In its first months, Dark Shadows spent a fair bit of time on the business interests of the ancient and esteemed Collins family. In those days, the Collinses were running out of money and their old nemesis, Burke Devlin, had come back to town with a plan to strip them of their remaining assets and drive them into poverty. The “Revenge of Burke Devlin” storyline never really took off, and was eventually subsumed into the tale of blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. Shortly after Laura disappeared, Burke formally gave up on his revenge. With that, the business stories ended, and there was no particular reason for Burke to stick around.
On Tuesday, Burke was recast. However little his character may have had to do on the show or however much he may have had to drink before he arrived at the studio, Mitch Ryan was always interesting to watch. Anthony George couldn’t match Ryan’s charisma, but by 1967 he had been a familiar face in feature films and primetime television for years. The original audience, even if they couldn’t remember George’s name, would have recognized him as a famous actor and assumed that his casting meant that something big was in store for Burke.
Today, we have two hints that business stories might be making a comeback as well. Seagoing con man Jason McGuire is blackmailing reclusive matriarch Liz into marrying him. Vampire Barnabas worries that the cozy little home he has made for himself in the Old House on the estate of Collinwood might be threatened if Jason takes control of the family’s holdings. He asks Liz’ brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger, to look at the original deeds for the Old House and the great house to see if there is some provision he might be able to use to defend his interests against Jason. That Barnabas asks about the deeds would suggest that he has acquired some form of ownership in the Old House. We’ve never seen him buy the house from Liz or receive it as a gift from her, but if both deeds are still in Liz’ name, he could hardly use their wording to claim a right to stay there. So when Roger goes off to look for the deeds, there is a chance he will come back with a story about real estate.
The second hint comes in Barnabas’ confrontation with Jason. Barnabas takes a very aggressive tone with Jason, who responds by asking Barnabas where he goes in the daytime and where his money comes from. “You have no accounts in the bank in town, and I know you don’t operate a business…” If Barnabas is going to be on the show for the long haul, as the ratings clearly indicate we should expect him to be, Jason will not be the last person to ask these questions. We might wonder how exactly he will forestall them.
If we have been watching from the beginning, the likeliest answer would involve Burke. When was a major character, Burke was presented as an inexhaustibly rich man who knew his way around some of the shadiest places in the world. If Burke happens upon Barnabas’ secret, we could expect Barnabas to bite him and thereby bring him under his power. With his money, Burke could set up plenty of bank accounts and businesses in Barnabas’ name. With his contacts in the demimonde, he could secure whatever papers Barnabas needs to establish his identity. Even a photo ID- Burke could easily hire a Barnabas lookalike to pose for a British passport.*
During the “Revenge of Burke Devlin” arc, Burke bought up a lot of Liz’ debts. In particular, he held enough notes payable on demand that she feared he might be able to put her out of business at any time. That hasn’t been mentioned for a long while, but if Barnabas takes control of Burke he could take those notes and exchange some of them for outright ownership of the Old House.
Barnabas could also compel Burke to fabricate some fraudulent papers that would make it look as if he were deeply in debt to Barnabas. When Barnabas got around to killing Burke, those papers would come to light. Liz and Roger would be grateful to Barnabas for taming their old adversary and clearing out some debts that posed a danger to their financial position, while well-meaning governess Vicki would be grateful to him for helping her boyfriend save his face after his business went south. As a result, his position at Collinwood would be unassailable.
Closing Miscellany
There is a location insert of Roger walking to the Old House, a flashlight in hand. I don’t think we have seen this footage before.
Until today, Barnabas has tried to be very suave with everyone who doesn’t know that he is a vampire. Since he has nothing to say to Jason that will intimidate him, he might as well continue that approach in his scene with him, or at least play dumb. But instead, he is openly, and self-defeatingly, hostile. This will become a pattern in future episodes. Time and again, Barnabas will greet a potential adversary with an immediate declaration of war, often before the adversary even knows who he is, thereby forfeiting whatever element of surprise he might have on his side.
Barnabas catches a glimpse of the ghost of his sister Sarah. He only sees her as a figure moving in the distance as he is looking out the window, and has no idea who she is. But it does confirm that he is able to see her, something we had not known he could do.
On Thursday, reclusive matriarch Liz admitted to well-meaning governess Vicki that she is being blackmailed. Eighteen years ago, Liz killed her husband, Paul Stoddard. Seagoing con man Jason McGuire then buried Stoddard in the basement. Now, Jason is threatening to expose this secret unless Liz marries him.
Today, Liz asks Vicki to be the legal witness at her wedding to Jason. Vicki demurs, saying that she might be compelled to speak up when the officiant asks if there is anyone who present who knows why these two people should not be joined in matrimony. The conversation then shades off into Vicki urging Liz to share her secret with her daughter, flighty heiress Carolyn. Liz won’t look directly at Vicki when Carolyn’s name is mentioned.
Word is spreading that Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, is dead. Vicki had just received that news when Liz brought up the wedding. Alexandra Moltke Isles does a fine job of expressing Vicki’s emotional tumult as she reels from one kind of shock to another. When Vicki breaks the news of Maggie’s death to Carolyn and then quarrels with Carolyn about her plan to marry motorcycle enthusiast Buzz, Mrs Isles reprises this transition from fresh bereavement to festering conflict, again quite effectively.
Carolyn goes out with Buzz, and Vicki goes for a walk on the beach with her boyfriend, Burke Devlin. Each episode begins with a voiceover which Mrs Isles delivers in character as Vicki. Typically, these consist of remarks about the sea and the weather which have some vaguely metaphorical connection to what’s happening on the show. While Vicki sits with Burke and stares out at the water, she launches into one of these monologues. In response, my wife, Mrs Acilius, started laughing so hard we had to pause the streaming. When Burke joins in with the observation that it is getting dark and “may get darker”- sometimes that happens as the evening goes on, seems to be some kind of pattern there- we both burst out laughing and had to pause it again. Before we restarted it that second time, Mrs Acilius asked “What does it say about us that we are sitting here watching this? That we choose to watch it when we’ve seen it before?” I’m not sure I want to know the answer to that one.
Vicki gets home shortly before Carolyn. Carolyn tells Vicki and Liz that after she saw Maggie’s boyfriend Joe walking down the street looking sad, she just wanted to go home and mourn. After Carolyn leaves them alone together, Vicki again urges Liz to tell her the truth. Vicki judges that Carolyn would listen to her sympathetically in the mood she is in now. Liz says she might tell Carolyn tomorrow, Vicki says that Carolyn might not be in the same frame of mind tomorrow, Liz says she can’t do it now.
In fact, Maggie is alive- her doctor decided to promote the story that she is dead as a lamebrained scheme to keep the person who tried to kill her from trying again. The blackmail plot, on the other hand, has barely shown a sign of life since it first arrived on the show ten weeks ago.
