Tag: laura murdoch collins

Episode 128: Whaddaya hear from the morgue?

Maggie Evans, keeper of the restaurant at the Collinsport Inn and The Nicest Girl in Town, greets her boyfriend, hardworking young fisherman Joe, with a hearty “So, whaddaya hear from the morgue?” As Dark Shadows gets to be more deeply involved with horror and the supernatural, that will become a plausible alternative title for the series.

Maggie wants to know the details of the death of Matthew Morgan, fugitive and kidnapper, whom she believes to have been scared to death by ghosts. Joe doesn’t want to entertain that idea. Maggie’s father, drunken artist Sam Evans, shows up and announces that he’s tired of the topic of Matthew’s death. He wants to talk to Maggie privately.

Sam wants Maggie to get information about a mysterious woman who is staying at the inn. Maggie says that the woman won’t give her name or say much of anything about herself, but that she spent some time telling her about the legend of the phoenix. That rings a bell for Sam, making him uncomfortable. Maggie says she was glad to hear about it- “It isn’t something you hear the yokels around here talking about.” Not like the latest doings at the morgue…

Sam won’t tell Maggie why he wants to know who the woman is or why he is so agitated about her. He does tell her that he’s on his way to the tavern, and she doesn’t like that at all. Today’s episode and tomorrow’s go into depth presenting Maggie as an Adult Child of an Alcoholic. Joe volunteers to go to the tavern with Sam and keep an eye on him.

The mystery woman comes into the restaurant after Sam and Joe leave. She lights a cigarette and stares raptly at the flame of her match.

The look of love. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die

Maggie engages the woman in conversation. She starts with a cheery description of Matthew Morgan’s autopsy report. The woman’s bewildered reaction makes you wonder what it would be like to walk into a diner and be regaled with clinical details of an unexpected death. Maggie asks a series of questions. She leans further and further forward across the counter as she tries to get the woman to identify herself. By the time the woman leaves without giving any answers, Maggie almost falls face-first into her coffee cup.

Maggie goes to the tavern and tells her father that she made a fool of herself in a fruitless attempt to get the information he requested. Sam gets upset, then leaves to conduct his own investigation. He goes to the inn, looks in the guest registry, and finds a name. He goes to the telephone booth and watches the woman come into the lobby. He makes a phone call.

He is calling high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins. Ten years ago, Roger paid Sam to conceal evidence implicating him in a case that sent dashing action hero Burke Devlin to prison. Burke came back to town seeking revenge against Roger in episode 1, and he has by now figured out that Sam had something to do with the case as well. Roger and Sam hate each other, but are bound together by the case. Sam tells Roger to meet him at the tavern immediately.

Sam makes Roger buy him a couple of drinks, then tells him that the last person either of them had wanted to see has come back to town- Roger’s estranged wife Laura, the other witness to the event ten years ago.

The closing scene makes me wish they hadn’t put Laura’s name in the credits the other day. There has been enough evidence on screen that returning viewers will be fairly sure it must be Laura by this time, but if there were a chance it might be someone else Sam’s revelation and Roger’s reaction would have packed more of a punch.

Episode 124: To die again

Well-meaning governess Vicki has been the prisoner of fugitive Matthew, bound and gagged in a secret chamber, for several days. Vicki is sick of it, the audience is sick of it, and Alexandra Moltke Isles is sick of it. Just look at her bouncing the production slate on her knee:

Posted on Twitter by the Widow Tillane

Today, strange and troubled boy David Collins has found Vicki. David has been helping Matthew, under the impression that he was innocent. Now his pathological fear of punishment takes over. In the first month of the series, that fear had led him to try to kill his father. Now, it leads him to run away and leave Vicki at Matthew’s mercy.

David meets Matthew in the woods. Matthew believes that David has found Vicki, and tries to drag him back to the Old House. David breaks free, and runs back home. Once there, he does something we have never seen him do before- he calls for his father.

Meanwhile, a mysterious woman is hanging out in the restaurant at the Collinsport Inn. There, she tells Maggie Evans, counter-woman and The Nicest Girl in Town, the legend of the phoenix. Maggie can’t get the woman to tell her her name or much of anything else about herself. Evidently the audience isn’t supposed to have too much fun trying to guess who she might be- at the end of the episode, she is credited as “Laura Collins,” a name returning viewers will recognize as that of David’s mother.

