Well-meaning governess Vicki is being held prisoner by homicidal fugitive Matthew, a fact unknown to any of the characters in today’s episode. As in all episodes from the first 55 weeks of Dark Shadows, Vicki delivers the opening voiceover; she seems annoyed when she says that “the inhabitants of Collinwood have only begun to suspect I’m missing!”
Reclusive matriarch Liz is in fact very worried about where Vicki has got to. Housekeeper Mrs Johnson holds fast to the theory that she and flighty heiress Carolyn drove off together to visit Vicki’s boyfriend in Bangor, Maine, but cannot convince Liz of this. Mrs Johnson concedes that Carolyn had been very concerned about her appearance before she went out, and that she would not have been likely to make such a point of looking her best if she were just driving Vicki to Bangor.
Carolyn wanted to look especially good for the same reason she didn’t tell her mother where she was going. She is on a date with her family’s arch-nemesis, dashing action hero Burke Devlin. By the time we catch up to them, they’ve gone back to Burke’s hotel room, where they are drinking, exchanging sweet nothings, and doing some serious kissing.
Burke and Carolyn kissing
Just Thursday, Burke was kissing Vicki, and now he’s moved on. This shouldn’t reflect too badly on him- after all, he’s one of only two eligible bachelors in all of Collinsport.
The other eligible bachelor is Carolyn’s ex, hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell. Joe interrupts Burke and Carolyn’s kiss with a knock on the door. They gather that Joe is there on behalf of Liz and jump to the conclusion that he is trying to enforce Liz’ prohibition against her daughter dating the family’s foe. This leads to a fistfight between Joe and Burke, in which Joe fulfills the vow he made in #24 to punch Burke in the mouth. When Burke learns that Vicki is missing, he forgets all about his date with Carolyn and goes to Collinwood to form a search party.
Within one minute, Carolyn goes from the high of seeing the entire available male population of the town fighting over her attentions to the low of being dismissed as both of them start literally chasing after Vicki. Nancy Barrett usually throws herself into all of her parts with the utmost gusto, but she plays this bit of emotional whiplash very quietly. It’s an effective choice- the situation is so blatant that an underplayed reaction comes off as shock.
At the great house of Collinwood, Joe hangs his coat up. It’s the first time we see someone doing this from inside the imaginary closet in the foyer. While doing it, he sees Vicki’s suitcase, proof that she did not go to Bangor:
The telltale suitcase
It’s a relief to have an episode in the middle of a captivity story that doesn’t lock the audience up with the captive. There are a couple of awkward bits. Vicki’s huge suitcase is in the coat closet, but there is no door separating that closet from the entryway, so it is simply inexplicable that no one notices it until the end of the episode. And, entertaining as Joe and Burke’s fight is, regular viewers will find it repetitious- Joe and Carolyn broke up weeks ago, long after they had bored us all silly with their pointless, joyless relationship. We know that Joe and Burke have nothing to fight about. And the conversations between Liz and Mrs Johnson go on too long and involve at least two statements of every point.
But those are relatively minor objections. This one moves along at a fair pace, has more action than usual, and the actors manage to paper over even the weakest of the weak points.
Well-meaning governess Vicki sits placidly in her bedroom at the great house of Collinwood, sewing and looking out the window. Flighty heiress Carolyn comes in and loudly berates Vicki for spending the day away from her charge, problem child David. Carolyn saw Vicki coming home as a passenger in a car driven by the family’s arch-nemesis, dashing action hero Burke Devlin, and jumped to the conclusion that Vicki was both on a date with Burke and on Burke’s side in his conflict with her family. Vicki is at first bewildered by Carolyn’s rage, and then confronts her with her own record of infatuation with Burke.
This scene shows how well cast Nancy Barrett and Alexandra Moltke Isles were as Carolyn and Vicki respectively. Miss Barrett throws herself completely into whatever her character is supposed to be doing at any given moment, a perfect style for the role of someone who is stormy and unpredictable. Mrs Isles takes a very deliberate approach to her part, working her way from the center of Vicki’s thoughts out to whatever lines she has to deliver. That suits the role of someone who is often baffled by the strange goings-on around her and who gradually gathers the strength to stand up for herself.
