Tag: roger collins

Episode 30: What monsters we create

Thunder rumbles. The lights go out at Collinwood. Alone in the drawing room, Vicki lights a candle. The doors swing open, and a darkened figure stands in shadow. Vicki calls to the figure. It does not respond. The lights come back on. The figure has vanished. Roger happens by; he is the only other person in the house, but he is too tall to have been the figure.

This is the second occurrence in the series that is either a supernatural manifestation or an elaborate Scooby Doo-esque prank on Vicki. The first time, in episode 14, happened when David had taken the bleeder valve from the braking system on his father’s car, an event that would have dire consequences. We can assume that this second occurrence is telling us that we are about to see events that will stir up the supernatural back-world of Josette, the Widows, and heaven knows who else.

David had planted the bleeder valve in Burke’s room, trying to frame the family’s enemy for his own crime. When he spends a few minutes with Burke and takes a liking to him, he tries to retrieve the valve, not knowing that Burke has already found it and that he is carrying it in his pocket. In Burke’s car on the way to Collinwood, he pleads with Burke to go back to the hotel. He can’t give an explanation for his plea, and Burke refuses to turn back without one.

Vicki tells Roger that she had found the bleeder valve in David’s room, and Roger quickly accepts that his son had tried to murder him. When Burke brings David home, Roger takes David into the drawing room and demands he confess to his crime. Burke refuses to leave the house. Roger calls Vicki into the room; Burke insists on joining them. David calls Vicki a liar, Roger continues to browbeat him. We see a reaction shot of Burke in profile, standing in the doorway, watching the scene intently. Roger mentions the bleeder valve; Burke steps forward, and with a flourish produces the valve from his pocket. David’s face crumbles into absolute dejection.

Has Burke really betrayed David? Or is he playing some other game? We have to tune in next time to find out.

So, we begin with an indication that what follows will stir up the back-worlds, and then see an episode about the relationship between Burke and David. Roger describes Burke and David as “the two people I dislike the most.” Something Burke and David have in common, something that Roger cannot forgive, is going to bring the ghosts out of the woodwork and into the foreground.

Episode 25: A neat way of managing people

The episode revolves around a letter to Victoria from the Hammond Foundling Home. The letter reports that no one connected with the Home had ever heard of the Elizabeth Collins Stoddard or any of the other Collinses before the letter came offering Vicki the job as David’s governess. This letter has set Elizabeth into a panic, since it exposes as a lie her story that Roger was friends with someone connected to the Home and that that person had recommended her. It sets David into an even more extreme panic, since he is terrified that his father will send him away to some kind of institution where children are kept and the Hammond Foundling Home is such an institution.

In her panic, Elizabeth demands that Roger sit down with Vicki and corroborate her lie. Roger is worried that Burke, who has hired private investigators to look into Vicki’s background, will discover some piece of information that will damage the family, and wants Elizabeth to confide in him. He is insistent enough about this to raise the audience’s hopes that in some future episode, we will get answers about Vicki through dialogue between the two of them. For now, she shuts him down by threatening to throw him out of the house unless he obeys her.

When Roger does talk with Vicki, she reminds him that she had asked him if she knew anything about her or about the reason she was hired when they first met. He had said no, and in every way showed bafflement about how Elizabeth heard of her. He tries to explain that away by saying that he was distracted by worry about Burke, and tries to deflect further questions by saying that his contact is a donor who wishes to remain anonymous.

Vicki is obviously unconvinced. Alexandra Moltke Isles has strabismus, and in her closeups during the scene with Roger she turns this to her advantage. Her eyes seem to be moving independently of each other, a more polite expression than eye-rolling, but just as effective at communicating disbelief. Marc Masse captured the effect quite well in this still image, on his Dark Shadows from the Beginning:

Roger’s remark to Elizabeth in this line, that she has “a neat way of managing people,” applies equally well to Vicki in her scene with him. At the end of the conversation, she knows that he was lying, and he knows that she knows. She also knows that he is under his sister’s thumb, not a threat to her position no matter how uncomfortable he may find her presence on the staff, and he knows that she knows that.

David’s panic leads him to take a less devious path than does his aunt, but ultimately an even more disastrous one. He steals the letter from Vicki. His father catches him with it and returns it to her.

