what she takes to be yet another of his scams, and tells him that “I’ll never figure out this latest plot of yours.” Indeed, the story is taking shape slowly enough that some viewers will have been saying the same thing.

Bennett and Dennis Patrick had many scenes together from March to July 1967, when he played seagoing con man Jason McGuire. Liz’ relationship with Jason was one-dimensional, consisting of nothing but a series of blackmail threats from him followed by capitulations from her. As her ex-husband, Paul offers far more for Liz to react against, and this scene is far richer and more satisfying than was anything we saw in the dreary Liz/ Jason story.

Liz goes out of the Collinsport Inn and sees David entering the antique shop across the street. The Inn has been part of the show from episode #1, but this is the first time we see a set representing its outside. Cutting between that set and the set representing the exterior of the antique shop, they make an attempt to create a sense of Collinsport as a place. When the show was in black and white, they would occasionally insert video they had taken at various locations in upstate New York and southern New England to achieve that effect, but they haven’t left 433 West 53rd Street since they went to color in August 1967. This quick cut between minimally decorated parts of the studio doesn’t work as well as that footage did, but it is a valiant effort in its own way.

Liz goes into the antique shop and insists Megan let her search the place for David. Since Liz essentially owns the town, Megan can’t say no. We conclude with Liz outside the door of the room upstairs from which Carolyn heard the breathing when we began. We hear the breathing again. David is inside the room, telling some unseen presence that it will like what he bought for it at Brewster’s. Perhaps he found it in the Unseen Presences section of the store. It’s in Collinsport, after all. David stops talking when he hears Liz’ voice; the breathing cuts out at the same time.

Episode 697: He was so cold and evil, he touched me.

Chris Jennings is a werewolf, a fact which old world gentleman Barnabas Collins is helping him conceal. Two years ago, Chris’ fiancée Sabrina Stuart chanced to see him transform; she hasn’t been able to speak since. Her hair turned white, and she is in a nearly catatonic state. Sabrina’s brother, a very loud man named Ned, has brought her to the village of Collinsport and keeps demanding that Chris visit them and explain what happened.

There is a full moon tonight, so Barnabas has sealed Chris up in the secret chamber hidden in the old Collins family mausoleum. He tells Chris that he will try to persuade the Stuarts to leave town and forget about him. Chris tells him that is impossible; Barnabas seems to believe he can pull it off.

In the Stuarts’ suite at the Collinsport Inn, Barnabas tells Ned that he is harming Sabrina by taking her along on his mission to confront Chris and that he ought to take her home and move on with his life. Preposterous as this is, Ned makes it seem credible. To be more precise, it is actor Roger Davis who makes it seem credible. He rubs himself all over Lisa Blake Richards’ scalp, face, and chest while she is required to remain motionless. To the extent that we accept them as their characters, we are forced to think of Ned as a caretaker who abuses his disabled sister sexually; to the extent that we recognize Mr Davis’ behavior as typical of his previous performances on Dark Shadows, we wonder how bad things were for women in show business in the late 1960s that Miss Richards didn’t contact the union and bring him up on charges. It isn’t every performer who can make an audience sympathize with an ex-vampire’s attempt to keep a woman in a comatose state lest she endanger his werewolf buddy, but you can always trust Mr Davis to enlist the viewers’ support for any plot development that will get him off the screen.

I wonder how much of that look is Barnabas reacting to Ned’s story and how much is Jonathan Frid wondering if he should stop tape and call Equity. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

There are also some indications that the show is firming up some of its world-building. For the first time, we hear the name “Edward Collins” as the grandfather of the senior generation now resident at the great house of Collinwood. We hear that Edward was the father of Jamison Collins and the brother of Quentin Collins. Quentin was first mentioned months ago as Jamison’s uncle, but on Friday Barnabas had a line identifying him as his brother, suggesting some behind-the-scenes wavering about this point. Quentin’s ghost is the chief villain in the current A story, and we heard several weeks ago that he wants to turn strange and troubled boy David Collins into a replica of Jamison, so these relationships are important to the action.

Longtime viewers will have fond memories when stuffy Roger Collins sees a book open by itself on the table in the drawing room of the great house. The same book opened itself on the same table in #52, one of the first unmistakable signs that ghosts were at work. No one but the audience was around to see that, but when it happened again in #182, Roger was there. It jolted him out of his refusal to face the facts about the supernatural menace operating at that time.

