carolyn stoddard – Page 6 – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 344: Listen to the music, listen!

Strange and troubled boy David Collins is sitting on his bed. The ghost of his cousin Sarah is with him, playing “London Bridge” on her flute. She has told him that local physician Dave Woodard is dead, and he is depressed. She explains that she thought she had to tell him.

Sarah says she thinks that Woodard’s death was a terrible one and that it shouldn’t have happened. She denies knowing any more than that, and when David presses her for further information she becomes uncomfortable and vanishes.

David’s aunt, matriarch Liz, comes into his room to break the news to him about Woodard. She is startled to find that he already knows. She is distressed at his attitude of complete resignation. Woodard was the only adult who believed all of the facts about the supernatural menace looming over the great estate of Collinwood and the town of Collinsport that David and Sarah have shared with each other, and when David last saw him Woodard was trying to do something about that menace. David takes Woodard’s death as the end of all hope.

Downstairs, Liz meets her daughter Carolyn and well-meaning governess Vicki. She tells them how sad David is, and Carolyn goes up to see him. She starts talking about imaginary friends, and David asks if she means Sarah. Carolyn says that she doesn’t think Sarah is imaginary, and David replies “You don’t have to pretend. I don’t care.” He isn’t the least bit angry with her- he means exactly what he says when he tells her he doesn’t care how she feels about him.

Viewers who have been with the show from the beginning could see that reaction coming. For the first 24 weeks or so, Carolyn was a flighty heiress, a self-centered young woman who took no interest at all in her little cousin. Since then they have discarded that theme and Carolyn has become a mature and caring person. She and David have had some moments where she has seemed like a big sister. Still, she is still far less involved with him than is Vicki, and David doesn’t have any hopes that even Vicki will listen to him when he tells the truth about the strange goings-on. So when David says “I don’t care,” Carolyn is hit by a freight train that we’ve seen coming for a long time.

This new Carolyn won’t give up on David. She confides that when she was nine years old, she had a friend named Randy, a little boy who always wore a red sweater and who may or may not have existed. Carolyn admits that Randy may have been a ghost, and there is a moment when, as Danny Horn puts it on his Dark Shadows Every Day, “David stands up, and he looks at her, as if they’re really seeing each other for the first time in a long while.” The first time ever, I’d say- David and his father Roger only moved into the house a month or so before the show started, and by that time Carolyn was the character we first saw.

This isn’t the first time the audience has seen this side of Carolyn. In the opening weeks of Dark Shadows, she was one of several characters who had brief conversations with Vicki about the legendary ghosts of Collinwood, and she was the most persistent about laughing those legends off. But before the show had been on the air for five weeks, Carolyn admitted to Vicki that the legends were all true, and that she had tried to downplay them only because she liked Vicki and wanted her to stay.

That development is recapitulated in this scene. Where Vicki had reacted with confusion, telling herself that she ought to be concerned about Carolyn’s mental health but unable to quash a sickly feeling that she might be right, David reacts with wonderment. He is beyond trying to do anything about the horrors that he knows are in progress, let alone appealing to anyone to join him in fighting them, but we can see him absorbing the information that Carolyn is not at all the person she had led him to believe she was.

Once Carolyn stops pretending she does not believe in ghosts, we see why she and the other adults in the family are so insistent about keeping the door shut on the supernatural back-world behind the main action. “London Bridge” starts playing on the soundtrack; Carolyn and David can both hear it. As it goes on, David declares that something terrible is about to happen. It will be an accident- no one will cause it, no one wants it to happen. But it can’t be stopped. Carolyn asks how he knows, and he says he just does.

David communes with the spirits. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The little girl we saw in the opening is Sarah, but in this moment we realize she is not the whole of Sarah. The girl is only one manifestation of an unfathomably vast complex of phenomena. The world in which the action appears to be taking place is a tiny, fragile thing by comparison with forces like Sarah. If the characters stray from their little paths of denial and evasion the whole thing may at any moment dissolve altogether, thrusting the back-world into the foreground and leaving them adrift. After a few minutes of David’s soothsaying, Carolyn protests that “None of this is real, it can’t be!” But it’s too late- she knows that it is all too real, and the world of love affairs and hotels and motorcycles and dress shops and restaurants in which she has spent the last 69 weeks trying to find a place is a dream from which she is already starting to awaken.