Vicki herself is less concerned with the letter than with a thought we saw take shape in the back of her mind at the end of episode 23. She asks David about the magazines on auto mechanics he likes to read, about how he learns to put things together and take them apart. David responds with a denial that he sabotaged his father’s car; Vicki calmly replies that she hadn’t accused him of that.

Vicki comes into the drawing room and tells Elizabeth that David has been acting strangely ever since his father’s car went off the road, that when the sheriff came he was overwhelmed with the thought that he would be arrested, etc. Elizabeth dismisses the topic brusquely, seeing no significance in it. Vicki persists in the topic, reminding her that the sheriff said they should try to think of someone other than Burke who might want to kill Roger. Elizabeth declares “There is no one else”; at that, Roger sashays into the room and declares “Except my loving son, of course.”

Elizabeth has even less patience with this remark from Roger than with whatever it is Vicki is saying, and moves along so that Roger can tell Vicki the lie she has ordained. In the course of that conversation, she again says that they don’t actually know that Burke was the saboteur, a point that is no more meaningful to Roger than it had been to his sister.

Afterward, she goes back to her room and finds that David has stolen the letter again. She goes to his room to look for it. She doesn’t find it. Instead, she finds the bleeder valve, evidence that her suspicions are correct.

Episode 20: A mockery to the future

In episode 18, Roger (Louis Edmonds) had demanded Vicki (Alexandra Moltke Isles) come with him to Burke’s hotel room, where they will tell Burke (Mitch Ryan) about all the evidence they have connecting him to Roger’s car wreck. Vicki repeatedly protests in that episode that it would be better to take this information to the police. In this one, they arrive at the hotel, and again Vicki objects that they really should be going to the police. Roger, however, is a man obsessed. He asks Vicki to wait in the restaurant while he goes to Burke’s room, telling her that it may not be necessary for her to join him.

Sam (Mark Allen) comes to the restaurant looking for his daughter Maggie. Finding that Maggie isn’t at work, he invites himself to Vicki’s table. Their previous encounter had been a strange and frightening one on the top of Widow’s Hill; Vicki is no more comfortable with Sam now than she had been then. He bellows at her, she reacts with quietly frosty disdain. These attitudes may have less to do with the script or the direction than with Mark Allen’s limitations as an actor; he bellows all of his lines in this episode, and quiet frostiness is as effective a technique as any other for holding onto the audience while sharing a scene with an incompetent loudmouth.

There’s no incompetence in the scenes in Burke’s room. Louis Edmonds and Mitch Ryan were first-rate stage actors, and their confrontation is a terrific fireworks display. When Roger brings Vicki up to tell Burke what she saw him do in the garage, she again plays the scene quietly, an effective counterpoint to the artillery blasts the men have been letting loose.

In the Evans cottage, Sam finds that Maggie (Kathryn Leigh Scott) has been home all this time. When Allen bellows at her, Scott bellows back at him, a far less effective tactic than the quiet intensity Mrs Isles had used earlier. The scene has some potential- the situation is that an alcoholic finds that his adult daughter has been checking up on him, he resents it, and they have a fight about all of the ways in which she has been forced to take on the parental role in their relationship. But as a shouting match, it might as well be about anything, or about nothing.

Returning home after their confrontation with Devlin, Roger and Vicki say goodnight in the foyer. Time and again in these early episodes, people have urged Vicki to leave Collinsport while she still can. Even in this episode, Burke had told her that. But as they part ways for the night, Vicki to her bedroom and Roger to the brandy bottle, Roger tells her that as a witness, “you can’t leave now.”

That line is effective enough, but if the scene between Sam and Maggie had worked it would have been very powerful. The Evanses, father and daughter, are a case of two people who are trapped, trapped in Collinsport, trapped with each other, trapped with his alcoholism and her sense of obligation to keep him alive. As written, the scene could have brought all that out, and induced a claustrophobic sense in the audience that would have made Roger’s line feel like a death sentence. As ruined by Mark Allen, it just leaves us with the sense that we’re watching a show that needs some recasting.