Episode 182: That spook bit

Like many children of divorce, strange and troubled boy David Collins finds himself having to decide which parent he will live with. He and his father, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger, have been living in the great house of Collinwood as guests of Roger’s sister, reclusive matriarch Liz, ever since Roger ran out of money some months ago. Now David’s mother, blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, has reappeared after an absence of many years, and she wants to take David. This idea delighted Roger from the first, but David had initially reacted to Laura with fear. He still has mixed feelings about her.

Today, well-meaning governess Vicki is trying to get David to focus on his studies. He tells her that he is thinking about his living situation. He likes Collinwood, especially since Vicki came. But he has just about decided to go away with his mother.

Vicki asks why David wants to do this. He reminds her of a vision he had yesterday that terrified him. He saw himself in the fireplace, immersed in flames and showing no sign of wanting to escape them. He interprets this as a warning from the supernatural realm that he is in great danger, and that the danger is to be found at Collinwood. He believes he will find safety if he goes far from the estate with his mother.

Vicki knows that David is partly correct. She has considerable evidence that the ghost of Josette Collins has been trying to warn David and her and several other people that David is in danger of being burned alive. She is also sure that the source of this danger is at Collinwood- it is Laura herself. She is an inhuman creature who will burn David alive. Vicki can’t tell David about this, but she does remind him of some of Josette’s previous warnings. David realizes that his mother featured prominently in those warnings, but does not see that she is the one Josette is warning him about. To Vicki’s dismay, David concludes that Laura is also in danger, and that it is urgent that the two of them go off together at once.

When her warnings to David backfire, Josette is running true to form. The first time she tried to rescue someone from imminent peril was in episode 122, when crazed handyman Matthew Morgan had kidnapped Vicki. Matthew’s response upon hearing a ghostly voice was to put a knife to Vicki’s throat. Eventually Josette enlisted some of her buddies from that land of ghosts which forms the back-world behind what we see, and together they would stop Matthew and save Vicki. Here again, Josette needs help getting her point across.

Of all the characters, David is the one who has had the easiest rapport with Josette. In #102, we saw him standing in front of her portrait in the long-abandoned Old House on the grounds of Collinwood, chattering happily away to her. We couldn’t hear her, but he could. She had no need to manifest herself visibly or do anything else spectacular; she and David could just talk to each other.

Now, Laura is blocking Josette’s attempts to communicate. In #165, Josette manifested in a room with Laura and David; Laura ordered her to go away, and she did. In #170, Josette began speaking through Vicki at a séance; Laura silenced her, and in later episodes visiting parapsychologist Dr Guthrie said that Josette was battling against some power at least equal to her own. Strong as Josette’s connection to David has been, she cannot break through his mother’s interference.

Vicki confers with Guthrie. They decide to present their case to Roger, who alone has the legal right to oppose Laura’s wish to take David, and to dashing action hero Burke Devlin, who has a great influence over the boy. Guthrie meets with Roger in the drawing room, and Vicki goes to Burke’s suite at the Collinsport Inn.

Roger despised Guthrie as a quack starting almost as soon as he met him, but in his most recent appearance, in #178, he started to suspect that there might be something to Guthrie’s ideas. He is quite rude to Guthrie throughout their conversation today, but does hear him out.

Burke respects Vicki, but finds it impossible to sit still when she starts talking about Josette. So she sticks to the demonstrable facts. The camera sticks to Alexandra Moltke Isles’ eyes, on which the light plays arrestingly.

At length, Burke admits that something strange might be going on. Vicki asks Burke if he will stop encouraging David to go away with his mother. He says he believes that he ought to stop doing that, but that he doesn’t know what he will actually do after he next sees Laura. Vicki says she knows how he feels about Laura. Burke tells her that he himself doesn’t know how he feels about Laura, or about anyone else.

