We open in the drawing room of the great house on the estate of Collinwood. Well-meaning governess Vicki tells parapsychologist Dr Guthrie that she is frightened at the thought that some unknown evil stalks the estate. So he says he wants to leave. He wants to spend the day in the town of Collinsport.
In their cottage in Collinsport, drunken artist Sam Evans is bickering with his daughter Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town. Sam’s hands were burned in a fire some weeks ago, which he believes and the audience knows was caused by blonde fire witch Laura Collins. He can’t paint and is trying not to drink. When he refers to his belief that Laura caused the fire, sensible rational Maggie scolds him. He laughs a little, as if he is starting to doubt that Laura is to blame. Maggie leaves for her shift running the restaurant in the Collinsport Inn.
Vicki and Guthrie meet Maggie at the restaurant. They represent Dr Guthrie to her as “Mr Guthrie,” and tell her that he is a connoisseur of painting who wants to meet Sam. Maggie is thrilled by this idea, but worried that Sam may not make a good impression.
Dashing action hero Burke Devlin enters. Vicki introduces him to “Mr” Guthrie. Burke asks to speak to Vicki alone. Guthrie volunteers to call on Sam by himself.
After some awkward and pointless back-and-forth at the Evans cottage, Guthrie tells Sam that he is investigating the strange goings-on concerning Laura Collins. Sam realizes that for the first time he has an ally who takes his ideas seriously, and begins talking calmly and in depth about what has happened to him. He tells Guthrie that he doesn’t really know anything about Laura, but that some mysterious force compelled him to paint pictures in which her likeness embodied “evil incarnate.”
Back at the restaurant, Burke tells Vicki that Laura is the most wonderful woman in the world. The audience doesn’t know how much of Burke’s infatuation with Laura is native to his psychology and how much is the result of a spell she may have cast on him, but we can see plainly enough that Vicki, Dr Guthrie, and others who stand in opposition to Laura can expect no help from him.
Vicki tells Burke that she was reluctant to sit down with him, because she was afraid they would “have the same conversation all over again.” Perhaps she’s been watching the show- the three episodes immediately preceding this one consisted entirely of recycled dialogue.
Events may not move forward rapidly today, but there are some signs that the story will soon get moving again. Sam may not tell Guthrie anything that is new to regular viewers, but some of it is new to Guthrie. More importantly, we can see what Sam’s attitude towards his situation has been, and can see indications that it might change. Since he does hold crucial pieces of more than one of the puzzles the characters are trying to solve, that raises the prospect of plot development.
Moreover, Burke gives Vicki a vital piece of information. Reclusive matriarch Liz has been carted off to the hospital because of a sudden and mysterious ailment. Laura has been telling everyone that she hadn’t seen Liz the day before she was stricken. Burke casually mentions to Vicki that he and Laura saw Liz very shortly before her initial attack. He doesn’t know that he is exposing Laura in a lie- in fact, he boasts that he and Laura have nothing to hide. Vicki takes Burke’s information to Guthrie. We don’t see them planning their next moves, but this is the first moment all week when we have any reason to suppose that anyone will have a next move.
At the end of Friday’s episode, we saw reclusive matriarch Liz start to fall down the stairs, then saw her sprawled on the floor below. Today begins with a recreation of that scene, but instead of merely starting to fall, actress Joan Bennett tumbles far enough forward that she must really have gone down. It’s an impressive stunt.
Dark Shadows first stunt performer: Joan Bennett
Most of the episode is taken up with Liz’ demented condition and the reactions of the members of the household to it. The audience knows that Liz’ troubles are the result of a spell cast on her by blonde fire witch Laura. At moments Liz is almost able to figure that out herself, but no one else has a clue what is going on. The whole episode is full of standout moments for Liz. If there had been Daytime Emmy Awards in 1967, this would have been the episode Dan Curtis Productions would have sent to the voters to get Joan Bennett her Best Actress award.
At one point, Liz begins to recover her memory and is about to take action against Laura. Before she can reach anyone, a ghostly figure appears in her room. Afterward, she has a mad scene, indicating that she has been rendered powerless.
The ghostly sighting raises some questions about Laura. Is it Laura’s ghost she sees? Or another ghost allied with Laura? Or has her abuse of Liz’ brain led it to produce this hallucination on its own? The show is very indefinite about what exactly Laura is and how she operates, giving us the chance to have a lot of fun speculating about her.
This episode is replete with notable firsts. In addition to the first real stunt of the series, it features the first scene in which Bob O’Connell, as the bartender in The Blue Whale, has lines to deliver.
In that same scene at The Blue Whale, we hear music coming out of the jukebox that we haven’t heard before. It is a medley of Lennon-McCartney tunes rendered in “smooth jazz” style by Bud Shank.
It’s also the first time a conversation on the landing at the top of the stairs leading up from the foyer is photographed straight-on. Several times, we had seen characters talking to each other up there, but always before the camera had been angled up from the floor below. That had created the sense that the conversation was removed from the main course of the action. Today, it’s just another part of the set.
It is the first time we see Liz’ room. Two notable firsts take place there. A favorite prop of Dark Shadows fandom, the so-called “Ralston-Purina lamp,”* has been seen several times in the Collinsport Inn. In Liz’ room today, it makes the first of many appearances in the great house of Collinwood.
