We open in the hotel suite occupied by dashing action hero Burke Devlin. Burke is getting a briefing from a paid agent of his whom he placed in the home of his enemies, the ancient and esteemed Collins family. This agent is wildly indiscreet housekeeper Mrs Johnson.
Mrs Johnson has come to report on a conversation between high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins and Roger’s estranged wife, the mysterious and long-absent Laura. Mrs Johnson overheard Laura telling Roger that she is keeping Burke pacified by pretending that she will testify on his behalf in a retrial of a long-ago criminal case. When Mrs Johnson relays this to Burke, he flies into a rage. He demands to know who is paying her to defame Laura. Mrs Johnson stands up to his abuse, and he apologizes.
Mitch Ryan and Clarice Blackburn were outstanding actors, and it’s always fun to see them play a scene together. But this doesn’t really make much sense. Whatever Laura’s plans, it is hardly likely that she would advance them by telling Roger that she is going to side with Burke. Since this is a conversation Burke is having with a secret agent in his employ, the audience would expect him to understand deception.
Meanwhile, Laura is in the cottage where she is staying on the grounds of the great estate of Collinwood. She has a visitor- her son, strange and troubled boy David. The head of the Collins family, reclusive matriarch Liz, has forbidden Laura to see David and ordered her to leave the estate. Laura repeatedly urges David to keep his visit to her a secret. She gives him a music box, reminding him to hide it from everyone in the great house.
Moments after David gets home, Liz catches him with the music box. She recognizes it as Laura’s and scolds him for visiting her. She tries to explain why he can’t see his mother. David takes this badly, shouting at her that he doesn’t love her. When she objects that this is a terrible thing to say, he tells her he hates her.
Liz sets out for Laura’s cottage. Laura is there, but she is not alone. Burke has come to ask about the conversation Mrs Johnson overheard. Several days ago, Burke had asked her about her relations with Roger, naming well-meaning governess Vicki as his source. Today, Laura asks if Vicki has been talking again. Thoughtlessly, Burke won’t answer, further convincing Laura that Vicki is her enemy.
Laura starts crying. Burke’s anger evaporates. He embraces her and kisses her. At that moment, Liz enters.
Burke, whom we first saw today in his role as spymaster, tells Liz he’s glad that happened because he likes to have everything out in the open. Liz, who has sealed up most of her house and hasn’t left the estate in eighteen years because she is trying to cover up some hideous secret, says that she also likes that. Burke leaves.
Liz demands Laura leave the estate no later than tomorrow morning, and vows that she will never have custody of David. Laura says that no power on earth can keep her from her son, and tells Liz she will learn to her cost what she is capable of.
Back in the house, Laura’s face is superimposed over the screen as Liz grows faint. Liz starts climbing the stairs. She calls for help, naming Roger and well-meaning governess Vicki. We see her start to fall. Then we see her sprawled at the bottom of the stairs.
The process shot makes it clear that Laura is using witchcraft to control Liz. Burke’s behavior is also uncharacteristic, but it is an open question whether it is the result of Laura casting a magic spell on him, of his own emotions leading him to make a fool of himself, or of sloppy work on the part of the writers.
Mysterious and long-absent Laura Collins has returned to the great house of Collinwood, seeking custody of her son, strange and troubled boy David, and a divorce from her husband, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger. Roger is enthusiastic about this plan, but David’s attitude has shifted from eagerness to see his mother to the terrified belief that the person who has come to the house is not his mother, and that if he becomes close to her something terrible will happen.
These episodes are loaded with hints that there is something very strange about Laura. When Laura was due to visit the house yesterday, David thought he saw her appear on the lawn and then vanish, an idea Liz dismissed instantly and Roger took as evidence of his great desire to see her. David did indeed want to see Laura at that time; when she came into the house, he was afraid of her. Coupled with other indications that there is something supernatural about Laura and with David’s history of sensitivity to eerie happenings, these disparate reactions might lead us to wonder if there are two of her- a ghost who flickers on the lawn, and a corporeal being who comes inside and carries on conversations.
We have seen Laura at the restaurant in the Collinsport Inn several times; the restaurant’s keeper, Maggie Evans, mentions that Laura never eats or drinks. On Wednesday, Laura’s ex-boyfriend, dashing action hero Burke Devlin, tells her that she seems profoundly different than she had been when they knew each other before. Yesterday, reclusive matriarch Liz told her that her personality had undergone a radical change. She is obsessed with fire* and with the legend of the Phoenix, suggesting that her radical change may have something to do with that myth. Maggie’s father, drunken artist Sam Evans, is possessed by an otherworldly power marked by theremin music on the soundtrack and paints a woman in flames, apparently a consequence of something Laura’s presence has stirred up in town.