Jason is supposed to sweep away the last non-paranormal story elements left over from the period before Dark Shadows became a supernatural thriller/ horror story in December 1966. So far he has managed to disclose to the audience, but not to the other characters, why Liz hasn’t left home since the night Stoddard was last seen. That wasn’t an especially interesting question, as they have never shown us anyplace she would want to go, and it’s the only thing he has cleared up.
Another unanswered question is the one that led Vicki to come to Collinwood in the first place. She grew up in a foundling home, with no idea of who her parents were. The show has been hinting heavily that Liz is Vicki’s mother. Indeed, when Jason was brought on the show, the plan was that the grand finale of his storyline would confirm this. If that is still the plan, then the relationships among Vicki, Liz, and Carolyn are due for a drastic upheaval. That prospect lends a certain interest to the scenes among these characters today.
Closing Miscellany
This episode originally aired on 27 June 1967, the first anniversary of the broadcast of #1.
From #1 until #248, dashing action hero Burke Devlin was played by Mitchell Ryan. Ryan showed up at the set too drunk to work when they were supposed to tape #254 and was fired off the show. Today announcer Bob Lloyd tells us that “The part of Burke Devlin will be played by Anthony George.” There was never very much on Dark Shadows for a dashing action hero to do, and now that the most popular character on it is a vampire there isn’t going to be. It was only Ryan’s star quality that kept the character on the show so long.
Anthony George had appeared in feature films in the 1950s, had guest-starred in several prime-time shows, had been a regular cast member on the hit series The Untouchables, and had played one of the leads on a series called Checkmate. When the original audience saw him, many of them would have recognized him as a famous actor and would have expected the character to go on to do something important. Evidently they haven’t given up on Burke yet. But they had better come up with a story for him- George may have had a terrific resume, but he doesn’t have any fraction of Ryan’s charisma.
Unfortunately, they have given up on Buzz. He is on screen only briefly today, and we don’t see him again. Worst of all, while his first three episodes left us with the impression that he could not fail to be hilarious, he manages not to be even a little bit funny in this final appearance. He is just nasty and inconsiderate, demanding that Carolyn forget about whatever it is that’s bothering her and come to the loud party he’s planned.
Getting Buzz off the show the day Anthony George comes on as Burke does solve one problem. As of this episode, the three young women on Dark Shadows all have boyfriends. Maggie has Joe, played by Joel Crothers; Vicki has Burke, played by Anthony George; and Carolyn has Buzz, played by Michael Hadge. Those three actors were all gay. That wasn’t widely known at the time (except perhaps in the case of Mr Hadge, who really does not seem to be making an effort to keep the closet door shut while playing Buzz,) but now that everyone knows all about it, it does seem to be a sign that the show was spending a lot of energy on things that aren’t going anywhere.
A mysterious little girl in eighteenth century garb shows up outside the dungeon cell where vampire Barnabas Collins is keeping his victim, Maggie Evans. The girl stands with her back to Maggie’s cell and sings a couple of verses of “London Bridge” over and over while tossing a ball. Maggie pleads with her to stop singing, to get away before Barnabas and his sorely bedraggled blood thrall Willie Loomis catch her, and to tell someone that she has seen her. The girl does not acknowledge Maggie in any way.
Seconds after the girl has strolled slowly away, Willie comes by the same path she had taken. Maggie is bewildered that Willie didn’t see her. She urges Willie to escape from Barnabas. Willie gives a big speech about how he thinks about escaping all the time, and that when he is in his car he has sometimes tried to keep driving. But Barnabas’ power keeps pulling him back. Regular viewers will be interested in this confirmation that Willie has a car.*
At the great house of Collinwood, strange and troubled boy David Collins is impatient with the geography lesson his governess Vicki is trying to give him. In the first 39 weeks of the show, the only set which consistently saw interesting scenes was David’s room, where he and Vicki became friends during his lessons. They don’t have the studio space to build that set today, so this lesson is conducted in the drawing room. When flighty heiress Carolyn comes into the room, Vicki sends David to play outside. Since the interrupted lesson was about Australia, he hops away kangaroo-style.
Vicki and Carolyn talk about Carolyn’s boyfriend, motorcycle enthusiast Buzz. Buzz is a refugee from Beach Blanket Bingo, so broadly comic a figure that he might have been too silly even for the biker gang in that movie and its sequels. Unfortunately, Buzz doesn’t show up today, and Vicki and Carolyn’s conversation is a pure specimen of old-time soap opera earnestness. There is an odd moment when Vicki asks Carolyn “How far do you intend to go with Buzz?” and Carolyn answers “All the way!” At the end of the scene, Carolyn uses the phrase “all the way” again. She’s talking about her plan to marry Buzz, but “all the way” was such a familiar euphemism for sexual intercourse in the 1960s that it is hard to imagine it wasn’t intentional on some level. When Carolyn tells Vicki that she and Buzz will go “all the way” while Vicki watches, we wonder what weddings are like in Collinsport.**
David has gone to the yard around Barnabas’ house. We see a location insert of him on the swing set there. This footage is reused from #130, when we discovered that he was being watched by his mother, blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins. Laura had died sometime previously, but it didn’t take.
Now, he is being watched again. The mysterious little girl from the dungeon has made her way up to the porch and calls to him as “Boy!” When he tells her his name is David, she says “I know.” She gives her name as Sarah, and asks him to play with her. They toss her ball back and forth, and he finds fault with her fondness for “London Bridge.” She says she used to go to school, a long time ago. She lives around there, but everyone she lives with went away and left her all alone. She excuses herself to go look for them. Willie then comes out of the house. David tells him about Sarah, and Willie shoos him away.
Playing catch as best you can when you’re on a tiny set, photographed in 4X3. Screenshot byDark Shadows Before I Die
That Sarah can come and go from the dungeon without being seen shows that she is one of the ghosts who haunt the house. David has seen several of these, but does not recognize her. Her behavior in the opening scenes leaves us wondering if she is aware of Maggie’s presence; if not, she may simply be an apparition, unable to interact with the living characters.
When Sarah meets David, not only is she able to converse with him, but her ability to play catch with him using the ball she brought with her shows that she has a physical body and that she can manipulate material objects. That makes it all the more puzzling that she did not answer Maggie. Was she ignoring her, or was she somehow less capable in the dungeon than she is on the porch?
When Sarah uses the words “a long time ago,” we suspect that she knows she is a ghost and she has been displaced to a future century. But then she becomes confused as to where her people are, and is filled with a terrible urgency to go look for them. Again it is ambiguous just what sort of being Sarah is and what she can do.
There is always a vagueness about the supernatural- if you could explain a phenomenon fully in words and measurements, it wouldn’t be in that category at all. The key to holding an audience’s attention with a story about ghosts and such is to intrigue them with questions that seem like they might have answers and to use them to lead to another, equally imponderable set of questions before the first set gets old. So it is a promising sign that Sarah is introduced while we are still asking what Barnabas can do, what he wants to accomplish, what he needs for survival, and how he got to be the way he is.
