Seagoing con man Jason McGuire has talked his way into the drawing room of the great house at Collinwood. Reclusive matriarch Liz is dismayed to see him. Their conversation builds to his threat that the secret they share about something that happened one night eighteen years ago will not be safe unless she lets him stay at the house. She capitulates to this threat.
Liz’ husband, the never-seen Paul Stoddard, disappeared eighteen years ago, and she hasn’t left Collinwood since. Jason makes it clear to more than one character that he knew Stoddard, and implies to Liz that the terrible secret they share explains Stoddard’s absence. She is very uncomfortable any time anyone goes into the basement of the house. After Jason goes to get his luggage today, Liz tells well-meaning governess Vicki that it is more important than ever that no one know she saw her coming out of the locked room in the basement the other night. The obvious conclusion would seem to be that Liz and Jason killed Stoddard and hid his corpse in the locked room, though perhaps there might be some twist coming up that will lead us to a different conclusion.
Looking at today’s episode, I think we can see several routes they might take to add interest to the tale. Vicki is eager to help Liz in any way she can, and both Liz’ daughter Carolyn and her brother Roger show themselves more than ready to stand with her against Jason. If she accepts their help and tells them any part of the truth, their reactions to what she tells them and their attempts to work together against Jason might change the relationships among them in exciting ways.
Carolyn wonders if Jason is an old flame of Liz’. If there is an attraction between Liz and Jason, then we might see that Carolyn inherited her tendency to fall for the worst possible man from her mother, and there might be conflict between mother and daughter mirroring the tension when Carolyn was chasing after the family’s nemesis, dashing action hero Burke Devlin. Jason is mysterious enough, and actor Dennis Patrick is charismatic enough, that a romance that begins with Liz disregarding her better judgment and falling for Jason in spite of everything could lead to any number of interesting places.
Jason’s threat to Liz today, and indeed all of his talk when they are alone in the drawing room, is in terms of a single incident- “the most important incident of your life,” as Jason describes it to Liz. If his only leverage over her comes from one isolated event, then all he can do is repeat the same threat every time he wants her to make another concession. That would get to be unbearably monotonous very quickly. On the other hand, Liz’ reaction to him shows that when she and Stoddard knew him eighteen years ago, he was just as smooth-talking and untrustworthy as he is now. So it might be that Liz and Stoddard involved themselves in a series of his scams, and that she has a long list of secrets she is afraid he will expose. If that turns out to be the case, there might be a long list of pressure points where he can place his finger depending on just how outrageous his demand might be.
Failing any of those twists, the Jason storyline could be pretty dreary. Art Wallace, who was the sole credited writer for the first 40 episodes of Dark Shadows and stayed with show until #85, wrote a 30 minute episode of a CBS anthology series called The Web in 1954 under the title “The House.” You can see the whole thing here:
That version features a retired sailor coming to a coastal town. He finds out that a local woman whom he knew years before hasn’t left her house since he was around, which was at the same time her husband disappeared. He goes to her house and threatens that he will expose the hideous secret in her basement unless she lets him stay with her. His demands mount. When he insists that she marry him, she finally admits that she killed her husband and the sailor hid his body in the basement. The basement is dug up, revealing that there never was a body there. Indeed, she never killed anyone. The husband tricked her into thinking she had killed him, and the sailor tricked her into thinking he had buried him. When this truth comes out, the sailor flees and the woman lives happily ever after.
That may sound like enough story to fill a 30 minute time-slot, but The House has a number of slow parts. That thinness bodes ill for the narrative arc now starting. This is already Jason’s third episode, and the themes of Stoddard’s absence, Liz’ seclusion, and the locked room in the basement were dealt with over and again in the first weeks of Dark Shadows. Art Wallace’s original story bible for the series, Shadows on the Wall, included a straight retelling of the plot of The House, with no fresh complications until the very end. Today, when Jason tells Liz that as a houseguest he won’t require much entertaining, she replies “I don’t intend to entertain you at all!” If they stick to Wallace’s idea, the same might be the epigram for Jason’s whole storyline.
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