The Ralston-Purina lamp
The ghostly figure in Liz’ room is played by Susan Sullivan, who has been acting in primetime on network television more or less continuously for the last 55 years. During the other hours, she writes plays and performs in Dark Shadows audio dramas.
A play she wrote under the title “What Friends Do” was produced by Smartphone Theater and posted on Youtube. The cast is made up of Dark Shadows alums Susan Sullivan, Kathryn Leigh Scott, Mitch Ryan, and David Selby. It’s about four friends in a retirement community during the Covid pandemic, and it’s terrific. The Q & A after includes a lot of stuff that Dark Shadows fans will find irresistible, including a little bit about today’s episode.
The voice that says “Dark Shadows is a Dan Curtis production” at the end of the closing credits does not sound like ABC staff announcer Bob Lloyd. It’s higher-pitched and faster than his delivery, and the vowels are flatter than he articulates them. Perhaps it’s a tape fault distorting Lloyd’s voice, or perhaps he had a cold that day. If it was someone else, it’s another first. The Dark Shadows wiki doesn’t say anything about it, so I assume the surviving records and the published books that use them don’t say it was someone else.
*So-called because its red-and-white checked pattern looks like the logo of the Ralston-Purina animal food company.
High-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins had some bad news several weeks ago when he learned that his estranged wife, the mysterious and long-absent Laura, had come back to town. His consternation turned to joy when he learned that Laura wanted to divorce him and leave with their son, strange and troubled boy David.
The one obstacle in the path of the divorce is Roger’s sister, reclusive matriarch Liz. Roger has squandered his entire inheritance and has no inclination to make himself useful enough to anyone to earn a living. He therefore lives as a parasite on Liz, living as a guest in her house and drawing an income from a sinecure with her business. Liz distrusts Laura and sees in David the only hope that the family name will continue. She is determined to prevent Laura from taking David, and Roger has to appease her.
Today, Liz is disturbed that the authorities in Phoenix, Arizona keep insisting that Laura is dead. She lived in an apartment there which burned to the ground. The medical examiners in Arizona have now inspected the charred remains of a woman found inside, and the dental records are a perfect match for Laura’s. Lieutenant Dan Riley of the Maine state police shows up to inform everyone of this fact and to convey Arizona’s request that Laura submit to a physical.
Riley has some rather peculiar mannerisms. When Roger answers his knock to let him into the great house of Collinwood, he finds him standing at the door, staring off into space at a right angle to him. I’ve answered many a door in my day, and I don’t believe I have ever found anyone on the other side presenting his profile to me in this way. It is truly an odd thing to see. I suppose director John Sedwick must have told him to do that in order to make some kind of point, but I can’t for the life of me imagine what that point might be.
Lt Riley presents his profile to Roger
Roger is dismayed that the bizarre situation created by Arizona’s insistence that his wife is dead threatens to postpone his final farewell to Laura and David, but he does see the funny side of it. He and Liz take Riley to the cottage where Laura is staying. Before Riley can start talking, Roger asks Laura how it feels to be dead. The show has been giving us lots of clues that Laura is a revenant of some kind, and both Liz and David’s well-meaning governess Vicki have taken note of some of these clues. Laura’s shock when Roger puts that question to her strikes her silent for a whole commercial break. When they come back and we find him teasing her with the news from Phoenix, we might wonder if she’s about to betray herself- “I haven’t been dead for weeks, not altogether anyway!” But instead she just sputters and postures, behaving as if offended. Roger is puzzled by this reaction, and asks what happened to her sense of humor. Apparently his comments are the sort of joke that used to make her laugh.
Riley does not doubt that the Arizona authorities have made a mistake and that Laura in fact is the person everyone in the town where she grew up, including her husband, her ex-fiance, her disapproving sister-in-law, and the sheriff, has taken her to be. He simply asks them to play along and help his colleagues in Arizona to complete the routine tasks required of them. Among the questions she answers correctly is that it was her idea to name her son “David Theodore Collins.” Roger had wanted to name him “Charles Andrew Collins,” after some of his ancestors, but she insisted on calling him “David,” a name no previous Collins had ever borne. At Roger’s instance, Laura agrees to go to a doctor so that Riley will be able to send the Arizona officials the paperwork they need.
After Liz and the policeman have left Laura alone, Roger asks her what she isn’t telling about the fire in Phoenix. She is alarmed that he might attach some weight to the identification of the body as hers. He at once dismisses that as too ridiculous for words, but says that he is sure she knows more about the dead woman than she is telling. She won’t budge from her denials, and he tells her that while he will be glad to publicly support any lie it might be useful for her to tell, they really ought to share the truth in private.
That evening, Vicki is on a date with Roger’s lawyer, instantly forgettable young Frank Garner. She tells Frank she is glad that David is warming to Laura. He says that there are so many unanswered questions about Laura that he fears Vicki’s attitude towards her is excessively charitable. He does not think that Vicki or anyone else really knows enough about Laura to be sure that she ought to be trusted with David’s care.