That we see David in a lesson with Vicki and then hear him talking with Sarah about how neither of them goes to school anymore is also interesting to regular viewers. Dark Shadows is just about a year old. It started with Vicki’s arrival at Collinwood, where reclusive matriarch Liz had summoned her to teach David. David and his father, Liz’ impecunious brother Roger Collins, had been living at Collinwood for about a month. Before then, they had lived in Augusta, Maine, where David went to school.
When Vicki showed up, Roger objected that he knew nothing about her, and Liz refused to tell him or Vicki how she knew that she existed or why she chose her to be David’s governess. The show has been hinting very heavily that Vicki is Liz’ biological daughter and that Liz is desperate to keep that relationship secret. It is also clear that Liz wants above all for David to grow into her idea of a male Collins, an idea to which her bratty little brother Roger does not in any way conform.
Barnabas’ plan for Maggie is a ghoulish parody of Liz’ for David. He wants to erase her personality and replace it with that of his long-lost love, Josette Collins. Over the generations since her death, Josette has become the patroness of the Collins family and the emblem of its perfect female member. And of course Barnabas is as anxious to hide the secrets in his basement as Liz is to hide those in hers. That Sarah appears to both Maggie and David emphasizes that Barnabas is a funhouse mirror reflection of Liz.
Back in the great house, David hears Buzz’ motorcycle and tells Carolyn that he is there for her. She can’t quite bring herself to tell David that she and Buzz are planning to get married, but does encourage his interest in going for a bike ride with Buzz. As she leaves, he brilliantly mimes motorcycle riding.
David gives Vicki a detailed account of his encounter with Sarah. She is disappointed he didn’t bring her home. Though it is her job to be David’s only friend, Vicki is no more enthusiastic about his isolation from playmates his own age than Willie is about Barnabas’ treatment of Maggie.
Back in the dungeon, Willie finds that Maggie has not eaten. They share a sad moment. He leaves, and Sarah reappears. Maggie talks to her. At first, she doesn’t respond. But then she turns to her and says “If you see my big brother, don’t tell him you saw me. He doesn’t like anybody to come down here.” Then she leaves, a spring in her step.
The last time a ghost spoke to an imprisoned woman was in the same house, in #126. That time, Vicki was bound and gagged and hidden in a secret room on the main floor by crazed handyman Matthew Morgan. When Matthew had gone to get an ax with which to decapitate Vicki, the ghost of Josette had appeared to her and said, in a perfectly cheerful voice,*** “Do not be afraid.” Josette didn’t untie Vicki or anything, she just told her that and vanished. Later in the episode, she and some other ghosts scare Matthew to death before he can kill Vicki. When Sarah goes away from the stunned Maggie and skips along the floor, regular viewers might remember that event and see a promise that Sarah has something up her sleeve.
Closing Miscellany
Sarah is identified in the closing credits as “Sarah Collins,” the name given in #211 for Barnabas’ sister who died in childhood. That rather blunts the surprise of her closing reference to her “big brother.”
Sarah’s identity raises a couple of other questions. Barnabas’ house was the original Collins family home, and he and Sarah would have lived there. The cell in which he keeps Maggie is covered with cobwebs, evidently a feature of the house from its beginning. When she tells Maggie that her big brother “doesn’t like anybody to come down here,” she is speaking from experience- the adults don’t like it when you go near the jail cell in the basement.
Slavery was a legal institution in Massachusetts**** until 1783, and indentured servitude under conditions not so far removed from those to which slaves were subject continued long after. The Old House has been described as a “huge mansion,” so presumably its owners would have held people under at least one of these statuses. As a Collins of the eighteenth century, Sarah’s blithe attitude towards someone held in the cell would seem to be chillingly appropriate.
Sarah’s address to David as “Boy!” when she knows his name is also interesting coming from her. To be sure, if she had called him by name before they met, he would have known right away that there was something very strange about her. Since he has seen many ghosts and knows that ghosts congregate in and around the Old House, he may have identified her as one right away.
On the other hand, during the “Revenge of Burke Devlin” storyline that ran from #1-#201, there was considerable doubt as to whether David was Roger’s natural son or Burke’s. That doubt came to a head when Laura was on the show. Laura only left 13 weeks ago, and Burke is still hanging around. As far as we know, the question may come back up, and David Collins may turn out to be David Devlin. In that case, Sarah may have chosen to call him “boy” because she is a Collins and therefore better than everyone who is not.
I posted a couple of long comments about this episode on Danny Horn’s Dark Shadows Every Day. I won’t copy them here, because they contain spoilers for people who haven’t seen the whole series. But I’ll link to them- under the post about this episode, I argued that Sarah’s introduction was the most important plot development in the entire series; and under a post about a much later episode, I wish one of the words in her closing line had been different.
*Regular viewers are interested in some weird stuff, what can I say.
**My wife, Mrs Acilius, is very much taken with the actresses’ recollections of how Louis Edmonds, who played Roger, would make them laugh so hard during rehearsals that it was sometimes difficult for them to stay in character during filming. She says it is just as well that Roger wasn’t in this episode, because there is no way they could have got through this scene if he had been.
***Provided by Kathryn Leigh Scott, who also plays Maggie.
Frustrated that her mother, reclusive matriarch Liz, has decided to marry seagoing con man Jason McGuire, flighty heiress Carolyn spends the day and night with motorcycle enthusiast Buzz Hackett.
Buzz is modeled on the biker dude villains of Beach Blanket Bingo. Some of his mannerisms, such as speaking in a Beatnik slang that was a decade and a half out of date by 1967 and wearing sunglasses when he rides his motorcycle at night, would have been a little too broadly comic even for that movie, and are ludicrously out of place on the rather solemn Dark Shadows. The very sight of Buzz therefore raises a laugh.
I mean really
Nancy Barrett’s acting style was to throw herself unreservedly into whatever the script had her character doing that day, and seeing her present Carolyn as a newly minted biker mama is hilarious from beginning to end. When Carolyn and Buzz show up at the Blue Whale tavern, she’s already sloppily drunk. They see well-meaning governess Vicki and hardworking young fisherman Joe at a table, and Carolyn insists they go over and greet them. Vicki and Joe give Buzz and Carolyn frosty stares, which are of course the main ingredients of drawing room comedy.
If Vicki put on a police uniform, Carolyn wore a big feathered headdress, and Joe were a construction worker, they could make beautiful music together
As Danny Horn points out in his post about the episode on Dark Shadows Every Day, Buzz is actually pretty nice. That’s a good comic move- the obvious outsider is the one who knows enough to be uncomfortable, while the one who has been a central member of the cast from the first week is oblivious to the social awkwardness surrounding her. If it were the other way around, we might feel sorry for Buzz or be angry with him, but since we know that Carolyn’s place is essentially secure we can laugh at her uninhibited behavior, no matter how much it may make others squirm.
