The two most senior members of the ancient and esteemed Collins family, reclusive matriarch Liz and her brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger, are both being blackmailed. At rise, Liz and her blackmailer, seagoing con man Jason McGuire, are having another version of the same conversation that took up most of yesterday, in which he makes demands, she resists, he threatens to expose her secret, and she gives in. Jason is a new character, connected to no one but Liz, and this is all we’ve seen him do. The actor is appealing, but not enough to make us want to see that scene a third time. When Liz and Jason summarize their relationship by telling each other “We’re stuck with it,” they give voice to a sinking feeling in the pit of the audience’s stomach.
Roger’s blackmailer is someone we know and care about. He is drunken artist Sam Evans. Sam took money from Roger years ago in exchange for keeping silent about evidence that Roger was responsible for a fatal hit-and-run, and to make the transaction look legitimate gave Roger some of his paintings. Now a powerful New York art dealer has told Sam that she can make him rich and famous if she shows those paintings in her gallery, and Sam is desperate to get them back. He threatens to take his information to dashing action hero Burke Devlin, who went to prison over the incident, unless Roger produces the paintings.
Roger spends today’s episode trying to find the paintings. His search takes him to the basement. There, he shines a flashlight directly into the camera.
Shortly after, Jason comes to the basement, and Roger catches him fiddling with the lock on a room Liz insists no one ever enter. Roger shines his flashlight in Jason’s eyes. When Jason complains about that, we again see Roger shining the flashlight directly into the camera. We’ve seen actors shine flashlights into the camera so many times that it must be in some way intentional, but this is the first time there is dialogue to give the show an intelligible reason to do it.
Jason won’t tell Roger what he is doing, but does say that he saw Liz’ husband, the never-seen Paul Stoddard, in that basement the night he disappeared. He then throws around some hints that there may have something untoward about Stoddard’s disappearance and that Liz may be hiding something about it. Later, he mentions to Liz that Roger doesn’t seem to know anything about the situation, suggesting that the hints were his attempt to test Roger.
Roger meets with Sam at the Blue Whale, the working-class bar where Sam spends his time (and, presumably, his daughter’s paychecks.) Roger can see that Sam is serious about his threat to go to Burke if the paintings do not materialize. Roger tells him that there is only one place he hasn’t searched. At the end of the episode, we see Roger back in the basement, trying to open the locked door.
These two blackmail stories have the potential to clear out all of the unresolved questions left over from Dark Shadows 1.0. Why is Liz a recluse, what happened the night Stoddard disappeared, what’s with the locked room in the basement, and what is the connection between Liz and the origins of well-meaning governess Vicki? Jason’s demands on Liz might answer all of these questions. How will Burke react when he learns what Sam knows, and what will the consequences be for Roger, for Sam, and for Sam’s relationship with his daughter Maggie? Sam’s threat to Roger might bring all of those answers to light.
The problem is that those questions have been around for thirty nine weeks and have yet to drive much of a story. It’s hard to believe they will suddenly become exciting now. Perhaps when they do clear them out of the way, they will find something different to put front and center in Dark Shadows 2.0. Let’s hope they do, and that they find a way to keep things interesting until then.
Dark Shadows Commentary 