After dinner, Vicki is a passenger in Frank’s car. We are introduced to this fact by a shot of a car’s headlights coming at us, a shot previously used in an early promo for Dark Shadows.
Car
While Frank is droning on about who knows what,Vicki looks off in the distance and smiles broadly. Frank sees this big smile, recognizes that nothing he is saying could elicit so vivid a reaction, and objects to her ignoring him. She says that the scent of jasmine is all around. He says he doesn’t smell anything.
The scent of jasmine has been established as the sign that the ghost of Josette Collins is present. Josette has been trying to warn everyone that Laura poses a threat to David, and Vicki is especially susceptible to communication from her. So regular viewers will know that Vicki is now acting under instructions from Josette.
Vicki starts issuing commands. She orders him to take the next right turn, then a left, and finally to stop in the middle of a field. When Frank asks whether she has ever been there before, she says no. When he asks if she knows where they are, she says no. When he asks why she keeps giving these orders, she says that “It is where I am supposed to be.” He realizes that they are in a cemetery.
Vicki jumps out of the car and runs up to the door of a small building. She knocks furiously at the door. Frank comes running after her, asking her what she is doing. Again, she will only say that it is where she is supposed to be. When she knocks, he tells her no one can possibly be in there. It is a chapel or some other kind of public building, there is no public event taking place in the cemetery, and it is long after regular business hours. Vicki listens to him and starts to move away from the door. Then, she sees the door handle turn. She and Frank watch as the door opens.
Vicki arrives at the buildingWhere she is supposed to be
Dark Shadows never had much of a budget for sets. Every time we see a new one, even one as modest as this, it is a sign that something important is about to happen.
There isn’t really any structure to this episode, certainly no suspense. It’s a collection of scenes in various moods, each exploring some familiar themes, all taking place in the great house of Collinwood.
Reclusive matriarch Liz wakes her nephew, strange and troubled boy David. She is glad to find that David is cheerful, but disturbed to hear that his mother, the mysterious and long-absent Laura, visited him in his room last night. Liz says that Laura couldn’t have been in the house last night. David proves that she was there by showing Liz the handkerchief she gave him.
Liz is puzzled how Laura got in and out of the house without being seen. Friday, she learned that there had been strong evidence of supernatural activity in the house yesterday. As she questions David about the details of Laura’s visit, it looks like she might be trying to rule out a supernatural explanation of Laura’s visit. That’s a bit of a dead end- Liz is committed to covering up anything that will make the family look weird, so if she is thinking along those lines she certainly won’t be talking about it with anyone. But she had a confrontation yesterday with Laura, in the course of which each implied that she had sufficient willpower to defeat the other. So Liz’ unsettled reaction might explain why Laura left the handkerchief. She wants Liz to know that she is not dealing with any ordinary antagonist.
We then see Liz and her brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins, having breakfast in the kitchen. Roger is delighted by the prospect that his wife Laura will divorce him and go away with their son David. He promises Liz he will think fondly of David when David is a distant memory. Liz is exasperated with Roger’s narcissism. She reminds him that he lives as a guest in her house, and that it was for David’s sake she took him in. He studiously ignores the implication that if David goes away, he will have to find a place to live and pay his own bills.
Liz’ daughter, flighty heiress Carolyn, comes into the kitchen as Roger is leaving. She informs Liz that Laura has been seeing the family’s arch-nemesis, dashing action hero Burke Devlin. Before Laura came back, Burke had been leading Carolyn on, and she has been bitterly disappointed that no romance will be blossoming between them. She leads Liz to the idea that after Roger and Laura are divorced, Laura will deliver David to Burke. “The last of the Collins! The only hope our name will continue!” exclaims Liz. Fearing Burke’s intentions, she vows to keep Laura away from David.
While she may not have forgotten what she heard Friday about the indications of supernatural doings, Liz has not grasped the message the ghosts are trying to send. While Burke may want David to forget Roger, think of him as his father, and change his name from Collins to Devlin, the ghosts have been telling anyone they can reach that he won’t get the chance. If David goes to Laura, she will change far more about him than his last name. Perhaps she will kill him, perhaps she will turn him into some kind of otherworldly creature, but whatever her plans are, Burke should be the least of Liz’ worries.
Roger was among those who saw and heard the signs of the ghosts on Thursday. On Friday, he flatly declared to well-meaning governess Vicki that he refused to think about them any more. While Carolyn is in the kitchen giving Liz the news about Burke and Laura, Roger goes to David’s room to try to talk him into spending more time with his mother.
When he hears Roger at the door, David is sitting on his bed, playing with toy soldiers on a chessboard. He hastily shoves the soldiers and the edge of the board under his pillow and picks up a textbook.
Everything Roger says seems to bewilder David. When Roger tells David that he has done something to please him, David replies “I have?” David continues to answer all of Roger’s statements in that wise until Roger protests that David is using “two-word questions” only to annoy him. He talks about how important it is for a boy to spend time with his mother, that he ought to ask Liz if he can go on a long trip with his mother, etc. At the end of their talk, Roger tells David “You can be a very intelligent little fella when you want to be.” David continues to give him a mystified look.