Buzz takes Carolyn home to the great house of Collinwood, parking his motorcycle a few feet from the front door. That isn’t a sign of inconsideration- there only are a few feet in front of the door, they’d be off the set if he parked any further away. It’s still pretty funny to see.
Buzz and Carolyn
Inside the house, Buzz jokes about riding his bike up the main staircase. Carolyn laughs, then urges him actually to do it. He refuses, clearly appalled that she would want such a thing.
Carolyn shocks Buzz
They go into the drawing room. Carolyn picks up a transistor radio and finds some dance music. Buzz is ready to dance, but takes a seat when Carolyn goes into the violent, rhythm-less jerks people in Collinsport do when music is playing. Buzz watches her, apparently ready to provide first aid.
As Carolyn’s performance of the Collinsport Convulsion ends with her falling face first, Liz comes downstairs. She protests against Carolyn and Buzz making so much noise at 3 AM. For the first time, Buzz is rude. He does not stand up when Liz comes into the room, and when Carolyn introduces her as “Mommy,” he greets her with “Hiya, Mommy!” Liz orders him to go.
Before Buzz has a chance to comply, Carolyn starts taunting her mother, yelling at her that her name will soon be “Mrs McGuire!” Liz retreats up the stairs as Carolyn taunts her with repetitions of this name. When Liz is on the landing, Carolyn and Buzz clench and kiss passionately. While they kiss, we see Liz above and behind them, trying to exit the scene. As it happens, the door she is supposed to go out is stuck, so she has to struggle with the knob until she’s out of the frame. Thus, the longest period of intentional comedy on the show ends, not with a break into angry melodrama, but with a huge unintended laugh. It is one of the few truly perfect things ever seen on television.
Door’s stuck
As Buzz, Michael Hadge really isn’t much of an actor- he shouts his lines and goes slack whenever he isn’t speaking. That doesn’t matter so much today. Nancy Barrett’s high-energy performance, the other cast members’ skill at comedy of manners, and the mere sight of Buzz combine to keep the audience in stitches throughout.
Still, I can’t help but wonder what might have been. Yesterday, vampire Barnabas Collins threatened to murder his blood thrall, the sorely bedraggled Willie Loomis. Viewers watching on first run might have wondered if Buzz was going to be his replacement. They might have, that is, if Buzz were played by an actor in the same league as John Karlen. With Mr Hadge in the role, that suspense never gets off the ground.
One of the little games I play in my head when the show gets boring is to ask who else might have taken a part and to imagine how it would have changed with that other actor in the cast. So, if Harvey Keitel was available to dance in the background at the Blue Whale in #33, then surely Mr Keitel’s friend Robert De Niro would have taken a speaking part in #252. Actors inspire screenwriters, and if Mr De Niro had played Buzz I would have wanted to write this line for him to speak to Liz: “Mrs Stoddard, you got me all wrong. You think I want to hurt you, or take something from you, but that’s not the way it is. Me and Carolyn, we’re just trying to have a good time.” Mr Hadge’s shouting wouldn’t have made much of a line like that, but delivered by Mr De Niro to Joan Bennett it could have started a scene between Buzz and Liz that would have expanded his role beyond comic relief and earned him a permanent place in the cast.
It may be for the best that it didn’t work out that way. A De Niro-Buzz might have been such a hit that Dark Shadows never would have got round to becoming the excursion into sheer lunacy that we know and love. And Martin Scorsese might never have been able to get soap opera star/ teen idol Robert De Niro to answer his phone calls.
Closing Miscellany
There are some other notable moments today. We might wonder why Vicki and Joe are sitting together in the Blue Whale, when Vicki has been dating dashing action hero Burke. In fact, the script originally called for Vicki to be out with Burke, but actor Mitch Ryan showed up too drunk to work the day they taped this one and was fired off the show. Burke gave up on his big storyline over ten weeks ago and there hasn’t been a reason for him to be on the show since. Besides, the same cast of characters cannot indefinitely include one whose type is “dashing action hero” and another whose type is “vampire.” The vampire is already pulling in bigger audiences than anything else they’ve done, so Burke has to go. Still, Ryan was such a charismatic screen presence that he was a high point in every episode he appeared in, so it’s sad we’ve seen him for the last time.
The bartender brings drinks to Vicki and Joe’s table and Joe calls him “Bob.” They have settled on this name by now. The same performer, Bob O’Connell, has been playing the bartender since the first week, but in the opening months of the show he had a long list of names. My favorite was “Punchy.”
There is some new music in the jukebox at the tavern and more new music while Carolyn and Buzz are outside the front doors of Collinwood. In the tavern we hear something with brass, and at the doors we hear a low-key saxophone solo.
The closing credits give Buzz’ last name as “Hackett.” We heard about a businessman named Hackett in #223, but Buzz doesn’t seem to be related to him. In the Blue Whale, Carolyn says that her mother has more money than Buzz will ever see, to which Buzz laughingly replies “That isn’t much!”
Seagoing con man Jason McGuire stands outside the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood, eavesdropping. The conversation is among heiress Carolyn, Carolyn’s uncle Roger, and well-meaning governess Vicki. Carolyn tells Roger and Vicki that she wants to stop Jason from blackmailing her mother, reclusive matriarch Liz, into marriage. She doesn’t know what hold Jason has over Liz, but is sure it has to do with something secreted in a locked room in the basement. Roger agrees to help Carolyn break into the room.
Jason reports this conversation to Liz and suggests they give Carolyn the key to the room. What Liz is desperate to hide is that Jason buried the body of her husband, Paul Stoddard, under the floor there eighteen years ago. Jason tells her that he sealed the floor up well enough that there is nothing to see unless you start digging. Liz is unsure, and Jason offers to go to the room and look.
First-time viewers may not make much of this, but those who have been watching from the beginning will be exasperated. Liz has gone into the room herself many times over the years; Vicki has even caught her coming out of it. When they take us to the room and show us that there is nothing interesting to see there, they are telling us that there was no point to any of the scenes where Liz gets frantic at the prospect of someone going into the room. It’s a slap in the face of the audience.
The cast assembles in the room and pokes around a little. They don’t open all the trunks and cases; there is a big barrel that could hold the remains of several missing husbands, and they never so much as look at that. After this has gone on for some time, Jason declares that it is “The most pitiful exhibition I’ve ever seen.” That’s good, it’s always fun when the villain has a chance to put the audience’s feelings into words. After they go back upstairs, Roger says that he’s never been more embarrassed in his life. Louis Edmonds delivers that line with tremendous feeling, it doesn’t sound like he had to act at all.
The whole miserable mess leads to Liz and Jason announcing their engagement, something Carolyn had been talking about when she lamented for “Poor mother- abandoned in her first marriage, blackmailed into a second.” But Carolyn, Roger, and Vicki all look shocked, a dramatic sting plays on the soundtrack, and the closing credits start to roll, as if this were some kind of news.
