Drunken artist Sam Evans is slamming down the booze at Collinsport’s tavern, The Blue Whale. The sheriff asks him if he’s seen high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins. After the sheriff leaves, Sam goes to the pay phone and calls Roger at home, leaving us wondering why the sheriff didn’t think to do that. Sam asks Roger to come and meet him.
Before Roger can get to the tavern, dashing action hero Burke Devlin invites himself to sit at Sam’s table. Sam and Roger have a tense conversation about Roger’s recently returned wife, the mysterious and long-absent Laura. Roger comes, and he and Burke have another tense conversation about Laura and her plans. Later, Roger and Sam leave, and Roger’s niece, flighty heiress Carolyn, joins Burke at the table. They have a scattered and confused conversation about what Laura is up to.
The most important thing about all of these scenes at The Blue Whale is that one of the background players is future movie star Frederic Forrest, making his first screen appearance. He is in quite a few shots. The camera work is ambitious in this one, and Forrest’s face is one of the elements director Lela Swift and the camera operators work hardest to capitalize on. Indeed, after the episode opens with establishing shots of the exteriors of the mansion and the tavern, Forrest’s face is the first thing we see:
The first shot with actors.
As Sam makes his way to the telephone, he has to cut in on the dancing couple. As he does so, Forrest’s face is again emphasized:
Sam finds that the dancing couple is blocking his access to the pay phoneSam makes his way through the dancing couple
When Roger comes into the tavern, the couple is at first startled to see the biggest snob in town in such a place. When Roger seems uncomfortable, they play it cool. Their body language seen from behind conveys the startle, but it is on Forrest’s face that we see the pretended nonchalance:
Is that Collins of Collinsport!?We’re being casual.
We catch another glimpse of the couple. Burke has been staring off into space thinking about Roger and Laura while Carolyn struggles to get his attention. He takes a break from that and tries to be charming to Carolyn. As he does so, we see the couple in the background, showing what two people look like when they are actually interested in each other. Forrest keeps moving and changing expressions, while the woman holds a smile. It really is his face that sells the moment:
Frederic Forrest talking to his date
That so much emphasis was placed on a background player who later proved himself to be a remarkably capable screen actor makes it hard not to wonder what might have been. Well-meaning governess Vicki is in the early stages of a relationship with instantly forgettable young lawyer Frank. Conard Fowkes, the actor who played Frank, seems to have been a nice guy and all, but perhaps if Forrest had taken the part the character’s full name wouldn’t have started with “instantly forgettable.”
I think of the goofy sincerity Forrest brought to the part of Chef in Apocalypse Now, and I see the perfect companion to Vicki as she wanders into a world of ever-more bizarre supernatural beings. Vicki always seems very innocent at the beginning of a scene, but quite often in these early months she makes tart little remarks that remind us that she is supposed to have grown up as a street kid in NYC. Forrest would have been ideal to both emphasize Vicki’s sweetness and to set her up to show her incisive side. Maybe it’s just as well that didn’t happen- I suspect that if Forrest had played Frank, the Vicki/ Frank romance might have been popular enough that the show might never have got round to the wild experiments that eventually made it such a hit that it is still available today.
Forrest’s skill at playing quiet men who can explode into fury when provoked would have turned many characters we haven’t met yet into fan favorites. Elsewhere, I’ve mentioned Forrest as the actor who should have played Charles Delaware Tate; I suspect that if I keep this blog up through episode 1245, Forrest’s name will come up in connection with several more.
Also, this is the episode where we first learn that authorities in Phoenix, Arizona have identified a charred corpse as the remains of Laura Collins. Since we have by this time begun to suspect that Laura might be a ghost, or an inhuman impostor, or two separate beings, one of them a ghost and the other an inhuman impostor, this news seems less ridiculous to us than it does to the characters.
For the first months of the show, the set representing the foyer of Collinwood ended a few inches from the front door. When they expanded that, they at first decorated the wall with a metal device resembling a coat of arms. Today, we see a mirror there. Throughout the rest of the interior, portraits of Collins ancestors adorn spaces of comparable prominence. The metal thing looked cheap and silly compared to the portraits. The mirror looks better, serves an obvious practical purpose for the characters, and figures in several of the complicated shots Lela Swift and her crew pull off today. But still, there really ought to be a portrait there.
