Tag: intentional comedy

Episode 41: Working day

Three people expressed surprise in episode 40 that Roger Collins wasn’t at his office. He still isn’t there today, and three more people are surprised. He finally decides to go in when Liz presents him with the alternative of looking for Carolyn.

Bill Malloy isn’t at work either, hasn’t been all day. He and Roger have been taking turns inviting themselves into Sam Evans’ house. Sam is also not working, and in fact takes time out of his busy schedule of downing one glass of whiskey after another to destroy the only thing we’ve seen him make as part of a paying job, a sketch of Burke. Maggie pieces the sketch back together- she’s also at home when she’s supposed to be working.

Telephones are unusually dynamic in this episode. Typically we see only one end of a phone call on Dark Shadows. This time, we cut back and forth between both ends of three telephone conversations this time. In the teaser Roger is browbeating Sam; Sam sets the phone down and walks off. While he gets another drink, the receiver is in the foreground and we hear Roger’s voice at the same volume as we did when Sam was listening. Sam comes back, returns the receiver to its cradle, and goes to sit down while it rings.

The bit when we see the phone and hear Roger’s voice, though Sam isn’t looking at the phone and can’t hear it, establishes the telephone as a character with its own relationship to the audience, independent of anyone who may or may not be paying attention to it. It’s a neat moment:

Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

Liz calls the office and talks to Joe. Joe tells her Bill hasn’t been in all day. The stress in his voice, the papers piled on his desk, and the tight grip he has on the telephone receiver all make it credible that he’s the only person in town who showed up for work today:

Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

Liz mainly wants to talk to Joe about Carolyn. Joe tells her he hasn’t talked to Carolyn in some time, and that he has no idea what if anything she is thinking about their relationship. While he breaks this news to Liz, we see him continue working, then cut back to the look of distress on Liz’ face.

Maggie calls Collinwood. Vicki answers and is excited to talk to Maggie. I guess the show is telling us they’re friends now. Maggie asks to talk to Roger. Vicki says Roger is probably in the office at this time of day, Maggie somehow knows he isn’t, Vicki remarks that he isn’t in the habit of confiding in her. Roger overhears this and asks “Is there any reason why I should confide in you?” When Vicki holds the receiver out to him and says Maggie Evans is on the line, he takes it and hangs up without so much as putting the receiver to his ear. Vicki and Roger then have one of their little quarrels.

That’s the only thing Vicki does in the episode. Her character is heading into a danger zone. Through the first eight weeks, she was on all the time. She was our representative, the outsider who knew nothing about the other characters or the town they live in, and to whom everything had to be explained. Now she knows as much about the rest of the characters as they know about each other, and we know as much as we want to learn by hearing explanations.

The major characters all have their secrets, but the only two who know each other’s secret are Roger and Sam. Vicki isn’t any likelier than anyone else to uncover that one. She has no secrets of her own, and her original story-line- her quest to discover her origins- is dead in the water. What’s more, Vicki is no good at lying. Soap operas are mostly conversation, and the big events on them are lies and the exposure of lies. The only time Vicki has tried to lie to anyone- in episode 13, when she told Matthew that Liz knew she was in his cottage- she was immediately found out, with disastrous consequences. If she’s going to stay relevant to the show, something is going to have to change, and fast. It’s fun to watch Alexandra Moltke Isles bicker with Louis Edmonds, but the characters they play need something meatier to bicker about.

This is the first episode credited to writer Francis Swann, indeed the first episode credited to anyone other than Art Wallace. Swann’s teleplay finds humor in the idea that so many people have taken the day off. Each time another character remarks on a case of absenteeism it gets that much closer to raising a chuckle. And Roger’s line that looking for Carolyn would require him to “neglect my vital tasks at the office… Dear me, no” is genuinely funny, especially as Louis Edmonds delivers it. The telephone scenes are also an innovation, and promise a new source of visual activity. Those favorable omens are offset by Vicki’s scene and its suggestion that her character is about to be allowed to wither on the vine.

A couple of the blogs I read when I prepare my comments made remarks about this episode with which I disagree. John Scoleri of Dark Shadows Before I Die says this of the quarrel between Sam and Maggie:

I know Sam gets frustrated with Maggie, but I’m beginning to wonder about their relationship. If he’s that close to hitting Maggie when he gets drunk, there’s no way I’m believing he hasn’t done that before.

To which I replied:

It doesn’t look to me like Sam has hit Maggie. She’s inches from his face when he is at his angriest, yet she doesn’t flinch, doesn’t slump down, doesn’t show any sign of withdrawal or fear or anger or panic or sullenness or bewilderment or any other possible response to physical abuse.

Patrick McCray said this:

There hasn’t been much happening on DARK SHADOWS in the last few weeks, but that doesn’t mean the show hasn’t been moving forward. There’s been a growing sense of doom throughout the show, and it’s obvious that someone is going to die. In this episode Sam rips up his portrait sketch of Burke Devlin, he and Roger lob threats at each other, Liz begins to draw Joe’s attention to his girlfriend’s romantic intentions on the family rival, and Victoria has been pushed around by just about everyone in the cast. In theory, any one of them is eligible for a ride in the bone wagon, but the show has been implying that Devlin is headed for a fall. It’s interesting that the show decides to go in another direction: I don’t know when Bill Malloy checks in at Eagle Hill Cemetery, but it’s probably sooner rather than later.