Closing Miscellany
On his great Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn analyzes the action of the episode as a series of devices to prevent anything interesting happening. He also goes through much of the unbelievably repetitious dialogue that clutters it up. He’s hilarious, the post is highly recommended.
When Jason goes to the basement to make sure that there is nothing there worth looking at, he shines his flashlight directly into the camera several times. It’s a flashlight we haven’t seen before, with a bulb mounted on top of a box. I’ve never been a particular flashlight aficionado, but that prop is the most dynamic part of today’s show.
Flashlight mounted on a boxJason enters the basementLooking at an old shirt
For the first months of Dark Shadows, the ancient and esteemed Collins family of Collinsport, Maine was deeply in debt and running out of money. Their nemesis, dashing action hero Burke Devlin, had become a corporate raider and was back in town, determined to strip them of their assets and leave them in poverty.
Now, the “Revenge of Burke Devlin” arc has fizzled to nothing. Burke himself formally gave up on it in #201. So we don’t hear any more about the Collinses’ financial insecurity. Indeed, they are being retconned as terribly rich.
Seagoing con man Jason McGuire showed up in #193 and set about blackmailing reclusive matriarch Liz out of the Collinses’ great wealth. He threatens to tell the police that one night, eighteen years ago, Liz killed her husband, Paul Stoddard, and that he helped her bury Stoddard’s body in a locked room in the basement of the mansion. Liz hasn’t left home since that night, and she gives in to all of Jason’s demands. Now, he is demanding that she marry him, and it appears she is giving in even to that.
Jason is an in-betweener meant to sweep away the few non-paranormal storylines left since Burke’s peace-out. They have waited rather too long to introduce him. When the Collinses had a great name but little money, we could believe that Liz would be immobilized with fear of disgrace. But now, when we hear that she inadvertently hit Stoddard so hard he died, we just wonder why she didn’t immediately call a lawyer. People as rich as the Collinses are coming to seem call lawyers as often as the rest of us brush our teeth, and they get away with far worse deeds than one Jason is using to control Liz.
A lawyer does show up at the house today, but Liz isn’t telling him what happened that long ago night or what Jason has been doing for the last ten weeks. Instead, she asks to be formally divorced from Stoddard. Her brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger, realizes that this is a preliminary to marrying Jason, a prospect that horrifies him.
When Roger passes the news on to Liz’ daughter Carolyn, Carolyn confronts Liz and Jason in the drawing room. She tells Liz that she knows Jason is blackmailing her and that it is obvious that whatever secret he is threatening to expose has to do with something in the locked room. She demands Liz give her the key. Liz denies everything and flees. Jason tells Carolyn that he will try to persuade Liz to give her the key, to which Carolyn replies with contemptuous disbelief.
Closing Miscellany
There are a few moments when characters allude to other storylines, past and present. Roger, Carolyn, and well-meaning governess Vicki all talk about missing local girl Maggie Evans and the vampire attacks in Collinsport. When Liz first tells Roger she is getting a divorce, Roger says that neither of them was cut out for marriage. Roger does not mention the name of his ex-wife, blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins, but regular viewers remember her well as the principal antagonist on Dark Shadows from #126-#191.
When people take off their coats in the foyer of Collinwood, they usually lay them on a polished table. Several weeks ago they introduced a coat closet, but not everyone has made the switch. Today, Liz’ lawyer puts his coat neither on the table nor in the closet, but flings it at Carolyn so that it lands on her shoulder. This is presented so blandly that I wonder if they are telling us that this is an accepted custom in-universe.
Dark Shadows is recycling a story element from December 1966 and January 1967. Back then, blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins kept staring out the window into the night and establishing a psychic connection with her son, strange and troubled boy David Collins. Each time she did so, David would have a terrible nightmare in which she was beckoning him to his death in flames. Since burning him to death was in fact her plan, we were left wondering if the nightmares were Laura’s attempt to get him used to the idea; if they were signs of his own willpower as he resisted her influence; if they were messages from the benevolent ghost of Josette Collins trying to warn her descendant of the danger his mother presented to him; or were the result of some other force that travels with Laura, but that is not under her control or necessarily known to her.
The other day, vampire Barnabas Collins stared out his window into the night and established a psychic connection with Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. Maggie reacted to that contact with confusion and dismay. In yesterday’s episode, she had a nightmare in which she saw a coffin open from the inside and herself laid out in it. It isn’t much of a stretch to assume that Barnabas’ plans for Maggie will require her to spend her days in a coffin. That leaves us with just the same options we had in accounting for David’s nightmares.
Maggie and Barnabas cross paths today in Collinsport’s night spot, The Blue Whale tavern. When Maggie leaves, Barnabas wishes her “Sweet Dreams.” She is shocked at this conventional night-time farewell. We see her at home getting ready for bed; Barnabas is still in The Blue Whale, chatting amiably with dashing action hero Burke Devlin. Barnabas gets a peculiar look on his face, excuses himself, and hurries out. Then we cut to the Evans cottage, where we see him entering her room to bite her. These are things we might have expected to see if the nightmare was something Barnabas sent to get Maggie used to the idea of becoming a vampire.
Barnabas sits at a table in the tavern with Maggie’s father Sam. They talk about how strong and independent she is. We have known her since the first episode, and know that she is indeed someone who can stand up for herself. Reminding us of that, this conversation leaves open the idea that the source of the nightmare is Maggie’s own struggle against Barnabas.
Sam himself figured prominently in the Laura story as a medium for Josette’s influence. He is an artist, and when David’s nightmares did not suffice to make Laura’s plans clear to the characters, Josette took possession of Sam and used him to literally paint a picture for them. That possession occurred in Sam and Maggie’s cottage. Moreover, Maggie had been delighted with Barnabas before the nightmare, but seeing him now she is extremely uncomfortable. That reaction, Sam’s presence in the episode, and the scene in the Evans cottage would all seem to support the idea that the nightmare was a warning from Josette.
When Barnabas and Burke are alone at the table, Burke is admiring the silver wolf’s head sculpted on the handle of Barnabas’ cane. He says that it looks ferocious and asks if the cane was made to be a weapon. Barnabas replies that he sees the wolf’s head as a peaceful symbol, an animal originally wild and hostile that has been tamed to be a companion, “almost a servant,” to humans. Canines are not so tame when Barnabas is busy, however. We hear a variety of dog noises, ranging from the howl of a sad hound to the violent snarling of a pack of large hunting dogs. This does not appear to serve his interests. Since it happens around people like Maggie who are mystically connected to him when he is far away, it is difficult to see it as a natural phenomenon. And since Josette’s previous interventions have not involved dogs, she is not an obvious suspect. So perhaps when Barnabas rose from his grave, he brought with him a ghostly companion who is not his servant, but is working at cross-purposes with him.