Today, we have further suggestions that Laura is not simply a physical entity. She tells flighty heiress Carolyn that although she has been staying at the inn for several days, she has not unpacked her bags. Carolyn looks at Laura’s crisp outfit and flawless makeup and is bewildered by this remark. Laura also explains that a taxi brought her to the house from the Inn and that it is scheduled to return. When she decides not to leave, she tells Carolyn that she will call to cancel the return trip, but when Carolyn leaves her alone Laura turns away from the telephone- evidently there never was a taxi. When well-meaning governess Vicki takes the several mile walk between town and the house, she is wearing the soap opera version of a sensible walking outfit. The style-conscious Carolyn is the perfect person to highlight the improbability that Laura took such a hike looking the way she does.
Laura will be staying at the cottage at Collinwood. This has been established as an important location, and we’ve been waiting for someone to move into it since its previous occupant, gruff caretaker Matthew, confessed to Vicki that he had killed beloved local man Bill Malloy, had then tried to kill Vicki, and had become a fugitive. Carolyn mentions that Collinwood’s housekeeper, Mrs Johnson, had cleaned the cottage up when Matthew died, but that it needs another cleaning. I found this to be rather a poignant touch. Mrs Johnson had for many years been Bill Malloy’s housekeeper, and was intensely devoted to him. It was quite insensitive to ask her to clean the home of Bill’s killer, and it is quite reasonable that she did not do a particularly thorough job.
*I can’t resist mentioning that Mrs Acilius and I watched this episode while staying in a hotel. I don’t know if this was a consequence of Diana Millay’s performance as Laura, but we had to pause it about halfway in when a fire alarm went off in the building.
A woman named Mrs Johnson joins the domestic staff of the great house of Collinwood. After reclusive matriarch Liz has sat with her in the drawing room for a few minutes, Mrs Johnson rises to begin her duties. Liz asks her to wait, and stammeringly warns her that some members of the household may seem unfriendly at first. She isn’t to take notice of that- they simply need time to get used to having a new person around when they have been so isolated for so long. Mrs Johnson takes this warning in stride, and again thinks she has been dismissed. But a second time Liz asks her to wait. She tells Mrs Johnson that she needn’t go into the closed-off portions of the house,* and particularly emphasizes that she wants her to stay out of the basement.
Liz’ nephew, strange and troubled boy David Collins, is not at all happy with Mrs Johnson’s accession to the household establishment. When his aunt begins to introduce them, David cuts her off, saying that he had met Mrs Johnson in the restaurant at the Collinsport Inn. He asks Mrs Johnson why she wants to work in the house. His level tone shocks his aunt. She takes David into the drawing room while Mrs Johnson goes upstairs.
When Liz reproves him for rudeness, David asks if he will have to apologize to Mrs Johnson again. He explains that the Collins family’s arch-nemesis, dashing action hero Burke Devlin, had made him apologize to Mrs Johnson in the restaurant after he yelled at her to “Shut up!” Liz says that for once Burke did the right thing. David then asks if Mrs Johnson is going to be his jailer. Liz asks him where he got such an idea. David starts talking about ghosts, and Liz can’t take it anymore. She tells him to go. He complies, still eerily calm.
In the next scene, we’re back in the drawing room. Gruff caretaker Matthew is working in the fireplace. David sneaks up behind Matthew and startles him. He asks Matthew what he’s scared of- is it ghosts? Matthew says he doesn’t talk about such things. David keeps needling him. Matthew gets more and more agitated, David stays absolutely in control of himself.
Mrs Johnson comes in with a ham sandwich and a glass of milk on a tray. She tells David she’s been looking all over the house for him. He protests that he doesn’t take his meals on a tray, but in the kitchen. When Matthew warns him not to make a mess, he gladly sits down on the couch and takes hold of the sandwich. Matthew sulks away.
Mrs Johnson wheedles David into talking about the closed-off rooms of the house. She asks him what he sees there. He asks if she believes in ghosts. She says she doesn’t. He says, again in the blandest possible voice, “You will.”
Matthew returns in time to hear Mrs Johnson encouraging David to describe the closed-off rooms. He sends David to the kitchen with his tray, and scolds Mrs Johnson for asking questions about matters Liz doesn’t want anyone looking into.
When the clock strikes 3 AM, Mrs Johnson shines a flashlight directly into the camera. She is inspecting the basement. She tries the door to the locked room. She can’t open it, but looks into whatever she can. Suddenly, something grabs her from the darkness. She looks down, and sees David’s complacent grin.