Mitch Ryan projects Burke’s bewilderment about his own behavior when he is with Laura. We haven’t seen any sign that Laura has cast a spell on Burke. So far, it is entirely possible that Burke is just smitten with Laura. She was the ex-girlfriend who left him for Roger and is now suggesting she wants to get back together with him. As such, she is the symbol of both his lost youth and his upcoming triumph over his bitter enemy. Also, she is beautiful, and can be hilariously funny. That combination would be enough to cloud anyone’s mind. But when Burke is telling Vicki how confused he is about his emotions, we wonder if there might be some witchcraft involved as well.

Back at Collinwood, Roger and David are in the drawing room. David tells Roger that he wants to go away with Laura, and when Roger asks why he has made that decision David tells him what he saw in the fire. David asks him if he still wants him to go away. In previous episodes, David had asked Roger about his hostility towards him. Sometimes Roger parried these questions with witty remarks, other times he simply dismissed David and walked away. Now Roger just chokes up. “We’ll see,” he keeps saying. “We’ll see.” What we the audience see in Louis Edmonds’ performance is a man who is starting to realize what he has thrown away by refusing to love his son. It makes a powerful moment.

After David leaves him alone in the drawing room, Roger assumes his usual position in front of the brandy bottle and pours himself a glass. He lifts it to his lips, then looks around, as if he detects an unusual scent in the air. He sets the drink down. He turns, and sees an old book open itself.

A book first did this in the drawing room in #52. That time the Collins family history opened to a picture of Josette. More recently, Josette’s signature jasmine perfume was in the air in the crypt at the old cemetery when a book opened itself there in #157. Regular viewers will therefore assume that when a book opens without visible aid of a cast member, it is Josette, the spectral research librarian, leading the characters to the information they need.

Roger hasn’t seen these previous occurrences, and he has chosen to disregard the evidence he has seen for the existence of supernatural influences around him. So the sight of the book opening itself comes as a great shock to him. When he looks at the page to which it has opened, he finds out something about the death of a woman named Laura Murdoch Radcliffe, whom Guthrie and Vicki believe to be an earlier incarnation of his wife. That Laura had died by fire in 1867, along with her young son David. Guthrie had told Roger that. A fact he had not mentioned, and which strikes Roger with particular terror, is that David Radcliffe had not wanted to be rescued from the fire. He had wanted to burn.

The idea of Laura the Phoenix is an interesting one, and the storyline gives Josette and the other vague, indefinable spirits of the supernatural back-world Dark Shadows has been hinting at since it began a suitable adversary to bring them into the action of the main continuity. But most of the individual episodes are so slow, so heavy with recapping, and so confused in their development that few of them can be recommended on their own merits. Indeed, this is only the second episode from the Laura arc, after #146, to which I apply the “Genuinely Good Episode” tag.

After we watched the episode, my wife, Mrs Acilius, shared her theory that the show is getting better because they’ve learned that it will be renewed for another 13 weeks. That makes sense- if it was going to be canceled after #195, the writers might not want to come up with any fresh stories and the producers certainly wouldn’t want to pay to build any new sets or hire actors to play new characters. Better just to run out the clock so that the Laura arc ends in #195 and everyone else lives spookily ever after. But if they know they can keep going until #260, they will have time to work out new ideas.

Whatever was going on among the writers, the actors seem to have been in a good mood today. David Henesy and Mrs Isles horse around a bit with the opening slate. He strikes a goofy pose to hold it, and she creeps up on him and puts her hand over his mouth.

Episode 157: Exactly 100 years

In episode 10, reclusive matriarch Liz had napped in a chair in the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood. Her sleep was troubled by unpleasant dreams; we saw her shifting in the chair and heard her muttering about ghosts. Strange and troubled boy David awakened her when he came in, having just sabotaged his father’s car in an attempt to murder him.

Today, we open with well-meaning governess Vicki sleeping in the same chair, showing the same signs of discomfort, and muttering in her sleep words she had heard Liz say in a mad scene at the end of yesterday’s episode: “fire… stone… bird…”

Vicki awakens, not to find David returning from a homicidal errand, but to be overwhelmed by the presence of the ghost of Josette Collins. She smells Josette’s jasmine perfume, and the picture is out of focus. She walks around the room talking to Josette, whom we can neither see nor hear. She agrees to some instruction from Josette only she can hear.

Vicki’s boyfriend, instantly forgettable young lawyer Frank, shows up. He is complaining that Vicki called him at 5 AM, asked him to come over at once, and still won’t explain why.

