lieutenant dan riley – Dark Shadows Commentary

Episode 174: I can’t say it hasn’t been weird

Parapsychologist Peter Guthrie has been doing a lot in the three weeks since he first appeared on Dark Shadows, but today is the first time we see him upset. He made an audio recording of the séance that he organized in the great house of Collinwood last week, and now blonde fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins has erased the tape and replaced it with the sound of fire crackling.

Dr Guthrie tells his friend, instantly forgettable young lawyer Frank Garner, that he isn’t sure exactly what it means to say that Laura erased the tape. Maybe there is some supernatural force that accompanies Laura but acts independently of her. Or maybe the force is one that grants her wishes, perhaps without her knowing it. Or maybe she herself is actively doing the strange things that everyone has been puzzling over lately.

When Laura first came on the show, the audience was invited to weigh these same three alternatives. She was mysterious in speech, vague in manner, and ethereal in appearance. She seemed to be in more than one place at a time, and to conduct herself very differently in each place. She ate nothing, drank nothing, had no material possessions, and spent most of her time sitting motionless, staring into the fire.

Recently, Laura has become a more substantial being. We’ve heard her make threats and seen her cast spells to carry them out. She has materialized in rooms, but then gone on to join conversations in other rooms. She has met with other characters and planned strategies. We still haven’t seen her eat or drink, and it is still hard to get her attention when she’s by the fire. But she gets so agitated when she talks about how little time she has to achieve what she must do that she seems to be quite corporeal. So we are leaning pretty heavily towards Option 3, but it is interesting to see that Dr Guthrie’s view of Laura today is what ours was a month ago. That does make sense- his knowledge of her now is about what ours was then.

The idea of Laura is an interesting one, but her story is developed at the slowest possible pace. They’ve been filling time lately by harking back to story points from the early weeks of the show that didn’t lead anywhere when they were first introduced, and then giving us a scene or two in which they still don’t lead anywhere. Today, I was afraid this was about to happen again. Hardworking young fisherman Joe comes to the house to deliver some papers, and has a conversation with flighty heiress Carolyn. When Dark Shadows started, these two characters had been dating for a long time. They were bored with each other, and the audience was bored whenever the camera was pointed at them. They gradually broke up, and now Joe is seeing Maggie, The Nicest Girl in Town. For a couple of minutes, it looks like we are about to have another scene in which Carolyn tries to start their relationship back up, leading to an endless recap of what happened between them to end it.

But that isn’t what happens at all. Instead, we have a sequence in which Carolyn and Joe talk about what is going on in their lives now and how they feel about it. Their attitudes towards their past influence that, but the main point is that Carolyn is more mature than she has ever been and Joe is more independent than he has ever been. If you were to analyze it in terms of plot points, you’d have something like “Joe offers to be Carolyn’s friend. She considers this offer from several points of view. He tells her that don’t have to be friends if she doesn’t want to be. She seems to want to be.” Hardly the stuff of a stirring adventure tale, but as they play it, the exchange goes a long way towards explaining why we care about these people. Carolyn was often exasperatingly selfish and impulsive in the early months of Dark Shadows, and Joe was such a one-dimensional Mr Nice Guy that you couldn’t imagine him doing anything to surprise an audience. But the woman and man we see today have real feelings and real problems, and a story about them could be exciting.

In the first week of Dark Shadows, we had a couple of brief glimpses of the administrative offices of the Hammond Foundling Home, a fictional institution in New York City where well-meaning governess Vicki lived before she came to Collinwood. A few times since, there have been scenes set in the town of Bangor, Maine. Today, we leave the northeastern USA for the first and only time in the entire series. They take us to Phoenix, Arizona.

A street in Phoenix, Arizona, where each car is driven by an office worker carrying money she has embezzled from an obnoxious guy in a cowboy hat.

The Phoenix police got their sign from the same place as the Collinsport sheriff’s office

Two policemen are filling out papers in an office there. One we have seen before. He is Lieutenant Dan Riley of the Maine State Police, and he has been hanging around asking Laura what if anything she knows about a woman whose charred corpse was found in what was left of her apartment in that city after it burned to the ground. The other is Lieutenant Costa of the Phoenix police.

Lieutenant Costa had been convinced that the woman who died in the fire was Laura Murdoch Collins, and all the scientific evidence his department has been able to gather has confirmed that identification. But of course there is a woman living in Maine who can also be proved to be Laura Murdoch Collins, so the authorities have decided to bury the remains as a Jane Doe.

Regular viewers might be puzzled as to why Lieutenant Riley had to go all the way to Arizona. The Phoenix police had a body to identify, and Riley asked Laura some questions on their behalf. But he never had an investigation of his own to conduct. Seeing him here, we might jump to the conclusion that there was more to Riley’s task than we saw on screen, though we can’t really imagine what it might have been. The performance of John Harkins as Lieutenant Costa goes a long way towards selling this idea; Harkins’ guest spots would become a staple of prime time network television in the 1970s and 1980s, and it’s easy to see why. His embodiment of a weary cop having to give up on an important case he’s been working on for a long time lets us believe that the premise makes sense. His scene partner, Vince O’Brien, doesn’t undercut Harkins. Riley seems as weary as Costa, though he doesn’t do anything special to express his weariness

Riley and Costa go to the morgue. This is a large set, well realized visually and even more so acoustically. The actors’ voices echo musically while the camera zooms steadily in on them. They open the vault in which the unidentified body was deposited, and find that it is empty.