Cheshire cat
Mrs Johnson tells David she came down to investigate a noise. That doesn’t impress David, perhaps because it doesn’t explain why she was opening drawers and cigar boxes. For his part, he tells her that he’s there waiting to see a ghost.
David tells Mrs Johnson that his aunt will be very upset if he finds out she was in the basement. She tries to bluster her way out of trouble, but David tells her not to worry- he won’t tell. She asks why not. Because, he says, she’s a friend of Burke Devlin. She denies being Burke’s friend. He says she must be- otherwise, when she publicly accused Burke of causing the death of beloved local man Bill Malloy, he would have been angry. Burke’s mildness persuaded David that the accusation was a little drama the two of them were acting out. Returning viewers have seen enough of Burke’s temper to know how David came up with his premises, and those who saw episode 79 know that his conclusion is true.
David goes on to say that he thinks Burke must have sent Mrs Johnson to the house to spy on his father, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins. This is also true. Before she can try to deny it, David says that he is all for this mission, because he hates his father and hopes he dies. Mrs Johnson is shocked, both by the words and by the altogether relaxed demeanor with which David speaks them. She must never have met a nine year old sociopath before.
Mrs Johnson resumes her bluster. David assures her that he won’t tell Liz he saw her if she doesn’t tell that she saw him. He goes upstairs, disappointed that he missed seeing the ghost. Mrs Johnson stays downstairs, and after a moment hears a woman sobbing inside the locked room. She tries the door again- it is covered with cobwebs, and obviously hasn’t been opened in a very long time. She knocks, and the sobbing desists.
We’ve heard the sobbing woman before. She drew well-meaning governess Vicki to the basement in the first week of the show, and when Matthew found Vicki down there he rebuked her fiercely and reported to Liz that he caught her “snoopin’ around,” the supreme evil in Matthew’s moral universe. When Liz talked to Vicki about the incident, she amazed Vicki by denying that she had heard any sobbing. Eventually, Vicki forced Roger to admit that he had heard the sobbing many times over the years, and that he had no idea what it was. The reappearance of the sobbing woman promises a resolution to a long-standing mystery.
*Several times in the episode, Mrs Johnson mentions the disused “east wing” of Collinwood. We’ve heard a good deal about a closed-off west wing, and it will be years before the show confirms that there is also an east wing. So “east wing” is probably a blooper today. But it is clear that the house has multiple closed-off sections, and in episode 84 there is a distinct suggestion of a sealed east wing. So if it is a blooper, it is a felicitous one.
We spend today, not so much with the ancient and esteemed Collins family, but with two of the three members of their household staff. Gruff caretaker Matthew Morgan goes into town so that he can scowl at the family’s nemesis, dashing action hero Burke Devlin. Mrs Sarah Johnson goes to the great house of Collinwood to interview for the position of housekeeper.
During the interview, Mrs Johnson tells reclusive matriarch Liz that “I’m not a gossip.” This will become a frequent refrain of hers in the years to come, and will usually serve as a preface to remarks in which she will blab the entire contents of her mind to anyone who will listen. This time, “I’m not a gossip” is followed immediately by her assertion that in all her years as housekeeper to beloved local man Bill Malloy, she never repeated a word she heard spoken in his house to anyone. It seems to be news to Liz that Bill had ever spoken any words he would want to have kept in confidence. It’s certainly news to the audience. All we’ve heard up to this point was that Bill’s whole life was absorbed in his work. Mrs Johnson set me wondering what we might yet learn about Bill.
Matthew drives Mrs Johnson back to town. He sits down with her as she prepares to have lunch at the restaurant in the Collinsport Inn. Matthew tries to persuade her she would be better off moving in with her daughter than taking a job at Collinwood. He tells her that Collinwood is in fact haunted, and that if she isn’t afraid of its ghosts she ought to be. She is unconvinced.
Matthew gets a great deal of emphasis in this episode. There are two location inserts featuring him- when he walks through downtown Collinsport to the Collinsport Inn, and when the taxi carrying Mrs Johnson pulls up to the outside of the house and we see him trimming bushes. Exterior footage is never commonplace in Dark Shadows, and when we see a character moving around outdoors it’s a sign of something important.
Matthew in townMatthew sees the taxi
Unknown to Matthew or Liz, Mrs Johnson is in fact convinced that Liz’ brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger, is responsible for Bill’s death and that Liz is protecting him. She wants to become housekeeper at Collinwood so she can spy on the Collinses for Burke.
After Matthew leaves the restaurant, Mrs Johnson reports to Burke on her interview with Liz. He is dissatisfied with her work as a secret agent. He berates her, as we had seen him berate his henchmen in earlier episodes. They had submitted to his rantings meekly. Mrs Johnson snaps at him, and gets an apology. Evidently we are supposed to expect that she will be a strong character in her own right, not a mere cat’s paw for Burke.