Since David has already had several scenes where he angrily told Roger that he knew Roger was trying to send him away with his mother because he wants to get rid of him, regular viewers are likely to take this scene as an indication that David is changing his approach to Roger. He’s tried confronting his father with the ugly truth, screaming at him, and threatening him. Last summer, when Laura was still an unseen, half-remembered figure David would call to while standing at the window, he tried murdering him. None of those tactics got him anywhere, so now he is just deflecting him with a show of incomprehension.
There is another possible explanation for David’s change. The most shocking of David’s recent behavior came when the ghost of Josette Collins was making her most intense efforts to get through to him about the danger his mother represented. That process manifested itself in nightmares and a frightening painting that threw David’s mind into an uproar. Now, Laura has appeared to him in the night, blocking the nightmares, and Roger has burned the painting. Josette is temporarily silenced. David is not afraid of his mother, and may not be enraged with his father.
Those who have been watching closely all along will find another interesting note in Roger’s attempt to manipulate David. In #68, Roger had been eager to get rid of well-meaning governess Vicki. In those days, David saw Vicki as an enemy. Roger sits with David in the drawing room and talks very calmly about the fact that David hates him. He asks if he doesn’t hate Vicki even more. David doesn’t deny it, and expresses extreme hostility. This was only a few weeks after Roger found out that David had tried to kill him, so it is rather chilling when he tells David that he will leave it entirely up to him to solve the problem of Vicki.
In that scene of horrifying child abuse, David was helpless as his father deliberately set about warping his mind so that he would attempt a murder. By contrast, this scene is a comedy in which David Henesy and Louis Edmonds get real laughs, and David Collins is certainly no worse off at the end than he was a the beginning.
David is playing with his toy soldiers again when he hears someone else at the door. Again, he stuffs the soldiers under his pillow. It is his cousin Carolyn. He tells her that with so many visitors to his room, he is having trouble studying. Carolyn takes the soldiers from under the pillow and says she can see how hard he’s been studying. He asks “Secret?” She replies “Secret!”
As far as I can recall, this is the first time we’ve seen Carolyn in David’s room. The “Secret?” “Secret!” exchange is certainly the first time we’ve seen them so friendly. It’s a relief- Carolyn’s over-the-top denunciations of David as a “little monster” were getting monotonous, and each of these characters needs more people to talk to.
After she and David have talked about Laura for a while, Carolyn goes back downstairs to talk to her Uncle Roger. Roger is lounging on the couch doing the crossword puzzle. He is quite annoyed that Carolyn is interrupting him in this most important task of his day. This is a bit of mirroring- as David is more concerned with his toy soldiers than with his studies, so Roger is more concerned with his puzzle than with any of the responsibilities you might suppose would attach themselves to a grown man who is nominally employed as an executive at his sister’s business.
Carolyn brings up Burke and Laura. Roger says that she needn’t worry about that- until their divorce is final, Laura won’t dare do anything to alienate the Collinses. Carolyn asks what will happen after the divorce, when David is living with Laura and Laura is available to Burke. It seems to dawn on Roger that it might be bad for the Collinses if the family’s only male heir is the stepson of their deadliest enemy, and so he says he’ll do something about it. Carolyn so adores her uncle and so resents Laura and Burke’s relationship that not even his crossword puzzle can keep her from blinding herself to his complete ineffectiveness. She is gleeful at the thought that Burke and Laura will now get their comeuppance at his hands.
Like Roger, Carolyn was among those who saw and heard the signs of Josette’s presence Thursday. She knows all about David’s nightmare and about the painting in which she warned that Laura would set fire to herself and David. Yet she has inherited the family’s tradition of denial. She will not see what is in front of her, and cannot shift her focus from her thwarted desire for Burke to the grave danger impending over David.
Yesterday’s episode gave writer Ron Sproat six major points to communicate to the audience:
None of the characters yet believed that the relationship between mysterious and long-absent Laura Collins and her son, strange and troubled boy David, involved physical danger or crime, much less a threat from the supernatural realm.
An police investigation taking place off-screen and centered in Phoenix, Arizona will advance the plot.
Well-meaning governess Vicki is a credible protagonist in the storyline about Laura.
Dashing action hero Burke Devlin is too smitten with Laura to be of much help to Vicki in her efforts to protect David from Laura.
The budding romance between Burke and flighty heiress Carolyn is at an end.
Vicki has decided the time has come to start fighting Laura.
With more help from the actors than he really deserved, Sproat managed to get all six of these points across. Today, Malcolm Marmorstein has only two themes to deal with. First, he shows us Carolyn processing her feelings about Burke. Then, he shows us the characters discovering that they are living in a ghost story.
Carolyn comes home to the great house of Collinwood in a grim mood. Vicki asks Carolyn who has upset her. She says that Burke has put an end to their budding romance. She asks Vicki to guess who has caught Burke’s eye now, and Vicki names Laura.
Later, Carolyn puts the same question to Laura’s estranged husband, her uncle, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins. Roger also names Laura, also without batting an eye. When Carolyn is surprised at his calm reaction, he assures her he has no interest in anything Burke and Laura might get up to.
In her anguish, Carolyn tells Roger that he would take an entirely different attitude if he could see Burke from a woman’s point of view. As Roger, Louis Edmonds replies to this remark by raising an eyebrow ever so slightly.