Liz’ brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins, appears at the top of the stairs and demands to know what Frank is doing in the house. Vicki claims that she wants Frank to take her for a drive in the country to help her clear her head. This makes sense to Roger. Liz is in a very bad way, for no reason the doctors can determine, and it has been a rough night in the house. Roger tells Vicki that he thinks it would be a good idea if she and Frank did take a drive. He is going to need a lot of help today, and the more relaxed Vicki is, the better able she will be to provide it.

The audience knows what Vicki has come to suspect, that Roger’s estranged wife Laura is a blonde fire witch who is responsible for Liz’ condition. Laura is staying in the cottage on the estate and she and Roger have begun the process of divorce. Laura and Liz clashed about guardianship of David, and Laura responded by casting a spell on Liz. With something like this in mind, Vicki wants Frank to take her back to a cemetery where they found some clues about Laura last week.

It is interesting to see Vicki with Frank in this episode. She is usually very demure, rarely looking anyone directly in the eye and consistently using a soft, delicate voice. She is that way today when Roger is around. But she looks straight at Frank and tells him in a crisp, candid tone just what they are going to do and why they are going to do it. That’s one of the reasons I keep wishing someone other than Conard Fowkes had played Frank. Fowkes is so dull that he simply could not survive on a show like Dark Shadows, but Frank is a character who gives us a chance to see a seldom-glimpsed side of Vicki.

Frank and Vicki visit the Caretaker of the cemetery outside town. In the archives of his building, Vicki smells jasmine and feels Josette’s presence. The Caretaker catches a distant whiff of jasmine too, but only Vicki’s nose can lead her to where Josette wants her to go. Josette pushes a book off a shelf and opens it to a page about a Laura Murdoch Radcliffe, who died by fire in Collinsport in 1867. Since they already know of another Laura Murdoch who died by fire there in 1767 and of someone who is medically indistinguishable from Laura Murdoch Collins who died by fire in Arizona earlier this year (1967,) Vicki finds great significance in the interval of 100 years. She tells Frank that the Laura Murdochs who died in Collinsport in 1767 and 1867 and the woman who died in Arizona this year are parts of the same corporate entity that is represented by the woman staying in the cottage.

Patrick McCray and Wallace McBride of “The Collinsport Historical Society” gave up writing daily episode commentaries around the time Ron Sproat joined the writing staff of Dark Shadows, but McCray does have a post about this episode. As usual, his remarks are thought-provoking:

We are about fifty episodes away from the introduction of Barnabas Collins, and you can feel the show straining with the need for it. We are at least watching a supernatural show, now. Going back to something less exotic will take the charm of a Dennis Patrick to pull off. He and Laura have something new that they are bringing/will bring to the show. One of the problems with the first six months of the show is how sad it is. The villains are wracked with guilt, somewhat grating in their personalities, and driven by necessity. Laura changes that. Her contribution to the show is less supernatural than philosophical. She likes who she is. She likes what she’s doing. She is demented enough to see that burning David alive is just dandy. Contrast this with Roger. He just wanted to be left alone, like a quietly queeny, ineffectual Hulk.
The Dark Shadows Daybook, 24 January 2018

I’m not at all sure Laura “likes what she’s doing.” Most of the time, what she’s doing is sitting motionless by the fire. She is stirred from that position only when someone calls for her, and then only with difficulty.

The only times happiness registers on Diana Millay’s face are when Laura is talking to David and telling him about the blissful life that awaits in the fantastic realm she comes from, not about the path she must take to approach that realm. At other times, her dominant mood is weariness and her manner is so distant as to be inscrutable. With characters other than David, she is energetic and immediate only when she flies into a rage.

We don’t even know how many of her there are. Vicki tells Frank at the end of today’s episode that Laura seems to be made up of four components, but the audience also knows of ghostly apparitions that seem to travel with those corporeal Lauras and to be at least partly independent of them. Maybe somewhere in that complex there is a spirit that delights in the idea of taking David into a pyre, but we don’t see that delight.