This is the first of many episodes that survives only on kinescope. This has some happy effects. For example, the footage of Matthew walking in downtown Collinsport is preceded by a shot of him going out the front door of the great house. The kinescope’s poorer resolution makes this set look like very much like an outdoor shot itself.
CORRECTION: It turns out this isn’t a kinescope, just a particularly crummy videotape. There’s a kinescope coming up later this week, though.
Mrs Sarah Johnson, longtime housekeeper to the late Bill Malloy, shows up in the hotel room of dashing action hero Burke Devlin. She tells Burke that she believes his enemy, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins, killed Bill. Her principal evidence for this is the fact that Bill’s body washed ashore near Roger’s home on the estate of Collinwood, and “I believe in signs and omens!”
This line is a bit of an omen itself- Clarice Blackburn will be an important part of the show, not only as Mrs Johnson, but as other characters who believe in signs and omens, and who make things happen in the name of that belief.
Meanwhile, hardworking young fisherman turned hardworking young clerk Joe Haskell is called into Roger’s office at the cannery. There, he finds flighty heiress Carolyn behind her uncle’s desk, looking seductive, or at least highly available.
Nancy Barrett’s way of throwing herself completely into whatever her character is supposed to be doing at any given moment sometimes makes Carolyn seem even more scattered than her persona as Flighty Heiress required, but it does come in handy when the character is supposed to be sexy. That makes her stand out- even by the standards of an American television show of the 1960s, Dark Shadows is remarkably un-sultry. Sometimes it’s a marvel that they can put so many good-looking young people in close proximity to each other and still project an image of total chastity.
Joe and Carolyn kiss, and she asks him to go away with her. He tells her that he can’t just leave work in the middle of the day. She explains that she is troubled by the doings of Joe’s bête noire, Burke. This leads to a lively conversation, which in turn leads Carolyn to resume her attempts to persuade Joe to take the rest of the day off. When Joe’s boss calls for him, she offers to use her clout as the owner’s daughter to persuade him to let Joe go. He won’t let her do this. She leaves, frustrated by his refusal.
Back at the hotel, Burke and Mrs Johnson are devising a plan in which she will get a job at Collinwood and act as a secret agent for him. We get a glimpse of Burke’s persuasive abilities. When Mrs Johnson is showing reluctance to follow his plan, Burke mentions that well-meaning governess Vicki has given Roger an alibi. She immediately declares that Vicki is lying. Burke won’t agree, leading her to demand that he set aside his personal feelings and devote himself wholeheartedly to making the case against Roger. Not only does the audience see Burke showing kindly feelings towards Vicki, keeping the idea alive that they might become a couple, but we also see Mrs Johnson commit herself to going along with Burke’s plan. Whatever Burke’s actual feelings for Vicki, his emotional display at this moment is timed to lock Mrs Johnson into doing what he wants.
There is a knock on the door. It’s Carolyn. Mrs Johnson hides in Burke’s kitchen and listens as he gives Carolyn the idea of hiring her as housekeeper at Collinwood. This isn’t very hard- Burke simply mentions that Mrs Johnson needs a job, and Carolyn at once says that she will tell her mother to hire her as housekeeper at Collinwood. Even so, Burke’s skillful handling of Mrs Johnson is so fresh in our minds that we don’t need to see him actually do anything to enlist Carolyn in his scheme for this scene to reinforce his image as master manipulator.
The sight of Mrs Johnson lurking in the shadows, eavesdropping on Burke and Carolyn, further reinforces this image. A guileless woman comes into his room proclaiming her every thought at the top of her lungs, as she had done when she was introduced at the sheriff’s office in episode 67. We can hardly imagine so straightforward a personality becoming an effective undercover operative Yet within minutes of meeting Burke, he has her working as a spy.
Writer Francis Swann is credited with the script for today’s episode. He is particularly good with installments that, like this one, have only four characters. Swann’s ability to slip substantial amounts of plot exposition into natural-sounding dialogue makes a minimalist drama seem busy. In this one, it also helps us to feel that we have seen Burke perform great feats of persuasion. Burke may not have had to work very hard to plant ideas in the minds of Carolyn and Mrs Johnson, but we are aware that the scripted dialogue has planted ideas in our minds, and know that someone on the other side of the screen is good at subtle communication.
Swann and director Lela Swift also make effective use of the sets in today’s episode. This is our first look at the kitchen in Burke’s room. He’s gone in and out of there several times, most notably in episode 29 when he prepared a nonalcoholic mixed drink, the “Burke Devlin Special,” for Roger’s son, problem child David. Regular viewers might have started to wonder what it might look like, and might pay close attention when we get our first look at it. What we do see is a complex pattern of shadows that signals Mrs Johnson’s initiation into the world of film noir.