Indeed, this episode explicitly tells us that portraits are terribly important. Sam takes Roger to his home and shows him a portrait of Laura surrounded by flames that some mysterious force has possessed him to paint. Sam hates the painting, and Roger is appalled by it. So it would seem unlikely to be hung next to the front door of Collinwood, but we might suspect that a portrait will eventually land there that will be associated with some kind of weird power.
In these early months of Dark Shadows, we hear that all the money made in the town of Collinsport finds its way to the old dark house on the top of the hill, where it does nobody any good.
The house itself is full of examples of wealth going to waste. Each of the last few episodes have involved long treks through abandoned corridors and visits to forgotten rooms. Everywhere you turn in these dank spaces, years of accumulated dust bury vases, paintings, antique furniture, oriental rugs, and other apparently valuable objects.
The Collins family is headed by a woman who hasn’t left the house in eighteen years. Reclusive matriarch Liz shares her home with her brother Roger, a spectacularly irresponsible man who squandered his entire inheritance and now holds a position in the family business which seems to involve little or no work. It is difficult to imagine that they run a dynamic enterprise that is taking advantage of the economic boom of the 1960s.
At the same time, Liz seems to have a vigilant concern for the security of her employees. Her only household servant, gruff caretaker Matthew, often brings up the fact that she gave him a cottage on the grounds of the great estate and assured him he would have it for the rest of his life. When plant manager Bill Malloy comes to the house to ask Liz to approve the acquisition of some new machinery for the cannery, her first question is how many men will lose their jobs as a result of it. Only when he assures her that the answer is zero does she agree to the purchase. So we might imagine that the attitude of local wage-earners towards the Collinses will be two-fold- on the one hand, gratitude that they go out of their way to ensure that the people working for them keep what they have, but on the other frustration with their failure to create opportunities for them to move ahead at a time when working people everywhere else in the USA were experiencing the fastest rise in real incomes in the nation’s history.
The relationship between hardworking young fisherman Joe and flighty heiress Carolyn occasionally seems like it will dramatize this situation. Joe is a local boy, and like everyone else in town, he works for the Collinses. Liz has taken a liking to him, and wants him to marry her daughter and have a career as an executive with the firm. He would be glad to marry Carolyn, but is not interested in that career- he wants to buy his own fishing boat and build his own business around it. Liz keeps trying to pull him deeper into her family’s firm, but he keeps insisting on his plan to go his own way. Joe mentions a friend with whom he wants to go into partnership. We never see this friend or anyone else who is working with Joe, and Carolyn doesn’t show the slightest interest in Joe’s plans. Since he doesn’t have anyone to talk to about his ideas, beyond a couple of scenes when he shakes his head at Liz and says “I’m sorry, Mrs Stoddard, but my mind’s made up,” the story of his attempt to diversify Collinsport’s economy doesn’t go anywhere. Earlier this week, the Joe/ Carolyn relationship met its long-awaited demise.
Joe has moved on to a relationship with Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. The daughter of drunken artist Sam Evans, Maggie runs the restaurant in the Collinsport Inn. She and Joe are representatives of Collinsport’s working class. During their first date, Maggie demonstrated an encyclopedic knowledge of sail-rigging, which may not be the most useful thing for a commercial fisherman in the age of diesel, but her interest in the sea raises our hopes that she might be a partner to Joe in his ambitions. Together, they might show us what it has meant for the town that the Collinses control so much wealth and do so little with it.
In a comment on Danny Horn’s blog Dark Shadows Every Day, I mentioned another way the show could have done more with this theme. I imagined that they might have expanded the part played by the only African American actor to deliver lines on Dark Shadows, Beverly Hope Atkinson.
The opportunities they missed came into view in episode 563, when Beverly Hope Atkinson appears as the unnamed nurse who keeps Nicholas Blair out of Joe’s hospital room but lets Maggie in. Unnamed Nurse lights up when she sees Maggie and greets her by name; they seem to be old friends.