Carolyn is on her way to the front door when her mother, reclusive matriarch Liz, asks her where she’s going. Still upset after her confrontation with Vicki, Carolyn snaps at Liz and gives sarcastic answers. Eventually she tells her that Vicki didn’t give David his lessons for the day, that she spent the day with Burke, and that she brought Burke home with her. Alarmed by this report, Liz heads upstairs towards Vicki’s room. Carolyn remembers her latest project, persuading her mother to take Mrs Sarah Johnson onto the domestic staff as a housekeeper. Liz cuts her off, saying that she has no time to think of hiring a housekeeper- all she can think about is firing a governess.
After Liz leaves the foyer to fire Vicki because Carolyn has led her to suspect she might be a spy for Burke, Carolyn picks up the telephone. She tries to call Burke. Evidently the infatuation Vicki had brought up to her is still driving Carolyn to inexplicable actions.
Mrs Johnson is in the restaurant at the Collinsport Inn. In fact, we first see her on the pay-phone there, talking to Burke about her plan to join the staff at Collinwood so she can work as a spy for him. Patrick McCray makes a nice remark about this on his Dark Shadows Daybook:
[P]lanting a spy for Burke Devlin is just the touch of espionage intrigue that Collinwood needs. Finally, someone can actually be the spy that Vicki is suddenly accused of working as. (In the same episode no less, with the irony and subtlety of an anvil landing in your lap.) That kind of duality — especially among the backstairs staff — is a concession to the dramatic thinking that DARK SHADOWS kinda lost over the years. The show gained plot, but it lost those opportunities for characters to reflect one another. As it reached a supernatural frenzy, this earlier, authorial delicacy was a necessary casualty. However, it’s vital to know that a sculpted duality like Mrs. Johnson and Vicki is an instinct buried in the program’s DNA.
I think he paints with a bit of a broad brush when he says that “this earlier authorial delicacy was a necessary casualty.” The frenzied pace of the later years didn’t stop Joe Caldwell or Violet Welles from crafting dramatic miniatures Art Wallace and Francis Swann would have been proud of. While Sam Hall and Gordon Russell were no miniaturists and did often value slam-bang story development over every other consideration, they did take time to show characters in each other’s reflections. Indeed, the whole “1970 Parallel Time” arc is months and months of nothing but “opportunities for characters to reflect one another,” and the actors could often make those reflections interesting (at least the first two or three times you saw them.) Of course, there are also large numbers of episodes written by Ron Sproat and Malcolm Marmorstein, but you can’t blame their shortcomings on excessively rapid pacing.
Mrs Johnson is a difficult customer for Maggie Evans, who runs the restaurant. She sends a sandwich back because she disapproves of the mayonnaise, and the look on Maggie’s face shows us that the cost of that sandwich is coming out of her paycheck. Mrs Johnson insists her meal be served in courses, demands that Maggie sit at her table, and gives her a tip of 10 cents (I checked- 10 cents in October 1966 would have the same purchasing power as 90 cents in October 2022. You could take that to your local hardware store, buy several nails, and still have enough left to operate a gumball machine.) She declares that the death of her late employer, beloved local man Bill Malloy, was no accident, and that according to the Bible someone will have to pay for it. When Carolyn comes into the restaurant, Maggie leaps at the opportunity to leave Mrs Johnson and wait on her.
Clarice Blackburn must have had tremendous fun playing Mrs Johnson in these sequences. The character is exaggerated almost to the level of what would become Dark Shadows’ “Go back to your grave!” house style of acting, so that there is no need to worry about overacting. Besides, so many performers wait tables that one of the standard responses young people in Los Angeles get when they tell people they are actors is “Great! What restaurant?” So it must always be gratifying to play a character who will show the world what a bad restaurant customer looks like.
As Maggie, Kathryn Leigh Scott also has a juicy role today. We usually see her in one of two settings. Either she is in the restaurant, where she is required to be nice to everyone, or she is at home with her father, drunken artist Sam. As the adult child of an alcoholic, she has a thousand habits designed to keep the mood light. When she is dealing with Mrs Johnson, Miss Scott shows us what Maggie looks like when her Nicest Girl In Town persona is stretched to the max.