Meanwhile, Vicki and her depressing fiancé Burke have declined Liz’ offer to live in the west wing of Collinwood when they are married. Liz had hoped to keep Vicki around so that she could help with David. When Burke asks if he should talk to David, Liz tells him not to bother. Carolyn already talked to him, Liz explains, and so far from calming David down she got herself upset too.

That response would suggest that Liz wants to tranquilize David, not to communicate with him. On the heels of the scene between David and Carolyn, it tells us more. Liz has lived in Collinwood longer than anyone, and she has struggled harder than anyone to keep the non-supernatural fore-world in operation. After Carolyn’s experiment in facing facts comes so close to sweeping the “logical explanations” away once and for all, we can see what Liz is trying to protect by keeping David quiet.

Burke is leaving the house, about to go on a business trip to South America, when David emerges from his room and says goodbye. David’s tone makes it clear that it is a final farewell. Burke keeps telling David that he will come back, but David is certain that Burke will die. Burke is shocked by David’s attitude, and says that perhaps they should live in the west wing after all. Vicki is thrilled by the idea.

Burke and Vicki go to a terrace outside the house. There, they hear the wind whistling through the rocks along the shore. On Vicki’s first night in the house, she heard from Liz’ brother Roger the legend of “The Widows’ Wail,” according to which this sound is a warning from the spirits of the widows who haunt the area. In those days, Vicki had little patience for ghost stories, and the “Widows’ Wail” seemed to be the easiest of all the legends to dismiss. But the wind blows every night, and she’s only heard it make that sound on a handful of occasions, usually right before something terrible happens. She’s also seen multiple ghosts, done battle with a humanoid Phoenix, and encountered what anyone with access to old movies would recognize as evidence that a vampire is operating in the vicinity. So she hears the Widows’ Wail the same way regular viewers of the show do, as the sound of the supernatural back-world blasting through and knocking everything else down.

Vicki hears the Widows’ Wail. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

When Vicki pleads with Burke not to go to South America, he replies “Don’t tell me you’re starting to believe all that stuff!” For months now, Burke has been gaslighting Vicki, pretending that she is crazy for believing in supernatural phenomena, including phenomena he himself witnessed and previously acknowledged. But hearing the Widows’ Wail, which was a prominent topic in the early days, and seeing the black and white imagery of the kinescope, we can remember a more appealing version of Burke. Back then, Burke was one of several longtime residents of Collinsport who used the word “ghost” figuratively in conversation with Vicki, each time prompting her to exclaim “Surely you don’t believe in ghosts!?,” to which he would reply that it was entirely possible that there were literal ghosts at Collinwood. For a moment, we see that Burke, and forget the gaslighting abuser. That moment lasts just long enough that we can share David’s sorrow and Vicki’s terror at Burke’s imminent death.

Episode 181: People can change

Strange and troubled boy David Collins is sleeping peacefully in his bed. His cousin, flighty heiress Carolyn, comes into his room to check on him. She tucks him in, waking him. He asks what she is doing in his room. When she says that she was making sure he was asleep, he points out that she woke him up. When she keeps showing concern for him, he reminds her that she has called him “a spoiled monster” and a “menace to the civilized world” among other endearments, and that if he showed up in her room there would be no end of hollering.

Carolyn goes on talking to David in a gentle voice about how important he is to her, and says that maybe she’s the one who is a spoiled monster and a menace to the civilized world. After Carolyn maintains an affectionate attitude towards him for a few unbroken minutes, David asks her if she is OK. She assures him that she is. As David Collins, David Henesy’s bewildered response to Carolyn’s friendliness brings the house down.

While we are still laughing, David presses Carolyn to explain why she is being nice to him. A look of fear comes over him, and he asks if something terrible has happened. Carolyn assures him that nothing has, but he just looks more and more alarmed. By the time she leaves him, his expression is little short of heartbreaking.

The next morning, well-meaning governess Vicki is sitting with David in the drawing room, going over his homework. He has written an essay about what it might be like to have an older sister. He wonders if such a sister would love him. Vicki says that she might, and that it is a waste when you don’t love the people who love you. When Vicki asks David where he got the idea of writing about an imaginary older sister who loves him, he doesn’t give a direct answer. He does start talking about Carolyn, making it clear that he is thinking of her.