In the first 42 weeks of the show, when the supernatural was in the background and the stories were slow, it would have been easy to have a couple of tea party scenes at the Evans cottage where Maggie and her lifelong friend, Unnamed Nurse, recap whatever is going on. Those scenes could have led to a whole exploration of the tension between the working-class people in the village and the jerks in the big house on the hill. That in turn could have led to the introduction of Unnamed Nurse’s family, headed by Unnamed’s parents, Mr and Mrs Nurse, including her brothers, Young Mr Nurse and Master Nurse, and her sister, Miss Nurse. We could then have seen the ancestors of the Nurse family in each of the flashback segments and analogues of them in Parallel Time.
I try to keep my contributions to Dark Shadows fanfic modest, so I didn’t try to think up a new name for Unnamed Nurse. My point is that the makers of the show did not need any more sets or many more characters to create a much more spacious world in the imaginations of the audience. The Evans cottage by itself, as an instance of a working-class home in Collinsport, is almost enough to make us think of a whole town of people teeming with ambitions, resentments, plans, and frustrations. Just a few small scenes there shedding light on some underused themes could have got us the rest of the way.
Another character who brings the Collinses’ deficiencies as commercial leaders of Collinsport into view is dashing action hero Burke Devlin. Himself born into Collinsport’s poorest class, Burke has gone away and somehow made himself very rich. The whole time he was in Collinsport he was penniless. He left town when he was sent to prison. Only five years after his release from prison, he is a millionaire many times over, in a position to buy up the Collinses’ debts and claim all of their assets. The show has dwelt on this timeline often enough that they have started making awkward attempts to explain how he got so rich so quickly. But it seems that we are supposed to feel that it was simply getting clear of Collinsport that opened the doors to wealth for him. He went to South America, he went to New York, he went to an oil field, he went someplace, but all that really matters is that he went far from the stifling influence of the Collinses and their gloomy house.
Now, Burke is moving to destroy the Collinses and supplant them at the head of local industry. Today, he and his lawyer meet with some of the key men from the Collins cannery and fishing fleet. He wants to recruit them to work for a competing firm he is buying. When the lawyer tells him the men may be too loyal to Liz to take his offer, Burke recites a list of the tired cliches that wealthy villains spout when boasting to their henchmen of the power their money gives them: “Money talks. Money buys loyalty. Everyone has their price. Name it and you can buy them. Some just come a little higher than others, that’s all, but everyone is for sale.” Too bad Cabaret didn’t get to Broadway until three weeks after this episode was broadcast, or he might have closed with a few bars of “Money Makes the World Go Around.”
The men are offended when Burke says he wants them to leave the Collinses and come to work for him. They pride themselves on their loyalty to the Collinses. If they feel that way, it’s a mystery why they agreed to come to a meeting with Burke in the first place- everyone in town knows about his vendetta against the Collinses. They start to leave, but stay long enough to hear Burke offer them higher wages than the Collinses can pay, and a profit-sharing plan.
The most senior of the men present, Amos Fitch, stops by the house to tell Liz and Roger about the meeting. Apparently the other men are more rational economic actors than Amos, and they are considering Burke’s offer.
After the meeting has broken up, Burke spends a few more minutes expounding to his lawyer on his theme that anyone will do anything if you dangle enough money in front of them. He interrupts himself before he can literally say that all people are whores and gives the lawyer a check, telling him that it’s always good to have some extra loyalty around. Apparently he decided that leaving a two-dollar bill on the night-stand might be too subtle. The lawyer reacts with distaste to Burke’s crassness, but takes the check.
Burke’s first attempt to buy someone’s loyalty took place all the way back in episode 3. He met Joe in the local tavern and offered him enough money to buy a fishing boat in return for information on the Collinses. When Joe refused, Burke told him that he himself got his start when a strange man approached him in a sleazy bar and offered him a lot of money to do something he wasn’t very specific about. He accepted, and that led him directly to great riches. That’s wonderful career advice, “A guy in a bar flashes some dough, you don’t ask no questions, honey, just leave with him.” Sounds like a guaranteed path to success. Anyway, it’s obvious in that one that Burke is trying to lure Joe into something dishonorable. We already care about Joe, so if he were to be tempted we would be in suspense until he proved his uprightness.
Contrast Burke’s attempt to buy Joe’s services back then with today’s attempt to hire this group. We’ve never seen or even heard of any of the men whom Burke is trying to lure. So if the conflict over control of the sardine-packing business is a test of their moral rectitude, it’s none of our concern. On the other hand, if it were a choice between a prosperous future for the town that does not include the Collins family or a stagnant future that does, there might be real suspense.