When she greets Carolyn, Maggie goes right into the chirpiest version of that persona. It’s a version that brings home the continuity between Maggie’s relationship to her father and her relationship to her customers. She speaks the first few syllables of each of her lines through a laugh. Many Dark Shadows fans complain about that as a habit of Kathryn Leigh Scott’s, but it’s a habit of Maggie’s. And if you start watching the series from episode 1, seeing all the scenes in the Evans cottage between Maggie and Sam, you’ll recognize it as something many adult children of alcoholics do. At the risk of giving away a spoiler, I’ll say that Sam will eventually cut back on his drinking, and some time after that will be written out of the show altogether. But Maggie’s character is formed in these weeks, when Sam is drunk all the time. Some of Miss Scott’s other characters on the show have similar habits, but those are the characters who are presented as Maggie Evans by other means, so they would have to be recognizable as her.
Carolyn tries to explain to Maggie, sotto voce, why Mrs Johnson is so upset, and Maggie drops her Nicest Girl In Town voice completely for a second- “I know who she is,” she rasps. Carolyn has been friendly to Maggie, and is equally friendly when she goes to sit with Mrs Johnson and tries to talk her into taking the job as housekeeper at Collinwood, assuming that her mother will offer it to her. After Mrs Johnson leaves, Maggie tells Carolyn that she has never been able to stand her- “She’s always given me the willies. I don’t know why,” she says, looking thoughtfully off into the middle distance.
Carolyn’s friendliness to the working class Maggie and Mrs Johnson is a welcome relief from her terribly snobbish sneer at Vicki as “Little Orphan Annie” who should “go back to your precious foundling home.” And it’s an opportunity for Nancy Barrett to take her performance from one emotional extreme to another within a single episode.
Back in the mansion, Liz confronts Vicki about not giving David his lessons. Vicki replies that Liz’ brother, high-born ne’er-do-well Roger, had said that he would tell Liz that he had taken Vicki on a tour of the cannery and had given David the day off. When Vicki hears Liz on the telephone confirming this with Roger, she blows up at Liz. She objects to being checked up on, she objects to being accused of lying, and, turning to look at the last spot where she had seen Carolyn, she objects to being accused of stealing people’s boyfriends. After she is done with her objections, she walks over to Liz. With their backs to the camera, the women quietly apologize to each other. Vicki explains that her protests mark the only way she can go on living in the house. Liz for the first time calls Vicki by her first name. Hearing this conversation when they are looking away from us is remarkably effective at creating a sense that they are sharing an intimate moment- more is happening between the two of them than even the audience can know.
Mrs Isles and Joan Bennett, as Liz, both play a wide array of emotions in their two scenes together, and do so brilliantly. It’s particularly interesting to compare Liz’ startled reaction to Carolyn’s snapping at her in the foyer when she asks her where she’s going to with her startled reaction to Vicki raising her voice at her in the drawing room when she’s been on the phone with Roger. They are two quite distinct startles. We see Liz from behind when Carolyn startles her. From that angle, we see the muscles in the back of her neck tense, signifying anger. That startle gives way to a parental sternness. The startle Vicki provokes is shown in profile. Liz pulls back a little, suggesting guilt. It leads to a rapid retreat.
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.
We’ve been watching each episode of Dark Shadows on the 56th anniversary of its original broadcast. Today was the 56th anniversary of the broadcast of episode 56, so a milestone of sorts.
Word is making its way around the town of Collinsport that the Coast Guard has found the body of Bill Malloy, manager of the fishing fleet and cannery that between them employ most of the men in town and sustain the Collins family in their big dark house on the hill. In the opening, reclusive matriarch Liz is stumbling over her words trying to break the news of Bill’s death to her daughter Carolyn. The phone rings. Carolyn answers it, and gets the Coast Guard’s report. Liz is shattered.