Vicki leaves David alone in the drawing room for a short while. He looks into the fireplace and sees his own face wearing a placid expression and immersed in the flames. He flees the room in terror, bumping into visiting parapsychologist Dr Guthrie. Vicki comes running, and David holds onto her for dear life.

David’s vision reminds me of a post of Wallace McBride’s on The Collinsport Historical Society from April of 2020. His point is summarized in his title, “In Dark Shadows, Your Reflection Always Tells the Truth.” David lives in 1967, so he doesn’t have access to that article. But he already knows the truth it tells- his terrified reaction shows that he knows it means there is an imminent danger that he will die by fire.

We see hardworking young fisherman Joe poring over old newspapers in the Collinsport Public Library. He finds something that alarms him, and rushes to a public telephone to call Vicki. He tells her he is coming to the house to show something important to her and Guthrie.

When Vicki tells Joe and Guthrie that David had a vision of himself in flames, she connects it with a recurring nightmare that had plagued him several weeks ago. David’s mother, blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, had come back into his life after an absence of several years, and he kept dreaming that she was beckoning him to join her in flames. While he was suffering from this nightmare, drunken artist Sam Evans, miles away in town, inexplicably painted a couple of canvases depicting exactly the image that kept appearing in David’s dreams.

Joe and Guthrie become very animated when Vicki tells them what David saw and how he reacted. Joe declares that what David has seen is a vision of the past. Joe has already shown Guthrie what he found in the library, a newspaper article from one hundred years before. The article is about someone named Laura Murdoch Radcliffe. That Laura Murdoch died in 1867 in a fire along with her young son. His name was David.

Episode 122: No man in his right mind

A while back, Tumblr user “marcycaa” posted this cartoon summarizing the relationships well-meaning governess Vicki has with strange and troubled boy David and flighty heiress Carolyn in the 1966 episodes of Dark Shadows:

Today, Vicki is being held prisoner by the fugitive Matthew, and Carolyn and David are off their leashes. Carolyn telephones dashing action hero Burke to complain that her mother and uncle don’t want her to see him. Burke reacts with disbelief that Carolyn is nattering on about that when Vicki is missing and might be dead.

David is the only one who knows where Matthew is. He is taking food and cigarettes to him. He has begun to suspect that Matthew has Vicki, and is afraid that he will kill her. This fear contends with his fear that he will go to jail for harboring a fugitive. He sneaks off to see Burke to seek reassurance. When Burke asks him what he wants, he says that he wants Burke to tell him that Matthew is innocent and that his hated father, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger, is responsible for everything Matthew has been accused of. When Burke can’t do that, David slips away.

Back in his hiding place in the Old House on the estate of Collinwood, Matthew lies down on a mattress next to the chair to which he has bound Vicki. Before he can get to sleep, he hears voices calling his name. The portrait of Josette Collins glows, eerie music plays, and one of the voices identifies itself as Josette. Vicki can hear none of this and tells Matthew that he must be dreaming. He wants to agree with her, fearing that the only alternative explanation is that he is going mad.

The audience knows that the ghosts are real, but we don’t know whether they mean anyone well. Matthew’s first action upon hearing the voices is to leap up and hold a knife at Vicki’s throat, so it doesn’t seem that they are protecting her. David considers them his friends, but nothing they have done for him has so far led him anywhere but deeper into his constant agony. The last time Vicki was locked up, the ghost of beloved local man Bill Malloy came and told her she would be killed unless she got away soon, but then vanished, leaving her trapped. While it seems likely the voices represent a power that will destroy Matthew, it is by no means clear they will do so before he kills Vicki. For all we can see, they may be about to drive him to do precisely that.

Vicki is our point of view character, but we’ve known Matthew since the second week of the show. As Carolyn tells David today, he’s always been gruff, but has seemed basically well-intentioned. Reclusive matriarch Liz seems to think that Matthew has some sort of cognitive impairment that would make it difficult for him to function in the world at large, and the sheriff’s manner of ordering him about when they have come into contact would suggest that he has the same idea. Matthew’s killing of Bill Malloy and crimes against Vicki have been desperate acts, committed with displays of reluctance and confusion. The idea that Matthew will end as the victim of a malign force that also spells doom for Vicki is therefore logically satisfying and dramatically compelling.