My usual themes: Supernaturalism

In 281 of the posts that follow, I link to comments I made on Danny Horn’s blog, “Dark Shadows Every Day.”

Not all of these comments were absolutely unique. Several times I made remarks about the concept of the supernatural that Dark Shadows develops with all its ghosts, witches, and other weird beings.

In this remark about Danny’s post on episode 659, I respond to a discussion in the comment thread in which several people dismissed the idea that it was the ghost of Sarah Collins who sent Vicki back in time in episode 364, precipitating the show’s first time travel storyline:

It makes sense to me that Sarah sent Vicki back. The whole thing with the supernatural is that what seems weakest is actually strongest. The dead are stronger than the living, children stronger than adults, etc. So it fits the conceit that a long-dead and not especially bright little girl is the greatest power. It fits the dramatic development as well- throughout her time as a ghost Sarah steadily reveals more and more powers, and by the time of the seance we’re wondering what she will show us next. Moreover, her whole approach throughout 1967 is an attempt to curb Barnabas’ murderousness and to shield him from accountability at the same time. Vicki’s return from 1795 storyline precipitates events that achieve precisely that goal, and it is the goal to which Julia (Sarah’s successor as a sister to Barnabas) devotes herself for the rest of Barnabas’ time on the show.

I enlarged on my thoughts about Sarah’s ghost in a response to a post about an episode in which she actually appears, number 294:

“I don’t really think the writers are sure who Sarah is, or what she wants.” I don’t think that either we or she are supposed to know what Sarah wants. Up to this point she’s been very mysterious- for the first few episodes it was unclear what she remembered from one appearance to the next. And of course she several times expresses puzzlement that she can’t find her parents in the Old House, and she doesn’t know why David and the others think her clothes are old-fashioned. So they leave open the possibility that she was just a projection from the past with no intentions and no ability to learn in the present.

By now it’s clear that she is a character interacting with other characters, but still unsettled as to whether she knows she’s a ghost, or what happened to any of the people from her corporeal days, or what century it is. It still could be that her presence is just a side-effect of Barnabas’ revival, that she represents some kind of energy that was released into the world when he came out of the box. In the Phoenix storyline, they played with that same kind of ambiguity- Laura’s presence in the house coincided with other disturbances, over which she had no control and of which she was not aware.

Later it will become clearer that Sarah knows a fair bit, but right up to the moment Vicki vanishes from the seance she is trying to figure out a way to curb Barnabas’ murderousness without betraying him. Indeed, the speech Sarah gives speaking through Vicki at that seance is the climax of that whole development- Sarah is deep in her own thoughts, trying to solve an impossible problem, and taking a gamble on something amazing of which the most she can say is that “maybe” it will work out.

In a comment on episode 639, I said a bit more about the idea that Sarah herself is supposed to seem uncertain about her nature, her powers, and her goals, finding actress Sharon Smyth the perfect choice to play such a character:

When she first starts showing up, Sarah is a total mystery to us- it’s pretty clear she’s a ghost, but do ghosts form memories? That is, can she remember during one appearance what happened in her previous appearances, or does she know only what she learned in life? Does she have plans and intentions, or are her appearances simply the result of invisible forces? … young Sharon Smyth’s confused demeanor (nowadays she sums her performance up in “one word- clueless”) plays right into all those questions.

In a comment responding to the post about 730, I commented on how the original Phoenix storyline of episodes 126-192 (what I call the “Meet Laura” period of the show) set the stage for the supernatural tales that would come to dominate the show after the vampire shows up in episode 211:

Laura is the first paranormal being who sets a story in motion. Ghosts had been in the background from the beginning and had played important roles in ending Vicki’s first two imprisonments, but they hadn’t started any plotlines. The Phoenix story is bounded by the supernatural on all sides. At the end of it, virtually all the characters concede that they have just seen something that cannot be explained and tacitly agree never to speak of it again.

One of my less well-formed comments was a rambling half-essay about ways that particular kinds of Christians might be expected to respond to particular supernatural stories that I contributed to the thread responding to episode 1017. It was one of those internet moments where you click “Post” because it’s the only way you can imagine yourself letting go of something you’ve already wasted too much time on. Unsatisfactory as that comment wound up being, I can defend my motivation for writing it. Several contributors had made blanket assertions about what Christianity teaches concerning various matters, and someone really ought to have objected that different groups of Christians teach different things.