Episode 18: Strange sounds and lonely echoes

Only three characters in this one- Roger, Vicki, and David. In the previous episode, Roger learned that his crash was no accident, that someone tampered with his brakes. Now he wants Vicki to tell him what she can that will help him prove that Burke Devlin was the one responsible. Which is a great deal- she saw him in the garage, with a wrench, next to Roger’s car. She had gone into the garage after hearing what she thought was a car door slam. She admits that the slam could have been the hood over the engine compartment, and since the car door next to Devlin was open, this seems likely. Since the reason Roger was on the road was that Devlin had invited him to town to discuss “business,” and the two of them do not seem to have any business together at all, the case against Devlin seems quite strong.

David will place rather a substantial difficulty in the way of Roger’s hope of sending Devlin back to prison. As the audience knows, it was he, not Devlin, who removed the valve from the braking system on his father’s car. We even see him handling the valve in this episode. In episode 17, he nearly confessed to his Aunt Elizabeth, and this time he makes an incriminating statement to Vicki. Both women had assumed he was merely expressing guilt for his hostility to his father, and tried to reassure him that his feelings and thoughts didn’t mean that he was to blame for what happened on the road. David even tries to talk to his father in this one, and Roger icily dismisses him. But we’ve seen enough mystery stories, including inverted mysteries where the audience knows who done it before the detective does, to be sure that Roger will learn the truth when he least expects it.

Roger not only has reason to suspect that Burke is responsible for his crash; he also has deep, complex, ungovernable feelings where Burke is concerned. Some of those feelings have to do with the testimony he gave at the trial ten years before which sent Burke to prison. Some go back before that, and have to do with the friendship that existed between them before that trial. All of them are deeply secret.

This show was being made in 1966, when Freudianism reigned supreme in much of American intellectual life, and the most respected of respectable novels was Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. All of the cast and much of the production staff comes from Broadway, where at that time Tennessee Williams was the undisputed king of serious playwrights. And the part of Roger was played by Louis Edmonds, who came out of the closet as a gay man as soon as it was possible to do so, and who was never in the closet as far as his friends and colleagues were concerned. So it seems likely that the secrets Roger is so desperate to conceal include some kind of homoerotic connection with Burke. This episode lampshades some standard soap opera craziness in order to call our attention to the irrational nature of Roger’s attitude towards Burke, and I think a mid-1960s audience would be likely to suspect that a repressed sexuality is driving that irrationality.

Here’s how I put it in a comment on John and Christine Scoleri’s Dark Shadows Before I Die:

When Vicki tells Roger what she saw Devlin doing in the garage, Roger asks her to come with him to confront Devlin at the hotel. That’s a typical soap opera character idea. What isn’t so typical is Vicki’s response, that it would be better to go to the police. She sticks with that rational idea until Roger tells her of his urgent need to see Devlin’s face. That picks up on Roger’s frantic behavior in Week One and sets him up for the whole saga of Where Burke Devlin’s Pen Is, in which we see that Roger’s attitude towards Burke is rooted in some deep and complicated emotions.

Episode 17: Such a strange question

Another of the diptych episodes in which Art Wallace excels. This time we have two pair of contrasting scenes.

David, thinking he has succeeded in his attempt to murder his father by tampering with the brakes on his car, awakes from a nightmare and walk out through a feature no nine-year-old boy’s bedroom should be without, a full window that opens on a ledge above a two hundred foot drop to the sea. Elizabeth stops him before he can jump. David is hysterical, Elizabeth frantic to console him.

Juxtaposed with the wrenching scene between David and Elizabeth is a very light scene between Roger and his doctor. Roger is in the doctor’s office, pitying himself for his minor injuries. The doctor is overly friendly and relentlessly makes little jokes at which he himself seems to be quite amused. Roger is annoyed with the doctor’s manner and impatient with his work. The self-contained, self-satisfied, ultimately trivial Roger seems to live in a different world than the one where his son is suffering so grievously.

Then we have two scenes of teacher and student. Bill Malloy explains hydraulic braking systems to Roger and a scene in the drawing room where Elizabeth tells stories from family history to David. Since Malloy’s explanation advances the mystery story that is the main thread of the show at the moment, it is fascinating, and since the early history of the family is not (yet!) relevant, Elizabeth’s stories are intentionally presented as tedious. Here’s how I put it in the comments on John and Christine Scoleri’s Dark Shadows Before I Die:

Bill Malloy was a talented guy. His explanation of a hydraulic braking system, supplemented by that admirably drawn schematic, was not only crystal clear, but genuinely interesting.