Episode 91: Everything she knows

Well-meaning governess Vicki, fresh from imprisonment at the hands of strange and troubled boy David Collins, gets a few days off work to visit Bangor, Maine. Flighty heiress Carolyn had agreed to drive her to the bus station in the town of Collinsport. Carolyn doesn’t have a job, go to school, or seem to have anything else to do, so why she and Vicki don’t just take a road trip together is unclear.

They wait for the bus at the local restaurant. From there, Carolyn telephones dashing action hero Burke Devlin, her family’s arch-nemesis and the object of her own obsessive crush, and invites him to join the two of them at their table.

Carolyn tells Burke that Vicki has recently seen the ghost of beloved local man Bill Malloy. Vicki tries not to give Burke any additional information. When Burke learns of Vicki’s plans, he volunteers to take her to Bangor in his car. She declines, but he won’t take no for an answer. I don’t drive, and I admire the way this scene shows how hard it can be for a non-driver to decline a ride.

When Burke leaves to get Vicki’s bags, Carolyn blows up at her. Carolyn tells Vicki that she must have known she came to town hoping to see Burke and spend the evening with him. Vicki did not know any such thing. After all, Burke has openly declared his intention of forcing Carolyn’s entire family into bankruptcy and disgrace, and she has expressed remorse for her infatuation with him. When Carolyn makes it clear she is still chasing Burke, Vicki doesn’t know what to say.

The Collinsport Historical Society says that Carolyn spends this week alienating the audience, and her passive-aggressive behavior towards Vicki is indeed exasperating. Watching the scene in the restaurant, it makes perfect sense that Vicki would decide that escaping Carolyn is worth the risk of getting in trouble with her employers by spending an hour with Burke.

Back home at the great house of Collinwood, Carolyn hears her mother, reclusive matriarch Liz, playing the piano. She makes a lot of noise when she comes in, ensuring that her mother will call her into the drawing room. Once there, Carolyn puts on a great show of being upset. She gives partial, teasing answers to each of her mother’s questions, drawing her in as best she can. She finally declares that Vicki is not to be trusted. She reveals that Vicki is in a car with Burke, probably telling him everything she knows about the Collinses and Collinwood. We then cut to Vicki and Burke in the car, where she is telling him everything she knows about her recent sighting of Bill Malloy’s ghost in the house.

Burke asks Vicki about Bill’s ghost. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

Again, the scene in the restaurant explains Vicki’s behavior. Carolyn had told Burke so much about it that it would be hard for Vicki or anyone else to see much point in trying to keep the rest of the story from him. When Burke wants her to say that the ghost accused someone in the house of murder, she insists that it only said it was someone in Collinsport, not Collinwood.

Carolyn has always been tempestuous, and Vicki has always been quick to forgive her. Perhaps now that the relationship between Vicki and David is about to enter a quieter, more complicated phase, the makers of the show wanted to ensure that there would be a continual source of conflict within the house. That might explain why they have chosen to feature Carolyn’s nastier side so heavily this week.

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 49: Where are we all heading?

Maggie Evans is working the counter in the restaurant at the Collinsport Inn. We open with her on the telephone, explaining to her father Sam that she hasn’t seen Bill Malloy. Dashing action hero Burke Devlin comes in, orders breakfast, and asks Maggie if she’s seen Bill Malloy. Hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell comes in, scowls at his bête noire Devlin, and asks Maggie if she’s seen Bill Malloy. Flighty heiress Carolyn Stoddard comes in. Carolyn already knows that Maggie hasn’t seen Bill Malloy, so she talks about her car.

Maggie and Carolyn are both cheerful when the episode opens, and by the end the men have dragged them down into gloom. Joe is in a sour mood, not only because shares the universal worry about where Bill Malloy is, but also because of the steadily mounting evidence that Carolyn doesn’t have any intention of getting married. Burke is in a towering rage because of his suspicion that either the dastardly Roger Collins or the drunken Sam Evans did away with Bill Malloy to prevent Bill from clearing Burke of the manslaughter charge that long ago sent Burke to prison. Sam is wallowing in despair, as per usual.