McCray goes on:

Burke? He just wanted to even the odds. I get that. But his victory would mean shutting down Collinwood, and that gives any viewer mixed feelings. As much as I like Burke, his storyline misfired because you’re left with nobody to root for. If Burke wins, the show has to end, and that’s not going to happen. For Burke to lose, justice must elude him once more, and a character we like goes away. I suppose that the show originally was so Vicki-centric that we weren’t supposed to care for either Team Burke or Team Collins compared with Team Winters. With the arrival of Laura, all of this changes. (I say this because Matthew was a loon and couldn’t take pride in his wrongdoing.) Like Burke and Roger or not, everyone is pitted against/used by the first in a series of Gloucesters employed by the series to delight viewers.
Ibid

McCray is exactly right that Burke’s original storyline could never be resolved. The character had an even bigger problem that prevented the writers from coming up with a new storyline for him. That problem is his type. As a dashing action hero, sooner or later he’s going to have to rescue someone. Yet he never gets to save anyone from anything.

The first three rescues on the show are all rescues of Vicki. David locks her up and leaves her to die in the abandoned part of the great house of Collinwood. Burke doesn’t have access to that part of the house, so she ends up being rescued by Roger, of all people. That adds some complexity to Vicki’s attitude to Roger, keeps her from catching on to some plot points she isn’t supposed to understand yet, and most importantly enlarges the obstacles keeping her from befriending David, thereby enriching the one narrative arc that works every time we see it.

Next, gruff groundskeeper Matthew tries to break Vicki’s neck in the cottage. Liz saves her that time. It would have to be her, since she is the only person Matthew listens to. That’s the in-universe reason. Also, Joan Bennett is the biggest star on the show, the origin of the relationship between Liz and Vicki is supposed to be the biggest secret in the show, and the mostly-female audience of a daytime soap might be interested in a scene where a female character saves the day. So it is more satisfying all around to have Liz rescue Vicki from Matthew than it would have been to have Burke barge in.

When Matthew is holding Vicki prisoner in the Old House on the estate and is about to swing an ax at her head, Burke is in the area looking for her. But it is the ghosts of Josette and the Widows, accompanied by the ghost of beloved local man Bill Malloy, who rescue Vicki then. Burke and Roger show up after the fact and walk her home. The show has spent so much time building up the ghosts and the supernatural back-world behind the continuity in which the characters operate that it would be a cheat if they did not come forward at this point and bring a story to its climax. Again, Burke is left on the outside looking in.

Now David needs rescuing, but since the show’s most reliably interesting storyline has been the budding friendship between David and Vicki, she is the only one who can be his rescuer. Burke is got out of the way by having Laura entrance him with the memory of their old love. Since the threat to David is supernatural, this is also an opportunity to bring the ghosts back into play.

When the vampire story begins, Burke will become entirely superfluous. A dashing action hero can’t allow a bloodsucking fiend to run amok. But stop the vampire, and you stop the first ratings generator the show has ever had. So that will finish Burke once and for all.

Further:

I may be so-so on the Phoenix as a big bad on the show, partly because she was such an out-there villain, grounded in an unclear mythology. Nonetheless, she ushered in a sentient, supernatural threat and a new school of evil that finally gave viewers a moral compass to lead them through Collinsport.
Ibid.

It may be pedantic to point this out, but it is the nature of supernatural mythologies to be unclear. Once you pass the point where the laws of nature that we can examine out in the open apply, it’s up to the audience to guess at what the alternative structure of cause and effect might be. The storytellers can guide our guesses. Vicki’s discovery that the three Laura Murdochs died by fire in 1767, 1867, and 1967 leads her to tell us that the hundredth anniversary of the previous fire has the power to cause the next one. The power of anniversaries will indeed become a major part of Dark Shadows’ cosmology, coming up in several future storylines, and is the inspiration for my posting these blog entries at 4:00 pm Eastern time on the 56th anniversary of each episode’s original broadcast.

When you get to vampires and witches and Frankensteins and werewolves and other relatively familiar monsters, you can draw on horror movies produced by Universal Studios in the 1930s and endlessly shown on television since the 1950s, and beyond those on the plays, novels, and folklore from which those movies derived some of their imagery. That reduces the amount of explaining the protagonist has to do. We all know what blood and bats and wooden stakes and crosses and mirrors and daylight signify in connection with vampires, for example. That creates an impression that there are clear and logical rules, but when you hang out with the vampire for a thousand episodes you start to realize just how little sense any of those rules really make.