Not-so-straight faces
The episodes Art Wallace and Francis Swann wrote in the first twenty weeks of Dark Shadows gave more than a few hints that Burke and Roger’s enmity has its roots in a past homoerotic relationship. In the months since Sproat and Marmorstein took over the writing duties, that idea has only cropped up a couple of times in Sproat’s scripts, and not at all in Marmorstein’s.
Edmonds’ raised eyebrow here will bring a chuckle to regular viewers who have caught on to the theme. As the look passes from his face, Carolyn turns to look at her uncle. When Nancy Barrett saw Louis Edmonds, she must have been glad the scene was ending, as she didn’t have to worry about keeping herself from laughing out loud.
In the village of Collinsport, drunken artist Sam Evans and his daughter Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town, are at home. Maggie is trying to cheer her father up after a recent mishap with fire injured his hands, leaving him temporarily unable to hold either a paint brush or a whiskey glass. Losing his ability to paint is not as upsetting to Sam as it might be at another time. Lately, an occult power has compelled him to paint nothing but pictures of Laura, naked and in flames, a subject which he and everyone else, especially the lady herself, finds horrifying.
What is weighing most heavily on Sam at the moment is a mystical feeling that something is happening to the first of these paintings. It now hangs at Collinwood in the bedroom of Laura and Roger’s son, strange and troubled boy David. An occult power, presumably the same one that took possession of Sam, made Vicki take it back to Collinwood and show it to David. David took the painting because it depicted the scene of a recurring nightmare that had afflicted him and that Sam had no way of knowing about. In the nightmare, Laura had beckoned David to join her in the flames. Again, the nightmare seems to be a communication from an occult power, and there is no reason why it could not be the same one that possessed Sam and Vicki.
The painting has a blank spot the size and shape of David. Sam’s mystical feeling suggests to him that the painting is being completed. He goes to Collinwood to investigate.
While Sam is on his way, we see David’s room. The painting glows, as both it and the portrait of Josette Collins hanging in the long-abandoned Old House have done when supernatural beings were about. Josette herself manifests. She looks around. She turns to the painting and touches the blank spot.
Josette’s ghost is played here by stand-in Rosemary McNamara. We get a fair glimpse of her face. Her hair and makeup looks very much like those we just saw Kathryn Leigh Scott wearing as Maggie. Miss Scott has played the ghost of Josette several times already and will be closely associated with Josette later in the series. If resemblance is intentional, as it would seem it must be,* why not simply have Miss Scott play Josette today?
Roger, Carolyn, and Vicki are gathered in the drawing room, talking about the painting. Carolyn reminds Roger that David is out of the house, and suggests that he take the painting now and destroy it. Vicki objects that David would take that as a grave betrayal.
A knock comes at the door. Vicki answers it and greets Sam. She shows concern for his injured hands, and very gently takes his coat. She tells him that she is as mystified by her own actions in taking the painting and giving it to David as Sam is mystified by his compulsion to paint it in the first place. Sam asks to speak with Roger. Vicki ushers him into the drawing room, where he meets Roger and Carolyn.
Roger and Sam hate each other, but in front of the young ladies they behave almost correctly. Certainly their hostility doesn’t slow down the exchange of story-productive information. Sam asks to see the painting. Roger and Carolyn send Vicki up to David’s room to fetch it.
That’s an interesting moment. When Sam knocked, Vicki had gone to answer the door at once, and had presented him to Roger and Carolyn very much in the person of a household servant. When Roger and Carolyn send her for the painting, she is all smiles, happy to be on the job. Yet when she and Carolyn were in the drawing room earlier discussing Burke, Vicki was functioning entirely as Carolyn’s equal. The two of them sound like old friends, or like the sisters the show has been hinting they might be. Vicki can move with remarkable facility between the roles of servant and family member. That extraordinary flexibility is one of the qualities that we can imagine will come in handy as she confronts the spiritual forces of darkness gathering in the background.
When Vicki enters David’s room, spooky music starts to play. Vicki walks in slowly, looking from side to side. She senses an eerie presence. She looks at the painting, and sees that where it once was blank it now sports an image of David. She screams.
Roger, Carolyn, and Sam are momentarily stunned by Vicki’s scream. By the time they leave the drawing room, Vicki is already on the stairs holding the painting. Seeing David’s face depicted there, Roger exclaims that he saw the painting earlier that day, and that the spot was still blank then. Sam touches it, and says that is impossible- it is oil paint, and would take days to dry. Roger says that the painting now shows the whole scene of David’s nightmare.
As the four of them try to figure out what could have happened, Vicki says that when she entered the room she felt a weird presence. She says there was a specific perception accompanying this vague feeling- she could smell jasmine perfume. None of the ladies in the house wear that scent. Vicki says that she smelled it once before- in #126, when she saw the ghost of Josette Collins. The association of Josette with the scent of jasmine will continue throughout the series.
Vicki and Carolyn wonder how David will react to his own likeness in the painting, and Roger replies that he never will see it. He throws it in the fireplace. As it burns, the sound of a woman’s scream rings through the room.