Maggie goes home to the Evans cottage to find that Burke is there, confronting Sam. The two men have been yelling at each other about not knowing where Bill Malloy is. After Burke leaves, Maggie tries to get Sam to tell her what’s going on. He refuses to do so. Downcast, she turns to go back to work. Before she leaves she asks her father “Where are we all heading?” After she’s gone, Sam looks at the closed door and says “Towards death, Maggie darling. We’re all heading towards death.”

Carolyn goes home to the mansion at Collinwood with Joe. They start to hug and kiss when there’s a knock at the door. Carolyn answers. It’s Burke, demanding to speak to Roger. He wants some answers, mainly about where Bill Malloy is. Joe and Burke wait in the foyer while Carolyn searches the house for Roger.

Burke gives an angry and not very coherent speech denouncing the Collinses. Some commentators think the evident difficulty Mitch Ryan has with this speech is a sign that he was drunk during taping. Ryan did have a drinking problem, and admitted that in the 1960s he sometimes showed up to work drunk. But the speech itself is so awkward and weird that I suspect there is another culprit aside from alcohol- uncredited additional dialogue by Malcolm Marmorstein. Be that as it may, the speech rubs Joe the wrong way, and by the time Carolyn comes back and tells Burke that Roger isn’t home, Joe is in a worse mood than ever.

Episode 47: Three calls for the ghosts of Collinwood, and none for me

Carolyn finds her mother playing the piano in the drawing room. They have a very sweet conversation about the good times they had when Carolyn was growing up. Liz laughs when her daughter calls her a “bit of a kook.”

Carolyn wants to talk about Roger and Bill Malloy; Liz doesn’t, but can’t help listening when Carolyn tells her that Roger had declared that he wouldn’t be anyone’s sacrificial lamb. Liz is troubled by what Bill had told her about Roger and the manslaughter charge that sent Burke Devlin to prison ten years before, and wonders if the sacrificial lamb has been led to the altar.

In this scene between Liz and Carolyn, we see a relationship we can care about. In the concern the two women have for Roger, we can see their wish that he would just be part of the good times, not a source of heartache.

Roger is in his office, where Bill had told him, Sam Evans, and Burke he wanted to meet them at 11 PM sharp. It’s 11:30 when we first see the three of them sitting around wondering where Bill is. Burke wants to keep waiting, the others decide to leave. Roger tells Burke that he wants to give him his pen back, feels for it in his pocket, and says he must have left it at home.

The three men in the office don’t have anything interesting to do today. They mention that they’ve spent their time talking about the weather and the price of sardines; it’s a wonder that three New England men with nothing in particular to say to each other on an August evening wouldn’t talk about the Red Sox, but I suppose the club had a bad enough season in 1966 that it would just have added to the gloom.

Roger comes home, apparently quite happy that Bill never showed up and the meeting ended without any new information for Burke. Liz confronts him in the drawing room. She tells him that Bill had told her he thought Roger, not Burke, was responsible for the manslaughter ten years ago, and demands Roger tell her the truth. He emphatically denies Bill’s charges. For good measure, he adds more lies, denying that Bill had said the same thing to him. Liz leaves him alone in the drawing room. Out of her sight, he looks stricken.

In yesterday’s episode, the clock in the foyer at Collinwood chimed at 10:10 and again at 10:30 pm. In today’s, it chimes at 11:10 and 11:30. We saw the hands on the clock each time, and today Carolyn even says that it is 11:10 immediately before it chimes. So it isn’t a blooper- they really want us to think that the clock chimes at 10 minutes and 30 minutes after the hour. That’s just a weird thing to set your clock to do, is what I’m saying. Staying home for 18 years isn’t the only kooky thing about Liz.

Episode 33: The one with Harvey Keitel

At Collinwood, Liz tells Carolyn that David won’t be going away just because he tried to murder his father. “Things will go on just as before.” On the other hand, Carolyn should marry Joe and leave the house, because “You’re the only one of us who can have a sane, happy life.” I suppose we’ve all seen that in real life, someone swinging wildly between deep denial and exaggerated despair. Two forms of learned helplessness, I guess.

