Tag: ghostwatch

Episode 8: The famous ghosts of Collinwood

Vicki calls the Hammond Foundling Home in an attempt to verify Liz’s claim that someone there recommended her for the job. We see Ms Hopewell, director of the home, in her office. The office is a nice glimpse of the world Vicki left to come to the house, and of the show’s idea of what was going on in the buildings around the NYC studio where it was produced.

Liz frets over Carolyn’s reluctance to marry Joe, Joe frets over the idea that his recent promotion was arranged to ease that reluctance, and everyone frets over Burke’s latest doings. Liz blames Carolyn’s hesitancy, and perhaps all the rest of her woes, on “the famous ghosts of Collinwood.” Like everyone else in these early episodes, she uses the word “ghost” figuratively, but with the door conspicuously open to the possibility that we will be hearing literal ghost stories later on.

Episode 4: Frightening a new friend

Here’s the comment I left on the Scoleris’ Dark Shadows Before I Die blog entry about this episode:

Interesting how the early episodes tiptoe towards the supernatural. Burke, Roger, and Carolyn all use the word “ghost” metaphorically, to refer to unresolved conflicts from the past that are still causing problems in the present. Liz and Vicki, each in her turn, responds by saying there are no such things as literal ghosts, only to hear the first person assert that there absolutely are. Giving this same little conversation to both Liz and Vicki is one of the ways the show tries to establish Liz and Vicki as mirrors of each other, of presenting Liz’s current life as a possible future for Vicki and of Vicki as a revenant of Liz’s past.

The sobbing sounds Vicki hears in this one are the first occurrences that would have to be explained as the act either of a ghost or of someone trying to make Vicki believe there are ghosts. The next such moment will come in episode 14, and there will be several more in the weeks and months ahead. This tiptoeing is what the Dark Shadows wiki on fandom tracks as “Ghostwatch.”

In view of the near-sexlessness of the later years of the show, it’s striking how frank this one is. Roger’s aggressiveness towards Victoria is plainly sexual. Liz catches him trying to sneak into Victoria’s bedroom, he derides her attempt to regulate his “morals.” He offers Victoria a drink, they talk about pleasure and pain in words that so clearly about sex that they barely qualify as sens double. Indeed, that is the only moment in the whole series when Victoria seems like what she’s supposed to be, a street kid from NYC. And the flirtation between Uncle Roger and his niece Carolyn is so blatant that it’s a wonder how Louis Edmonds and Nancy Barrett keep the scene from making the audience either laugh or feel ill.