There’s a structural justification for it- Liz’s lecture to David about Isaac Collins in front of Isaac’s portrait is deliberately presented as boring. So including another lecture supported by a single illustration and making it urgently interesting shows that what’s boring isn’t the format, but the relevance of the content to the story.

That venture into educational programming is a fine example of the freewheeling experimentation the series was doing in these early weeks. Some of those experiments come up again. The final 2 seconds of the episode is the first time a character looks directly into the camera, a trick they will use to advantage many times down the line.

Also, the date 1690 is interesting, not only because the portrait is ludicrously anachronistic- the man is wearing clothes from and is painted in a style that date from 200 years after that date- but also because we will hear about that period again, near the end of the series. Most likely that’s a coincidence, but I suppose it’s possible someone connected to the show in its final months remembered that the 1690s were supposed to be important in the history of the family.

Episode 15: I think he’s beginning to trust me

I left two comments about this episode on John and Christine Scoleri’s Dark Shadows Before I Die. A long one about its place in the overall development of the show’s stories:

This is a vitally important episode. The scene in David’s room is the first of many in which David Henesy and Alexandra Moltke Isles act their way out of weak writing to establish a relationship between two characters who can always make a connection with each other. Their body language, tones of voice, etc, triumph over some remarkably tedious dialogue to show us what people look like when they’re starting to trust each other. The growth of that relationship is really the only story that works in the first 42 weeks of the show. The big events involving characters we’ve only heard about or who will soon be recast matter insofar as they represent developments in that story, and other events don’t matter at all.

The scene that Liz and Roger play out in the drawing room while Vicki and David are talking upstairs is important in its own way. That these conversations are going on simultaneously is an example of the mirroring of Vicki and Liz that is such a strong motif in the first 42. Vicki is open and uncomplicated as she tries to talk David down from his superheated hostility to his father; Liz is guarded and double-minded as she tries to talk Roger back up to fear of Devlin. In the contrast between the two women, we see the difference between the innocent one with no past, and the frightened one with nothing but a past.

The contrast between father and son plays out in those scenes, and also in the two brief scenes between them. Roger’s narcissism renders him utterly childish, making no effort to take his son’s feelings into account or to understand Devlin’s motives. David’s fear and pain drive him to mimic adult behavior with absurd and indeed horrifying results. Liz tries to make Roger grow up, as Vicki tries to free David to be a child, but Roger’s inability to take anyone’s feelings but his own seriously dooms both efforts.

The moments between Liz and Vicki call for comment. Later on in the series, these characters will be stuck in many frustrating scenes where they inexplicably fail to pass on information that would resolve story points. At first glance, Vicki’s failure to tell Roger about Burke’s presence in the garage and Liz’s failure to pass the word of it on to him after Vicki tells her may seem to be the first of those failures. But Vicki has no reason to trust Roger, and very little to suspect Burke of wrongdoing. On what she’s seen of Roger so far, she can only assume that if she tells him what she saw he will jump to the most sinister possible conclusion and enlist her in his mad campaign against Burke. Liz seems relatively reasonable, at least on the topic of Burke Devlin, so by telling her Vicki is both satisfying an obligation and reducing the likelihood that she will be a party to slander. Indeed, Liz and Vicki tell each other quite a bit about themselves, much more than they will later on.

And a short one about a point that bothers many viewers:

Oh, and Liz’s failure to repeat Vicki’s news to Roger isn’t a problem. Liz is deeply preoccupied, and Vicki’s report wouldn’t be particularly interesting to anyone who hadn’t been watching the show.

Episode 12: You can still hear the widows

Roger and Vicki encounter each other on the peak of Widow’s Hill. Roger remarks it is the highest point in the area. At the end of their conversation, Vicki will call to Carolyn, inviting her to join them “down here.” This may seem to be a blooper, but since we hear “down” used to mean “up” in a later episode, I speculate that it’s a peculiarity of Collinsport English.

Little happens to advance the plot in this episode, but between Roger’s announcement that he and Vicki are standing on the highest point in the area and Vicki’s invitation to come “down here,” we hear a lot about the ghostly legends of the place. After the scene in episode 11 where the ghosts are troubling Elizabeth while David is doing something mysterious involving motor grease and little pieces of metal, it seems that the show is using the ghosts as a sign that something big is happening. Certainly the “Widow’s Wail” is a striking sound effect, and Louis Edmonds does a good job of selling the idea that Roger really does believe in all the legends about the house that his social position might require him and Elizabeth to ridicule publicly.