Barnabas realizes that he wants to have a bite before sunrise
Joe and Maggie are interesting today. Maggie wakes up from her nightmare and calls Joe. We see Joe, getting our first look at his apartment. We don’t see much of the place, just a single panel behind him decorated in true Collinsport fashion with a painting on one side and the shadow of some studio equipment on the other.
Joe at home
It isn’t just the decor that tells us Joe is a true Collinsporter. Maggie waits anxiously for him to answer when the phone rings several times. When we see him, we know what took him so long- he had to put his robe on over his pajamas. Sure, he lives alone, but he isn’t a savage.
When Joe and Maggie enter the tavern, she remarks that they could have saved money- she has liquor at home. Joe tells her she needed to get out of the house. Again, he is following the norms of Collinsport. A young woman alone at home telephones her boyfriend in the middle of the night and asks him to come over right away. A fellow from another town might not have realized that the best thing to do was to take her to a public place where they would be likely to meet her father.
Maggie and Joe have been talking about getting married for a while now. She kept saying she couldn’t marry, because she was worried about her father. During the “Revenge of Burke Devlin” arc, which ran from the first episode until Burke decided to peace out in #201, Sam was an alcoholic given to binge drinking. When they gave up on that storyline, they dropped the theme of Sam’s alcoholism as well. Today he goes to a bar with someone who is determined to buy him all the liquor he will accept. He stops after a couple of drinks and goes home, where he is crisp and sober. Apparently he just isn’t an alcoholic any more. I’m no expert, but I have a feeling it doesn’t really work that way. Be that as it may, it leaves Joe and Maggie with no reason not to get married.
Joe and Maggie not only run into Sam at The Blue Whale, but also Barnabas. If Art Wallace and Francis Swann were still writing the show, or if Violet Welles had come on board, I might wonder if this were a subtle hint that sexual repression creates monsters. Joe Caldwell has been making uncredited contributions to the writing for months, and he was perfectly capable of slipping in a point like that. But this one is credited to Ron Sproat, and Sproat is shameless about putting characters where they need to be to make the next plot point happen on whatever flimsy pretext he can find, regardless of any other consideration. So while it is always possible that the cast or the director or someone else associated with the production was trying to make a clever point, I don’t think Sproat was in on it.
Closing Miscellany:
The makers of Dark Shadows wanted episodes aired on Fridays to have numbers that ended in 5 or 0. A strike several weeks ago caused them to miss a day of broadcasting, and the numbers have been off ever since. They gave this one two numbers, 525 and 526, to get back on track.
Barnabas addresses Burke as “Devlin” and hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell as “Haskell.” We’ve heard him call Sam “Mr Evans,” so evidently he’s following some rule of his own about who gets a courtesy title and who doesn’t. His exquisite manners are such a big part of what comes up when the other characters talk about him that the writers might well have thought they were making some kind of point with this, but heaven knows what it was. Making it even harder to decipher, he calls Maggie “Miss Evans” at the beginning of the episode, but “Maggie” at the end.
In the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood, seagoing con man Jason McGuire has his third conversation with reclusive matriarch Liz. It is identical in form and content to their first two conversations. He makes a demand, she resists, he threatens to expose her one and only secret, and she gives in.
Liz’ brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger, is also being blackmailed. His blackmailer is drunken artist Sam Evans. Unlike Jason, Sam is someone we know and have reason to like. And unlike Jason and Liz, Sam and Roger do not repeat the same conversation every time we see them.
Moreover, Jason is acting against the interests of the audience, while Sam is trying to achieve something we might like. Jason is working to isolate Liz and to drain her funds. Those goals reduce the range of stories the show can tell, limiting a major character’s interactions with the rest of the cast and cutting back on the power of the family at the center of the series from making things happen in town. Sam wants to get hold of some old paintings of his, which will give him a chance at making a big splash in New York. If Sam succeeds, future episodes will be set at least partly in the midtown Manhattan art world. That would be a radical departure from the show we’ve been watching, but a radical departure of some kind is inevitable if Dark Shadows is to keep going at all. Dark Shadows 1.0 finished its liveliest stories when blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins vanished two weeks ago, and if Dark Shadows 2.0 is going to hold our attention it is going to have to come up with something very fresh.
Ten years ago, Roger paid Sam $15,000 and received from him ten paintings. These paintings have suddenly become fashionable, and a prominent art dealer has come to Sam asking about them. The real reason Roger gave Sam the money was nothing to do with the paintings, but to bribe him. The paintings changed hands only to cover the bribe.
Sam had seen a fatal hit and run accident, and knew that Roger, not dashing action hero Burke Devlin, was the driver. Burke went to prison for the crime, and has been trying ever since to prove that Roger was responsible. Now Sam threatens to go to Burke unless Roger produces the paintings. Roger has been searching Collinwood for the paintings, but he cannot find them.
The highlights of the episode are two scenes between Sam and his daughter Maggie. In the first, we see Sam drinking and talking to himself while Maggie is in the room getting ready to go to work. Maggie knows that her father has a great opportunity and that the man who has the paintings is keeping him from realizing it. She doesn’t know who that man is. She keeps asking questions, and he keeps getting upset. He shouts “Are you going to work or aren’t you!?” Then he apologizes and tells her he didn’t mean to raise his voice. She says bitterly that she should be used to it by now. He tells her that what he’s doing, he’s doing for her, that if he succeeds she will get everything she has coming to her. She isn’t impressed, and doesn’t have much to say.
As Maggie, Kathryn Leigh Scott does a fine job of showing an Adult Child of an Alcoholic trying to distinguish between the challenges the outside world is presenting to her father and those he has brought on himself. She’s looking for a way to simultaneously be Sam’s ally against the man who is keeping the paintings from him and to stand firm as an opponent of his drinking. Above all, she is trying not to let her pity for him harden into contempt. As Sam, David Ford is alternately so self-absorbed he apparently forgets Maggie is in the room, so angry he doesn’t care what he says to her, and so hopelessly dependent on her that he all but transforms into a baby. When he is looking up at Maggie and telling her all he hopes to do for her, Sam looks for all the world like a toddler trying to keep his mommy from being angry with him. It’s a heartbreaking finish.
Their second scene is even more powerful. Maggie comes home from work to find a groggy Sam slumped in a low chair. Once he has come back to life, Sam tells her that the man was in the house while she was at work, and that he can’t find the paintings. He lets slip that the man lives in Collinwood. Maggie realizes that it must be Roger. Sam tries to deny it, but since Roger is the only man who lives there he is stuck. He can hardly claim that well-meaning governess Vicki, a 20 year old woman, was a man ten years ago, or that she paid $15,000 for ten paintings to put on display in her cubicle at the Hammond Foundling Home. He briefly claims that “Collinwood” was a slip of the tongue, but can’t keep that lie up.
Sam finally admits that Roger is the man. Maggie asks why Roger bought the paintings. Sam asks if she really wants to hear him say it. When she says she does, he starts to speak, but falls abruptly silent in the middle of a sentence. While he looks down in shame, she blurts out that he took the money as a bribe to keep silent about Roger’s crime and to consign Burke to prison. She has suspected this for some time, but is devastated to say the words and see her father’s face.