In today’s scenes with Carolyn and Joe, we spend as much time in Roger’s office as we have in any other episode. It’s the only part of the Collins’ business location we see, standing in for the whole enterprise. Played on that set, Carolyn’s flippant attitude towards Joe’s job and his mixed feelings about the demands she makes lead us to wonder if she’s going to wreck the whole business. Her persistent friendliness towards family nemesis Burke gives substance to that thought. Regular viewers will remember that Roger’s self-indulgent behavior nearly annihilated the business; seeing his favorite niece play-act as him in his office leads us to wonder if she will finish the job.
This one belongs to Maggie Evans, the nicest girl in town. We open with her doing some work in the restaurant she runs. She isn’t feeling so nice today- dashing action hero Burke Devlin has accused her father, drunken artist Sam Evans, of various crimes, including the murder of beloved local man Bill Malloy. When flighty heiress Carolyn comes into the restaurant, Maggie tells her that it might be a good idea to flavor Burke’s coffee with rat poison.
Burke does show up. When he complains about the coffee, Maggie picks up on the idea she had floated to Carolyn and apologizes for not adding arsenic.
No arsenic today, sorry
Not that she’s going to let her father off without a piece of her mind. When he comes in and tells her some lies, she discards her usual adult-child-of-an-alcoholic manner of exaggerated patience and calmly asks him if he minds that she doesn’t believe him. He mumbles that there’s no reason why she should.
The sheriff comes into the restaurant to ask Maggie if she can confirm her father’s whereabouts at the time of Bill’s death. She gives him a sarcastic answer. When he asks what she is prepared to swear to on the witness stand, she makes it clear that she will swear to whatever she damn well pleases. Sam then tells the sheriff that Maggie doesn’t actually know where he was that night. At that, she declares that Sam has no idea what she does or doesn’t know. If she wants to perjure herself, it will take more than Sam and the sheriff to stop her.
In the sheriff’s office, we meet Mrs Sarah Johnson, housekeeper to the late Bill Malloy. Mrs Johnson is furious with the Collinses, the family in the big dark house on the hill who own half the town. She more or less blames them for Bill’s death. She very much blames them for his life, which he spent doing nothing but working for their interests. Mrs Johnson is even more indignant than Maggie, but the only person she interacts with is the sheriff. So we have a contrast between a character who gives us several distinct shades of outrage, one for each person she puts in their place, and another who spends her time bringing one specific shade of anger into perfect focus.
In between there’s a scene with Sam and the sheriff, and at the end one between Carolyn and Burke. These offset the studies in indignation from Maggie and Mrs Johnson, both giving the audience a bit of a breather and giving their fiery turns time to sink in.
Miscellaneous:
There’s a moment when the sheriff goes to the water cooler and finds the paper cup dispenser empty. He apologizes that he can’t offer Mrs Johnson a drink. All the websites list this as a production fault, but I’m not sure- it goes on for a while, longer than I imagine it would if he were actually drawing two drinks of water and giving her one, and the timing doesn’t seem off afterward. I don’t know if it was in the script- I suppose they might have noticed they were out of cups and improvised the scene before or during dress rehearsal. At any rate, I don’t think actor Dana Elcar was actually surprised by the absence of cups during the taping.
This episode was recorded on the Sunday before it aired. The Dark Shadows wiki quotes Kathryn Leigh Scott (Maggie) explaining that this was because one of her fellow cast members had shown up drunk on the day they were originally supposed to record it. Mitchell Ryan and David Ford both have important parts in it, and they were both alcoholics. After he stopped drinking, Ryan admitted that he showed up on the set of Dark Shadows drunk on more than one occasion. Ford never stopped drinking, and booze was apparently part of the reason he died in 1983 at the age of 57. Also, while Ryan and Ford are the two actors in this period of the show who usually have the most trouble with their lines, they are both nearly letter-perfect today, as if they had been in trouble and knew they had to be good boys or else. So it could have been either of them.
Clarice Blackburn joins the cast as Mrs Johnson today. As Mrs Johnson, Blackburn will be crucial at certain moments in the years ahead, and she will also be cast as other important characters in the later run of the show. When Mrs Johnson was cast, Blackburn was told to model her on Judith Anderson’s performance as Mrs Danvers, the frightening housekeeper in Hitchcock’s Rebecca. That instruction didn’t last very long, and when four years later they actually got round to including an homage to Rebecca, Blackburn didn’t play the Mrs Danvers part.