It’s a bit jarring that Carolyn drifts into the scene asking what Vicki and Roger are doing- “planning a suicide pact?” She had just told Vicki about the legend that a third governess would die by jumping off the cliff, and the series story bible still calls for Roger to throw himself to his death from it. So you might think it would be in questionable taste to bring that particular topic up just now.

There’s also a scene in the Evans cottage where Maggie (Kathryn Leigh Scott) tries to get Sam (Mark Allen) to tell her what’s been bothering him. In episode 11, Conrad Bain had triumphed over a weak script and Mark Allen’s relentless whine to turn what might have been a lot of tedious recapping into a compulsively watchable scene. At the beginning of this scene, Kathryn Leigh Scott is mustering such powerful emotions that it looks like she might be about to accomplish the same feat, but Allen has switched from whining all his lines to bellowing them. So the scene is a dead loss.

Episode 10: To the death of the monster

Carolyn is in Burke’s hotel room, where he charms her and tricks her into believing that he’s planning to leave town soon. I suppose the definition of “dashing” would be a charming fellow who makes things happen, things you wouldn’t have predicted and of which you aren’t sure you can approve. Burke is at his most dashing in scenes where he’s trying to enlist the women and children of Collinwood to his side. With Carolyn here, with Vicki back in episode 7, most of all with David in episode 30, we wonder what exactly he’s trying to do. He’s not so good with the men- when he tries to recruit Joe Haskell to his intelligence-gathering operation in episode 3, he ends up baldly offering him a bribe.

Liz and Roger are in the drawing room, where she demands he be less openly hostile to his son David. Unknown to them, David and his toy robot (a Horikawa “Attacking Martian,” which sold for $4.22 in 1966, not including two D batteries) are hiding behind a chair listening to Roger’s brutal denunciations of the boy. Unknown, that is, until Roger goes to the brandy bottle for his second drink, when the Attacking Martian starts attacking Roger.

Roger all but assaults David in response. David flees his father’s rage. He runs out of the house, telling Roger he hopes Burke Devlin gets even with him. Roger is as bleak and maladroit in these interactions as Burke is glittering and skillful in his handling of Carolyn. Again we see Art Wallace’s use of intercut scenes to bring out a comparison between characters.

After the second part of the scene in Burke’s room, David slips back into the house to find his Aunt Elizabeth asleep in a chair, muttering about ghosts. After all the talk about ghosts in the first two weeks, Elizabeth’s muttering about them seems significant- perhaps we are to think that her dream is a message from the ghosts who linger about the house, a sign that something is happening that will stir them up. Elizabeth awakes, and sees that David is in front of her, smeared with grease and holding a small object. He won’t answer any questions or let her see what he has in his hand. Before she can pursue the matter, Carolyn appears in the foyer, bringing an unexpected guest- Burke Devlin. Confronted with this shocking sight, she forgets all about David.

Episode 4: Frightening a new friend

Here’s the comment I left on the Scoleris’ Dark Shadows Before I Die blog entry about this episode:

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.

Episode 3: Open your door!

Episode 3 of Dark Shadows is remembered chiefly for two things. It’s the one where Carolyn and Vicki first meet, and Carolyn introduces herself by going on at alarming length about her crush on her Uncle Roger. Vicki’s quiet reaction is just what you’d expect from a new member of the household staff discovering that a member of the family is a raving loon.

It’s also the one that opens with Roger pounding on the door to the Evans cottage and shouting “Open yer doah, ya drunken bum!”:

There is more to it. At the Blue Whale, Burke tries to enlist Joe in his intelligence-gathering operation, an attempt Joe virtuously rebuffs. Bill Malloy confronts Burke, showing that he, like Joe, is devoted to protecting the Collinses.

Art Wallace, the author of the show’s story bible and sole credited writer for its first eight weeks, specializes in a diptych structure, building an episode by interweaving two parallel scenes. That structure leads us to compare and contrast characters with each other in a wider variety of ways than we might if the scenes followed each other in succession. In this one, we see Joe and Bill faithfully standing up to Collins family foe Burke, while newcomer Victoria tries to assume the persona of a loyal retainer in her response to Carolyn’s bizarre talk.