Episode 153: To be a dead woman

High-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins had some bad news several weeks ago when he learned that his estranged wife, the mysterious and long-absent Laura, had come back to town. His consternation turned to joy when he learned that Laura wanted to divorce him and leave with their son, strange and troubled boy David.

The one obstacle in the path of the divorce is Roger’s sister, reclusive matriarch Liz. Roger has squandered his entire inheritance and has no inclination to make himself useful enough to anyone to earn a living. He therefore lives as a parasite on Liz, living as a guest in her house and drawing an income from a sinecure with her business. Liz distrusts Laura and sees in David the only hope that the family name will continue. She is determined to prevent Laura from taking David, and Roger has to appease her.

Today, Liz is disturbed that the authorities in Phoenix, Arizona keep insisting that Laura is dead. She lived in an apartment there which burned to the ground. The medical examiners in Arizona have now inspected the charred remains of a woman found inside, and the dental records are a perfect match for Laura’s. Lieutenant Dan Riley of the Maine state police shows up to inform everyone of this fact and to convey Arizona’s request that Laura submit to a physical.

Riley has some rather peculiar mannerisms. When Roger answers his knock to let him into the great house of Collinwood, he finds him standing at the door, staring off into space at a right angle to him. I’ve answered many a door in my day, and I don’t believe I have ever found anyone on the other side presenting his profile to me in this way. It is truly an odd thing to see. I suppose director John Sedwick must have told him to do that in order to make some kind of point, but I can’t for the life of me imagine what that point might be.

Roger is dismayed that the bizarre situation created by Arizona’s insistence that his wife is dead threatens to postpone his final farewell to Laura and David, but he does see the funny side of it. He and Liz take Riley to the cottage where Laura is staying. Before Riley can start talking, Roger asks Laura how it feels to be dead. The show has been giving us lots of clues that Laura is a revenant of some kind, and both Liz and David’s well-meaning governess Vicki have taken note of some of these clues. Laura’s shock when Roger puts that question to her strikes her silent for a whole commercial break. When they come back and we find him teasing her with the news from Phoenix, we might wonder if she’s about to betray herself- “I haven’t been dead for weeks, not altogether anyway!” But instead she just sputters and postures, behaving as if offended. Roger is puzzled by this reaction, and asks what happened to her sense of humor. Apparently his comments are the sort of joke that used to make her laugh.

Riley does not doubt that the Arizona authorities have made a mistake and that Laura in fact is the person everyone in the town where she grew up, including her husband, her ex-fiance, her disapproving sister-in-law, and the sheriff, has taken her to be. He simply asks them to play along and help his colleagues in Arizona to complete the routine tasks required of them. Among the questions she answers correctly is that it was her idea to name her son “David Theodore Collins.” Roger had wanted to name him “Charles Andrew Collins,” after some of his ancestors, but she insisted on calling him “David,” a name no previous Collins had ever borne. At Roger’s instance, Laura agrees to go to a doctor so that Riley will be able to send the Arizona officials the paperwork they need.

After Liz and the policeman have left Laura alone, Roger asks her what she isn’t telling about the fire in Phoenix. She is alarmed that he might attach some weight to the identification of the body as hers. He at once dismisses that as too ridiculous for words, but says that he is sure she knows more about the dead woman than she is telling. She won’t budge from her denials, and he tells her that while he will be glad to publicly support any lie it might be useful for her to tell, they really ought to share the truth in private.

That evening, Vicki is on a date with Roger’s lawyer, instantly forgettable young Frank Garner. She tells Frank she is glad that David is warming to Laura. He says that there are so many unanswered questions about Laura that he fears Vicki’s attitude towards her is excessively charitable. He does not think that Vicki or anyone else really knows enough about Laura to be sure that she ought to be trusted with David’s care.

After dinner, Vicki is a passenger in Frank’s car. We are introduced to this fact by a shot of a car’s headlights coming at us, a shot previously used in an early promo for Dark Shadows.

While Frank is droning on about who knows what,Vicki looks off in the distance and smiles broadly. Frank sees this big smile, recognizes that nothing he is saying could elicit so vivid a reaction, and objects to her ignoring him. She says that the scent of jasmine is all around. He says he doesn’t smell anything.

The scent of jasmine has been established as the sign that the ghost of Josette Collins is present. Josette has been trying to warn everyone that Laura poses a threat to David, and Vicki is especially susceptible to communication from her. So regular viewers will know that Vicki is now acting under instructions from Josette.

Vicki starts issuing commands. She orders him to take the next right turn, then a left, and finally to stop in the middle of a field. When Frank asks whether she has ever been there before, she says no. When he asks if she knows where they are, she says no. When he asks why she keeps giving these orders, she says that “It is where I am supposed to be.” He realizes that they are in a cemetery.

Vicki jumps out of the car and runs up to the door of a small building. She knocks furiously at the door. Frank comes running after her, asking her what she is doing. Again, she will only say that it is where she is supposed to be. When she knocks, he tells her no one can possibly be in there. It is a chapel or some other kind of public building, there is no public event taking place in the cemetery, and it is long after regular business hours. Vicki listens to him and starts to move away from the door. Then, she sees the door handle turn. She and Frank watch as the door opens.

Dark Shadows never had much of a budget for sets. Every time we see a new one, even one as modest as this, it is a sign that something important is about to happen.