The Collinses are our point of view characters and the story cannot continue if they are thoroughly defeated, so if we enjoy watching the show we will root for them no matter how strong a case their antagonist may make for his position. On the other hand, we do care about Maggie and Joe, and are ready to care about characters who are friends of theirs. Therefore, if we see that a plan will be good for the working people in town, it won’t be easy for us to hope Liz and Roger will foil it. If the show can put us in that situation, we will feel suspense as we watch the events of the story and look for a way to resolve the tension that our mixed feelings have created. That’s how every thriller works- we may want the good guy to beat the bad guy eventually, but not until we’re done enjoying the contest between them.
Think again about Burke’s temptation of Joe in episode 3. Joe earns a few points with the audience by rejecting Burke’s offer out of hand. If he’d considered it, we would have paid attention to him until he made his decision, but only to him- a temptation story works only if the person or people being tempted find themselves isolated from everyone else. If he ultimately rejected the offer, the story ends and leads nowhere. If he’d accepted it, we would be disappointed in him and lose interest in his subsequent doings. He wouldn’t become interesting again until he either went through a redemption story, which would again tend to isolate him from the rest of the cast, or became a villain, which isn’t what they want the character for right now. But if, instead of a moral test, he had been presented with a plausible business decision, we could have had a story that would have given us a virtual tour of Collinsport and given us a feeling that we know the place, even if we didn’t actually see any new sets.
So that’s why I wish Dark Shadows had done more with the relationship between the Collinses and the rest of Collinsport. Not that I suppose the writers had deep political and sociological insights that I long to have heard, but that putting your characters in a bigger world allows you to tell bigger stories.
In the great house of Collinwood, well-meaning governess Vicki makes unsuccessful attempts to reason with strange, troubled boy David and with David’s father, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger. At the restaurant in the Collinsport Inn, it dawns on hardworking young fisherman Joe that Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town, would like to date him.
A fancy fountain pen Vicki found on the beach has gone missing from David’s room. After the two of them have spent a few relaxed moments looking for it, David declares it isn’t in the room. He suggests a ghost might have taken it. Rejecting this possibility out of hand and seeing no other explanation, Vicki concludes that David must be hiding the pen from her. She calmly asks him to return it; he indignantly denies having taken it. Exasperated with him, she raises her voice.
We cut to an outdoor setting, where we see Roger burying the pen. The audience saw him steal the pen at the end of yesterday’s episode. Roger is afraid the pen will be a piece of physical evidence implicating him in a homicide, so he is desperate to get everyone to forget that it exists. Why he doesn’t throw it in the ocean, or in a trash can, is never explained.
Roger returns to the house and hears Vicki and David yelling at each other about the pen. He goes upstairs to make inquiries. He takes David’s side, leaving both David and Vicki staring at him in astonishment. Roger then talks privately to Vicki, and urges her to forget about the whole thing. She reluctantly agrees never to speak of the pen again, to anyone. Roger visits David in his room, extracting the same promise from him. David tells Roger that he will get even with Vicki for her false accusation against him. Roger, eager as ever to get Vicki out of the house, has no objection to that idea. David glares out the window, looking directly into the camera and muttering to the audience that he will settle his score with Vicki.
The B-plot is much friendlier. Joe and Maggie are nice, attractive young people who have known each other for a long time, have fun together, and share many interests. Maggie is single, and Joe is at the end of a dull and mismatched relationship with flighty heiress Carolyn. There is no reason why they shouldn’t become a couple.
In fact, that is their biggest problem. As soap opera characters, they can have a romance if and only if there is some obstacle between them they will have to overcome in a dramatic fashion. Maggie and Joe are so obviously well-matched that generating such an obstacle will require the writing staff either to dig deep into the characters’ psychology and to expound that psychology in a superlatively well-crafted plot, or, if that is beyond them, to do something dumb like have them get bitten by vampires.
Joe stops by Collinwood to see if he can talk to Carolyn. Vicki tells him that Carolyn isn’t around, but asks him to stay for a while anyway. Vicki is nervous. She explains that “You don’t know what it’s like to be alone in this house with David.” Joe asks Vicki if she thinks he is an idiot for trying to resuscitate his relationship with Carolyn. When she can’t say he isn’t, he announces that he’s resigning from the idiot’s union and leaving for a dinner date. We know that he’s going to Maggie’s house, but he doesn’t tell Vicki that.