This episode is a turning point. Hints of supernatural activity have been cropping up in the show from week one, the audience has been seeing evidence of it for months, and both Vicki and David have seen and talked with ghosts. But the completed painting and the scream that emerges from the fireplace are the first unambiguous tokens of the occult that have been presented to a group like these four.
The only other time more than one person had seen anything like it came in #88, when Roger and his sister, reclusive matriarch Liz, found seaweed on the spot where Vicki reported that the ghost of beloved local man Bill Malloy had dropped it. But Roger and Liz both want to keep the stories of Collinwood’s haunting to a minimum, and they threw the seaweed into the fire without telling Vicki or anyone else that they had found it. Denial, the psychological defense mechanism, is the ruling passion of their lives, and when the two of them found the evidence it was a foregone conclusion that it would be destroyed.
There is no such unity among Sam, Vicki, Carolyn, and Roger. Now that the only way any of them can deny that supernatural powers are operating in connection with Laura and David is to lie, we see that the four of them are strikingly ill-appointed to be the members of a plot to keep a secret. Sam is an outsider and no friend of the Collinses. Vicki is too conscientious to be part of a coverup. Carolyn is a loose cannon, and might tell anyone anything. Roger is unburdened by a conscience and is quite happy to tell lies, but he is also so cowardly and irresolute that he might be the weak link in any conspiracy he might join. So, not only do these characters now know that spirits are at work in connection with Laura’s relationship with David, but everyone else is likely to find out as well.
*Rosemary McNamara’s face is of the same general type as Kathryn Leigh Scott’s, but I think the hair and makeup above emphasize the similarity. Here’s the picture from her imdb profile:
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.
Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, is worried about her father, drunken artist Sam. Maggie’s boyfriend, hardworking young fisherman Joe, is with Maggie at the Evans Cottage, waiting for Sam to come back from his current binge.
Maggie is particularly worried about Sam’s attitude towards a mysterious woman who has recently returned to town. Maggie doesn’t know who the woman is, but yesterday, Sam and the audience found out. She is Laura Collins, estranged wife of high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins. Laura is the other witness to an incident ten years ago that Roger paid Sam not to tell the police about. It was his guilt about that bribe that started Sam drinking in the first place, and he is terrified that his secret will come out. As Maggie and Joe talk about Sam, Sam is in the tavern with Roger, trying to figure out why Laura has come back to town.
Roger goes home to the great house of Collinwood and tells his sister, reclusive matriarch Liz, that Laura has come back to town. Liz wonders why Roger is afraid of Laura. Roger denies being afraid of her, and Liz loses interest in the question. She wonders what Laura wants. At the thought that Laura might want to see strange and troubled boy David, the son she shares with Roger, Liz expresses emphatic opposition. Liz thinks of Laura as a severely disturbed woman, and is convinced that seeing his mother would only harm David.
Sam returns to the Evans Cottage. Joe sees that he is massively drunk, and whispers an offer to Maggie to help her take care of him. She declines, saying that she has plenty of experience. Sam insists on starting a painting. Maggie can’t stop him, and goes to bed.
Sam lights a cigarette and stares raptly into the flame, as we saw Laura do yesterday. He then goes to the canvas and makes painterly motions with great rapidity.
The following morning, Maggie wakes Sam up. He lies passed out on the couch, a liquor bottle that had been mostly full the night before empty on the floor beside him. In response to his protests, she refuses to leave for work with him unconscious. On her way to make coffee for him, she sees the painting he did the night before. She remarks that it is not in any style she’s ever seen him use before, and he doesn’t remember a thing about it. It depicts a woman in flames. He reacts to the painting with horror.
Dark Shadows has already shown us portraits as powerful objects, even as a locus for the natural and supernatural. Just on Monday, the ghost of Josette Collins (which, like Maggie Evans, is played by Kathryn Leigh Scott) emerged from the portrait of Josette in the Old House and brought about the climax of a story arc that began in episode 38. Now we see where these eerie portraits come from.
We will see more portraits created by possessed artists in the years to come. Something else happens in this episode for the first time, but not the last. The bartender at The Blue Whale, who has been addressed variously as “Bill,” “Joe,” “Mike,” “Andy,” and “Punchy,” today answers to “Bob.” That’s the name they settle on, perhaps because the actor’s name is Bob O’Connell.
The restaurant at the Collinsport Inn appeared in the very first episode of Dark Shadows. Well-meaning governess Vicki arrives in town, and stops there on her way to her new home in the great house on the estate of Collinwood. Counter-woman Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, gave Vicki a bit of a hard time at first, but quickly emerged as the person likeliest to be her friend. And indeed, Vicki and Maggie have visited each other, had heart-to-heart talks, etc.
We’ve seen the restaurant many times since. As part of the inn, it has always figured as territory associated with dashing action hero Burke Devlin, arch-nemesis of Vicki’s employers, the ancient and esteemed Collins family. It was Burke who brought Vicki to the inn and therefore sent her Maggie’s way, and the major scenes in the restaurant since have revolved around Burke and his doings. By making the whole complex of the inn an extension of Burke’s personality, it established him as a force equal to the Collinses with their mansion and its precincts.*
Today marks a shift in the use of the set from a symbol of Burke’s power to a neutral space where new characters are introduced without giving away their relationships to the ongoing storylines. While Burke figures in the conversation, he doesn’t appear in the episode, and the action does not depend on what he has done.