Carolyn tells well-meaning governess Vicki that Bill’s body has been found. In episode 52, Carolyn had told Vicki that Bill was like a father to her. Carolyn, as played by Nancy Barrett, does indeed seem as upset in this scene as would someone who had just heard that her father’s body had washed up on shore. Vicki, as played by Alexandra Moltke Isles, is very calm and deliberate as she listens to Carolyn, letting her say what she has to say and emote as she needs to emote. It’s quite a well-turned bit of drama.
In the Blue Whale, Collinsport’s tavern, Liz’ ne’er-d-well brother Roger finds drunken artist Sam Evans, his co-conspirator in a long-ago crime. Sam tells Roger that the Coast Guard has found Bill’s body. Roger first takes a very lofty tone and announces that he will do whatever he must to ensure that Bill’s killer is brought to justice. After Sam asks him what he means by this, Roger coaches him on the lies the two of them should tell to ensure that neither of them is convicted of killing Bill.
Back at the great house on the estate of Collinwood, we see the Collins family album open to the page with the picture and name of Josette Collins. The last time we saw this was in episode 52, when the book opened to that page without the aid of any visible hands. Now we see that Carolyn is opening the book. That is followed immediately by the drawing room doors opening. That too has been the prelude to a ghostly apparition, but this time turns out to be Vicki’s doing.
The first few weeks, several characters used the word “ghosts” in metaphorical senses when talking with Vicki. Each time, she behaved as if they were talking about literal ghosts and said something like “Surely you don’t believe in ghosts!” To which they said that they damn well did believe in them, and that if she goes on living in the house at Collinwood for any length of time she will, too. Reminding us of ghostly manifestations and then showing mortal agency behind them harks back to this kind of open question. Art Wallace, who was the only writer credited on the first 40 episodes, is the writer today as well. Evidently he wants to remind us of the supernatural themes and to keep us guessing where they will take us.
This one is so good that I can’t resist going over it scene by scene. It has a wide variety of mood and image, tautly structured in a clearly told story, subtly realized by highly accomplished acting, and memorably presented in superb photography and imaginative sound design.
Well-meaning governess Vicki, out for a night-time stroll, makes her way to the crest of Widow’s Hill, where flighty heiress Carolyn stands looking down at the ocean swirling a hundred feet below. “Advance and be recognized! Friend or foe?” Carolyn challenges. Seeing Vicki, she remarks “Even the tutors are out tonight.”
Despite her whimsical greeting, Carolyn is in a low mood. She’s wondering at her own inability to take hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell’s desire to marry her seriously. She tries to interest Vicki in some of the ghost stories that surround the great estate of Collinwood, while the wind whips around the hill making the eerie sound known as “The Widows’ Wail.” Vicki stoutly insists on reducing all of Carolyn’s tales to psychology and asking her about her feelings. You can really see Nancy Barrett’s Carolyn trying to maintain a light tone despite her gloom, and in Alexandra Moltke Isles’ Vicki you can just as easily see a determination to cut through the nonsense and stick to what’s real, a determination fueled partly by her empathy for Carolyn and partly by her reflexive rejection of the weirdness of her new home in the old dark house.
In the house, troubled rich boy David Collins is complaining to his aunt Liz that the ghosts won’t let him sleep. Liz tells him to turn the lights on and chase them away. Unsatisfied by that response, David persists. Liz tells him that she has no time for him now and sends him to his room. Ten year old David Henesy trades these well-written lines with veteran movie star Joan Bennett as her professional equal. David Collins continually does nasty things to characters we like, refuses to take responsibility for any of his wrong-doing, and becomes violently surly when interrupted in his endless bouts of self-pity. He ought by rights to be a difficult character to take. But David Henesy finds something lovable in him, and brings that out clearly enough that he’s always a welcome presence on screen.
Vicki and Carolyn come to the house. Liz is disappointed they aren’t her ne’er-do-well brother Roger. Liz had ordered Roger to leave his desk at her company and come home early in the afternoon. She has questions about the disappearance of plant manager Bill Malloy, and about Roger’s lie that he hadn’t seen Malloy the night before. It’s well after 10 PM now, and no one has seen or heard from Roger since Liz called him.
