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:
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.
The restaurant at the Collinsport Inn appeared in the very first episode of Dark Shadows. Well-meaning governess Vicki arrives in town, and stops there on her way to her new home in the great house on the estate of Collinwood. Counter-woman Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, gave Vicki a bit of a hard time at first, but quickly emerged as the person likeliest to be her friend. And indeed, Vicki and Maggie have visited each other, had heart-to-heart talks, etc.
We’ve seen the restaurant many times since. As part of the inn, it has always figured as territory associated with dashing action hero Burke Devlin, arch-nemesis of Vicki’s employers, the ancient and esteemed Collins family. It was Burke who brought Vicki to the inn and therefore sent her Maggie’s way, and the major scenes in the restaurant since have revolved around Burke and his doings. By making the whole complex of the inn an extension of Burke’s personality, it established him as a force equal to the Collinses with their mansion and its precincts.*
Today marks a shift in the use of the set from a symbol of Burke’s power to a neutral space where new characters are introduced without giving away their relationships to the ongoing storylines. While Burke figures in the conversation, he doesn’t appear in the episode, and the action does not depend on what he has done.
Maggie presides over the place. Her interactions with newcomers begin from the fact that she works there. The only other public spaces we’ve seen are the Blue Whale tavern, where the bartender does not speak and any conversations start as part of whatever story the speakers are involved in, and the sheriff’s office, which is nobody’s idea of a casual hangout. So Maggie is elected Welcoming Committee.
A blonde woman in a stylish hat takes a seat at a table while Maggie is at the counter bantering with her boyfriend-in-waiting, hardworking young fisherman Joe. Joe tells Maggie that the woman looks familiar, but that he can’t quite place her. After Joe leaves, Maggie gives the woman a menu, pours her a cup of coffee, and talks with her.
The woman asks about Grace, whom Maggie replaced at the restaurant five years ago. She confirms that she lived in Collinsport when Grace ran the restaurant. Since she is from Collinsport, Maggie is surprised that she came to town on the bus and is staying at the inn. The woman asks about the Collinses. Maggie says that high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins is the same as ever, only more so. When the woman asks what that means, Maggie explains that he is the person in town likeliest to play the role of Ebenezer Scrooge.** The woman asks about Roger’s son, strange and troubled boy David Collins. She is happy when Maggie says that David is a cute, clever boy, and startled when she says that “a nice dungeon would help” him to be easier to live with.
The woman is never named, but returning viewers will have a very short list of people she might be. The ongoing storylines are:
Vicki’s quest to learn the identity of her birth parents. The woman doesn’t look anything like Vicki, and the one potential lead Vicki has discovered in her time in Collinsport is a portrait of a woman who looks exactly like her. If the woman is connected with that storyline, therefore, it would likely be in some roundabout way- we wouldn’t expect them to cast a blonde actress as a close relative of the brunette Vicki after the big deal they made of that portrait.
The mistress of Collinwood, reclusive matriarch Liz, hasn’t left home in eighteen years and no one knows why. Liz is the first person the woman asks about, so it could be that she has come to shed some light on this puzzle. The only women who lived in the house eighteen years before who have gone away since were the servants, so it could be that this woman is a former Collins family servant who has come into money.
Homicidal fugitive Matthew’s abduction of Vicki. Matthew has always been friendless, and his only relative is an elderly brother. He has always lived in poverty, and did not know the servants who were connected with the house before Liz became a recluse. So it is difficult to see what connection he could have to this woman. On the other hand, the ghosts with whom the show has been teasing us since the first week have been making their presence very strongly felt as that story reaches its climax. The woman may have some connection with the supernatural back-world of the series, and that may somehow link her to Matthew or Vicki.
Vicki’s love-life. Vicki and Burke had been spending a lot of time together, but she has told him that because he is the enemy of her employers they can never see each other again. Burke doesn’t seem to be ready to accept this. Since she has been missing, Burke has taken an aggressive part in searching for her. Vicki has been seeing instantly forgettable young lawyer Frank, but we haven’t seen him since she’s been abducted (that I recall; the guy is very forgettable.) The woman seems to be a bit too sophisticated for Frank, but she may be a rival for Burke’s affections.