At the Blue Whale, Joe is getting well and truly sloshed. Burke joins him at his table, interrupting a conversation between Joe and his whiskey glass. Joe tells Burke that he doesn’t like him, expresses his frustration with Carolyn’s refusal to get married, then goes to Collinwood, roaring drunk, and tells Carolyn, Liz, and Vicki what he thinks of them.

One thing Joe thinks is that Carolyn is doomed to be a spinster. Considering that she’s supposed to be about seventeen, that does call to mind Barnabas’ line to Carolyn in the 2012 Dark Shadows movie, “Fifteen? And no husband?”

Marc Masse brings this point out well on his Dark Shadows from the Beginning, and argues that the depiction of Carolyn may be one of the things that sunk the show with young viewers between the end of the first month and the introduction of the vampire:

You have to wonder what kind of impression the character of Carolyn Stoddard would have made to young viewers in 1966. Here she is having grown up in a mansion with forty rooms and her only option in life is to be married off before her eighteenth birthday to a local fisherman, or else face a life of lonely spinsterhood. In that respect, Dark Shadows seems to belong to the sensibilities of previous decades.

This paragraph is part of an in-depth discussion of Dark Shadows’ place on ABC’s schedule, its ratings, the show that preceded it in its time-slot, and Art Wallace’s rather antiquated view of the world. It’s all very informative, highly recommended.

When Joe passes out on the couch, Vicki goes to town. She goes to the Blue Whale, where Burke asks if she’s looking for someone. “I just found him,” she replies. Obviously, she’s talking about Harvey Keitel, who is dancing a few feet away from her.

That Harvey Keitel was once an extra on Dark Shadows is pretty interesting. If he took that job, clearly he would have taken a speaking part. I gave some thought to parts I wish he had taken in comments on Danny Horn’s Dark Shadows Every Day four times: here (on episode 470,) here (on episode 769,) here (on episode 1057,) and here (on episode 1137.)

Episode 27: In your room

Vicki tells Carolyn that David was the one who sabotaged Roger’s car, which Carolyn accepts as fact almost immediately. The story does build a foundation for Carolyn’s reaction- she repeatedly calls David a monster, and has been guilt-stricken at the thought that she let Burke into the house to commit the crime. But it is also the first example of what will become the hallmark of all of Nancy Barrett’s performances on the show. Her characters are the first to throw themselves into whatever is going on. She comes to serve as a one-woman chorus backing whoever happens to be the protagonist at the moment.

Liz still refuses to face the facts about David. When Vicki finds David’s Mechano magazine in her underwear drawer with the page about hydraulic braking systems marked, she and Carolyn see it as evidence that David had access both to the drawer and to the technical information he needed to commit the crime. Liz sees it differently, saying in a distant, ghostly voice “It was in your room, Miss Winters.”

Liz’ ghostliness is highlighted strikingly earlier in the episode. In the upstairs hallway, Carolyn is chattering away about ghosts, both the metaphorical ghosts of current problems resulting from past conflicts and the literal ghosts that, she would have you know, most definitely exist. Vicki looks at the door to the rest of the house which inexplicably opened and closed itself a few episodes back, and gasps as it opens again. This time it’s Liz coming out, having looked for David in the closed-off wing. Liz is impatient with the girls’ talk of ghosts, but her manner and appearance as she enters through that door are spectral.

The other setting in today’s diptych is a hotel room in Bangor.* Burke is meeting a private investigator there. He’s giving him a tough assignment. He wants more information about the Collinses in less time than the investigator had originally expected. He also wants the job done in absolute secrecy, and if the Collinses catch wind of the project the investigator will suffer dire consequences. The investigator is played by Barnard Hughes, a highly accomplished actor, and his skills are needed. Burke is being harsh and unreasonable, and the investigator is being deferential. Hughes is able to give his character enough texture that he seems to be keeping his dignity. Without that, Burke would have come off as a bully. The audience has to like Burke, so Hughes makes an important contribution to the show in this, his only appearance.

There’s an irony to Burke’s hard-driving intensity. He’s looking for information to hurt the Collinses, while the women at Collinwood have information far more damaging to the family than anything he’s sending his man to look for. So we’re in suspense as to what he’ll do when he catches up to them.