On his blog Dark Shadows from the Beginning, Marc Masse develops a theory that set designer Sy Tomashoff was influential in casting Dark Shadows. He focuses on a guest spot Clarice Blackburn had on an earlier series where Tomasheff did the sets, a primetime show called East Side, West Side:
The version of Mrs. Johnson we see today in episode 67 is based on an even earlier role as Gert Keller in the critically acclaimed but greatly overlooked groundbreaking series East Side, West Side, in a 1964 episode called The Givers. Perhaps the biggest surprise to those not familiar with the series would be its leading actor, featuring George C. Scott as a… social worker.
It should be noted that both of these earlier productions had Dark Shadows scenic designer Sy Tomashoff as the “art director”; in the East Side, West Side episode The Givers, the cast list even featured Bert Convy, the original early choice for casting as Barnabas Collins on Dark Shadows. Tomashoff held the same production role in For the People. Both of these series are notable for a good many cast member crossovers with Dark Shadows, often several in a single given episode; and because Sy Tomashoff worked so closely with executive producer Dan Curtis on Dark Shadows, it is likely that he played a significant part in a number of the key casting decisions in the early days of Dark Shadows.
Especially curious as noted in the introduction to today’s post is how Mrs. Johnson comes across as the grieving widow, indicating that she may have been more than just a housekeeper to Bill Malloy even if Malloy himself was never aware of this. If you see her as Gert Keller in the East Side, West Side episode, she seems to be reprising this earlier role…
An even more striking parallel between the portrayals of Gert Keller and Sarah Johnson are the similarities in character dialogue between the speech patterns and emotional tone… [I]n each instance, vocal delivery of dialogue as provided by the actress shows a similar shift between the emotional extremes of tearful despair and bitter resentment at the injustice of each character’s passing, first over Arthur Keller in East Side, West Side with an almost identical pattern and tone evident today on Dark Shadows over Bill Malloy.
In East Side, West Side, Art Keller is a business man struggling with elusive opportunities due to a past bankruptcy situation. Despite the best efforts of Neil Brock [George C. Scott] and his resources and contacts, Keller winds up ending his life soon after Brock drops by with the news that despite the availability of a possible deal for work in connection with a local congressional office, he had to intervene on Keller’s behalf because of the shady nature of the congressman’s methods of operation.
Two years later on Dark Shadows, Gert Keller is transplanted from East Side, West Side to make her debut as Bill Malloy’s bereaved housekeeper, Sarah Johnson.
It’s plausible, but not conclusive- after all, both East Side, West Side and Dark Shadows were cast with New York actors at a time when there was already more national television production, and therefore more proven acting talent, in Los Angeles. Many of the relatively well-established actors who were in New York in the 1960s were there because they were busy with specific projects and weren’t in a position to commit the time for a recurring role on a five-day-a-week TV show. So if you’re casting Dark Shadows and you’re looking for someone you can trust to give you a performance with a particular quality, of course you’re going to look at a lot of people who were on East Side, West Side, whether Sy Tomashoff recommended them or not.
In the teaser, Carolyn asks Vicki what’s on her mind. “The meaning of life?” “No, just the opposite- death.” Exchanges like that go a long way towards explaining the appeal the show has to depressives. Casting makes a difference, too- actresses Nancy Barrett and Alexandra Moltke Isles seem to be far from death-obsessed, so they can deliver the most preposterously gloomy lines without boring the audience.
After the first break, Vicki and Carolyn are having breakfast in the kitchen. As it always does, that set creates an intimate atmosphere which makes it seem natural that the characters should share confidences. Carolyn confesses her feelings of guilt at having brought Burke to the house; Vicki confesses that she doesn’t believe Burke tampered with Roger’s brakes. For some reason, Vicki tells Carolyn that when she was six years old, an attendant at the foundling home played a prank and told her that her birth parents would be coming for her. All of Vicki’s stories about her childhood are like that, it’s no wonder she feels at home in Collinwood.
There’s a scene between Bill Malloy and Burke in Burke’s room. It’s always interesting to see actors as talented as Mitch Ryan and Frank Schofield playing off each other. It is puzzling that a Collins family retainer as loyal and intelligent as Bill would go to Burke before the police have a chance to question him or search his room and tell him everything he knows and suspects about the crime. But Roger has already tipped his hand to Burke, so another indiscretion isn’t going to damage the prospects of the prosecution by much. This scene, in which Burke is eating breakfast while Bill is confronting him with his suspicions, is intercut with the scene in which Vicki and Carolyn are eating breakfast and consoling each other. So, opposite extremes- former friends in a hostile setting, new friends in a nurturing setting.