Joe’s breakup with flighty heiress Carolyn and his budding romance with Maggie. Maggie doesn’t recognize the woman at all, Joe can’t identify her, and their working-class backgrounds make her almost as unlikely a connection for them as she is for Matthew. Still, if she is a former servant at Collinwood, she might have some connection with one or the other of their families.
Burke’s quest to avenge himself on the Collinses in general and Roger in particular. There is a woman involved in Burke’s grudge against Roger- Roger and a woman named Laura were in Burke’s car when it killed a pedestrian. They both testified that Burke was driving, saw him sentenced to prison for manslaughter, then married each other. Burke swears that Roger was driving, and Laura was apparently Burke’s girlfriend, certainly not Roger’s, before the night of the fatal collision. Laura is still married to Roger, though they have lived apart for some time, and she is David’s mother. The mystery woman’s reactions to Maggie’s descriptions of Roger and David would make sense if she were Laura, as would her evident affluence and her separation from friends or relatives.
Vicki’s effort to befriend David. If the woman is David’s mother, she could complicate this, the quietest but most consistently successful of all the show’s storylines.
Maggie’s reference to “a nice dungeon” is ironic. There are dungeons about, both literal and figurative. Matthew is keeping Vicki bound and gagged in one inside the long-abandoned Old House on the grounds of Collinwood, where his helper David visits him today. David doesn’t know that Matthew is holding Vicki until the end of the episode, when he stumbles upon her. As David Collins, David Henesy gives a splendid reaction to this shocking sight:
Before the mystery woman enters, Maggie herself seems to be in a kind of dungeon. Her dungeon is built not of stone walls or iron bars, but of careless writing. Joe is filthy and exhausted after many long hours searching for Vicki, who is missing and may be in the clutches of a murderer. Even though she is Vicki’s close friend and The Nicest Girl in Town, Maggie doesn’t show a moment of concern for her. She giggles, jokes, and smiles all the way through her conversation with Joe. Not only is her dialogue out of character, it is composed entirely of cliches that remind you forcibly that you’re watching a 56 year old soap opera. For example, when Joe mentions that he crossed paths with Carolyn in Burke’s hotel room, she exclaims, “That is a convention!” The dread Malcolm Marmorstein strikes again…
*My wife, Mrs Acilius, developed this point in our discussion of the episode.
**Louis Edmonds would indeed have made a marvelous Scrooge. It’s too bad the cast of Dark Shadows didn’t get round to performing A Christmas Carol until 2021, two full decades after his death. It was a great performance, highly recommended, and is followed by a Q & A every fan of the series will find fascinating.
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 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.
In the posts that follow, I link to comments I made on Danny Horn’s blog Dark Shadows Every Day. Unlike most daytime serials, Dark Shadows tended to restart itself from time to time, dividing the show into major periods. I’ve tagged most of these posts with the periods of the show to which they refer.
There are several ways of periodizing the show. The scheme I use is this:
Episodes 1-45 “Meet Vicki”
Episodes 46-126 “Meet Matthew”
Episodes 127-192 “Meet Laura”
Episodes 193-209 “Meet Jason”
Episodes 210-260 “Meet Barnabas”
Episodes 261-365 “Meet Julia”
Episodes 366-466 “Meet Angelique”
Episodes 467-626 “Monster Mash”
Episodes 627-700 “Meet Amy” (subdivided into “Chris the Werewolf,” 627-638, and “The Haunting of Collinwood,” 639-700)
Episodes 701-885 “1897″ (subdivided into “Meet Quentin,” 701-748, and “Meet Petofi,” 749-885)
Episodes 886-969 “Leviathans”
Episodes 970-1060, “Meet Another Angelique”
Episodes 1061-1198, “Meet Gerard” (subdivided into “1995,″ 1061-1070, “The Re-Haunting of Collinwood,” 1071-1109, and “1840,″ 1110-1198)
Dark Shadows Commentary 