Carolyn and Vicki have tea and try to take Liz’ mind off her worries, but without success. Liz scolds Carolyn for bringing up the ghost stories at a time when everyone is worried about Bill Malloy, but she can’t long keep herself from drifting off into the tale of the two women who died falling off the cliff, and the third who will someday follow them. That drifting, as Joan Bennett plays it, speaks volumes about Liz’ state of mind. She’s agitated about Bill Malloy, about Roger, about the possible connection between their two absences. That agitation gives way to hopelessness.
Roger comes home. Liz greets him with a demand for explanations. He responds with perfect insouciance, informing his sister, in whose house he lives as a guest and from whose business he draws a salary on her sufferance, that he is going to the kitchen to make a sandwich. Louis Edmonds’ delivery of Roger’s lines is brilliantly funny- we laughed out loud.
Liz most definitely does not see the humor. She has a brief scene by herself after he goes off to prepare his snack. All she does is watch him leave the foyer, turn, walk a few steps to the drawing room, and take a seat. With no dialogue and no mugging for the camera, she shows anger, disbelief, exasperation, and despair. It is a wonderfully economical performance, quite as extraordinary as is Edmonds’ comic turn preceding it.
In Vicki’s room, we see the word “death” scrawled on her mirror in all caps. Vicki enters, dragging David behind her. She demands to know who wrote it. He insists that the ghosts of the Widows did it. Vicki remarks that it is surprising that the Widows have the same handwriting as David. Carolyn enters, sees the word, and scolds David. Vicki silences Carolyn with a glance and asserts control of the situation. Only when Vicki threatens to tell Liz about the word does David erase it, though he still insists it was the Widows who wrote it, not him.
After David has left the room, Carolyn tells Vicki how horrid David is. Vicki perks up and makes a series of jokes about the Widows. She’s in such a chipper mood as soon as David is out of earshot that she must have been putting on an act presenting herself to him as angry. Much to Carolyn’s mystification, Vicki likes David and is confident that sooner or later she will make friends with him.
At another point in the series, this scene might have been padded out to fill a whole episode. Today, Art Wallace writes a quick and forceful interlude, showing us everything we need to know about what the three characters in it are like and where they stand in their relationships to each other, shedding some light on the idea of the ghosts of the Widows, then moving on to the next story point. The writing is as economical as the acting, and as absorbing.
Liz and Roger have a confrontation in the drawing room. Liz asks why Roger didn’t come home when she told him to. He tells her that he went to Bill Malloy’s cousins’ house to see if Bill had been there, and that he simply forgot to tell her he would be making the trip. This response is so unsatisfactory that it seems to double the anger with which Liz puts her next question- why did he lie to her when he denied having seen Bill Malloy last night? Roger tries to weasel out of answering that question, and does manage to get Liz to give him some information he can use to craft more plausible lies, but does not get himself off the hook.
The relationship between Liz and Roger is the first of Dark Shadows’ several relationships between a Bossy Big Sister and a Bratty Little Brother. In Liz and Roger’s case, they are literally older sister and younger brother; the most important such relationship will be a figurative one, between Julia and Barnabas. But it’s Liz and Roger who set the pattern. Roger’s impossible behavior in this scene is certainly among the finest examples of brattiness among all the little brothers, and Liz shows with crystal clarity the limitations of the power of the Bossy Big Sister when confronted with a truly horrid Bratty Little Brother.
Carolyn and Vicki come downstairs. They are going back to the crest of the hill to look for Carolyn’s wristwatch. Once they’ve left, Liz meets David at the top of the stairs. She tells David that they are looking for a wristwatch. “That’s not what they’ll find- they’ll find death” replies the boy. Last episode, David received the gift of a crystal ball; that marked the beginning of his career as a clairvoyant.
No sooner has the seer made his prediction than we hear Vicki screaming. Looking down from the cliff, she and Carolyn see a figure on the beach- a man face-down in the water. We hear the tide and the wind, sounds of nature on a large scale, and the immobile figure seems to represent something vast and inevitable.