Maggie presides over the place. Her interactions with newcomers begin from the fact that she works there. The only other public spaces we’ve seen are the Blue Whale tavern, where the bartender does not speak and any conversations start as part of whatever story the speakers are involved in, and the sheriff’s office, which is nobody’s idea of a casual hangout. So Maggie is elected Welcoming Committee.
A blonde woman in a stylish hat takes a seat at a table while Maggie is at the counter bantering with her boyfriend-in-waiting, hardworking young fisherman Joe. Joe tells Maggie that the woman looks familiar, but that he can’t quite place her. After Joe leaves, Maggie gives the woman a menu, pours her a cup of coffee, and talks with her.
The woman asks about Grace, whom Maggie replaced at the restaurant five years ago. She confirms that she lived in Collinsport when Grace ran the restaurant. Since she is from Collinsport, Maggie is surprised that she came to town on the bus and is staying at the inn. The woman asks about the Collinses. Maggie says that high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins is the same as ever, only more so. When the woman asks what that means, Maggie explains that he is the person in town likeliest to play the role of Ebenezer Scrooge.** The woman asks about Roger’s son, strange and troubled boy David Collins. She is happy when Maggie says that David is a cute, clever boy, and startled when she says that “a nice dungeon would help” him to be easier to live with.
The woman is never named, but returning viewers will have a very short list of people she might be. The ongoing storylines are:
Vicki’s quest to learn the identity of her birth parents. The woman doesn’t look anything like Vicki, and the one potential lead Vicki has discovered in her time in Collinsport is a portrait of a woman who looks exactly like her. If the woman is connected with that storyline, therefore, it would likely be in some roundabout way- we wouldn’t expect them to cast a blonde actress as a close relative of the brunette Vicki after the big deal they made of that portrait.
The mistress of Collinwood, reclusive matriarch Liz, hasn’t left home in eighteen years and no one knows why. Liz is the first person the woman asks about, so it could be that she has come to shed some light on this puzzle. The only women who lived in the house eighteen years before who have gone away since were the servants, so it could be that this woman is a former Collins family servant who has come into money.
Homicidal fugitive Matthew’s abduction of Vicki. Matthew has always been friendless, and his only relative is an elderly brother. He has always lived in poverty, and did not know the servants who were connected with the house before Liz became a recluse. So it is difficult to see what connection he could have to this woman. On the other hand, the ghosts with whom the show has been teasing us since the first week have been making their presence very strongly felt as that story reaches its climax. The woman may have some connection with the supernatural back-world of the series, and that may somehow link her to Matthew or Vicki.
Vicki’s love-life. Vicki and Burke had been spending a lot of time together, but she has told him that because he is the enemy of her employers they can never see each other again. Burke doesn’t seem to be ready to accept this. Since she has been missing, Burke has taken an aggressive part in searching for her. Vicki has been seeing instantly forgettable young lawyer Frank, but we haven’t seen him since she’s been abducted (that I recall; the guy is very forgettable.) The woman seems to be a bit too sophisticated for Frank, but she may be a rival for Burke’s affections.
Joe’s breakup with flighty heiress Carolyn and his budding romance with Maggie. Maggie doesn’t recognize the woman at all, Joe can’t identify her, and their working-class backgrounds make her almost as unlikely a connection for them as she is for Matthew. Still, if she is a former servant at Collinwood, she might have some connection with one or the other of their families.
Burke’s quest to avenge himself on the Collinses in general and Roger in particular. There is a woman involved in Burke’s grudge against Roger- Roger and a woman named Laura were in Burke’s car when it killed a pedestrian. They both testified that Burke was driving, saw him sentenced to prison for manslaughter, then married each other. Burke swears that Roger was driving, and Laura was apparently Burke’s girlfriend, certainly not Roger’s, before the night of the fatal collision. Laura is still married to Roger, though they have lived apart for some time, and she is David’s mother. The mystery woman’s reactions to Maggie’s descriptions of Roger and David would make sense if she were Laura, as would her evident affluence and her separation from friends or relatives.
Vicki’s effort to befriend David. If the woman is David’s mother, she could complicate this, the quietest but most consistently successful of all the show’s storylines.
Maggie’s reference to “a nice dungeon” is ironic. There are dungeons about, both literal and figurative. Matthew is keeping Vicki bound and gagged in one inside the long-abandoned Old House on the grounds of Collinwood, where his helper David visits him today. David doesn’t know that Matthew is holding Vicki until the end of the episode, when he stumbles upon her. As David Collins, David Henesy gives a splendid reaction to this shocking sight:
Before the mystery woman enters, Maggie herself seems to be in a kind of dungeon. Her dungeon is built not of stone walls or iron bars, but of careless writing. Joe is filthy and exhausted after many long hours searching for Vicki, who is missing and may be in the clutches of a murderer. Even though she is Vicki’s close friend and The Nicest Girl in Town, Maggie doesn’t show a moment of concern for her. She giggles, jokes, and smiles all the way through her conversation with Joe. Not only is her dialogue out of character, it is composed entirely of cliches that remind you forcibly that you’re watching a 56 year old soap opera. For example, when Joe mentions that he crossed paths with Carolyn in Burke’s hotel room, she exclaims, “That is a convention!” The dread Malcolm Marmorstein strikes again…
*My wife, Mrs Acilius, developed this point in our discussion of the episode.