While it is true that “in theory, any one of them is eligible for a ride in the bone wagon,” I do think there’s a clear front-runner to be the first Dark Shadows character to be killed. It’s Sam who is obsessed with the fear of death, Sam whom Roger has threatened, Sam who left a mysterious sealed envelope to be opened in the event “something happens.” And, from an out-of-universe perspective, it’s Sam who has a daughter played by an appealing actress who needs a story-line. Maggie seeking revenge for the killing of her father would be just the plot to elevate Kathryn Leigh Scott from the bottom of the second string to the starting lineup where she so obviously belongs.

No other character has anyone so well-positioned to play avenger if they’re killed. The only keen attachment Bill Malloy has shown is his devotion to Liz, and in her scene with Matthew in episode 38 Liz demonstrated that she sees devotion from people outside the family as a tool to use when time comes to protect the good name of those inside it. So if she suspects Roger killed Bill, she won’t become Bill’s avenger- if she could order Matthew to throw away his own good name to cover up the truth about David, we can hardly expect her to expose Roger to redress Bill’s grievance against him. Indeed, when Bill is murdered, they will introduce an entirely new character to seek revenge for him.

Vicki is an orphan, who tells us in today’s opening narration that before she arrived at Collinwood she had never known a home. No one is likely to avenge her, and besides, she still does the opening narration for every episode- she’s supposed to be important, even if the writers can’t quite figure out what to do with her. Burke is supposed to be rich and powerful. Presumably he has friends, but we haven’t seen any of them. Joe is Mr Nice Guy and he’s mentioned a friend or two, but again, we haven’t seen them. The series story bible calls for Roger to die when Burke finally gets his revenge, but every time Louis Edmonds’ performance is the most interesting thing in an episode it becomes so much the less likely that they will ever get around to playing that scene. So the smart money, at this point, would be on Sam to be the victim in the first Dark Shadows murder. So much so, indeed, that it might not be surprising enough if it does happen- they may think they have to kill someone else to keep the audience engaged.

Episode 14: We’re all pals again

We see David looking for a place to hide a small metal valve. He settles on Vicki’s underwear drawer. She catches him going through it; he runs off, and she finds nothing missing. She would apparently rather not think about what he was doing in that particular drawer. Later, he will claim that he was trying to slip a present into the drawer- a seashell, at first; then, a magazine.

Alone in the upstairs hallway, Vicki sees the locked door to the closed-off part of the house open and close, apparently by itself. At first, she thinks it’s David playing a prank on her, but he comes out of his room so soon after that there doesn’t seem to be any way he could have done it. The show has been using the idea of ghosts in episode after episode to suggest that something big is about to happen; now, for the first time, we see an event that is either a supernatural manifestation or an elaborate, Scooby Doo-esque hoax perpetrated by some unknown person for some unknown reason. So what she’s doing now- looking for David, trying to figure out what he’s been up to- is directly connected to something that is disturbing the supernatural back-world of Collinwood. It may be a while before the back-world erupts into the foreground, and even longer before it crowds out everything else and becomes the whole show. But that little valve represents the first irretrievable step on the path that will lead to what Dark Shadows became.

This is also the first episode in which Vicki gets to make someone laugh. Carolyn says that she and Joe will probably go to a movie, because “What else is there to do in this town?” To which Vicki replies “You could get into a fight in a bar.” It’s also the last episode in which Vicki is allowed to make a joke. Humorlessness one of the things that will eventually squeeze the life out of the character. Alexandra Moltke Isles delivers her one good joke well enough that it clearly could have been otherwise. Those of us who wish Vicki had stayed at the center of the show all the way through can’t help but feel sad that it wasn’t to be.

Episode 6: “Winters! Victoria Winters!”

Looking for David in the basement of Collinwood, Vicki encounters caretaker Matthew Morgan. No one has bothered to tell Matthew that a new person will be coming to the house, so he assumes she is a burglar and confronts her accordingly. Liz shows up, telling Matthew that Vicki belongs in the house and telling Vicki that she doesn’t belong in the basement.

In week one, Liz refused all requests for information about who Vicki was and why she hired her to be David’s governess. But at least she had told the other members of the household that Vicki would be coming. She hasn’t told even that to Matthew, notwithstanding the fact that, as she will explain to Vicki in this episode 13, Matthew is a “strange and violent man.” By taking the job and living in the house, Vicki, our point of view character, has made herself dependent on Liz; we the audience are also dependent on Liz, in that the stories in these first months all revolve around actions Liz will or won’t take. So it’s doubly unnerving that she is so very stingy with information.

George Mitchell, who plays Matthew here and in his next few appearances, is the sort of actor we often see in the first 42 weeks of the show. He is essentially a miniaturist, who builds a character one finely etched mannerism at a time. His successor in the role, Thayer David, worked at the opposite extreme, becoming the first exponent of the Dark Shadows house style of acting (often called “Go Back to Your Grave!” because of Lara Parker’s explanation of it.) Without that style, the show wouldn’t have become what it did in the period which people remember, so I can’t regret the recasting. But I do wish we could somehow see what it would have been like had George Mitchell carried the character through his whole arc of development. He could have played something I think Art Wallace could have written, a closely observed, sensitively explored psychological study.

There’s another what-might-have-been moment when Vicki tries to make friends with Matthew. He introduces himself to her with a gruff “Morgan! Matthew Morgan!” To which she replies, mimicking his down-east accent, “Wintahs! Victoria Wintahs!” It isn’t much of a joke, and Matthew isn’t amused. But it’s hard not to wonder what Vicki might have become if she’d been allowed to make the occasional joke as the series went on.