Of all the questions the two blackmail plots might prompt the show to answer, how Maggie and Sam’s relationship will change as the result of the disclosure of his secrets is the most interesting. So it should be no surprise these two scenes are among the strongest we’ve seen in months.
Closing miscellany:
At one point in the episode, we see Jason talking on the telephone to someone named “Willie.” This marks the first time we hear this name on Dark Shadows.
During a conversation with Roger, Jason sits at the piano and pokes at a few keys. This is the first time since flighty heiress Carolyn tried her hand at “Chopsticks” in #119 that a member of the cast makes use of the instrument.
Roger and Liz have a scene in the basement of Collinwood. Roger’s fear of blackmail leads him to hope that he might find Sam’s paintings in a locked room there, while Liz’ fear of blackmail leads her to forbid that anyone ever go into that room. When Roger asks Liz what is in there, she refers to her long-absent husband, Paul Stoddard: “They are… ah… old things of Paul’s. Yes, that’s it! I put his things in there.” This is so obviously a lie she is making up on the spot that we laughed out loud. Joan Bennett must have meant to elicit this reaction.
This one belongs to Maggie Evans, the nicest girl in town. We open with her doing some work in the restaurant she runs. She isn’t feeling so nice today- dashing action hero Burke Devlin has accused her father, drunken artist Sam Evans, of various crimes, including the murder of beloved local man Bill Malloy. When flighty heiress Carolyn comes into the restaurant, Maggie tells her that it might be a good idea to flavor Burke’s coffee with rat poison.
Burke does show up. When he complains about the coffee, Maggie picks up on the idea she had floated to Carolyn and apologizes for not adding arsenic.
No arsenic today, sorry
Not that she’s going to let her father off without a piece of her mind. When he comes in and tells her some lies, she discards her usual adult-child-of-an-alcoholic manner of exaggerated patience and calmly asks him if he minds that she doesn’t believe him. He mumbles that there’s no reason why she should.
The sheriff comes into the restaurant to ask Maggie if she can confirm her father’s whereabouts at the time of Bill’s death. She gives him a sarcastic answer. When he asks what she is prepared to swear to on the witness stand, she makes it clear that she will swear to whatever she damn well pleases. Sam then tells the sheriff that Maggie doesn’t actually know where he was that night. At that, she declares that Sam has no idea what she does or doesn’t know. If she wants to perjure herself, it will take more than Sam and the sheriff to stop her.
In the sheriff’s office, we meet Mrs Sarah Johnson, housekeeper to the late Bill Malloy. Mrs Johnson is furious with the Collinses, the family in the big dark house on the hill who own half the town. She more or less blames them for Bill’s death. She very much blames them for his life, which he spent doing nothing but working for their interests. Mrs Johnson is even more indignant than Maggie, but the only person she interacts with is the sheriff. So we have a contrast between a character who gives us several distinct shades of outrage, one for each person she puts in their place, and another who spends her time bringing one specific shade of anger into perfect focus.
In between there’s a scene with Sam and the sheriff, and at the end one between Carolyn and Burke. These offset the studies in indignation from Maggie and Mrs Johnson, both giving the audience a bit of a breather and giving their fiery turns time to sink in.
Miscellaneous:
There’s a moment when the sheriff goes to the water cooler and finds the paper cup dispenser empty. He apologizes that he can’t offer Mrs Johnson a drink. All the websites list this as a production fault, but I’m not sure- it goes on for a while, longer than I imagine it would if he were actually drawing two drinks of water and giving her one, and the timing doesn’t seem off afterward. I don’t know if it was in the script- I suppose they might have noticed they were out of cups and improvised the scene before or during dress rehearsal. At any rate, I don’t think actor Dana Elcar was actually surprised by the absence of cups during the taping.
This episode was recorded on the Sunday before it aired. The Dark Shadows wiki quotes Kathryn Leigh Scott (Maggie) explaining that this was because one of her fellow cast members had shown up drunk on the day they were originally supposed to record it. Mitchell Ryan and David Ford both have important parts in it, and they were both alcoholics. After he stopped drinking, Ryan admitted that he showed up on the set of Dark Shadows drunk on more than one occasion. Ford never stopped drinking, and booze was apparently part of the reason he died in 1983 at the age of 57. Also, while Ryan and Ford are the two actors in this period of the show who usually have the most trouble with their lines, they are both nearly letter-perfect today, as if they had been in trouble and knew they had to be good boys or else. So it could have been either of them.
Clarice Blackburn joins the cast as Mrs Johnson today. As Mrs Johnson, Blackburn will be crucial at certain moments in the years ahead, and she will also be cast as other important characters in the later run of the show. When Mrs Johnson was cast, Blackburn was told to model her on Judith Anderson’s performance as Mrs Danvers, the frightening housekeeper in Hitchcock’s Rebecca. That instruction didn’t last very long, and when four years later they actually got round to including an homage to Rebecca, Blackburn didn’t play the Mrs Danvers part.
On his blog Dark Shadows from the Beginning, Marc Masse develops a theory that set designer Sy Tomashoff was influential in casting Dark Shadows. He focuses on a guest spot Clarice Blackburn had on an earlier series where Tomasheff did the sets, a primetime show called East Side, West Side:
The version of Mrs. Johnson we see today in episode 67 is based on an even earlier role as Gert Keller in the critically acclaimed but greatly overlooked groundbreaking series East Side, West Side, in a 1964 episode called The Givers. Perhaps the biggest surprise to those not familiar with the series would be its leading actor, featuring George C. Scott as a… social worker.
It should be noted that both of these earlier productions had Dark Shadows scenic designer Sy Tomashoff as the “art director”; in the East Side, West Side episode The Givers, the cast list even featured Bert Convy, the original early choice for casting as Barnabas Collins on Dark Shadows. Tomashoff held the same production role in For the People. Both of these series are notable for a good many cast member crossovers with Dark Shadows, often several in a single given episode; and because Sy Tomashoff worked so closely with executive producer Dan Curtis on Dark Shadows, it is likely that he played a significant part in a number of the key casting decisions in the early days of Dark Shadows.
Especially curious as noted in the introduction to today’s post is how Mrs. Johnson comes across as the grieving widow, indicating that she may have been more than just a housekeeper to Bill Malloy even if Malloy himself was never aware of this. If you see her as Gert Keller in the East Side, West Side episode, she seems to be reprising this earlier role…
An even more striking parallel between the portrayals of Gert Keller and Sarah Johnson are the similarities in character dialogue between the speech patterns and emotional tone… [I]n each instance, vocal delivery of dialogue as provided by the actress shows a similar shift between the emotional extremes of tearful despair and bitter resentment at the injustice of each character’s passing, first over Arthur Keller in East Side, West Side with an almost identical pattern and tone evident today on Dark Shadows over Bill Malloy.