Joe may be resigning from the idiot’s union, but it looks like Vicki is ready to fill his place. David looks at her with undisguised hostility and tells her that he has indeed hidden her pen. When she asks where it is, he points to the closed-off part of the house. Vicki tells him no one can get in there; he shows her a key, and says that no one but he can. She is clearly on edge throughout the whole scene. After some protest, she follows this person she has just said she fears into a locked area to which he has said only he has the key. All that’s missing is a gigantic sign made of electric lights spelling out the words THIS IS A TRAP.
Future writing teams will gradually transform Vicki from the intelligent, appealing young woman we have come to know into a fool who will get them from one story point to another by doing or saying something stupid. We’ve seen Dumb Vicki in one or two fleeting moments already, but those moments haven’t really damaged the character yet. She is just on screen so much of the time, and is so consistently the innocent party in whatever conflict is going on, that when the writers paint themselves into a corner she is the only person available to take some insufficiently motivated action that will solve their problems for them.
This time, though, the episode is credited to not to any of those future writing teams, but to Vicki’s creator, Art Wallace. And her inexplicable action is going to stick us with her in a frustrating situation for days to come. As Vicki, Alexandra Moltke Isles follows David into the place of confinement with slow steps and her neck bent, as if she has resigned herself to being sacrificed. That’s an intriguing acting choice, but there is nothing at all in the writing to suggest that her spirit has been broken in that way. My theory is that Wallace, who will be leaving the show in a few days, is losing interest in the work, and Mrs Isles is trying to salvage what she can from a weak script.
Vicki to the slaughter
Monday’s episode was so washed-out I thought it was a kinescope, and I said in my post that it was the first one of the series. Apparently it wasn’t- that episode is taken from a surviving videotape, just one that is in bad shape. This one really is the first episode to come down to us on kinescope. It really doesn’t look any worse than do prints like Monday’s.
PS- This is the only episode from the first 42 weeks that Danny Horn discussed on his tremendous blog Dark Shadows Every Day. He includes an analysis of it in the middle of a long riff about #1219, the “missing episode.” His remarks are hostile, unfair, misleading, and absolutely brilliant. I recommend it to everyone.
Last week’s episodes established that high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins and dashing action hero Burke Devlin are both unpredictable men capable of real cruelty, and that our point of view character, well-meaning governess Vicki Winters, is about to find herself in the middle of a conflict between them. Today, we see that Roger and Burke’s conflict will take the form of a lot of prattling about a fountain pen.
As we open, Vicki is starting a math lesson with her charge, “strange and troubled boy” David Collins. David, son of Roger, has been studying his crystal ball, hoping to find evidence implicating his hated father in murder. Unknown to either of them, Vicki may have stumbled upon just such evidence. While taking a walk on the beach at Lookout Point, she found a fountain pen that Roger may have left there during a homicide. All Vicki knows is that the pen looks nice. She is in a happy mood, and teases David with jokes about the pen. As usual, David refuses to laugh or to cheer up in any way, but he is impressed that the pen looks to be very pricey.
Vicki reclaiming the pen from David
In the restaurant at the Collinsport Inn, Burke invites himself to sit at the sheriff’s table. Perhaps Burke has a crystal ball of his own- he has somehow developed a theory that Roger left the pen on the beach at Lookout Point while killing beloved local man Bill Malloy. The sheriff is unimpressed with Burke’s theory and bored with the whole topic of the pen. In this, he is the voice of the audience. On his blog Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn lists 21 episodes that are largely or entirely dedicated to talking about the pen. I believe it is uncontroversial among Dark Shadows fans to say that 21 episodes was too many for this theme.
Knowing that Vicki has the pen, Roger is close to panic. He succeeds in his second attempt to steal it from David’s room. Between the two attempts, he has offered Vicki thousands of dollars in cash if she will go away and take a job with friends of his in Florida. He has also complied with Burke’s telephoned demand that he go to town and participate in a confrontation about the pen. During this confrontation, the sheriff happens by and earns a cheer from all of us by telling Burke to find another topic.