Carolyn tells Liz that Vicki doesn’t think Burke is guilty. Liz responds that she doesn’t “care what Miss Winters thinks.” Liz then collapses into pity for Carolyn and guilt about herself as a mother. She remembers that when Carolyn was a child, she would come home from school crying because the other children taunted her, saying that “Carolyn’s mother is a witch.”
That’s an interesting story, because it implies that Carolyn went to the school in town. How did she get there? It’s much too far to walk. Did a school bus come up the hill to Collinwood to pick her up and drop her off? That’s a bit hard to imagine. Liz doesn’t want anyone around the place. Sooner or later, some adventurous child would slip off the bus with Carolyn and go exploring the grounds, no doubt finding a way into the house itself. Roger didn’t live there until recently, and Liz has never set foot outside the grounds since Carolyn’s birth. The only servant on the estate is Matthew, and he and Carolyn are not at all close, not as they would be if he’d taken her to and from school every day in her childhood.
That leaves Bill Malloy. He comes to the house more or less daily to go over business with Liz- perhaps he used to combine those visits with picking Carolyn up for school and dropping her off afterward. He is very close to her, calling her “Princess.” He’d have to pick her up very early in the morning, since his responsibilities involve supervision of the fishing boats. She might still have been in her pajamas. She’d have needed to get dressed and have breakfast at Bill’s house. We learn later that he has a housekeeper who has been with him many years; much, much later, that housekeeper will reminisce with Carolyn about brushing her hair for her when she was a little girl. So maybe that was it…
Vicki talks with Liz and Carolyn about the private investigator Burke has hired to look into her background. Liz doesn’t want to talk about anything that touches on how she heard about Vicki and what she knows about her, but by a skillful line of Socratic questioning, Vicki leads Liz to the conclusion that something about her origins might be embarrassing to someone associated with Collinwood. Liz walks out of the room, as Euthyphro walks out when Plato’s Socrates springs a similar trap for him, and we can see how smart and determined Vicki is.
Scenes that focus on the question of Vicki’s origins tend not to get much attention from fandom, perhaps because the whole story-line ultimately fizzled out with no resolution. But watching it forward, not thinking about what comes later, we can see some strong scenes devoted to it.
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. A number of times I argued that the show was not so discontinuous as people were making it out to be. To be sure, the creative process is very close to the surface, so that viewers have to do a lot of re-writing in their heads to make sense of what they’re watching. Sometimes the writers just lost track of the story and contradicted themselves from one episode to the next, and other times they changed their minds abruptly. But there were other times when alleged contradictions can be reconciled without having to invent anything drastic.
For example, Danny and many of his regular commenters from time to time mock the depiction of Dr Julia Hoffman as sometimes a blood specialist, sometimes a psychiatrist. I think that’s a pretty easy one to resolve. In this comment, I added some fanfic of my own to sell the idea that she started as a hematologist and retained an interest in that field after switching to psychiatry:
The story I made up for myself is that Julia started out as a blood specialist but switched to psychiatry. She was interested in rare diseases, the rarer the better. She found that in hematology, there’s so much money to be made from developing treatments for the most widespread disorders that a researcher with an emphasis in the exotic is constantly fighting an uphill battle for funding and recognition.* Even those colleagues who had an abstract appreciation of the importance of studying rare disorders had to work within a system where all the institutions push them towards the biggest projects possible.
Psychiatry, on the other hand, always had room for the unusual.** In fact, Julia discovered that high-strung rich people would pay a great deal of money to be told that whatever happens to be bothering them at the moment is not the same kind of problem that one of their servants might have, but is a mental aberration hitherto unattested in the annals of psychiatry.*** So she switched to that field and quickly made enough money to open her own, hugely profitable, mental hospital. But she never stopped working in rare blood diseases, and the experiments she was able to finance by flattering the vanity of her wealthier patients earned her such a reputation in a male-dominated field that even her old acquaintance Dave Woodard would commit sexist slips of the tongue and say of “Hoffman” that “he” is “the top man in the field” of rare blood diseases.
Lucrative as Windcliff was, Julia’s true love was never money, or even science per se, but the exotic. When she found herself as the best friend/ frequent accomplice/ bossy big sister of an honest-to-wickedness vampire, surrounded by ghosts and witches and werewolves and Frankensteins and time travelers and interdimensional anomalies and who knows what else, there was never any question of her going back to the office.
*I have no reason to believe this was true in the real world in the middle decades of the twentieth century, or that it is true today. It’s simply part of the fictional world in which I see Julia. **(Same note) ***(Same note)
In this comment, I devised a much more modest bit of fanfic to answer a simpler question. Quentin has a girlfriend named Tessie, and at some point in the night he had, in his werewolf form, attacked her in the woods. Why was she in the woods? Danny and his commenters had proposed various awkward scenarios to answer this question, but I suggest she just followed Quentin after she saw him in town looking for booze.