*In a comment on Danny Horn’s Dark Shadows Every Day, “TD” points out that the hotel room in Bangor has a television set, the first such device we see on Dark Shadows. We will not see another until 1970. That one will be in a parallel universe. We never do see a TV set in the Collinsport of the main continuity.

Evidently Mr Bronson had the hotel send a TV up to his room.

Episode 21: “Carolyn’s mother is a witch.”

In the teaser, Carolyn asks Vicki what’s on her mind. “The meaning of life?” “No, just the opposite- death.” Exchanges like that go a long way towards explaining the appeal the show has to depressives. Casting makes a difference, too- actresses Nancy Barrett and Alexandra Moltke Isles seem to be far from death-obsessed, so they can deliver the most preposterously gloomy lines without boring the audience.

After the first break, Vicki and Carolyn are having breakfast in the kitchen. As it always does, that set creates an intimate atmosphere which makes it seem natural that the characters should share confidences. Carolyn confesses her feelings of guilt at having brought Burke to the house; Vicki confesses that she doesn’t believe Burke tampered with Roger’s brakes. For some reason, Vicki tells Carolyn that when she was six years old, an attendant at the foundling home played a prank and told her that her birth parents would be coming for her. All of Vicki’s stories about her childhood are like that, it’s no wonder she feels at home in Collinwood.

There’s a scene between Bill Malloy and Burke in Burke’s room. It’s always interesting to see actors as talented as Mitch Ryan and Frank Schofield playing off each other. It is puzzling that a Collins family retainer as loyal and intelligent as Bill would go to Burke before the police have a chance to question him or search his room and tell him everything he knows and suspects about the crime. But Roger has already tipped his hand to Burke, so another indiscretion isn’t going to damage the prospects of the prosecution by much. This scene, in which Burke is eating breakfast while Bill is confronting him with his suspicions, is intercut with the scene in which Vicki and Carolyn are eating breakfast and consoling each other. So, opposite extremes- former friends in a hostile setting, new friends in a nurturing setting.

Carolyn tells Liz that Vicki doesn’t think Burke is guilty. Liz responds that she doesn’t “care what Miss Winters thinks.” Liz then collapses into pity for Carolyn and guilt about herself as a mother. She remembers that when Carolyn was a child, she would come home from school crying because the other children taunted her, saying that “Carolyn’s mother is a witch.”

That’s an interesting story, because it implies that Carolyn went to the school in town. How did she get there? It’s much too far to walk. Did a school bus come up the hill to Collinwood to pick her up and drop her off? That’s a bit hard to imagine. Liz doesn’t want anyone around the place. Sooner or later, some adventurous child would slip off the bus with Carolyn and go exploring the grounds, no doubt finding a way into the house itself. Roger didn’t live there until recently, and Liz has never set foot outside the grounds since Carolyn’s birth. The only servant on the estate is Matthew, and he and Carolyn are not at all close, not as they would be if he’d taken her to and from school every day in her childhood.

That leaves Bill Malloy. He comes to the house more or less daily to go over business with Liz- perhaps he used to combine those visits with picking Carolyn up for school and dropping her off afterward. He is very close to her, calling her “Princess.” He’d have to pick her up very early in the morning, since his responsibilities involve supervision of the fishing boats. She might still have been in her pajamas. She’d have needed to get dressed and have breakfast at Bill’s house. We learn later that he has a housekeeper who has been with him many years; much, much later, that housekeeper will reminisce with Carolyn about brushing her hair for her when she was a little girl. So maybe that was it…

Vicki talks with Liz and Carolyn about the private investigator Burke has hired to look into her background. Liz doesn’t want to talk about anything that touches on how she heard about Vicki and what she knows about her, but by a skillful line of Socratic questioning, Vicki leads Liz to the conclusion that something about her origins might be embarrassing to someone associated with Collinwood. Liz walks out of the room, as Euthyphro walks out when Plato’s Socrates springs a similar trap for him, and we can see how smart and determined Vicki is.

Scenes that focus on the question of Vicki’s origins tend not to get much attention from fandom, perhaps because the whole story-line ultimately fizzled out with no resolution. But watching it forward, not thinking about what comes later, we can see some strong scenes devoted to it.