As the Saga of the Pen begins, the idea that Roger will be exposed as a murderer generates a measure of excitement. Our desire to see justice triumph is in conflict with the fact that Roger is so much fun to watch that we don’t want him to face any consequences that will remove him from the core cast. That is the sort of conflict an audience experiences as suspense.
Today, though, the suspense is blunted. The coroner has ruled Bill Malloy’s death an accident, so the sheriff doesn’t have a case to investigate. Even if there were still a homicide case pending, there is no way of proving that the pen was left on the beach that night. Bill died many days before Vicki found the pen. In that interval, a person, an animal, or the tides could have moved the pen a great distance.
Roger’s conflict with Burke is similarly unconvincing. Burke has searched Lookout Point and knows the pen isn’t there now, and he has no reason to think that it ever was there. He had no reason to summon Roger to town, nor did Roger have any reason to come.
At times, the writing seems to be deliberately tedious. Both the word “pen” and images of the pen are repeated countless times. The sheriff’s exasperation with the topic gets a great deal of screen time, and Roger’s labeling of it as an “endless conversation” is the only memorable phrase in his whole scene with Burke.
The pen was first introduced in episode #42, the second episode written by Francis Swann. Episodes 1-40 were all credited to Art Wallace, who also wrote the original series bible, Shadows on the Wall. Neither the death of Bill Malloy nor the pen is in Shadows on the Wall; those may have been among Swann’s contributions. This is Wallace’s last week on the show. Swann will stick around for another month, leaving after episode #113. I wonder if the tedious parts of today’s script are Wallace’s refusal to try to make Swann’s inspiration interesting, or if they are a positive warning to Swann and the writers who are about to come on board that the Saga of the Pen is going to bore the audience silly unless they rethink it radically.
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.
In 281 of the posts that follow, I link to comments I made on Danny Horn’s great blog Dark Shadows Every Day. Danny starts with episode 210 and makes only a handful of remarks, most of them highly disparaging, about the first 42 weeks of the show. As a particular fan of that period of the show, that distressed me when I first started reading him, but I found that it gave me an opportunity to make substantial contributions to the comment section. I could always find something in those early stories that gave extra depth to whatever was going on in the later installments.
Now, Mrs Acilius and I are watching the show through a second time, again starting with episode 1. I’d so much enjoyed commenting on Danny’s site when we were watching 210-1245 from March of 2020 to April of 2021 that I decided to start commenting on a blog that covered the first 42 weeks. So I’ve left many comments on John and Christine Scoleri’s Dark Shadows Before I Die.
The Scoleris haven’t assembled the kind of community that made Danny’s comment section a big party. I still get responses to comments I left on Danny’s site, almost a year and a half after his final post. I have yet to get a reaction to any of my comments on Dark Shadows Before I Die. So I’m thinking of just recording my thoughts here.
The Scoleris aren’t the only bloggers who discuss the first 42 weeks of the show. There’s also Marc Masse, a.k.a. Prisoner of the Night, whose (fiercely controversial) Dark Shadows from the Beginning is occasionally viewable, usually private. And of course Patrick McCray, whose Dark Shadows Daybookset the standard for online commentary on the show. Neither of those sites has an open comments section, which is why I’ve been contributing to the Scoleris. There are also podcasts, Facebook groups, Reddit threads, etc, but I’m not into any of those.
Asking who to talk to and how to get through to them brings episode 1 to mind. Vicki comes to an unfamiliar town, and the audience comes to an unfamiliar show. She’s a stranger looking for someone to talk with; we’re viewers of a daytime soap, a genre that consists almost entirely of conversation. Everyone Vicki meets is talkative enough, but most of their talk is about how they aren’t speaking. The lady sitting next to her on the train goes on about what a nasty place Collinsport is. The fellow who gives her a ride from the train station responds to the innkeeper’s warm greeting with an ostentatious refusal even to acknowledge that he knows him, let alone to engage in conversation. The server at the lunch counter announces to Vicki, before she’s had a chance to say two sentences, that she regards her as a “jerk.” The family she will be working for is represented by a lady who won’t answer her brother’s questions as to who Vicki is and why she hired her, a reticence that is made all the more ominous when a private investigator reports on their strange, unfriendly ways. Dark Shadows fandom is far less forbidding than the situation Vicki faced!