Vicki tells Carolyn that David was the one who sabotaged Roger’s car, which Carolyn accepts as fact almost immediately. The story does build a foundation for Carolyn’s reaction- she repeatedly calls David a monster, and has been guilt-stricken at the thought that she let Burke into the house to commit the crime. But it is also the first example of what will become the hallmark of all of Nancy Barrett’s performances on the show. Her characters are the first to throw themselves into whatever is going on. She comes to serve as a one-woman chorus backing whoever happens to be the protagonist at the moment.
Liz still refuses to face the facts about David. When Vicki finds David’s Mechano magazine in her underwear drawer with the page about hydraulic braking systems marked, she and Carolyn see it as evidence that David had access both to the drawer and to the technical information he needed to commit the crime. Liz sees it differently, saying in a distant, ghostly voice “It was in your room, Miss Winters.”
Liz’ ghostliness is highlighted strikingly earlier in the episode. In the upstairs hallway, Carolyn is chattering away about ghosts, both the metaphorical ghosts of current problems resulting from past conflicts and the literal ghosts that, she would have you know, most definitely exist. Vicki looks at the door to the rest of the house which inexplicably opened and closed itself a few episodes back, and gasps as it opens again. This time it’s Liz coming out, having looked for David in the closed-off wing. Liz is impatient with the girls’ talk of ghosts, but her manner and appearance as she enters through that door are spectral.
The other setting in today’s diptych is a hotel room in Bangor.* Burke is meeting a private investigator there. He’s giving him a tough assignment. He wants more information about the Collinses in less time than the investigator had originally expected. He also wants the job done in absolute secrecy, and if the Collinses catch wind of the project the investigator will suffer dire consequences. The investigator is played by Barnard Hughes, a highly accomplished actor, and his skills are needed. Burke is being harsh and unreasonable, and the investigator is being deferential. Hughes is able to give his character enough texture that he seems to be keeping his dignity. Without that, Burke would have come off as a bully. The audience has to like Burke, so Hughes makes an important contribution to the show in this, his only appearance.
There’s an irony to Burke’s hard-driving intensity. He’s looking for information to hurt the Collinses, while the women at Collinwood have information far more damaging to the family than anything he’s sending his man to look for. So we’re in suspense as to what he’ll do when he catches up to them.
*In a comment on Danny Horn’s Dark Shadows Every Day, “TD” points out that the hotel room in Bangor has a television set, the first such device we see on Dark Shadows. We will not see another until 1970. That one will be in a parallel universe. We never do see a TV set in the Collinsport of the main continuity.
Evidently Mr Bronson had the hotel send a TV up to his room.
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.
Interesting how the early episodes tiptoe towards the supernatural. Burke, Roger, and Carolyn all use the word “ghost” metaphorically, to refer to unresolved conflicts from the past that are still causing problems in the present. Liz and Vicki, each in her turn, responds by saying there are no such things as literal ghosts, only to hear the first person assert that there absolutely are. Giving this same little conversation to both Liz and Vicki is one of the ways the show tries to establish Liz and Vicki as mirrors of each other, of presenting Liz’s current life as a possible future for Vicki and of Vicki as a revenant of Liz’s past.
The sobbing sounds Vicki hears in this one are the first occurrences that would have to be explained as the act either of a ghost or of someone trying to make Vicki believe there are ghosts. The next such moment will come in episode 14, and there will be several more in the weeks and months ahead. This tiptoeing is what the Dark Shadows wiki on fandom tracks as “Ghostwatch.”
In view of the near-sexlessness of the later years of the show, it’s striking how frank this one is. Roger’s aggressiveness towards Victoria is plainly sexual. Liz catches him trying to sneak into Victoria’s bedroom, he derides her attempt to regulate his “morals.” He offers Victoria a drink, they talk about pleasure and pain in words that so clearly about sex that they barely qualify as sens double. Indeed, that is the only moment in the whole series when Victoria seems like what she’s supposed to be, a street kid from NYC. And the flirtation between Uncle Roger and his niece Carolyn is so blatant that it’s a wonder how Louis Edmonds and Nancy Barrett keep the scene from making the audience either laugh or feel ill.
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