**Louis Edmonds would indeed have made a marvelous Scrooge. It’s too bad the cast of Dark Shadows didn’t get round to performing A Christmas Carol until 2021, two full decades after his death. It was a great performance, highly recommended, and is followed by a Q & A every fan of the series will find fascinating.
Well-meaning governess Vicki is being held prisoner by homicidal fugitive Matthew, a fact unknown to any of the characters in today’s episode. As in all episodes from the first 55 weeks of Dark Shadows, Vicki delivers the opening voiceover; she seems annoyed when she says that “the inhabitants of Collinwood have only begun to suspect I’m missing!”
Reclusive matriarch Liz is in fact very worried about where Vicki has got to. Housekeeper Mrs Johnson holds fast to the theory that she and flighty heiress Carolyn drove off together to visit Vicki’s boyfriend in Bangor, Maine, but cannot convince Liz of this. Mrs Johnson concedes that Carolyn had been very concerned about her appearance before she went out, and that she would not have been likely to make such a point of looking her best if she were just driving Vicki to Bangor.
Carolyn wanted to look especially good for the same reason she didn’t tell her mother where she was going. She is on a date with her family’s arch-nemesis, dashing action hero Burke Devlin. By the time we catch up to them, they’ve gone back to Burke’s hotel room, where they are drinking, exchanging sweet nothings, and doing some serious kissing.
Burke and Carolyn kissing
Just Thursday, Burke was kissing Vicki, and now he’s moved on. This shouldn’t reflect too badly on him- after all, he’s one of only two eligible bachelors in all of Collinsport.
The other eligible bachelor is Carolyn’s ex, hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell. Joe interrupts Burke and Carolyn’s kiss with a knock on the door. They gather that Joe is there on behalf of Liz and jump to the conclusion that he is trying to enforce Liz’ prohibition against her daughter dating the family’s foe. This leads to a fistfight between Joe and Burke, in which Joe fulfills the vow he made in #24 to punch Burke in the mouth. When Burke learns that Vicki is missing, he forgets all about his date with Carolyn and goes to Collinwood to form a search party.
Within one minute, Carolyn goes from the high of seeing the entire available male population of the town fighting over her attentions to the low of being dismissed as both of them start literally chasing after Vicki. Nancy Barrett usually throws herself into all of her parts with the utmost gusto, but she plays this bit of emotional whiplash very quietly. It’s an effective choice- the situation is so blatant that an underplayed reaction comes off as shock.
At the great house of Collinwood, Joe hangs his coat up. It’s the first time we see someone doing this from inside the imaginary closet in the foyer. While doing it, he sees Vicki’s suitcase, proof that she did not go to Bangor:
The telltale suitcase
It’s a relief to have an episode in the middle of a captivity story that doesn’t lock the audience up with the captive. There are a couple of awkward bits. Vicki’s huge suitcase is in the coat closet, but there is no door separating that closet from the entryway, so it is simply inexplicable that no one notices it until the end of the episode. And, entertaining as Joe and Burke’s fight is, regular viewers will find it repetitious- Joe and Carolyn broke up weeks ago, long after they had bored us all silly with their pointless, joyless relationship. We know that Joe and Burke have nothing to fight about. And the conversations between Liz and Mrs Johnson go on too long and involve at least two statements of every point.
But those are relatively minor objections. This one moves along at a fair pace, has more action than usual, and the actors manage to paper over even the weakest of the weak points.
Well-meaning governess Vicki visits dashing action hero Burke in his hotel room. Burke wants to express his sympathies over Vicki’s recent ordeal as prisoner of the homicidal Matthew. Vicki wants to tell Burke that, because he is the sworn enemy of her employers, the ancient and esteemed Collins family, she can never see him again. He abruptly kisses her, then apologizes. She tells him to forget about it, then leaves.
The actors do what they can with what they’ve been given. Alexandra Moltke Isles and Mitch Ryan were two of the ablest stage kissers on Dark Shadows, and their smooch looks great. But the whole theme of their conversation is a wistful sadness as the two of them wonder what might have been were it not for the conflict. In that context, the kiss is a gesture of mourning. Later, reclusive matriarch Liz will notice that Vicki is unsettled and will ask if it is because of something Burke did. Evidently we’re supposed to think Vicki is coming undone because she shared a great moment of passion with Burke, but the scene that was in the script included no such thing.
The real highlight of the episode comes later, when strange and troubled boy David Collins raids the pantry in the kitchen at Collinwood to get food to take to the fugitive Matthew. It’s our first look at any part of the kitchen since #53. It’s good to know they still have the kitchen in mind. The characters have always exchanged a lot of story-productive information during their conversations in that relaxed, intimate environment, so I hope they build that set again soon.
Dark Shadows Commentary 