In the “1995” segment, Mrs Johnson and Carolyn talk about how Mrs Johnson brushed Carolyn’s hair for her when she was a little girl. Some say this was a continuity error, because Mrs Johnson didn’t come to work at Collinwood until episode 81. Before that, she’d been housekeeper to Collins family retainer Bill Malloy. However, I say that she still could have brushed little Carolyn’s hair while working for Malloy:
I have a theory that could explain Mrs Johnson brushing Carolyn’s hair when she was little.
In the early episodes, Carolyn talks about having gone to school in town. How did she get there?
She can’t have walked; it was miles away, much of it along a winding road with several blind curves. Her mother never left the grounds during those years, she couldn’t have driven her. Roger was living in Augusta with Laura. The only servant was Matthew. Matthew and Carolyn don’t seem at all close; it doesn’t seem likely that he drove her to school every morning. If a school bus came up the hill to Collinwood day after day, the kids who rode it couldn’t have maintained the attitude Carolyn describes, whispering behind her back about her living with the witch in the haunted house. Sooner or later they’d have started talking to her face to face about it.
Carolyn also talks about Bill Malloy being more like a father to her than any other man, and the two of them do have a cozy relationship. Carolyn is also very quick to fall in with Mrs Johnson when Burke pitches the idea of her joining the household staff at Collinwood. So I think we have to conclude that Bill Malloy and his housekeeper were in charge of getting Carolyn to school in the mornings. Malloy was on the fishing boats, so that would require an early start to the day. There were probably many days when little Carolyn was still in her pajamas when she got to the Malloy house. On those days, Mrs Johnson brushed her hair while the water came to a boil for breakfast.
Several times I explained my theory about how the “Meet Gerard” segment (episodes 1061-1198, including “1995,” “The Re-Haunting of Collinwood,” and “1840”) fits together. This iteration also suggests ways to resolve a couple of puzzles about Angelique:
For me, a lot can be explained by the smile of satisfaction Gerard gives when he sees Julia and Barnabas take the staircase from 1995 to 1970. The dark power he represents called them to 1995 from Parallel 1970, and is now sending them back in time, first to 1970, then to 1840 to make it possible for the future they see in 1995 to exist.
This is analogous to what the Leviathans did at the end of 1897. First Quentin’s ghost, then Barnabas and Julia’s I Ching trips, had created a rift in the order of things that made it possible for the Leviathans to erupt from the underworld into the human world, and to send Barnabas to 1969 as their agent. So too have the journeys Barnabas and Julia took into Parallel Time torn open the fabric of time and space, and made it possible for Judah Zachery to bring a Frankenstein maker back to his time.
Attributing to Zachery the same power to exploit disruptions in time to shuttle people between past and future and thereby to rewrite his own history that the Leviathans had shown, we also have a way to resolve the Angelique/ Miranda paradox. Perhaps Angelique really was relatively new to witchcraft in 1795. Perhaps also, in her early naive attempts, she stumbled into the same kind of trouble Barnabas stumbled into with his time-travel. That’s what Zachery had in mind when he shouted at her during his trial that she ought to tell the truth, that she had come to him of her own accord- it was only because she had already worked in the black arts that he could call her to him, from the days after she first left Collinwood in 1796 to a nearby town 104 years before. And perhaps, with the first beheading of Zachery, his spell broke returning her to a time shortly after the “Burn Witch Burn!” moment in the tower room.
Come to think of it, that might also put sense into Angelique’s remark that she is “consigned to this century forever.” There were a few days after Zachery calls her to 1692 and before she returns from 1692, and until Barnabas and Ben torched her, she was sentenced to relive those few days over and over again, Bill Murray-style.
The logic that counts the most in the show isn’t so much the kind of sequential reasoning that I’ve done in these posts as it is the associational logic of a dream. An image or situation or word reminds a dreamer of something, and suddenly the dreamer is in the middle of that something. You dream about polishing your Ford with Turtle Wax, and the next thing you know Polish turtles are whacking away at a shallow spot in a river. You tell a story about rich, selfish people who obsessively keep secrets and set a dreary tone for their town, and the next thing you know your main character is a vampire. I left an unreasonably long comment where I natter on about the concept of dream logic.
In the episode, Mrs Johnson says that she brushed Carolyn’s hair when she was a little girl. Some say that is a continuity error, since Mrs Johnson didn’t start working for the Collinses until Carolyn was grown. I explain how it could be consistent with the continuity they have established.
Acilius on Dark Shadows 