In East Side, West Side, Art Keller is a business man struggling with elusive opportunities due to a past bankruptcy situation. Despite the best efforts of Neil Brock [George C. Scott] and his resources and contacts, Keller winds up ending his life soon after Brock drops by with the news that despite the availability of a possible deal for work in connection with a local congressional office, he had to intervene on Keller’s behalf because of the shady nature of the congressman’s methods of operation.
Two years later on Dark Shadows, Gert Keller is transplanted from East Side, West Side to make her debut as Bill Malloy’s bereaved housekeeper, Sarah Johnson.
It’s plausible, but not conclusive- after all, both East Side, West Side and Dark Shadows were cast with New York actors at a time when there was already more national television production, and therefore more proven acting talent, in Los Angeles. Many of the relatively well-established actors who were in New York in the 1960s were there because they were busy with specific projects and weren’t in a position to commit the time for a recurring role on a five-day-a-week TV show. So if you’re casting Dark Shadows and you’re looking for someone you can trust to give you a performance with a particular quality, of course you’re going to look at a lot of people who were on East Side, West Side, whether Sy Tomashoff recommended them or not.
Sheriff Patterson is at the mansion on the estate of Collinwood, talking with reclusive matriarch Liz and Liz’ ne’er-do-well brother Roger about the mysterious death of plant manager Bill Malloy. Liz listens as Roger answers the sheriff’s questions, seeming every bit the trusting sister. The minute the sheriff leaves, she turns to Roger and asks in an icy voice “How much of what you told him was the truth?” She confronts Roger with the differences between what he told the sheriff and what he’d told her. Roger is upset, and finally tells Liz she has to trust him. Liz looks sadly off into the distance and says that yes, she does have to do that.
“Yes, I do have to do that.”
I’m always interested to watch actors play characters who are themselves acting. When she’s concealing her doubts about Roger from the sheriff, Joan Bennett has her first chance to show us what sort of actress she thinks Liz would be. She’s a skillful one- she does have some subtle reactions to Roger’s evolving story when the sheriff isn’t looking at her, but her abrupt, contemptuous turn to Roger is the removal of a convincing enough mask that it shocks the audience. And her statement that she does have to believe Roger, coming after she has made it clear that she knows he has been lying to her and is likely to go on lying, is a performer’s resolution to go on playing a part, however unpromising that part may be.
Intercut with the scenes at Collinwood are scenes in the restaurant at the Collinsport Inn. Waitress Maggie Evans is serving one customer, her father Sam Evans. Sam wants Maggie to return a sealed envelope he gave her some time ago. He won’t tell her what’s in the envelope, why he wants it back, or why he gave it to her in the first place. She won’t give it back to him without answers to at least some of those questions.
Francis Swann is the writer credited with today’s script, but the contrast between the scenes at Collinwood and those in the restaurant form a diptych of the sort Art Wallace specialized in. Sister Liz demands information which brother Roger won’t give; Roger is a fountain of lies and evasions, and finally tells Liz that her idea of family loyalty requires her to behave as if he were telling her the truth. Daughter Maggie demands information which father Sam won’t give; Sam mutters little lies, stonewalls, and begs her to forget about the whole thing.
The two family pairs are both unhappy, but in different ways. The Evanses aren’t having any fun, but you can imagine them reopening communication and re-establishing trust, if only Sam can get off the hook in this crisis. Liz and Roger don’t seem ever to have trusted each other, but they are so much fun to watch that you can see how they might choose to go on fighting these battles indefinitely.
No one has told Maggie or Sam or anyone else that Bill Malloy is dead. When Maggie wonders if Bill might be able to help Sam with whatever troubles he’s refusing to tell her about, Sam replies that yes, Bill might be the only one who can help him. Dashing action hero Burke Devlin telephones the restaurant to order delivery of a meal; he asks if Maggie has seen Bill. Maggie tells Sam that everyone has been asking about Bill.
The sheriff comes in to the restaurant. Roger had told him that he was with Sam and Burke the night Bill disappeared, and the sheriff mentioned then that he’d be talking to both of them. The sheriff reacts strongly when he sees Sam, and tries to strike up a friendly conversation with him. Before the sheriff can elicit much of a response, he gets a telephone call. He rushes out of the restaurant as soon as he’s hung up. On his way out, he casually mentions to the Evanses that it was the Coast Guard calling to say they’d found Bill Malloy’s corpse. They are shocked at the news.
The sheriff doesn’t seem to be watching Sam’s reaction to the news about Bill’s death. That’s odd- while viewers know that Roger is the show’s principal villain at this point, Sam seems to be an equally likely suspect in the case of Bill Malloy. Casually mentioning such a terrible piece of news would seem to be a tactic that a policeman might use to gauge a suspect’s emotional state. Unless it is a tactic of some kind, it would be a spectacularly unprofessional way of announcing to the people of a small town that a highly respected local man was dead. Up to that point the sheriff hadn’t been presented as a blundering fool, so I wonder what they were saying by having him do that.
Miscellaneous:
Marc Masse’s blog posts about the first 54 episodes of Dark Shadows include promotions for Kathryn Leigh Scott’s novel Dark Passages. His post for episode 55 is the first that doesn’t include one of those, and is also the first in which he refers to Miss Scott as “the actress who plays Maggie Evans.” As in “scenes like this emphasize the great and natural chemistry for the father-daughter relationship being portrayed as embodied by David Ford and the actress who plays Maggie Evans.” I wonder if Miss Scott was alienated by “The Dan and Lela Show,” the dialogues between executive producer Dan Curtis and director Lela Swift that he claims to have heard in the background of the episodes. Many Dark Shadows fans were indignant about these, and I’m sure they let Miss Scott know about their objections. Perhaps she pulled her ads from Masse’s blog, and he couldn’t bring himself to mention her name afterward.
Sam Evans is starting to regret writing his Get Into Jail Card that confesses his role in Devlin’s railroading. He tries to get Maggie to return it to him, but she’s not stupid. Maggie is probably a better avatar for the show’s audience than Victoria, and if there’s anything we like more than a mystery, it’s learning the solution to said mystery. While there’s genuine concern for her father’s latest alcohol, caffeine and tobacco binge, she suspects she’s in possession of the final few pages in the mystery novel the whole town is talking about. And she’s running out of reasons not to take a peek and see how things end.
Sam is doing his usual “I’m not looking suspicious by trying not to look suspicious, am I?” thing at the restaurant when Patterson arrives. There’s something of a performer in Sam, who brings his sketchiest A-game when he sees the sheriff, and gets twitchier than Peter Lorre with a pocket full of letters of transit. Luckily for him, the sheriff has other things on his mind. The Coast Guard has found Bill Malloy. Dead.
I’m beginning to lose track of how often we’ve been given the news that Malloy is dead.
Dark Shadows Commentary 