Laura is interesting precisely because she starts without any of that unearned sense of clarity. The show has to build her up to the point where she makes enough sense that we are in suspense, but not to go beyond that point and explain so much that we can’t avoid realizing how disconnected she is from the world we live in. I’d say they strike that balance quite well.

Moreover, because we have so little information about Laura, she is the perfect adversary for the supernatural beings we have met so far on the show. The ghosts of Josette and the Widows are definitely around, but they are deep in the background, seldom seen, even more seldom heard, and when they do intervene in the visible world their actions are brief and the consequences of them ambiguous. These vague, distant presences are credible as a counterforce to a figure as undefined as Laura, but have to evaporate when a menace appears that calls for a dynamic response sustained over a long period. Since the show has spent so much time hinting around about Josette and the Widows, it would be a shame if they hadn’t come up with a supernatural adversary for them to engage.

Back to McCray:

This episode is rich in atmosphere and menace, but anything involving the mysterious Caretaker will do that. It serves up Collins history as a net that strangles generation after generation… and the place where the answers to today’s mysteries will be found. The show has always been about the past… Paul Stoddard, the car accident, Vicki’s parentage… but (Widows notwithstanding) never beyond the lifetimes of the protagonists. By having our heroes deal with ancient dangers that still long to cause harm, DARK SHADOWS truly begins.
Ibid.

I demur from lines like “Dark Shadows truly begins” at some point other than episode 1. The whole wild ride of improvisation and reinvention is what I find irresistible. Each period of the show has some connections to the one immediately before it, but as time goes on there is absolutely no telling where they will go. Watching this part, the so-called “Phoenix” story, you can just about see how it follows from the moody, atmospheric showcase that Art Wallace and Francis Swann’s scripts provided for fine acting, ambitious visual compositions, and evocations of Gothic romance in the first 20 weeks of the series. And you can just about see how the period of the show that comes after it is resolved follows from the Phoenix. But when you look at the stories they will be doing in 1968 and later, all you can do is ask how they could possibly have found their way from here to there. Going along for that chaotic, meandering journey is the fun of it, and you deny yourself a little bit of that fun every time you ignore or downgrade an episode.

I also have reservations about the remark that “This episode… serves up Collins history as a net that strangles generation after generation.” The 1767 incarnation of Laura Murdoch married into the Stockbridge family, and the Caretaker told us they were great and powerful. The 1867 version of her married into the Radcliffes, and the Caretaker is shocked to find that her parents are not listed in his records- the Radcliffes were so high and mighty that none of them would ever have married someone whose parents were not known. So the history that strangles generation after generation is not the history of a single family, but something about the part of central Maine where Collinsport is. “Laura Murdoch” is a curse that falls on each prominent family in the region in its turn.

Episode 52: The very atmosphere

We intercut between two contrasting scenes: in the mansion at Collinwood, Vicki the governess and Carolyn the heiress pour their hearts out to each other, while in the Evans cottage drunken artist Sam refuses to answer any of the questions his adult daughter Maggie puts to him.

The disappearance of doughty plant manager Bill Malloy looms over both conversations. Vicki and Carolyn can’t avoid the conclusion that the body they saw face-down on the beach at the end of Friday’s episode was Malloy’s. Sam tells Maggie that the reason he can’t sleep is that he’s worried about Malloy.

The two settings connect when Sam telephones Collinwood in hopes the dastardly Roger will answer. The call prompts Vicki and Carolyn to break up their slumber party in Vicki’s room and come to the telephone outside the drawing room.

Vicki answers the telephone. Sam says “Collins,” Vicki asks to whom she is speaking, he hangs up. They then hear a noise from inside the drawing room. They go in and search to see if anyone is hiding there. Vicki goes directly to the window and pays special attention to the area behind the curtain on her right, a spot that will become a frequent hiding place much later in the series. I suppose it makes sense that people would eventually start hiding there- the camera has a great angle on it. Smart of Vicki to know that’s the first place to look.

