Well-meaning governess Vicki is in a hotel restaurant in Bangor, Maine. She is waiting for dashing action hero Burke to drive her the 50 miles to her home in the great house of Collinwood.
Vicki is sitting at a table with Burke’s lawyer, Mr Blair. Blair takes out a pen to mark up some contracts. Vicki tells him that his pen is identical to one she found on the beach at “a place called Lookout Point.” She had earlier told another lawyer, her new friend Frank, that beloved local man Bill Malloy was killed at Lookout Point. Blair doesn’t know that part of it.
Blair tells Vicki that she must be mistaken- there are only six such pens in the world. He has one, Burke has one, and the other four are in South America. Blair tells her that if she found one, it must be Burke’s. He goes on to say that the pen is very expensive, and that if it is Burke’s he would certainly want it back.
Blair hands Vicki the pen. She examines it. A look of alarm crosses her face. She hurriedly assures Blair that, looking at it close up, she can see that it is nothing like the pen she found.
Burke returns to the table. Blair gives him the contracts to sign. He asks Blair to lend him something to write with, saying “My pen is among the missing.” Focused on the contracts, the men do not notice as Vicki’s look of discomfort intensifies.
Burke asks Vicki if she’s ready to go. She excuses herself to make a telephone call. Unable to reach Frank, she calls Collinwood. High-born ne’er-do-well Roger answers. Vicki asks Roger to come to Bangor to get her. Appalled by the notion, Roger asks why he would ask him to inconvenience himself so seriously. She says she thinks she might be in danger. She explains her theory that the pen she found made its way to Lookout Point when Burke dropped it there while murdering Bill Malloy. Roger tells Vicki to wait for him, and rushes out of the house.
Over a period of several episodes, the sheriff questioned Roger, Burke, and drunken artist Sam Evans about Bill’s death. Roger is firmly outlined as the villain, so we suspect him. There were also a number of moments when the show gave us definite reasons to think Sam might be the culprit. At no point did they dwell on the idea that Burke may be responsible, but it would be an interesting twist.
Bill had told Burke he would find evidence to clear his name in connection with a manslaughter charge that sent him to prison years before, and it has never been clear just what Bill could do to deliver on that promise. Perhaps we will learn that Burke discovered that Bill couldn’t deliver on it, and, succumbing to the violent temper he has displayed many times, he reacted by shoving Bill off Lookout Point to his death in the waters below. For all we know, Vicki’s suspicions might be the first step towards exposing Burke as the killer of Bill Malloy.
It’s true that Roger had Burke’s pen and believes that the pen Vicki found will suggest that he was at Lookout Point. But it could easily be that Burke, who after all gave the pen away very blithely when he was having lunch with flighty heiress Carolyn in the same restaurant where he and Vicki are today, in fact owns another one, that Vicki found that other one, and that Roger lost the pen Burke gave Carolyn somewhere else. Roger’s frantic attempts to hide the pen would incline us to believe that he was at Lookout Point with Bill, but it is precisely that belief that would make the revelation that it was Burke who dropped the pen a twist ending.
The pen itself, as the only piece of physical evidence in a whodunit that has been going for ten weeks and shows no signs of ending, gets a great deal of attention. Dark Shadows fans often lament this, and rightly so. At times, the pen falls into Alfred Hitchcock’s famous category of a “MacGuffin,” the thing that everyone in the story is urgently trying to get hold of. In a 90 minute action movie, just about anything can be a MacGuffin- a cache of diamonds, a secret document, the Maltese Falcon, etc. But when the story goes on for months and it involves a mystery we’re supposed to be trying to solve, the thing people are trying to get their hands on can’t be just anything.
Of course, if we’re watching an inverted mystery where we see the case from the villain’s point of view, there will be excitement any time s/he suddenly realizes s/he left a piece of evidence unconcealed. Some of Roger’s scenes with the pen play this way, but since we didn’t see what happened to Bill Malloy and haven’t been told anything definite, they don’t quite close the loop.
There are two things a piece of evidence has to be if it is to work in the place the story gives to Burke’s pen. First, it has to be a clue that will solve the mystery. Roger’s behavior concerning the pen certainly reinforces our suspicions of him, but it is easy to think of many other ways it could have been left where it was. Even if we leave aside the possibility that it is a duplicate Burke dropped, we have to remember it was several days after Bill’s death that Vicki found the pen. Who knows what sort of creature might have been attracted to its shiny surface, carried it from wherever it was originally left, and deposited on the beach long after Bill was already dead.
Second, and more importantly, the object has to connect one substantive story element to another. The crucial piece of evidence in Dark Shadows’ first mystery story met this requirement. Strange and troubled boy David had tried to kill his father, Roger, by tampering with the brakes on his car. David had trouble getting rid of the bleeder valve, and was eventually caught with it in his possession. We’ve seen David reading a magazine about mechanics and playing with mechanical toys, and have seen Roger refusing to take an interest in machinery. So a piece of hardware in David’s possession reminds us of the estrangement between father and son. Moreover, while Roger is not interested in the workings of his car, he is avidly concerned with it as a marker of his status. Burke envies him that status, and hangs around the car. When Burke comes to be involved in the story of Roger’s crash, the prominence of a piece of the car brings that envy to mind. That the same object represents Roger’s conflicts with David and with Burke associates those conflicts with each other in our minds, and sets us up to expect them to merge, as indeed they do.
Burke’s pen has no such associations. It’s something he shares with Mr Blair, who is barely a character on the show, and with four other men whom we have never seen and whose names we’ve never heard. Neither Burke nor anyone else we’ve seen is a calligrapher, or a writer, or any other person who would come to mind when we hear about pens. So the story doesn’t establish a specific symbolic charge for a pen considered as a pen.
Of course, the show was made in 1966, so there is an inevitable symbolism associated with any cylindrical object. Zach Weinersmith explained this the other day in a Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic:
I think the writers intentionally put their fair share of Freudianism into the scripts, and I can’t imagine Louis Edmonds didn’t expect some in the audience to watch his portrayal of Roger’s panicked obsession with where Burke’s pen is and think in those terms. Indeed, while Weinersmith talks about the period 1890-1970 and singles out the 1930s as a peak, it was in the 1960s, the age of Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, and Peter Shaffer, that Freudianism peaked in its influence on the New York theater world where the people involved in making Dark Shadows were most at home. So this episode would be a case in point for Weinersmith’s hypothesis.
Dark Shadows Commentary 