The girls find a book open on the floor. Vicki demonstrates that the noise they heard was the sound of the book falling, but she cannot explain how it moved several feet from the table where it was kept to the spot where she and Carolyn found it. Carolyn insists that they consider the possibility that a ghost put it there. Since they had heard the same sound at least once while they were still in Vicki’s room, it would make sense to consider that someone or something must have been involved in picking it up and dropping it again.

Vicki holds the book several feet from the table — Screenshot by Dark Shadows from the Beginning

Vicki and Carolyn leave the drawing room, and we see the book reopen itself to the same page. The camera zooms in, and we see that the page bears the name and likeness of Josette Collins. This is the first supernatural manifestation that the audience sees when no character is looking. We’ve been hearing about the ghost of Josette Collins from week one; we have to assume that she is leaving us her carte de visite.

The book opens by itself — Screen capture by Dark Shadows from the Beginning

Each of the previous supernatural manifestations had marked a moment when off-screen events were stirring up the spirits that inhabit the back-world behind the universe the characters inhabit. When troubled rich boy David had tampered with the brakes on his father Roger’s car in an attempt at patricide, reclusive matriarch Liz was asleep and ghosts were trying to reach her in her dreams. That same night, Vicki saw a door open and close itself inexplicably, and saw a shrouded figure on the threshold of the drawing room. At the beginning of this episode, Carolyn admitted to Vicki that while Collinwood has always been a strange place, it was only when she and Burke came to town that the really weird stuff started happening. So we have to take it that Vicki’s presence in the house is itself a matter of concern to Josette and the other ghosts, and that what is happening off-screen in connection with the body on the beach and the secrets Sam refuses to share with Maggie are going to bring the phantoms out of the back-world into the foreground.

It’s also interesting that the first character we see after the ghost of Josette announces herself is Maggie. At this point and for some months to come, the show will be developing a connection between Vicki and the ghost of Josette. But later on, both Maggie the character and Kathryn Leigh Scott the actress will be very much involved with Josette. The series involved very little advance planning, nothing at all like daytime serials of the present day that have their stories sketched out in detail months in advance, so that is probably just something you’d expect to happen when you only have four actors in the studio. Still it’s an eldritch moment for repeat viewers.

Within the context of the show as it actually was at this period, I think there is a point to the juxtaposition of the ghost of Josette with the scene between Maggie and Sam in the Evans cottage. Vicki and Carolyn are girls at a slumber party scaring each other with ghost stories. Even when the slumber party takes place in a mansion on a great estate belonging to the family that gave the town its name, that’s a silly situation. When the ghost stories turn out to be true, though, you’re suddenly vaulted into an elevated realm of fantasy. Turn to a small house where the adult child of an alcoholic is wearing her late mother’s night-gown and trying fruitlessly to prise some useful information out of her drunken parent, and you land back in the real world with a thud. Nothing here seems to be either silly or fantastic. Sam’s association with Roger’s secret, and therefore with the unknown events that are roiling the supernatural world, suggests that the mundane struggles of the Evanses and the fantastic doings at Collinwood will sooner or later collapse into each other.

I should mention Marc Masse’s post about this episode on his always intriguing, usually inaccessible blog Dark Shadows from the Beginning. Masse meticulously demonstrates the influence of the 1944 film The Uninvited on the show in general and this episode in particular with close analysis and multiple screenshots, and then does the same thing with an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents called “The Gentleman from America.” It’s a very impressive and thoroughly convincing work of scholarship.

Masse’s blog is infamous among many Dark Shadows fans because of what he presents as transcripts of conversations between director Lela Swift, executive producer Dan Curtis, and others that he claims were picked up by the control room microphone and that he has recovered by some more or less magical technique unknown to other audio technicians. In this one he includes such a “transcript,” in which Swift (who didn’t direct this episode, but is supposed to be in the control room anyway) tells Curtis that she thinks it’s a terrible idea to do a ghost story or a Hitchcock story on daytime TV.

That installment of “The Dan and Lela Show” is pretty tedious to read, but in a way it’s a relief. In previous posts Masse has presented Swift as maniacally driven by lust for the female cast members, a presentation that her husband and their children might have found surprising. His post for episode 48 brings that presentation to a sort of crescendo. Since this one includes two shots of Vicki and Carolyn in bed together, I braced myself for Masse to outdo himself in that line, but there isn’t a bit of it there.